All in the family

Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell recalls working with her father, Alfred, on "Strangers on a Train" and "Psycho."

By Michael Sragow

Aug 13, 1999 | Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was known as the master of suspense. But he should have been known as the father of suspense. He didn't merely master the movie thriller -- he just about invented it. Virtuosic in his use of counterpoint and rhythm, he made pictures that resembled mercurial pieces of music. Born on Aug. 13 a hundred years ago to a grocer in the East End of London, he became the quintessential international filmmaker. He began his career directing silent films in Munich for a British producer, and ended it on the lot at Universal Pictures. (He arrived in Hollywood in 1939, and became a U.S. citizen in 1955.) From deft English classics like "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes" to the mad American adventures of "North By Northwest" and "Psycho," Hitchcock kept upping the level of visceral excitement a film could deliver to an audience. He brought off violent spectacle with cunning and artistry -- often without showing a smidgen of gore. So he attracted all audiences, including aesthetes who would never have ventured into a Grand Guignol theater of blood.

When Hitchcock received his AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, one Los Angeles TV commentator expressed shock that a man who devoted his professional career to depicting aberrant behavior had taken home an august "establishment" award. Of course, that glorious incongruity is what most fans enjoyed about the evening. Despite his other honors and success, Hitchcock, who never won an Oscar, was the least "respectable" of beloved directors.

British critic Raymond Durgnat sees the world of Hitchcock's English films as "that of [Graham] Greene -- of Orwell, with his vision of the semidetached houses as so many 'cells of fear.'" In his emotionally tumultuous, too-little-known British film, "Sabotage" -- which conveys the horror of terrorism with spellbinding intimacy -- he conjures a stifling lower-middle-class claustrophobia, then disrupts it with a bang.

The first American Hitchcock film to jump from keenly observed realistic settings to phantasmagoric murders was the droll and tingling "Shadow of a Doubt." In this precursor to David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," Hitchcock frames such an indelible and hilarious portrait of a complaisant California bourgeoisie that James Agee hailed "its clever observations of rabbity white-collar life" as "the best since W.C. Fields' "It's a Gift."" It was followed (and equaled or surpassed) by "Strangers on a Train," "Rear Window," "Vertigo" and of course "Psycho." These movies bring a stark, electrifying cackle -- a sense of inescapable, if not original, sin -- to the thriller-maker's eternal boast that things are not as they seem.

Hitchcock's mid-career milestone, "Notorious," a voluptuous espionage romance set in post-World War II South America, has a fearless, grown-up view of sexuality and of moral and amorous compromise that Hitchcock himself would never match. But a decade later, Hitchcock perfected a lighter style of international thriller in "To Catch a Thief" and "North By Northwest" -- films set in an upper-crust fantasy land, filled with courageous men and women who exchange suave, bitchy banter between showdowns and clinches. With apologies to James Bond, nobody did it better.

Hitchcock appealed to teenagers because his pictures rarely spouted the positive-minded cant of other movies of the '40s and the '50s. He may have gotten tired later in his career, but at least he didn't turn sentimental. "Psycho" told middle-class rebels that they were right not to share their parents' security -- even when they were in the shower.

So what was it like to be Patricia Hitchcock (now Pat Hitchcock O'Connell), the daughter of the father of suspense -- and not just the daughter, but also an actor with parts in three of his films and nine episodes of his TV show? And why should we be interested in the answers? Because a balance needs to be righted. Ever since psychohistory took over criticism and celebrity took over journalism, movie lovers have been too apt to presume that the dark strains of an artist's personality are more crucial to his genius than the ingenuity, craftsmanship and wit that give those strains form and fiber.

We've become too willing to believe that hidden obsessions can overwhelm an artist's working life. That would be disastrous for a movie director, who must operate like a master manipulator every day, hiding fights with the suits when he's with his cast and crew -- and fights with his cast and crew when he's with the suits. Repressed sexual demons may have driven Hitchcock to play Svengali to Grace Kelly (in the mid-'50s of "Dial M for Murder," "Rear Window" and "To Catch a Thief") and, catastrophically, to Tippi Hendren (in the mid-'60s of "The Birds" and "Marnie"). But that doesn't mean he wasn't, in general, a genial taskmaster -- and a considerate father.

Hitchcock's influential biographer, Donald Spoto, interprets his choice of his daughter for a small role in the minor but engaging "Stage Fright" as "a benevolent gesture not undiluted with a certain sarcasm." To Spoto, Hitchcock was taking a dig at her when he cast her as a jolly acting student named "Chubby Bannister." But Patricia Hitchcock has just the kind of unusual yet real presence in "Stage Fright" that her father (in his prime) loved to have in his supporting casts. I think calling her "Chubby Bannister" -- a girl, Hitchcock quipped, "you could always lean on" -- was a sign, not of mockery, but of identification on the part of a director who was, after all, more portly than his daughter and known for his reliability.

That thought was confirmed when I re-watched "Strangers on a Train," in which Patricia Hitchcock plays the critical role of hero Farley Granger's future sister-in-law. Of course, she is the comic relief in the tense, morbid tale of how Robert Walker, as Granger's malignant alter ego, murders Granger's estranged wife in hopes that Granger will commit a murder for him. But what's funny about her is her inveterate truth-telling and the way she stays rooted when Granger and her sister (his fiancee) drift into a whirlpool. "One doesn't always have to say what one thinks," says her fictional father, a senator (played by the redoubtable Leo G. Carroll); "Father, I am not a politician," she blithely replies. And in "Psycho," she brings a forthright comic touch to Janet Leigh's plain-Jane office-mate, who generously offers to share tranquilizers that her mother gave her for her wedding night.

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