McGilligan, Patrick. . Alfred Hitchcock : a life in darkness and light / Patrick McGilligan. 1st ed. 006039322X series New York : Regan Books, c2003.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1998.3.H58 M38 2003

    In Part 5 (Paramount: The Glory Years) chapter 15, the author describes the process by which Hitchcock decided on the actors that he chose to star in the film. Originally, James Stewart had be slated for the role of Thornhill, but due to the poor performance of Vertigo in the box office it was unclear whether Hitchcock and the studio could justifiably use him instead of Cary Grant. Stewart was an immensely popular actor, but not considered sexy enough for the role. By using Grant who appeared younger, the studios were happy because there would be a greater draw for women to see the film and Hitchcock was happy because he signed a lead actor whom the audience would have more emotion invested in. Hitchcock next arrived at the task of picking the female lead. He rejected the studio's suggestions and chose Eva Marie Saint, a well regarded actress but not regarded as exceptionally sexy or mysterious. Hitchcock hoped to mold her and give her a specific role. James Mason comments on this, accusing Hitchcock of using his actors as "animated props".

    The choice of actors in a film a critical first step towards creating the desired output. Despite Hitchcock's often firm hand in micromanaging the details of each shot, the actor has a great deal of responsibility and artistic license in the way they portray their character in the film. Hitchcock made his decisions based on the overall effect upon the audience. Thus, careful selection of each actor was an important prerequisite for achieving his desired outcome in each shot. The decisions made however led to great success. The strength of the movie rests on the audience's concern for Thornhill's successful resolution of the dangerous challenge he was forced into, and also of Eve's safety as she plays the role of secret agent to the enemy spy. While casting the correct actor into a role is critically important, it can also be argued that massaging that actor into the desired character during filming is of equal importance. If the character is not playing the part as envisioned, the director essentially loses control over his tool he uses to manipulate the emotions of the audience.  Hitchcock not only carefully screened his actors, but was also known for his adept manipulation of their skills into the finished product he himself desired.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Interview with Bryan Forbes. BFI. 1967. 8 Apr. 2008 http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/interviews/hitchcock.html.

    This interview begins with thoughtful questions asked by another director who is clearly a fan of Hitchcock's work. Through thoughtful questions, Hitchcock is encouraged to discuss his script-writing process. For example, we learn that Hitchcock planned the Mount Rushmore scene fifteen years prior to North by Northwest, and simply waited for an opportunity to insert the scene. He also speaks of his fan of the montage technique, and how greater emotions are brought forth by the audience's emotional attachment to the actors. Using humor and wordplay, Hitchcock adeptly keeps the interest of the audience as he discusses his thought processes and motivations behind the stylistic elements he is famous for using.  Much of the interview is devoted to specific stylistic decisions in his films, but even these can be viewed as representative of Hitchcock's overall strategy as a director.

    It is clear from this interview that Hitchcock operates in a very casual manner, and despite the widespread belief that he adamantly enforces his own view of the film it appears he is sometimes willing to make concessions. Also, here Hitchcock gives interesting evidence about why he often picks big celebrities to act in his films. Because his beliefs closely resemble the founder of the montage Eisenstein in that the key goal of a montage is to create emotion, Hitchcock insists on using actors that the audience will have an emotional attachment to. He believes that an actor such as Cary Grant will receive greater sympathy from the audience, and thus the heightened emotion will ultimately lead to greater suspense and enjoyment of the moviegoers. It is through this interview that one is offered a rare glimpse into the thoughts of Hitchcock. As is the case with any director, certain parts of his style can be analyzed simply by viewing the films he has created. It is through this, for example, that we are aware of Hitchcock's use of visual impact rather dialogue to drive the plot forward. However, to truly understand him one must venture beyond the work he has produced and instead take a more direct approach to deciphering his beliefs and motivations.

Cavell, Stanley. "North by Northwest." Critical Inquiry 7 (1981): 761-776.

    This article carefully examines many plot elements within the story which are thought to be similar in many ways to other Hitchcock thrillers. The first and most obvious is the casting of Cary Grant into the lead role. The two have worked together several times and Grant had gained stardom in part due to these movies. Hitchcock makes light of his stardom in several occasions, first when Grant is leaving a phone booth and gets stares from a young female, and later when he is walking through a woman's hospital room and she tries to persuade him to stay in a seductive tone. Also, the script does not deny that Grant is an actor. Vandamn frequently comments on Thornhill's acting and even the professor asks him to "play the part". Other plot elements mentioned are Hitchcock's insistence on using ordinary situations and ordinary people for the more suspenseful situations.  This is no doubt a hallmark of Hitchcock's work and imitated wildly in the following decades.

    What is not adequately addressed in this article is that Grant must play the role of the victim. He was thrust into the situation against his will, due to mistaken identity. Unlike his last role with Hitchcock in "To Catch a Thief", Grant's character is that of a law-abiding citizen. A ‘mama's boy', he is thrown into a world totally unfamiliar and being pressured on both sides to perform as any super-agent would. He succeeds in the task, and is ultimately the hero stopping state secrets from reaching the Soviets. Thus, while Grant's character is similar to others he performs for Hitchcock's camera in many respects, ultimately this is a fundamentally different character because he is one everyone in the audience can empathize with.  Because of this, Grant is able to command a stronger control over the viewer.

Hollywood : critical concepts in media and cultural studies / edited by Thomas Schatz. 0415281318 (set) series London ; New York : Routledge, 2004.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1993.5.U6 H556 2004

    In chapter 34 of this book, Andrew Sarris attempts to classify and find themes in the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Using frequent references to specific scenes and elements of the films, Sarris argues that Hitchcock is unusually adept at rousing interest from his audience. Furthermore, Sarris believes that Hitchcock never received the visual analysis he deserved, presumably because of the mass appeal of his films. The style is said to be uniting of the divergent classical traditions of Murnau (notably the camera angles) and of Eisenstein (use of montage). The thrillers Hitchcock has produced all require a situation of normality. Hitchcock would never allow a murder to occur in a dark alley, simply because the audience expects that is where a murder should occur. Rather, a situation of normality would be the best place for a murder. Sarris uses the example a clean hotel bathroom in Psycho, but this argument could be applied to the murder at the United Nations, or the fight scene on the faces at Mount Rushmore.

    What Sarris is alluding to, but not declaring outright, is that a thriller must engage its viewer at a visceral level. Any murder that occurs expectedly due to the scenery would not adequately arouse the emotions of the viewer. This is one of the key elements of classic Hitchcock style. Hitchcock refuses to allow plot twists to occur formulaically; he insists on keeping the audience guessing. While this has no doubt added to his popular appeal and the frequency of imitation his works see, it is a concrete example at the ingenuity of the director and why he deserves a prominent place in cinematic history. His refusal to accept the obvious and his thirst for innovative and unexpected events keeps the viewers emotionally engaged in the film, and is thus one of the greatest cognitive tools at his disposal.

In this article, Mast chronicles the making of Bringing Up Baby from production to its opening at the Radio City Music Hall in March of 1938. The film actually began as a short story written by an unknown Hagar Wilde in Collier’s in April of 1937. Titled “Bringing Up Baby,” the story was about a tame panther named Baby that is let loose to roam freely in the Connecticut countryside. Coincidentally around the same time, Howard Hawks signed a contract for a six picture deal with RKO pictures and was told to select a project from a pile of scripts, treatments, and stories, of which “Bringing Up Baby” was one of the choices. Hawks, naturally, picked “Bringing Up Baby” and together with the studio, began to convert the story into a film. Although many of the film’s funniest lines are directly from the short story, writer Dudley Nichols was hired for the script to create a ninety minute narrative out of what was essentially a simple magazine article. In the resulting script, a museum was added, as was the search for an intercostal clavicle. Several jail scenes were added as well, in addition to the mishaps on the road to Connecticut, a drunken gardener, a golf course, and a variety of other gags. The basic storyline was also altered—instead of Baby the panther acting as a threat, tearing apart an engaged couple, Baby the leopard became the driving force uniting two complete strangers.

RKO bought the rights from Wilde for $1000 on June 11, 1937 and the film was scheduled to begin a fifty-one day shoot in September with Katharine Hepburn starring and virtually no leading man. It was not until a week before shooting was to begin that Cary Grant signed on to play the part of Dr. David Huxley. Throughout filming, Bringing Up Baby was met with even more delays as Hawks preferred improvisation, but also extremely complex set-ups for shots in order to achieve the right effect. Shooting eventually ended in January of 1938, forty days over the scheduled fifty-one days of filming, and the first cut of the film which ran 10,150 feet was sent to the PCA board for review. Interestingly, the board did not seem to have an issue with the scene in which Huxley proclaims that he is turning gay or other various scenes with similar subtleties. It did have an issue with Hepburn’s torn dress, however, but despite this, the film was granted a seal in February.

The film was eventually cut down to 9,204 feet and released later that year, achieving modest box office success. It was later re-released in 1940 to a better box office turnout, both domestically and internationally. Total revenues amounted to $1,259,000, which translated to a final profit of $163,000—a modest success for RKO. For the two stars, Bringing Up Baby reflected a lighter and brighter side to their acting abilities and for Hawks, the film confirmed once again, his versatility in filmmaking.

Ronald R. Butters’s article in Dictionaries: Journal of The Dictionary Society of America examines the origins of the relationship between the word “gay” and “homosexual.” Citing Cary Grant’s infamous utterance “I’ve just gone gay all of a sudden!” in Bringing Up Baby as a potential first link between the two words, Butters provides a thorough analysis of all possible connotations of the word and in turn, how audiences of the time would have interpreted the usage of the word in such a manner.

Butters uses Vitto Russo’s novel on homosexuality in American cinema as a framework for his argument, but then refutes Russo’s idea that Grant intended the phrase to denote homosexuality. Russo states that Grant’s line was actually an ad-lib and was not found anywhere in the script. Paired with a “hysterical” leap, Grant’s words, in Russo’s point of view, represents “a rare textual reference to the word gay and to the concrete possibility of homosexuality in Hawks’s work” (198). Butters argues, however, that upon watching the scene again, it appears as if Russo has exaggerated Grant’s actions. He is not a hysterical person with possible homosexual mannerisms, but rather, a frustrated and repressed man who has been forced to wear something extremely feminine after his clothes have been taken from him.

Although Butters disagrees that Grant’s choice of words had any homosexual connotations, he does state that ignoring the statement would also be an “act of lexicographical irresponsibility and perhaps even sociopolitical insensitivity” (199). Therefore, Butters attempts to examine the impact of Grant’s words on the filmmakers who were involved with production and also the reaction of the film’s audience members of the time. Butters claims that there is no evidence that the filmmakers drew the conclusions that gay meant homosexual in this context. What is interesting however, is his argument stating that even if anyone involved in the making of the film recognized this double entendre, they would be among an “in-crowd of Hollywood sophisticates who had strong ties to the repressed homosexual underworld” (199). Thus, it can be assumed that nearly all of the audience members who watched the film in 1938 also did not conclude that Grant’s statement had anything to do with homosexuality. Yet, the context of the word gay in this instance does not seem to fit the standard 1930s definition of happy, joyous, or carefree. Butters argues that Grant’s statement was probably a form of archaic slang that translated into: “I’ve just gone crazy all of a sudden!” (200), which would fit with the craziness of the rest of the movie and would therefore go unnoticed by audiences and more importantly, the Production Code Administration as well.  

The second chapter (pp. 29-66) of Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy presents an analysis of the genre of screwball comedy. Gehring argues that the main characters in this particular genre tend to exhibit five key characteristics: “abundant leisure time, childlike nature, basic male frustration (especially in relationship to women), a general propensity for physical comedy, and a proclivity for parody and satire” (29). Gehring cites various films from different time periods ranging from George Cukor’s Holiday (1938) to the comedies of today, noting that each film’s “comic antihero” shares these common characteristics.

Gehring also uses Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) as a classic example of this particular genre. In Hawks’s film, Dr. David Huxley, played by Cary Grant, is the epitome of the comic antihero. As an absentminded professor (often a recurring character in such genre films), Huxley is essentially a member of “high-society.” He is a relatively wealthy man, despite his need for a million-dollar research grant, and has time to socialize with other members of high society, whether on a golf course, at a dinner party, etc. Yet his high education, paired with his seemingly paradoxical absentmindedness and bumbling personality, also serves as comic relief throughout the film. Referred to as “comic rigidity,” a term used in Henri Bergson’s theory of comic superiority, which Gehring cites, these comedic elements stem from this “inversion” of what is generally the norm for a professional such as Huxley.

Huxley also has a childlike nature, according to Gehring, which is reflected through the dominance of the female character, Susan. Throughout the film it is clear that Susan, played by Katharine Hepburn, is in command—she has the power to alter Huxley’s plans and eventually, his entire future. It is through this dominance that the element of basic male frustration is exhibited as well. Huxley is basically powerless as Susan drags him to Connecticut in hopes of delivering a tamed leopard named Baby. As a source of frustration for Huxley, Susan also draws out Huxley’s displays of physical comedy in various scenes. For example, Huxley often retaliates to Susan’s dominance with physical actions, not words. In a scene where Huxley is simply annoyed with Susan, he pretends to strangle her instead of saying something. Gehring also argues that the presence of physical comedy in screwball comedies is due to the fact that the genre was born out of slapstick comedy from the silent film era. In fact, Gehring mentions that Grant’s character was based on silent film star Harold Lloyd as well as Buster Keaton.

The last part of Gehring’s discussion focuses on the satiric elements of screwball comedies, which the author states was Howard Hawks’s specialty. This proclivity for parody and satire is evidenced in many instances, and is a running theme throughout the film. Like other screwball comedies, Bringing Up Baby, has a tendency to make fun of romance and the characters themselves. For example, Huxley’s engagement of convenience to Miss Swallow in the beginning of the film is a direct comment on marriage and the film’s jail scenes as well as the lavish party scenes poke fun at rich society.

Gehring concludes his argument by noting that these five characteristics, though not limited only to screwball comedy, serve to help define the complex genre.

Classic screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn

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