They’re greying, perverted and mildly alcoholic and combine traits which, on their own, can be violently unappealing. But when combined and wrapped in a sharp suit, the result is otherworldly.
Everyone has a childhood idol. Or, in some cases, multiple idols, which can result in a terrifying mish-mash of costume parts if the person in question is unwilling to prioritize their hero. Mine, terrifyingly, was the Hitchcockian male. Harried, besotted, greying at the temples men of action. Being a notorious douche-pagoda, you’d think that Alfred Hitchcock was bound to portray men and women in line with how he viewed gender politics (anyone brave enough to try and bang actress Tippi Hedren whilst his wife was in the next room has terminal quantities of chutzpah). But the Hitchcock male was, and is, blazingly attractive for several key reasons.
Firstly, he gets thrust into adversity. Sure, I could sexualise the word “thrust”, but I’m classier than that. Few things are more attractive than watching a handsome man in an immaculate suit get chased by a shady consortium of hitmen/psychopaths/seagulls. Take Roger Thornhill, the protagonist in North by Northwest, played by Cary Grant. After a case of mistaken identity, he bounds from mishap to mishap like a gazelle which has caught on fire. Yet he somehow manages to evolve and adapt, outwit his pursuers time and time again, nail a spy and stay in touch with his mother.
The Hitchcockian male also has a superb dress sense. Much of this comes down to a) the era in which the films were shot, and b) costume designer Edith Head, whose style was so potent it could rupture organs from a distance of fifty feet. Every Hitchcock male is dressed immaculately. Moreover, they have an open disdain for fashion and grooming whilst looking immaculate. The exception to the rule is in Rear Window, in which L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) chastises Grace Kelly for bothering with fashion at all. He, it should be pointed out, spends the entire film in his pajamas. Ladies.
Incidentally, one of the reasons I idolised men in Hitchcock films was their attraction to terrifying, complex women. At the age of 11, basically every female seemed terrifying and complex to me. This might be because of a gas leak at our school, which caused me to lose my shit when the school principal, Mrs Doherty, spewed flames from her eyes at the emergency assembly, but the men in Hitchcock films dice with some truly off the map ladies.
The most notable examples of this are in Vertigo (fake death, phobia and hair dye debacle), Psycho (dead mother stabbing debacle), and Marnie (can’t recall the plot because Sean Connery’s hotness distracted me).
There was one quality however, which men in Hitchcock films possessed that, as a vague and scrawny youngster with a penchant for reading Tin Tin during class, I coveted: they climbed Mt Rushmore. Sure, only Cary Grant did it in North by Northwest, but that was the first Hitchcock film I saw, and the score by Bernard Hermann, coupled with a young Martin Landau stepping on Cary Grant’s fingers, or the image of a crop duster doing something other than dusting crops wiped all my preconceived images of cinema and manhood away. Men in Hitchcock films, I decided, were perfect. Even Norman Bates in Psycho had redeeming qualities; he was good to his mother (in a very specific way), was kind to strange women (at least initially) and, again, dressed very well.
At least, most of the time.
