Hitchcock, the counter-caster

By Tom Shone

What are movie stars for? These days, we expect them to display powers of transformation, a very different thing from acting, involving the donning of false noses and prosthetic chins, or a five-month spell in the wilderness without hair conditioner, so that critics can fall over themselves to pronounce the star “a chameleon” who has rendered themselves “unrecognisable” to all but the millions sitting in cinemas muttering mutinously, “Nicole Kidman’s false nose looks droopy.” Such self-uglification would have been anathema to the stars of the golden age. “To watch her is to achieve direct, cleansed perception of something which, like a flower or a fold of silk, is raptly, unassertively, and beautifully itself,” wrote Kenneth Tynan of Garbo, who regarded the impersonation of other people as running a poor second to the more pressing task of being herself.

Then there is Alfred Hitchcock’s way, which goes something like this. Take an actor who is a decorated war hero. Nothing too fancy: the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing 20 missions deep into Nazi Germany, say. Upon his return home, let him visit his parents and come back to the screen in something toasty like “It’s a Wonderful Life”; then, with public affection for this All-American hero at its warmest, cast him as a misanthrope, a peeping Tom and a necrophiliac. That is what Hitchcock did with James Stewart, in “Rope”, “Rear Window” and “Vertigo”, opening up a vein of agony that no one had seen before. This Jimmy Stewart talked murder, spied on neighbours and obsessed about fashioning new lovers in the image of old, dead ones. Such a wonderful life.