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Alfred Hitchcock

A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone

May I have a show of hands?

By Alan Vanneman

See the introduction to this nine-part photo study.

In the Jesuit school that Hitchcock attended as a boy, misbehavior was punished by blows to the hand with a sort of rubber truncheon or club. I suspect that this experience helped Hitchcock to think of hands as the symbol of human vulnerability. In his films, people are always extending their hands in hope of assistance, and very seldom getting it. Vertigo begins with a re-creation of Hitchcock's early schooling: we see a bar, and then a hand smacking into it and grabbing it.

The hand we see at the beginning of Vertigo belongs to a criminal, being pursued over the rooftops of San Francisco by Jimmy Stewart. This leads to one of the many "falling" scenes in Hitchcock, with the hero holding on for dear life.

Stewart has a similar mishap at the end of Rear Window, when murderer Raymond Burr attempts to toss him over the sill. Here we see hands used as symbols of both vulnerability and violence.

The climax of Strangers on a Train shows Farley Granger clinging to an out-of-control merry-go-round while Robert Walker stamps on his foot.

Cary Grant, clinging to a rock on Mt. Rushmore, suffers similar mistreatment from Martin Landau at the end of North by Northwest.

Hitchcock loved to show hands in extreme closeup. A sequence in Strangers on a Train, showing Robert Walker retrieving a lighter from a storm drain, is one of the most agonizing on film.

While hands in Hitchcock's films usually "tell the truth" — that is, express human vulnerability — they can also lie. In Notorious, Claude Rains reaches out to take the hands of his beloved wife, Ingrid Bergman, not knowing that she is holding the key to the wine cellar, stolen from his key chain and a symbol of her decision to betray him. She opens her right hand but artfully conceals the key in her left and as they embrace transfers it to her right, which allows her to drop it silently to the floor. She then retrieves it and, in a variation of what has just taken place, passes it to Cary Grant. The concluding close-up is probably the tightest shot possible at the time.

In Psycho, Marion Crane's hands are entirely innocent. In the famous shower scene, we see her, left for dead by "Mother," reach her hand out to grasp the shower curtain. It collapses beneath her weight and she sprawls lifelessly to the floor. (The breasts you may faintly see in the background do not belong to Janet Leigh, but rather a dancer whose name has been discreetly withheld from posterity.)

Marion Crane reaches out for mercy, but in the world of Psycho, the hands of mercy have been turned to stone, emphasized by the bronzed hands in Mother's bedroom.

Only in the last shot of Psycho is Marion's request for help granted. The audience seems to reach into the screen to pull her buried car from the swamp into which Norman had cast it. But this is very little comfort indeed.

Click any of the links below for additional categories/motifs, or to return to the intro page:

Houses † Staircases † Women's Hair † Hands † Eyes

The Uncanny † The Vortex † Notorious Sequence

The Man Who Knew Too Much Sequence

November 2003 | Issue 42
Copyright © 2003 by Alan Vanneman

ALSO: Check out other fine articles and reviews by the author.

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