The Big Screen (58 page)

Faulkner tried Hollywood in the early 1930s, as he published
Light in August
. At Universal, in the summer of 1934 he was on $1,000 a week, working for Howard Hawks and doing a hundred-page treatment on a Blaise Cendrars novel,
Sutter's Gold
—it sounds like the Eisenstein idea. Why not? Story ideas hang around in Hollywood longer than some marriages or buildings.

At $1,000 a week, Faulkner seemed “hot.” Paramount had bought
Sanctuary
(published in 1931) and turned it into
The Story of Temple Drake
(with Miriam Hopkins). This was not
Sanctuary
, but Faulkner had not expected it to be. The association with Hawks is the root of the matter, though it would be hard to think of a more unlikely pairing. They drank together. Hawks was a snob who may have been tickled by the southern gentleman. They both loved flying. Whatever did it, they stuck together.
Sutter's Gold
was never made, but Hawks got a studio to buy a Faulkner short story, and he let the novelist work on isolated scenes.

There must have been something like respect between them. But can we imagine Hawks reading his way through
The Sound and the Fury
(1929), with its run-on stream of consciousness, times flying and memory's talk colliding with half-glimpsed scenes? Did he ever say to Faulkner, look, put down the book, just tell me the damn story so I can follow it? Someone else might have told Hawks that the stream-of-consciousness stuff was exactly what film could do: cutting disparate elements together, going from past to present, throwing up a glimpse of a little girl's muddied underwear so you never forget it.

There is a terrible film of
The Sound and the Fury
, made in 1959, directed by Martin Ritt, with Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward, Margaret Leighton, Jack Warden as Benjy, and Ethel Waters as Dilsey. Perhaps I'm making this up—it doesn't sound possible, but I think I saw it, and I suppose it was the result of someone working out what the story of the damn book was. Faulkner has never been done adequately on film. You can sum up the misguided attempts in the notion of Paul Newman as Flem Snopes in
The Long
,
Hot Summer
(1958, when it was enough in movies for the South to be sultry, lazy, and remote). There are good moments in Douglas Sirk's
The Tarnished Angels
(from
Pylon
), and for
Playhouse 90
on television, in 1958, John Frankenheimer did a version of
Old Man
that I think was decent.

Faulkner abided, as he might have said, resilient against every blandishment. He adapted his story “Turnabout” into a script and suffered the ridiculous studio imposition that the story needed Joan Crawford (there had been no woman's role). The film that emerged was
Today We Live
(1933). Later, Faulkner's movie salary fell off precipitously as his own economic situation deteriorated. By the early 1940s he was dangerously broke and most of his novels were out of print. So he worked for Hawks at Warners for $400 a week (he said he would have taken $100), and all he got for credits were
Air Force
,
To Have and Have Not
, and
The Big Sleep
. We don't really know what he did, except that he wrote John Ridgely's death scene in
Air Force
and the scene where the crew, in midair, hears Roosevelt explaining Pearl Harbor on the radio. Faulkner admitted that on
To Have and Have Not
, Hawks came up with most of the business. Jules Furthman was on the picture, too, lifting things Slim Hawks said for the Bacall part. Films like that weren't written. They were gathered here and there. But the money kept Faulkner going; it was a kind of grant.

He must have been appreciated on the set, and people realized he was Howard's man. But Howard loved fast talk, sexual innuendo, and farcical undertones in perilous places. Perhaps Faulkner enjoyed such scenes; he never passed an opinion. Nor did he exhibit one sign of being educated by the movies in seeing how a narrative could move once you realized what film editing was. In that respect, he wrote in a different world from, say, Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Patrick Hamilton, or Ernest Hemingway. Read this:

That's chapter 3 of Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
, published in 1926, when movies were still silent. Not that this kind of dialogue, with its sense of the unspoken, would be heard on-screen for at least twenty years. But the moment is cinematic: the transition from “slammed the door” to “Brett was leaning back” is a cut. Hemingway didn't depend on being aware of that, and no one had yet used a sound effect to bridge two shots in a movie. But unconsciously, he was following the energy of film's editing. So many fiction writers were. The value of the movies was simple and sweeping for writers: film helped you see your own scene in your head, and you could count on readers having the same instinct. Soon enough, literature would find that dispassionate observation as almost a policy or philosophy. Seeing was so potent and immediate, you could overlook its consequences. Nabokov once told his son that everything he wanted to write in the future was already there in his mind, “like film waiting to be developed.” We don't really have film anymore, but to write a story is very often running a movie, or different cuts of it, in the writer's head. As if he hadn't had to think of it?

“I am a camera.” No one is, but the technological shift it gave writing was profound, even if it might foreclose the potential of an inner life—Faulkner's pressing concern. This is one of the things we should have been talking about to our childen for a hundred years. And our children are too old now, and too uncertain about having an inner life. We have “streaming material” all the time, and god knows what that sauna does to us, but maybe consciousness has been shelved. It's something else we have to learn not to worry over.

I have described how Hitchcock flowered as artist and entertainer in the 1950s. This progress culminated in the unacademic shock of
Psycho
(1960)—was that “movie” or “cinema”?

Many people, including his studio, Paramount, had warned against this project: the material threatened to be nasty and gruesome, without Hitchcock's urbane and attractive people—you couldn't cast Cary Grant as Norman Bates (and I doubt Hitch could have brought himself to murder Grace Kelly). The shower killing and the looming mother seemed like exploitation, or Grand Guignol, as well as trouble with the censor. With his agent, Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock persevered. So long as he worked cheaply, using the crew from his television show, and staying in black and white,
Psycho
could be set up in a deal to make more money for Hitch than he had ever known before.

Step by step, he crafted his way past the censor. He cast Anthony Perkins as Norman; the audience knew him as a soft-spoken, decent young man. He set up the amiable Janet Leigh to be slaughtered; she was mainstream, as well as a blond movie star. And Hitch did it as what he called “pure cinema”: a series of effects made out of camera angles and cutting, invitation and withheld information, a delicious ordeal. He also made it a personal venture. In the theater lobbies there was a lifesize cardboard figure of the director—familiar from his cameo appearances on his television show—warning that no one would be admitted after the picture had started. More than just an auteur, he was in charge of the show. And the $800,000 film had rentals of $15 million. Hitch walked away with at least $4 million.

The reviews were all over the place.
Psycho
became a test case in the auteur debates; some said it was unpleasant, meretricious, ridiculous, and grisly, while at the other extreme it was regarded as a masterpiece, the introduction of breakdown as a subject, and a disturbing essay on the rhythm of voyeurism and detachment, suspense and distancing, in film history. Yes, we watched the story, to the point of nausea or compulsive reaction, but we followed the process, too, the way it was done. And in that analysis there was the start of a rare, chilly detachment. Was Hitch just a poker-faced entertainer or a modern genius?

François Truffaut had no doubts. He had cherished Hitchcock's films for years and had interviewed the maestro in the South of France during the making of
To Catch a Thief
. On June 2, 1962, between
Jules and Jim
and
The Birds
, Truffaut wrote to Hitchcock saying, “Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. There are many directors with a love for the cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself and it is that which I would like to talk to you about.”

He proposed eight days or thirty hours of recorded interview toward the making of a book that would assess every Hitchcock film and all the director's ideas about the medium. As soon as I've finished
The Birds
, promised Hitch. They sat down together for a week in August in Hitchcock's bungalow at Universal, with Helen Scott (one of Truffaut's most valued friends and consultants) present to help with translation issues. They talked for six days, and the book was not published until 1966, in part because it contained spectacular illustrations with frame-by-frame analyses of certain sequences. There had never been a book like it before, either in celebration of an individual director or in its close attention to the celluloid detail Hitch had given his life to.

This book became a key text in the mounting number of university seminars on Hitchcock, backing up the 1964 publication of Robin Wood's
Hitchcock's Films
—and Wood was a writer close to the
Movie
magazine group. By 1967, Hitch was sixty-seven, and there was a somber irony in the way his films became less interesting as he was the more esteemed. Was there a connection? The audience mood of the 1960s was changing rapidly, and directors of Hitchcock's age ran the risk of losing touch. The man who had made such inroads on censorship with
Psycho
, and judged its titillation to the frame, began to seem clumsy or overwrought with sexual violence by the time of
Frenzy
(1972), in which his interest in disturbance felt out of control and uncomfortable.

Hitchcock never won an Oscar for Best Director, though he was given the Irving Thalberg Award in 1967 and the AFI Life Achievement award in 1979, the year before his death. But he was at the pinnacle of success in the early 1960s as he made
The Birds
(1963) and
Marnie
(1964), and sat down for the Truffaut interview book. The inhibited voyeur was never drawn out of his shell. To study Hitchcock's films is to feel the deep yearning for his actresses and the concurrent suppression of it. Hitchcock had wanted Grace Kelly to return for
Marnie
, but the protocol of the principality of Monaco would not permit it. So he used Tippi Hedren again, his actress from
The Birds
, and made a crude pass at her. That is her account of it, but it is not really doubted. She rebuffed him, and Hitchcock was left crushed in his moment of glory. It was a strange and embarrassing revelation that the man in charge might be not just an omniscient auteur—someone who always had the whole picture in his head—but also a desperate person crying out from the back room of his being. Rich as it is, the Truffaut book does not discover that man. Hitch was too professional, too superior, too Hollywood, to let him be seen or to own up to his pressing subject, the loneliness.

The question often arises with Hitchcock as to how well he understood himself. Planning everything in advance, and claiming to be a little bored during the shooting, could be a droll way of not noticing yourself. Or was he just the wry if slightly wicked entertainer he found viable in public relations?

In 1964, he had an exchange with Vladimir Nabokov on ideas for collaborating on a picture. They came to nothing, though some plans were put forward on both sides. Hitch suggested a plot concerning a woman in love with a defector. The correspondence includes this, from Hitchcock:

“Naturally.” But by 1964 Hitchcock had revealed so much about himself—not least the passionate voyeur, as intense as Humbert Humbert beholding Lolita. Could it be that some film directors, if they are to gaze with such longing, are safer and freer if they don't ask too much about their own motives? Is it possible that a similar liberating restraint applies to us, the viewers? One of the charms in “I am a camera” was always its insinuation that if you become that mechanical you may not need to think or question what you are doing. The same facility is useful in torture or playing golf.