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I’m still available — available Ferguson.
(00:08:33)
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[INT. Scottie’s Apartment (NIGHT)]
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Hitchcock, displeased with Raymond Chandler and his work on Strangers on a Train (Chandler was drinking, frustrated in his marriage, somewhat pretentious, generally unpleasant to be around), did what he could to hide the fact Chandler had worked on it. Chandler, famously, married a woman many years his senior, a woman he seems to have loved and who loved him in return, but who was already middle-aged when they met and had, at best, a waning sexual appetite. Chandler, it was said, was fired from his job as vice-president of Dabney Oil because of his alcoholism, but it was his philandering that embarrassed the company, and it was his philandering that really led to his firing. On the surface, there seem to be similarities between Chandler and Hitchcock. At a deeper level, perhaps there really were. Like finds like, but, like the ends of a magnet, it’s opposites that attract and likes that repel. Hitchcock seems to have been basically impotent for the greater part of his time in Hollywood. When, during the run-up to the production of Topaz, Universal publicist Orin Borsten, a fan of Chandler’s, asked if he could have one of Hitchcock’s two signed first editions of The Big Sleep, Hitchcock said, “Take them both.”
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Hitchcock had Raymond Burr (as Lars Thorwald, the murderer in Rear Window) made up and costumed as David O. Selznick, Hitchcock’s first American producer. It was not meant as a compliment.
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Hitchcock repeatedly cast against type — Jimmy Stewart, in all of his Hitchcock roles, for instance. Robert Walker.
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Janet Leigh, the only bankable star in Psycho, he killed off in the first thirty minutes.
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Cary Grant, 55, a man so cultured and dapper he never needed a costumer for his debonair roles with Hitchcock, began taking LSD “therapeutically” after filming North by Northwest.
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(Of course, “Cary Grant” was born Archibald Leach, and took part of his adopted name from the character he played in a stage production of William B. Friedlander’s Nikki, one of his first acting roles.)
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Hitchcock demanded that his production designers and set dressers refer to research photos, often going to great lengths to make the set mirror reality. For instance, he tells Truffaut that for Vertigo. he sent people to San Francisco, where the story is set, to photograph apartments of retired detectives with college degrees, and based the design of the James Stewart character’s apartment on the photos.
(Krohn, Hitchcock at Work)
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The scene that required the most retakes was scene 151, the scene following Scottie’s rescue of Madeleine, when she awakes to find herself in his bed.
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When Judy, still in character as Madeleine, awakes in Scottie’s bed, she says, “Where is my child?” a reference to Carlotta’s lost son or daughter (in Elster’s oddly incestuous formula, a child who would be her grandfather or grandmother). But critic Bill Krohn believes the line may also refer to J.M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, Hitchock’s never-filmed pet project. In Barrie’s play, Mary Rose is a young woman who disappears while on vacation with her husband, only to reappear many years later, the same age as when she disappeared. Her son, very young at the time of her disappearance, has grown up, and to all appearances is now older than his mother. Barrie had written, in an earlier work, “The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. What is saddest about these ghosts is that they may not know their child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an injury.” Is Krohn then, by extension, theorizing that Scottie is Carlotta’s lost child? Is the film?
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Legal department memo to Hitchcock:
“If the present indication is to be approved that Scottie has completely undressed Madeleine and put her to bed, the evidence of embarrassment on her part will have to be played down. Also, on page 60, Scottie’s broken line, ‘Not at all. I enjoyed — talking to you’ should be read without the break and also without any show of embarrassment.”
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I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception.
(Priest, The Affirmation)
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There is no language without deceit.
(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
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Robin Wood writes, “Midge, driving up to Scottie’s apartment, sees Madeleine drive away. That the two women never appear, beyond this, in the same scene brings home to us the incompatibility of the worlds they represent. Midge’s reappearance immediately after the beautifully sensitive, tentative groping toward a relationship between Scottie and Madeleine, makes us aware of her exclusion from certain levels of experience and her inadequacy to combat the sort of rivalry Madeleine offers; yet at the same time it makes us aware of her as representing a healthy normality to set against the element of neurotic sickness in Scottie’s attraction to Madeleine.”
As with an actor playing two roles in the same production, though, it might also “bring home to us” that one can never be in more than one place at one time. Midge does not appear on camera together with Madeleine, not in this scene, not ever. It is not a case of divided affection but of simple, mathematical efficiency — if Madeleine is there, Midge cannot be, and vice versa. Midge parks just as we hear Madeleine’s car start across the street, like an actress ducking behind the curtain for a quick change. Midge and Madeleine are one and the same.
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Self-imitation often results from the doomed attempt to resolve the circular paradox of marital sexual rejection. That is, the husband desires both an erotic encounter and a legitimate child, but not always from the same woman, and to close the circle, his wife must double back to become the person she knows she is, the person he cannot see until she transforms herself there and back again: his erotic partner (and often the mother of his children). Wives triple-cross their double-crossing husbands by substituting for the mistresses who are substituting for the wives, so that the man commits adultery with his own wife, stumbling home in the dark. The wife really is the mistress because fantasy and desire make her so — if for no other reason than because she appears in her erring husband’s mind to be so.