
Name your poison — one has him depicted as a slobbering toad obsessing over his icy discovery; the other shows him as an oversized infant tortured by thoughts of his wife's infidelity and taking advice from a notorious serial killer.
Neither one is any damn good — and it's not nice to pick on someone who's not alive to defend himself.
HBO's The Girl centers around Hitch's obsession with Tippi Hedren, a model he happened upon by chance. While he is casting The Birds, wife Alma points out a pretty model on television and suggests her for the part of "the girl." Thus begins his fevered, wet-mouthed obsession with the unattainable actress, who is grateful for the opportunities he's giving her at the same time she's recoiling from his advances. In turns pursuing and punishing her, he looses real birds on her during the climactic attack scene, keeps her on edge with disgustingly ribald limericks and locks her in a seven-year contract to keep her from working for other directors.

Toby Jones (who also played Truman Capote in Infamous, one of two Capote biographies of the mid-2000s) bears little physical resemblance to Hitch, but at least sounds like him. Imelda Staunton is really quite good as his no-nonsense pepperpot wife Alma, as is Penelope Wilton playing his devoted assistant, Peggy Robertson. But Sienna Miller doesn't look or sound anything like Hedren, and she spends much of the film looking dazed, except — of course — during the requisite "bird flashback" scene.
The biggest problem with this film is that it's just plain dull. I can only imagine its intended target audience is old fat guys in love with beautiful, untouchable young women. And a closing title has the temerity to suggest that his second film with Hedren, the dull Marnie, is now considered his final masterpiece.
Wrong! Take a look at 1972's Frenzy again. Not only was the Master firing on all cylinders with this wonderfully sick dark comedy, he really gave full reign to his misogynistic feelings. Just check out the truly awful rape and murder of Barbara Leigh-Hunt..."Lovely....Lovely!"

Then, when we start meeting the cast of his proposed new horror film, our anticipation increases even more. Though Scarlett Johannson looks nothing like Janet Leigh, she does a terrific job capturing her essence and matter-of-fact way of speaking. James D'Arcy, on the other hand, looks and sounds just like Anthony Perkins. Then the trouble starts...

According to John J. McLaughlin and Stephen Rebello's screenplay, Alma was nurturing a screenwriter during the production of Psycho, and jealous Hitch was so worried that she was sleeping with the younger man that he was driven to distraction. To make matters worse, he'd risked his own money on the film and couldn't even get the screenplay cleared by the censors.
There's a bit of nice history here and there. We're shown some pre-production wrangling with the Production Code's Geoffrey Shurlock (Kurtwood Smith) denying Hitch's film a seal of approval and a couple of recreations of Psycho, including the shower scene, and we get bits and pieces of his ideas for its promotional campaign, but for the most part Hitchcock is more concerned with its rather pedestrian story of a marriage than it is with revealing any aspects of the Master's creative genius.

One marvelous scene (that comes too late in the film to save it) occurs when Hitch is standing in the lobby of a theater during the Psycho premiere. Listening to Bernard Herrmann's now-legendary cue, he knows exactly when the shower curtain will be ripped open and when the audience inside will react. And when it does, he conducts the subsequent screams as if they were instruments in an orchestra. Alas, it only serves as a reminder of what could have been.
1 comment:
Spot on! If only Alma had lived to apply some of her insightful editing on both films - but then there would have been nothing left of either.
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