Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "alfred-hitchcock"

Tippi: A Memoir
Tippi Hedren
Publisher: William Morrow (November 1, 2016)
ISBN-10: 0062469037
ISBN-13: 978-0062469038
https://www.amazon.com/Tippi-Memoir-H...

Back in Feb. 2012, I had the opportunity to interview actress, humanitarian, and animal rights activist Tippi Hedren for online radio’s “Dave White Presents.” At the time, she was touting The Girl, an HBO/BBC film about Hedren’s relationship with Alfred Hitchcock in which Hedren was played by Sienna Miller.

To my surprise, Hedren never mentions The Girl in her new memoir, although she devotes several inevitable chapters to her involvement with the director who discovered her when he saw her in a commercial and then cast her as his leading lady in 1963’s The Birds and again in the following year’s Marni opposite Sean Connery. As she’s been saying for years, Hedren again expresses her gratitude for all Hitchcock taught her about the movie business while discussing his obsessive sexual harassment and stalking of her before threatening to ruin her career for not yielding to his advances. It’s likely most readers will pick up Tippi looking for insights into The Birds, Marni, and Hitchcock as these are the subjects she is most known for. However, few readers will glean any new revelatory details on these matters as they’ve been covered in countless sources before.

What is likely to most interest those who don’t know the story is Hedren’s epic eleven-year quest to make the film Roar (1981) with her then husband, Noel Marshall. In 1969 while she was shooting two films in Africa, the couple was introduced to the plight of African lions. Soon, the Marshall’s started bringing lions, lions, more lions, cheetahs, and tigers into their Hollywood home in preparation for the movie they wanted to make to spread awareness about endangered African wildlife.

The lion’s share of the memoir deals with Tippi’s life with the lions which became more than one private home could handle. Ultimately she created the Shambala Preserve to house the more than 150 animals used in Roar which grew to include any abandoned wild felines that had no other place to go. During the making of the film, many of these animals were almost lost in a ravaging flood and later surrounded by California wildfires. The section on the flood and the quickly assembled rescue of the animals is without doubt the most exciting passage of the book.

Gratefully, Tippi is not a name-dropping Hollywood tell-all, and those looking for much about the movie business won’t get much of what they seek. Readers will see little about her short time working with Charlie Chaplin on the Countess from Hong Kong and less on later film and TV appearances other than her pleasure at appearing on The Bold and the Beautiful. Admittedly, most of her roles were either in low-budget films or one-off appearances on television series used to raise money for her causes. For me, the biggest surprise was the Marshall’s efforts to get Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist into print and their having to wait for years to earn their well-deserved percentages of the book and film version.

Instead, the memoir covers one woman’s odyssey from a girl who hoped to become a figure skater turned model turned actress and the mother of Melanie Griffith and grand-mother of Dakota Johnson. Griffith fans may marvel she survived child-hood with all those dangerous beasts literally prowling into every room in her house. Along the way, we see Hedren taking on humanitarian efforts like entertaining the troops in Vietnam, taking overseas tours on behalf of Feed the Hungry, becoming the God Mother of the modern Vietnamese Nail Industry, and her efforts to push Legislation through Congress for the protection of wild animals in captivity. She shares much about her personal life, like the accident that took away her senses of smell and taste and the constant headaches she’s been enduring for years.

From beginning to end, a very personable and vivacious personality shines through the triumphs and struggles, and we meet a very independent and strong-willed lady whose self-confidence rarely lags even when things seem very dark, especially in the later ‘70s when her second marriage and film work hit the bottom. It’s hard not to root for a courageous woman who isn’t self-absorbed but rather deeply concerned for her family, refugees, and of course her beloved big cats. Bull elephants, too. One indication of what matters to Tippi is the appendix which lists an impressive catalogue of awards and honors, but there’s no filmography.

In short, this is more than a readable autobiography, especially if you don’t need wall-to-wall star-studded anecdotes of Hollywood’s yesteryears. Tippi Hedren herself is more than worth the price of admission. Perhaps you’ll be inspired by her wisdom and sage advice and be moved to join in with her animal rights projects.

You can hear Wes Britton’s Feb. 29, 2012 audio interview with Tippi Hedren archived for download at:
http://tinyurl.com/87lxu8o


This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Oct. 27, 2016 at:
goo.gl/uWGnfY

Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life
Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Nan A. Talese; Reprint edition (October 25, 2016)
ISBN-10: 0385537417
ISBN-13: 978-0385537414
https://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchco...


After decades of numerous in-depth biographies, studies, analyses and memoirs of those who knew and worked with director Alfred Hitchcock, one question must spring to mind when considering any new bio of the esteemed director: what can any new book provide that hasn’t been covered before?

A few answers occur to me. While it’s difficult to imagine any full biography can ever supersede Donald Spoto’s 1983 The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock or Patrick Mcgilligan’s 2003 Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, I think there’s room for a “brief life” geared for the general reader without all the scholarly discussions appropriate for film students or serious movie aficionados. “Brief” implies there’s no attempt for Ackroyd’s biography to be exhaustive or authoritative but rather is a book for those who would like a history of how Hitchcock’s film canon came to be in a non-academic presentation.

It’s also fair to say any important artist should be viewed through new critical lenses anew from time to time as new generations will see creators of the past in very different ways from their predecessors. In addition, readers of books written in previous decades were far more likely to be familiar with many of the master’s films while new readers may have seen few of Hitchcock’s productions. This is most likely true of Hitchcock’s early silent films, his British efforts, or his final movies made after the success of The Birds.

Of course, most books of the past pay considerable homage to critic
François Truffaut due to the exhaustive interviews he conducted with Hitchcock in 1962 which probed the director’s artistic visions much deeper than anyone else was able to accomplish first-hand. Ackroyd too spends some time summarizing the highlights of Truffaut’s conversations with “Hitch” and Truffaut’s popularizing the notion that Hitchcock was an “auteur”—a director that was completely and individually responsible for his work. While not overtly saying it, Ackroyd signals that Hitch was far more collaborative then he’d publically admit, the director always downplaying the contributions of, in particular, script writers and actors.

Ackroyd’s book opens with a quick biography of Hitchcock’s childhood, pointing to the sorts of events that would influence the films to come, in particular the traumas that set the stage for the fears and anxieties present throughout Hitchcock’s life and canon. From that point forward, Ackroyd discusses each film in chronological order with brief overviews of how each came to be, some bits of production history, critical reaction to each film, and how each fit the development of the director’s cinematic trajectory. Along the way, Ackkroyd makes clear what he thinks of each movie and readers can match their own critical analyses with the author. For example, Ackroyd is far kinder to Torn Curtain than most reviewers would be, then or now.

A Brief Life, it seems to me, shouldn’t be dismissed by serious Hitchcock fans, no matter how many previous books they may have already read. Ackroyd does give us fresh perspectives and doesn’t shy away from being controversial. For example, he largely dismisses Tippi Hedron’s tails of near rape by Hitchcock during the making of The Birds and Marni. While Ackroyd is usually balanced in his appreciations and critiques of Hitchcock as a man, this was one instance I found the author a tad unkind.

If you’ve never read a Hitchcock bio, A Brief Life is a good place to start. If you haven’t seen many of the master’s films, A Brief Life should give you a list of films you’ll want to check out. If you’re a Hitch expert, perhaps you will think about movies or personal incidents in new ways. In other words, A Brief Life is well worth exploring by scholars or general film buffs alike.


This review first appeared Jan. 8, 2016 at:
goo.gl/xkUByl