Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony Film and Culture Series John Belton, General Editor Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony Richard Allen Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Allen, Richard, 1959– Hitchcock’s romantic irony / Ri chard Allen. p. cm. — (Film and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-13574-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-13575-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-50967-1 (ebook) 1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899–1980—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PN1998.3.H58A73 2007 791.4302’33092—dc22 2007012808 (cid:2)(cid:2) Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Reproduction of color stills was made possible with a generous grant from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Portions of the following work have been published in slightly different form and are reprinted with the permission of the editors and publishers: “Hitchcock, or the Pleasures of Metaskepticism,” October 89 (Summer 1999): 69–86; “The Lodger and the Origins of Hitchcock’s Aesthetic,” Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002): 38–78; “Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense: Theory and Practice,” in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds., Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amster- dam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003); “Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock,” in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Film and Literature (New York: Blackwell, 2004), 298–325; and “Sir John and the Half-Caste: Identity and Representation in Hitchcocks’s Murder!,” Hitchcock Annual 13 (2004–2005): 92–126. In memory of Tom Keavy (1991–2003) Their faces were not made for wrinkles, their Pure blood to stagnate, their great hearts to fail. The blank grey was not made to blast their hair, But like the climes that know nor snow nor hail They were all summer: lightning might assail And shiver them to ashes, but to trail A long and snake-like life of dull decay Was not for them—they had too little clay. — lord byron Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xix p art i: narrative form 1 Romantic Irony 3 2 Suspense 38 3 Knowledge and Sexual Difference 72 part ii: visual style 4 Sexuality and Style 117 5 Expressionism 164 6 Color Design 218 Conclusion 251 Notes 261 Index 281 I n America … you respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love. Anyway, it’s the same man we are talking about, the same man, and the same artist. —françois truffaut I t seemed to me, as much from certain precise points made in the conversa- tion as from statements gathered from Hitchcock’s collaborators, that he had a permanent notion of mise-en-scène, that of a tension in the interior of a sequence, a tension that one would not know how to reduce either to dramatic categories or plastic categories but which partakes of both at the same time. For him it is always a question of creating in the mise-en-scène, starting from the scenario, but mainly by the expressionism of the framing, the lighting, or the relation of the characters to the décor, an essential insta- bility of image. Each shot is thus for him like a menace, or at least an anxious waiting. . . . One recognizes at a glance the most banal still from one of his fi lms, in the admirably determined quality of this disequilibrium. —andré bazin