The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock (Web Exclusive)
by Dan Callahan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp., illus. Hardcover: $34.95 and E-book: $23.99.

Reviewed by David Greven

Dan Callahan has established himself—with biographies of Barbara Stanwyck, Vanessa Redgrave, and a two-volume study of American screen acting—as a leading author on acting for film. The Camera Lies confirms his significance as such and as a critic of Hitchcock’s films. For critic is what Callahan most definitely is—the old-fashioned evaluative kind, with a special ability to offer a lyrically sustained evocation of performance. As I read this book—and it is very readable—I found myself nodding appreciatively but also grimacing frequently. 

In a jacket blurb, Dave Kehr notes, with a sigh of relief, that Callahan’s book has “no trace of academic jargon.” The opaque style some academic writers are fond of is indeed frustrating and can blunt or distort the subject. And Callahan is valuable precisely because he offers evaluations that come from a highly well-informed and distinctive critical sensibility. At the same time, I often longed for a more concrete foundation for his analysis of Hitchcock’s films, all of which are touched on in this book, itself an impressive achievement. This is a book that ultimately rests on the strength of Callahan’s impressions of films—luckily for him, these are strong and compelling impressions, but they’re offered on a knife edge of potential failure, of being categorized as that dread term “impressionistic.” There is very little foundation here in thought or theory about particular schools of acting, and even the analysis of differing English and American styles flows from evaluation rather than anything particularly concrete.

Callahan’s theoretical approach to Hitchcock has its foundation in the director’s preference for “negative acting.” Because the director distrusted “open displays of emotion,” he “liked what he called ‘negative acting,’ as in the moment where a smile falls away from a face, which is most touchingly done by Sylvia Sidney in the movie house sequence” in Sabotage (1936). The supreme Hitchcock actors for Callahan are the two who most thoroughly embody this negative acting ideal, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. And who would argue against that? Notorious (1946) remains engulfing and searing precisely because its two main stars are not only entrancing screen presences but also give such fine-grained, acute performances.

Callahan favors what he argues Hitchcock favored, an ambiguity and mysteriousness that prevents us from fully understanding or knowing what seethes beneath the surface. Therefore, the actors he praises include Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958) and Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Passionately invested in these films and performances, I can only gratefully agree. At the same time, Callahan generates considerable suspense as a critic, if you will, because his opinions are not just forceful but also willful. He likes what he likes, and the fact that he can explain what he likes well doesn’t exculpate him for, at times, substituting personal response for thorough critical analysis.  

For example, Callahan finds Teresa Wright’s performance in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) simpering and uninteresting. While I find bewildering that response to her breathtakingly fresh and incisive performance, I recognize that Callahan simply responds to it differently than I do. Where I—and presumably other readers—dissent are those moments where Callahan offers a negative evaluation that seems supported only by his impressionistic preferences or aversions. Chief examples are his disappointingly shallow assessments of Ivor Novello in The Lodger (1927) and Sara Allgood in Juno and the Paycock (1930).

For that matter, The Lodger, surely one of Hitchcock’s most important films and the template for all his films that follow, deserves better than this flippant reading: we wonder what kind of relationship the heroine will have with the titular figure given that, as Callahan writes, he has “survived a vengeful mob and a sexy crucifixion where he has fallen and hung himself by handcuffs on an iron fence. In this scene, there is some fraught cutting between his helpless hands wilting, his pants from behind pulling up into the crack of his ass, and Novello’s helpless, pretty face swooning with fear from the front.” I wouldn’t have described this extraordinarily constructed and thematically rich tableau in such a manner.

Similarly, Callahan’s preference for Hitchcock’s penchant for mystery leads him to devalue James Stewart’s work as overobvious, “aw-shucks”-y, and less interesting than that of the supremely Hitchcockian stars. Callahan does praise one of Stewart’s line readings in Vertigo—the desperate reprimand Scottie gives Judy in the bell tower about wearing Madeleine Elster’s necklace, “You shouldn’t have been that sentimental”—as a killer line. But Stewart, as did Grant, who also made four pictures for Hitchcock, showed remarkable new sides of his persona, indeed flaying open this persona, in those films. Stewart’s eyes always plangently search for meaning and thereby reflect a mind doing so, as in the haunting moment when his Ben McKenna processes the dying, darkly makeupped Louis Bernard’s words in the director’s 1956 remake of his 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. This is one of Hitchcock’s crucial works, that, in keeping with his adherence to conventional opinions of Hitchcock’s films, Callahan faults for being “padded unnecessarily.” That “padding” involves material both comic and disturbing and reflects Hitchcock’s much more probing analysis of the middle-class family than he demonstrated in the 1934 version. 

While I am relieved to see that Callahan shares my high estimation of Hitchcock and am elated by his astute critical assessment of Hitchcock as an important theorist of acting, I do find Callahan’s obeisance to received opinion somewhat frustrating. There is rarely a moment when Callahan breaks from received wisdom about Hitchcock’s films. Therefore, Spellbound (1945)—again, a crucial Hitchcock film—is “far-fetched,” Under Capricorn (1949) a “misfire,” North by Northwest (1959) a “lively entertainment” (whereas I believe it to be a profound, mature Hitchcock work), and the films made after Marnie—Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), Frenzy (1972), Family Plot (1976)—not worth dwelling on at length. That said, I am grateful that Callahan champions Tippi Hedren’s performances for Hitchcock and the emotional power of Marnie (after Vertigo, Hitchcock’s greatest work, in my view).

Callahan’s argument is that the glycerin tears of Joan Barry’s unhappy wife in Rich and Strange (1931) and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious represent Hitchcock’s art in its prime, and that the real, exhausted, Method-y tears shed by Louise Latham as Marnie’s angry, finally defeated, and discarded mother represent the end of Hitchcock’s art, the place from which he could go no further. This is a compelling argument, certainly, but one with which I disagree. Julie Andrews’s underappreciated performance in Torn Curtain has its most eloquent moment when she confronts Paul Newman on the plane when he believes he is escaping from her. Her tears look real to me and express a continued investment in a woman’s affectional life on the director’s part. On a more outré note, perhaps, the lack of appreciation for Karen Black in Family Plot seems to me not just a missed opportunity but also reflective of a closed-minded approach. And there is nary a mention of any nonwhite actor in Hitchcock’s films, such as Canada Lee, the moral heart of Lifeboat (1944), or Roscoe Lee Browne in Topaz. 

Let me turn to what are this book’s undeniably valuable strengths. Throughout, Callahan sheds welcome, revelatory light on the broader careers of actors in supporting roles in Hitchcock’s films, often providing fresh and galvanizing insights. Exemplary of this knack is Callahan’s discussion of Shadow of a Doubt’s Janet Shaw, who plays the blank-faced, blank-voiced Louise Finch, a waitress in the Til Two bar where Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) schools Charlie (Teresa Wright), the niece named after him, that “The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?” Matching the serial killer in abject cynicism, Louise marvels at a ring that Charlie’s uncle stole from one of the widows he has killed and given to his niece. Callahan’s sharp, appreciative, insightful analysis lights up such moments.

Callahan is to be credited with weighing in convincingly and authoritatively on the body of Hitchcock’s films. He is particularly valuable on films such as the director’s first, The Pleasure Garden (1925), and the understudied but major Rich and Strange, of which Callahan provides the best assessment I have read. He is also very compelling on The Wrong Man (1956), which he suggests may indeed be Hitchcock’s most significant film. In all these cases of the critic writing at his most incisively, I felt that Callahan was making an intervention and developing ideas from his thesis rather than being boxed in by it. No doubt other readers will have similar experiences, especially if they appreciate Hitchcock as sensitively as Callahan does.—David Greven

David Greven is professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His books include Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1