Everyone's favourite rotund auteur was fond of describing his actors as 'cattle' and deflating their pretentions with a cry of 'It's only a movie!'. Heaven help his scriptwriters, you might think, who traditionally come way down the Hollywood pecking order. But canny Hitch liked to have solid foundations in place before shooting an inch of film, from detailed storyboards to a fully refined screenplay. His fruitful yet ultlimately fractious relationship with repeat script-chap John Michael Hayes is the focus here.
It would be fair to say there's been a book or two written about Hitchcock before now; in fact, there's even been previous books about his relationship with his scripters (not least Evan Hunter's pithy Hitch and Me). In a search for new ground, DeRosa specifically details the uniquely long-lasting partnership of Hitchcock and Hayes, which takes in four films - Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble With Harry (1955) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). For the most part this is a painstaking examination of how each was made, from the kernel of the idea (often appropriated from optioned novels) through to production and release. The thrust of DeRosa's argument is that Hayes' sterling work reinvigorated Hitchcock's ailing career (although one might uncharitably suggest that the pictures in question are far from Hitchcock's masterpieces, and that better work was to come).
Such a book stands or falls on its ability to shed new and engaging light on such well-known films, and in the main this fails to do so. The promise of a candid exploration of Hayes' dealings with the director never materialises on the page. As a work of pure scholarship, no-one could doubt the research that's gone on here, and Hayes himself is quoted throughout; but while he comes across as being a thoroughly nice chap, none of his memories are particularly electrifying. Hitch devotees may lap up the yards of statistics and facts on offer, but others will find this more exhausting than exhaustive; it would benefit enormously from more human anecdote, not merely to keep the reader reading but also to illustrate more effectively the working relationship between the two men. In practice it reads as rather impersonal (although faint-hearts might want to watch out for an unsavoury story concerning Alma Hitchcock and a helping of calves' brains…).
A final section goes into even closer - nay, excruciating - analysis of the scripts of the four films to determine themes and motifs, but so much of what emerges stems from filmed visuals that it fails to convince that Hayes, rather than Hitchcock, was the genius alchemist in the relationship. After all, by 1960 Hitchcock had made Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), whilst Hayes had added Peyton Place (1957) and Butterfield 8 (1960) to his CV. (More recently, it seems, he's been working on a sequel to Rear Window, almost fifty years after the fact: so maybe he did have something to teach the master about suspense after all....)
Reviewed by Andy Murray
