Postwar Gender Dynamics in Hitchcock's American Films

Postwar America and Shifting Gender Expectations

In postwar America, expectations for men and women diverged sharply from those that had prevailed during the war years. The exigencies of World War II interrupted the evolution of social progress for Americans, substituting a kind of "fast forward" that could better serve national initiatives. From a period in which everyone had focused on the war effort and their role in supporting it, the postwar years brought a return to the traditional values that had dominated before the conflict. Supported by the G.I. Bill, men sought education at unprecedented levels and reestablished themselves in business, resuming positions of leadership they felt were rightfully theirs. Homemaking and childrearing returned to the center of women's lives in postwar America. If women engaged in business at all, it was considered secondary to their gender-based roles as mothers, wives, and daughters. Some effects of wartime patterns, however, were resistant to change: women did press for more entry points into corporations, in addition to their more traditional employment as teachers, nurses, and secretaries.

In the films Strangers on a Train (1951) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Alfred Hitchcock explores these gender dynamics as subplots within two of his recurring narrative frames: danger from unknown sources and danger from known ones. These two perspectives are illuminated by Hitchcock's emphasis on threats that result from some contamination of the family unit — that is, danger originating outside the family but invading it like a virus — and danger that originates and remains entirely outside the family, thereby eventually bringing about greater family unity. The everyday parallels to these two subplots are characteristic of the era, particularly in the guise of equal rights for women and homophobia.

All in the Family: Danger Within in Strangers on a Train

Against this postwar background, films produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock largely echoed traditional social sentiments — all the while engaging in unrestrained deconstruction of the very premises that undergirded them. From the outset, it is clear that danger lurks outside the family unit in Strangers on a Train. The immediate threat is that Senator Morton's entire family will be pulled down, suffering much the same fate as the infamous cigarette lighter. The fate of the family, in other words, will rest in the hands of a "very clever man" who happens to be both a momma's boy and a sociopath.

In Strangers on a Train, the characters Anne Morton, Guy Haines, and Miriam Joyce Haines are engaged in a deadly — if somewhat improbable — triangle. Divorce was not common in the 1950s, but one has only to look at the affair between Wallis Simpson and the Prince of Wales to recognize that divorce, though considered scandalous by many, could be relegated to the background of social life over time. The core problem in the film is that, since Guy seemed to be navigating the social ladder quite successfully, Miriam did not want a divorce. Senator Morton, Anne's father, who seemed inordinately immune to gossip and bad press, played a stabilizing role in the scheme — an effect that made the story more believable.

Little depth of character can be found in the Morton family. Ruth Roman seems completely wrong for her role — indeed, she was the studio's choice, not Hitchcock's, and he made her suffer for it — but both Patricia Hitchcock and Leo G. Carroll are the kind of people one would like to invite to dinner. The most fully dimensional character is Bruno Antony, whose lunacy grows more apparent as the plot progresses. A more interesting dynamic, however, plays out between the relentlessly intrusive Bruno and the preoccupied Guy. In this pairing, Hitchcock employed the same sexual ambiguity he had used in Rope (1948).

Not Part of the Family: External Threat in The Man Who Knew Too Much

The threat in The Man Who Knew Too Much exists entirely outside the family unit, which enables a plot line of "them against us" — a much less convoluted and more familiar story in the cinema of the period. Dr. Ben McKenna, his wife Jo, and their son Hank are quite simply in the wrong souk at the right time, a situation that places them within whisper distance of a dying man's last words. Because those whispered words are the key to unraveling a plot to assassinate a prime minister, the McKennas must be silenced by those who plan to carry out the assassination. The most expedient way to accomplish this — from the point of view of the villains — is to kidnap young Hank.

As the parents strive to figure out how to rescue their son and prevent the assassination, they exhibit all the tensions of their postwar domestic — and not particularly blissful — life. Jo is an accomplished pianist and singer who has given up her career to be a mother and wife. Over a decade would pass before Betty Friedan would give this collective angst a name — or rather refer to it as "the problem that has no name" (Friedan, 1963).

Men and women in postwar America were beginning to experience the movement toward greater individuation. For Jo, this meant questioning why she could not be a concert pianist and a wife and a mother simultaneously. For Ben, it meant experiencing some equivocation about his role as a man in contemporary society. These blurred roles are evident in the film's final scenes: Ben moves with bravado to physically confront the threat to his family — the man with the gun who kidnapped his son — while Jo taps the bravura of "Que Sera, Sera," the song her son will recognize and, she hopes, to which he will be able to respond.

Conclusion

Hitchcock was a master of subtlety and of obfuscating his social critique in much the same way that he hid his cameo appearances in plain sight. The stories that surround Alfred Hitchcock's approach to filmmaking do not cast a particularly favorable light on his interpersonal relations, especially with women. One wonders, then, to what degree scriptwriters prevailed and to what degree Hitchcock subverted their intentions for the sake of box office returns.

Regardless of the Hollywood gossip, Hitchcock was supremely skilled at depicting the exigencies and anxieties of the several eras in which he produced films. For those films made in postwar America, Hitchcock captured the subtle undercurrents of social change that were just beginning to be felt in the 1950s. The tensions between the sexes as they navigated the multiple roles that men and women were seizing or shunning are exquisitely portrayed in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Strangers on a Train. Moreover, Hitchcock exemplified the public's preoccupation with homosexual stereotypes, a theme addressed in a number of his films, including Strangers on a Train. In this sense, Hitchcock's postwar American films function not merely as thrillers but as quietly subversive documents of their time.

References

Hitchcock, A. (Director), & Hayes, J. M. (Writer). (1956). The Man Who Knew Too Much [Motion picture]. Perf. James Stewart, Doris Day. Paramount Pictures. Based on a story by Charles Bennett and D. B. Wyndham-Lewis.

Hitchcock, A. (Director), Chandler, R. (Writer), & Ormonde, C. (Writer). (1951). Strangers on a Train [Motion picture]. Perf. Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Patricia Hitchcock, Marion Lorne. Warner Brothers. Adapted by Whitfield Cook from the novel by Patricia Highsmith.

Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. W. W. Norton.

MacGilligan, P. (2004). Alfred Hitchcock: A life in darkness and light. Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-098827-2.

Truffaut, F., Hitchcock, A., & Scott, H. G. (1985). Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster.