Harrow Road Police Station and Alfred Hitchcock
The Places That Change Our Lives
https://medium.com/be-somebody/tolstoys-dilemma-67747c0207fd
Harrow Road Police Station
“This is what they do to naughty boys.”
In 1904, at the tender age of five years old, a nice young boy named Alfred was sent to jail in Leytonstone in East London. The incident didn't make the front pages and remained in obscurity for decades. Nor was there any question of the authorities mistaking him for a different five-year-old felon. He was in this predicament because his father instructed him to walk to the Harrow Road Police Station and turn himself in. The crime? It must have been atrocious, an act of the most unforgettable kind.
Except that Alfred forgot.
William Hitchcock was a devout Irish Catholic who brooked no indiscretions, especially on the part of his children, and before sending Alfred off he he gave him a note that made it clear — the boy was to be placed in a solitary jail cell. His incarceration would set off a chain of events no less profound than Jean Pernet’s flunking Albert Einstein in physics (by the way, Einstein wasn't surprised; he graduated second to last in his class). As the weighty metal doors closed behind him, the officer looked at Alfred scornfully, solemnly declaring through tarnished iron bars, "This is what we do to naughty boys."
For his crime, Alfred Hitchcock served a sentence of five minutes.
Young and Innocent
History does not record what Alfred Hitchcock did, as recounted in his interview much later with François Truffaut: "I must have been about four or five years old when my father sent me to the Police Station with a note. I haven't the faintest idea why I was punished. My father used to call me his 'little lamb without a spot…." Like most Hitchcock stories, it had a suspenseful ending that would have pleased the subject.
The imprisonment of Alfred Hitchcock as a child may be the most frequently cited and misunderstood anecdote in Hollywood history. This was in part because he loved telling the story every chance he could, and because his exceptional career — marked by numerous Academy Award nominations for Best Director (tied with Robert Altman, Clarence Brown, and King Vidor), a remarkable four films earning the Best Picture distinction, and a total of fifty Oscars — overshadowed the true meaning of the incident in his life.
Contrary to modern interpretations, ranging from hysterical accusations of child abuse to those who find in the brief episoce a key to his peculiar relationship with the leading ladies film critic Roger Ebert astutely called "blonde, icy, and remote,” the punishment may have been an act of liberation as well as paternal compassion. It certainly inspired an extraordinary obsession with danger.
But it is crucial to contextualize the event in the backdrop of Hitchcock’s Victorian era. The late 1800s and early 1900s were a time when corporal punishment was a creditable method of teaching children, not abuse. For example, teachers were obliged to beat pupils using a cane made out of birch wood — boys were caned on the backside, and girls were beaten on their bare legs — for infractions such as leaving a room without permission.
The story reflects, in all likelihood, Bill Hitchcock’s crude attempt to provide a milder alternative for Alfred’s misbehavior in place of the more popular forms of discipline. Furthermore, Nellie Whelan, Hitchcock’s adoring mother, was always on hand to offer comfort through indulgent treats from the cupboard. It explains the trademark paunch. Hitchcock managed to pack 365 pounds into a 5'8" frame as a result of the immense satisfaction food gave him— which transmuted into the yin-yang of danger followed by happy endings played out in his films.
In later years, Alfred Hitchcock, fully recognized the profound impact of his early jailing incident, commenting that he wanted to inscribe “This is what they do to naughty boys” on his tombstone. he understood the transformative power of significant places, the people and experiences we associate with them. It was an acknowledgement of the lasting impression they have on our lives, influencing our artistic endeavors, and liberating our ambitions. Like the masterful filmmaker he was, Hitchcock was never one to let a compelling narrative go to waste.
Appearances
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation.”
The jailing incident, far from being a mere footnote to Hitchcock's biography, offered profound inspiration for his development as a director and storyteller.
Hitchcock recognized a traumatic experience when he saw one, even from the age of five. According to the International Society for Traumatic Stress, he created his own therapeutic solution: “To gain authority over trauma-related memories, people often have to talk in detail about their past experiences.” Hitchcock did just that. Throughout his illustrious career, he skillfully deconstructed the frightening flotsam and jetsam of his childhood, recombining them and into extraordinary works of art.
Without the aid of neurological drugs, as biographer Donald Spotto notes in The Dark Side of Genius, Hitchcock masterfully took a literal house of horrors and transformed it into captivating stories featuring policemen, jails, and thrilling encounters. Through his storytelling prowess, he was able to develop an astonishingly new directorial philosophy: “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation.”
The notion of individuals falsely accused and unfairly punished became a recurring theme. One notable example is "Incident in a Small Jail," a short film from the sixth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, released in 1961.
This thinly disguised biographical piece revolves around a traveling salesman who arrives in a small town and is unexpectedly arrested for jaywalking. To his dismay, he shares a jail cell with a suspected murderer of a vulnerable young girl. As tension mounts, a dangerous lynch mob begins to form outside the jail. It does not take a degree in psychiatry to see where the rage against unchecked authority began. But by highlighting the ramifications of false accusations, anger gives way to a haunting reminder of the fragile line between perceived guilt and actual innocence as Hitchcock challenges the viewer to confront their preconceptions and the dangers of rushing to judgment.
Later, in "Strangers on a Train," "North by Northwest," "Frenzy," and "To Catch a Thief," the ability to prevail under pressure while the wrong arm of the law does its mischief, coupled with a macabre sense of humor and bleak view of humanity, became the key to his development of character. His films (and audiences) enjoyed glimpses into individuals crumbling but ultimately finding redemption through a desperate pursuit of love and protection.
The Wrong Man
The lifelong fascination with suspense that defined Alfred Hitchcock's career was not solely the result of one brief encounter with incarceration. Growing up in the haunting shadow of London's East End, where chilling tales of Jack the Ripper still lingered two decades hence, Hitchcock was already immersed in a milieu that ignited his curiosity for the macabre. While his five-minute prison sentence left him — as he candidly told renowned talk show host Tom Snyder as late as 1973, "scared stiff of anything … to do with the law" — it did not leave him scarred.
And therein lies the distinction between Hitchcock and our all too easily triggered times. This was the crucial difference that sets the extraordinary apart from the ordinary.
Hitchcock's resilience can be attributed to mindset. In his films, he blurs the lines between suspense and tragedy, humor and insanity, creating a unique world where these elements coexist. His ability to transform a literal house of horrors into the enchantment of a Hollywood movie set without skipping a beat attests to his genius to turn every ordeal into a deal — that if we stuck with his movies until things worked out, he’d promise to make us happy.
He knew firsthand that danger could be real, but it could also be imagined, and the imagination could be a way to find something more profound, which was his art. As Ernest Hemingway would say a few decades later, "Everyone breaks now and then, but many emerge stronger in the broken places."
Hitchcock emerged not only stronger, but more famous and successful.
In his 1956 psychological thriller, Hitchcock once again returns to the theme of a scary place. “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” a gripping tale of the McKenna family, an American vacationing in French Morocco, takes a suspenseful turn when they encounter a suspicious Frenchman. The Frenchman is stabbed, and soon after, their son is kidnapped, leading to a tense situation where the boy is held captive in an isolated room with armed criminals and determined police on their trail. This plot may feel familiar as Hitchcock had been rehearsing it since early childhood.
In the opening scenes of the movie, keen-eyed viewers will spot Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic bald head making a cameo appearance alongside Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day in Casablanca. These cameos became a trademark of Hitchcock’s films, injecting a touch of humor and intrigue into the otherwise sinister narrative. It served as a playful nod to the audience, indicating that a compassionate figure was overseeing the story while also urging them to pay close attention to seemingly ordinary events in the lives of ordinary people.
The suspense deepens in a later scene when Doris Day’s character, Jo McKenna, sings the famous song “Que Sera, Sera” during the grand finale at the Royal Albert Hall. Through her performance, she ensures her son can hear her and identify his location, leading to the dramatic climax where the kidnapper meets his demise while attempting to escape.
The plot thickens in a much later scene when Doris Day’s character, Jo McKenna, sings the famous song “Que Sera, Sera” during the grand finale at the Royal Albert Hall leading her son to whistle along. Once more in the Hitchcockian mythology, a mother comes to the rescue of a young boy. The whistling reveals where the boy is being held hostage, and the kidnapper falls to his death trying to escape.
The three verses of “Que Sera, Sera” or “What will I be?” explore the uncertainties of the future from a child’s perspective. The mother’s insistent response, “What will be, will be,” underscores the unknown nature of the future at any given moment. Hitchcock not only employs this beloved song for its melodious score but also as a means to convey a deeper message.
When Hitchcock made his signature cameo appearances, he was reminding his audience that the future, very much like his own at one time, is beset by trapdoors and pretend jail cells, and though they may terrify us, we do not need to let them alter our path or our self image. He wants his characters to have the power to change outcomes, an enigmatic response to the film’s overarching question: What will we be?
However, the scene also carries a secondary significance, serving as a cautionary reminder that appearances are misleading, perhaps the critical tool of the suspense filmmaker.
Hitchcock was well aware the song would be immediately recognizable to his British audience, as “Que Sera, Sera” is of English origin. For those unfamiliar with Spanish, Italian, or French, the phrase “Que Sera, Sera” appears grammatically incorrect in all Romance languages. In reality, it is a mistranslation from Spanish or Italian, akin to Pig Latin, resulting in a literal rendering of “what will be, will be.”
While it was translated into late medieval Spanish in 1559, the grammatically correct version would be “lo que será, será,” which is itself incorrect, the enchanting melody struck a chord in the English-speaking world. The Italian-sounding variation, “che sarà sarà,” can be traced back to a British aristocrat who adopted it as his heraldic motto in the 16th century. The phrase also appears in Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus” and Charles Dickens’ novel “Hard Times.”
Even during Hitchcock’s time, “Que Sera, Sera” remained a linguistic anomaly, searching for its true linguistic roots, much like Hitchcock himself in a jail cell. His portrayal suggests that lineage matters less than a captivating melody when symbolizing our ability to overcome past struggles and forge a promising future.
Despite its fabricated Latin origin, the song “Que Sera, Sera” won the esteemed Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1956. Like the director, it was a true original in the sense that it was self made, mirroring Alfred Hitchcock’s transformative journey from a brief stint behind bars to becoming a renowned master of suspense.
After all, without suspense, Hitchcock was the most ordinary of ordinaries.
The Longest Day
Places make us or break us. They come in all shapes and sizes, a home, a place of birth, or a vacation. They can be a college or a platoon, a spaceship or a basketball court. They can be a jail cell on Harrow Street in Leytonstone. The experiences have a palpable and liberating effect, or if they are mismatched, smother and suffocate. Hitchcock understood that the difference comes down to how we see ourselves, either as the servent of our environment or the master of our domain. Hitchcock’s personal narrative shines a light on that profound realization.
The key to dealing with his life’s challenges — a phrase that could also be taken to mean the fear of the unknown — was perception. Hitchcock approached his trials with the discernment of an antique dealer, carefully choosing what to retain and what to discard. Like a skilled craftsman, he meticulously altered Grace Kelly’s Philadelphia accent to that of an aristocratic femme fatale and adjusted Cary Grant’s hair part to the right side to make him handsomer, to suit his artistic vision.As Grant was to acknowledge to Hitchcock much later, “I became the man I wanted to be; I don’t know if I became him or he became me.”
Where others perceived trauma, Hitchcock found theater. With a keen eye, he unearthed something of profound value during this brief encounter in the Harrow Road Police Station. It was the longest day of his life in one important respect, it was a necessary first stop on a long road to an extraordinary destination and it lasted a lifetime.
An Ordinary Life
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation.”
— Alfred Hitchcock
When reflecting on Hitchcock’s remarkable journey, we are reminded of the ability to transcend humble beginnings as he did moving from a period of juvenile incarceration to recognition at the Oscars. It serves as a powerful stimulant to find our our rightful calling in life, which most often begins with the right place at the right time. What that obscure sounding statement means is something that unlocks our inner greatness, and without which we may as well join the long line of hopefuls who ‘live lives of quiet desperation, as Henry David Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays while spending his year meditating in Walden in 1854:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
But what exactly was Thoreau telling us? That life is fairly hopeless, even pointless? There is a true self that we nurture and grow. If we allow it to develop it expands and conquers new worlds. Otherwise, when restrained, one can’t tell a prize pumpkin from the kind that sit outside gas station lots on Halloween. They are all marked for a job, and then poof, it’s over. For Hitchcock, his life became an adventure to find out why he cared so much about art, and why he chose to follow it wherever it led. He was planning his escape.
As Charles Derry wrote in his biography “The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock,” Hitchcock was not interested in mere mystery, as the genre often lacked the essential element of emotion that is crucial for creating suspense. For Hitchcock, “mystery (without intrigue) is seldom suspenseful.” Hitchcock adored emotion. He loved the thrill of the chase, and found in it the calling of his art and his raison d’etre. He became the small boy conquering the fear every time he sat in the director’s chair.
Alfred Hitchcock, despite his unremarkable youth, found a hidden greatness somewhere along the way. It became our job to determine where and and how?
His early years were filled with mundane jobs and humdrum opportunities, seemingly destined for mediocrity, but then his path took a turn. After attending the London Council School of Marine Engineering and working as a sales clerk at a telegraph company, Hitchcock’s talent for drawing and design emerged, leading him to a role in creating title cards for silent films in 1920. This initial artistic endeavor marked his entry into the world of cinema, although his directorial debut would not come until 1922.
Alfred Hitchcock led an unremarkable youth. His early years were filled with mundane jobs and humdrum opportunities, seemingly destined for mediocrity, but his path took a turn when he found a niche in art. After attending the London Council School of Marine Engineering and working as a sales clerk at a telegraph company, Hitchcock’s talent for drawing and design emerged, leading him to a role in creating title cards for silent films in 1920. This marked his entry into the world of cinema, although his directorial debut would not come until 1922.
Still, it was to be a long road.
Still, it was to be a long road. His most notable films, notable films such as “It Takes a Thief,” “The Birds,” and “Psycho,” would not be created until he was in his late 50s and 60s. Think of this time as gestation period in which suspense and tragedy, humor and insanity grew to be only millimeters apart, and therein lay his genius.
Born into London’s cockney society in 1899, Hitchcock came of age during an era when Victorians were captivated by sin and intrigued by the vulnerability of helpless blonds. Throughout his illustrious career, Hitchcock placed cool, self composed actresses in precarious situations, and then enveloped these goddess-like figures with obsessively paternal attention. It doesn’t take Freud to figure it out that when he was young something inspired an inner self to behold the world at large, and that something made all the difference in his life.
We asked ourselves, how did Hitchcock take five minutes of tough love and transform it into a lifetime of immortality. What was it that happened in his five year old mind? That something was a place that liberated him, or brought the inner boy into the artist on the world stage. We were certain of that because of the great yawning gap between his early life and his achievements.
What we didn’t understand is how it worked. We set out to find out what it was.
