In December, 2012, Father Mark Henninger, S. J., wrote in The Wall Street Journal about his experience in early 1980 celebrating Mass at the home of Alfred Hitchcock.  Father Henninger sought to correct recent statements claiming that to the end of his days Hitchcock (1899-1980) was not religious.  Yet, Hitchcock had grown up Catholic, attended a school run by Jesuits, and had been married and buried within the context of the Catholic Mass.

As Father Henninger pointed out, Hitchcock had helped to create the impression that he was not a religious man.  Apparently to preserve his privacy, Hitchcock publicly rejected claims that he had a priest come to his house for the sacraments.  In his book-length interview with François Truffaut, published in English in1967, Hitchcock had said, “I am definitely not anti-religious; perhaps I’m sometimes neglectful.”

The setting was Truffaut asking Hitchcock, “How do you feel about being labeled a Catholic artist?”  Hitchcock had replied, “I don’t think I can be labeled a Catholic artist, but it may be that one’s early upbringing influences a man’s life and guides his instinct.”  Later on he explained that “my love of film is far more important to me than any considerations of morality.”

It is an understandable reaction:  an artist wants to be known for his art.  Would one ask Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo whether they wanted to be thought of as Catholic artists?  However much Catholic faith and culture permeates their work, the work comes first.  Nearly always when the religious sense is put first, the art suffers.

For Hitchcock, that principle seems to have informed his dissatisfaction with his movie I Confess (1953).  Probably the most obvious example of Hitchcock using film to explore Catholic themes, it focuses on a young Canadian priest, a veteran of the Second World War, who has heard the confession of a murderer and is then framed by the murderer.  Hitchcock was intrigued by the dilemma, since the priest could not violate the seal of the confessional.  Protestant and secular critics, however, thought the premise far-fetched, and Hitchcock told Truffaut, “we shouldn’t have made the picture.”

Truffaut rightly disagreed with Hitchcock about I Confess, but let us consider a less obvious case.  In March, 1963, Alfred Hitchcock told an interviewer from The New Yorker that of all his films his favorite was Shadow of a Doubt (1943), yet around the same time, when speaking with Truffaut, he said that it was not his favorite, while not saying which movie did hold that honor.  Whether it really was his favorite film, it marks the first time Hitchcock used an American location for looking into what Truffaut called the three basic elements making up any film by Hitchcock:  “fear, sex, and death.”

In Shadow of a Doubt, a man is on the run after having killed several wealthy widows.  He travels across the country from New York to Santa Rosa and hides in the home of his sister and brother-in-law.  The latter, a mild-mannered bank clerk, has a hobby of reading murder mysteries.  Irony and tension build, and suspicion comes closer and closer to the murderer.  “It’s quite possible,” Hitchcock told Truffaut, “that those widows deserved what they got, but it certainly wasn’t his job to do it.”

That same message occurs near the end of Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948).  There, the character portrayed by James Stewart tells one of the two young murderers, “Until this very moment, this world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me, and I’ve tried to clear my way with logic and superior intellect . . . , but now I know we’re each of us a separate human being with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society we live in.”

Truffaut noted that in Hitchcock’s movies there was always the pervasive role of the idea of original sin.  Although a recurring theme in Hitchcock’s films is that of an innocent man suspected of a crime he did not commit, Truffaut saw that “he is generally guilty of intention before the fact.”  As an example, he cited the voyeur played by James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).

When talking about his schooldays, Hitchcock told Truffaut about his odd situation and about the moral sense he developed.  “Ours was a Catholic family,” he said, “and in England, you see, this in itself is an eccentricity.”  At Saint Ignatius College, “a strong sense of fear developed—moral fear—the fear of being involved in anything evil.”  He transformed that Catholic eccentricity and that fear of evil into some of the finest films ever made.

In all his cinematic work, Alfred Hitchcock was deeply concerned about human integrity.  How someone dealt with temptations and trials was what made a story interesting.  In theological terms, not only was original sin a factor, so was free will.  All of us face such scenarios to a greater or lesser degree every day, but rarely do they reach a level worthy of a tale of suspense.  As Hitchcock often said, “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”

One day, before offering Mass at Hitchcock’s home, Father Henninger asked Hitchcock if he had seen any good movies lately.  Hitchcock said no, adding, “When I made movies, they were about people, not robots.  Robots are boring.  Come on, let’s have Mass.”

Robots bore because, even if they find working with humans very stimulating, they lack the human capacity for love, sin, and redemption.  They share no nature with Christ.  According to Father Henninger, during those Masses at his home, Hitchcock gave the responses in Latin, and, the dull bits of life cutting out of the theo-drama, upon receiving Communion “he silently cried, tears rolling down his huge cheeks.”

 

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.