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Numerous observers have noted that Hitchcock’s villains are often the most interesting characters in their films—the most charming, and, strangely, even the most sympathetic. Hitchcock often seems to identify—however exactly we understand this term—at least as much with his villains as with his protagonists (although the matter is complicated by his equally strong identification with his female characters). Within Hitchcock films, the villain represents, at one level, a recurring character type or set of types, like the girl-on-the-threshold-of-womanhood, as I call her in Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze (1982) or the policeman who uses his official powers for his own private ends. Most often, Hitchcock’s villains possess the sang-froid of the gamesman, who treats matters of life and death as merely aesthetic matters. Just think of the moment in The 39 Steps (1935) when Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) tells the Professor (Godfrey Tearle) that he has been warned to be on the lookout for a diabolical mastermind missing the top joint of his little finger, and the Professor, with a grin that invites an appreciative grin in return, holds up his own hand to disclose that he is that villainous character. Not only villains, among Hitchcock characters , have such a sense of style, however. When at the end of Frenzy (1972) the Inspector (Alec McCowen) catches the murderer with his pants down, as it were, he speaks the wonderful line, “Mr. Rusk, you’re not wearing your tie,” C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N The Villain in Hitchcock: “Does He Look Like a ‘Wrong One’ to You?” WILLIAM ROTHMAN 213 with exactly the same understated relish that we hear in James Mason’s voice, at the end of North by Northwest (1959), when Vandamm, now in custody, says to the Professor (Leo G. Carroll), who has just had a marksman shoot Vandamm’s lieutenant, Leonard (Martin Landau), “Not very sporting, using real bullets.” With his cockney upbringing, Hitchcock no doubt found satisfaction in embracing the honorable, time-honored tradition of associating villainy with the manners of the English upper class. (But compare Frenzy, with its unapologetically working-class villain.) The effeteness projected by this style also gives many Hitchcock villains a hint of homosexuality. This enhances our sense, in several Hitchcock films, most notably Strangers on a Train (1951), that the bond between protagonist and villain is deeper than the relationship either has, or desires, with whatever woman whose affections are ostensibly at issue. There are other Hitchcock films, however, in which the villain loves a woman, or at least passionately desires her. We see this in Notorious (1946), for example; hence Hitchcock’s remark to Truffaut that Sebastian’s (Claude Rains) love for Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) is deeper than Devlin’s (Cary Grant). We see it in North by Northwest, as well. When Leonard informs Vandamm that Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) has betrayed him, Vandamm loses his composure and slugs him. In Murder! (1930) we see Handel Fane (Esme Percy) momentarily lose control when Sir John (Herbert Marshall) has him audition for the killer’s role in his new play, revealing beyond a shadow of a doubt that, despite his disciplined efforts to keep his feelings hidden, he is as seething with emotion as the “bloke what twitches” in Young and Innocent (1937). Such cases are illustrations of Hitchcock’s oft-repeated dictum that we are fated to kill what we most love. These are crimes of passion, not profit. And the tormented villains who commit them are what I call “Wrong Ones.” Hitchcock’s “Wrong Ones,” such as Handel Fane in Murder!, the “bloke what twitches” in Young and Innocent, Uncle Charles (Joseph Cotten) in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Bruno (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train, or, most famously, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960), are unfit for love. Condemned from childhood to a life outside the human circle, their form of life is solitary, and sexuality remains a closed book to them. Perhaps Hitchcock, too, is a Wrong One, his films imply—at least rhetorically—even as they call on us to acknowledge that we may be Wrong Ones as well. In The 39 Steps, by contrast, we never see a crack in the villain’s façade that is wide enough to reveal what inner turmoil, if any, lies beneath—except, perhaps, when his wife (Helen Haye) knocks on the door to call...

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