Hitchcock’s Spy Films

Abstract

Hitchcock’s Spy Films Henry K. Miller (bio) James Chapman, Hitchcock and the Spy Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. 360 pp. $36 cloth. In “Hitchcock’s Vision,” one of his most penetrating essays, uncollected to this day, Peter Wollen compared Hitchcock with “perhaps the major influence on his work,” John Buchan.1 “For Buchan,” wrote Wollen, “the game of adventure, the pursuit, the combat, had a purpose, ultimately a political purpose, the defence of an empire and a way of life.” The essay begins with a quotation from Buchan’s 1913 serial The Power-House—published as a book in 1916 after the success of the previous year’s The Thirty-Nine Steps: “Now I saw how thin is the protection of civilization . . . .” For Hitchcock, however, “this purpose has evaporated. The struggle takes place over a MacGuffin, a mere pretext which in its perfect form, as Hitchcock repeatedly emphasizes, is simply nothing, a void.” Rather, espionage took on psychological significance, above all as a pretext for staging voyeurism. The Imperial connection is not incidental: one of Hitchcock’s fullest discussions of the MacGuffin, in Truffaut’s interview book, traced its roots to the stories of a writer who is practically synonymous with Imperialism, Kipling. “Many of them were spy stories, and they were concerned with the efforts to steal the secret plans out of a fortress. The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin.”2 These documents mattered to the characters, who were trying to preserve the security of the Raj, but to Hitchcock “they’re of no importance whatever.” [End Page 117] James Chapman’s Hitchcock and the Spy Film sets out to “locate his spy films in their wider cultural and institutional contexts” (1), arguing that hitherto Hitchcock has been largely the province of auteurists who see Hitchcock’s films as Hitchcock films rather than genre films, disregarding the seedbed of espionage fiction, both literary and cinematic, from which they flowered, and ignoring the industrial conditions in which they were made, above all by eliding the difference between British and American systems. There is a chapter on each of the spy films—The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Notorious, The Man Who Knew Too Much again, North By Northwest, Torn Curtain, and Topaz— plus chapters on “Hitchcock and British Cinema” and “Hitchcock and American Cinema,” as well as one on Hitchcock and James Bond. In Chapman’s view, it was with Hitchcock’s 1930s thrillers “that the spy film really emerged as a genre in its own right” (8), and in his introduction, “Authorship, Genre, National Cinema,” he gives a brief overview of the genre’s largely British ancestry, distinguishing between two schools of spy fiction, the sensational and the realist. Buchan, “Sapper” (creator of Bulldog Drummond), and Ian Fleming belong to the first school; Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré to the second. Hitchcock, says Chapman, straddled the two sub-genres. The identity of the auteurists whom Chapman frequently invokes is a matter for conjecture; except for the original Cahiers du cinéma critics of the 1950s and their Anglo-American followers of the 1960s, none are named. It is hard to think of anyone now writing for whom “everything in the film is seen as the outcome of the director’s creative agency and as an expression of his ‘worldview’” (4). If it is the case that the auteurist “emphasis on the individuality and uniqueness of the auteur neglects any comparative framework that considers what their films might have in common with, as well as how they are different from, those of other film-makers working in the same institutional and cultural [End Page 118] contexts” (4), then Rohmer and Chabrol were not auteurists; they are quoted as calling The 39 Steps “a perfect example of the thriller in its pure state—so much so that it has as an essential characteristic the essence of every thriller” (55), a judgment that suggests some awareness of genre. Nor would it have been news to them that there were differences between Hitchcock’s British and American films; they actually distinguished...