Sunday Review: The Girl

Will the real Alfred Hitchcock please step forward

By Morris Dean

The title of Julian Jarrold's 2012 HBO film about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of his two films The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) refers to the 33-year-old actress Tippi Hedron. According to the movie and presumably to the book on which the film is based—Donald Spoto's 2009 Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies—Hitchcock had seen a television advertisement featuring Ms. Hedron and told an assistant, "I want that girl."

    The Girl explores in what senses Hitchcock (played by Toby Jones) wanted Ms. Hedron: to revive his waning sexual capacity, to replace Grace Kelly, to produce a box-office star around whom to promote Hitchcock's films?
    We are shown a couple of scenes in which Hitchcock—who is portrayed as having an inordinate fondness for limericks, the more shockingly obscene the better—recites such a limerick to Ms. Hedron. Hitchcock is played so convincingly by Mr. Jones that when the real Tippi Hedron, who served as an adviser on the film, heard his voice, she said he sounded so much like Hitchcock, "it brought it all back." She doesn't comment on how realistically Sienna Miller portrayed her reaction to hearing the limericks, but Ms.Miller says she spent a lot of time with Ms. Hedron, so her self-possessed impassiveness upon hearing the limericks in front of the camera can be presumed to be fairly accurate.

A second film about Alfred Hitchcock was released eight weeks later—Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi and starring Anthony Hopkins, with Helen Mirren playing Mrs. Hitchcock. This film was reviewed by Jonathan Price on January 6.

Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedron

    It's fun to compare Hopkins's portrayal of Hitchcock with Jones's. They are quite different, of course, but some of this actually derives from the different Hitchcocks who are portrayed. The Hitchcock of Hitchcock seems to be more playful and, for all the peeping through keyholes to spy on Janet Leigh (played by Scarlett Johansson), Hitchcock is portrayed as treating her quite decently. The Hitchcock of The Girl behaves abominably toward Tippi Hedron (Ms. Miller), and not just in matters explicitly sexual, but also, for example, in telling her that the birds-in-the-attic scene would employ mechanical birds and take a day of shooting, then using real birds and extending the shooting over I think six days. The real Tippi Hedron was quite a trooper.

Tippi Hedron,
from a poster for Marnie

    By contrast, Alma Hitchcock seems consistent from film to film, despite the greater differences between Helen Mirren and Imelda Staunton (who plays Alma in The Girl) than between Hopkins and Jones. You feel that Ms. Mirren, too, would have walked out on Hitchcock, if she rather than Ms. Staunton had had to witness her role-husband's behavior toward the young actress.
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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