FILM / James Stewart and Cary Grant: Portraying Two Sides of Alfred Hitchcock / Christian Perkins
Image © Paramount Pictures
With Vertigo and North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock concluded two quartets of films with his recurring lead actors, James Stewart and Cary Grant. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Hitchcock would regularly alternate from James Stewart—whose films include Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo—and Cary Grant who starred in Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest. While the interchanging between Stewart and Grant may hardly seem anything noticeable, Hitchcock knew both actors brought different personas in their performances in each film, and never was the difference more strongly noted than in the films each actor did with Hitchcock throughout the 1950s. In the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, director and personal friend François Truffaut explained “With Cary Grant[,] the picture is more humorous, and with James Stewart the emphasis is on emotion.” Donald O. Spoto also notes the differences between the Stewart and Grant. Writing in his Hitchcock biography The Dark Side of Genius, he notes that James “Stewart was closer to a representation of Hitchcock himself than any presence until Sean Connery's in Marnie. Elsewhere one of Hollywood's clearest exponents of the ordinary man as hero, Stewart's image was reshaped by Hitchcock to conform to much in his own psyche. Whereas with Grant, he embodied what Hitchcock ‘would like to have been.’” Thus, it appears the Stewart–Hitchcock films of the 1950s aimed to be more serious and Stewart's character was an exact reflection of the director himself while the Grant–Hitchcock films during the same era were more light-hearted and Grant's character was what Hitchcock wished he could be.
With Rear Window and Vertigo, Stewart stands as a substitute of the director himself enabling sexual perversity into each performance whilst bringing out a darker side of the actor. The story that became the basis for Rear Window was titled “It Had to be Murder,” which was first published in Dime Detective Magazine in February 1942 and was credited to William Irish (a pseudonym for Cornell Woolrich). Much of the original short story was retained in the finished film albeit with few noticeable changes to the protagonist who was originally named Jeff and had no mentioned occupation or girlfriend involved in the story. The role of the girlfriend Lisa Fremont was written specifically for rising actress Grace Kelly, who had previously starred in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. Jeff was renamed L. B. Jeffries, in which Hitchcock had Stewart in mind for the role since the film’s inception. With the new name, he was granted the occupation of a photographer now becoming a substitute for a voyeur director, much like Hitchcock was himself.
In Rear Window, biographer Marc Eliot writes that Stewart “manages to combine all of Hitchcock's subrosa sadistic, obsessive, voyeur fantasies and still make Jeffries someone the audience strongly identifies with, and deeply roots for.” With his broken leg wrapped in a cast, Jeffries's chair becomes a substitute for a director's chair. His binocular and telephoto lens becomes his camera with each block of the nearby apartment suite as its own mini-movie. Even Lisa herself becomes an actress for Jeffries's pleasure when he instructs her to remain hidden as Lars Thorwald returns to his apartment gesturing his hands as a director would do with his actors. Unlike Grant's two characters, Stewart's characters were not flamboyant playboys who chased women. If so, as in Vertigo, it was done in a perverse manner. As seen in the film, Jeffries is not romantically interested in Lisa, and by the end, the two are still not a married couple. Instead, Jeffries replaces his sexual interests in a murder mystery. When Jeffries overhears the cry of a woman, he begins to suspect Thorwald is the murderer of his wife. His obsession with this crime becomes allegorical for sexual voyeurism. Eliot likened Jeffries's spying as masturbation writing that “his excitement heightened whenever he zooms in” on “other people’s most sexually private moments.”
This portrayal of sexual voyeurism appeared more strongly when their partnership was capped with Vertigo released in 1958. In this film, John "Scottie" Ferguson is assigned by Gavin Elster to investigate his wife, Madeleine, who is said to be possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes. During his investigation, Scottie follows Madeleine from the grave of Carlotta Valdes to the art museum. Much like Jeffries, Scottie does not interact with Madeleine preferring to remain afar. As Donald Spoto argues, “[i]n no other film did Hitchcock have so clear a masculine alter ego than James Stewart in this film” as the main character of Scottie “was really Hitchcock himself. Like James Stewart in Vertigo, Hitchcock chose fantasy over reality, and he could not respond to a woman until she was refashioned to correspond with his dream.” The actresses who did correspond with his vision during his career up until then included Madeleine Carroll, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and Vera Miles. However, it was Miles who famously turned down the dual role of Madeleine Elster/Judy because she became pregnant before principle photography was to take. Up until then, Hitchcock's desire for Miles was to mold her into a major Hollywood star for she “was a sexy blonde with ethereal looks—like Madeleine's.” This correlates with Scottie's attempt to make Madeleine become his lover, but it falls apart when she falls to her death at the tower and subsequently, he suffers a mental breakdown in which he is diagnosed with “acute melancholia, together with a guilt complex.” For Hitchcock, this was his self-diagnosis of the same disease because of “his own most recent reaction to the disappointment he felt over Vera Miles.” To replace Miles, he reluctantly selected Kim Novak. As seen in the second half of Vertigo, Scottie must force a reluctant Judy to alter her clothing attire and hairstyle to conform to his fetish for Madeleine. Interestingly, Hitchcock noted his interest with the film dealt with “changing the woman's hair color—because it contained so much analogy to sex. This man changed and dressed up his woman, which seems like the reverse of stripping her naked. But it amounts to the same thing. I really made the film in order to get through to this subtle quality of a man's dreamlike nature.” This is indeed a parallel to how Hitchcock had to mold the appearance and mannerisms of Novak into his preference and vision of a Hitchcock blonde as seen in his previous films. In his Hitchcock biography, Patrick McGilligan recorded that Hitchcock was angered with Novak's refusal to not subscribe to his preferred desires for Madeleine to wear a gray suit and don a plain hairstyle at wardrobe meetings, in which he told the actress: “you do your hair whatever color you like, and you wear whatever you like, so long as it confirms to the story requirements.” As seen in the finished film, he eventually did have his way with her.
As seen in Vertigo, the treatment of women in Stewart's films with Hitchcock was more different than seen in Cary Grant's films. As Robin Wood notes in his book Hitchcock's Films Revisited, unlike Cary Grant's Hitchcock films where there is an “equalized male/female relationship,” Stewart's films present his characters with the "desperate and hopeless drive to dominate [the female characters]—to assert an ideologically constructed ‘masculinity . . .’” In the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Spoto notes that Stewart plays “the protective but decidedly manipulative husband and father” in which he likens as being similar to Hitchcock's own personality. McGilligan also labels Hitchcock as “a staunch family man—a facet of his character that belies the image of a man obsessed with murder and evil. A surprising number of his films, especially in the first half of his career, were in one sense about true love, and protecting one's marriage and family.” Thus, with Stewart playing a Hitchcockian family man, Ben McKenna is also a reflection of the actor himself intended to play on his star persona. In the film, he mentions he hailed from Indiana and served during World War Il, which is fairly true to Stewart's own personal background. One dark side of McKenna reveals itself is when he encourages his wife, Josephine, overwhelmed with the loss of her son, to take prescription pills and at multiple points, he supersedes over her to the point it is almost bullying. The film, which was released in 1956, is retrospectively dismissed as a minor Hitchcock production, but it also shares in the serious-minded mood of Rear Window and Vertigo. To add onto the serious mood, the film showcases emotionally driven performances of both Stewart and Doris Day portraying the distraught American parents of a missing boy in Morocco. Here, the son Henry “Hank” McKenna becomes almost a MacGuffin for the parents to find and for the villainous Draytons to hold captive during a political conspiracy and intrigue. However, unlike Hitchcock's other MacGuffins, it is an integral one since the McKennas has to find the Draytons in order to find Hank.
When Vertigo was released in May 1958, critical reception was mixed. On a budget of $2.48 million, Vertigo grossed $3.2 million in North American box office rentals by January 1959. While the film did return a respectable net profit, this was a sharp downturn from the box office performance of Rear Window, which grossed $5.3 million in North American rentals. Stewart was personally affected by the commercial disappointment as he viewed his box office draw with audiences was weakening and his tenure as a top-tier Hollywood leading man was ending. Hitchcock was too deeply affected by Vertigo's box office performance. He personally told Truffaut that he accused the elderly appearance of Stewart for the commercial downturn of Vertigo. For that attribute, Hitchcock declined the possibility of casting Stewart from any upcoming film.
Beforehand, during the filming of Vertigo, Hitchcock discussed his follow-up project North by Northwest with Stewart. Intrigued with the premise of the film, Stewart naturally assumed he was envisioned for the leading role as the traveling advertising man Roger O. Thornhill. Indeed, screenwriter Ernest Lehman tailored Thornhill in mind for Stewart to portray. Similarly, Hitchcock did consider Stewart for the role, but he felt his performance would make the film serious. Instead, the director turned to Cary Grant for the role. Because Hitchcock did not want to upset Stewart, he delayed filming North by Northwest until Stewart was contractually assigned to star as Shepherd Henderson in Bell, Book and Candle where he was again paired with Vertigo co-star Kim Novak. At the time, Novak was loaned to Paramount Pictures to star in Vertigo by Columbia Pictures in exchange for Stewart to star in their film Bell, Book and Candle. Interestingly, Cary Grant was in mind to portray Henderson. With Stewart out of the way, Hitchcock used his absence as an excuse to maintain his friendship with the actor while having to avoid casting him in North by Northwest. With Thornhill re-written to match Grant’s romanticized persona, Hitchcock knew in advance that Grant would accumulate higher box office returns overseas while “making it more of a draw as a “woman’s picture”” in the United States.
To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest would be the last two films Grant did with Hitchcock. Both films have Grant portray a leading man falsely suspected a crime he did not commit. On his run from the law, he romances a beautiful blonde woman and proves his innocence. Furthermore, he confided that the film was merely a showcase of “beautiful people, beautiful scenery, a love story and suspense”. In order to visualize this type of film, Hitchcock knew that he needed a glamorous leading man and leading lady to play the couple, John Robie and Frances “Francie” Stevens. He would turn to Cary Grant, who had announced an early retirement from screen acting in 1952 having been subdued by Method acting, the social culture of the 1950s, and “that nobody cared about elegance or comedy at all”. Knowing Grant’s gifts for comedy, Hitchcock sent the script of To Catch a Thief to address his displeasure. Telling his co-star Brigitte Auber, Grant exclaimed that “Hitchcock likes me a lot, but at the same time he detests me…He would like to be in my place. He’d very much like to be in my place, because he can imagine himself in my place.”
A deeper subtext would imply that Hitchcock would often imagine himself in a scenario in which he becomes a wrongly accused man. As seen in these "wrong man" pictures with Cary Grant, both Robie and Thornhill receive the transference of guilt for a crime they did not commit. This would be allegorical to Hitchcock's own fear of committing an illegal act. In his own interview with Françoise Truffaut, he recounted a story in which his father locked him in jail at an early age and his education at the Jesuit school instilled him with the moral "fear of being involved in anything evil.” Spoto also seems to confirm that "Hitchcock harbored a lifelong terror of breaking the law and thus being thought a “bad boy.” (When asked what he would like on his tombstone, he replied: “This is what we do to bad little boys.”)
Allegorical to Grant’s return from retirement, John Robie must come out of retirement to outwit the real thief to prove his innocence. The film plays on Grant’s athleticism when he climbs upon rooftops and escape from the French police, as well as his sex appeal when he appears shirtless in a beach scene. In a forerunner to James Bond, Robie is dressed in a tuxedo while at a gambling table. Unlike the Stewart films, Donald Spoto writes, “To Catch a Thief is noteworthy for its verbal and visible sexual puns and double entendre, and it was in fact one of the film of the fifties that pushed further the limits of adult humor.” For example, one exchange hints at the sexual tension behind Robie and Francie:
ROBIE:
Jewelry—you never wear any.
FRANCIE:
I don’t like cold things touching my skin.
ROBIE:
Why don’t you invent some hot diamonds?
FRANCIE:
I’d rather spend my money on more tangible excitement.
ROBIE:
Tell me, what do you get a thrill out of most?
FRANCIE:
I’m still looking for that one.
As for the visual sexual puns, one scene has Robie and Francie embrace each other at her apartment, which is cross-cut with a firework display. This, of course, is meant to highlight sexual chemistry between the characters. Much like North by Northwest, there is a scene in which Grant's Roger O. Thornhill and Eva Marie Saint's Eve Kendall, which similarly carry sexual innuendo and flirtation:
KENDALL:
I tipped the steward five dollars to seat you here if you should come in.
THORNHILL:
Is that a proposition?
KENDALL:
I never discuss love on an empty stomach.
THORNHILL:
You’ve already eaten.
KENDALL:
But you haven’t.
The film then concludes with the two characters married and having sex while being cross-cut with a train entering into a tunnel, which is an intentional sexual pun.
While it is true that North by Northwest does have serious, tense moments and contains implausible situations as seen in The Man Who Knew Too Much, it is a little inconceivable to see Stewart as Thornhill. Thornhill required an actor who displayed great sexual chemistry with the leading actress, in this case Eva Marie Saint, and appear rather dashing. Arthur Laurents, the screenwriter of Hitchcock's earlier film Rope which starred Stewart, noted "Jimmy Stewart was not sexual as an actor, while Cary Grant was always sexual.” While Vertigo was a romance film, the actual romance was more of an obsessive one with Scottie forcing Judy to become his object of desire. Rear Window's romance was left unresolved and the romance in Man Who Knew Too Much was more controlling. As Robin Wood noted earlier, the romance relationships in Grant's films were always more consensual and placed him on equal footing with the leading lady. With Cary Grant in the role, he interestingly gave the actor free rein with his character with the actor selecting his own custom-made Saville Row suits to wear for the film. This is an abrupt departure from his insistence of choice of attire for Novak in Vertigo. Perhaps, Hitchcock felt Grant knew more about appearing glamorous onscreen than he did. After all, Hitchcock went on record stating “One doesn't direct Cary Grant. One simply puts him in front of a camera. He enables the audience to identify with the main characters.”
Albeit made in the 1940s, Notorious is another film in which Hitchcock supplants Grant for his alter ego. The commonality in both Grant's character Devlin and Hitchcock himself is their infatuation for Ingrid Bergman. In the film, Devlin, a government secret agent, falls for Alicia Huberman (played by Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of a Nazi agent, but he withholds his affection so that she may use her sexual talents to woo Alexander Sebastian, the head of a Nazi spy ring in South America. As many biographers of Hitchcock have noted, the director himself was very fond of Bergman. Mark Eliot writes in his biography of Grant that “what Hitchcock dared not try in real life, he could act out and control vicariously through the actions of his characters. As Hitchcock directed Grant, so did Devlin direct Alicia.” Just as Devlin places duty before love, “Hitchcock's sense of duty at home and at work clashed with a long-suppressed sexual life he neither understood nor fully wanted” as Spoto writes. Spoto also believes Devlin is another cinematic side of Hitchcock. So, whatever love Hitchcock carried for Bergman, he had to repress it for work on Notorious just as Devlin “is full of unspent passion for Bergman, but he can neither articulate his love nor respond to her desire for him.” Much like The Man Who Knew Too Much drew from Stewart's background, Notorious draws from Grant's “real life, at least some of which Hitchcock must have been aware of and that he may have used as a way, for the sake of the character, to try to connect Grant to his darker side.” Eliot would list that Grant himself worked with the Federal Bureau Investigation, was accused for slapping his first wife Virginia Cherrill, and his second wife Barbara Hutton had friendly ties to the Nazi Party. Long after the dissolution of her marriage to Grant, Hutton had married a former German tennis star Gottfried Von Cramm who briefly served as a Nazi soldier in World War II. These situations directly mirror Devlin's actions (and those towards Alicia) in the film. Despite these dramatic and rather cold actions, Devlin still possesses sexual charm and warmth in his lengthy kiss scene with Alicia. As Eliot writes in the actor's biography, his “performance of Devlin proved once and for all that could successfully portray charming, heroic, romantic characters that had both darkness and depth, even while dressed in his requisite tux (which he donned for the reception scene).”
In conclusion, as Donald Dewey even noted in Stewart's biography, “Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto saw as casting Stewart for protagonists he considered himself to be and Cary Grant for the ones he would have liked to have been.” With films such as Rear Window and Vertigo, Stewart becomes Hitchcock's alter ego with their journey into voyeurism and obsession that helped Stewart to portray a darker side of his cinematic persona but still retain his likeability. Even The Man Who Knew Too Much saw Stewart portraying an aspect of Hitchcock as a family man. Most of Stewart's films were more serious-minded. With Cary Grant, the films allowed to show his sexual charisma and appeal while the romance was on equal footing. His Hitchcock films of the 1940s viewed a more dramatic side of his persona that saw him be both charming, yet slightly abusive lovers. In the 1950s, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest saw Grant playing elegant bachelors that won over the Hitchcock blondes as much as Hitchcock wanted to do as well as play on the director's worst fear of being a wrongly accused man. Those films were more escapist films with romance, comic situations, and sexual innuendo.
Bibliography
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Dewey, Donald. James Stewart: A Biography. Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1996. Print.
Eliot, Marc. Cary Grant: A Biography. New York: Harmony Books, 2004. Print.
Eliot, Marc. Jimmy Stewart: A Biography. New York: Harmony Books, 2006. Print.
McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: ReganBooks, 2003. Print.
Nelson, Nancy. Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991. Print.
Truffaut, Françoise. Hitchcock (Revised Edition). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Print.
Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983. Print.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films Revisited (Revised Edition). New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.
Christian Perkins lives in Louisiana and holds a B.A. in Film and Media Arts from Louisiana State University. He is currently writing screenplays and short stories.
