Hitchcock at the Source, the Auteur as Adaptor edited by R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd (review)

Just as Francois Truffaut once described his 1983 study of Hitchcock as a cookbook of the director’s film work, the reader can lunch on twenty essays in Hitchcock at the Source, the Auteur as Adaptor, edited by R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd. The book also contains illustrations, an appendix, and an introduction by the editors.

Alfred Hitchcock leaves both clear and smudged fingerprints on all of his films, including plays, short stories, novels, memoirs, and other screenwriters. This book offers numerous examples, focusing both on lesser known British films as well as canonical works. Palmer and Boyd present essays on how Hitchcock often relied upon unacknowledged source material, which should be recognized as an important enrichment of his work. The book reveals how aware Hitchcock was of the popular literary and film culture of his time. For instance, he bought the movie rights to the novel, To Catch a Thief, before its publication. The editors write that the point of Hitchcock at the Source is to acknowledges the “deep roots of Hitchcockian cinema within Victorian and modern literary culture” (5). The editors praise Hitchcock as auteur, but also draw critical attention to his literary sources in order to underscore “the interconnections between Hitchcockian and adaptation” (ibid).

Alfred Hitchcock took full credit for his films. In a civil deposition involving Rear Window, he claimed that he dictated the script to John Michael Hayes, taking credit not only from Hayes, but also from the original writer Cornel Woolrich, and from Joshua Logan who first wrote the treatment (217). Although most critics did favor Hitchcock’s narrative over Woolrich’s “drugstore writing,” Pamela Robertson Wojcik writes in “The Author of This Claptrap” that it is interesting to ponder a potentially gay film with the original black houseboy, Sam, instead of Lisa, and Stella the nurse, added by Hayes. Additionally, she discusses the 1990 U.S. Supreme Court Case, Stewart vs. Abend, in which “the owner of the copyright to the original source....in essence trumps the copyright to the derivative work, in this case, the film, Rear Window” (214 my italics).

In 1927, at age 28, Alfred Hitchcock was the highest paid director in the United Kingdom. In “Hitchcock and the Manxman, A Victorian Bestseller on the Silent Screen,” Mary Hammond argues that the early director’s work was uneven and not as creatively successful (47). She examines the Manxman novel to more fully understand “the illustrative and narrative tropes from which Hitchcock may have been learning at this point” (50). The Manxman (1929) is his last silent film, and is true to the book, aside from being a success. Hammond recognizes Hitchcockian motifs in it, noting that the film could not have existed without them. She explains that The Manxman advances “ambiguous moral values” and how the director’s framing shots trap or exclude characters. Indeed the film’s setting often dwarfed its actors (64). For instance, the pulsing lighthouse is still recognizable as a 19^th century trope, (to post World War I audiences) but it is innovative because Hitchcock relentlessly uses it, without any reference to the action; he lets “shadows fall on the just and unjust alike” (65). Hammond reports that it is not known if Hitchcock saw the first silent version of Manxman (Loane Tucker 1916), or any play, serial versions, or illustrations; but both Victorian and Edwardian illustrative and theatrical traditions were imprinted in his memory (63).

Hitchcock’s work in England began with the silent film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), but Thomas Leitch’s essay, “From Stage to Page,” notes that “eight of the first sixteen films that Hitchcock directed ...were based on theatrical sources” (11). The 39 Steps (1935) marks a watershed moment for his use of novels and short stories instead of plays as basis for films; future exceptions were the films Rope (1948), I Confess (1952) and Dial M for Murder (1953). Leitch writes...