The Dark Masters Trilogy by Stephen Volk

Three of Stephen Volk’s recent novellas, portrait stories of significant figures in the fields of horror and the macabre, have been lovingly and lavishly repackaged and conjoined as the ‘Dark Masters Trilogy’. Here we meet, in youth, middle age and premature old age, ‘Fred’ Hitchcock, Dennis Wheatley and Peter Cushing in the environs of Leytonstone, Netherwood and Whitstable. It’s a resonant overarching title. The real characters embedded in these tales of psychological suspense, uneasy horror and occult powerplay were all masters of the dark arts. But the darkness is also the existential void, the crisis of the soul with which Volk confronts them. Peter Cushing’s sense of desolation after the death of his beloved wife Helen; ‘Fred’ Hitchock’s childhood bewilderment at the strange machinations of the adult world; and the sense of inadequacy and social inferiority which bedevils Dennis Wheatley.

There is a thematic coherence which fully warrants the use of the word ‘trilogy’, and subtle links are included which connect the worlds of the three focal characters. In Whitstable, a waitress is referred to as ‘a Kentish Kim Novak’; Both Hitch and Aleister Crowley are likened to Buddha; Alesteir Crowley recalls an encounter with a young and enthusiastic Christopher Lee, who professes to be an ‘enormous fan’ of Dennis Wheatley (a gentle dig at Sir Christopher’s tendency to name drop); and Dennis Wheatley recalls his friendship with Hitch and Alma. But is this testing, this drawing out through the psychic scouring of adversity and terror, which draws the three portraits together and provides us with such a rich, ambiguous and ultimately loving depiction of legendary figures made human, revered icons rendered vulnerable. The stories, inflected with biographical detail but straying far from the straight path of fact, nevertheless feel true. Volk’s investment in the lives and the work stamps them with the hallmark of authenticity.

Novellas they may be, but Whitstable, Leytonstone and Netherwood are highly concentrated, multi-layered works which encompass a complex array of themes. As the titles suggest, they are partly evocations of place. The East End London of Leytonstone, where Fred’s father owned a grocer’s at 517 The High Road; The Kentish fishing town of Whitstable where Peter Cushing became such a well known resident; and the Hastings guest-house where Alesteir Crowley lived out his declining years. But these are also places rooted in particular historical moments, hence the appending of dates to the titles in the contents pages. Leytonstone is set in 1906, the pre-First World War twilight of Empire; Netherwood takes place amidst the post-war ruination and austerity of 1947 – ‘the blighted land’ as Dennis Wheatley thinks of it whilst gazing out of the train window; And Whitstable is situated in 1971, at the beginning of the steady decline of the decade following the euphoria of the 60s.

Together, they offer a kaleidoscopic portrait of England (more particularly, South Eastern England) across the twentieth century. Volk has a way of nailing time and place with a keen, haiku-like phrase. An ‘airfix blue sky’ is the perfect simile for a clear 70s day. And the use of the word ‘malachite’ to describe the particular shade of green livery employed by southern railway carriages somehow immediately fixes them to the 40s world, to British Transport Film colour. Indeed, the very fact that Dennis Wheatley, a writer at the height of his bestselling renown with the wealth attendant upon it, travels by train says much about the nature of post-war, pre-Beeching Britain. Small details are also used like cuttings in a nostalgic scrapbook to summon the particularities of an era. In the case of the 1971 of Whitstable, songs on the radio (Grandad and My Sweet Lord), Pan Books of Horror and a Doctor Who Radio Times cover heralding the first appearance of Roger Delgado’s Master.

This national portraiture also encompasses a keen sense of class division, which Volk delineates with great subtlety. The ‘monster’ of Whitstable is a working class character, and Peter Cushing’s entrance into his ‘lair’ and encounter with a working class mother is a finely observed distillation of the bristling class conflicts boiling to the surface at the time. It’s a measure of the novella’s loving tribute to Cushing (it was first published in his centenary year) that he is shown as being entirely understanding of her verbal hostility towards his refined accent and bearing, even though he feels each ‘fuck’ thrown at him as a blow. The class distinctions of the East End Edwardian milieu are exemplified by the division of the local into saloon and public bar areas. Even within the fairly narrow economic range of this neighbourhood, there seems some inherent need to put up barriers to make the stratifications of social position visible, to ensure they are correctly observed. The tensions created by the maintenance of such appearances are one of the barely understood influences which go towards forming the character of young Fred, and thereby, of course, his subsequent art.

Dennis Wheatley is plagued by a sense of social inferiority, of the hollowness of his achievements. Joan, his wife, is from an aristocratic background and he never feels a part of her circle; ‘they were Joan’s people, not his’, as his inner chorus comments during a recollection of a grilling at a particularly awful party. Like Hitch, the persona put on by the adult Fred, he feels the obligation to put on a front, an affable, clubbable façade. Peter Cushing, feeling utterly hollow in his grieving for Helen, also finds himself compelled to don his outward cloak of charm and gentile courtesy when all he really wants to do is hide from the bright life and expectations of the world. Pedro Marques’ cover art captures this aspect of the trilogy perfectly. The sense that we are glimpsing a series of authentic, troubled selves behind a carefully fashioned masquerade. This is not to say that we are offered the kind of one-dimensional ‘dark-side’ portraits of well-loved characters which have been a staple of TV biopics for some time now. These three stories are an attempt to create rounded, human characters by taking biographical details and fleshing them out with themes and preoccupations distilled from the work.

It’s an interesting fictional form, a blend of tribute, biographical meditation and auto-commentary on the subjects’ work. All three masters are caught within refractions and inversions of their own archetypal tales. Peter Cushing’s confrontation with a monster whose ‘evil’ seems inherent and ineradicable; Fred’s early reification of the ‘fair-haired girl’ icon, his manufacture of a suspense narrative whose ultimate, ever-receding aim is self-discovery; and Dennis Wheatley’s reluctant involvement in an occult thriller with the model for one of his own villainous magi, Alesteir Crowley - A scenario which complicates his own need for a world in which the forces of darkness and light are clearly defined, as they had seemed to be during the war.

These all work magnificently as tales of terror, unease and suspense in and of themselves. But the moulding of the fictional narratives around psychological portraits of actual artists (whether their artistry comprised of writing, film directing or acting), the splicing together of art and biography, results in a reflection on the extent to which authors, auteurs and actors invest truthful elements of their own being into their work (to whatever degree of self-consciousness or fanciful disguise). This also becomes a comment, particularly pertinent in an age of rampant celebrity, on the way that readers or viewers can mine books, films or performances for seams of the creator’s authentic inner life, which may be hidden by the cultivated public persona presented to the prying world. Dennis Wheatley’s experiences at Netherwood, his co-option and testing by the arch manipulator Alesteir Crowley, leads him to contemplate the theme for his next novel, the book which will free him form a debilitating period of writer’s block, a crisis of self-belief. He comes up with the title and the character sketch of the protagonist: The Haunting of Toby Jugg. With its portrayal of an airman physically and psychologically traumatised by the experience of war, it’s generally considered his most substantive and personally nuanced achievement.

Oddly enough, I have recently come across two further pieces of writing which have directly reflected upon the Dark Masters Trilogy. Earlier this year, I saw the film The Ballad of Shirley Collins and later read Shirley’s excellent autobiographical memoirs All In The Downs. Collins was a young girl growing up in Hastings during the post-war period. Her mother was a member of the local Communist party and would send Shirley and her sister Dolly out into the town to sell the party magazine the Daily Worker. Dennis Wheatley would have been horrified to see it. In the film, Shirley is seen watching the revived Jack In the Green ceremony in her old home town. More Pagan rituals in Hastings. She was aware of Crowley’s presence at Netherwood at the time. She notes that she and Dolly first sang in public at Oakhurst Hotel on The Ridge as part of a Hastings Communist Party social weekend. Netherwood was just nearby. Crowley ‘had a reputation as a person to keep clear of – and I know that when Dolly and I were walking along The Ridge to The Harrow where our Uncle Wally and Aunt Nell in their Tudor farmhouse, we’d always cross to the other side of the road and creep by. Then run!’ This is no doubt an anecdote which she has regaled to her good friend David Tibet, who was instrumental in encouraging her back to singing once more. Tibet creates powerful music of an incantatory, recitative nature with Current 93, constructing his own occult mythologies in which the forces of good and evil battle struggle for ascendancy in scenarios of Gnostic apocalypse. He was also one of the authors of Netherwood: The Last Resort of Alesteir Crowley, by a ‘Gentleman of Hastings’, a book which Volk found in a bookshop in the Old Town (an area which Shirley’s mum considered ‘rough’) and which proved indispensable for the writing of his own Netherwood tale. The introduction of All In the Downs is written by Stewart Lee, a great fan and supporter of Collins. Lee is one of the writers appearing in an anthology of horror stories written by comedians and edited by Johnny Mains and Robin Ince, Dead Funny (and its follow up, Dead Funny Encore). Volk dedicates the Dark Masters Trilogy to Johnny.

Another comedian with a story appearing in Dead Funny is Matthew Holness. His story Possum, about a tormented puppeteer, is the basis for a forthcoming film of the same name (with a very, very disturbing poster, particularly if you are an arachnaphobe). Holness was interviewed by the Guardian about it. He talked about his childhood in Whitstable, and his early obsession with the horror genre. He met with Peter Cushing in town, of course. Cushing ‘expressed concern that the six-year old asking for an autograph knew so much about Hammer’. Did young Matthew have a copy of Dennis Gifford’s Monsters In The Movies, I wonder. When he passed his 11-plus, Cushing gave him a copy of his autobiography with a lengthy inscription (yes, he really was a lovely man). Connections, connections.

In telling tales whose focal characters are key figures in the literature and cinema of horror and the macabre and incorporating them within contemporary variations of their own archetypal narratives, Volk also interrogates the nature of the genre. He suggests the insights into human nature, the understanding of the moral struggles constantly at work in the world and, strangely enough, the comforts which it can afford. Dennis Wheatley, in being granted a glimpse of his eventual obscurity, comes to the conclusion that there is a certain nobility and honour, an essential usefulness in providing people with imaginatively diverting and luridly exciting entertainments in a post-war era which has left people in a state of psychological shock. The names of Dachau, Buchenwald and Belsen are recited like an appalling dark litany in both Netherwood and Whitstable. In Leytonstone, the celebration of Empire Day, a tableau which is built around the famous photo of young Fred, clad in military attire, sat upon a pony outside his dad’s grocers in a street bedecked with Union Jacks, anticipates the clash of Imperial powers in the First World War, and the disastrous fractures of world politics and economics which ensued. What can a literature of terror do to encompass (or even to attempt to exclude) such terrible knowledge of the depths to which humanity can sink? How can the old Romantic and Gothic traditions continue to provide their sublime terrors, their subtle frissons in the face of the numbing extremity of the horrors starkly presented in newpaper photos or on the TV screen throughout the 20th century. Peter Cushing perhaps speaks for Volk in his self-defence of the genre for which he had unwittingly become such a defining figure. Answering a no-doubt oft-voiced question as to why he made such ‘horrible films’, he explains ‘I think the best so called “horror” shows us our worst fears in symbolic form and tries to tell us in dramatic form how we can overcome them’.

For Volk, a romantic humanist, the answer is connection, always connection. It is Hitch’s tragedy that he never truly seems to find it. There is always a hollow chamber within, a cell inhabited for life by the confused and frightened boy who must keep the world at bay with ordered systems (from train and tramspotting to the plotting of perfect cinematic thrill rides) and a bluffly remote façade of macabre joviality. The damage sustained in childhood and carried through into adulthood, and the threat to children from the damaged or simply monstrous is a theme which recurs in Volk’s fiction, from Afterlife to Ghost Watch and The Awakening. It is present throughout this trilogy too.

Both Cushing and Wheatley are firm believers in a benevolent Christian God, a force for good in the world. Their worldview is strongly moral, with an underpinning commitment to confronting evil wherever it might be encountered. For Wheatley, as for so many others, the Second World War was a fight against the encroachment of an evil ideological poison in the world. The ritual battle he takes part in with Crowley as an unlikely ally is a struggle against a kind of occult fascism, an attempt to use magic potency attained through pitiless cruelty and brutish bullying to exert a violent, self-aggrandising power. The dark magus whom they oppose is the antithesis to Wheatley’s values and it turns out, surprisingly, Crowley’s. His utter disconnection from all human connection, fellow-feeling and compassion are what makes him truly monstrous. The same is true for the monster whom Cushing confronts in Whitstable. He talks of life being about satisfying ones appetites, and talks of developing the taste for the once prevalent local delicacy of oysters (a scene with uncomfortable echoes of Laurence Olivier’s seduction of Tony Curtis in Spartacus). This is stated as if it were a self-evident truth. Cushing quietly offers an alternative credo in his mind. Life is given meaning through love. Peter’s love for Helen, and Dennis’ love for Joan. This is the redemptive force. Whether it derives from a benevolent God or from the shining heart of the Human spirit.

Stephen Volk's Leytonstone and the Secret Heart of Hitchcock

Stephen Volk’s new novella (novelette? I never did work out the fine distinctions) Leytonstone is a tangential follow up to Whitstable, his acclaimed 2013 book, also published by Spectral Press. He once more fashions a story around a particular time, place and a real person inhabiting them. Whitstable offered a heartfelt portrait of the aged Peter Cushing wandering through the sleepy Kent seaside town in which he had settled with his beloved wife Helen and made his home. It reflected upon both Cushing’s gentlemanly manner, old world kindliness and Christian worldview and the moral rectitude and certainty of the more upright, crusading characters he played onscreen. These qualities were set against the backdrop of the harsh, increasingly desensitised world of the 70s in which such moral and spiritual convictions had begun to dissipate, and to which the fantasy world of Hammer with which Cushing was so indelibly associated was struggling to adjust. New fears and terrors, allied with the uncertainties attendant upon a declining economy, were arising to eclipse the gothic staples of the Hammer universe with monsters of a more grimly realistic tenor – monsters with a human face. Cushing’s personal crisis of faith and hope in the wake of his wife’s death becomes paradigmatic of the crisis of the country at large. In the manner of Boris Karloff at the climax of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 film Targets, Cushing has to face a contemporary monster imbued with all the ambiguous complexities of human nature. In that film, Karloff confronted a sniper who had turned his sights on the audience at a drive-in where one of his old cobwebbed gothics was screening. In Whitstable, Cushing intervenes in order to protect a young boy who has turned to him, or rather to Dr Van Helsing, for help in driving out the father whom he believes to be a vampire. In doing so, the actor has to face his own fears of redundancy and helplessness in a world he no longer understands, and feels he has no real place in anymore. It is a deeply moving portrait, full of the compassion and psychological insight Volk brought to difficult and upsetting subject matter in his supernatural TV series Afterlife. This was a fictional iteration of Cushing, but it spoke about the man and his work with great eloquence, revealing much about the enormous respect, admiration, and indeed love with which he is still regarded by so many (myself included).

Volk treads a parallel path in Leytonstone. Whereas Whitstable viewed the compensatory imaginative world of a child from the perspective of an adult, Leytonstone invites us to see things from a young child’s point of view. That child is Fred, or ‘Cocky’ to his schoolmates. We know him better as Alfred Hitchcock, or perhaps as ‘Hitch’, the nickname which he preferred as an adult to the crude name-calling of the playground or childhood streets. At this stage in his life he is a 6 year old boy living in the east end London borough of Leytonstone, in a house attached to the successful greengrocer’s business of his father, William Hitchcock.

Volk adopts a cinematic style appropriate to his subject, setting the scene with the acute eye of the accomplished screenwriter. There is some quick cross-editing in the first few pages, with Fred’s recitation of potato varieties intercut with close-up details of the street, indicating someone approaching (‘dark legs stride in mirror-black shoes’). The imaginary camera eye then pulls out to give us an interior and exterior view of the Hitchcock greengrocer’s. Later, there are expressionist shadows which turn a policeman walking the gaslit streets into a skull-faced ghoul: a nod to the German films from which the young Hitchcock learned so much in the formative years of his career. We get a foretaste of some of Hitchcock’s own cinematic devices too. Windows and peepholes provide voyeuristic screens within the screen, iris ovals which make the audience complicit in what they watch. Fred clears the misted pane of his bedroom window to look out onto the evening street below. Volk observes that ‘it’s black and white out there, like a film’. A view at a safe distance from the pick-up he half-comprehendingly watches take place. Later, he spies on a prototype Hitchcock blonde through a hole in a matchbox he had customised for a practical joke (played upon said blonde). This tiny matchbox is a miniature model of the prying lens of the movie camera. Echoes of Rear Window resonate down the years. The fact that the matches are of the England’s Glory make provides the potential for a crude joke (the glory hole) which Fred would have no understanding of, but which the adult Hitch most certainly would. His love of bawdy toilet humour is anticipated in Fred’s nervous inscribing of a cock and balls, copied from a piece of graffiti he has seen, onto the wall of the toilets at his Jesuit school.

Other well-recorded aspects of Hitch’s character and behaviour are also anticipated, lent dramatic context and provided with psychological insight: his compulsive comfort eating, his yearning for easeful luxury, his enactment of elaborate and cruel practical jokes, and his placid remoteness and emotionally distant demeanour. His iconic image is pictured at the end of the book seated onstage at the American Film Institute’s celebration of his life and work. It is an image of someone who is aloof and at a remove from ordinary human motivations, which he observes and sums up with a few dramatically weighted words of mordant wit. Volk describes him as ‘a vast Buddha as recognisable as any of the actors whose name he put up in lights’. It’s a description which could be applied to the giant sculpture of his head which rests, heavy-lidded and rustily bronze, in the centre of a complex of offices and flats built on the site of the Islington studios where his film directing career took flight. But this is a Buddha, Volk’s story suggests, who never achieved enlightenment; who remained in the dark, alone and filled with a paralysing fear which could only find release through his art. Behind the Buddha’s serene gaze lies a void.

Hitchcock and Truffaut

The first half of the story centres around an event which became a well-worn anecdote reeled off time and again by the mature and feted Hitch. His father took him to the local police station when he was a small boy (‘about six’, as Hitch told it). He had arranged for the policeman in charge to lock him in a cell for a short period of time (‘five minutes’ was the general estimate). ‘This is what we do to naughty boys’ the PC in charge told him by way of explanation. Hitch told this well-rehearsed tale, along with many others, as a way of deflecting any attempts at soliciting personal information. It offered a tidbit of prefabricated insight into the genesis of the ‘wrong man’ theme running through his work, along with the notion of transferable or latent guilt which attends it. The anecdote was duly brought out for the 1962 interview with Francois Truffaut which formed the basis for his 1967 book on Hitchcock. This was the only window on his early childhood he allowed his admiring interrogator, aside from a remark that, rather than being strict, his father was ‘a rather nervous man’. The only other glimpse we can get of Hitch’s childhood is the photograph of him posing next to his father, perched comfortably on a stout pony, in front of the luscious cornucopia of fruit and veg (including pineapples strung upside down like gamebirds) displayed in front of the shopfront with its proudly prominent sign reading W.Hitchcock – Fruit Salesman. William and Fred are both dressed in tropical khaki, the windows draped with flags to celebrate Empire Day (a celebration which the exotic fruits also implicitly play their part in). The photograph is incorporated into Volk’s story, which gives us some idea as to what might be going on behind the distant, detached gazes of father and son.

Volk takes the police station story and transforms it from the inflexible anecdotal shield it had become into a raw and pivotal moment in young Fred’s emotional and psychological development. The constant reiteration of the experience in the form of an amusing tale becomes a double-bluff; a piece of genuine self-revelation coated in the polished veneer of a light, carefully crafted recollection. It’s a pointer to the nature of Hitch’s films, the way in which he embedded his own deeply personal fears and desires beneath their immaculately contrived surfaces whilst never, ever admitting to any such dimension in public. In Volk’s story, the punishment meted out in the police station is a great deal more traumatic than the mild admonishment of the anecdote, the incarceration much lengthier than the brief incarceration Hitch outlined. Fred is left there overnight, bullied and tormented by a sadistic policeman who delights in telling him that Jack the Ripper is lodged in the adjacent cell. He has only a piss-stained bed with an indeterminately sticky blanket to curl up on, his lullaby sinister nonsense songs bellowed by the neighbouring drunk. It’s related with a Kafkaesque sense of existential terror. Fred feels utterly abandoned, and betrayed by his parents (his mother who let him go with a promise of his favourite steak and kidney pie upon his return). But most of all, he doesn’t understand. If he’s being subjected to this terrible punishment, he must be guilty of something. But what? Some latent sin he has yet to manifest? A universal guilt lodged within every human heart? It’s almost as if he is being guided to discover that guilt. At this juncture, he might as well be called Fred K.

The shadows of films to come are glimpsed throughout the story. There’s a certain game-like element to these allusions. They are partly speculative excavations, searching for the psychological strata underlying the stories Hitch chose to tell. But they are also offered with a nod and a wink, an enjoyable bit of movie spotting for terminal film buffs. The Ripper reference looks forward to The Lodger; the stuffed bird in the Jesuit father’s office, the transvestite and the police officer’s taunting ‘bit of a mummy’s boy, are we?’ to Pyscho; the ‘fluttering and scratching’ pigeons filling the upstairs room of a ruined house to The Birds’; the idea of hiding a body in a sack of potatoes to Frenzy….and so on.

Shadow selves - Guy and Bruno in Strangers on a Train

Other abiding themes running through Hitchcock’s films are also alluded to. The idea of disguised or hidden selves is present from the start in the form of metaphorical architecture – the division between the immaculate and bright streetfront display of the Hitchcock greengrocer’s and the dark interior behind in which the family lives. One of the bullying policeman’s methods of playing on young Fred’s imagination is to act as if he believes that his thorough knowledge of transport timetables and routes points to his being a potential spy. He turns something innocent, a source of intellectual pride, into something secret and despicable. Spies are key characters in a significant number of Hitchcock films: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, North by Northwest, Torn Curtain and Topaz. Volk has Fred ask his father what a spy is. His answer sheds light on their role within these pictures. His dad also inadvertently describes himself and all adults who aren’t unblemished saints (ie all adults), and presents his son with a sketch of his future self. A spy, William explains, is ‘a person who keeps secrets. Somebody who says he’s one thing but he’s really another’. The spy theme and the idea of the self hidden behind a carefully maintained surface extends to the doubled characters which cast mirroring reflections across Hitchcock’s filmography. Cary Grant and James Mason (Roger Thornhill – or ‘Mr Kaplan’ - and Phillip Vandamm) circling each other in North by Northwest is the example that most vividly springs to mind. But there are also the pairings of Cary Grant and Claude Rains in Notorious, Farley Granger and Robert Walker (Guy and Bruno) swapping murders in Strangers on a Train, James Stewart scripting Raymond Burr’s murder of his wife to alleviate his boredom in Rear Window, deadbeat Jon Finch and his psychopathic mate Barry Foster (Richard Blaney and Bob Rush) in Frenzy and many others. In Leytonstone, Fred’s father William is doubled with the monstrous, bullying policeman. The latter is a bluff brute who lives to feed his appetites, without any moral compunctions which might curb them. William is far more uncertain of himself (the ‘rather nervous man’ of Hitchcock’s recollection), filling his life with labour to allay the fear that it might all be ultimately without purpose. Or rather, that he might never discover that sense of purpose which those around him seem intuitively to possess. The doubling theme finds interesting form in Johan Grimonprez’s 2009 film Double Take, in which footage taken from introductions to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series is contrasted with interviews with and footage of a contemporary Hitchcock impersonator.

Villain as victim

There’s an often ambiguous borderline separating hero from villain in Hitchcock’s films. They are, to varying degrees, different aspects of a divided self. The hero is sometimes bland and rather weak, as with Guy in Strangers on a Train or Richard in Frenzy. The villain is contrastingly smooth, decisive and charismatic. In other cases, Psycho being the prime example, the heroes are little more than bullies, the villains damaged, fearful and misunderstood (save by the director and, perhaps, their victims). Fred exhibits sympathy towards the ‘villain’ as he appears at the beginning of Dickens’ Great Expectations. ‘I like him’, he says of Magwich after his mother has called him ‘a terrible man’.

The wrong man as Christ-like martyr - The Lodger

The doubled self also links in with the ‘wrong man’ theme. If there is a wrong man then there must also be a right man, or a man who bears the genuine burden of guilt. Fred is the wrong man (or boy) in Leytonstone. But in a sense he is also the right man. his imprisonment is a premonitory punishment (akin to the delayed punishments meted out by the Jesuit teachers at the hour of the pupil’s choosing). The notion of overwhelming and all-pervasive personal guilt, prevalent also in his Catholic upbringing and schooling, almost invites action to provide a palpably solid basis for its nebulous presence, an identifiable source for its oppressive weight. Volk suggests a religious dimension to the wrong man theme (a dimension explicitly evident in Hitchcock’s I Confess) by having Fred ask of the Jesuit schoolfather ‘but Jesus was crucified as a criminal. For a crime he didn’t commit. What was the crime they though he committed?’ So Christ was, from a certain viewpoint, and example of the ‘wrong man’ – the lamb taken for a lion. Or of the right man, taking on the guilt and sins of others, something only possible by virtue of a shared humanity. The wrong man takes on the sins of the ‘villain’ with whom he becomes inextricably linked. The guilt is, to all appearances, removed from the ‘sinner’, for the time being anyway. What happens to that guilt? Does it correspond to something that was always present in the ‘wrong’ man? Of course, it’s the nature of the plot’s progression that he tries to return it to its original owner. The analogies with Christ only stretch so far. As Father Mullins, the Jesuit teacher, states, desperately trying to evade the issue, ‘it’s complicated’.

Of course, there has to be a Hitchcock blonde. The prototype here is a girl called Olga from the local convent school. Fred is fascinated by her coolness in the face of his friends’ base schoolboy pranks. His confusion over his feelings towards her leads to the dramatic tension at the heart of the second half of the novella. A tension which mirrors that of the first, but with Fred now putting himself in a position of power. Taking up the director’s chair. It provides a psychological basis for Hitch’s treatment of the ice blondes in his mid-period classics (Grace, Kim, Eva, Janet and Tippi) which is directly linked to his experience in the police cell. The production of exquisitely manufactured scenarios of suspense and release as a means of subsuming personal, inexpressible fears, art as a means of controlling that which eludes you in real life. It is also, as the parallel events of the story make clear, an indirect way of trying to connect with someone, to create an intimacy based on shared fear. This perverse melding of romance and terror would characterise many of his films. It also suggests that if Hitchcock has his doubles onscreen, the characters which truly express the secret spaces of his heart, then they are not the suavely collected Jimmy Stewarts, Cary Grants or Sean Conneries, but the fearful, haunted Tippi Hedrens, Kim Novaks and Eva Marie-Saints.

Volk takes a certain amount of license with the facts in Leytonstone. The police cell incident took place when Hitch was about 6, and that is Fred’s stated age in the story. He attends St Ignatius Jesuit School, although Hitchcock didn’t go here until 1910, when he was 11 years old, by which time the family had moved from Leytonstone to Stepney (via Poplar). His precocious 6 year old self is already familiar with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whereas Hitch spoke in interviews about having discovered him when he was 16. There is also no mention of his older brother and sister, William jr. and Nellie, who would presumably have been living at home at this time. But this is mythography, not biography. Volk is creating a fictional portrait based on aspects of a well-known public persona and body of work, drawing on elements from a whole lifespan. Hitchock’s version of his own life was as much fiction as fact (the same could no doubt be said of us all). Volk’s story, with its compression and folding outward of time, its collision of the real with the invented, reflects on Hitch’s fundamental, Kane-like inscrutability.

There have been many attempts to psychoanalyse Hitchcock, generally undertaken in an amateurish and highly speculative manner. They seem to take their cues from the psychology for simpletons lecture at the end of Psycho. Hitch was a master of misdirection and manipulation, both in his films and as regarded his private life. It’s tempting to reach for facile simplifications when trying to penetrate his implacable exterior, to draw on particular events to neatly summarise the complex contradictions of his character. Donald Spoto’s controversial biography, whilst admirably frank and honest in some respects, is all to ready to reach instant psychological conclusions. Volk’s book is partly a response to these versions of Hitchcock, which have reached their apogee in two recent films (Hitchcock and The Girl) which cast him in a deeply unflattering light. By portraying Hitch as the young Fred, a frightened and confused boy, Volk is able to examine the roots of his art and its universal appeal from a neutral distance.

Hitch’s films have affected an enormous number of people over the year, attracting an audience way beyond the coterie of cinephiles who continue (in the wake of Truffaut and the Cahiers du Cinema boys) to revere him. Vertigo has now displaced Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time in the weighty estimation of Sight and Sound readers and critics. Volk’s Hitchcock is ultimately a mystery to himself, just as his father is depicted as being. He’s not a monster. He remains that frightened boy, bewildered by the betrayals and machinations of the adult world; torn between adoration of his father, respect for his father’s authority and a rejection of both; and disconnected from the turbulent swell of his own emotions, and thereby from real communion with others. He is a tragic figure.

Reaching out for contact (see also the Anthony Perkins photo above)

Towards the end of the book, we encounter him in the form we know at the American Film Institute’s celebration of his life and work held in 1979, not long before his death the following year. The lost little boy is still there, unable to apprehend the love and professional respect being directed towards him. He remains adrift, the world never having truly made sense to him since that night in the police cells when he was confronted with such overwhelming fear and guilt arising from an unknown place, from no identifiable source. The films are phantom emanations, attempts to reach that emotion, to create a sense of commonality through fear and suspense. The adulatory response of the AFI audience is proof that he achieved that. The tragedy is that he is unable to share in that commonality. The depth of his films lies in the perception of the tragedy lying beneath their exciting colourful surfaces (and the nearness of that tragedy to the surface of Vertigo is perhaps why it is so critically revered). Hitch also persisted in asking the questions which Volk has his Jesuit teacher Father Mullins so definitively to answer. In a strange way, he was a religious director.

Volk’s book brilliantly and movingly gives an origin myth to bring light to the ambiguous depths and tragic dimensions of the films, and to restore to Hitchcock his humanity, the wounded and confused pain and compassion at the heart of his work. The critic and playwright David Rudkin wrote, in his TV play Artemis 81, of Hitchcock’s camera being a ‘consecrating eye’, detecting the sacred aspect of his work, the yearning for a transcendent sense of connection, of profound love. This sense of the sacred, of shared fears and desires, is at the heart of Hitchcock’s great post-war work. It’s what has earned him his immortality, and has made such a profound impact on so many people over the years. We can all empathise with these feelings at some level, learn to fall together and find release from our fears. Hitch, forever Fred deep inside, remains outside, watching us with an impassive, unreadable regard, that famous profile a serenely blank mask. Perhaps he’s Buddha after all.

Underground (1928)

The bfi restoration of Anthony Asquith’s 1928 film Underground was first shown at the 2009 London Film Festival, but it has now finally made it into a handful of cinemas across the country ahead of its dvd release in the summer. It was the first film on which he received a sole directing credit, having previously been assistant director on a picture called Shooting Stars in 1926. It’s an astonishingly assured debut, fully assimilating new techniques from the continent and handling what could easily have been an overheated melodrama with sensitivity and a keen observation of character. A prefatory title card informs us that this is to be a story about ‘workaday people whose names are just Nell, Bill, Bert and Kate’. Fortunately, that snootily patronising ‘just’ is not reflected in the ensuing film. The rituals, rhythms and places of work are central to the film, and from our perspective some 8 decades on give a fascinating glimpse of the differences from (and similarities to) our own lives. Nell works in a department store, Bill as a station attendant on the underground; Bert as a power station operative, and Kate as a home-based seamstress. The story revolves around their intertwining love stories, and the passions which they arouse. Nell becomes the focus for Bill and Bert’s amatory advances, whilst Kate pines after Bert (who lives downstairs from her), who firmly rebuffs her advances (telling her that it’s all over) until it becomes convenient for him to use her. We can tell that Bert is a bad egg from the start. When we first see him, he nabs a seat which a soldier and a sailor are vying to give up for a young woman standing in the aisle. When they remonstrate with him, he merely gives them a cock-eyed ‘what are you going to do about it’ grin from beneath his broad flat cap. When we first meet Bill, on the other hand, he is standing at the bottom of an escalator helping bewildered travellers find their bearings in the underground tunnels. He even rescues a puppy which has toboganned down the central slope and reunites it with its owner.

Nell (Elissa Landi) on the elevator

The tone of the film veers between light comedy, romance, psychological drama and action thriller. The transition between these wildly disparate moods is sometimes a little awkward, but never to the extent of unbalancing the film as a whole. The actors playing the four central characters are all great. Elissa Landi’s Nell seems very modern in her gestures and looks, a very 20s character who remains relatively unfazed by the attentions she receives from the two men. Her reactions, looks and gestures are naturalistic and unaffected, effectively giving the sense of an ordinary young woman of the period. Norah Baring’s Kate is a tragic female character in a more traditionally Victorian mould, working in overworked and underpaid conditions little changed from nineteenth century and wasting her affection on a love which is clearly one-sided (and which, in true Dickensian Nancy style, is wasted on a brute). She is more exaggerated in her emotional gestures, which seem to derive from an earlier, DW Griffith era of theatrical film acting. The scene in which she realises that she has been used by Bert and begins to mentally unravel is very affecting, however, partly due to its underplayed tone. We watch her circling the room, making small adjustments to the sparse ornaments and objects which dot its bare spaces, turning a plant pot around and picking at the earth and leaves. It seems like the prelude to a more tempestuous collapse (as indeed proves to be the case). Her nervous mental energy (and the overwhelming volume of work she has to get through to earn a crust) is also ably conveyed in the ferocity with which she turns the wheel of her sewing machine.

Bill and Bert are contrasted in their manner of courting. Bert takes a direct approach, effectively stalking Nell, confronting her in her workplace and later following her along the riverfront and forcefully pushing her up against an alley wall. She pushes him away and requests he lower the barrier of his arm leaning against the bricks. When he refuses, she simply shrugs and ducks under. His rough and cocky ‘you know you want it’ approach definitively fails to impress, and suggests that Bert is really only after one thing. Bill on the other hand takes her on an omnibus ride out to a more idyllic and pastoral riverside setting on the outskirts of the city (out Twickenham way?), where they enjoy a picnic reclining beneath a solid oak tree. A ragged but winsome urchin creeping up on them with an eye on their sandwiches adds a mild element of tension, and may serve as a reminder of Bert with his flat cap. But he ends up sharing their meal and bringing the two closer together in a natural and unforced manner (as opposed to Bert’s unsubtle approach), his temporary presence hinting at a long-lasting relationship and a future family.

Bill (Brian Aherne) and Nell in the emergency stairwell

Brian Aherne, as Bill, mixes a winning hesitancy and boy next door charm and courtesy with hints of a more calculating and worldly side. This latter aspect sometimes uses the mask of innocence to its own advantage. It is he, after all, who first thwarts Bert’s pursuit of Nell by tripping him up at the foot of the escalator and then delaying him further by dusting him down with sarcastically fussy solicitude. Cyril McLaglen’s Bert is fairly open and transparent in his rough charms. There’s little guile to his character, and his casual and throwaway attitude to romance is clearly well known to the regulars at his locals, who exchange knowing glances at his mooning over his latest ‘girlfriend’. It is only after a confrontation in the significantly male environment of the pub (the only woman is the stolidly indifferent barmaid, who remains rooted to the counter throughout) that his wounded pride drives him to take reprisals against his rival, which swiftly escalate beyond his control. He does so by using Bill’s appearance of bland innocence against him, with the intention of revealing the more violent aspect of the man who tripped him up on the escalator and laid him out in the pub which lies beneath. The antagonism from this point on exists more between the two men, with the women reduced to secondary, reactive roles. They could be seen in terms of a Jekyll and Hyde split, expressions of conflicting sides of the male persona. As such, the final epic chase becomes a struggle between these normally co-existent halves which have gone to war against each other to assert dominance.

Power Underground - Edward McKnight Kauffer

If it’s taken on a literal level, the highly charged and thrillingly shot chase sequence is a coda which is jarringly out of register with the rest of the film (although very exciting in its own right). It takes us to the heights of the power station roof before descending once more to the depths of the underground in a way which connects both locales. The underground is a place apart from the regular world above, a warren of the unconscious in which normally suppressed feelings are given a tentative flicker of expression. The power station is seen to be the source of the underground’s power, and is also the symbolic representation of powerful human passions, the generating heart where they connect with full, blinding force. A similar connection was made linking machine and muscle, overground and underground in Edward McKnight Kauffer’s striking futurist-inspired Power Underground poster produced for the Underground in 1931 (one of those featured in the set of Royal Mail stamps issued to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first London underground train). The final chase feels like it could have been lifted from one of Hitchcock’s wrong man suspense thrillers. Perhaps it’s not so inappropriate, given the underlying theme of doubles and split personae which runs throughout Hitch’s oeuvre, and the tendency of his heroes to be a little bland or complacent, his antagonists often more characterful, sympathetic or even attractive (albeit psychopathic).

Chelsea Blue - Lots Road Power Station

The film is a delight for transport enthusiasts, as well as for anyone interested in the history of London. There is a good deal of location shooting which gives fascinating glimpses into the inter-war city. Bill and Nell’s trip on the top of the omnibus harks back to the ‘phantom rides’ of early cinema, in which the camera would be set up at the front of a tram or train to film the passing parade. Here, the focus is obviously on our two romantic leads, the camera facing backwards, but we do get to see the buildings receding on either side. The conductor sells them a ticket from a wooden rack of pre-prepared specimens (producing an audibly excited exclamation from one bus enthusiast in the audience). This was long before the introduction (in 1953, if you must know) of the ‘Gibson’ paper ticket-roll machines which were suspended from the conductor’s neck, with their mini-hurdy gurdy style dispensing handles and adjustable printing blocks in convenient reach at the front. Nell’s walk by the riverside during which she is accosted by Bert also offers a background picture of the working Thames, barges drifting past and the chimneys of factories and power stations belching smog-creating smoke into the London skies. We also get a panoramic view of the Thames in West London from the sloping rooftop of the Lots Road Power Station in Chelsea Creek during the climactic chase sequence, a plume of steam marking the progress of a train across the Chelsea Harbour bridge far below. Lots Road provided the electricity for the Metropolitan Line, the first underground line to be opened (in 1963, 150 years ago). It remained independent from the other lines, which were amalgamated within the dominant Underground Group, until the unification of all London transport systems within the London Passenger Transport Board, a public corporation set up in March 1933 (and better known as plain old London Transport). The underground scenes centre particularly around the escalators whose distinctive uplighting ‘torches’ seem to place them at Picadilly Circus. The station had been redesigned by London Underground architect Charles Holden and was only officially opened on the 10th December 1928, which might explain the confusion of so many of the passengers Bill has to help out. Holden would go on to design many of the distinctively moderne stations on the northern end of the Picadilly line (Arnos Grove and Southgate being particularly good examples), as well as the fabulous art deco headquarters of London Underground at 55 Broadway, which boasts sculptural reliefs by Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein on its external façade. The Picadilly escalators are seen in all their glory, with their wooden treads, bronze fittings and triumphal rows of evenly spaced uplit torches.

Picadilly escalators

There’s some lovely observational comedy concerning underground etiquette (or its breaching) in the opening scenes. Acquaintances spot one another across a crowded carriage and lean over to conduct a conversation through an archway of arms. Bert reads his neighbour’s paper, much to his irritation (made visible in the traditional manner by shaking and readjusting the broadsheet), and it is pointedly thrust into his hands in roughly folded form as the other chap departs the carriage. A portly gentleman takes up a position in the aisle, holding on to the hanging knobs on either side, and Nell is hypnotised by the gentle sway of his belly as the carriage rocks in its forward rush. A policewoman (or is she a conductor?) standing stiff and erect beneath her brimmed upturned bowl of a hat repels all eye contact with her basilisk glare, sending one meek chap shrinking behind his paper after his offer of a seat is batted aside as a base insult. With the war and the female workforce which it engendered now a decade or so in the past, the idea of women in uniformed positions of authority was evidently once more a cue for wry amusement, and the use of the matronly ‘old dragon’ stereotype. She does crack a sisterly smile when Nell thwarts Bert’s advances by chucking his beloved cap away, though. There is much tactical manoeuvring involving the offering of seats and the acceptance or refusal of the offer. This tends to be a less than selfless attempt on the part of gentlemen to move nearer to an attractive young woman, or a counter move on the woman’s part to move further away. What with Bill’s use of the escalator as a means both to trip up his rival and to make initial contact with Nell, the crowded carriages and corridors of the tube seem to be portrayed as a natural theatre for flirtation and the possibility of turning a chance encounter into something more lasting.

Underground etiquette

The regimentation of the escalator into slow and fast lanes (standing on the left, striding up on the right) has yet to become ingrained, and ascent and descent is something of a hustling free for all. Notices instructing passengers which foot they should step off with are in place at the bottom, and there is an amusing scene in which a foot soldier lugging two bulging kitbags is sent into a panic of confusion by this simple advice. This is largely due to the looming presence of his fearsomely moustached sergeant major behind him, who observes his stumbling disembarkation with an air of exasperated familiarity. The walls are absolutely plastered with advertisements, most of them a great deal smaller than those found today, and filled with text rather than enticing passers-by with the kind of arresting images which we have become so inured to today. It gives the corridors and station walls a rather cluttered look. There is no sign of the posters designed for the Underground Group, and later London Transport, which reached a consistently high standard of artistic distinction under the guidance of publicity director Frank Pick. These were displayed in especially reserved spaces outside the stations and in the entrance halls and lobbies. The more generalised advertising we see here was restricted to corridors and station platforms. Pick would also ensure that there would be a more standardised aesthetic approach to the visual side of the tube system once the London Transport body co-ordinating all aspects of the capital’s transport was created in 1933. When we catch sight of a tube map, it is still one of those drawn by FH Strangemore, composed of curving lines which attempt to follow the contours of real geography. Frank Pick’s famous design, reducing the complex web of intersecting lines to a pipeline schematic of geometrical semi-abstraction, would not appear until 1933. When Nell gets off at Waterloo Station near the end of the film, she does so by opening the gate at the end of the carriage herself. The pneumatic automatic door system, operated by the driver, had evidently yet to be introduced on this line. By 1930, it would be a feature of all the trains, which were by then standardised throughout the system, so this scene was about to become historic even as the film was made. The opening title cleverly incorporates the ceramic UndergrounD sign outside a station, each letter contained within its own tiled block, with the bracketing U and D larger than the rest. These signs, and the graphic setting of the word, were used on the buildings which Leslie Green designed for the UERL (the Underground Electric Railways Company of London) and on their posters and publicity. The UERL predated the amalgamation of different and competing lines within the Underground Group, of which it was the major and controlling company.

Anthony Asquith

Asquith demonstrates an inventive cinematic eye throughout. Although the story he tells is fairly conventional and clearly aimed at a popular audience, he is not averse to using innovative or experimental techniques to express its more interior aspects. He was familiar with the latest films from Europe through his membership of the London Film Society, which screened pictures by the likes of Fritz Lang, FW Murnau and Sergei Eisenstein at the New Gallery Cineman in Regent Street and the Tivoli in The Strand. Alfred Hitchcock was another member and regular attendee. The Society was set up in 1925 under the aegis of the renowned newspaper critic Iris Barry. She was assisted by Ivor Montagu, an enthusiast for the more experimental form which some European directors were taking. He had travelled to Germany in 1925 and written an article for The Times about the new German cinema, and was familiar with its practitioners, some of whom he knew personally. He would go on to work with Hitchcock on the post-production of The Lodger after its fate became embroiled in the internal politics of the Islington Studios where it was made. Rather than impose his views and act like some heavy-handed studio enforcer, as Hitchcock feared, he voiced his enthusiasm for the film and encouraged him to emphasise the expressionist elements, extending them to the design of the intertitle cards. The Lodger, also restored by the bfi and released in a new print last year, provides a good point of comparison with Underground. By the time of Asquith’s film, the European techniques have been fully absorbed and raised to a new level of technical sophistication. The cameras have also moved beyond the studio, displaying a greater facility for location shooting. Such freedoms, and the mature and complex visual style which had developed by the end of the 20s, would be severely curtailed by the arrival of sound and the cumbersome equipment which accompanied its near universal adoption, and it would be a long time before they were rediscovered. Asquith himself, after his next film A Cottage on Dartmoor, would retreat from his innovative and highly cinematic style, producing the kind of conventionally theatrical fare which would be a dominant part of British cinema for the next few decades; Pictures like Pygmalion, The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Crane shot - location shooting in Chelsea Creek

The expressionist use of shadows in Underground can be seen in the distorted grid stretching along the angle of the ceiling and walls from the skylight outside Kate’s room. When she comes out to look over the banister and watch Bert’s return, she is caged within these bars of shadow, one of which covers her eyes like a blindfold. It’s a perfect visual shorthand with which to introduce the character, trapped as she is within the cage of her own lingering longing for the man she watches, and by the unrelenting demands of her work which imprisons her within her room and her inescapable poverty. The play of shadows also provides a humorous counterpoint to Bill and Nell’s initial encounter in the well of the emergency staircase, in which they awkwardly arrange a first date. As the two look at each other and speak in nervous bursts of speech, their shadows on the wall behind them diverge from the movements and gestures of their progenitors, embracing and kissing in what amounts to a projection of Bill’s (and maybe also Nell’s) sublimated desires. The Lots Road power station, with its towering, smoking chimneys and monumental, block-like mass looks like a futurist fortress, and is the perfect locale for tilted and skewed expressionist angles. The underground sign at the start, which serves as the title card, is also set at a diagonal slant, a statement of stylistic intent. Asquith also includes shots which fill the screen with abstract geometrical patterns, as if he were drawing on the work of Futurist, Russian Suprematist or Constructivist, or (nearer to home) Vorticist movements. All were intent on producing an abstract or semi-abstracted art for the machine age in which the straight line and grid pattern predominated over the rounded, branching forms of nature. A close-up of the wooden escalator steps has their revolving rectangles, with their raked perpendicular striations, passing hypnotically before our eyes. There is also a shot which pans along a lengthy row of angular windows high up on the wall of the power station, which gives a sense of measured out time and distance (Kate is running towards the entrance at this point).

Superimposition and rapid intercutting familiar to Asquith from the montage techniques of Russian filmmakers like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov is also employed to add new psychological and metaphorical layers to the story. In a scene set in a street corner pub, shots of the patrons and their interactions with Bert are interspersed with brief, repeated inserts of snooker balls being struck by cues and the hammers of a player piano jangling against the strings. Both imply an element of sound and serve to conjure up the atmosphere of the place in a visual manner. Later, the increased frequency of the inserts also creates a sense of rising tension as Bill enters and a confrontation brews up. When a fight does break out, the final sucker punch is shown as a point of view shot from the perspective of the unfortunate recipient (Bert). The fist flies towards the camera until it almost fills the frame (and we can imagine it cracking the lens), at which point we fade to black – the blank screen of unconsciousness. The shot is subsequently replayed as a loop superimposed over Bert’s bloodied face as he walks home, its obsessive reiteration a projection of his furious sense of humiliation. Later, as Kate runs towards the power station, she seeks Bert’s glowering face projected over it. This serves the direct narrative function of indicating his presence in the building, the projected object of her breathless dash. But it also makes the subjective link between the driving power generated by the dynamos within and the electrifying, force which Bert seems to exert on Kate, driving her on as if her will was no longer her own. When Bert emerges from the power station for the final pursuit, his hair has risen into a crazed expressionist shock, a wild mad scientist thatch worthy of Lang’s Rotwang or Dr Mabuse, or Robert Wiene’s Dr Caligari. It’s as if he’s absorbed the power from the generators and has turned into some fizzing electrical monster.

Rooftop chase - river view from the Lots Road Power Station

There are further individual touches which add an idiosyncratic flavour to the film. During the frantic fight in the lift, a blind man (and we know he’s blind because he’s go a notice hung around his neck which says so) gazes off in the opposite direction. This creates a certain tension in the viewer, whose attention is partially drawn away from the action. Comparitive shots of Kate and Bert preparing themselves in front of their separate dressing table mirrors in their separate rooms (she readying herself to approach him, he rapidly changing to head off to the pub) make the gulf between them apparent, and tell us how futile her hopes of winning his non-existent affections are before we even see them meet, or learn of their former relationship. Incidental characters also add depth and enriching detail to the bustling and crowded city portrayed in the film. There’s the starving urchin in the countryside, a penniless street artist by the river, and an old man playing a jig on a penny whistle to entertain a straggling group of children, as well as the odd assortment of well-worn regulars at the pub and the diverse cross-section of working Londoners on the tube. The opening and closing shots make imaginative use of the blackness of the tunnel to emulate the blankess of the screen before the film frames begin running through the projector. At the beginning, a white dot just off centre expands to reveal itself as the tunnel mouth as the train in which we are enjoying a ‘phantom ride’ (with the camera point of view placed in the driver’s cab) approaches a station. It’s like a cinematic variant on the theatrical curtain being raised on the drama about to unfold. At the end, the process is reversed, the darkness of the tunnel expanding to enfold us, the curtain lowered to bring the story to a close.

Platform seating - Waiting at Waterloo

Silent film soundtrack maestro (and sometime playwright – he wrote a very touching play about Laurel and Hardy) Neil Brand provides another of his fine programmatic scores, which responds to the shifting moods and registers of the story with an appropriately wide-ranging use of orchestral styles. He also employs sounds from his orchestral palette for several moments in which instruments are played onscreen (the penny whistler, a mouth organ wheezed by the urchin, and Bert’s whistling of The Boy Friend), incorporating them smoothly into the score rather than resorting to direct imitation. There’s a quotation of the tune ‘Where Did You Get That Hat?’ for a scene in which Bert tries on a series of the pancake-shaped caps he favours, which is a nice little touch typifying the care he takes to match the music precisely with what we are seeing on the screen. Brand’s classy score it the icing on the cake for this excellent restoration of film which will only add to Asquith’s reputation as a rediscovered master of British silent cinema.

Hollywood Costume at the V&A

The Hollywood Costume exhibition at the V&A, which I went to see over Christmas, covered a century or so of classic American studio movies, and gathered together a stellar cast of phantom stars. There really was an impressive range and number of outfits on display, crowding three large halls and spotlit within suitably shrouded surrounds of cinematic darkness. In the first hall, the costumes were displayed as empty shells, hats raised on thin lengths of wire to balance on invisible heads. It drew attention to the obvious absence at the heart of the show, the vacuum left by the actors who had brought them to life. We initially left to fill in that void, to add our own spectral superimposition of recollected faces and expressions. As we progressed, however, the ghostly parade of uninhabited but still filled out costumes was replaced by the more solid form of dummies. They were black and featureless, still lacking all but the most notional of features, with just a little bit of stylised hair sculpted from stiff cardboard or leather to suggest character (Johnny Depp’s wild, windblown thickets of Bride of Frankenstein streaked hair from Sweeney Todd, for example). Finally, as we approached the final room (and the culminating shrine to Saint Judy and Our Lady Marilyn), small wafer-thin screens provided odd virtual-reality approximations of heads. It’s an acknowledgement of the squared-off frame through which we always view these legendary figures, and the carefully contrived fantasy which they convey, a fantasy which the costumes they wore did much to construct. The actors faces are caught in a frozen, slow-motion loop – so slow that it took a while to notice them coming to life at first. The effect was as ghostly as the initial invisibility, giving the effect of a projection of imprinted memory.

Marlene in Angel (1937)

The exhibition started on a high, the first star you were greeted with being Marlene Dietrich via her dress from the 1937 film Angel. This was a light Ernst Lubitsch comedy from the post von Sternberg period, by which time her image had been firmly established. The extensively jewelled, embroidered and fur-lined gown shows off the feminine side of Marlene (with a knowing wink added) – we’ll see her more masculine attire later. It was designed by Travis Banton, who worked for Paramount in the 20s and 30s, and also created Marlene’s extraordinary costumes for the von Sternberg pictures Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus and the delirious The Scarlett Empress, which established her complex, highly self-conscious screen goddess persona – lazily vampish, wearily erotic and beneath the veneer of indifference, deeply and irreducibly romantic. In the same introductory parade, Vivien Leigh’s green velvet dress with ‘Robin Hood’ hat from Gone With the Wind stands with prim correctness (we get to see her red velvet dress later, too, from this most extravagant of costume dramas). A different shade of green is displayed by Kim Novak’s woollen dress from Vertigo, offering a contrast in period, material and colour tone. The men are noticeably shabby in such company. Jeff Bridge’s towelling dressing gown, as loosely sported by The Dude in The Big Lebowski, faced the more elegant and expensively tailored outfits with defiant obliviousness to fashion or style. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp outfit is obviously one of THE iconic costumes in cinema history, and even if he has fallen from the pinnacle of fame and worldwide regard he enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was still quite a thrill to be able to peer so closely at such an instantly familiar get up. The trousers were authentically tattered and spattered with mud, the shoes holed and twisted, and the jacket frayed at the edges with buttons hanging on to a last wisp of thread. The painstaking creation of such a worn and beat look was achieved with a level of detail which went far beyond what would have been detectable on the screen, no matter how palatially gargantuan. It’s the perfect example of the way in which a costume goes a good way towards defining a character, one of the things which the exhibition set out to explore.

Katherine Hepburn in her Philadelphia Story dress

Some of the great designers from the classic Hollywood era were given their due. Many a glamorous picture from the 30s and 40s ended with the credit ‘gowns by Adrian’, a singular appellation akin to an artist’s signature. Its declarative ring and assumption of familiarity put him on a par with the actresses he dressed – Garbo, Harlow, Garland, Hepburn and Crawford. He was in fact Connecticut born Adrian Adolph Greenburg, who avoided the Anglicisation of names common in Hollywood by simply editing the last two out. The most eye-catching of Adrian’s gowns here was the dazzling sequined scarlet of Joan Crawford’s killer dress from the 1937 picture The Bride Wore Red. Its carmine splendour was rather diminished by the monochromatic black and white of the picture, however. The 1938 historical drama Marie Antoinette obviously gave him full reign to produce something of maximal extravagance for Norma Shearer to show off in the title role. It was Versailles via 30s couture, and we also got to see its modern equivalent nearby, with Kirsten Dunst’s costume for Sofia Coppola’s new romantic Marie Antoinette from 2006 also included, galleon-topped hat and all. Katherine Hepburn’s white dress from The Philadelphia Story was simple and elegant, its trim and line showing the influence of Classical Greek styles which was one of the trends of the time.

Greta is Queen Christina

Most exciting as far as I was concerned was the regal dress Adrian designed for Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, worn in one of the few scenes in which she forsakes her more masculine garb. It produces a priceless look of startlement from co-star John Gilbert when he sees her sitting on the throne in it, having previously encountered her under very different circumstances. Away from the illuminated black and white of its screen incarnation, it is a rather dull beige colour, its jewels rather evidently paste, its precious stones glass beads. But it was worn by GARBO, which gives it its own special aura. Ironically, the costume in the exhibition which caused the most excitement and stirred up the most publicity was the one which, viewed objectively, without this added aura, was the most drab and ordinary of Adrian's creations. It was, of course, the gingham apron dress worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, with ruby slippers adding a touch of Technicolor sparkle. The clash between the two elements of the costume serves to symbolise the two worlds between which Dorothy is torn – the homely, familiar, but limited one of family, hard work and realistic expectations and the more exciting but dangerous one of imaginative freedom and exploration. By the time I got there, the original ruby slippers, immensely valuable and no doubt hugely expensive to insure, had been replaced by reproductions (very good ones, mind you).

Marilyn tries to warm up Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot

Dorothy’s dress and slippers were saved until the end, a culminating point and perhaps the ultimate example of how a costume can become so much more than just material given pattern and design. Beside it was another costume which may have caused many to feel a little weak-kneed: Marilyn’s white dress from The Seven Year Itch. It was the very one which, raised by wafts of warm air from a New York subway, led to thousands of posters, parodies and statuettes. It was such a simple thing in the flesh (or rather cloth). But elaborate and showy fashions were almost redundant in costumes which Marilyn would be animating. The dress was made by Travilla, another mono-monickered designer. He went the other way from Adrian, dispelling any taint of the ordinary by expunging his Christian names (William Jack), happy to revel in the exoticism of his surname alone (i.e. to sound Latin and foreign). He was the man who clothed Marilyn in her greatest films of the 50s. Perhaps more interesting as a dress than as a piece of iconography like the Seven Year Itch costume was the tassled and beaded 1920s number with accompanying stole draped sinuously across the shoulders. It’s the one she wore in Some Like It Hot whilst singing I Want To Be Loved By You, teasingly playing with the shadowy border of the spotlight’s illumination and the lowcut line of the dress’ bust. She subsequently sports it during her attempted seduction of the duplicitous Tony Curtis’ supposedly frigid heir to the Shell millions on what she believes to be his yacht. It’s not, and he’s just a lowly saxophone player for hire, and it takes all his will power to maintain the fiction. Travilla’s association with the movies blossomed in the 50s, but he started out in the 40s, and won an Oscar early on for his work on The Adventures of Don Juan. Erroll Flynn’s rakishly piratical costume for the title role was on display, loose shirt and trouser allowing flexibility of movement for duelling foil action. Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean foppery was placed adjacent for contrast and to demonstrate continuity and influence.

Edith Head

Perhaps the reigning queen of Hollywood costume design, and certainly the most instantly recognisable with her distinctive black helmet of symmetrically cut hair and ubiquitous dark, round-lensed glasses, was Edith Head. She began work (uncredited) on the 1927 silent picture Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for best picture) and continued through to the 1970s. Most of this long period was spent with Paramount Pictures, and she took on whatever the studio assigned her. During her golden period, spanning the 40s through to the 60s, she was incredibly versatile, responding to any challenge which was thrown down. She worked on film noirs (making Barbara Stanwyck’s costumes for Double Indemnity), comedies (including Preston Sturges’ run of classics in the 1940s, again with Barbara Stanwyck, and the Bob and Bing road movies), and musicals. In the latter category, the exhibition included a striking red, sequin-dazzled dress with open front worn by Ginger Rogers in the 1944 picture Lady in the Dark. Ginger sported it in a dream sequence set in a circus in which vivid colour was used with deliberate and prominent symbolism. Nearby, Nicole Kidman’s showgirl costume from Moulin Rouge, displayed on a dummy perched high with leg kicking out on a pendant swing, provided a modern contrast.

Tippi Hedren in The Birds

Head enjoyed a particularly fruitful creative relationship with Alfred Hitchcock on the pictures he made for Paramount and Universal in the 50s and early 60s. The green dress worn by the second incarnation of Kim Novak’s Madeleine in Vertigo was on show, as previously mentioned. Vertigo is a film in which costume and the identity it confers is a vitally important element. James Stewart’s character Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine’s grey suit, and the recreation of a silvery ‘ghost’ of a woman from the past, could almost be seen as an attempt to reverse time into a pre-Technicolor (or pre-cinematic) era of monochromatic black and white. Head’s light green skirt and jacket for Tippi Hedren in The Birds matches the colouring of the lovebirds she buys as a pointedly sarcastic gift for Rod Taylor’s character, and the equivalence lends her her own distinctive plumage. It’s a costume which carries a certain cool self-assurance, as betokened by the upturned collar. Hitchcock is intent on ruffling that assurance through his avian assaults, and the costume is finally torn and unravelled during the traumatic bird-filled attic scene. Head also worked with Audrey Hepburn on many of her films, including Roman Holiday and Funny Face (whose beatnik costumes were particularly her style). Although fashion house Givenchy provided the costume designs for Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Head was still the supervisor on the film. The black dress in which Audrey glides through the escalating chaos of her epic party was on display, as was her very different cockney flower girl’s costume from My Fair Lady. Head moved aside for Cecil Beaton on that one, who had after all designed the costumes for the original stage play.

Louise Glaum's spider dance costume from Sex (1920)

Other costumes played against type or expectation. Mary Pickford’s tomboy overalls and cap from the 1925 picture Little Annie Rooney pulled against her sweet and girlish image. An accompanying clip showed her scrapping with a boy with impressively unrestrained realism. Marlene’s tux and topper (made for nonchalantly flicking to a jaunty angle) from the 1930 von Sternberg picture Morocco (on which Travis Banton was once more the costume designer) emphasised her androgynous appeal and ambiguous sexuality, playing against the almost parodic femininity of her elaborately theatrical and ornately accessorised gowns. Joan Crawford’s waitress uniform from the 1945 noir melodrama Mildred Pierce was drably utilitarian, a conscious dimming of her customary glamour. She soon exchanged it for a fur coat with shoulder pads broad enough for an American football player. Carole Lombard’s costume (another Travis Banton creation) from the 1936 screwball comedy My Man Godfrey, meanwhile, stood, or lounged (it was displayed on a dummy reclining in a suitably languorous pose) for the classic shimmering silver sequined sheath dress of the period, a figure hugging suit of armour in which to take to the battlefields of the evening parlours and nightclubs. Other costumes were inventive, offbeat or redolent of their age. Vanessa Redgrave’s Guinnevere outfit from the musical Camelot was a 60s loose and freely hanging woollen dress with the unusual decorative addition of pumpkin seeds sewn into the veil like dessicated beads furthering its wholesome organic look. Bessie Love’s costume for her character Hank Mahoney in Broadway Melody of 1929 was a reductive division into a bare outline of a chorus girl’s outfit, separated into its basic elements: a hollow top hat and a jacket with isolated shirt cuff bracelets emerging from invisible sleeves. Louise Glaum’s tantalising spider web outfit from the 1920 film Sex, which promises more than it actually reveals, was another startling music hall costume, in which her vampish character performs her man-catching spider dance at the Frivolity Theatre in New York. It’s the kind of outrageous and provocative design which Hollywood could only get away with in the halcyon pre-Hayes Code days. Claudette Colbert’s dress from her 1934 film Cleopatra gives the Queen of the Nile a very art deco look. Its lengths of green silk are pleated below a scarab brooch into streamlined folds. The art deco look of the brooch goes to show how much the discovery of Egyptian antiquities and art influenced the moderne style. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleo, on the other hand, drapes herself in a black negligee of suspiciously 60s vintage, with a tasteful asp design stitched in. Placed side by side, it has to be said Claudette’s costume puts Liz’s in the shade. Of course, we’ve not got Amanda Barry’s Cleo outfit to compare them both with. Neither wins points for historical accuracy, however.

Claudette's Cleo (picture it in jade green)

There’s a science fiction section at the back of one of the halls. Darth Vader’s beetle carapace costume from The Empire Strikes Back and Ming the Merciless’ imperial finery from the 30s Flash Gordon serials illustrate the importance of the cape to interstellar dictator chic. Ming’s velvet outfit, with its snazzy yellow zig-zag trim, is looking a bit faded now, like heavy curtains exposed to decades of sunlight. And the metallic instrument panel which forms Vader’s bust is in a shockingly shabby state. The surface is scratched and scuffed and its chunky plastic buttons look like they’ve been ripped off from a flat-top tape recorder. Rachel’s black and charcoal suit from Blade Runner, meanwhile, harks back to the 40s, its shiny material suggesting some synthetic fabric yet to be invented. With its exaggerated shoulder pads and cinched in waist, it takes a classic Edith Head look and projects it into a re-invented noir future (neon-noir, as the film has often been dubbed).

Charles Middleton's Ming the Merciless

There were a good many costumes from more modern films. Superheroes were posed in unusual positions: Spiderman halfway down the wall; Batman watching from the shadows on an elevated ledge; Michelle Pfeiffer’s PVC catwoman suit crouching above the exit door, its stitched together skin torn, leaving gaping gashes; and the Superman of Christopher Reeve’s incarnation suspended awkwardly above the milling spectators, low enough that the exceptionally tall might bump into his stomach and set him swaying. Superhero materials are synthetic, sometimes unappealingly so – Superman’s nylon, and Spiderman’s lycra. The latter could be (and no doubt was) digitally airbrushed on screen, but it looked uncomfortable, impracticable and inelegant close up. Warren Beatty’s lemon yellow Bugsy Malone trench coat attempted to reproduce the colour scheme of the comics, colours which are used on the page to identify and define character. Then there was the black trench coat from The Matrix, whose billowing tails were suspended into the gelid bullet time of the movie. Many others seemed either to be deliberately turning their back on glamour (Bruce Willis’ Die Hard t-shirt, the lovers’ practical outdoor clothing from Brokeback Mountain, Matt Damon’s melt into the crowd high street outfit from The Bourne Conspiracy). As far as women’s costumes go, they seem to be self-consciously harking back to the classic Hollywood period (Kate Winslet’s white pin-striped dress and hat from Titanic, Keira Knightley’s greening evening dress from Atonement), or to be stuck in a permanent recycling of certain historical periods (Cate Blanchette’s regal red costume from Elizabeth: The Golden Age or Judi Dench’s from Shakespeare in Love). They simply fail to hold the same level interest, for me at least. Only in gothic dramas and comedies such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (from which the Count’s capacious red dressing gown and Mina’s ancestral incarnation Elisabeta’s sumptuous gown were included) and The Addam’s Family (with Morticia’s velvet dress sharing the arachnoid theme of Louise Glaum’s webbed dress from Sex) was something of the old flamboyence allowed to shine through once more. Perhaps modern sensibilities are too attuned to the notion of camp, and too ready to detect it and dismiss it. The appetite for a certain sort of realism in dramas beyond the prescribed genres of the fantastic (where its influence has also crept in, leading to the decline of gothic stylisation) has dispelled the old, elaborately artificial fantasies. I guess they really don’t make them like they used to any more. The exhibition continues for a few more days (until the 27th January) before packing its trunks and taking the next liner back to the land of dreams.