Alfred Hitchcock's Stairways of Attraction

In Three Early Hitchcock Films, He Establishes Use of Stairways to Convey the Relationships of Men and Women

Hitchcock intimately studied the relationships that can exist between men and women in most of his films. Even with his wife Alma Reville as his editor he explored how courtship and the binds of marriage can complicate desire and love. His early British releases capture the possible relations of men and women under the changing times of patriarchal England. A certain light can be shed on how Hitchcock handles these relationships by observing his direction of a coupled man and woman ascending up a stairway.

Three films of interest in which a stairway is emphasized in a scene include Blackmail (1929), Rich and Strange (1932), and The 39 Steps (1935). This selection offers a chronological progression of Hitchcock's early British films and his maturing fascination with the heterosexual couple and his characters' perspective of trust within that relationship. These early experiments on the stairways would later blossom into the intense studies of marriage, obsession and love in his later American films.

In each of the aforementioned films the featured couple in the scene symbolically ascends up a stairway to reveal what their unison implies. Though, Blackmail serves more as a counterpoint to the obvious notions towards marriage made in Rich and Strange and The 39 Steps. Nonetheless the counterpoint is used to contrast the thematic concept of trust in traditional relationships and courtship. The man in each scene is pursuing the woman and his desires for her are implied through their ascent up the stairway.

For the artist Crewe in Blackmail it is an illicit night with Alice White that he desires, and must gain her trust before ascending to his studio. Commander Gordon romances Emily Hill in Rich and Strange with an ascent into idealized marriage of higher-class status and it is through this gesture that he gains her trust. The only option available to Richard Hanna in The 39 Steps is to force Pamela into ascent in the hotel room so the potential of their attraction can be realized, and she can be convinced to trust him.