In his nightclub routine, Woody Allen once joked that he had written a short story about his first year of marriage. No one would publish it, but Alfred Hitchcock had expressed interest in the film rights. The joke is surprisingly accurate in what it says about Hitchcock. Marriage, and the tangled relationships between men and women, is a major theme which Hitchcock would hammer away at in all of his films. While the conventional dogma of the happy ending in the traditional Hollywood film stated that marriage brought continued bliss, Hitchcock saw it as merely a transition in the tense, and usually tainted, nature of sexual relationships. In the 1964 film Marnie, the couple's ultimately therapeutic relationship is rooted in their mutually sick, pathological behavior patterns. Sabotage (England 1936) concludes with the wife stabbing the husband to death over the dinner table. The newlyweds in Rear Window (USA 1954) are, by the end of the film, on the same path to mutual hatred that had led to the murder at the beginning of the film. Instead of happiness, marriage caused paranoia, distrust, and many violent deaths.
That marriage may be built upon mutual weakness rather than strength was examined by Hitchcock in two films: Marnie and Suspicion (USA 1941). The two films bear some striking similarities. Sean Connery's obsessive love for Tippi Hedren is caused by the fact that she is both frigid and a pathological liar. Not only is his love for her sick, but his method of curing her involves a subtle use of psychological torture. In Suspicion, Cary Grant plays an amoral, pathological liar whose obvious illness makes him romantically attractive to Joan Fontaine. She, in turn, is not only exceedingly naive, but is also willing to nurse and even protect his sickness up to a certain point. Her own behavior is remarkably child like and her constant fumbling with her eyeglasses is a visual indication of her own blindness. Her love for Grant's character is largely based on her need to escape from her parents, just as his love for her is based on an innate need for nurturing, yet the only thing she nurtures within him is a continuation of his pathological behavior. The film's climax (which was not the original ending of the film) literally pushes them to the edge of their relationship, a point at which they must make the decision to mature.
Their mutual illness even takes certain mutual forms. One of the few times that Fontaine's character shows signs of great vitality is when she is horseback riding. Likewise, Grant's great passion is betting on the horses. Grant plays an immature man, and when they first meet she is reading a book on child psychology. The weakness that threatens to separate them is also the very bond that holds their marriage together.
For Hitchcock, things other than mental illness can hold a marriage together. In Rich and Strange (England 1932), the banality of middle-class life is the thread that ultimately binds. The couple in the film are bored with life and each other and their unexpected inheritance enables them to take an exotic world cruise, a trip that quickly turns into a surrealistic journey of the soul. Taking the title from a line in Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Nothing of him that doth fade/but doth suffer a sea-change/ into something rich and strange"), the film's visual strangeness clearly demonstrates the influence of Luis Bunuel on Hitchcock, but the central theme is strictly his own. The couple's escape from banality leads only to a false glamour and a realization of the precarious nature of life. The security of boredom is seen by Hitchcock as being preferable to the horrors of reality.
Spellbound (USA 1945), like Marnie and Suspicion, returns to the notion of romantic love and mutual mental illness. While Fontaine's character in Suspicion is symbolically blind, Peck's character in Spellbound is an amnesic whose loss of memory is needed to blind him to his inner sense of guilt. Ingrid Bergman's own aloof and cold personality in the film is a facade covering her own vulnerability and her protectiveness of Peck becomes obsessive.
The film may now be best known for its dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali, although only a fragment of the complete sequence was actually used in the film. An element of surrealism is always evident in Hitchcock's films, but in very subtle ways, and he felt uncomfortable with the extreme artificiality of the sequence. During the forties, when he made Spellbound, Hitchcock had adopted a classical, invisible film technique more in line with Hollywood film making of the period. An important aspect of this kind of film making is maintaining the illusion of reality, and while Hitchcock was not a realist, he was fond of the illusion. His films of the forties were more subdued than either his more experimental films of the thirties or his great masterpieces of the fifties.
Perhaps one of the most under-rated films ever made by Hitchcock is Mr. and Mrs. Smith (USA 1941). Directed as a favor to Carole Lombard, the film was a late entry by Hitchcock in the screwball comedy genre. Lacking the larger subject matter of his other films, Mr. and Mrs. Smith concentrates completely on the theme of marriage. The couple in the film are a pair of egotistical, over-grown children whose behavior pattern holds them together as much as it drives them apart. They are clearly made for each other as their petty destructiveness makes them unsuitable for anyone else.
The weak critical reputation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith may leave the viewer unprepared for what is actually a genuinely funny film. Hitchcock's flair for comedy is evident in many of his thrillers. Certainly Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a minor film in that it limits itself only to this one idea, making it a sonata when compared to the grand symphony of a film like Vertigo (USA 1958). As a sonata, however, it is delightful and is especially light-hearted as opposed to Hitchcock's own darker viewpoint.
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