The Horrible Dr. Hichcock

I guess the time has finally come to trash that old 16mm TV print of this movie. The thing is in blurry B&W, missing bits of scenes and riddled with bad sprockets. Yet back in the 1970s we watched it again and again while trying to figure out what was going on. It led to the writing of a 1997 Images article, aided by conversations with a friend from UCLA, author James Ursini.

We worked at the Theater Arts Reading Room in UCLA’s special collections department, which had full catalogs of key film culture magazines. Two concentrated paragraphs in a 1962 issue of The Monthly Film Bulletin nailed the film’s concerted hommages to key images from The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. It enumerated what it characterized as playful re-creations of visuals remembered from Rebecca,  Suspicion,  Foreign Correspondent,  Under Capricorn and  Vertigo. Non-Hitchcock Gothics quoted or subsumed into this show are Cukor’s Gaslight (you’re going crazy, Cynthia!) and Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (the nighttime walk down the scary path). This was of course years before Brian De Palma made the re-staging of Hitchcockian visuals serve as the backbone of his thriller Sisters.

Also an inspiration was the film criticism of Raymond Durgnat, who as early as 1967 described the cult surrounding the swooning fan adoration of star Barbara Steele. Durgnat claimed High Art status for the film’s funeral scene. Rain pours, but a glint of sunlight hits the lens with a momentary prismatic rainbow effect — a effect Durgnat described as poetic.

Before home video every fan and film critic harbored lists of ‘unavailable’ movies they badly wanted to see again. A picture seen in Technicolor on a giant screen in 1960, might only be accessible in infrequent TV airings, or not available at all. During the 1970s a list of key Alfred Hitchcock pictures were almost completely out of circulation. Rare museum and FILMEX screenings of Vertigo were almost legendary occasions. After getting a quick look at poor copies of  The Seventh Victim and  Eyes Without a Face, we waited ten years to see them again.

Only now has The Horrible Dr. Hichcock surfaced in a truly worthy home video presentation — unfortunately, only for collectors with Region B accessibility.  ^*  Our first thoughts on the movie can be read online in the 1997 Images essay Women on the Verge of a Gothic Breakdown and a review of the not-so-desirable 2016 Olive Films Blu-ray.

After seeing L’Orribile Segreto on this terrific new disc, we’ve collected a few thoughts to revisit.

1) Roman Vlad’s music is an enormous asset.  The music score haunts the movie. The funeral dirge and the lighter hallucination theme alternate throughout yet never grow repetitive. So little of the picture is communicated through dialogue, it’s practically a Gothic Concert, functioning like the operatic music scores of Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone. It mirrors Dr. Hichcock’s obsession, which is felt as much through the music as through Robert Flemyng’s intense performance.

Beware ‘original soundtrack’ offerings of the Roman Vlad score. Those I have heard are sourced from the rough, mediocre-quality audio of the American release version, editing around dialogue and sound effects.

2) Don’t forget the Vertigo connection.  The extras and commentary on this disc don’t make much of Horrible’s most expressionistic device, the red glow that suffuses the morgue chamber when Bernard Hichcock feels his ‘secret passion’ taking over. I don’t think the effect (or the film’s lighting scheme in general) owes a lot to Mario Bava, although these working Italo filmmakers were a close bunch. Tim Lucas has shown evidence that Bava was regularly consulted by many of his colleagues, including Federico Fellini.

A literal neurotic, erotic haze of light.

Going with the  hommage flow, the red glow in the morgue is derived directly from a scene in Vertigo. Anticipating the recreation/resurrection of his beloved Madeline, James Stewart’s Scotty Ferguson has gone erotic-nuts in a way not unlike Dr. Hichcock:  he also wants to make love to a dead woman through the body of another. Hitchcock & cameraman Robert Burks express Scotty’s obsession with a weird hazy lighting effect.  When Judy/Madeline finally materializes in a doorway, she’s half-hidden in a shaft of eerie blue-green light. Vertigo’s Scotty is no less ‘sick’ than Bernard Hichcock.  Both men are engaged in ‘romances’ that abuse women as objects in a private fantasy.

Bernard’s second scene in the morgue does not use the red glow effect, even when he’s able to touch the object of his desire. But the expressionist red lighting returns for Cynthia’s subjective hallucination in the canopied ‘funeral bed.’ The drugged Cynthia confronts her husband’s ‘naked desire,’ which not only blasts fever red, but also transforms him into a ghoulish vision of lust.

Visual note: in Cynthia’s drug-hallucination scene, Bernard’s bloated, distorted face ‘rhymes’ with a much earlier image.  Cynthia presses her face against a rainy window pane, peering at a ghost vision of Bernard’s first wife. Rivulets of water produce distortions of a different kind, creating a striking expression of Gothic vulnerability.  ↓

3) The dissolves added by Technicolor for the American version.  As a film editor, I have to believe that the movie originally had almost all straight cuts, as did a great many European films that didn’t want to incur a steep optical bill. The straight cuts make for several efficient, dynamic transitions. Cutting directly from Bernard with a syringe in the O.R., to him performing the same action in his ‘funeral room,’ tells us without dialogue what he’s injecting the same drug into the compliant Margaretha.  ↓ The purposeful jump cuts ‘read’ as smooth as silk.

I would wager that Sigma III’s American editor added the dissolves to a neutral shot of a carriage for the same reason that American studios were resisting what they saw as ‘mistakes,’ affectations of the French New Wave that went against desired ‘continuity’ conventions. The prosaic American version spells it all out, showing Bernard’s coach ride home. Editorially we can see that the revision editor must freeze frame on the shots of Bernard holding the syringe, to make the dissolves possible.

Further proof of this is visible near the end, at the beginning of the aforementioned hallucination scene. Bernard bends to pick up Cynthia, and there’s a hard cut to Cynthia in the funeral room, now alone on the canopied bed. Here’s where a conventional editor would have been justified with a dissolve, as it is something of a jump cut. Only the unbroken music tells us that something isn’t missing.

The cuts/dissolves issue is not obscure. For 1969’s The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s editors also wanted to use ‘European’ straight cuts to transition to the film’s varied flashbacks. By 1968 straight cuts were becoming common everywhere, but Warners preferred old-school standard ‘wavy dissolves.’  Was that because straight cuts were deemed too modern for a film set in 1913?

4) I still like my fantasy embellishing the film’s Psycho connection, based on the report that director Riccardo Freda threw out the script’s entire original ending. Is the insane, disfigured woman resting in that rocking chair really Margaretha, or was she once meant to be a corpse, with housekeeper Martha impersonating her to freak out that usurper Cynthia?  Critic Chris Fujiwara reports that his researches prove that such was not the case. Given how the film’s last scene now plays as flimsy, disconnected nonsense (“I’ll use her blood to restore your beauty!”) we’ll hang on to our fantasized Psycho hommage, just because it’s such a good fit … and pretend that the film’s ‘Mrs. Danvers’ character asserted herself at last.