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THE AUTEUR
The Lodger catapulted Hitchcock to a level of public notice that no other British director enjoyed. Two more films produced by Michael Balcon followed—Downhill and Easy Virtue (1927)—after which the bright young thing of British cinema was lured to British International Pictures (BIP) by John Maxwell’s promise of superior resources and a hefty pay rise. At £13,000 per year, Hitchcock was the best paid director in Britain.
None of the first four movies he made at BIP had the strange, compelling power of The Lodger, though each explored something that Hitchcock would appropriate as part of his house style—the drama of live spectacle in The Ring (1927), the parochial social comedy of The Farmer’s Wife (1928), the willful child and moralizing parent in Champagne (1928), the themes of guilt, shame, and pariahdom of The Manxman (1929). Each also gave Hitchcock the opportunity to try out ingenious trick shots and inventive ways of photographing a scene, every little flourish a moving trademark for the man audiences could not see but whose presence was constant and unavoidable.
In 1929, his silent career ended with the release of Blackmail, a talkie about the traumatic fallout of an attempted rape. It would prove to be his best, and most important, film since The Lodger, and its production at Elstree Studios was graced by a visit from the Duke and Duchess of York, the future king and queen. Ronald Neame, the assistant cameraman on the film, remembered vividly how the event had been a source of apprehension for everyone on set—everyone, that is, except Hitchcock. When Neame had worked with Noël Coward at another film studio at the time of a royal visit, Coward drilled his crew on protocol and etiquette, “but Hitch didn’t have any of that kind of thing.” When the duke and duchess watched a scene being filmed, they were both keen to explore the miraculous technology of talking, moving pictures. Hitchcock was happy to oblige but didn’t stand on ceremony. “I saw Hitchcock pull her [the duchess], literally pull her hat off and give her the headphones, which he then put on her head.” Manhandling a duchess was, to put it mildly, not the done thing. The message was unavoidable: even when in the presence of royalty, his set was his kingdom. A Hitchcock film was Hitchcock’s creation.
Before the mid-1950s, the idea that Alfred Hitchcock was a great artist was as alien to those who wrote about art as it was to those who spent every Saturday night at the movies. Even Hitchcock disliked public discussion of his films as art, especially once he had become a fixture in Hollywood. “I really hate the word artistic,” he remarked in 1952, explaining that his job was to balance an array of competing commercial concerns—the star system, audience expectations, the nit-picking of po-faced censors— cannily enough to make a hit of which one could be proud. “I have too much conscience to take a million dollars and make a film that would please only me and the critics,” he insisted.
The way the world thought about Hitchcock—and, to a degree, the way Hitchcock thought about himself—began to change thanks to a group of young French critics affiliated with the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. They identified Hitchcock as an embodiment of what we now refer to as the “auteur theory,” a reading of cinematic production that stresses the centrality of a director’s creative vision in the making of a film. Hitchcock, it was argued, didn’t simply direct his films, he authored them. Moreover, his authorship was so rich, innovative, and distinctive that he was more than a Hollywood hit-maker; he was a bona-fide artist.
His first encounters with the French critics caused surprise and not a little confusion on both sides. At a radiant flower market in Nice in 1954, the founder of Cahiers, André Bazin, was permitted to interview Hitchcock during a break in the filming of To Catch a Thief (1955). When Bazin floated questions about the themes, symbols, and meanings of his films, Hitchcock equivocated, partly because he disliked being entirely frank with a journalist when he could tantalize and dissemble, partly because he was genuinely nonplussed by Bazin’s detailed analysis. For his part, Bazin, always less enthusiastic about Hitchcock’s work than many of his colleagues, was astonished by the director’s docility on set, slumped silently in his chair looking “prodigiously bored” as the crew worked busily around him. As afternoon turned to evening, Hitchcock suddenly roused himself and began an animated conversation with Cary Grant. Was he concerned about some subtlety of his star’s performance, or anxious about the dying light, perhaps? “No, the light is excellent,” Hitchcock told Bazin, “but Mister Cary Grant’s contract calls for stopping at six o’clock; it is six o’clock exactly, so we will retake the sequence tomorrow.” This was Hitchcock, a supposed Napoleonic general of the movies, whose armies of the make-believe were under his unwavering control—yet, to Bazin, he looked more like a competition winner than a director, a guest for the day on somebody else’s shoot.
Bazin’s reservations didn’t deter his colleagues. In 1957, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol published Hitchcock, the first full-length critical study of his work. To many in America and Britain, it seemed absurd that the man they’d always seen as an uncommonly accomplished ringmaster was now being hailed as an artistic genius. The new take on Hitchcock—and other Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks—was the stirrings of something that was larger than film criticism, a reevaluation of popular culture that dissolved the stark barriers between art and entertainment. By the end of the sixties such notions would be pervasive. For now, the Hitchcock reappraisal seemed delusional to some. In the British journal Sight & Sound the American critic Richard Roud published a piece about the excesses of French criticism, citing the eulogizing of Hitchcock as Exhibit A. Roud suggested that “one’s first reaction might be to conclude that these men must be very foolish,” and that Hitchcock himself knew that “this Hitchcock idolatry” was risible.
For Anglo-Saxon unbelievers, worse was to come. In 1962, François Truffaut, a thirty-year-old critic turned filmmaker, arrived in Los Angeles for a lengthy series of interviews with Hitchcock that remains the starting point for most analyses of Hitchcock’s life and work. The following summer, Jean Douchet traveled to California for his own piece about Hitchcock. Keenly aware of the publicity opportunities offered by his young French disciples, Hitchcock arranged for a limousine to ferry Douchet to and from his hotel for three days. Douchet’s expenses were covered by Universal Pictures, to whom Hitchcock was contracted, excepting a night at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, for which Hitchcock paid.
Perplexed as he may have been by some of the auteurist theories, Hitchcock agreed with the fundamental precept that behind each great film sat a great man in a canvas chair. As early as 1927, he had expressed the opinion that any films worth watching have their director’s thumbprints on the negatives. “They are their babies just as much as an author’s novel is the offspring of his imagination. And that seems to make it all the more certain that when moving pictures are really artistic they will be created entirely by one man.” It was just such a powerful, creative progenitor that Hitchcock projected himself to be from the start of his directing career, finding various ways to insert himself into his body of work. In his first movie, The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock included his signature in the credits, and in most of his subsequent films he made his famous cameos. A photograph taken during the making of his second movie, The Mountain Eagle,* shows him posing as the kinetic hub of his film set, a decisive young man in masterful control of the most modern of media.
The story of how his third picture, The Lodger, came to be muddies that image. June Tripp (professionally known simply as June, but also sometimes referred to as June Hillman), who played the female lead of Daisy, attested that on set Hitchcock was in absolute control. “Fresh from Berlin, Hitch was so imbued with the value of unusual camera angles and lighting effects with which to create and sustain dramatic suspense that often a scene which would not run for more than three minutes on the screen would take an entire morning to shoot.” It was draining for the cast, but “his brilliance was patent”—though not to everyone. As producer Michael Balcon told the story, Hitchcock’s
old director Graham Cutts, perhaps motivated by jealousy at Hitchcock’s rapid advancement, “began to tell anybody who would listen that we had a disaster on our hands. Unfortunately one person who listened to him was C. M. Woolf,” the distributor. When he watched the film, Woolf, who had already delayed releasing Hitchcock’s first two movies because he felt they lacked box-office appeal, said he had never seen such artsy rubbish in his life, and ordered it shelved.
Hitchcock posing as the dynamic young director; Alma Reville looks on, c. 1926.
Balcon stepped in and persuaded Hitchcock to work with Ivor Montagu, a twenty-two-year-old polymath, with the aim of enhancing the film’s box-office appeal. Montagu thought the situation was “as humiliating for the one as it was embarrassing for the other,” but the changes he made saved the day. He slashed the number of intertitles from around three hundred to eighty, shortened some scenes, suggested reshooting certain others, and recruited the graphic artist E. McKnight Kauffer, whose atmospheric designs bolster the brooding expressionism of Hitchcock’s movie. Balcon showed the new version to an audience of journalists, whose glowing response persuaded Woolf that it was safe to release.
On one level, this is evidence of the difficulty of expressing a single creative vision in an industry replete with technical, commercial, editorial, and political forces outside a director’s control. One of the reasons Hitchcock looked back at his work with Balcon with such fondness is because Balcon tried to remove some of those obstacles and let Hitchcock stay as close to his own path as possible. In America, Hitchcock took a producer as well as a director credit from the late forties onward, but in the first few years in Hollywood he bristled at the involvement of powerful producers, especially David O. Selznick, who considered himself to be the key creative presence in any production that bore his name. In such circumstances, identifying a lone “auteur” can be tricky, if not impossible.
However, Montagu stressed that he inserted nothing of himself into Hitchcock’s work; his contribution to The Lodger was “in the nature of that which a gallery director makes to a painting in suggesting how it should be framed, where hung and in what light.” He loved Hitchcock’s original cut and believed that “what the film needed was editing toward, not away from, its exceptional qualities,” emphasizing Hitchcock’s influence on the film, those characteristics that Montagu elsewhere described as his “observation of familiar and unfamiliar pictorial detail” and “an artist’s eye for meaningful compositions.” Montagu tried to locate and enhance the essence of Hitchcock, a method that many of Hitchcock’s subsequent collaborators would employ.
Of all those who invested their talents in the Hitchcock legend, the most constant, and perhaps the most important, was his wife, Alma Reville. They were, at first sight, an odd couple. Her small, delicate frame contrasted with his famous bulk. Likewise, her instinct to please and soothe, reflected in the beaming smile with which she greeted the world, differed sharply from Hitchcock’s egotism, his tendency to sulk and show off. To quote their daughter, Hitchcock was “a born celebrity” who craved things—attention, public affirmation, a feeling of specialness—that the more retiring Alma seemingly had little use for.
Alma was born to Lucy and Matthew Reville in Nottingham, on August 14, 1899, just one day after Alfred’s birthday. The family moved to London when Alma was an infant, after Matthew secured a job in the costume department at Twickenham Studios. As a teenager, Alma dreamed of being an actress, though her father thought it best for her to experience the “seamy side of film life,” and helped her land a job as a “cutter.” It proved a turning point. Although Alma later took a couple of small acting roles, it was scriptwriting and editing that absorbed her. While Alfred was still at Henley’s, Alma’s film career cantered ahead. A variety of jobs came her way, but she often doubled up as editor (a more functional job in the tender years of cinema than it is today) and “continuity girl,” a member of the crew responsible for recording the details of a take in order to avoid discrepancies in the edit. While still in her teens, she was even hired to work on Hearts of the World, directed by D. W. Griffith, the titan of silent films, and one of the few directors that Hitchcock readily admitted he was influenced by.
Though it wasn’t love at first sight for Alma, her first experience of Alfred was memorable. It occurred in 1921 at Famous Players-Lasky, where they had both recently begun work. She was amused by his imperious manner, entirely unsuited to his junior standing and baby-faced appearance, and puzzled by the fact that each time their paths crossed, he acted as though she were invisible. Years later Hitchcock revealed that his rudeness was a symptom of his youthful anxiety around women, exacerbated by the fact that Alma was, in career terms, four years his senior and already an editor and second assistant director when he was still sketching intertitles. Alma claimed that as it was “unthinkable for a British male to admit that a woman has a job more important than his, Hitch had waited to speak to me until he had the higher position.” That moment came when he was made assistant to Graham Cutts on a picture called Woman to Woman and, quite out of the blue, he called Alma to offer her the job of editor. They worked together on a further four films with Cutts, and bonded over their conviction that they could do a much better job than their director. When Hitchcock was handed the reins on The Pleasure Garden, his first important decision was to hire Alma as his assistant director.
Both were passionate about cinema, fiercely ambitious, but shy and self-contained people whose social lives as children had been limited. In Alma’s case, she had been stricken by Sydenham’s chorea (St. Vitus dance), causing involuntary tics, jerking of the limbs, and muscle weakness. She lost two years’ schooling because of the disorder which, in the opinion of her daughter, led her to become “extremely self-conscious and sensitive about her lack of formal education,” much as Hitchcock had. Alma even had a strange story of childhood trauma to parallel Hitchcock’s. Amid the crowds in London attending the funeral procession of Edward VII in 1910, Alma was coming down from her father’s shoulders when her hair got caught in the coat buttons of a fellow bystander, and she was dragged to the ground as the man walked past, triggering a lifelong aversion to crowds.
The story of their engagement is one Hitchcock enjoyed revisiting. It happened, he said, on Christmas Eve of 1925, sailing back from Germany, where he and Alma had been working on The Mountain Eagle. Hitchcock entered Alma’s cabin with an engagement ring in his pocket and a rehearsed speech in his head, only to find her prostrate on her bunk, green with seasickness. Undeterred, he popped the question. In response, Alma “groaned, nodded her head, and burped.” For all its unlikeliness, the anecdote has a ring of authenticity. As observed by Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock had a hugely quixotic view of rail and sea travel, and probably convinced himself that this was the perfect occasion to fulfill a romantic fantasy. That he was unable to gauge the situation and postpone his proposal for a more appropriate moment says a lot about his social clumsiness, and hints at one of the many things the warmer, more empathetic Alma brought to the Hitchcock partnership.
As with The Pleasure Garden, The Mountain Eagle had been full of delays and obstructions, caused by the weather and other unforeseen circumstances—a nightmare for a worrier such as Hitchcock. When he recounted these experiences publicly, Hitchcock told them laughingly, but in the way one might retell a peculiar anxiety dream. Barraged by unexpected, time-sensitive problems, he turned to Alma for constant reassurance, and she, “sweet soul, gave me courage by swearing I was doing marvelously.” She also came to his rescue by handling delicate issues with cast and crew that Hitchcock couldn’t stomach. “Like a man, I left Miss Reville to do all the dirty work,” he admitted. Hitchcock told many tales about those times in Germany, but he always cast Alma in the same role: a sunny-natured dynamo of winning optimism, “standing four-foot-eleven in stockings and a trifle more in high heels,” who never ceased to tell him he was “the snake’s hips and the cat’s pyjamas.” She acted as his battery as well as a pro
tective layer between him and the daunting unpredictability of other people, oiling the Hitchcock machine with diplomacy and emotional intelligence. Over the ensuing decades, Alma worked, formally and informally, in a variety of roles on Hitchcock films: development producer, assistant director, writer, casting producer, script supervisor, all-around editorial adviser. Aptly, she was sometimes simply credited as “continuity.”
It’s been said that Hitchcock’s idea of the cinematic strongman was something he acquired in the film culture of Weimar Germany. However, his view of himself as a precocious expert was manifest years before his time at Neubabelsberg. Aged twenty-one, and only three months into his first full-time job in the film business, he had an article published in Motion Picture Studio magazine on the secrets of how to create good intertitles. Exhibiting a self-confidence out of step with the anxious, socially awkward youngster he was away from filmmaking, he criticized “one or two of the leading directors in the States [who] have made a practice of illustrating all their titles. The result of illustrating a spoken title can only confuse the reader,” he warned, and urged his peers to avoid repetition. “The hour glass and the scales of justice, their day is ended.” A neophyte in the movie business, and he was already disparaging the visual sensibilities of established directors, sniffing at their reliance on hoary cliché.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 7