HITCHCOCK: THE SPY-TINGLING SIDE OF GENIUS

Secret arms swaps. Cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations. Kidnapings. Covert hostage negotiations.

It’s all old news to Donald Spoto, a 45-year-old author and lecturer on film who’s best known for his best-selling biography “The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.”

“It’s very timely, isn’t it?” said Spoto. “You’d have to say that Hitchcock was tragically prescient. In 1934, when he made the original ‘Man Who Knew Too Much,’ he had terrorists kidnap a small child. And in ‘Saboteur,’ he had a bomb go off in Piccadilly Circus.”

Spoto threw his hands in the air.

“At the time, people thought it was wild. Who would do such a thing! Yet those events could completely be torn from today’s headlines!”

Spoto is currently presenting a film series, “Spying on Spies: Political Thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock,” at the Otis/Parsons School of Design.

An articulate, animated storyteller who can recite long patches of Hitchcock dialogue verbatim, Spoto insists that the master of suspense refused to romanticize the shadowy realm of espionage or Oliver North-style covert adventurers.

“One of the things we’re stressing in the course is what an analogous time we’re in today,” said Spoto, who with his thick thatch of white hair, checkered shirt and Levi’s, looked more like a gentleman farmer than a film scholar.

“For Hitchcock, the life of a spy was tawdry at best, murderous at worst. Take ‘Secret Agent,’ for example. Madeleine Carroll’s immediate reaction to having to kill a man is to say, ‘How thrilling.’ But later, when the wrong man is murdered, she tells John Gielgud, ‘I don’t like killing at close quarters as much as I expected.’

“We see that espionage--even in the service of our country--isn’t a glamorous way for a devoted patriot to have a career. Hitchcock never approached his stories from a political soapbox or a preacher’s podium, but from the aspect of how these capers affect individual lives.”

Spoto, who’s also written a critical study of Hitchcock films plus biographies of Tennessee Williams and Stanley Kramer, recently moved here to complete work on a Lotte Lenya book project. He says his film and lecture series stress the uneasy relationship between public duty and private conscience.

“Hitchcock refused to endorse the belief that the ends justify the means,” he explained. “Look at Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in ‘Notorious.’ We can’t endorse their aims, because the scheme nearly gets them both killed--and it doesn’t even work.

“That’s the great irony of that film--the villains’ experiments are successful in the end! It’s like the CIA’s poisoned cigars with Castro. The plans go awry anyway.”

Spoto waved his arms again. “In fact, it’s amazing that Hitchcock got movies like ‘Notorious’ and ‘North by Northwest’ made at all. If you really look at them, they suggest that our side is just as guilty of villainy as the other side. And this at a time--in 1946 and 1959--when our country was at its most chauvinistic.

“Hitchcock had no illusions. Look at the henchmen in his films. They haven’t a care what happens to the people working for them. In ‘Notorious,’ we know Ingrid Bergman is dying--she’s being poisoned. Yet Cary Grant’s spy master is lying in bed, spreading cheese and crackers, worried about closing the case.

“Of course, we--the audience--care. You can’t cynically say, ‘What’s a life or two?’ Not when it’s Ingrid Bergman’s life!”

Spoto was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., and grew up in New York’s Westchester County and Connecticut. At age 10, he found himself watching “Strangers on a Train.”

“When I was a teen-ager, Hitchcock was a national presence,” he recalled. “From age 10 to 17, I saw him make all these extraordinary films, one after another--’Rear Window,’ ‘Vertigo,’ ‘North by Northwest.’ It made a huge impression on me.”

In 1975, after Hitchcock read several chapters from Spoto’s critical study “The Art of Alfred Hitchcock,” the aging director invited the author to the set of “Family Plot,” Hitchcock’s final film. Though in failing health, Hitchcock was unfailingly cordial, lunching numerous times with Spoto to discuss his work.

“Like Dickens, he was his own best publicist,” Spoto said. “He was a great conversationalist, always willing to discuss his technique. But he avoided any discussion of the content or the themes of his films.”

Did Spoto ever try to steer talk in that direction?

“He wasn’t a man to be drawn out,” he said with a hearty laugh. “If he didn’t want to answer a question, he just answered with his own answer.”

Apparently Hitchcock appreciated Spoto’s critical study. The author has a framed note from the director hanging in a downstairs bathroom, with a handwritten postscript saying, “The book is great.”

However, when Spoto’s “Dark Side of Genius” came out, some Hitchcock loyalists complained that the biography dwelt too much on Hitchcock’s troubled private life, in particular his cruel practical jokes, drinking and bizarre obsession with then-protege Tippi Hedren.

“Let’s just say they don’t know what I left out, “ he retorted. “I don’t want to go into any details, but Hitchcock’s life was full of private pain which he miraculously transformed into public art.”

Oddly enough, considering Hitchcock’s fascination with the labyrinthine realm of crime and espionage, Spoto insists that Hitchcock was “strangely” apolitical. Many of his films were “loosely” inspired by actual incidents, but Hitchcock was more intrigued by personal loyalties and emotional entanglements than political events.

“He never tried to stencil his films to the headlines of the day, which is probably why they seem so applicable now,” Spoto said. “Until the ‘60s, he never even mentioned what country is spying. It’s always some mysterious McGuffin, like a treaty’s secret peace clause or the strange substance in a wine bottle.

“It’s a very English trait--they’ve always been fascinated with the thriller, largely due to its moral subtext. Hitchcock was terrified of disorder and chaos. And for him, espionage undid the order of the world. His spies--these insidious gentleman villains--always end up safely on some gorgeous terrace overlooking the Riviera, leaving a trail of hacked-up bodies behind them.”

For Spoto, that’s what makes Hitchcock such a landmark film maker. He demonstrated how “the veneer of polite respectability” can mask the most gruesome crimes, and yet showcase these unsettling portraits as beguiling entertainment.

“Americans tend to think that something is either serious art or diverting entertainment,” he said. “But Hitchcock knew it could be both.

“He always used to say that people should see his movies three times to pick out the significance of every detail. Everyone thought that was just another shrewd publicity ploy. But I think that was his typically veiled way of admitting there were a lot of tantalizing things going on beneath the surface.”