A man opens his front door and a woman opens her coat, couture curtains parting to reveal a pleated skirt soaked with blood.
“Johnny, you love me. Say that you love me. You do love me, don’t you? I think he’s dead, I’m sure he’s dead. I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it.”
Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich) pushes past Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) and collapses against the nearest wall.
He asks the obvious question: “Who’s dead?”
ATELIER DIETRICH
People don’t talk much about Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) these days. If this back-catalogue Hitchcock thriller is remembered for anything, it’s that Marlene Dietrich refused to sign on unless she was costumed exclusively by Christian Dior. Though it may sell this slippery treatise on performance and presentation short, it’s fitting that a film with such complex and concerted attention to how its characters dress would be forever associated with a ballooning wardrobe budget.
Though Warner Bros. was initially reluctant, and Hitchcock was never one to bend to the whims of his actors, Dietrich’s star power was too attractive to pass up. So the actress decamped to Paris to oversee the designs, and while Dior set to work on the (modestly discounted) assortment of sumptuous suits and gowns, Hitchcock and screenwriter-slash-devoted-wife Alma Reville tailored the role of Charlotte Inwood just as attentively to the actress’s talents and reputation.
Charlotte is a famous stage persona in 1950s London, and though she spends the majority of Stage Fright acting, she can’t really be called an actress; like the Dietrich Divas of yore, Charlotte is first and foremost an entertainer. When she stumbles into her lover Jonathan’s apartment, her costume of choice—a delicate white frock, marred by a quart of her husband’s blood—becomes an axis point in the resulting manhunt.
Charlotte needs an unspoiled garment from the flat she just fled, unable to miss a day of work lest she arouse suspicion. Jonathan, ever the push-over, scurries off to get it for her. A maid comes home early and spots him staging a break-in. Charlotte tells him he’d better lay low, barely suppressing a smirk as he asks naively, “Then we’ll start again, won’t we?” Cooper panics when the police inevitably come knocking, and a car chase leads him to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) is rehearsing. He barges onto the stage, making a quick bow before turning away from the audience to embrace his old friend and whisper in her ear: “They think I killed a man, can you hide me on your father’s boat?”
He’s been recounting all of these woes to Eve in her getaway car, which careened through the film’s in medias res opening shots. “Do you hate me?” he asks her. She responds with wounded loyalty, “I do wish I’d taken lessons on the second fiddle.” Her lingering devotion to Jonathan leads Eve into several tight corners as she scrambles—with the help of her wisecracking father—to shift the blame onto Charlotte, who proves a more-than-worthy opponent.
An avatar for moneyed insouciance, commercial appeal, and chrome-plated glamour, Charlotte is the ideal foil to the demure, artistically-inclined Eve, who spends a 25-minute stretch of runtime plotting an infiltration of her rival’s manicured front. When she finally finds her way into Charlotte’s circle, having swapped places with the maid, she finds her being fitted for mourning clothes, all the while taking absentminded drags from a cigarette beneath a black veil. She holds it away from her face as she blows plumes of smoke through the fabric. The material is porous, concealing and revealing in equal measure—a fitting garment for an enigmatic woman who presents herself as an open book. “This is very nice—if you can call mourning nice—but isn’t there some way we could let it plunge a little in front? I suppose not,” she coos.
Some detectives pay her a house call, so she swaps her collared dress for one with layers of black lace, which she lets hang suggestively off of one shoulder. Charlotte changes clothes as though it were second nature, like costumes in her follies-style productions: slanted diagonal florals and a wide-brimmed hat for a garden party; a sharp-cornered skirt suit topped off with an over-the-shoulder fox fur for the curtain call; a dizzying rotary of diamonds, pearls, netting, and tulle. Through all of these relentless shifts in garb, the woman beneath remains the same—but the more time we spend with Charlotte, the less we know about who that woman might be.
Charlotte’s everyday getups are only marginally less coiled and coiffed than the ones she wears onstage. A glittering, undulous, low-backed gown glimpsed from the wings is swapped for another white dress––a flowing garment comprised of scrunched, diaphanous folds––this one cinched by a sash of the same material winding out from her waist, holding it all together. It’s paired with a flamboyantly feathered robe, which rustles and bounces with her movements while she slinks between a series of chaise longues stretching toward the audience. Each step of the stairs is framed by a frilled proscenium. They expand successively, yawning around Charlotte like rows of shark teeth as she sings Cole Porter’s “The Laziest Gal in Town,” projecting and epitomizing all of the lofty pageantry the character wears as armour:
Nothing ever worries me
No one ever hurries me
I take pleasure leisurely
Even when I kiss
But when I kiss, they want some more
And wanting more becomes a bore
It isn’t worth the fighting for
So I tell them this:
It’s not ’cause I wouldn’t
It’s not ’cause I shouldn’t
And you know it’s not ’cause I couldn’t
It’s simply because I’m the laziest gal in town.
Enter Jonathan, tucked away in the standing section, fresh out of hiding and headed for her dressing room. They lock eyes, and though Charlotte’s face lights up in fear, she finishes the number like a professional.
DAPPER DAN(DY)S
Dietrich plays so deftly into type that it’s easy to forget a crucial detail; everything we know about the murder was relayed to us in flashback via Jonathan. His account of events comes so early, and so quickly, that we instinctively accept it as the basic premise of the story. It’s loaded with the kind of morbid touches that seem too absurd to fabricate (Mr. Inwood’s corpse blocks the entrance to Charlotte’s closet, for example, and Jonathan is shown attempting to dislodge it), and when Eve takes her shifty, bug-eyed friend at his word, we’re inclined to as well.
Jonathan is the only character who never changes costume. Partially dictated by the logistics of the plot, this nonetheless sets him apart from the rest of the cast, who are free to alter the ways they are presented and perceived. He wears a wool tweed suit jacket, white collared shirt, and grey sweater vest, with the knot of a striped tie peeking out at the top. It’s not entirely clear whether the clothes are too tight for him or whether the actor’s comportment merely telegraphs a perpetual squirming anxiety, but even when Jonathan loosens his tie, his apparel seems hopelessly constricting.
This is contrasted by the character of Smith (Michael Wilding, who will have you frantically googling for any relation to Alan Cumming), the detective whose shared attraction with Eve turns her best-laid plans inside out. She spots him at the Inwood crime scene and follows him to a pub, where she feigns a dizzy spell, orders a small brandy, and—with some trial and error—lures him to a table to comfort her. He’s caring, respectful, and the right amount of awkward. A black trilby hat compliments his chiseled features, but a lanky frame clashes with the broad shoulders of his double-breasted suit (which fits at least a size too big), and the thin tie that snakes down from his collar is so short that it shakes free of the buttoned jacket when he sits down. The loose fit lends him a strange combination of authority and cool, an imposing figure undercut by a warm and dandy demeanor.
“You don’t look like an actress,” he tells Eve, whose composure instantly crumbles: “Oh, I thought I did.” Though Eve continues to pry him for intel in between flirtations, their dynamic gradually and steadily wears down her performative faculties, reaching its climax when they share a taxi en route to a garden party (Smith wears a black-tie getup with an almost identical baggy fit). The two cantillate in a hushed, reverent register, eyes locked in romantic stupor. As they drift closer, their responses become increasingly nonsensical, the words scrambled and mistimed. “What?” they both ask as their lips finally meet.
Where Jonathan spends the film in states of protracted unravelment—his attempts at poise perpetually thwarted—Smith is a stable presence whose equanimity (whether natural or practiced) gently disrupts the practiced fronts of his scene partners. The blind eye he subconsciously turns to Eve’s sloppily-concealed involvement in the case both threatens and strengthens their connection. That Smith makes for such a convincing love interest is surprising for Hitchcock, whose crime-laden filmography is reliably populated by churlish, thick-witted, and snugly vestured officers of the law.
CATTLE PROD
Stage Fright is uncharacteristic of Hitchcock in more ways than one. A decade into one of Hollywood’s longest-running heydays, the shoot gave this studio-bound director a rare chance to work on location in his old London stomping grounds. The textured scenery creates a deep-seated tension with his deliberate, artificial imagery, not to mention with the film’s attention to the prevalence of artifice and fakery in everyday life (in Hitchcock-land, the “everyday” allows ample space for murder and roleplay).
The director’s authoritative, guiding hand is usually central to the generation of suspense in his films; in Stage Fright this manifests on a textual level with the inclusion of a spiritual stand-in. Eve’s devoted father, Commodore Gill (Alastair Sim), sports a winking sense of humour that often removes him from the action, rendering the character an overseer. His outfit changes are as functional and situational as Smith’s; a cable-knit sweater befits his secluded coastal life (which Eve and Jonathan barge into), and a long black suit jacket serves as urban camouflage when he follows Eve to London (conspicuous white trousers, however, preserve his distinctive, mischievous bearing––call it Divorced Dad swag).
Though the Commodore nudges Eve like any caring parent would, he spends most of the runtime commentating from the sidelines. He is finally forced to enter the fray at a lavish theatrical garden party, where his daughter’s contradicting roles threaten to intersect in disastrous ways. The sequence doubles as actualization and intervention; Eve dictates the movements of those around her—traversing the boundary between action and direction in the process—but when she inevitably stage-manages her way into a corner, the Commodore steps in. His plan to publicly spook Charlotte mid-performance using a blood-stained doll (brandished by a cooperative boy scout) backfires when Charlotte asks her ‘maid’ to help her onstage, forcing Eve to step away from her spot in the audience next to a dumbfounded Smith.
The film’s fixation on the falsehoods of acting already called to mind the director’s infamous quip that actors should be treated like cattle, but Eve’s perilous—and ultimately unsuccessful—ventures toward an authorial form of control cast Stage Fright in an even more multivalent light. Is Hitchcock paying tribute to the power of performance, satirizing it, or something in between?
MAID METHOD
Eve is the closest thing Stage Fright has to a moral center. This is less a reflection of the character’s moral sense than of the audience’s attachment to her perspective. Everyone in Stage Fright engages in acts of performance, but Eve allows us behind the curtain, where we are both privy to and implicated in her deceptions. The character’s eccentric combination of naivety and opportunism is the film’s source of suspense, pathos, and irony; a (genuine, if misplaced) moral alignment with the interests of a man she believes to be innocent gives her the perfect excuse to toss out the conventional frameworks of her chosen craft for something more titillating. Even when she tests the boundaries of appropriate behaviour, the audience shares and revels in that excitement.
Her first disguise is for Smith: a queasily curious ingénue wrapped up in a wool trench coat, leather gloves gripping at her collar like a life raft. The outerwear doesn’t just envelop a woman with a secret—it also conceals the habiliments of a woman who’s in over her head. Having just returned from stashing Jonathan at her father’s seaside cabin, she’s still wearing the casual garb of a student (a cardigan, a swallow-tail collar, a droopy bow, a skirt with pockets).
The next target is Charlotte’s loud-mouthed maid Nellie (Kay Walsh), whom Eve first notices during her barroom encounter with Smith. After the detective walks her home, she changes into a grey dress replete with jutting, angular shapes (collar, shoulder, breast pocket) and marches right back to the pub. Now she’s a pushy reporter for a paper she’s not allowed to name, and she’s willing to pay Nellie to feign an illness and send her cousin ‘Doris Tinsdale’ to replace her. “All this trouble just for a newspaper story?” the leery woman asks, and Eve maintains that “we women have a tough job competing with the men, especially on important stories.” The unscrupulous Nellie is only moved by cash on the table.
Though she’s warned that the role entails highly skilled work, Eve was always prepared to go method. She suits up in the most ‘common’ clothes she can find—a wrinkly button-up, a bulky pin-check skirt suit, a hair-flattening bowler hat, and glasses (stolen from her mother) which render her half-blind. She tests the efficacy of her costume by ringing the doorbell to her own apartment. When her mother answers, she exclaims, to her daughter’s chagrin, “Oh there you are! Help me find my glasses, Eve darling, I can’t see a thing!” So she dials it back from frumpy to plain, restoring her bobbed hair and rounding out the shapeless attire with a cockney brogue.
Eve shows up to the garden party in a delicate dress of layered sheer fabrics, lined with bold white seams and decorated with spiral patterns on the outer layers of the skirt. The collar encircles her neck, but the line of the dress leaves a triangular plunge where her chest pokes (tastefully) through, and she’s got a hat and purse of the same material to match. She looks the part of Eve Gill, not Doris Tinsdale or a reporter in disguise. When Nellie, Charlotte, and Smith all compete for an audience with the woman they believe her to be, Eve is forced to play all of these roles in the same costume, momentarily transcending the signifiers of fashion through talent and force of will.
Though the Commodore’s meddling did more harm than good, he devises a sting to entrap Charlotte (and salvage his daughter’s legal and romantic standing) once and for all. Eve, as Doris, needs to coax a confession from Charlotte while a hidden microphone broadcasts their conversation to the cop-ridden theatre upstairs. The farthest she gets is an admission to being an accessory, as Charlotte swears on her life that Johnny killed her husband in a fit of rage. Eve emerges, dazed and defeated, onto the stage, her eyes filled with tears. Is she sad that she failed to exonerate her friend, or that her performance didn’t have the desired effect? As she leans against the curtain in distress, we cut to her father applauding in the front rows below, a gesture suspended somewhere between support and derision.
When the trusting, resourceful Eve helps Jonathan make one last break for it, hiding with him in a prop carriage below the stage, she’s under the impression that her game of dress-up has run its course. She’s right in only one sense; the trappings of ‘Doris’ still cling to her, a mocking reminder of her recent failure. When her father shouts to her “come away from him, he’s dangerous, he’s a killer!” Jonathan turns to say “he’s right, you know.”
SAFETY OFF
The iron curtain is a failsafe mechanism that separates stage and audience in the event of a fire. Stage Fright’s opening titles play over footage of one such curtain rising, gradually unveiling a sprawling establishing shot of an idyllic London vista, seamlessly composited behind it. The cheeky, spectacular effect places the rest of the film in nesting quotation marks, but it’s also an equally cheeky and spectacular bit of sadistic foreshadowing.
When Eve finds herself in an enclosed space with a murderer, stranded in the costume of a woman far meeker than herself, she’s faced with a life-or-death chance to prove her acting chops.
“Charlotte knew the kind of man I was, she knows I can’t control myself when I get into a rage. Like a fool I’d told her about that girl I killed…” whispers Jonathan. A band of light makes Eve’s eyes blaze in the surrounding darkness.
“You could give yourself up… they can’t do anything to a sick man,” she whispers carefully. “But there’s nothing wrong with my mind, and they can’t prove that there is unless… I kill someone for no reason.” His hands creep toward her, fingers forming the shape of a throat.
Eve puts her hands gently and firmly over his. She tells him she doesn’t hear a sound now, that they can escape through the orchestra pit, and she can take him to her father’s boat. They lock eyes for a moment, and Eve says “come along.”
Jonathan trusts her one last time, walking through the door of the pit as she holds it open. “Here he is!” she screams as she slides the bolt closed. The police close in. Jonathan runs onto the stage, where more cops appear. As he turns back toward the audience, someone calls to drop the iron curtain and cut him off. Jonathan slips and falls at the edge of the stage, and cut him off it does—at the waist.
Eve gasps in horror, turning into the waiting arms of Smith and away from the wreckage of the performance that saved her life. Her sartorial schemes were all an elaborate dress rehearsal for an audience of one—a final act with no changes in costume, divorced from symbol or signifier. Stripping away the fashionable packaging reduces a performance to its functional essence; a lie by any other name.