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Just because you’re a filmmaking genius doesn’t mean you’re not a freaky genius. Take Woody Allen and the nightmare story of how his then-girlfriend’s adopted daughter became his wife.
Before Allen there was Alfred Hitchcock. He put the yuck into yikes!
Yet those men created some of the greatest movies of all time, including my favorites, Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”
But in real life, these guys were playing with some seriously psycho behavior bordering on crimes and misdemeanors.
Tomorrow night, HBO presents an original movie, “The Girl,” about Hitchcock’s obsession with actress Tippi Hedren, who starred in two of his movies.
Based on the book, “Spellbound by Beauty,” with the cooperation of Hedren, the movie concentrates on what happened to Hedren (Sienna Miller) once she was chosen by “Hitch” (Toby Jones) for the lead in his movie, “The Birds,” upon the suggestion of his wife, Alma.
Although Hitch could have had his pick of any top actress in Hollywood — he was still riding the crest of “Psycho” — he fell into unrequited love and lust with the obscure Midwestern single mother/model.
If you’re looking for a story about Hitchcock, this isn’t really it, so much as it is the story of Hedren’s nightmare life while making “The Birds” and the far less successful “Marnie.”
Hitchcock had a creepy appearance and an even creepier, darker personality. Apparently, he’d had sex with one woman in his life, his wife, who was more friend than wife. While she loved him like a man, he loved her like a crutch.
By now, you’ve read the pre-movie publicity about what a disgusting, filthy freak he was and how horrible he was to Hedren, constantly physically throwing himself on her, telling her she’d have to make herself sexually available to him (she didn’t) and punishing her by substituting real birds for mechanical ones and forcing her, over five days, to repeat being attacked by the gulls and ravens over and over until she was covered in bites, scratches and bird droppings. (HBO said it took only two or three hours to film the bird segment in its movie.)
“The Girl” could have been a great movie, but the screenplay turns Hedren into a paragon of female strength and morality. I mean, seriously? She was a 30-something model with a young daughter (in real life her daughter is Melanie Griffith) and just wouldn’t go around making proclamations like, “I was a model for 11 years. I learned any number of ways to wriggle away from guys with cameras.”
Her words don’t sound so much like dialogue as they do interview answers 50 years after the fact.
And then there’s Sienna Miller. Halfway believable but missing what Hitchcock called “the volcano inside.”
Jones, however, is spectacular. Now, that’s a volcano.