Queering the Cattle: Hitchcock and Performance

Abstract

Queering the Cattle: Hitchcock and Performance Thomas Leitch (bio) Dan Callahan, The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii + 251 pp. $34.95 cloth. Considering the critical attention that has been lavished on so many aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, the relative neglect of his collaborations with performers is as striking in its way as Hitchcock’s own well-documented neglect of performers who cried out in vain for more active direction. Doris Day despaired over her leading performance in the American remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much because Hitchcock “never said anything to me, before or during or after a scene, and I was crushed”; Thelma Ritter emerged from Rear Window with the wisdom that “if Hitchcock liked what you did, he said nothing. If he didn’t, he looked like he was going to throw up.”1 Apart from the anecdotes liberally sprinkled through Hitchcock’s biographies about the director’s relationships with the actors who brought his nightmares to life, critical studies of acting in Hitchcock include James Naremore’s penetrating chapters on Cary Grant’s performance in North by Northwest and on Rear Window as a performance text; Doug Tomlinson’s “‘They Should Be Treated Like Cattle’: Hitchcock and the Question of Performance”; Susan White’s essay “A Surface Collaboration: Hitchcock and Performance”; Carey Martin’s “The Master of Suspense and the Acrobat of the Drawing Room: How the Relationship of Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock Shaped Their Collaboration in Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest”; and Lesley L. [End Page 63] Coffin’s Hitchcock’s Stars: Hitchcock and the Hollywood Studio System.2 None of these contributions, not even the last, amounts to a compelling full-dress examination of acting in Hitchcock’s films. Now at long last Dan Callahan has undertaken to provide just such a study. He approaches his subject not as a Hitchcockian—his brief bibliography does not include any of these earlier books or essays, and he nods only rarely and briefly at previous Hitchcock scholarship—but as a highly regarded expert on Hollywood acting, the author of Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman (2012), Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave (2014), The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912–1960 (2018), and The Art of American Screen Acting, 1960 to Today (2019). The warm reception that has greeted all of these projects, especially the last two, would seem to make Callahan the logical candidate to write a definitive study of acting in Hitchcock’s films. Callahan enters a field in which he has only a few competitors with several notable advantages over them. His volume is extensive in its coverage, discussing every one of Hitchcock’s completed features from The Pleasure Garden to Family Plot. He displays an engaging zest for his subject, and his confident, intimate prose makes that zest infectious. Most important, he assumes from the start that acting for Hitchcock is an obvious subject for a monograph in a way that acting for George Cukor or Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino would not be. This is partly because of the contempt for performers Hitchcock communicated in his famous pronouncement, “Actors are cattle,” which was scarcely mitigated by his elaboration years later: “I would never say such an unfeeling, rude thing about actors at all. . . . what I probably said was that all actors should be treated like cattle” (quoted in Callahan ix). Instead of concurring or registering ritual disapproval of the director’s famous remark, Callahan shrewdly contextualizes it: He made his “actors are cattle” statement because the [stage-trained] English actors he was working with in [End Page 64] the 1930s, like John Gielgud, who starred in Secret Agent (1936), and Michael Redgrave, who was the lead in The Lady Vanishes (1938), treated movie work too lightly. . . . Gielgud didn’t take Hitchcock’s movie thrillers as seriously as he did his Shakespeare, and this hurt and annoyed Hitchcock. (xiv) Callahan is equally deft in distinguishing between what might be called actors’ cinema, which seeks to evoke emotions by presenting them explicitly, especially in the “‘big scenes for players” that were “anathema” to “Hitchcock’s approach” (94), and...