Literature Film Quarterly (2000) - Fashion dreams: Hitchcock, women, and Lisa Fremont
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(c) Literature Film Quarterly (2000)
Fashion dreams: Hitchcock, women, and Lisa Fremont
Alfred Hitchcock has long suffered from a reputation as a misogynist and a Svengali. Of course, he has earned this reputation -- through the scenes of violence against women in his films of the sixties, his coarse comments about women in his interviews, and in his well-publicized obsessive relationships with his actresses late in life, most notably Tippi Hedren, during the filming of The Birds and Marnie -- relationships which are meticulously detailed in gossipy biographies like Donald Spoto's, Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius.
Nevertheless, such critics as Lesley Brill and Tania Modleski have wondered whether Hitchcock's tag as a misogynist, though undoubtably accurate vis a vis certain of his films, is inadequate in summarizing his work in general. Hitchcock's work as a whole is too strongly infused with a fascination with the feminine and too acutely conscious of the deficiencies of the male personality to be summarized simply as denigrating to women.
Many of the contemporary opinions about Hitchcock and women have been shaped by Spoto's biography. It is in many ways a carefully researched book and represents a terrific source of anecdotal evidence on Hitchcock's life. But most of those who knew and worked with Hitchcock are suspicious of what they see as an exaggeration of Hitchcock's dark side in the book. And, in fact, the evidence that Spoto amasses to support his dark interpretations is unimpressive. One has the sense, after having read the book, that were the direct quotations that are accumulated in the book read on their own, unaccosted by Spoto's dark readings, a much more benevolent view of Hitchcock would surface. Spoto, for example, quotes Ivor Montague as saying, in regards to Hitchcock, that "a good director must have something of the sadist to him. I do not necessarily mean to pathological degree, but that his looking at things and telling characters to do this, undergo that, is necessarily akin to dominating them, ordering them about." But, Spoto introduces this quote as "characteristically generous" and finishes by contradicting it altogether, suggesting that Montague's "delicate diction, refined sensibility and reluctance to betray the man he considered the master of cinema do not entirely cover his awareness that there might indeed have been something pathological" in Hitchcock's directorial technique (Spoto 164). Spoto tends to breeze by overt testimonies on Hitchcock's behalf in his hunt for sinister subtext that in the end he may be the only one who sees.
Which is not to say that Hitchcock did not have his sadistic tendencies (though, as Montague points out, directors are famous for those). Farley Granger noted that Hitchcock always "had to have one person in each film he could harass" and it must be admitted that it often seems to have been a woman (Ruth Roman in Strangers on a Train, for example, or Edith Evanston on the set of Rope [Spoto 346]). But, Spoto's portrait of Hitchcock as a monstrous Svengali has to be qualified in several ways.
First of all, if one is going to emphasize Hitchcock's controlling tendencies with his actresses one had better do so within the context of his attitude to actors in general, both men and women. Male actors, like John Gielgud and Gregory Peck, have complained about Hitchcock too. He irritated certain actors, as did the French film director Robert Bresson, in his quest for a more neutral performance than the actor wanted to give. "In answer to my questions about mood or expression," Peck complained gently, "he would simply say that I was to drain my face of all expression and he would photograph me" (Spoto 291). He was similarly condescending toward method actors. He found Montgomery Clift "too obscure" (Bogdanovich 31), and repeatedly in his interviews took out his frustrations with Torn Curtain on Paul Newman. "I wasn't too happy with the way Paul Newman played it. As you know, he's a 'method' actor, and he found it hard to just give me one of those neutral looks I needed to cut from his point of view" (Truffaut 313).
Hitchcock's approach to acting may be the one area in which he is close to the Bazin school of filmmaking. Here he had no interest in artifice, as he did on his set. Like Bresson, Hitchcock had a horror of the theatrical and dramatic in his actors. He understood that the cinema is a different medium for actors than the stage, that the camera registers small details about an actor's face and demeanor and that it mechanically records an actor in such a way that it cannot be fooled the way a theater audience can. A person is what he is on film and there's no escaping it in fantastic roles and gestures. Hence Hitchcock's love for the star system in which an actor was appreciated for certain consistent tendencies and was asked to be the same, not change, with each film. Hitchcock encouraged his actors, as Bresson did, to lose their technique and to let him capture something about them that was real and essential. He often described his technique as getting his actors to unlearn their technique. This could be quite deflating, especially for serious stage actors like Gielgud who came to the cinema with some condescension, or high-minded actors like Ingrid Bergman who had a very literary, vaunted notion of the cinema she would like to do. ("Except for Joan of Arc," Hitchcock said of Bergman, "she could never conceive of anything that was grand enough" [Truffaut 189]). In many ways the deciding factor in whether an actor got along with Hitchcock was not their sex, but their level of self-seriousness, whether they had vaunted notions of acting that contradicted the quiet neutrality Hitchcock sought in his actors, whether they had a sense of humor about themselves.
Nevertheless, it is apparent from Spoto's book and other biographical sources that Hitchcock had unusually close and often dominating relationships with certain actresses. His obsession with Tippi Hedren is legendary ("She wasn't allowed to do anything beyond what I gave her. It was my control entirely"), even if the facts are somewhat hazy (Spoto 498). Joan Fontaine was not comfortable with the intensity of Hitchcock's interest in her, describing him as a "Svengali" who "wanted total control of me" (Spoto 226). As early as the sound test footage with Anny Ondra during the filming of Blackmail, we can see the way in which Hitchcock mixed crudeness and charm in teasing his actresses, how he compensated for his appearance with a gently aggressive humor and charm.
His early writings express his perfectly legitimate aesthetic of deglamorizing his actresses, but they often do so crudely ("Nothing pleases me more than knocking the ladylikeness out of chorus girls") or with unctuous self-satisfaction (Gottlieb 70). In the article "Nova Grows Up," in which Hitchcock describes how he is grooming Nova Pilbeam for stardom, we see at an early stage the kind of paternalistic condescension that Hitchcock often exhibited when shaping his actresses ("I found her to be amazingly full of self-confidence, and she was inclined to tell me how scenes should be played. She had to be handled diplomatically" [Hitchcock "Nova" 82]). When, in the articles he wrote on actors in Britain, before he came to America, he contemplates "getting his hands" on American actresses, we get a strong sniff of the childish fantasist in Hitchcock. He suggests a boy shuffling his baseball cards as he itemizes each actress and what he would do to them were he given the chance to work with them. Shaping Claudette Colbert was a recurrent fantasy, "I have often visualized her in the role of a beautiful mannequin who, having risen from the gutter, has to keep up a good appearance, but who is, in her soul, lazy, good-natured, irresponsible, and slightly sluttish" (Hitchcock "Stars" 92). As usual in Hitchcock's conception of his women, crudeness mixes with a good deal of inventiveness.
Hitchcock himself seemed conscious of the fact that he was vulnerable to creating powerful fantasies around his actresses. When explaining to Truffaut why he took on a project as un-Hitchcock like as Under Capricorn, he explained that in many ways it was due to his infatuation with Ingrid Bergman. He took the project, he tells Truffaut, simply because Bergman was the biggest actress of the day. "All I could think about was: here I am, Hitchcock, the one important English director, returning to London with the biggest star of the day. I was literally intoxicated at the thought of the cameras and flashbulbs that would be directed at Bergman and myself at the airport. All of these externals seemed terribly important. I can only say now that I was being stupid and juvenile" (Truffaut 185-86). It is a pretty frank confession, one that shows Hitchcock was conscious of the impulses toward his actresses that Spoto would highlight years later. It also suggests that Hitchcock's obsession with his actresses had as much to do with power and celebrity as with sex.
From his early comments on Nova Pilbeam on, Hitchcock's comments on his actresses' style are characterized by a paternalistic condescension but also, and this is key, a witty perceptiveness. They reveal a man who did enjoy the power he could exercise over women in his professional capacity but they also reveal a man who had an unusual sensitivity to his actresses' style and an acute sense of how to register that style on the screen. Even a style as elegant as Grace Kelly's needs a director who understands how that style will play on the screen. Hitchcock could be rude about his actresses but also extraordinarily perceptive about their style, often more so than the actresses were themselves. "The first thing I did when I put Vera Miles under contract," Hitchcock said, "was to have Edith Head design a complete wardrobe, not just for the picture but for general wear so she wouldn't go around in slacks looking like a Van Nuys housewife" (Spoto 402). He was similarly proprietary of Grace Kelly's look. Kelly, he said, "was rather mousy in High Noon. She blossomed out for me." Of Eve Marie Saint, he said, "I took a lot of trouble with Eve Marie Saint, grooming her and making her appear sleek and sophisticated. Next thing she is in a picture called Exodus looking dissipated" (Spoto 439). These quotes might exhibit a disturbingly proprietary attitude toward his actresses. Choosing Vera Miles's general wear anticipates the way he tried to exercise control over Tippi Hedren's personal life. On the other hand, Hitchcock is right about Kelly and Saint. Their image is a great deal more lasting in Hitchcock films than in realistic, message-laden exercises like High Noon and Exodus. Hitchcock's preoccupation with his actresses is inextricably linked to his ability to accentuate their style and glamour. Hitchcock studied his leading ladies. He was more sensitive than any other director to what made his actresses unique.
Fashion Dreams
Spoto's take on Hitchcock's fascination with women's dress and style is that it reflects his tendency to dominate women on the set and through the camera and in doing so compensate for his deficiencies in appearance and in social ease. It is true that for Hitchcock's entire life he exhibited a naughty sense of humor with both men and women, that, while often scandalously charming, often veered off into the lascivious and crude. And, certainly by the time of his interest in young actresses like Tippi Hedren and Clair Griswold in the late sixties, Hitchcock's mastery over women, through his costumes and camera, had taken on an uncomfortable, obsessive quality. It is unfortunate for popular artists to live too long. Their first posthumous biographies tend to chronicle their dotage in pathetic detail.
But the Hedren episode does not seem to merit quite the attention Spoto pays it. Any overview of Hitchcock's career makes clear that Hitchcock's indiscretions with Hedren should only be contemplated within the large perspective of a career that is marked distinctly by fruitful relationships with actresses, much more so than the careers of many auteurs who don't suffer nearly as strongly from reputations as misogynists. Even Spoto's dark study of Hitchcock can't hide, through its first person accounts, how many of Hitchcock's actresses, from Carole Lombard to Teresa Wright to Grace Kelly, adored Hitchcock personally and professionally. Even on the set of Marnie, when Hitchcock was in the throes of his obsession with Hedren, the attitude among Hitchcock's peers seems to be one of painful sympathy for Hitchcock, who is perceived more as a pathetic fantasist than as a powerful Svengali. Jay Preston Allen, screenwriter for Marnie, summed up the attitude of the crew best when he said of Hitchcock's crush on Hedren, "It was wrenching to watch. It was so obviously an old man's `cri de coeur"' (Spoto 503).
Hitchcock's obsession with Hedren represents the rather sordid finish to a career that had been characterized by an unusually fruitful collaboration with women. Hitchcock's works are characterized by a fascination with women, with their charm, their sophistication, their maturity, their wisdom (a wisdom that often outstrips that of their male counterpart). His greatest films are those that explore a woman's sorrow, her suffering at the hands of men who underestimate them and treat them cruelly. Films like Vertigo, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho, and, of course, Rear Window all tell stories of women who are driven by cold and unresponsive men into criminality and life-threatening situations. Hitchcock was adept at accenting his actresses' style and sophistication, of giving an edge to their glamour by making it more human. And he was adept at showing women's private sorrow, their vulnerability around, and suffering at the hands of, men.
Perhaps what Spoto most underestimates is how much the very qualities in Hitchcock that he sees as indications of his Svengalism -- his fascination with women's clothing, his desire to control wardrobe -- are part and parcel of what makes Hitchcock's films so distinctly feminine. There are very few filmmakers (Stanley Donen is one of the few who comes to mind) who are so fascinated with women's fashion and who make it such a significant feature of their film's overall design.
For example, Kim Novak initially refused to wear a grey suit with her hair dyed blond in Vertigo. She thought she would look "vague and washed out." But, Edith Head remembers that Hitchcock was very specific in wanting her to "look as if she just stepped out of the San Francisco fog -- a woman of mystery and illusion" (Spoto 421). Hitchcock too recalled the incident to Truffaut. "I went to Kim Novak's dressing room and told her about the dresses and hairdos that I had been planning for several months. I also explained that the story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact on the screen, once the picture is completed" (247-48). That Hitchcock had been planning hairstyles and clothing choices "for months" attests to how seriously he took fashion choices in his films, as does his reference to her clothes as part of the "over-all visual impact" to his film. His actresses' costumes were centerpieces of the visual themes he worked out in his film.
Hitchcock put a great deal of thought into his color schemes in general. For example, the color white was, he told Charles Taylor Samuels, a kind of Leitmotif in Spellbound (233). His choices in regards to his actresses' costumes were often central to these color schemes. Edith Head recalled in Spoto's biography that Hitchcock's effort to tighten up the rambling narrative of To Catch a Thief was marred by his strong desire to colorfully showcase Grace Kelly. "He had," Spoto recounts, "his head set on an elaborately vulgar costume ball sequence for the finale, the sole purpose of which was to show off his leading lady in shimmering gold" (Spoto 377-78). In Rear Window he was careful not to color anything else across the way green so that Miss Lonelyhearts's emerald green outfits would stand out more clearly. He matched Miss Lonelyhearts's green dress the night she goes out to brave the singles scene with the heroine, Lisa Fremont's lighter green suit, so the viewer would unconsciously link the two.
In Vertigo Hitchcock had shot Madeleine through a fog filter giving her a "green effect, like fog over the bright sunshine." Later he put a green neon sign outside Judy's window at the empire hotel "so that when the girl emerges from the bathroom, that green light gives her the same subtle ghostlike quality" (Truffaut 244-45). Hitchcock often referred in hisinterviews to the color scheme in Dial M. for Murder in which he dressed Kelly in red early in the film but then as the tragedy overtook her moved her to brick colored outfits, then gray and finally black. Hitchcock chose his colors as he did his shots -- in accordance to mood. There is a similar care given to Eve Marie Saint's outfits in North by Northwest. "I suggested she be dressed in a basic black suit, a heavy black silk cocktail dress subtly imprinted with wine-red flowers in the scenes where she deceives Cary Grant; in a charcoal brown, full-skirted jersey and a burnt orange burlap outfit in the scenes of action" (Spoto 439).
This is classic Hitchcock: black and wine red for deception; charcoal brown and burnt orange, earth colors, for action scenes. Hitchcock had very clear ideas of the emotional suggestiveness of color. For all of his competent craftsmanship and precise planning, Hitchcock could also be an instinctual artist, arranging his film like the Expressionist painters he admired and to whom he compared his own work -- that is, according to certain patterns of colors that he chose for the unconscious effect they have on the viewer. And his leading lady's dresses were an integral part of this instinctual pictorial design. Hitchcock had as strong a sense of the feminine as any director in Hollywood. He knew not only how to make his actresses more beautiful than other directors did, but how to use that beauty, incorporate it, and make it a part of both the pictorial and thematic virtues of his film.
In her interview with Hitchcock published in Film Weekly in 1935 under the title of "Women are a Nuisance," Barbara Buchanen begins by asking Hitchcock, "why do you hate women?" Her opinion that Hitchcock does hate women seems questionable based as it is on his unglamorous treatment of Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps. "Hitchcock deliberately deprived Madeleine Carroll, one of our best actresses, of her dignity and glamour (79). It is this very deglamorization that we are likely to find charming in Hitchcock films today. Hitchcock's early writings express a strong respect for the role women play in his films. He wrote in 1931 of the necessity of choosing actresses "that must be fashioned to please women rather than men" and reiterated the idea to Truffaut 30 years later (Hitchcock "Heroines" 73). The paradox of Hitchcock is that though he was the hungriest for glamorous star actresses he was the most adverse to a simple notion of the sex symbol. "The very beautiful woman who just walks around avoiding the furniture, wearing fluffy negligees and looking very seductive, may be an attractive ornament, but she doesn't help the film any" (79).
Hitchcock, though preeminent among directors in his sense of style, hated ornament, glamour for glamour sake. He did not like glamour that didn't serve a purpose in his films, whether it was in his sets or actors. Hitchcock loved to dress his actresses but not as so many barbie dolls, as he is often accused. He considered his actresses' costumes, as he considered his set and other matters of design, for how they contributed to his dream vision of a film. But it would also be a mistake to say, then, that he must dehumanize his actresses, putting them on the same level as interior decoration, because this dream vision that he would conceive for a film tended to issue from his feelings for an actress, and the character that she played. Invariably, a woman stands at the center of Hitchcock's greatest films. And it is in her elegance and style that Hitchcock finds his inspiration.
Lisa Fremont
Lisa Fremont, in Rear Window, represents the Hitchcock heroine par excellence. To begin with, she is played by Hitchcock's favorite muse, Grace Kelly, the actress to whom no other actress Hitchcock worked with could, he felt, quite compare. Kelly was a former model who wore her clothes with unparalleled elegance. Hitchcock was at the height of his powers and discovering the expressive qualities of color film. The result is one of Hitchcock's richest evocations of fashion and feminine grace. "Every costume was indicated when he sent me the finished script," remembers Edith Head. "There was a reason for every color, every style, and he was absolutely certain about everything he settled on. For one scene he saw her in pale green, for another in white chiffon, for another in gold. He was really putting a dream together in the studio"(Spoto 372).
Head's comments indicate how powerful Hitchcock's vision of Kelly was. But she makes other crucial points about how fashion figures into Hitchcock's art also. First, there is an idea behind each clothing choice. Hitchcock was extraordinarily conscious of what was in his screen, how it would show up, and what effect it would have. He was nearly religiously opposed to allowing anything incidental in his screen and that goes for costume also. Secondly, Head sees in Hitchcock's fashion choices the expression of a dream, a striving
toward the realization of an inchoate vision. Hitchcock's color choices relate most directly to the intuitive, dream-like, Expressionist goals of his filmmaking. Each of the six outfits Lisa Fremont wears carries with them a feeling that Hitchcock is trying to convey in that scene.
Finally, Hitchcock's fascination with his actress's wardrobe is not just the result of a Svengali-like determination to control his actresses but is indicative of how central his actresses, his women characters, were to the visual scheme of the film, how central they were to the personal dream that the film was to Hitchcock.
Fashion was always important to Hitchcock but there are few films in which fashion becomes as central to the storyline of a Hitchcock film as it does in Rear Window. Hitchcock had a fetish for unity and if he brought an element into his film he tended to work and rework that element. It is no surprise then that, in this film starring a former model, Kelly, the character she plays works in the fashion world also, nor that the issue of fashion becomes central to the storyline. Fashion is what Lisa and Jeff fight about as Lisa tries to get Jeff to commit to a relationship and Jeff seeks to avoid that commitment. Jeff sees himself as a rugged world traveler living out of one suitcase. Lisa's love of fashion is, to Jeff, indicative of her superficiality, why she is not right for him. Jeff holds Lisa's elegance against her.
Critics and viewers of Rear Window often make the mistake of identifying Hitchcock's point of view with that of his male protagonist. Jeff is impressed with himself but Hitchcock is not impressed with Jeff. Hitchcock and Jeffrey Michael Hayes's script is replete with zingers at Jeff's expense, most coming from Lisa and Jeff's crusty insurance nurse, Stella, and most having to do with Jeff's weak libido and his fear of women, sex, and commitment. One of Jeff's longest speeches about how he needs "a woman who can go anywhere, do anything" takes place while Stella, the irritable nurse played by Thelma Ritter, literally throws a helpless Jeff (he's in a waist-high cast) around the room during a rubdown. Jeff makes fun of Lisa, but while he is doing that Hitchcock makes fun of Jeff -- for hiding his fear of women behind a screen of male bombast and for not being able to see what is evident to the filmviewer, especially as the film evolves, that Lisa is not only pretty, but of the two, probably the bravest and most capable (that's Lisa climbing into the murderer's apartment window, not Jeff.)
Laura Mulvey is one critic who falls into the trap of thinking like Jeff. She too criticizes Lisa for being a superficial, fashion-conscious bimbo who struts her stuff for Jeff's male gaze (31-39). But Tania Modleski specifically refutes Mulvey, emphasizing Lisa's fashionableness as a sign of her independence from Jeff, a means of expressing herself that makes Jeff uncomfortable. "If, on the one hand," Modleski notes, "women's concern with fashion quite obviously serves patriarchal interests, on the other hand this very concern is often denigrated and ridiculed by men (as it is by Jeff in the film" [77]). What Modleski understands here is that while some might find an attention to fashion superficial, Hitchcock most certainly did not. Hitchcock has Lisa parade around in the latest fashions not only for the sake of her elegance (though that was important to him) but to bring out certain cruel and immature tendencies in Jeff, who is afraid of committing to Lisa and who rationalizes his fear by attacks on her style and way of expressing herself.
Many of Hitchcock's greatest films are studies in male condescension, studies in the ways men pigeonhole, trivialize, or reduce women. Dev in Notorious and Roger in North by Northwest both assume the women who love them are more duplicitous and promiscuous than they really are. Scotty in Vertigo similarly assumes Judy is more superficial and criminal than she really is. Jeff, too, assumes Lisa is too superficial and delicate for his rugged life. He also underestimates how profound her loyalty is to him, often comparing her to the sexpot who lives across the way and who has a tendency to juggle several men at once. All of these Hitchcock heroes are woefully unaware of how loyal these women are to them, how much they are putting up with for the men's sake, how much they suffer. Hitchcock was drawn to situations where his men were blind to the virtues of a woman's character. This makes us root for the heroines that much more. Hitchcock was always conscious of speaking to a female audience and, consequently, he keeps the spotlight on the women's emotions. That such a woman-oriented director should suffer from a reputation as a misogynist is at least partially explained by the delight he took, particularly toward the end of his career (in its more powerful, cocky phase), of describing his approach to women in the most insensitive way possible: "I always believe in following the advice of the play-write Sardou.... `Torture the women. . . The trouble today is that we don't torture women enough" (Spoto 483). That quote alone suggests why Hitchcock's films are so feminine in nature and yet at the same time perceived as being so hostile to women.
Jeff's character fits into the lead male patterns in the films mentioned above. The way Jeff denigrates Lisa's interest in fashion is part and parcel of his generally superior and dismissive attitude toward her. His denigration of her fashion reflects his weakness, not Lisa's -- his cruelty, not her superficiality. On the contrary, on the subject of fashion, Hitchcock's sympathies lie much closer to Lisa than Jeff. Hitchcock took fashion very seriously. He was no rugged adventurer, like Jeff, living out of a single suitcase. His were the fantasies of the urban sophisticate, even if he never quite shook the dust of his middle class background. He liked good food, wine, and clothing, to the point of pretension. His closet was an ode to his conservatism and sophistication, lined as it was with rows of nicely tailored suits of the same cut and color. The man who "prefers talkative colors to somber ones in a room, properly introduced through flowers or fine paintings" (Hitchcock "Woman" 52) is a great deal closer to Lisa's sensibility than Jeff's. When Lisa tells Jeff that it is "time to come home," open up a photography studio and wear nice, elegant blue suits, she is asking him to be, by appearance and vocation, more like Hitchcock. And the definite attitude in this film is that a willingness on Jeff's part to settle down, to drop his pseudo-Hemingway shtick and settle into some sensible clothes and a correspondingly sensible life, would be a sign of maturity. Hitchcock may be ambiguous at times in this film in his attitudes toward men and women and marriage but on the subject of fashion he is rock solid with Lisa. It is only a sign of irresponsibility and a certain lack of refinement not to see the dignity of couture clothing.
It is part of the film's charm and impressive unity, that that which seems like Lisa's weakness, her preoccupation with fashion, becomes the skill by which she (not Jeff) cracks the case. Lisa gets the evidence that will convict Lars Thorwald (his deceased wife's wedding ring) through her understanding of jewelry, handbags, and women. And it is Jeff who is reduced to sitting passively in his chair, consigned to those bland pajamas, while Lisa does all the work, scaling fences and fire-escapes, digging in the garden, all the while dressed impeccably. The point seems to be that not only can Lisa do all that Jeff thinks she cannot, she can do it better than Jeff, and, most importantly, she can do it while dressed to the nines.
Lisa's Outfits
Edith Head's comments about wardrobe in Rear Window make it clear then that Hitchcock chose Grace Kelly's outfits with a great deal more in mind than making her look pretty. Each of Lisa's six outfits (four dresses, one nightgown, and one pants and shirt outfit) are chosen with precise care and each is expressive of ideas in the film. For example, when we see her for the first time, the night Lisa brings a dinner from the exclusive restaurant, "21," she dresses appropriately, in Manhattan black and white, a gorgeous dress with a pleated chiffon skirt adorned with black embroidery, a black, close-fitting short-sleeved bodice with a light tulle wrap. It is a glittering introduction to Kelly who wears this kind of clothing with unparalleled ease and to Lisa who brings a breath of exciting Manhattan air into Jeff's dreary, souvenir laden apartment. It should be noted that as Kelly swirls through the film in this variety of stunning outfits, Jimmy Stewart is reduced to a single pair of bland pajamas, a comment both on Lisa's central importance in the film and on the blandness of Jeff's character, his lack of vivacity and style.
The night of her second visit Lisa is dressed in black, but this time more of it. This is the scene that discovers her in Jeff's lap and in which she and Jeff engage in the most playfully erotic (at least on her part) dialogue of the film. Accordingly she is in a lacier, closer fitting black dress, with transparent sleeves. It's the right outfit for a petting party, as elegant as the last outfit, but darker and more casual. The first outfit was meant for sweeping into a room. This is better for reclining on a divan.
Keeping in mind Head's comment that Hitchcock sought correlations in the costumes of Lisa and the women across the way, the chief reference point in this scene has to be Miss Torso (the exhibitionist dancer who lives across the courtyard) who is dressed in a frothy black teddy that seems to be cut of the same material as Lisa's dress. Ironically, it is Miss Torso at whom Jeff gazes, abstractly, after Lisa has given up trying to seduce him, and stares at him accusingly from the other side of the couch. The suggestion is that as black and lacy as Lisa is she cannot compete with the even blacker and lacier fantasy interest across the street.
Lisa's third outfit is more formal: a pale green suit, loosely but elegantly cut. Her hair is for the first time, up and closely bound, under a small hat with a light veil. It's a look that anticipates Madeleine's buttoned down look in Vertigo and Tippi Hedren's suits in Marnie and The Birds. Here Lisa is adopting a more conservative or business -- like look, perhaps because the pace of the film is picking up a bit. These scenes preoccupy themselves less with Jeff and Lisa's relationship, and more with their joint investigation of the crime at hand. Accordingly, she sports clothes that fit the lady detective.
Also, the formality of Lisa's attire this evening has something to do with Hitchcock's propensity for contrasting stiff, formal exteriors with a softer interior passion. We know that Hitchcock favored a stiff look in his actresses because, he felt, it made their sexuality more hidden, more powerfully evocative. The night Lisa wears the somewhat conservative suit, she surprises Jeff by telling him that she intends to spend the night at his apartment. In true Hitchcock fashion, Lisa goes through the bedroom door, hair up, in the classic formal Hitchcock suit, but emerges, hair down, in a soft, swirling negligee.
Even here, though, Hitchcock plays little games with Lisa's clothes. Her negligee is a dead-ringer for the one we have seen, from a distance, the murder victim, Mrs. Thorwald, wear. Hitchcock made Mrs. Thorwald physically a double for Lisa to emphasize the parallel between Jeff's desire to get rid of Lisa and the murderer Thorwald's desire to get rid of Mrs. Thorwald. The fact that Lisa's nightgown evokes the specter of the murdered wife offers a macabre undercurrent to the scene. On the surface, it seems like the classic scene in which the leading lady has "slipped into something a little more comfortable," leaving the leading man speechless in the face of her glamour. But, Hitchcock rarely gives us sex without ominous undertones and while we, like Jeff, are wowed by Kelly's beauty, our enthusiasm is hampered by the visual reminder of Thorwald's dead wife.
Hitchcock makes one more statement through Lisa's fashion that night. When she first arrives that evening, Lisa shows off the designer "Mark Cross handbag" that contains, so economically packed, her nightgown and slippers. "You said I'd have to live out of one suitcase," she says, referring to Jeff's argument, earlier in the film, that Lisa could never live out of one suitcase as he does. Lisa mocks Jeff by following through on his orders, but on her own terms ("I bet yours isn't this small.") She trims herself down to one bag, but a bag specifically tailored to her view of life. It is only one of many moments (witness her courage in tackling Thorwald) where she shows that she can do anything that Jeff can, and do it more elegantly.
Lisa's last dress is a sleeveless red and gold floral print, belted at the waist. Whereas Lisa is elegant and formal the night she swishes brandy snifters with Jeff and Lt. Doyle, tonight (the night they capture the murderer) she will be digging in the murderer's garden and scaling fences, fire-escapes, and window ledges. Accordingly, the dress is a more open, sweeping cut that allows for activity, and the floral print strikes just the right outdoor note. It suggests a flowered trellis and goes nicely with the brick exterior of Thorwald's apartment building when Lisa is clinging to it.
A pair of smart, well-pressed jeans and a flannel shirt represent Lisa's final outfit in the film. She wears this outfit during the film's coda, when the action has passed and it is assumed that Jeff has come to value, rather than shun, Lisa. Obviously, there is a suggestion in this casual wear that she is seeking to compromise with Jeff. She is wearing hardier, outdoors clothing and reading a book on the Himalayas, although not too seriously, as we find it conceals a fashion magazine. Obviously, this compromise only goes so far.
There are various ways to interpret Lisa's final outfit. One is that she has been somewhat transformed by the experience of the last few days. One of the themes the film clearly articulates is that Lisa is more adventurous and courageous than Jeff had suspected, that she has more guts and character than your average city model. She is dressing, then, according to her new persona, expressing a more masculine, adventurous self. In fact, you might say that Lisa now wears the pants in the family, because Jeff, recumbent and double-tasted (he had broken his other leg in a fall during the film's climactic encounter with the murderer) and sleeping like a baby, is more immobile and in greater need of nursing than ever. Of the two, Lisa seems much more likely to actually scale the Himalayas. The clothes in this final scene give us the impression more than ever that Lisa is in control, even if she does only pretend to play Jeff's game. The jeans and flannel shirt, like the Mark Cross handbag, suggest she is willing, to a point, to play Jeff's game. But, the sharp crease in the jeans, the Vogue magazine she has hidden under the Himalayas book, and her feline pose of selfsatisfaction suggest she will do it according to her sense of style.
This, then, is the flip side of the obsessive relationship Hitchcock had with his actresses that Spoto documents. The Svengali habits that developed late in life were the darker expression of a talent that had been at the center of what made his best films elegant and graceful: his sensitivity toward women, toward their carriage, their charm, their particular style. His interest in his actresses was so intense that he filmed them more lovingly, in greater detail, and in greater sympathy than other directors. And with more intimacy. We might remember the biographical details of Hitchcock and Kelly -- that he felt betrayed, almost like a forsaken lover, by her retirement from film, that, according to some, he seemed to obsessively re-create Kelly in a series of subsequent actresses (Vera Miles, Kim Novack, Tippi Hedren) in much the same fashion as Scotty tries to re-create the dead Madeleine through Judy in Vertigo. All this bolsters our sense of Hitchcock as a Svengali who was obsessed by his actresses and used his power as a film-director to dominate women. But the real legacy of Hitchcock and Kelly is their films, the best films Kelly made, and the best because she found in Hitchcock, the most feminine of directors, an artist who centered his films' scripts and visual designs around his actresses and who registered their style and elegance more lovingly and sensitively than any other Hollywood director.
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