They were married for six decades, she reviewed the castings, the plans, and the scripts and decided the projects that would become films. On the 40th anniversary of the director's death, we look back at his best-kept secret.
In 1925, an article in the Picturegoer film magazine titled "Soul in Wonderland: An Interesting Article Proving That A Woman's Place Is Not Always Home," highlighted the figure of Alma Reville, "a tiny woman, boyish in appearance with such a solid career that she occupies a unique position in European cinema." According to the main publication of British cinema, Alma was in charge of assisting the director in tasks that only a woman could carry out: "A man who looks at a passing girl observes that she is pretty, attractive or ugly, as the case may be, but A woman, getting the same fleeting glance, will be able to describe with terrifying accuracy every garment she wore, how long she had had them, what material they were made of, where they were bought, and at what cost. Beyond how exotic these words can be today, the truth is that the figure of Alma was exceptional.
When she was 16 years old, it was already clear to her that she wanted to dedicate herself to the cinema, but contrary to the usual among girls her age, she did not want to be one of those actresses who were beginning to be recognized in the marquees. She wanted to be part of the development of those films that fascinated her. Her parents didn't think it was the best idea and to help disenchant her they asked a producer friend to find her a job in the industry, in the editing room, "away from all the supposed glamor and excitement of the studio itself.".
Contrary to expectations, the assembly not only made her immensely happy, but she ended up being one of the best of hers in her profession. It didn't take long for her to rise in the company and become a second assistant director, when she was already a reputable assistant she joined the company as a graphic designer who was in charge of the dialogue cards for the films, his name was Alfred Hitchcock.
They worked together for two years hardly speaking until one day she received a call. This guy was going to direct his first movie and he needed an editor. According to her daughter, Patricia Hitchcock, who wrote Alma Hitchcock: The Woman After the Man, the interview was brief, Alma politely told her future husband that the salary he was offering was inadequate, she left the room and he followed her and the offer improved. The film was shot in Germany, they got engaged and she began to contribute her ideas to the director's cinema. "After each take," Hitchcock acknowledged, she "would look back at my fiancée and ask if she was okay." Alfred and Alma were married on December 2, 1926. Recalling those moments in his famous conversations with François Truffaut, Hitchcock confessed: "I had never dated a girl in my life. I had never had a drink in my life."
Hitchcock and Reville began to write the scripts together and from The Ring in 1927 to Panic on the Scene in 1950, she participated in essential titles such as Rebeca, Suspicion, Sabotage, The Paradine Trial or The Shadow of a Doubt and not only as a screenwriter, in Sometimes she was also a script and second unit director. She also worked with other directors, but her strongest and most satisfying union was with her husband.
As Hitchcock's success led them to Hollywood, Alma gradually stopped signing scripts and became a traditional wife and mother, although she remained his closest collaborator. "She was still occasionally on set," recalls her daughter, "but it was at home at night when my parents were arguing about the movie they were making." Alma rewrote the scripts and gave her opinion on all the shots and if she didn't like an actor she could say goodbye to the casting. 'She would comment when she thought something was wrong, and she was usually right. If she had been born a man, or she had had a different nature," Stephen Rebello states in Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho "she would have been a director."
In 1950, Frightened the Scene became the last film in which she officially collaborated, but her unofficial influence remained in every shot of all the films she made in her life. However, except for movie fans, her figure is practically unknown: she is nothing more than the pimp who consented to her husband's excesses with blondes. When Helen Mirren played her in Hitchcock, she affected this ignorance: "I had not realized how important Alma was in the creation of the Hitchcock films, I was very happy to be in the shadows. But they had an incredibly close and creative relationship at all levels."
His role was essential, for example, in the first sequence that comes to mind when we think of Hitchcock, the one that occupies its own space in the history of cinema and caused an element as every day as a shower curtain to be used for a long time. become the most terrifying in the house. If there is something that causes that scene to stick to fire in our brain, it is the hysterical dissonant violins of Bernard Herrmann, at this indisputable point. Well, Hitchcock was opposed to using it despite Hermann's pleas, he only wanted the screams of Janet Leigh and the water, but Alma supported Herman and the rest is history. It was not her only contribution, after seven days of exhaustive filming they saw the final copy of the scene and the former assistant director who had fascinated Picturegoer magazine for her ability to observe noticed something that no one had seen: in a barely perceptible way Janet Leigh was breathing! It was intolerable, but no one had noticed. They couldn't shoot new shots, so that shot was replaced by one of the shower showers.
In his daily life, there was very little suspense. The couple led a routine life, the director liked to work at his home in Bel Air, away from the office and if he filmed he would return home soon. They both ate dinner exactly every day at five in the afternoon and on Thursdays, they went to Chasen's, his favorite restaurant, and they took a steak for their dogs. When they organized meetings attended by the stars of her films, she cooked and according to the chronicles of the guests, she was as good in the kitchen as in the editing room.
They were united by their love for movies, good food, and their taste for always being elegantly dressed, something relatively simple when Edith Head, the most legendary costume designer in Hollywood, designs your clothes to measure, but their demeanor set them apart. exposure to the public. Hitchcock was a born publicist who enjoyed promoting his films and himself, he loved to be recognized while she preferred the background and shunned the limelight.
According to the director's biographers, it seems that the most passionate relationship between the two took place in front of the script. Hitchcock spoke about his impotence and more than once declared that they had only had S- relations once: the day they conceived Patricia. In the Hitchcock film, it is hinted that Reville nearly had an affair with writer Whitfield Cook with whom she worked on the scripts for Strangers on a Train and Scene Fright. The biographer Pat McGilligan who glossed the figure of the director Alfred Hitchcock: a life of lights and shadows had access to Cook's letters and affirms that "they certainly had a romantic relationship, possibly S-. As for Hitchcock, his fondness for the actresses in his movies, especially the ones who fit the type of woman he was fascinated with, the icy blonde. 'Was Alma upset about that?' wonders McGilligan. "I doubt it. She was a total professional. Did she occasionally roll her eyes like Helen Mirren does in the movie? Maybe."
Until in recent years, there has been a certain vindication of her figure, Alma had been considered mainly the pimp of the S- appetites of her husband and of those obsessive Pygmalion cravings that many of her actresses suffered, especially Tippi Hedren. "I was developing this obsession with myself and I began to feel very uncomfortable," the actress told Donald Spoto in 2007. Spoto touches on the figure of the director as a voyeur with a complex in his book Alfred Hitchcock: The Hidden Face of Genius and affirms that Tippi He asked Alma to intervene in the face of the bullying he was suffering "Alma, you can stop this with a word." He said, "Why don't you do it? And Alma just looked at Tippi and walked away from her."
Not all the actresses who worked with him share that vision. For Ingrid Bergman, he was always a good friend. So did Grace Kelly, her favorite, Joan Fontaine, and Janet Leigh
With others like Vera Miles, whom he unsuccessfully tried to turn into the new Kelly, the relationship was tense, just like with Kim Novak. But with none, that has transpired, he reached the levels of harassment and meddling that he developed with Hedren for whose surveillance she even hired a detective.
Hitchcock's dependence on Reville was such that when she fell ill due to a stroke he fell apart and gradually lost interest in cinema. Alma had already suffered from breast cancer and the possibility that her partner would die before him gripped him. Although the viewers were unaware of the relevance of Alma de Ella, he kept her in mind every day. The director passed away in 1980, a few months before he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and this was his speech:
“I ask permission to mention by name only four people who have given me all their love, recognition, encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a screenwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is the most excellent cook who has ever worked miracles in a home kitchen, and the name of the four is Alma Reville. If the beautiful Miss Reville had not accepted a life contract with no options 53 years ago to become Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock might still be in this room tonight. However, he would not be at this table, instead, he would be one of the slowest waiters in the room. I want to share this award, as I have shared my life, with her."
She passed away just two years later. Outraged by the lack of recognition that Reville had received in life, film critic Charles Champlin wrote a fiery article in the Los Angeles Times titled Alma Reville Hitchcock. The Unsung Partner in which he flatly stated. "The Hitchcock touch has four hands," he wrote. "And two of them are from Alma."
