Bird’s-eye view

In HBO’s The Girl, the Master of Suspense is depicted as the Master of Sadism, submitting fledgling actress Tippi Hedren to live bird attacks and attempted groping in the backseat of a car. It’s hard to say which is more horrifying.

Alfred Hitchcock has been wrung through the biopic mill a few times lately. HBO’s production (showing this month) makes for interesting pairing with last year’s theatrical release Hitch, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren. Whereas that feature focused on the casting and backstage hoodoo surrounding 1960’s Psycho (with a bouncy Scarlett Johansson standing in for Janet Leigh), The Girl takes up the story as Hitchcock casts his follow-up release, The Birds, seeking a new “ice blonde” to fulfill his heroine fantasies. “Blondes make the best victims,” reads a caption credited to Hitchcock at the opening of The Girl. “They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”

Toby Jones captures the voice of Hitchcock pretty well, but gets no closer physically than Hopkins did to the man with an all-too-public profile: the portly silhouette and wry commentary of Hitch on his TV show made him such a familiar figure that true mimicry is perhaps impossible to pull off.

Sienna Miller rises to the job of playing Tippi Hedren, an American fashion model with no acting experience who becomes Hitch’s latest obsession. Miller, who’s more able to slip into character than someone like Keira Knightley (see: Factory Girl), captures the steely reserve of Hedren, who later accused Hitchcock of hitting on her repeatedly while making The Birds, then tormenting her when she refused him.

Get the girl: Director Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) sizes up his new blonde in HBO’s The Girl.  

The torment goes beyond typical casting couch ploys: by Hedren’s account, Hitch became obsessed with her, constantly harassing the actress sexually and psychologically, on and off the set. True, Hitchcock locked Hedren into an exclusive contract, barring her from appearing outside of his pictures; and her career never thrived after The Birds and Marnie, her two pictures with the director. Yet by the end of The Girl, Jones descends into a parody of obsession that’s almost psychotic: you practically expect him to don a bathrobe and wig like Mrs. Bates and reel around wielding a knife. The narrow script (by Gwyneth Hughes) offers only one side of the story — that of a woman pushed to the brink of sanity, saved only by her strength and determination. (Well, the title is The Girl, after all. It suggests that Hedren is not only “The Girl,” but the “Final Girl” of John Carpenter/Wes Craven movies: the one who survives the maniac’s unrelenting pursuit.)

While the movie Hitch offered a too-tame, almost ebullient view of the director’s peculiar, er, work methods, HBO’s The Girl swings in the opposite direction, depicting old Hitch as a lecher of uncommon cruelty, one whose idea of charm was sending the actress’s daughter, Melanie Griffith, a gift of a small wooden coffin with a blonde doll — dressed exactly like her mum — inside.

It’s hard to credit either biopic version as 100-percent reality, even if based on biographical accounts. The truth about Hitchcock is probably more complicated than either film can capture. Looking at his work methods from the outside, some see sadism, while others put it down to the intensity that’s needed to be an effective director. And as far as behind-the-scenes lechery, Hedren’s hellish experience has not been corroborated by other Hitchcock blondes such as Kim Novak and Janet Leigh. Still, this doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

The attic scene (from The Birds) is particularly damning. The Girl focuses on the moment when Hedren is to enter an attic door, only to be pecked by a flock of birds. Hitch originally planned to use mechanical birds, but perhaps found them unconvincing. Instead, a bird handler throws live ones in Hedren’s face as the cameras role (the bird handler’s advice to the nervous Hedren: “You’ll be safe… just don’t let them near your eyes.”). The scene reportedly took five days to shoot. Why Hitch insisted on so many takes with live birds is open to interpretation. Was he looking for a level of terror that he hadn’t yet plumbed in his untested new actress? Or was he willingly inflicting lingering torture on a starlet who had refused his advances? As The Girl proceeds, it’s obvious which view is offered.

Also in contrast to Hitch, the director’s wife Alma (here played by mousy Imelda Staunton) can’t hold a candle to Mirren’s pluckier version, a woman who would take over on Hitch’s set when he was ill and suggest dialogue changes. It’s hard to square such diametrically opposite views of the husband-wife relationship in these two movies.

Miller, on the other hand, plays Hedren as a woman who grows to empower herself by refusing Hitch’s increasingly freaky demands. Every time he pushes her to the brink, she responds by becoming as hard as marble, the very “ice blonde” that Hitchcock sought in his leading ladies. Still, this doesn’t stop him from trying: “I want you to make yourself available to me sexually whenever I ask,” he creepily informs Hedren behind closed doors, but in The Girl’s view, it’s all bluff: earlier he had admitted to his assistant, Jim, that he’s impotent.

All of this may be true. Or not. The fact is, despite Hedren’s critical acclaim in two of Hitchcock’s most celebrated movies, she never did work with him again, or in Hollywood very much for that matter. Perhaps two experiences in the presence of the Master of Suspense was enough to convince her that acting was a lot harder than simply living.

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Watch for repeat screenings of The Girl this month on HBO and HBO HD.