Thanks. Yeah, Holden did seem to die a lot in his films, or simply lose or barely make it. Even his triumph at the end of Stalag 17 is a near miss. He pulls it off, but barely. One never got the same feeling from watching someone like, say, Burt Lancaster, whom one would know would pull this one off. Hell, he'd take on half the German army! Holden was much more realistic, not that much like a movie star. A true Everyman. Also, a kind of Rorschach for moviegoers. I imagine that small town guys from Kansas can easily see a lot of themselves in Holden's All-Ammerican qualities; also men from more priveleged backgrounds who sense the actor's innate refinement, his palpable discomfort in chaotic or just plain messy predicaments; while urban types like myself can, well, feel Holden's pain, the at times almost suffering artist quality behind his mask of normality and stoicism. The guy never seemed a happy camper. I can dig it. When up against big guns,--Crosby and Kelly in The Country Girl--Holden could really rise to the occasion. Third-billed in that one, it was a major but semi-supporting role for Holden, yet he inhabited his quick-tempered albeit compassionate character so skillfully, and with such offhand grace, as to steal the movie. The final scene of him reading the reviews of the play he had just directed, as Crosby and Kelly "make love" on some street corner below, nails it. Holden handed the movie over to his co-stars with such magnanimity that he, ironically, stole the picture, at least as I see it. As to Bridge On the River Kwai, Holden was the box-office insurance on that one. It was never one of my favorite Holden performances; his very presence in the film seemed incongruous. My opinion changed somewhat when I saw an interview with Robert Mitchum in a Holden biography some years back; and Mitchum, who admired Holden greatly as an actor, referred to his work on Kwai, praising Holden to the skies, saying "he was perfect, didn't make one false move the entire picture". I was impressed. Mitchum wasn't the gushy type, and he seldom said anything nice about his colleagues apart from a few longtime buddies from way back.
I think that Holden might have risen to Cary Grant status as a long-time superstar,--he was at Grant's level and then some in the 50's--but booze, drugs and whatever bedeviled him made his peak period briefer than it might have been. Holden was actually first choice for the male lead in Guns Of Navarone but turned it down for some reason. They went for Gregory Peck instead. Peck was excellent in the film. I can't see Holden doing any better. Maybe the "commando story" was too close to BOTRK for comfort, with the big cannons blowing up in the end instead of a bridge. The next year Holden sleepwalked through the tedious, overlong Counterfeit Traitor. The writing was on the wall. Peck didn't look that much different from the way he did in Roman Holiday. Holden was really showing his age by then. Working for Hitchcock was probably not even an option for Holden in the 60's, during which time he lived mostly abroad, which got him bad press in the States. A few years earlier he'd have been the first choice for Torn Curtain, but not in 1966. Topaz, maybe, but that one was going to tank no matter who played the lead. Sam Peckinpah rescued Holden in the nick of time with The Wild Bunch, which brought him back into the public eye after a long time out of the spotlight. Ironically, Holden's absence from the front rank of stars in the 60's actually helped him. He didn't suffer from the over-familiarity of the Lancasters, Douglases and Fords. The Wild Bunch was like a rebirth, and it got him one more classic, Network, several years later. Who would have guessed, nine years earlier, in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, that Faye Dunaway would be doing a bedroom scene with William Holden in 1976? If it hadn't been for his tragic accidental death Holden might have had a few big ones left.
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ecarle
17 years ago
Interesting observations about Holden, who I liked very much, and pretty much for all the historical reasons enumerated in your immediate post.
Holden WAS up to and above Grant in the fifties at the box office, but I think Grant got a "career best" win by retiring before having to take lower billing or TV movies, as Holden did ("The Blue Knight", "24 Hours at Munich.")
"The Wild Bunch" was crucial to Holden, I think, in "re-birthing" him for a new generation, and giving him the clout to land another classic ("Network"), a blockbuster ("The Towering Inferno," behind McQueen and Newman but over the title, nonetheless) and a hit ("Omen II.")
By "Network," Holden's lined face was damaged beyond repair and yet he STILL had "it." Voice, presence, and HISTORY (on screen) made all the difference.
The trivia on Holden and "Guns of Navarone" is that he asked for a lot more money than the producers were willing to pay (percentage-wise), and Peck would take less.
Meanwhile, I've read about three different versions of why William Holden, and not Cary Grant, got "Bridge on the River Kwai." It seems like no contest, given that the Holden role was meant as an All-American contrast to Alec Guinness' veddy British Col. Nicholson, but I have read that Grant actually wanted the Holden role and competed for it.
I've always felt that William Holden managed to pull off one of those "inadvertently meaningful final films," the epitome of which was John Wayne playing the cancer-ridden gunslinger in "The Shootist."
For Holden, it was Blake Edward's broad but black Hollywood comedy "SOB," which came out in 1981, the same year that Holden died. In a fairly starry cast, Holden was billed first, and played a womanizing, boozy producer who believably still scored chicks and who, trying to talk a director friend out of suicide, said, "We're ALL committing suicide. I am. Just more slowly, with booze, cigarettes, and broads." Fateful talk, given that Holden famously died drunk of a head wound that he might have survived had he not been home alone when he bumped into a night table.
P.S. I've always figured that William Holden would have been good for "Topaz"...but in the JOHN FORSYTHE role, a glorified cameo as the U.S. CIA man who buddies up with the French hero. The movie would have still bombed, but with a star.
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telegonus
17 years ago
Interesting factoid regarding Guns Of Navarone. I like the movie so much the way it is, much as I like Holden as an actor, more so than Gregory Peck, I think that Peck's relatively youthful looks put him over in this. Also, Peck had a terrific rapport with Anthony Quinn in the movie, which I don't think the more "midwestern" Holden would have had; ditto with David Niven, though Holden had worked with him before. I wonder if Holden was offered or would have accepted the part of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Yes, I know that Peck owns this one, but it's fun to speculate. Holden's softer, more flexible disposition would have made him a less remote father to the children; and his "selfish" personality (idealists were not his strong suit) would have made for a fascinating contrast between an easygoing man, a decent lawyer and fine parent, who must rise to an occasion that, by nature, he doesn't really want to rise to. He has to. With Peck as Atticus there was no doubt that the man had great moral integrity,--Peck oozed moral integrity--and he was good to go when the black man was falsely accused. One knows this from the get-go. No suspense with Peck in the role. But Bill Holden reading a law book outside the town jail when the lynch mob approaches? It's a perfect set-up for the courageous Peck, and I wonder if Holden could have pulled it off, and more to the point, how he would have done so. It just doesn't seem right, does it? Yet Bogart didn't seem right for Captain Queeg, on paper, but was superb in The Caine Mutiny. Debonair Ray Milland as a weakling alcoholic, good guy Fred MacMurray as a murdering insurance salesman; there are dozens of classic movies that, were one to look at the casting on paper, shouldn't work, yet they do, beautifully. If for some weird reason Holden had gone for the Atticus role in To Kill a Mockingbird, and did some serious soul searching as he prepared for the part, he might have been as good as Peck, surprised everyone in Hollywood, and won a second Oscar. Dream on, you say. Perhaps, but let's remember Monty Clift on a cattle drive in Red River, as an army boxer in From Here To Eternity; or Brando as a mafia don (!). It's possible. Everyone laughed at first when "comedic actor" James Stewart began playing gritty westerners starting with Winchester '73, but three or four years later the laughter had subsided.
As to Holden and Hitchcock, I think that one role that might have suited Holden very well,--ten to fifteen years after the film was made--would have been uncle Charley in Shadow Of a Doubt. It would have been quite a risk for likeable Bill to have seriously essayed the role of a serial killer of aging widows, but I think that Holden had the skill and, more to the point, the ambiguity, to pull it off. This would have seriously challenged Holden's All-American image during his "golden" period (his agent almost surely would have talked him out of it), but WTF! If Bogart could do Fred C. Dobbs, Holden could do uncle Charley. As he was better looking and hunkier than Joseph Cotten his niece's hero worshipping of him would make more sense; and I think that Holden could have laid on the charm even better than Cotten did in the family and the meet the neighbors scenes. Ah, but could be project malice! Cotten could, and did, in those moments when his loathing of the human race came through. It would have been a real stretch for Holden, but I think he had it in him.
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ecarle
17 years ago
You're hitting several of my favorite topics here, telegonus.
One is the precise nature of casting the right male stars in leads. This issue continues today (though in a different way, so many of the males are like kids), but in the fifties, a producer would no doubt take his script about a male hero and start wondering:
Cary Grant
William Holden
James Stewart
Rock Hudson
Gregory Peck
Gary Cooper
John Wayne
Frank Sinatra
Henry Fonda
Clark Gable
Burt Lancaster
Kirk Douglas
Tony Curtis
I stopped there, knowing that I surely missed some. But those men were part of the deck of face cards.
In the fifties, certain things "occurred." Cooper and Gable started aging, for instance (oh, hell, Bogie was there for most of the decade too --he got REAL old.) John Wayne was best in Westerns, a bit stilted in modern dress (not half bad in "The Quiet Man.")
Lancaster and Douglas were a bit too "scarily macho" and Sinatra too brooding. (Mitchum, too -- hey I forgot him, too. What a list!)
If you were lookin for "white-bread" heroes (with necessary flaws)of a certain youth and handsome virility, you were looking for Grant or Holden or Hudson or Peck, in the main. I suspect that many a producer shipped the script to all those guys, and crossed his fingers for a match.
Rock Hudson was first offered Atticus Finch. It was a Universal Picture, and Rock was the biggest Universal star. I suppose it is to his credit that he turned it down (too difficult?) but sometimes the role makes the star. Maybe Rock would have dazzled us as upright Atticus. I've never read of another star getting the offer twixt Hudson and Peck (James Stewart, a natural choice, was simply too old for the part by then.)
Holden would have been great as Atticus Finch. Look, I buried the lede here -- I love William Holden on screen. When he was great-looking, you couldn't beat his mix of cynicism and vulnerability (he was a bit more "real" than Cary Grant.) When his face went, his honor stayed.
Holden also would have made a wonderful Uncle Charlie. Hitchcock persuaded a few "heroes to go heavy" in his time: Joseph Cotten, Robert Walker, Ray Milland, Anthony Perkins. But the truth is, none of those guys were as "big" as William Holden or other major male stars. (Cary Grant supposedly really considered the quite evil bad guy in "Dial M" but may have been denied the role by Jack Warner.)
The other wistful issue you raise here, telegonus, is particular to my liking of Hitchocck in general. I wish he worked with a greater variety of major actors. Any actor seen "through Hitchcock's lens" came out differently at the other end: Cotten, Gregory Peck (too young and callow when Hitch used him), Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Paul Newman. Oh, to have seen Holden or Cooper or (yes!) Bogart "through Hitchcock's eyes."
Still, its hard to see other actors in the many Stewart and Grant Hitchcock roles. Hitchcock just should have made more movies. Ha.
In the seventies, Hitchcock made some outreach to Michael Caine. The role was wrong (the sick sex killer of "Frenzy") but I WISH Hitchocck and Caine could have done SOMETHING. Robert Redford and Hitch would have been a good mix, I think, as well. But Redford got too big for Hitchcock in the seventies; Paul Newman was the last chance.
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telegonus
17 years ago
Shortly after reading your post I wrote a lengthy response, three, maybe four paragraphs, only to have my system go down when I hit the reply button! I was too angry to even attempt to rewrite it and now can't remember all the details.
I just can't see Curtis or Sinatra working as Hitchcock heroes. They were probably on the studio lists of potential leads for his films, yet seem wrong for him. Both had a certain roughness, an unpolished quality, that was the virtual antithesis of what Hitch sought in his leading men. Also, Tony and Frank were unapologetic go-getters, best playing guys moving up, hustling, trying to make the big time. Hitchcock preferred his heroes to already be in the big leagues, therefore more at ease with themselves and in the world, not striving and competing all the time.
That Cooper never made a film with Hitch was just bad luck on his part. He'd have been just fine. Gable was as wrong for Hitchcock as Sinatra and Curtis, for somewhat similar reasons; his aggressiveness in particular would have been a disqualifying factor.
Two you didn't mention, Glenn Ford and Jeff Chandler, were also on the loose in the 50's, yet neither seems big enough, in terms of screen presence, to be right for Hitch. Ford might have made it as a second choice if someone else proved unavailable. (Hitchcock's track record with less than top rank stars wasn't a happy one. The best he could hope for would be a "good enough", which he got with McCrea and Cummings, but not with Robert Montgomery, Richard Todd or John Fosythe. He crashed through with Robert Walker and Anthony Perkins, but both played psychos, and their casting and playing was in each case designed by Hitch to overwhelm the leading men in terms of charisma.)
Rock Hudson is one who might have made a fine Hitchcock hero. He had all the qualifications. His smoothness, his pleasing delivery of dialogue, his solid presence (yet never pushy) were, one would think, just what Hitchcock would have wanted. Issues: lightweight persona; strong ties to Universal (-International), not a prestige studio at the time, which "cheapened" his image somewhat, augmented by his made-up name, and they'd have charged a bundle for their biggest star's services; a "risk factor" in using someone still quite young who didn't have that strong a screen image, as distinct from the better established (by the time Hitch got them) Grant and Stewart. Later on, in the mid-60's, when both Hitch and Rock were at the newly reorganized Universal, maybe, yet by that time Hudson's best days were just behind him. I can see Rock doing just fine by Marnie, but Hitch went for the red hot Connery instead. Torn Curtain's a possibility, but Hitch played it safe with the by then stronger Newman. For the record, I don't think that Hudson's gayness would have put off Hitchcock in the least; if anything it would have intrigued him. I doubt that this was a factor in Rock's not having worked for Hitch. More likely a matter of timing and contractual issues.
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ecarle
17 years ago
Coming in late, telegonus, as I'm wont to do, on those "star analyses."
I think Hitchcock invites a lot of "what ifs" about actors he DIDN'T work with. For the most part, the macho tough guys of his era were of no use to him: Humprhey Bogart, James Cagney, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum. He expressed a desire to Truffaut that Burt Lancaster play the macho Joseph Cotten part in "Under Capricorn," but there is no real record of Lancaster being offered the part.
Hitchcock generally wanted, and needed, slightly weak men to play out his themes of obsession and redemption. He also seemed to want men who could play "regular guys" like the men in the audience (James Stewart, Henry Fonda) for better identification purposes. Even the suave Cary Grant had some experience playing husbands and fathers.
Hitchcock did pursue Rock Hudson for "Marnie," and evidently only moved on to Connery after Hudson (a bigger star than Connery, for one more year before "Goldfinger," of 1963) said "no."
In Hitchcock's time, leading men were generally handsome square-jawed types. He was choosing from the same "menu" as everyone else. Rock Hudson was "in Hitchcock's range." Grant fit the "suave" roles; Stewart fit the "weakish regular guy" roles. He wanted William Holden but couldn't get him. He got Henry Fonda (once) and Monty Clift (once.) Neither Walker nor Perkins were formidable stars when Hitch turned them into psychos.
Had Cary Grant refused "North by Northwest" (and word has it, he TRIED to get out of the movie once committed), Rock Hudson or William Holden would have been good replacements.
As for Hudson's gayness, I doubt Hitchcock would have had a problem. He worked with a number of gay actors, actresses, writers, and collaborators. Indeed, the rather dandyish Alfred and his rather mannish wife Alma were sometimes taken for a companion-gay couple(like Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester) in their early years. In one interview, he said, "Had I not met Alma, I might have become a poof" (gay.)
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telegonus
17 years ago
I've read similar things said about Hitchcock being "saved" by Alma but never read about the great man himself admitting as much. One could get into a lengthy thread concerning Hitchcock's interest in sexually ambiguous-confused-twisted characters, which pop up in his films regularly, surprisingly, more so after he came to America, which is odd, as Americans were even more conservative regarding even the suggestion of such issues than were the Brits in those days, yet there's Mrs Danvers in Rebecca, Hitchcock's first American film.
Either Holden or Hudson would have worked out well enough in NxNW, but I'm hugely satisfied with Grant's casting. Neither of the aforementioned could have brought anything near to Grant's unique style to the Thornhill role, nor would calling either of them "Kaplan" have been funny the way it was with Cary. The cropduster scene was another case of Grant's superiority. Holden and Hudson would have likely played it straight, while Grant played it only semi-straight, looking frightened enough to make the scene feel real, yet his very presence drawing attention to the absurdity of his very urban persona in a cornfield. Without mugging or hamming, Grant was clearly "in" on the joke (he knew Hitch well enough by then), while my sense is that neither Bill nor Rock would have been or, maybe more to the point, could have been.
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ecarle
17 years ago
True about Holden and Hudson in "North by Northwest."
I suppose I've often thought of them for replacements for Grant in that film because it has been written that James Stewart wanted that role, and he REALLY wouldn't have fit it. James Stewart would have looked right at home standing on the open prarie near a cornfield -- as much as Cary Grant did not, which gave that famous scene "counterpoint". And, alas, Stewart had rather aged out of being able to play a "suave playboy" by 1959.
Stardom becomes a matter of real precision at the level of these men. In the 50's, William Holden brought a "regular guy" earthiness to characters in "Picnic" or "Bridges at Toko-Ri" that wouldn't have fit Cary Grant at all.
As for Rock Hudson, for a few years there, he was a bigger box office attraction THAN Grant, and had a bit of his own specialty: "bigness." Rock was aptly named, for he tended to fill the frame nicely, with a body both tall and wide, and a booming, ironically masculine voice. Hudson also had a deft comedy touch. But he lacked the history and voice of Cary Grant in '59.
Still, had Cary said "no" to "North by Northwest," I can see Bill or Rock in the role before I see Jimmy. (Or maybe Gregory Peck -- who MGM wanted -- if he lightened up. Heck, maybe even Dean Martin.)
The elements of gayness in Hitchcock's life and films has made for its own "course of study" in recent years. It's pretty apparent in the movies, but I think perhaps Hitchocck was just "pushing the envelope." The Hays Code made gay references as verboten as references to premarital sex and dismemberment, which Hitch also "slipped into" his films of the time. It was all rather forbidden and naughty to him, I expect. So you got Mrs. Danvers, the killers in "Rope," Bruno Anthony, and Leonard in "North by Northwest." Plus Norman Bates, who was "all over the place."
Hitchocck famously professed, in interviews and to associates who gave their own interviews, that he was celibate for about the last 40 years of his life. It's possible. How funny in a town where film directors got all the action they wanted (from the opposite or same sex.)
And yet, there are rumors that Ingrid Bergman and/or Grace Kelly "got Hitchcock" once or twice (especially Ingrid.) McGilligan's book makes a rather interesting claim: that a frustrated Alma had a brief affair with a writer named Whitfield Cook (who worked on "Strangers on a Train")...who was believed to be gay by Hitch.
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telegonus
17 years ago
A celibate Alfie? I've read that before but forgot about it, as I find it too sad to contemplate. If so, it certainly helps explain the director's edgy take on male/female relationships in so many of his films. The conflicts were there already in his British films, yet even stronger in his American ones. So many seemingly mismatched couples in Hitchcock's films (Rebecca, Suspicion, Saboteur, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Strangers On a Train, Dial M,--need I go on?). Normal, easygoing heterosexual relationships were not the norm in Hitchcock's pictures. He seemed to revel in the conflicts between men and women, which are obviously there in real life, very strong in Hitchcock's films. Even when his couples seem reasonably well adjusted sexually, as in Rear Window and Psycho (Sam and Marion, I mean), there are issues, issues, issues. The Birds is sort of the reductio ad absurdam of Hitchcock's films, with poor Rod Taylor unable to really get it on with Hedren, what with those crazy bird attacks and all! Substitute "performance anxiety" for birds and one may have a clue to the movie's main theme.
Women do seem to get the raw end of the deal in many Hitchcock pictures; if not murdered outright then kidnapped, tortured or just plain treated badly by men. Laraine Day does nicely by Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondnant, yet there's that nasty business of her father being in league with the Nazis. Teresa Wright is nearly murdered by her beloved uncle (already, literally, a lady killer), Tallulah loses everything,--typewriter, necklace--in Lifeboat, Guy's wife is killed in Strangers On a Train, Grace Kelly almost strangled to death in Dial M, Raymond Burr dismembers his wife in Rear Window, Vera Miles loses her mind in The Wrong Man, Kim Novak loses her life in Vertigo. Hitchcock may have been celibate during his last four decades, but women were most definitely on his mind.
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ecarle
17 years ago
Hitchcock gave a few interviewers that "celibate" quote, and evidently told various collaborators -- Leon Uris, the first screenwriter (of his own novel) on "Topaz," for instance.
Who knows? Certainly Hitchcock didn't look like a man who was going to have fun in the sack, but far less attractive, less powerful men DID in Hollywood (Sam Spiegel comes to mind. Ugly man, surrounded at all times by beautiful women.)
A telling quote I read from Hitchocck on the subject was "sex is for kids, sex is for movies."
If by "kids," Hitchcock meant "teens and collegians," well, that's when the hormones DO stir. As for "sex is for movies,"...well, Hitchcock certainly took THAT subject up time and time again.
Many writers on Hitchcock have tried to connect Hitchcock's sexual frustrations off-screen with the decidedly weird, kinky, or conflicted romantic relationships he portrayed on-screen. The connection certainly seems to be there. And, for a "celibate" man, he sure loved to film long intense close-ups of sexual soul-kissing of the highest order (Grant and Bergman, Stewart and Kelly, Grant and Kelly, Stewart and Novak, Grant and Saint, Gavin and Leigh -- though not, indeed, Taylor and Hedren.)
I'm with you on the mistreatment of women by Hitchcock in his films, particularly the later ones.
But I always like to take note that a lot of MEN die in late Hitchcock, too. In "North by Northwest," only men die (five of them, to be exact). In "Psycho," a man is butchered as well as a woman. In "The Birds," we only see the pecked-out eyes of one victim: a man (though a woman is also killed.) In "Marnie," only a man is killed. In "Torn Curtain," only a man is killed...and it takes forever. And so on.
By "Frenzy" (1972), however, Hitchcock pulled even on all those male deaths, telling the tale of a rapist-murderer who does in four women on-screen, and more before the movie begins...
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telegonus
17 years ago
Old Hitch has been accused of misogyny, though there are too many sympathetic and likeable female characters in his films for this to stick, going as far back to the heroic mother in The Man Who Knew Too Much and the equally heroic Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes, through the middle-aged mystery writer in Suspicion, uncle Charley's high strung but sympathetic sister in Shadow Of a Doubt, through the characters essayed by such actresses in later Hitchflicks as Thelma Ritter, Mildred Natwick, Barbara Bel Geddes. Vera Miles and Suzanne Pleshette (I'm talking non-leading ladies here). So Hitchcock's pictures, though they have their share of unlikeable women, are by no means anti-female. Nor are they particularly pro-male, in the chauvinist sense. Hitchcock was by no means a macho man and yet he doesn't, to put it mildly, treat women with any special gallantry in his films. He comes off, on the basis of his subject matter and characterizations, as essentially neutral in the "battle of the sexes" (remember that old phrase?). Hitch liked to entertain both sides of the issue; indeed, he seemed literally entertained by each side and by the battle itself, without actually taking sides.
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ecarle
17 years ago
I think that's a good call. Hitch was fascinated by the strengths, weaknesses, and perversities of men AND women, and tended to go down different paths, movie by movie.
Sometimes, it was simply a matter of "star emphasis." "North by Northwest" is about a weak and complex man, Roger Thornhill, played by a big star, Cary Grant. The movie studies the man, even as Eve Kendall has her own problems. "Under Capricorn" is a vehicle for Ingrid Bergman, so the story is about the woman. "Notorious" hits almost evenly between Grant AND Bergman, though Grant complained "Hitchcock threw that movie to Ingrid."
"Psycho" fascinatingly starts as a tale about a woman (Janet Leigh) and becomes a tale about a man(Tony Perkins)...but rather mixes the sexes once Norman's story takes the stage.
I have read that Hitchcock first developed "Torn Curtain" to focus on the woman in the story, but after having Julie Andrews forced on him and not much liking her, he ordered the script re-written and the story shifted to the man (Paul Newman, somewhat less forced upon him and somewhat better liked than Andrews by Hitchcock.) The resulting lack of confidence in the focus may have hurt that film.
Your mention of all those "sympathetic ladies" (Ritter, Pleshette et al) seems true -- Hitchcock often weighted his supporting characters with the "straight line" of his stories as the leads were being neurotic.
In "Vertigo," Bel Geddes' sane and sensible Midge is defeated and leaves the movie at the 2/3 mark -- whereupon Jimmy Stewart REALLY goes crazy, and so does the story.
The "misogyny" charge seems to attach to all those murders of females in Hitchcock movies, but as I noted, some men die equally gruesome deaths.
The problem may have been off-stage, and Hitchcock fretted and obsessed over the actresses under his charge. When they had little power (Vera Miles, Tippi Hedren), his attentions proved "dark." But even Grace Kelly and Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint found themselves being doted upon, or bullied (Novak) and made over by Hitchcock.
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nutsberryfarm
7 years ago
nah. no misogyny. hitch disliked both men & women equally.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.-Albert Camus🍁
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