I live in Los Angeles; I’m a revert to the Catholic faith; and I attend the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills.
Apparently, these are points at which I may intersect with famed producer and director Alfred Hitchcock, whose birthday is today, Aug. 13.
Born in 1899 in England, Hitchcock became a film legend in the U.S. and around the world, known for his masterworks of suspense and horror, his TV anthology series, and for his distinctive persona (and profile), seen both in films and TV. He’s a genre all his own, since describing something as “Hitchcockian” is a thing.
He was also a Catholic, although that’s not often obvious from his work. But he was indeed baptized, catechized, raised and educated in the Faith.
From a 2015 U.K. Guardian review of Peter Aykroyd’s biography of Hitchcock:
According to Ackroyd’s account, perhaps the most important aspect of Hitchcock’s working-class upbringing was that his family was deeply Catholic, which instilled in “Alfie” (he became known as “Hitch” as an adult) a squeamishness about bodies and a “tremulous sense of guilt”. His Catholic education gave him a sense of “mystery and miracle”. What, after all, is “suspense,” but a riff on the Catholic sense of awe at the unknown forces of the universe? Hitchcock’s religious sensibility informed films such as Vertigo, which, to Ackroyd, is “a reverie and a lament, a threnody and a hymn.” The final, chilling line is spoken by a nun: “God have mercy.”
As related in a 2012 Wall Street Journal article by Jesuit priest Father Mark Henninger, when he visited Hitchcock in his Bel Air home in the company of a fellow priest:
After we chatted for a while, we all crossed from the living room through a breezeway to his study, and there, with his wife, Alma, we celebrated a quiet Mass. Across from me were the bound volumes of his movie scripts, “The Birds,” “Psycho,” “North by Northwest” and others—a great distraction. Hitchcock had been away from the Church for some time, and he answered the responses in Latin the old way. But the most remarkable sight was that after receiving communion, he silently cried, tears rolling down his huge cheeks.
Tom and I returned a number of times, always on Saturday afternoons, sometimes together, but I remember once going by myself. I’m somewhat tongue-tied around famous people and found it a bit awkward to chitchat with Alfred Hitchcock, but we did, enjoyably, in his living room. At one point he said, “Let’s have Mass.”
He was 81 years old and had difficulty moving, so I helped him get up and assisted him across the breezeway. As we slowly walked, I felt I had to say something to break the silence, and the best I could come up with was, “Well, Mr. Hitchcock, have you seen any good movies lately?” He paused and said emphatically, “No, I haven’t. When I made movies they were about people, not robots. Robots are boring. Come on, let’s have Mass.” He died soon after these visits, and his funeral Mass was at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills.
A story in Variety marking Hitchcock’s death described him as a “devout Catholic and regular churchgoer.”
My day job is as Social Media Manager, internet-content creator and blogger for Hollywood-based TV/film/digital production company Family Theater Productions (check our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), part of Holy Cross Family Ministries. So, I checked with Father Willy Raymond, C.S.C., president of HCFM — and former head of FTP and well-known in Hollywood as simply “Father Willy” — to see what he thought of Hitchcock.
Here’s what Fr. Willy — just returned, along with some HCFM colleagues, from World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland — emailed back to me:
He was a practicing Catholic and that gave him a leg up on using all the senses in his films to frighten the daylights out of people.
I was told by Professor Craig Detweiler, from Pepperdine, that film is an art form that benefits from the Catholic sacramental approach to life.
John Ford, Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Martin Scorsese were all Catholic, if not always observant.
Of course, if you’ve received the Catholic Sacrament of Baptism — even if you never went through Confirmation — you’re a member of the Church for life. From a recent story in First Things:
But there really is no such thing as an “ex-Catholic.” Catholicism is not a congregationalist religion. Membership is not a self-defining proposition. Grace—the grace of baptism—makes one a Catholic. The Church teaches that “by baptism, one is incorporated into the Church of Christ and is constituted a person in it.”
Catholics believe that baptism has certain objective and unalterable consequences. That Catholic identity is not the subject of self-definition. Nor is it the consequence of proper Catholic behavior, or assent to the Church’s teachings, or even obedience to the Magisterium.
In 2009, Pope Benedict affirmed that Catholicism comes without an escape clause: Once a person is baptized or received into the Church, there is no getting out.
Baptism imparts sacramental graces and has a permanent impact on the soul. Then, if the person receives instruction in the Faith, and is raised in a Catholic context, that will have a further effect, regardless of how observant, or not, he or she is later in life.
So, are there Catholic elements in Hitchcock films? There is the scene described above in “Vertigo” — but I’m not enough of a student of his films to offer a definitive list. But I did find a list, and here’s what it said regarding the Faith and recurring Hitchcock motifs:
Guilt and confession
– Catholic overtones
– transference of guilt
– guilt, confession, and the police
Well, that’s not much to go on, and I suspect it’s a reductive analysis. As Fr. Willy said above, the Catholic sacramental worldview informs everything we do. We don’t just work in words; we also work in symbol and metaphor. For us, things like water, smoke, candles, bells, chant, icons, images of saints, crucifixes — even ordinary objects, like a cup or keys, or nature itself — hold deep spiritual meaning and resonance.
The Catholic imagination has a whole language of images to draw upon. Our literature, art and movies don’t need to be sermons. We can make movies about Christ that depict Him and His followers, or we can make movies about Christ that never mention Him at all.
As in “The Lord of the Rings,” by Catholic writer J.R.R. Tolkien, we can read the symbolism behind the story, interpreting it back into Catholicism, like translating from one language to another.
But, that may not be helpful with Hitchcock. From a 2014 article in Crisis magazine:
For a number of years, it has been a parlor game to look for the Catholicism in Hitchcock films, especially amongst his French critics. Not a game worth playing in my opinion. His cinematic universe is not recognizably Christian, there is little by way of redemption in this celluloid world ruled by two demons: fear and guilt. Its heroes often falsely accused, living in dread of discovery, or harboring some dark secrets that manipulate their every move, with destinies controlled and pushed by entities without compassion and whose judgment is harsh. This is, at best, half of the Catholic vision of humanity: the fallen bit. This is, also, the endless nightmare of someone who knows solely guilt and fear, not forgiveness and mercy, and with that, perhaps, we are coming closer to the truth, and of one who knew that only through the prescribed sacrament could such negative forces ever really be expunged.
At this point, there are some solid facts to be presented on behalf of the defense. To all intents and purposes, Hitchcock was a practicing Catholic all his life. He never said anything against the Church of his birth. He did make the odd joke, but hardly the stuff of public scandal. He was married at Brompton Oratory in 1926, but only after his fiancée, Alma, had undergone a full course of instruction in the Faith. His only child, Patricia, was brought up in the Faith, and went on to marry in it, before raising her children Catholic. There are, also, lesser-known, if telling, facts, for example, in the early 1920s, on his first trip out of England to Paris, then a city synonymous with decadence, the first thing the young Englishman did on arriving there was to attend an early morning Mass.
So, did Hitchcock make Catholic movies?
Well, there is “I Confess,” with Montgomery Clift as a priest caught up in a murder …
And in “The Wrong Man,” based on a true story about a man (Henry Fonda) wrongly accused of a robbery, there is this, from a Feb. 2016 piece in Crux, written by film critic Deacon Steven Greydanus:
At perhaps Manny’s lowest emotional ebb, his mother asks him if he prays, and when he says he does, she asks what he prays for. “For help,” he says shortly, but she tells him to pray for strength. “Please pray, Manny!” she urges him repeatedly.
Then, coming face-to-face with a Sacred Heart image of Jesus hanging on his wall, Manny begins to pray – and, as he does, the image fades into a prolonged double exposure in which a shadowy figure emerges from the distance until his face is superimposed on Henry Fonda’s praying face, highlighting their strong resemblance. What happens immediately afterward is clearly the answer to Manny’s prayer.
It’s a brilliant shot – a shot that is not only the key to “The Wrong Man,” but one that, more clearly than any other in any Hitchcock film I’ve seen, reveals the religious sensibility and moral ideas at work in all his films.
But to state that Hitchcock made “Catholic movies” is likely a bridge too far. What we can say definitively is that he was a Catholic who made movies.
And that is more than enough.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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