Participants in a symbolic conversation develop a set of repeating symbols that evolves as their relationship continues. Alma Reville appeared in a film with birds, so her future husband, Alfred Hitchcock, included birds in his earliest movies. The Lodger was his first directing success. That film has cats. A cat opens Rear Window in 1954, a 27-year echo of The Lodger’s 1927 premiere. Rear Window has a caged bird. The Lodger has a cuckoo clock.
The Moulin Rouge windmill in Paris appeared in Woman to Woman, Hitchcock’s first film working with Alma. Windmills reappear in Foreign Correspondent, which has a scene replicating his shipboard marriage proposal. Mills are also featured in Young and Innocent as a hiding place and Strangers on a Train as a carnival attraction.
Elia Kazan used symbolism in the hospital play Men in White to request an internship with Hitchcock. The positive answer in Waltzes from Vienna echoed men in white as bakers, and offered mentoring advice. Kazan, who planned to seize Hitchcock’s job, responded to the advice with angry messages. Hitchcock’s assistant directing film The Blackguard opened on Hitler’s birthday. In the year following Men in White, the first scene of Kazan’s play Dimitroff has Hitler standing in a ray of light.
Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester inserted themselves into Hitch and Alma’s symbolic conversation because he wanted to play Peter Pan’s Captain Hook in Britain’s first sound film. Hitchcock took that honor with Blackmail. Laughton’s Captain Kidd is a blackmail note on a pirate ship.
Eyes show the development of an echoing symbol. During Hitchcock’s erotic tennis court cameo in Easy Virtue, Larita is hit in the eye with a tennis ball. Young and Innocent exposes the villain by his twitching eyes just before Erica and Tisdall find true love, an echo of the cameo in Easy Virtue. The next year, Kazan directed Casey Jones, about a train engineer with eye problems. Because he mimicked Hitchcock, the train and the eyes are an echoing theft. Strangers on a Train returns to Easy Virtue’s erotic cameo with a tennis player and a murder reflected in the victim’s glasses. In Kazan’s Viva Zapata!, an older woman is subdued by a man’s thumb over her eye. Then Hitchcock has Sam rescue his friends in The Trouble with Harry by opening the eyes of the figure in his drawing, returning to Easy Virtue with a love story about two couples.
The symbols tend to be familiar images, easily merging into the camouflage plot, a movie’s traditional story. Their echoes in subsequent films are unobtrusive. Alma was a horsewoman, so Hitchcock has real horses, horses in dialog, and horses as art. They form the background until their echo is discovered.