Pat McFadden

Chadwick and Danvers: Hiring the Help in Hitchcock

n Hitchcock’s films, from The Farmer’s Wife onward, barriers between service and intimacy can be fluid and shallow. Throughout his work, there are butlers, maids, servants and assistants, both benevolent and criminal. Rebecca, The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn and even I Confess utilize domestics as plot devices. In the back-to-back pair of Daphne Du Maurier adaptations, Jamaica Inn has been long hidden in the shadow of Rebecca, disregarded by its creators and audience. But we mustn’t throw away the butler with the bathwater, because in the shadow of Mrs. Danvers is Chadwick, the lifelong manservant to Squire Pengallan. Although Chadwick was an inserted invention of screenwriters Sidney Gilliat, Joan Harrison (and likely his master, Charles Laughton), he is nonetheless informed by the Du Maurier universe, and designed to fit within it. Like Mrs. Danvers, Chadwick is thorough and loyal—and a fierce guardian of secrets and madness. These domestics pave the way for the likes of André Latour, Mrs. Wilson, Milly, Stella and even Leonard in later Hitchcock films. But the roles of servant and master can also equate to crew and director, director and assistant, husband and wife, and even that between the filmmaker and the guardians of the decency code.

About
HitchCon Advisory Board member. Pat McFadden looks at cinema as civilization's most wondrous cave drawings.  Growing up in Manhattan, he scoured television listings and theater schedules in an effort to see every Alfred Hitchcock film, and many others that got in the way.  After graduating from the High School of Performing Arts, he abandoned drama for film at Emerson College in Boston. His senior student film there, "Equilibrium-ness," earned both a Student Emmy and a regional Student Academy Award. He then transplanted himself to Los Angeles, where he worked several years as an Assistant Film Editor, notably on HBO tele-features. Ill-suited to feast or famine gig-employment, Pat switched to office work, and was an executive assistant at Walt Disney Imagineering for 23 years. Pat is honored to have been a contributing editor and creative consultant for Joel Gunz’s Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook Page, and an associate producer for Good Evening: an Alfred Hitchcock Podcast, where he was referred to as “The Man Who Knows Exactly Enough.” He’s author of “Sir Hitch and Uncle Walt: Feud? What Feud?” in The Hitchcockian Quarterly, 2023.