Hitchcock and Audience Expectations

Janet Leigh, on her role in Psycho:

“I saw that she was really a shabby, mousy little woman. She wasn’t in any way glamorous or anything. So we chose clothes that she could have afforded. We didn’t have a dressmaker do them; we just went out and bought clothes that she could have bought on her salary. And I didn’t have the hairdresser do my hair, I did it myself as she would: she couldn’t afford a beauty parlour…I knew the background of this girl: it was lonely, poor…she was the older sister who took care of the younger one. And her drab life, in that office with that terrible man trying to take her out…”

And here, for all you film fans, is a beautiful and in-depth look at the work of Janet Leigh in one of my favorite film-obsession sites Images Journal.

Janet Leigh will probably always be remembered for Psycho – but her career lasted decades. And it was with Touch of Evil and Psycho that her talent was actually utilized, for the first time. These directors saw beneath that lovely surface, they saw the guts there, the truth. I mean, read that quote above from her. It makes me want to hug her. If you look like Janet Leigh, directors often don’t WANT you to be talented. You are there for the sole reason of your beauty.

But, in the same way that Hitchcock sensed a darkness underneath the surface glitter of Cary Grant, and worked to bring it to the surface (time and time and time again), Hitchcock sensed something ELSE going on with this beautiful all-American blonde.

Perhaps it is not so much that Hitchcock cared what was ACTUALLY going on within Cary Grant, or Janet Leigh but he knew that audiences would come to these films with a certain set of expectations – or anxieties – and he was going to either shatter the audience’s expectations or play on their anxieties.

What the hell am I talking about?

The handsomeness of Cary Grant is undeniable. It’s a God-given gift. It’s barely REAL. Normal people don’t look like that. Hitchcock knew this … and so (North by Northwest is a perfect example) put this oh-so-handsome gentleman through tormenting situation after tormenting situation. NOBODY is more degraded and crashed off the pedestal than poor Roger Thornhill. In a weird way, you could look at that film as Hitchcock’s revenge. “Okay, fine, SOME people are born looking like Cary Grant, while OTHER PEOPLE are born looking like me?? Let’s see how Cary Grant deals with THIS.” Hitchcock envied people who were beautiful (which was why his films were always filled with such gods and goddesses). He wanted to look like Cary Grant. So maybe subconsciously, it pleased him to some degree to make Cary Grant, the idol of a million women, go through all of these horrible experiences. Like: hahahaha, I may be fat and bald and homely, but I can make THE Cary Grant crouch in a corn field!! Ha!

But ALSO – Hitchcock knew that audiences would come to a Cary Grant movie expecting a certain thing. Hitchcock LOVED to make audiences uneasy. He LOVED to make people gasp with horror. He loved to set them up: Okay, you think this is a Cary Grant movie? You want to see him urbane and suave? TOO BAD, here’s what I have in store!! (evil laugh)

(Side note: Hitchcock said that the only actor he ever “loved”, of all the actors he worked with, was Cary Grant. Cary Grant was his alter ego, his favorite actor. And Cary Grant believed that he and Hitchcock had some kind of psychic connection/understanding … one of those rare actor/director relationships that sometimes occurs, like Scorsese and DeNiro. Cary Grant, who trusted almost NO ONE, trusted Hitchcock. He would do ANYTHING in those Hitchcock movies. Because he knew he was in good hands with Hitchcock. Howard Hawks was another one. I mean, good LORD, look at the outfit Howard Hawks was able to get Cary Grant to wear in Only Angels Have Wings. Gouchos? A gun holster? A wide Panama hat? And – ahem – that has to be one of the sexiest performances ever given by an American male. EVER. Flowing goucho pants and all.)

But back to Hitchcock, and his penchant for taking these beautiful people, putting them in his movies, and messing with an audience’s expectations:

Think of the raging FIRE beneath the surface of Grace Kelly’s heiress in To Catch a Thief. That actress was NOT just a cool blonde, although audiences kind of expected only that from her. Many directors only saw her coolness, her blondeness, her cool blondeness, whatever. Hitchcock saw something else. He made her eat a drumstick WITH HER FINGERS, in that picnic scene, and then had her LICK HER FINGERS. Yum. It’s a great scene. Movie star actress-types did NOT do stuff like that on screen in those days. But Hitchcock made this blonde have a chill exterior, sure, but underneath was this earthy hungry woman … and … well … the moment when SHE initiates the kiss with Grant? I read some reviewer who said, “It was a small kiss, but the look on Cary Grant’s face afterwards is as though she had unzipped his fly.”

I’m now leaping back to Hitchcock’s Suspicion:

Hitchcock sets Cary Grant up as … a sketchy character in Suspicion – you don’t know what to make of him, is he evil? Is he bad? But … the looks!! That CHIN! Hitchcock plays on our experiences of Cary Grant’s beauty, and the fallacy that beautiful people are always good and to be admired. That movie turns that expectation on its ear. Suspicion was the first of many Cary Grant/Hitchcock collaborations … Here are some of my posts on that movie: Here, and here … There are probably more in that Cary Grant archive.

The studio made Hitchcock change the ending to Suspicion, because they were shocked that Cary Grant would be such a villain. So the movie doesn’t QUITE work … but it’s fascinating to watch nonetheless.

It’s one of the reasons why I think Cary Grant is one of the best actors to have ever practiced the craft. PERIOD. If all you saw was Bringing Up Baby, you’d STILL have to admit that the guy was special – but put it alongside Suspicion, and Notorious and North by Northwest??

Hitchcock loved messing with the audience.

And in Psycho, with that shower scene, with the entire set-up to the scene … and the fact that it was JANET LEIGH – Hitchcock messed with the audience in a way that still reverberates today.

DO NOT read the following excerpt if you haven’t seen the film:

It discusses Janet’s ACTING in that famous scene, something many overlook – because the scene itself is so notorious. It’s about so much more than one woman’s performance.

What Janet Leigh does with her body in Psycho is not nearly as interesting as what she does with her face. In a very black sense, Hitchcock acknowledges this by destroying her body and leaving us with that lovely face smeared against the bathroom floor. When Marion and Norman talk in her room, Norman walks over to and past Marion and she turns towards him as he passes her. It is as though they are going to dance. As he passes and she turns, she smiles to herself at his ineptitude–he cannot bring himself to say “bathroom” in front of her–and as she looks up the private grin segues into, not a look, more a regard. It is as if for all his ineptitude, his strangeness, she is actually beginning to like this boy. Her look momentarily opens her tired face to new possibilities.

In this brief moment, she renews her habitually positive pact with experience, she bounces back as she has a million times before. Emboldened as much as we are charmed, Norman invites Marion to have something to eat with him. Her look is such that we do not notice the cut to him as he issues the invitation, with its mute intimation of disconnection, alienation, horror. The scene is then swallowed up in Perkins’ boyish glee that this dreamboat is actually prepared to break bread with him. It feels as though the modern stray who has dominated the first half of the film now “throws” the initiative, the narrative, his way and he’s thrilled. “She is so clearly like the all-American girl you saw on the magazine covers,” Harvey writes, “in the cigarette ads, even the movies–like Janet Leigh, to put it plainly–the ideal daughter, the ideal wife.” And now she is his. … In her short tenure on screen, Leigh’s face runs the gamut from contented to perplexed, sad to sympathetic, worried to agonized. It is the expressive lexicon of a million working girls as they negotiate the troubled terrain of contemporary sex and manners, the life (and death) of the American Girl.

Short tenure on screen, indeed. Brilliant.