If Alfred Hitchcock were still around to make films today, he wouldn’t be making them. Neither would Elia Kazan.
Both men, two of cinema’s greatest directors, were accused – and in their lifetimes, too – of sexual harassment and sometimes worse.
I knew Kazan and knew the rumours, and it makes you step away, stand back, re-evaluate their work, their lives, even their humanity.
No one has to make that kind of judgment call today, but that is a recent thing in the history of cinema. The director was God.
You look back at the presence of some woman like the great American actor, Eva Marie Saint, in the films of both of these titans, and you wonder how she survived.
One of the things that you learn in life is that a person considered to be a kind of sexual demon vis-a-vis his actors male and female can also make beautiful, great films. Monsters are one of the conundrums of great art.
Eva Marie Saint worked with both Hitchcock and Kazan. She made her film debut in Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) and won the Oscar for best supporting actress.
Her Edie Doyle, whose brother’s death sets the film in motion, is a match in clarity with the “palooka” that is Brando’s Terry Malloy. She is quite simply the light in the film, and we believe her, and, because of her, the film has a grounding, a centre, even a kind of sanctity.
We become prepared, in a strange way for Jeanne Moreau, her contemporary, whose cinematic clarity matches her own.
On the Waterfront was a major success in every way and changed American film-making itself. Kazan, who came from theatre, gave Eva an Actors Studio trick, in which he put her in a room and told her that the Brando character was the boyfriend of her sister. She was not to open the door to him under any circumstances.
That was the direction. She played it. And won an Oscar.
In North by Northwest (1959), Hitchcock lowers her voice.
“How does a girl grow up to be a girl like you?” or words to that effect, asked by Grant’s character in lust and in awe.
And Edie Doyle, the virgin of Waterfront, metamorphoses into the Hitchcock Blonde, elusive: a dream.
Grant wins her in the end with a Hitch closing scene of such heavy-handedness that we can see this master director tipping over into the abyss of his own obsession: with Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) and most notoriously with Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963) and in Marnie (1964).
Eva Marie Saint escapes both Kazan and Hitchcock. Like her French counterpart, Moreau, she is quite simply bigger than they are.
Eva Marie Saint was born on July 4 in New Jersey. That date is the US national holiday and also the date, this year, of our general election in the UK.
Go vote and then try and see On the Waterfront or North by Northwest. Maybe several times. They never age.
And, also, raise a glass to one of the great women actors of vintage cinema, the last survivor of what many call “The Golden Age of Hollywood”.
Because on that day, July 4, 2024, Eva Marie Saint will be 100 years old.
The answer to last week’s quiz is William Holden. Holden co-starred with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954). And he also starred with Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), directed by David Lean.
Guinness won the Oscar for best actor. But it was Holden who was the big winner. He got a cut of the profits from this massive hit and, in doing so, made one of the best deals any actor ever made in film history – perhaps until, in the late 1970s, Guinness made a deal which gave him 2.25% of the gross profits from a small sci-fi film called Star Wars.
This week’s quiz: Let’s stay with Eva Marie Saint. Who is the link between her, Alfred Hitchcock… and the Beatles?
