Our current Movie of the Month, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 post-war noir Notorious, is a love story first and an espionage story second. Most of the thrills in its first hour are found in the bitter flirtation between Ingrid Bergman & Cary Grant, whose catty chemistry pounces on the dividing line of what the Hays Code would allow without ever fully crossing it. There’s so much explosive energy in their love-hate situationship that you often forget the real threat in the picture is the Nazi cabal they’ve gone undercover to subvert. It isn’t until the second half of the film that any of the Nazi expats step into the spotlight with vicious enough villainy to match the volatility of Bergman & Grant’s flirtation. That centerpiece isn’t any of the men who make up the secret Nazi cabal smuggling uranium into their Brazilian hideout, either. It’s one of those men’s mother (Leopoldine Konstantiin), a true believer in the Nazi cause whose default distrust & hatred for Bergman proves useful in outing her as a spy.
Notorious may have been one of the first instances of Hitchcock getting distracted from a movie’s more obvious villains to focus on an evil mother figure instead, but it would be far from the last. In the 1960s in particular, he made a string of iconic thrillers that highlighted wicked mothers at the periphery of the center-stage evil. So, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to further sink into one of the all-time great directors’ unresolved Mommy Issues.
Psycho (1960)
If you’re going to delve into Hitchcock’s auteurist Mommy Issues, you kinda have to start with the movie that put the “psycho” in “psychobiddy,” right? Psycho is a notorious act of misdirection. It starts as a seedy noir about a lovelorn secretary who robs her boss blind in the daylight, then shifts halfway through to a proto-slasher about a Peeping Tom motel owner who slays that amateur thief and everyone who comes looking for her. It’s also misdirection in the characterization of its sweaty, pervy killer, since its casting of the goofily charmingly Tony Perkins in the role masks the psychosexual violence of the shower scene until it’s too late for his first victim to escape. Perkins is such an adorable, All-American sweetheart that the audience is tempted to continue blaming his overbearing mother for his . . . transgressions, even after it’s revealed that she’s been dead for a solid decade before the audience arrives at the Bates Motel.
Regardless of Norma Bates’s status as a living being, she’s a dark presence in the picture – sometimes literally, as when her silhouette appears in a shower curtain or at the top of a staircase during a kill scene. Before we know what Norman is capable of, we hear Norma shaming him about his “cheap erotic mind” in shrill arguments from the Gothic home outside the motel. By the time Norman insists that “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” we’re already aware of how abusive she is to him, framing him as more of a victim than a killer. The fact that he’s the one keeping his mother alive through his taxidermy & cosplay hobbies is beside the point; the half-remembered, half-improvised arguments he has with her ghost tell a clear story about how her responsibility for his violence.
The Birds (1963)
There’s at least clear Freudian pop psychology reasoning behind the wicked motherhood themes of Psycho, whereas they’re almost completely arbitrary in Hitchcock’s when-animals-attack thriller The Birds. For a long stretch of The Birds, Hitchcock seems uncertain of who’s more likely to peck Tippi Hedren’s eyes out: the supernaturally murderous birds swooping at her head or Lydia, her new boyfriend’s well-meaning but slightly overbearing mother. He eventually does decide that the killer birds are the bigger threat, but it’s a hellish journey getting there.
Hedren stars as an heiress playgirl with an international tabloid reputation for living freely, pranking with wild abandon, and frolicking naked in public fountains. When her flirtatious pranks lead her to the doorstep of a seaside small-town lawyer (Rod Taylor), she immediately finds herself at odds with the oblivious hunk’s mother (Jessica Tandy). The women’s competition for the himbo lawyer’s affections is hilariously apparent in their casting & costuming, mirroring the combatants with similar height, hair, and icy demeanor. Thankfully, being attacked by an organized army of winged hellbeasts in “The Bird War” eventually inspires the women to bond, but in the meantime their volatile tension inspires debates about whether it’s better to experience “a mother’s love” or to just be abandoned, spared of it. There’s a lot of uncanny avian violence in The Birds, but it’s somehow just as unsettling watching a grown man peck his mother on the cheek and call her “Dear” while allowing her to compete against a would-be lover. I have no idea what those two threats—crow & crone—have to do with each other, but I do know it makes for a great thriller.
Marnie (1964)
It’s somewhat foolish to push for a personal, auteurist read on Hitchcock’s adaptations of various novels & short stories that happen to dwell on fictional characters’ Mommy Issues, but by the 1960s his choices to adapt these specific projects really did spell out an obsessional pattern. For instance, the director went through three hired screenwriters during the development of this 1964 noir Marnie, because each were too squeamish to get as psychologically dark as he wanted the picture to be. Through Marnie, Hitchcock perversely lays out all of the various sexual & psychological hangups with women & marriage that echo throughout his work, so it’s impressive that he made a little time to parade around his Mommy Issues too. Thorough!
Much like the initial protagonist of Psycho, the titular Marnie is a seemingly obedient secretary who loots her boss’s safe in the opening sequence, leaving town with grotesque piles of cash. The difference is that Marnie is a habitual thief instead of an impulsive one. She’s also a Freudian headcase, her icy demeaner immediately melting whenever she’s confronted with a lightning storm or the color red. Tippi Hedren plays her as the uneasy middle ground between Norman Bates & Marion Crane: a violently psychotic, intensely vulnerable victim. What’s most unsettling (and maybe even unforgiveable) about Marnie is that Hedren’s victimhood is not blamed on the wealthy playboy (Sean Connery) who exploits her kleptomania to blackmail & rape her as his reluctant bride. Instead, all of Marnie’s problems are—shocker—blamed on Marnie’s mother, a Baltimore widow whose “Aww shucks, I’m just a poor Southerner” facade barely covers up her distanced disgust with her only child. Marnie’s mother adopts neighborhood children as surrogate daughters to ramp up Marnie’s jealousy, offering her actual daughter so little affection that she’ll shout, “Don’t be such a ninny!” at her during a full mental breakdown instead of laying a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. A last-minute flashback eventually fills in the details of how these two women initially arrived at this hateful mother-daughter dynamic, but not until after Hedren mocks the impulse to investigate & explain their dynamic with the line “Me Freud, you Jane.”
Alfred Hitchcock made over 50 movies in his half-century career as a director. I’m sure somewhere in that expansive canon you can find counter examples of his fictional mothers being lovely, loving people. I do find it amusing that so many of his mother figures at the height of his auteurist control as a major filmmaker are awful, hateful women, though. They’re the reason killers kill, the reason thieves steal; they’re the one thing in this world worse than literal Nazis.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 