In his original Cahiers du Cinéma article, Philippe Demonsablon divides ‘The Hand’ into four subheadings: ‘floating hands’ (e.g. the Lodger's going down the banister rail); ‘strangling gestures’ (e.g. Ashenden's hands reaching out as if to strangle Marvin after the train wreck in SECRET AGENT); ‘grasping hands’ (e.g. Bruno reaching down into the drain to retrieve the cigarette lighter) and ‘indicating hands’ (e.g. Kate's father publicly pointing out Philip as ‘her betrayer’ in THE MANXMAN). Apart from these groupings, Demonsablon makes only a few points about the overall significance of the motif: to hold something is to have it in one's power; hands tend to have an autonomous will; ‘is it an accident that most of Hitchcock's killers are stranglers?’ (Demonsablon 1956:26). Altogether, he lists some thirty-five instances of the hands motif in Hitchcock, but even within the films he covers, there are many more; it is unquestionably one of the director's most significant motifs, and all I can do here is refer selectively to its usage. In Part I, I look at certain cases where the hands motif is used ‘expressionistically’ in Hitchcock (➢ A melodramatic motif: hands). Here I touch on an argument begun in Part I – that the director's use of hands is essentially ‘melodramatic’ – but my main concern is to use the hands motif as a means to examine key aspects of the sexual politics in Hitchcock's films.

Male hands / female hands

A moral distinction between male and female hands in Hitchcock goes back to THE PLEASURE GARDEN, his first film. In it, a naïve young woman, Patsy, marries a man, Levet, whom we know to be unworthy of her: immediately after the honeymoon, he sets off alone for a colonial outpost, where he promptly sets up house with an anonymous native woman and turns to drunken dissolution. Responding to his lie that he has had a fever (his excuse for not writing), Patsy travels out to be with him. Her arrival shocks Levet, and when an opportunity presents itself, he drowns the native woman (➢ WATER). At this moment, Patsy is tending Hugh, structurally the film's hero, who genuinely has fever.