Alfred Hitchcock's Tunnel of Love - Part II

By Elisabeth Karlin

Who is Hitchcock's most erotic creation? People tend to answer this in couplings: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly; Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman; Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. But what character stands on his, or her, own as the apotheosis of straight-up animal lust? Based on the above list, one might assume Cary Grant. Grant was a rare breed--a male love object--but do we really think of him as prowling the carnal jungle? Besides, let's be real--when we're talking Hitchcock sex we're talking women.

Among the array of cool blondes, available brunettes and the smattering of exotic types, who is the most lickerishly libidinous? She should be someone who actually has sex. We know North by Northwest's Eve Kendall is sexually active but it's a job. And for all the dizzying pheromones Kim Novak seems to shoot off, Vertigo's Judy Barton is driven by needs beyond sex.

It's really not enough for the personification of eroticism to have sex, she must be hungry for it. Psycho's Marion Crane comes to us straight from Sam's sweaty sheets but she longs for marriage and respectability. Marion is not a woman dictated by her appetite (she eats like a bird.) Constance Porter in Lifeboat is experienced and willing (and God knows she's hungry) but her function is as brainy leader--more Athena than Aphrodite. The pan-sexual title character of Rebecca would fill the bill, were she alive and Rear Window's Miss Torso puts on a good show but she is all tease.To find the woman in Hitchcock who combines lust, hunger and just enough coarseness to wear it proudly, one must get on board the train to Metcalfe and look up Miriam Haines. Strangers on a Train's Miriam is far from the Grace Kelly mold of fine bones and subtlety. Teetering on the brink of frumpiness, she is the antithesis of a Hitchcock siren and yet he has assigned a stunning amount of allure to her. In the hours of one day, Miriam has loaded interactions with four different men--she has a heated argument with husband Guy, dates two young swains at once and flirts with a mysterious stranger. And that's not even including the man who impregnated her. She is voracious.

Somehow we are led to believe that by throwing over Miriam for Senator Morton's daughter Ann that Guy is trading up. Even Bruno chides "A slight improvement over Miriam, eh Guy?" But is she? In her limited amount of screen time, we see Miriam vamp, threaten, yell, laugh, sing and eat an ice cream cone with deep-throated devilishness. By contrast, we see Ann fret. Underscoring all this, actress Laura Elliot incarnates Miriam with her whole earthly body while Ruth Roman plays Ann hardly moving her tiny teeth.

Miriam might not be an easy person to like but Hitchcock manages to tenderize her along the way as she transforms from Guy's bully to Bruno's guileless and vulnerable victim. We see her ride her carousel horse, shyly eyeing the man who will put an end to her. To hear her sing the eerily prophetic lines of "Casey and the Strawberry Blonde"--His head was so loaded it nearly exploded, the poor girl she shaked with alarm--is to realize that we're all frail victims of our fate. And Miriam, was sadly, just too sexy to live.

Alfred Hitchcock's Tunnel of Love - Part I

By Elisabeth Karlin

"It's more interesting to discover sex in a woman than to have it thrown at you." And so, Alfred Hitchcock branded the blonde for his own iconography in 1935 with Madeleine Carroll in The Thirty-Nine Steps. "Anything could happen with a woman like that in the back of a taxi" Hitch marveled, as he rejected more blatant sex objects as "vulgar and obvious. "

But there is more to Hitchcock's amorous interests than a string of unforgettable blondes. From 1925's The Pleasure Garden with its frenzied chorus girls on, Hitchcock has not skimped on purveying his own particular and most vivid eroticism.

That goes for eroticism in all its variations. Intrigued with homosexual love, Hitchcock portrayed it outwardly with Rope's Philip and Brandon; suggestively with Strangers on a Train's Bruno and Guy; and whimsically as in the sweet devotion of The Lady Vanishes' Caldicott and Charters. Lesbians came not just in the pathological shape of Rebecca's Mrs. "Danny" Danvers but also matter-of-factly with Suspicion's very out and proud mystery writer Isobel Sedbusk.


Censorship was no impediment for an artist as practiced in the veiled and sly as Hitchcock. His kisses, the conventional stand-ins for sexual consummation, were weighty with drama and character revelation. He gave us the loaded long take of Notorious, the crashing crescendo kiss of Vertigo and, my favorite--the open-mouthed, let's go down together lip-lock of Lifeboat.

In 1960 Hitch teased the censors and his audience with flashes of nudity in Psycho, yet when nudity was sanctioned in the Seventies, Hitchcock responded by making Frenzy, the least sexy of his movies. Frenzy had nudes but they were dead nudes. Sex in Frenzy is death-dealing and not much fun. There had always been an explicit sex-death connection in his films but in Frenzy Hitchcock did away with the heightened romantic aspect of that connection.

Frenzy is actually more concerned with that other great sensual pleasure--food. But despite the film's cornucopia of gastronomic metaphors, the food in Frenzy is inedible or downright disgusting. When a decent meal is served, it is frustratingly interrupted. In Frenzy, a film made by an old man back in a country he had left long ago, food and sex are pointedly unappetizing.

It was in 1964 that Hitchcock made his movie that was purely about sex--Marnie. The movie announces its intentions right from its audacious opening shot of a woman's purse. Filling the screen is a view of the purse, that with its folds and inner slit, bears a striking resemblance to a human vulva--labia majora, minora, pubic thatch and all. Then we see the back of the woman clutching the purse as she walks a deserted railroad platform between two standing trains.

The story of Marnie concerns one man rising to the challenge of penetrating that purse. And though the movie ends on a hopeful note, the consensual act is never realized. Instead, Hitchcock finds his most sublimely sexual moment in the film when frigid Marnie, in a cocktail dress, kicks off her high heels and throws herself astride her glorious horse Forio. Holding on with handfuls of his mane, she gallops bareback into ecstasy.

In Part II I will look at Hitchcock's most erotic characters.