The Girl (2012 TV film)

Background and development

The Girl is based on Donald Spoto's 2009 book, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, which examines the relationships between Alfred Hitchcock and the female stars of his films. Spoto wrote that Hitchcock attempted to turn Tippi Hedren (star of The Birds and Marnie) into his perfect woman, choosing the clothes and lipstick he thought she should wear. Hedren told Spoto that Hitchcock fantasised about running off with her.^[3][4][5]

Details of a film examining Hitchcock's obsession with Hedren were reported in December 2011. The Girl, written by Gwyneth Hughes, would star Toby Jones as Hitchcock and Sienna Miller as Hedren.^[2] In a post-production BBC press release about the film in November 2012, Hughes described her enthusiasm when she was approached about the project while on holiday: "[I] got a phone call from producer Amanda Jenks. She only managed to get out the words 'Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren' before I was already shouting 'yes yes yes!' to this seductive, sinister, deeply touching story of love and obsession among Hollywood royalty".^[4] Hughes interviewed Hedren and members of Hitchcock's crew before preparing a script. She described her discussions with Hedren: "Her wisdom and insights have helped me to put her real life ordeal on to the screen. I know Tippi is absolutely thrilled, as I am, with the casting of Sienna Miller to play her".^[2] The film's title was inspired by the name Hitchcock used for Hedren after she stopped working for him.^[3][6]

Diana Cilliers designed the costumes, recreating what Hedren wore (including Melanie Daniels' green suit) in Hitchcock's films: "[T]here were certain items that we just copied – such as the Birds suit and the yellow Marnie bag, but otherwise we looked at clean lines, colours. Nothing too fussy".^[7]

Filming

As part of her research Miller (who was in the early stages of pregnancy) spoke to Hedren several times during filming, and the two became friends.^[8] Live birds were used to recreate the filming of the attic scene in The Birds. Miller told the Radio Times: "I did go through a bird attack for two hours. It pales in comparison to what [Hedren] was subjected to, but it was pretty horrible. There were men off-camera with boxes of birds, throwing seagulls and pigeons in my face".^[9][10]

Jones's role as Hitchcock required him to spend four hours each day being made up with prosthetic makeup and a fatsuit,^[11] and he did daily twenty-minute vocal exercises to imitate Hitchcock's distinctive speech. In interview with The Scotsman, Jones said that "[Hitchcock's] voice was so beautiful. There's something in the rhythm and roll of it that is connected to the way Hitchcock thinks and moves. Then there is everything he ingested – the cigar smoking and drinking that's imprinted on his voice. And everywhere he lived; you can hear cockney London, California, and a plummy received pronunciation in that voice".^[12]

Release

As part of its marketing campaign for The Girl, HBO released a 30-second trailer in August 2012. During a Television Critics Association press tour promoting the film, Hedren said: "I have to say that when I first heard Toby's [Jones] voice as Alfred Hitchcock, my body just froze".^[13] Hedren's daughter, Melanie Griffith, attended a screening; when the film ended, the audience was silent until Griffith said: "Well, now I have to go back into therapy again!"^[11][12][14] Hedren attended a London screening in October.^[15] The Girl made its US television debut on HBO and HBO Canada on 20 October.^[3][16] It had its UK premiere on 26 December, as part of BBC Two's Christmas programming.^[17][18] The film was released on DVD in the UK on 7 January 2013.^[19]

Criticism and reaction

The film's portrayal of Hitchcock as a sexual predator was criticised. On the day of its UK television premiere, David Millward of The Daily Telegraph quoted Eva Marie Saint, Doris Day and Kim Novak, who described their work relationship with Hitchcock as and positive one than Hedren suggested of hers.^[26] Writing for savehitchcock.com (a website established in response to the media's portrayal of Hitchcock), John Russell Taylor – author of the 1978 biography Hitch – said the film is "totally absurd".^[33]

In an interview with London's Evening Standard in January 2013, Anthony Hopkins (who played the eponymous role in the 2012 Alfred Hitchcock biopic Hitchcock) questioned The Girl's portrayal of the director and the need for a film about that period of Hitchcock's career: "I talked to Tippi Hedren one day ... and she never mentioned that ... Whatever his obsession was, she didn't want to dwell on it ... I don't think it's necessary to put all that into a movie".^[24][34] Speaking to The Independent later that month, Hitchcock director Sacha Gervasi said, "[The Girl] seems a rare one-note portrayal of a man who was a little more complex than that. A lot of people, who were there, do not recognise this portrayal of him as this monster".^[33] Danny Huston, who played screenwriter Whitfield Cook in Hitchcock, told WENN.com that he believed Hitchcock would not have contested Hedren's account of him: "Hitchcock was such a deliciously dark character that I don't think he would dismiss what Tippi was saying as not true".^[35]

Prior to the film's release, Hedren said in October that although she believed the film accurately portrays Hitchcock's negative behaviour towards her, the time constraints of a 90-minute film prevented telling the entire story of her career with him. She told television critic Rob Salem: "It wasn't a constant barrage of harassment. If it had been constantly the way we have had to do it in this film, I would have been long gone".^[36]

Reviews

Before the film's US television debut, Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times was critical of the film's objectives: "[T]he trouble with The Girl is that it tries to psychoanalyze Hitchcock but fails by trying to know the man too much. It's a movie about Hitchcock that ignores his best advice: 'Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement'".^[3] Richard Brody of The New Yorker also gave the film a negative review, writing that, instead of being a drama, the film is an unoriginal work of criticism which "points to what everyone ought already to have been talking about in the first place: not least, that it's no surprise to learn that a filmmaker whose art is devoted to pain, fear, control, and sexual obsession also experienced and inflicted them in life".^[37] On the day of its UK premiere, James Rampton of The Independent wrote that The Girl was "no mere black-and-white hatchet job on Hitch. It does not seek to portray him as an unambiguous monster; rather, it highlights the profound psychological damage that plagued the director throughout his life".^[17] The Guardian's Deborah Orr was generally positive about the film: "[T]here was only one thing wrong with The Girl. There was no Hitchcock in the director's chair to make it the utterly compelling psychological drama that it could have been".^[38]

The Telegraph's Nigel Farndale praised the film's balanced view of the director: "[E]ven though he was portrayed in this exquisite drama as a manipulative, vindictive martinet, the portrait was not unsympathetic".^[39] The Daily Mirror's Jane Simon echoed this view, praising Jones's Hitchcock and writing that the actor "managed to give [Hitchcock] touches of humanity, too. There are moments when you feel a real pang of sympathy for Hitchcock, although admittedly they don't last long".^[40] She also added: "[G]liding gracefully through it all (and with an impeccable American accent) Sienna Miller brings untouchable beauty and icy glamour, but also captures the extraordinary resilience Hedren must have had to withstand everything Hitchcock threw at her".^[40] In The Telegraph, Clive James said "[a] better choice [to play Hedren] could not have been made than Sienna Miller, who is even lovelier than Hedren was ... Toby Jones, quite believably looked stunned".^[41] John Doyle of Canada's The Globe and Mail was less impressed with the actors' performances. Of Miller (whom he described as "good but not great") he wrote that "she doesn't have the iciness that Hedren had in her youth and she struggles to convey Hedren's enormous strength of character as a woman unwilling to let Hitchcock have his way". Doyle was equally critical of Jones, describing him as someone who "seems to be imitating Hitchcock rather than inhabiting the role".^[16]

Historian Alex von Tunzelmann gave the film a mixed review in The Guardian: "The Girl is perhaps a more effective piece of film-making than Hitchcock, though it is also more questionable in its portrayal of the director [...][t]he film depicts [the attic scene] accurately, though Jones's Hitchcock appears to be more gratified by the spectacle than the real Hitch was".^[20] Simon quotes Donald Spoto's book The Dark Side of Genius (1983), in which Hedren told Spoto that "[Hitchcock] was terribly upset by all this"; screenwriter Evan Hunter said that "[h]e wanted to shoot it, but something in him didn't want to shoot it, and everybody could hear how nervous he was".^[20] Nancy deWolf Smith of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the film should not be viewed in terms of truths or untruths, but instead as "an exquisitely lurid morality play in the Hitchcock style", calling The Girl "an original masterpiece that pays tribute to Hitchcock's talent and vision".^[42]

Ratings

According to viewing figures collected by Nielsen Media Research, The Girl's US television premiere (at 9:00 pm on Saturday, 20 October 2012) was watched by an average audience of 722,000.^[43][44] The first UK screening (at the same time, on 26 December) attracted an audience of 1.8 million, according to The Guardian.^[45]

Accolades