Hitchcock in The Gazebo (1959)

  Add George Marshall’s The Gazebo (1959) to the list of Best Non-Hitchcock Hitchcock films. It may not dislodge Charade but it ranks. 

Glenn Ford plays Elliott Nash, a TV writer/director who’s driven to kill a blackmailer threatening to publish old nude shots of his wife Nell (Debbie Reynolds), who’s breaking into Broadway stardom. Her devoted ex-suitor Harlow Edison (Carl Reiner) is the cop hot on his tail.

Nash is trying to write a screenplay commissioned by Hitchcock, but his blackmail worries distract him. When Hitch phones him, Nash solicits his advice and how to get rid of a body without a shovel. The “fireplace” response suggests the body might be burned away but no. Hitch rather suggested deploying the fireplace shovel. Thus the film-world produces a miniature solution to the real/reel-life dilemma. 

Hitchcock casts a more general shadow than just that scene. The whimsical imagery and music of the opening and closing title sequences evoke the tone of The Trouble With Harry (1955).  So too the characters’ assuming responsibility and guilt over a corpse they didn’t kill and the burial and unearthing of the body. Both films offer a black comic version of Hitchcock’s patented “transfer of guilt” theme. Cop Edison is a hedonistic and self-serving antithesis to sheriff Calvin Wiggs. But the antithesis is as clear a parallel as an equation would be. 

When the opening scene moves from a classic noir murder scene into the mechanics of its TV presentation we recall the theatre/life fluidity in Stage Fright (1950). (See my discussion of that film on this site.) 

A host of Hitchcocks — especially I Confess (1950), Dial M for Murder (1954), The Wrong Man (1956), etc. — lie behind the cop’s line “It’s amazing. How an innocent man can look so guilty.” Here the wrong man is the corpse as well as the erroneously accused killer.

Unlike Suspicion (1941) here the husband who appears to be so guilty actually is that guilty — until a convenient heart attack renders him innocent. 

Finally, the climactic intervention by the pigeon provides a prophetic link to the birds in Psycho (1960) — from the Phoenix setting to Norm’s stuffing and the doom of Marryin' Crane — and of course on to The Birds (1963).  

As it happens, the film’s source play, staged in London in 1958, was written by Alec Coppel, best known for his script for Vertigo (1958). He comes by his Hitchcock spirit legitimately. Indeed, Nash’s fond description of the eponymous edifice may equally apply to the British Hitchcock: “a little bit of Olde England comes to Connecticut.” 

My thanks to Joel Gunz of the HitchCon gang for alerting me to this connection.