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Wed, 27 Jun 2012 11:53:58

We’re after the drawing-room type. An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise, she’ll probably pull a man’s pants open.

- Alfred Hitchcock on his infamous ‘Hitchcock blonde’ typecasting as told to Francois Truffaut

Alfred Hitchcock relished placing his ice blonde heroines in jeopardy. He broke them down emotionally, and even physically. Preoccupied with manipulating their screen images - dictating the tiniest details of costume, coiffure, makeup and shoes - Hitchcock eventually strove to control their private lives as well.

“I always believe in following the advice of the playwright (Victorien) Sardou,” Hitchcock once confessed. “He said, ‘Torture the women!’ The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.”

The Hitchcock Blonde reached her apex in three films with Grace Kelly (Dial ’M’ for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief). Kelly epitomized his idée fixe: the ice goddess who could unleash unexpected flames of passion. The camera, standing in for Hitchcock, clearly worships her.

Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with possession. A reoccurring motif throughout his films is of a man possessing a woman, or in the case of Vertigo: a spirit possessing a woman, ending up with a male trying to possess her.

Hitchcock’s attitude toward this ideal darkened after what he perceived as betrayals: Kelly’s abandoning acting to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco; and Vera Miles’ opting for pregnancy rather than starring in Vertigo, which Hitchcock had planned as her breakthrough role.

Vertigo was his most autobiographical work. James Stewart played Scottie, a man obsessed with Kim Novak’s Madeleine, who was herself haunted. After her death, Scottie forces an unwilling second woman (Judy, also played by Novak) to duplicate every aspect of the dead woman’s attire and hairstyle. The plot creepily echoed Hitchcock’s domination of his female stars. Vertigo’s recurring shot of a tightly wound coil of ash-blonde hair atop Novak’s head encapsulates the theme of obsession. It’s a hypnotic vortex into which Stewart (or Hitchcock) could fall and disappear forever.

InPsycho, Hitchcock treated his blonde viciously, killing off Janet Leigh’s pert embezzler less than halfway through the film. The shower murder was widely regarded as the most shocking act in film history up to that point.

With Tippi Hedren, star of The BirdsandMarnie, his obsession finally spun out of control, like the berserk carousel at the climax of Strangers on a Train. He discovered Hedren in a TV commercial. A model, she had no plans for an acting career. Signing her to an exclusive contract, he launched his most intensive and intrusive campaign to play Pygmalion, as detailed in Donald Spoto’s biography The Dark Side of Genius.

Hitchcockian men would go to any length to gain possession of their female leads. In Marnie, where Mark (Sean Connery) blackmails Marnie (Tippi Hedren) into marriage and rapes her during their honeymoon. In her memoir, Hedren writes that it was a widespread belief that, “the rape scene that had driven Hitchcock to make Marnie in the first place, that a man taking his frigid, unattainable bride by force was Hitchcock’s fantasy about me.”

Hitchcock’s need to control Hedren extended the instructions he gave on set: “Do not touch The Girl.” A simple conversation with a male cast or crew member would result in Hedren receiving an icy reaction from Hitchcock, or vulgar limerick recited. And when Hedren rejected Hitchock’s touch, he answered in two ways: forcing himself on her and then refusing to let her work.

Hedren writes:

“I’ve never gone into detail about this, and I never will. I’ll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and more repulsed. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became. Then he started adding threats, as if he could do anything to me that was worse than what he was trying to do at that moment.”

Hitchcock followed through with his threat of trying to ruin her career by not casting her in any more of his films after Marnie, while at the same time not letting her out of her contract. A classic case of a rejected man: if he couldn’t have her, no one could.

More so than any other artist, Hitchcock isn’t only given possession of the themes and actors inside the frames of his own films, but also other peoples’ films, real life events, and actual people. I expect Hitchcock would be very happy about his ability to possess, even if it’s only grammatical. His birds. His suspense. His Marnie. But also: Hitchcockian suspense; a Hitchcockian conspiracy; Hitchcockian composition. Hitchcock blondes. It would make sense to refer to hair dyed an Yves Klein blue a Klein blue, but a Hitchcock blonde? Hmmm. Many film historians and critics would say that Hitchcock did not invent the blonde; Jean Harlow did.

**Photos: Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren, two of the archetypal ‘Hitchcock blonde’.