The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 143 - Michael Wood on Hitchcock

 JOHN

Our guest today on the Musical Innertube is Michael Wood, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His wide-ranging curiosity has led him to teach and write all over the world, and in many languages, about many literatures. Among his books are Stendhal (1971), America In The Movies (1975), and books on the work of, for example, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, Yates and Franz Kafka. Michael has kindly agreed to be our guest for the next two episodes of the Musical Innertube, because he's been writing such interesting books, we want to catch up with him. Today, we'll discuss his 2015 work Hitchcock, The Man Who Knew Too Much; and next week, we'll delve into his 2023 book, Marcel Proust. Welcome, Michael Wood.

MICHAEL

Thank you. Great to be here.

JOHN

I'm so excited to be talking to you about Alfred Hitchcock. And to begin with, how did you personally first come to Hitchcock's work? Was it in a theater, and if so, which film was it, and how did you build up a familiarity with this most familiar of film makers?

MICHAEL

I'm not sure when the first, it would have been, it would have been quite, it would have been, was in school, probably, and it would have been in Lincoln, in the city of Lincoln in the Midlands, in England. And they would have been, yeah, would have been in the cinema. I'm not sure what film it would have been in though. And then at a certain point, I, yeah, I caught up with all of them sooner or later, and by the time I'd done this book, I saw all the movies I hadn't seen before.

Speaker 1

Wow. So, you've seen all of the - I know I haven't seen them all. And is it your memory that Hitchcock was popular in Lincoln?

Speaker 2

Oh yeah, hugely popular. Yeah, yeah. And. And then of course, a lot of people by that stage, a lot of people knew him. So it was, this would have been the 50s, probably the 50s. And people knew him for his TV show. So, if you said Alfred Hitchcock, what people saw in their minds was a guy introducing a TV show.

JOHN

Right!

MICHAEL

So, Twilight Zone view.

DON

Yeah, stepping into that silhouette that he always had on his TV show.

MICHAEL

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, that was the kind of, so, that was his fame, I think. And then then there were the movies. And then people had very different ideas about the movies. You know, where you joined in with him. At some point I just saw them, like, I would see them whenever they came out. By that time, you know, I caught up, and I saw them when they were new. All the later ones I saw when they were new.

JOHN

It seemed that he kept making, especially in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, he was making movies that were controversial, that they were, people didn't know quite what to make of them, and they would - they knew that they had had an experience, and so, it was great. They, they lasted well after the viewing experience, which many movies you know, really are sort of quiescent after that experience, but not a Hitchcok film.

MICHAEL

Yeah, I think, I think he really wanted to bother people. I mean, there, there was a point at which his goal was to entertain, and to be interesting. And you know, one of the great sources for this are his interviews with François Truffaut, you know. You know that book is a fantastic interview. They go through movie by movie, he says all kinds of wonderful, smart things there, but it's all pretty serious about what he what he's trying to do. And I think  in the later works, I think he was just trying to bother people, just upset them in some way, and he certainly bothered, yeah.

JOHN

Don't you think, don't you think The Birds is just sort of like, you know, a provocation of the audience in some ways? Because nothing is explained. It's simply this highly absurd thing that keeps happening for an hour and a half. And you go away, basically - yes, I think I can say this - you go away traumatized.

MICHAEL

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think I think Psycho was sort of the edge, but Psycho, I think it was, it was a great movie and traumatized you, and scary and everything, but it was still sort of intelligible, right?  It was a great crime movie, a thriller, and it worked all kinds of ways, full of edgy stuff, but there was still a sort of plot around it, they sort of gathered it together. But something like The Birds or Marnie, I think they're just there to sort of, you know, you know, bother you, I think. That's not supposed to entertain you.

DON

I have to confess that I was a film major when I was in college, so I saw a lot of Hitchcock, and we talked a lot about Hitchcock, and we went through all of his cinematic tricks, from the offing of Janet Leigh in Psycho, to the continuous loop or the continuous scene in Rope where it looks like it's all shot in one continuous scene, and we were desperately running it over and over again trying to find the...

MICHAEL

The cuts?

DON

Exactly! OK, he went behind this wall, there! But, genuinely speaking, there was a genius to whatever he did, in the sense that he knew film, he knew what he could do, and what it could do, rather, and he knew what he could do with it to make the audience go down the path that he wanted them to go down.

MICHAEL

Yeah, that's a really good point, Don. I think, because, I think, it's just about a lot, a lot of works of art. I mean, you can have preferences, but I think it goes back to what John was saying about what the film leaves with you. What happens afterwards when you finish, and so. But one of the things I think, and is true about great writers, too, is they're interested in the medium, and they're doing something with the medium, and you and you know the medium, there's that something, it's not necessarily matter or self-conscious or arty, it's actually just use of the medium itself. And so, for example, if you listen to a Beckett radio play it's quite different from a Beckett stage play, because, the stage is not a radio, you know, and the same issues - that wonderful movie! He wrote a movie script that was turned and shot twice, back where the camera, generally in the in the Beckett movie, if the if the character is in front of the camera he can't see you, and if the camera ever falls behind you, kind of right at the end it falls back, and the and you becomes a, you know, so the guy looks at you, and he goes that he is you and you, you're him. But not until the end but. But that's the old medium.

JOHN

Right. That's consciousness of what goes in into the medium. And, I was thinking, I don't know why I was thinking about it today, but I was thinking of Sabotage, the 1936 movie that was called Sabotage, at least in England, and now it is in the United States, it was given a different title when it first came out. One of my favorites and it's one of my favorites because he makes it - it's based on a Conrad book, Secret Agent, I believe -

MICHAEL

Yes, Secret Agent, yeah.

JOHN

-but he switches it so that the shop that's run by one of the protagonists is a cinema. And the cinema runs films that are sort of a commentary, a running commentary on the action outside the cinema in the movie. So, I don't think anybody had ever done that before, at least I'm not aware of it. Probably they did, but they're in a, really, a piece of pop culture. You get something extraordinarily sophisticated and delicate, and you hear the movie playing, you can hear the room noise of the room. You could hear the audience shifting in their seats and the echoing of the sound of the film. But you also get parts of Disney shorts, right? But they all touch on what's going on, and it's delectable, and it's, also it adds to the terribleness of the film, the horror that's part of it, and the suspense. And that's also what you're talking about, isn't it, that this is a self-conscious mastery of the elements of cinema.

MICHAEL

Yeah, yeah. There's a book by, a recent book by a philosopher called Robert Pippin, called The Philosophical Hitchcock. And I think - it's a very good book - but I think either way, even when he wasn't supposed to be philosophical, he was. There's a kind of philosophical question about what did we see? I think, as you were saying, John, about the cinema in Sabotage, I was thinking about the glass of milk in Suspicion. You know, where he - Joan Fontaine is afraid that it's got poison in it. You can't see poison. How could you see poison? Doesn't matter. Just a glass of milk, whatever it looks like. But Hitchcock put a bulb in there. An electric bulb in there. So, the light that it would glow with light. So, he's walking up the stairs with the tray and a glass of milk, and it's glowing. So, our eyes are drawn to this thing. But it's not, it's nothing to do with poison, it's to do with our own desire to  learn through seeing what can't be learned through seeing.

DON

Right. And it and it's.

MICHAEL

For a movie maker to do that, it’s really great!

DON

It takes you also into Joan Fontaine's head, ’cause she's gone over the deep end and thinking that that he's going to kill her at any minute. And here comes that glass of milk and you're focused on it. And she's focused on it. So yeah, again it it's part of his whole thing where he takes you down the path that he wants you to go down, and he and he makes you see what he wants you to see. Which, I guess, every filmmaker does, but Hitchcock was just brilliant at it.

MICHAEL

No, I think that that notion of a kind of, it's everywhere in Hitchcock, but I think, and other movie makers do this, but the idea that we're so, you know, it's like a, it's like a silent movie makers idea of cinema, right? That is, to do it with seeing, and not to do with hearing, usually it's not to do with hearing, so, to do with what you can actually see, and most of our lives are good - think of how and driving a car, whatever. Most or a lot of things we do are talking about how well we can see. You know, what we can see. Can we see the traffic light change? Can we see the person crossing the road? Can we see this? With seeing as a kind of functional dependency. We need to do that. Movies of course, are made up of what we can see. On the other hand, for Hitchcock, the game he plays is:  I'm going to show you something, but I won't tell you what's true, because actually, what you see is not the same as what's true.

JOHN

Very seldom, yeah.

MICHAEL

And Hitchcock almost, like, in North by Northwest where Cary Grant comes to the guy, and the guy's just been knifed, and he picks up the guy to see if he can help him and holds the knife to take it out. At that point he's caught on camera. You got a guy, he's got the knife in his hands, how could that not be evidence that he that he's killed him?  What else do you need?

DON

And, I’ll tell you, the scene where Cary Grant drives home drunk in North by Northwest. I drove like that a lot when I was in college!  But that yeah, that is that is one where, you know, you don't, you cannot figure out how he made it home at the end, because it's just so scary.

MICHAEL

Exactly. Exactly.

DON

All the way down.

MICHAEL

Yeah. And I think that's perfect.  And also, I think, just to go back to Suspicion for a minute, the thing I read about, I mentioned this in the in the book, but having cleared up the milk question, having realized that we're in in her mind, and he's not, you know - he's a rake, he's unreliable, he tells lies, he tells all kinds of scandalous things, but he's not really a murderer. So, we go, “Got this,” until right at the end of the movie, then we think he's pushing her out of the car, but he's not. He's saving her from jumping out of the car, pulls back everyone’s started to go, we all relax. We sit back. That's good. Now we're gonna - the car, there's a shot from the back, right? And his arm goes ’round her shoulder in this way. And at that moment, I stop and think, “Oh my God. Maybe we were right after all!” It's just a trick! Then it ends. That's it. That's it.

JOHN

You know, I'm thinking that, there are so many things like that in in Hitchcock.  OK, the beginning of Psycho, that whole thing is a misdirect in some ways, because it begins with a robbery, and it's very delicious and naughty, we're sort of in the car with this lovely woman who is a thief, and looks like she's gonna get away with it. And we care about that in a movie, automatically, we think, “Oh, well, that's what the movie’s about.”  And while she does get away with the robbery, she don't get away with anything else! So, that, if you've never seen Psycho before, everything up to - let's, I don't want to spoil this for people haven't seen it, but - everything up to the shower scene is sort of a misdirect, you know, she pulls up to a seedy motel, or whatever it is, and then, oh, well, here comes  -now it becomes almost a whole other movie.

MICHAEL

Yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting move there. Yeah, absolutely right. I think. And I think it's also, I think probably what Don was saying too, but he relies on us, on the audience, being very busy as interpreters, and keen to know what's going on. Keen, in a way a little too keen. So, we guess, we think we know what's happening – we don’t. There's a kind of lure there in a lot of those cases. And I think also, I do think this goes with the kind of - it's not exactly philosophical, it's more political in a way - with Hitchcock’s relation to authority, people who know things, people who know things. Usually, he likes the idea that people who know things are wrong. He thinks there's a kind of, you know, theory of political theory of some kind there that we're too inclined to trust people. When people who look as if they know things, we're inclined to trust them. Or, they're supposed to know things, like cops or lawyers. We're supposed to trust them, and we are wrong.

JOHN

That's a big mistake.

DON

And that's true. In all of his casting, in some of the most memorable films, in North by Northwest, what was the one, Saboteur with Robert Cummings. and a number of different (films), it varied between Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. They're kind of everymen that are put into a situation that's unique, and movies would have us believe that these action heroes can get their way out of it. But in Hitchcock, they're befuddled through the whole thing, and a lot of times they get through it just in sheer luck or, you know, making this choice instead of that choice that winds up being OK.  And you're right, the authority figures that they have to deal with, like Leo G, Carroll in North by Northwest or others, you're never sure if they're on your side or if they're not.  And, what's the movie that - it escapes me now, but you were talking about it in your book, where the guy -  39 Steps was it, where the man is dependent upon his superior, and he comes and tells him everything, says he's missing part of one finger and the superior says like this? And holds up his hand.

MICHAEL

Yeah, yeah.

DON

So yeah, the people are in a sea of common, and they don't know anything. And the people who know stuff, you're not sure if they're on their side or not.

MICHAEL

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of the movies have that scene where there's something that looks like really irrefutable evidence that this is the case, so they got Cary Grant saying that this has to be. So, looks tell you what this is like, it happens again and again.  And I think that that sense of the, it looks as if the evidence, that visual evidence, cannot lie. But the point is, it can, and it does all the time. Particularly when Hitchcock is making you look!

JOHN

Yes, exactly. Yes. And, you know, this is a Hitchcock film, isn't it? And one of your favorites, Vertigo, that's certainly the case where we are, well, at least Jimmy Stewart is, directed at one direction, and that's shown to be wrong. And it's wonderful, we'll get to this in a minute, but part of the symbolism of Vertigo, part of that metaphor, is how we feel when we realize that everything we thought was wrong, everything that you know is wrong, right Don? You know?

DON

Everything you know is wrong, yes.

MICHAEL

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's true. I think that Vertigo’s especially sort of weird in that sense, ’cause it really, it compounds that. So, something like North by Northwest or other movies, they have a sort of, there was a crime, and did this guy commit it, did he not commit it, this is this kind of, like, who is this person. And the point is, it's hard even to talk about it, but the case is, the real person, as Kim Novak, as a fake, as real as you're going to get in this movie, is the fake Madeleine. She's more real as the fake Madeleine that she is as Judy Barton. And the real Madeline is dead thanks to this. So, there's no real Madeleine. And there never was anyone other than this person who was simultaneously Judy Barton and the fake Madeleine. 

JOHN

Wow, yeah. There's nobody else.

MICHAEL

Right. And, it's, it's amazing.

JOHN

One of my favorites is, we were talking the other day, Michael, about our favorite Hitchcocks. I like Shadow of a Doubt.

MICHAEL

I like it, too.

JOHN

And there, the audience is way ahead on it. It flips the mystery a little bit. We sort of know the answer to the identity question a little bit before the protagonist does. We know about Uncle Charlie. But, part of the suspense in it is when does, when do the nice people find out about him? And of course, again, the FBI is wrong. You know, the feds are wrong. And one of the problems, of course, is that, well, Charlie comes really close to getting away with it. A lot of the time, we're just as at sea as everyone else is in a Hitchcock movie about it. But in that one, we know the truth and we're shouting at the screen, “Can't you see?”

MICHAEL

Yes. Yeah. Well, also the thing is in that movie, you know, there is that, we’re let in on things, like “Merry Widow” we get to hear the “Merry Widow Waltz,” and he's the “Merry Widow Killer.”

JOHN

Yes!

MICHAEL

Where the music tunes it in for us. And then, it really is only the other Charlie who knows in that world, the only person who knows he's really filthy is his niece, who loves him so much. And, I always think – now, I've screened that scene on the train where he's trying to kill her, but he's the one who falls off the train. If you look at it again, you can't really tell what's happened there.

JOHN

I can't understand it.

MICHAEL

Did she push him off? Did she push him off? Did he throw himself off in the end? Did he just give up?  Was it an accident? What? What was that? You know, it's very strange. I think that.

JOHN

Yeah, it's one of these simple twists of fate. That is, you cannot analyze it, because you don't have enough, you really just don't have enough information. You don't know which  - wouldn't it be great if Charlie pushed him?  She's a murderer!  Wouldn't that be great?

MICHAEL

She's a murderer! Yeah. You see, it's possible, right? That might well be here.

JOHN

This leads to, you know, something that we've been talking about all along. But I still, you know, I've still I'm driven to ask about it. Much of Hitchcock criticism deals with this notion that here is pop art that's also art.

MICHAEL

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOHN

And I guess much of what we're talking about are the reasons why, that that there is more self-consciousness about form and media in the making of the movies, there's, as Don has been saying, he leads us into different mindsets, different subjectivities, in ways that are fiendish, you know.  And I think that that is - we don't really see that except in writing. But my question to you is: is that the reason that so many people who do literary studies are attracted to Hitchcock, that things happen in his movies, that you really don't see happening unless it's in books?  I'm just wondering.

MICHAEL

Yeah, I don't really know the answer, John, but I do think all Hitchcock movies are actually art movies. They really are art movies. They happen to be to be popular movies also. And they make money. First of all, I think the structure that you can't, if you're gonna make real art movies, they have to be tiny audiences and you're, you know, poor artists who can't really  make it, but you sacrifice everything to your arts. And the other thing is, it’s crude movies which everybody wants. There's no divide like that in Hitchcock.  He’s as artistic as Buñuel or any other sort dedicated to the art of cinemas. Anybody. At the same time, he has these popular things, and there's some trick there, by the way, some hook that he has of getting us into this thing, but I think it's true that the academic end of it means that it's perfect because it's what one would like all writers to be. Both self-conscious, arty, doing our works, and really popular. I think it's true if someone said there are writers like that, Dickens is like that, for example.

JOHN

Yes, very much so.

MICHAEL

You know, if you could read Dickens for the for the plots and the story, you can watch the TV episodes, but you could read just for the language and the jokes, you know, sort of thing, line by line, you know, so that there are writers like that I mean. Actually, I also think Jane Austen is like that, although nobody else thinks so except me!

JOHN

I was just going to say Jane Austen.

MICHAEL

I think she, also, has as a kind of - I do think of her and sometimes associate her with Hitchcock, because you see, there's a line where the plot line takes you in a certain direction, the characters is going to do this, and let's say people are going to get married going to live happily ever after because- and one knows, when she says, “The reader will be able to tell from the from the smallness of the number of pages remaining that that we are hastening towards felicity.” I mean, essentially, OK, you folks want these people to get married, and I'm writing, that's the kind of novel, I'm not going to disappoint you, but don't pretend it's true.

DON

Exactly! And was it Jane Austen with, was it Jane Eyre that came up with the whole mad woman up in the attic?

MICHAEL

That was Charlotte Brontë, but it was the same, very much the same sort of vein and she ends with that. There’s a lot of stuff like that.

DON

That's right, that's right. But that was a common sort of thread about, there's always something in the background. You meet Mister Right, and there he is, he's wonderful. He's got something in the attic!

MICHAEL

Exactly. But also the whole notion of which - this is, I think it does really well, it's to do with the genre. If the genre is crime, the crime has got to be solved in some sort of way. But then there are two snags for this. One is, a lot of crimes aren't solved. So, there's a kind of deep unreality in the in the plot, that's OK. But then, Hitchcock wants to remind you how unreal it is. Even as he delivers it.

JOHN

Right.

MICHAEL

Say, you got Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, it’s gonna be OK, and either it's not gonna be OK because there's something else, like there's a mad woman in the attic, or it's gonna be perfectly OK and we can all be happy, except we're a little bit haunted by, like, that, embrace at the end of Suspicion. Maybe it's not OK. Maybe it's just, we want it to be OK, but this guy’s not, it's not reliable.

JOHN

Well, I just wanted to mention, also, that Jane Austen does something that is really hard to do, and that is she often, her books, the main thing is to show how someone's wrong. How first impressions are wrong, that all the ways that we have of deciding whether a person is worthy or not, turn out to be really wrong. Everyone's wrong about Emma, and she, after a while, proves them wrong. Everyone's wrong about Darcy - I mean, part of that is his fault, you know - at any rate, she's doing much the same thing that he's doing in the setup is testing our assumptions and just pulling the rug out at some place.

MICHAEL

And also, I think it's true that there is a kind of, in Hitchcock and in Jane, there's a kind of tough basis, like life is actually hard, dangerous, difficult, hard. But then, the cinema is the place for entertainment. So, I'm not gonna tell you how hard it is. I'm gonna entertain you for a couple of hours, and we're gonna have fun. It's gonna be great. But something - that action takes place over a kind of subtext or sort of undercurrent that says, let's not forget life is hard. There's a scene also in Emma, which I like, where the woman who's been courted by Mr. whatever his name is, and then she agreed to marry - Emma turns him down, and Harriet, our friend, agrees to marry him. And then he says, well, how soon can we name the day? And, she says, pretty much as soon as possible because I'm perfectly happy to marry you. I can't bear the idea of your courting me. Just don't romanticize it. Let's get to the wedding. I need you. I need the money, right? Marry me. Give me the money. But forget about all this courtship crap, and these fancy – like, I can't bear to hear it.

JOHN

Right. I just hate suspense.

MICHAEL

It’s a terrific line!

DON

Cut to the quick! 

JOHN

We’ll return to our podcast in just a moment, but first, here’s a soothing musical interlude.

DON

Michael Wood is professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

JOHN

Born in the city of Lincoln, England, Michael received his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge University.

DON

He has written widely and in many languages about everyone from Franz Kafka to William Butler Yeats and Vladimir Nabokov to, well, Alfred Hitchcock.

JOHN

Michael has long had an interest in film, reflected in his 1975 book America in the Movies, a survey of American films of the 1940s and 1950s, and also in Film: A Very Short Introduction of 2012.

DON

Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the British Academy.

JOHN

For more about Michael Wood, check out his Princeton University webage at English.princeton.edu/people/Michael-wood

DON

And now we return you to The Musical Innertube, already in progress!

DON

In reading your book, I looked at Hitchcock's early years and he was a good boy, according to his father and everyone else, he went to work for a telegraph company, and eventually he started to write for the in-house newspaper there. But what was it in his upbringing or in his development that steered him toward making films of note?

MICHAEL

Good question.  I think some of it had to do with being a Catholic in a Protestant country; something had to do with the small business, his dad was a grocer, and they were not poor, but they weren’t rich either.  I don't think this explains it, but I mean this is part of it -  there were certain things that you would be used to being. And then there was, as I said in the book, he went to this Jesuit school, so did James Joyce, and so did Luis Buñuel, went to exactly the same kind of school in different countries, which is sort of tough. So  you would get an education which would insist on hell and damnation and sin, and how easy it is to get things wrong.  I'm not sure that, say, something like the doctrine of original sin might have a real part in the answer to your question. Suppose you believe that -  you know, I was thinking, I grew up as a Protestant in England, I wasn’t a Catholic. But I remember going to, we were godparents to one of her brother’s kids. And I've never been to a Catholic baptism before. But one thing that happens there, doesn't happen in Protestant things, in Catholic churches, the baby is, like, this tiny baby’s being christened, right? And the priest has to cast out the sin the baby already has in them

DON

Yeah. John and I grew up Catholic, so we know exactly what you're talking about.

JOHN

Yeah, we're both from Irish, American Catholic families, so yeah.

MICHAEL

So you know this.

JOHN

In our case, it didn't work, Michael.

MICHAEL

But it didn't work. Glad to hear it!  But I mean, it's really, I was so shocked by the idea that that sin - I think the idea that we might all be inclined to sin is perfectly reasonable, and then the evidence is pretty good, but the idea that that you start with this, you start with this radical defect. That you will incline to do wrong unless you fix it, unless you incline yourself otherwise. And I think that's something in there, I think. So, there is something about the Catholic that's part of it.

JOHN

That's so interesting.

DON

And I would think, now, you're British, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's part of the British makeup to distrust the hierarchy, to distrust those who are above you.

MICHAEL

Yes. Well, that's very interesting because I think it depends, it's part of, it's an English tradition, right, that distrust to those above you which comes from the civil war in the 17th century, comes through the blood of America and their departure, the Puritans. There was always a refusal of orthodoxy and things like the process. But there's also, because there was a mainstream, there was a mainstream of saying yes to authority, and yes to rank, and yes to order, and yes to stasis and conservative, which keeps the monarchy going, and the Anglican church, and the whole series of upper class behaviors. But then, there are a series of pockets of resistance which could be the Puritans, it could be the Catholics. I was born in the Congregational Church, which is the same church as Milton’s. It was then called the Independent Church, and it was independent in the sense that there were no priests, the there was no power. There was nothing you could do, and it was not hierarchical like the Anglican thing. There were no bishops, nothing. It was just people. Very democratic. And it was the founding of a kind of - I didn't realize until long after this that I had been trained to distrust authority, not from my parents, but by going to this church. I discovered it when I read a biography of Robert Browning, who was also a Congregation, brought up in this way, and all this description of his instinctive sympathy for protesters, for people on strike. And his total lack of sympathy with the ruling classes. And I guess now with all of these things and that that wasn't me, I just, you know, somebody poured that into me. It wasn't, I didn't choose it. But I think the Catholics in England were quite a tiny minority, and often persecuted, they couldn't vote until 1830 or something like that? They couldn't hold government jobs.  And in Lincoln, when I grew up, there weren’t any Jews, but people love to hate Catholics. I had a friend, school teachers, who would say to me, they would talk about the Catholics having taken over the BBC, the media. That was why everything was - exactly the way anti-Semitic people talk about the Jews ruining the world, you know.  

JOHN

Michael, has anybody written about Hitchcock’s Catholicism?

MICHAEL

Not really as far as I know. But it would be interesting.

JOHN

Because that seems like a fertile area. But the one thing this leads us into, and maybe it's a nice place to stop as well, but let's consider it for a moment, that your book does talk about this also - that the movies are sort of the surface of a much deeper conversation. There's sort of a language that he uses to have a conversation that is unspoken, but nevertheless very profound, and you can feel it when, for example, we were talking about things that don't exactly happen but you feel as if they have, for example, when the guy isn't assassinated in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Well, he almost was, and if that lady hadn't have screamed, he could have been. So, you sort of feel that a little bit more than you felt, "Oh gosh, he got away.”  So there's, the relief coexists with a very bad feeling about how close they came. And I'm thinking, you know, the depths of this conversation - first of all, you've identified the idea that life is hard, that life is very difficult. You know, there's several movies that end, you know, well, Notorious, I think we see how difficult, you know, what happens to Claude Raines in Notorious is a terrible thing.  But, so, how difficult life is, that human beings, at least some human beings, really are just bad. You know, that we can't explain it away, we can't minimize it, we can't boil it down. That's just the way it is. And, gosh, you know, viewer, you might be one! Could always be!  But, are there other things that you hear in the conversation, that aren't expressed but are certainly shown?

MICHAEL

I think that it's a release, what you're saying, John. But I think there's a question about, and I think this also has a bit to do with the Catholicism, is that, there are a lot of things that are accidents. It’s just that, maybe, it's we're less in control of it than we think we are. I, Alfred Hitchcock, I'm totally in control of this movie. I am the dictator as far as the movie goes. But the movie is not about that. The movie is about not having that kind of control. And so,  it's up to you whether you think, “Oh well, God works in mysterious ways,” and there's a religious basis, God only knows these things. Or it's just chance. It's just luck, you know.

DON

There's two other things I wanted to find out before we wrap it up. Number one, his wife was incredibly influential in his life and in his work. How did that work out?

MICHAEL

Well, I think they knew each other when they were young, you know? And she worked at the same firm as he did, and she'd been there -she was actually probably a year or so younger than he was - but she'd been there before, when he arrived there, she was already working.  So, I think she must have shepherded him around for a bit when they first met. And she was also very smart. She was credited on all the movies up through the 40s, and then her name disappeared from the credits. I don't know what the deal was. Maybe she felt it was -  but she was certainly there all the time. He didn't do anything without checking with her. So, as I mentioned, there were two movies that were about her, one where she was played by Helen Mirren, and I forgot who was the other person is. But she's not like, the point about that is, the real Alma was much quieter, more discrete. So, to go back and answer your question, John, let's imagine you can make a great movie about the person Alma might have been, but the real Alma cannot appear in the movie.

JOHN

Wow.

MICHAEL

She's so discreet and quiet, there's no movie there, right? But it's something like that. That's what I think. Something, something.

DON

And the other thing I want to do, since we're coming to the end of our conversation, is let's come to the end of Hitchcock's career. I was still in college at the time. We're talking Frenzy, we're talking Family Plot. We're talking some really weird movies, and there were people that definitely thought Hitchcock lost it at the end, lost control and was making stuff that he thought was great, no matter what would happen in the box office, is that kinda, is that the feeling that you got?

MICHAEL

I did. Generally I did. I thought, I like Frenzy better than I liked Torn Curtain, or something like that. And I like, I like Family Plot a lot actually. I thought Family Plot was going to return to form. What did you think, Don?

DON

I you know, I was too busy watching Bruce Dern chew up whatever scenery was there.

JOHN

Yes, yes, that's what he did.

DON

You know, I mean, it was just, it was an amazing thing, after having people like Paul Newman and Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, to have Bruce Dern as your main guy was a little disconcerting, but on the other hand, it did play like a comedy, almost from the beginning.

MICHAEL

Yeah. And then you remember that, it's the sort of thing, he didn't often do fancy photography, but he's got a very high angle shot at the graveyard. And you see the paths of the graveyard...

DON

And they're walking their separate paths...

MICHAEL

...and they're looking like they're never going to meet, or they are going to meet? This is what I mean by the chance, accident thing - that's like a diagram, you know, the high angle shot of the graveyard with people following paths. Are they gonna meet? They're not going to meet? Will they ever?  Can they not see each other from their same frame? You know, I liked it a lot. I also thought Frenzy was the first time, he used this shot, he's very respectful of the life of imaginary people. When I first saw Frenzy I've seen too many films where people die just casually, yeah, they just go over, somebody kills them and they die, and nobody cares because they aren't in the plot anymore. It's gone, right. And I remember that there's a scene in which in, I think it's in France, where the, the person is killed, the woman is killed. But the camera says goodbye to her. The camera, the door closes, it tracks back down the corridor, all the way out of the building and out into the street.  It’s like saying, no, I can't stop this sort of dying, but, like, we can grieve for her. We can say goodbye in a in a decorous way.

DON

Yes. Give you a little a kind of a smattering of how she lived, or where she lived, yeah. I can see that.

MICHAEL

And I think that the building, and I think it's something about, I think he had that feeling of, that if you ask your audience to invest in the life of a character, to give your imaginative time to this person, like, you can't just throw them away. It's like actually killing a real person.

DON

It really is, well, and again, to your point, the murder that starts Rope was just one of the most offhanded – strangle a guy and put him in a trunk, you know, and he doesn't really mean anything to anybody, except for the fact that he's...

MICHAEL

He's there all the time, right?

DON

...the Mcguffin through the whole thing. Yeah, which is, that always bothered me that Rope started off with a bunch of frat guys killing one of their friends just for the hell of it.

MICHAEL

Yeah, the hell of it. Yeah.

DON

That never sat right with me.

MICHAEL

Well, no.

JOHN

Michael Wood, this has been wonderful. I can't wait for our next episode, so we better finish this one.

MICHAEL

OK, OK!

JOHN

We've been talking to Michael Wood of Princeton about his book, Alfred Hitchcock, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Pick it up. It's a really great read if you're not knowledgeable about Hitchcock, it's a great introduction. If you are, it will challenge you, and make you go back to the movies, which is a good reason to read the book. Next week we're going to climb a big mountain. We're going to talk about Marcel Proust and talk about Michael's book of the same name. And I can't wait for that either. So, thank you for joining us, Michael.

MICHAEL

Thank you both, a great conversation. Real pleasure.