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The final reputation of Alfred Hitchcock-arguably the greatest film director who ever lived-today seems to be haunted by the noisy ghosts of misogyny and cruelty. Robin Wood, dean of Hitchcock criticism, has argued in Hitchcock's Films Revisited ( 1989) that the most important question about Alfred Hitchcock's films is whether they can be "saved for feminism." A major difficulty in doing that is the primary biographical work on Hitchcock, Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (1983). Spoto presents a Hitchcock far removed from the self-promoted image of impishly macabre fat man; The Dark Side argues that Hitchcock was an inwardly-tortured master manipulator who became a despot toward actresses like Tippi Hedren for whom he felt a simultaneous attraction and repulsion. And yet, despite such violent exhibits as the shower scene in Psycho (1960), Hitchcock continues to attract phenomenal popular and critical interest. Whatever Hitchcock's inner demons, women in Hitchcock films are often the focus of the audience's strongest empathy and are, indeed, the main characters in films such as Blackmail (1929), Rebecca (1940), and Marnie (1964). Further, although it has not and probably cannot be adequately assessed, the creative contributions of Hitchcock's wife Alma to his work were significant and continued throughout her life.
The question of women and their treatment by Hitchcock exists for every contemporary devotee of Hitchcock's work, so when the American Movie Classics channel invited me to moderate a historic round-table discussion with five Hitchcock actresses from three decades of his films-their presentation for the Television Critics of America meeting in Pasadena in July, 1997-I leapt at the chance. The panelists were Eva Marie Saint, who starred in North by Northwest (1959), Janet Leigh from Psycho (1960), Tippi Hedren, who appeared in The Birds ( 1963) and Marnie, Suzanne Pleshette from The Birds, and Karen Black, who appeared in Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976). As a scholar who has studied and taught Hitchcock's work, I wanted to learn more about Hitchcock's relationship with women from these actresses who had worked so closely with him, and I was not disappointed. In the discussion that follows, clearly there are things that remain unsaid-when the other actresses champion Hitchcock, for example, Tippi Hedren seems to disappear from...