Novak/Hitchcock/Truffaut/Quine

Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, Richard Quine, 1957

In the still-vital book Hitchcock/Truffaut, made up mostly (and in the first edi­tion, pretty much entirely) of inter­views between the former crit­ic and film­maker François Truffaut and the dir­ect­or Alfred Hitchcock con­duc­ted in the sum­mer of 1962—over fifty years ago, now—the older dir­ect­or dis­cusses his 1957  1958 film Vertigo mostly in terms of dis­ap­point­ment. While the film­maker who at the time was known as the “Master of Suspense” seems pleased with the dar­ing of the movie’s scenario—“To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who’s dead; he is indul­ging in a form of necrophilia”—and is under­stand­ably proud of the way he pulled off an ostens­ibly impossible track-out/forward zoom shot—“it only cost us nine­teen thou­sand dollars”—for most of his exchange with Truffaut he plays the skep­tic while the young­er film­maker tries to reas­sure him of the movie’s strength. It’s hard to remem­ber, read­ing this book now, just how much its very exist­ence was an argu­ment for what few in the main­stream of movie cul­ture at the time believed, e.g., that Hitchcock was a great artist. While the through-line of the per­cep­tion of the  great­ness of Citizen Kane has been a largely con­sist­ent one, the world in which Truffaut inter­viewed Hitchcock is one that’s a rather long way from a world in which Vertigo is pro­claimed the greatest film of all time, or any such thing. 

Hitchcock had ori­gin­ally planned to put Vera Miles in the lead role of Vertigo, and the details of their rela­tion­ship and fall­ing out are, as they’ve been revealed over the years, pretty unpleas­ant, and don’t reflect well on Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s account to Truffaut is both plain and enig­mat­ic: “[S]he became preg­nant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that I lost interest; I could­n’t get the rhythm going with her again.” 

Truffaut moves on: “I take it, from some of your inter­views, that you wer­en’t too happy with Kim Novak, but I thought she was per­fect for the pic­ture. There was a pass­ive, anim­al qual­ity about her that was exactly right for the part.”

As it hap­pens, one is now able to hear the actu­al tapes of the Hitchcock/Truffaut inter­views through the agency of vari­ous archives, online and off. I have not audited the dis­cus­sion of Vertigo, but I can­’t help ima­gin­ing Hitchcock emit­ting a long exhal­a­tion, if not an out­right sigh, before say­ing: “Miss Novak arrived on the set with all sorts of pre­con­ceived notions that I could­n’t pos­sibly go along with. You know, I don’t like to argue with a per­former on the set; there’s no reas­on to bring the elec­tri­cians in on our troubles. I went to Kim Novak’s dress­ing room and told her about the dressed and hair­dos that I had been plan­ning for sev­er­al months. I also explained that the story was of less import­ance to me than the over-all visu­al impact on the screen, once the pic­ture is completed.”

Truffaut coun­ters with a “there, there” vari­ant: “It seems to me these unpleas­ant form­al­it­ies make you unfair in assess­ing the whole pic­ture. I can assure you that those who admire Vertigo like Kim Novak in it. Very few American act­resses are quite as car­nal on the screen. When you see Judy walk­ing on the street, the tawny hair and make-up con­vey an animal-like sen­su­al­ity. That qual­ity is accen­tu­ated, I sup­pose, by the fact that she wears no brassiere.” 

While his erot­ic pre­dilic­tions, both those that were obvi­ous fifty years ago and have since been gone into in fur­ther detail, do not sug­gest that Hitchcock  was much of what we call “a breast man,” he does perk up here, and responds, “That’s right, she does­n’t wear a brassiere. As a mat­ter of fact, she’s par­tic­u­larly proud of that.”

Animal-like sen­su­al­ity? Hell, for the whole exchange Hitchcock and Truffaut do sound as if they’re dis­cuss­ing some exot­ic zoo exhib­it. And Truffaut’s demur­al con­cern­ing “unpleas­ant form­al­it­ies?” It’s called dir­ect­ing, guys. While his routine con­dem­na­tion on account of that “cattle” quip is indeed unfair, it’s kind of undeni­able that Hitchcock did­n’t have much patience with fussy per­formers. Not just the females—Paul Newman drove him up the wall. And when he wanted to play Pygmalion, watch out. It’s also reveal­ing to see the ostens­ibly more “pro­gress­ive” Truffaut so nat­ur­ally slid­ing into the ali­en­ated pat­ri­arch­al mode of per­cep­tion. In the event you were ever won­der­ing why The Feminine Mystique needed to be writ­ten, it’s all here in a nut­shell. (It came out in 1963.) And yet, who would argue, if we look at the work by itself, that both Hitchcock and Truffaut were among the greatest dir­ect­ors of women, and among the most con­sist­ent pro­viders of sub­stan­tial roles for women. (Even at their most orna­ment­al, Hitchcock women are nev­er card­board cutouts.)

Do dir­ect­ors talk about act­resses as if they’re objects because they (the dir­ect­ors) are men, or because they are dir­ect­ors, people whose job is, in a sense, to make sub­jects out of objects? In a 1960 inter­view with the journ­al­ist Archer Winsten, the dir­ect­or Richard Quine, talk­ing about his latest film, Strangers When We Meet, said of Novak, the female lead in that film, “She’s tre­mend­ously sens­it­ive.” He was quick to add a caveat: “If she does­n’t know what she’s doing, she draws a blank. Like in Pal Joey, she’s innoc­u­ous.” “Innocuous” is maybe the worst word you can apply to a per­former. Perhaps Quine had a spe­cial invest­ment in try­ing to sound pro­fes­sion­al, object­ive, in charge; he and Novak were romantic­ally involved at the time of Strangers’ mak­ing.

My friend Farran Smith Nehme recently pos­ted, on her blog, a short essay about the largely lacking-in-compassion, and, to my mind and hardly incid­ent­ally, anti-feminist reac­tion to Novak’s appear­ance at last Sunday’s Oscar cere­mony, and in that piece she exam­ines the boor­ish, oppor­tun­ist­ic treat­ment of Novak by Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn. If Novak had any­thing like a knight in shin­ing armor at the stu­dio, it was Quine, a one-time com­ic act­or who had a num­ber of B‑pictures to his name as a dir­ect­or when Cohn assigned him to handle Novak’s first star­ring vehicle, 1954’s Pushover. If one of Pushover’s most spe­cial fea­tures is just how prom­in­ent Novak’s bra­less­ness registers in a film girdled by the Production Code (hon­estly, not since Sign of the Cross has their been a more jar­ringly out-of-its-time reveal), Quine’s over­all treat­ment of Novak sig­nals an appre­ci­ation of the depths that  lurk beneath the breath­tak­ingly ala­baster sur­face. And in fact that is the theme of his next two films with Novak. In Bell, Book and Candle, Novak plays a char­ac­ter who can be rendered impot­ent by reveal­ing her vul­ner­ab­il­ity. In Strangers When We Meet she plays a woman whose gor­geous looks back her into a neighborhood-sexpot corner that her gentle true nature inhib­its her from claw­ing her way out of; all of her sub­sequent actions in the movie are determ­ined by her impossible pos­i­tion. Of his four films with Novak, it’s the final one, 1962’s The Notorious Landlady, made after their romantic involve­ment ended, that iter­ates this dilemma as farce (Novak’s char­ac­ter is sus­pec­ted of a murder that of course she did not commit). 

This, I think, adds up to a cine­mat­ic para­dox that is both glor­i­ous and tra­gic. That Harry Cohn’s best/worst efforts not­with­stand­ing, Kim Novak became a great screen act­ress, and that at her greatest, the sub­ject of her work was the dif­fi­culty of being “Kim Novak.” See also Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid, the most fren­et­ic and con­fused and strangely exhil­ar­at­ing of meta-movie farces, and Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare, the most vicious of meta-movie expres­sions of self-loathing.