Divert & Subvert: Hitchcock’s Diabolical Technique with Casting by Craig Hammill

Hitchcock, shockingly, has been one of the few directors to work in America in all its history that seemed to fully grasp the cinematic tool of casting with hidden purpose.

Hitchcock would often cast a Cary Grant, a Jimmy Stewart, a Grace Kelly, even a Sean Connery in roles that would explicitly take their star personas and subvert them in some interesting way that would add a whole cinematic layer to the proceedings.

For instance, this weekend we’re showing Hitch’s Suspicion (1941) in which debonair, handsome, charming Cary Grant plays a ne’r do well husband that wife Joan Fontaine begins to suspect may be plotting to kill her.

Imagine the shock audiences must have had realizing that romantic comedy Cary Grant (his era’s Paul Rudd in some ways) might be scheming, lying, and manipulating his trusting wife.

Hitchcock lands a kind of directorial triple lutz ice skating move here because:

A) We realize that we too would almost certainly want to marry Cary Grant and would believe whatever he told us

B) We realize how easy it would be to fall for such a charming sociopath and thus the movie gets charged with suspense and tension from the beginning

And

C) We sit on the edge of our seat to see if our beloved Cary Grant really is a wife-killer.

Now, many directors since have used this technique to good effect. Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Mann both cast teflon Tom Cruise, blinding in his charisma and near monk-like commitment to his craft, as either a mysoginistic conflict riddled motivational speaker to incels (Magnolia) or a sociopathic hitman (Collateral). And in both instances, Cruise embraced the challenge and we as audiences had a richer more unpredictable experience for it.

But it’s hard to pull this kind of maneuver off successfully. Sometimes actors want to play roles they aren’t normally offered and we discover, unfortunately, there’s a reason they aren’t offered those roles (though they should always get the highest marks for effort).

And some actors are just so good they can play anything (Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Gene Hackman, Toshiro Mifune, Marlon Brando, Daniel Day Lewis) so if they play a knighted saint or a Mephistopholean devil, we’re on board and ready.

But Hitch specifically had a knack for using classic Hollywood superstars as both diversions and subversions to get at his deeper purpose.

Case in point: many filmmakers (including Martin Scorsese) have pointed out that Rear Window almost certainly couldn’t work with anyone BUT Jimmy Stewart in the role of voyeur and peeping tom L.B. Jeffries. Stewart spies out his apartment window on everyone before stumbling across a possible murder in the apartment across the courtyard.

What Scorsese points out is that Hitchcock HAD to cast someone like all-American good hearted Jimmy Stewart to pull that movie off. We love Stewart. We know Stewart is essentially good at heart. His whole persona is built around that. So we are willing to be voyeurs with him because we already like, identify, sympathize, and care for him DE FACTO before the movie even starts.

If L.B. Jeffries had been almost anyone else the icky and creepy factor would have become way more apparent to us much earlier.

Hitch would of course push this to the extreme (and succeed) when he cast Stewart in Vertigo as an obsessed, sexually fetishistic, mentally unhinged detective.

Now, in truth, this is a two-way dance and Stewart also was very canny in who he worked with after World War II. Stewart was always up for subverting audience expectation and made many of his greatest movies in the 1950’s playing near crazed bounty hunters for Anthony Mann (The Naked Spur) and near amoral attorneys for Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder) among other great roles.

In one of Hitchcock’s more undersung (in this programmer’s opinion) masterpieces Marnie (maybe Hitch’s last truly great movie and the B side of our double bill this weekend, on 35mm!) , Hitch cast then red hot Sean Connery (still playing James Bond) as Mark Rutland, a wealthy businessman, who is clearly sexually turned on by Tippi Hedren’s Marnie being a thief and psychologically complex.

What’s interesting is that in casting the sexually magnetic Connery in the role, Hitchcock could save on explicit dialogue and scenes (which would have still been hard to get by censors at the time). The audience would automatically get that Connery was sexually attracted to Hedren’s Marnie and vice versa. It would be a given. And thus Hitchcock could move on to the psychologically twisted motivations these two have for marrying each other without their deeper underlying phobias, hangups, fetishes being resolved in a healthy way.

Hitch would use the divert and subvert casting technique again and again throughout his filmography to create added levels of cinematic mastery to his movies.

Joseph Cotten, often cast as the innocuous and morally upright love interest, plays a psychotic greedy killer of dowagers in Shadow of a Doubt.

Claude Rains plays what may be the most sympathetic Nazi of the immediate post World War II Hollywood period in Notorious.

Jimmy Stewart debuts in a Hitchcock movie as a Nietzsche-spouting beyond good and evil professor who inspires two of his pupils to commit murder in Rope (though Stewart ultimately is a kind of misunderstood good guy in this, it’s still shocking to hear him talk dismissively about most accepted morality).

James Mason plays an urbane almost apologetic completely sympathetic villain in North by Northwest whom we almost feel bad for by the end.

And maybe most clever and subversive of all is the casting of shy, handsome, boyish Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho.

All of this is to say that Hitchcock like German master moviemaker F.W. Murnau used every part of the whale when making a picture. And clever, intelligent, subversive casting, hard as it is to pull off, creates intricate delicious unexpected spider webs of suspense, tension, association.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.