Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  When it came to be known that Hitchcock would be directing Novello at Maida Vale Underground station, after midnight on a Saturday, a large crowd clustered at the entrance. Novello was to be filmed descending an escalator, an effect never before attempted, with the obvious intent of suggesting the downward movement of his life together with vertigo and general instability. It took five takes in almost four hours as the actor, caked in greasepaint, made the journey down the wooden escalator. Hitchcock held the camera still for twenty-three seconds in each take, where other directors might have allowed five or six seconds. He himself was dressed in white tie and tails, having previously attended the theatre.

  There was another instance of what might be called the heroic age of film-making. At one showing of Downhill in a London cinema the lights and the screen went up in the middle of the production to reveal Novello himself on the stage, dressed in the part he played, who then proceeded to enact the next ten minutes of the narrative for the benefit of the no doubt surprised audience.

  Such was the speed of production, and appetite for new films, that Hitchcock began his next project while still working on Downhill. When the cameraman fell ill on this new production, he readily stepped forward and took up the role. Easy Virtue was the account of a woman whose wicked past catches up with her after she marries a suitably rich and respectable young man. It is an old story, but Hitchcock directs it with panache as a study in guilt and voyeurism. The eyes have it, whether they are the eyes of the accusing characters or of the cinema audience. The interiors are full of mirrors and reflections, and the image of the camera becomes central. A newspaper photograph reveals her past. “Shoot,” she says to the photographers in the most memorable line in the film, “there is nothing left to kill!”

  . . .

  Easy Virtue was Hitchcock’s last film for Gainsborough Pictures. He had been persuaded by John Maxwell to move to the Elstree studios of British International Pictures (BIP) that had recently been founded by Maxwell; he was promised better facilities, better control and, just as important, a better salary. Hitchcock would be paid, at £13,000, an annual salary three times larger than before; by the middle of 1927, he was the highest paid director in England. The terms and conditions must have been acceptable since, in the course of the next five years, he completed ten films with Maxwell as producer. British International Pictures was more commercial, and perhaps more professional, than Gainsborough; John Maxwell himself was a Glaswegian solicitor who knew business better than a businessman. It is a measure of Hitchcock’s own professionalism that he was happy to work under such auspices, and indeed take advantage of them.

  Much of his work for the next few years consisted of literary or theatrical adaptations that were guaranteed to please an English audience. The first of the Elstree films, however, The Ring, seems to have been from a concept of his own devising. For the first time in his career it was announced as “written and directed by Alfred Hitchcock,” but it can be assumed that his wife had some part in the composition of the screenplay. He said later that this was the second “real” Hitchcock picture, but he had also taken into his small circle a new cameraman, Jack Cox, who had been working in the film industry since 1913. He would stay with Hitchcock for eleven films, culminating eleven years later in The Lady Vanishes, and was partly responsible for the Hitchcock “look,” both intimate and impersonal. Cox’s assistant recalled how Hitchcock would pull out a sketchbook and draw foreground and perspective for a particular scene, saying “I want you to use a 50 mm lens.”

  The Ring is a story of two prizefighters challenging one another for the hand of the same woman. There is much play with the notion of the “ring” itself—the boxing ring, the engagement ring, the wedding ring together with the swings and roundabouts of the fairground. Hitchcock liked fairgrounds. The pugilism is itself part of the fun of the fair, with a cast of carnivalesque characters who turn up in later Hitchcock films. Hitchcock had what might be called a cockney vision of the world as part pantomime and part spectacle; he was not interested in the moral complications of characters, only in the scene and the striking image. This was the source of his visual sense. He was not creating a real world, indistinguishable from that outside the cinema, but a carefully crafted artifice. Comedy is in fact the key tone of The Ring, together with the suspense of which he had become a master. He had made an art out of the nervous stomach; he pinned the butterflies to the wall.

  While directing The Ring Hitchcock was everywhere at once. He was not so much interested in the boxing as in what he called “the shop,” all the details and business that happen around the fight itself. He experimented with these details; he focused upon them. A fairground was constructed, and a newspaper article confirmed that “the film’s director, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, will be moving among the crowds giving instructions to his cameramen…disguised as a showman wearing the traditional frock coat and red silk handkerchief and ebullient silk hat.” He was directing the crowds but at the same time he was directing the audience. He knew how to manipulate its attention and moods in the manner of a showground busker. “It is amazing,” a journalist wrote, “how he manages to maintain his energy and keenness, considering that since the beginning of the year he has been on the floor, working practically every day.” Every new film was now crucial to him, eager as he was to capitalise on his new association with BIP. He had memorised the saying that a director is no better than his last picture.

  The premiere of The Ring in the autumn of 1927 was a success, with the audience clapping a sequence of montage that Hitchcock had learned from the Russians. “I never heard a montage get a round of applause before,” he said, “but this did.” The film seemed to come as a revelation and was described in the Daily Mail as “the greatest production ever made in this country” and, in the Daily News, as “a devastating answer to those who disbelieved in the possibilities of a British film.” The Bioscope commented that “if future British films only approach The Ring in quality, we need have no fears for the ultimate success of the entire producing industry in this country.” So Hitchcock, at the age of twenty-eight, was being identified as the saviour of British film. Yet the film was not as successful at the box office, which may have prompted him to meditate further upon the relationship between art and commerce. Was there a point at which both could meet?

  He had gone down to Devon by the time The Ring was released, ready to start work on The Farmer’s Wife. This could be described as a pastoral comedy concerning a farmer’s desperate attempt to find a bride after the death of his first wife. The brides, each one less attractive than the one before, kept on saying “no”; in that context Hitchcock taps the rich vein of English character acting which he always admired. It was in fact an adaptation of a play but Hitchcock opens it out, as it were, by bringing the camera into the action with fluid and subtle movements.

  He said later that “it was a routine job” and merely “a photograph of a stage play with lots of titles instead of dialogue,” but he did less than justice to his youthful skills. The Farmer’s Wife is, in pictorial terms, an impressive and even beautiful piece of work with the landscapes of Devon and of Surrey summoned up as a suitable backdrop for gentle comedy. Nor was it an affair of talking heads, or photographs with titles. A farmhouse was built on the set of Elstree to allow the camera unimpeded access so that it could weave through each room; it was an experiment, following an actress from the sitting room to the kitchen and then upstairs to the bedroom, and he was not sure that it would be successful. But it was. The rhythm of the film was important to him; he said in an interview that “I had to film a little scene in The Farmer’s Wife six times the other day because the players took it too slowly to fit in with the mood of the picture.” The result was impressive, despite Hitchcock’s later disclaimer, and a critic remarked that “it has been left to Alfred Hitchcock to put England on the screen.”

  At a party to celebrate the end of filming Hitchcock invited the members of cast and crew to a West End restaura
nt; but he had hired the smallest room he could find. The forty guests were crowded into a space designed for twelve, in which rude and clumsy waiters were played by actors. It was one of the practical jokes for which he was well known. On one occasion he arranged a dinner party for the actress Gertrude Lawrence in which every item on the menu was blue. On one opening night Sir Gerald du Maurier found a horse, rather than flowers, in his dressing room courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock. When friends were abroad or away on holiday, he would order the largest and most awkward furniture to fill their rooms. He had a set of whoopee cushions at home, and brought them out for the more grand or formal guests. He painted clown faces on his sleeping daughter.

  He often directed his macabre humour at his players. He contrived to get Montgomery Clift hopelessly drunk at the end of filming I Confess by plying him with alcohol. Some of his jokes were demeaning to their victims. He made a bet that a property man would not be able to spend the night chained to a camera in a darkened studio; the man accepted the bet, and Hitchcock presented him with a bottle of brandy to beguile the hours away. It was laced with a very strong laxative, with the intended consequences soon apparent. When filming The Birds with Tippi Hedren he presented her daughter with a tiny image of Tippi lying in a coffin.

  Alma once confessed that “he never stopped playing jokes on people, and now and then I got a little apprehensive.” The psychology of the practical joker has been much discussed. It is a form of indirect revenge, and of the need for mastery or control; it also suggests an instinctive scorn for the human race, as exemplified in Edgar Allan Poe’s equally celebrated “hoaxes” of an unkind nature. Poe, too, enjoyed gallows humour. It was Hitchcock’s speciality, and he eventually made a television series out of it.

  For their first wedding anniversary in early December 1927, the Hitchcocks returned to the Palace Hotel at St. Moritz; they preferred familiar places as well as familiar faces. And, at the end of the year, he sent out a caricature of himself in the form of a jigsaw.

  . . .

  In the New Year, Alma made it known that she was pregnant. “I did it with a fountain pen,” was his often reported comment.

  At approximately the same time his next film was announced with the simple title of Champagne. New English films were now considered to be highly desirable, and at the end of 1927 a new Cinematograph Films Act, designed to end the American monopoly of English cinema screens, had stipulated that by 1935 one fifth of all films should be made in England. In fact the quota was reached by 1932. There was even talk of an “English Hollywood.”

  Champagne was not really the film to lead the charge. It was, as its name suggests, a light and frothy affair; its heroine, Betty Balfour, was as bubbly as can be, but she did not meet with Hitchcock’s approval. He described her to a young photographer on the set, Michael Powell, as “a piece of suburban obscenity.” He had wanted another, more resourceful, actress for the part of the daughter of a rich man suddenly fallen on hard times. He had also wanted a more serious story of exploitation but, as he said later, “we ended up with a hodge-podge of a story that was written as we went through the film and I thought it was dreadful.” Betty Balfour, the ultimate “flapper,” frothed and glistened throughout an improbable plot but she was not taken to the public’s heart. The film was described as “champagne that had been left in the rain all night.” Hitchcock himself was not in the best of tempers during the filming and did all he could, for example, to stop Powell taking stills of Balfour.

  Powell himself left a description of the disgruntled director. “He really was the fattest young man I had ever seen. He had a fresh, rosy, complexion, his dark hair was sleeked back, and he was correctly dressed in a suit with a watch-chain across his waistcoat. He wore a soft hat. He observed me out of the corner of his piggy eyes sunk in fat cheeks. There was not much that Hitch missed with those piggy eyes.”

  Just before the production of Champagne was completed, Alma went into labour. It was her husband who panicked. Unable to bear the anxiety he left the flat and went for a long walk through London; he purchased en route a sapphire and gold bracelet in Bond Street, so he might be able to offer her some recompense for his unwarranted absence. Their ensuing conversation seems to have been so much part of familial tradition that it appeared in their daughter’s memoir of her mother.

  “But you didn’t have to go out,” Alma told him. “I wasn’t really feeling bad at all.”

  “I know you weren’t, dear. But consider my suffering. I nearly died of the suspense.”

  In his imagination he had taken on the agonies of the woman. Alma said later that “he might as well have changed places with me.”

  The Hitchcocks had already decided, for the sake of the as yet unborn child and themselves, to purchase a cottage outside London in the neighbourhood of Shamley Green about five miles south of Guildford in Surrey. It is now designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty and in the early part of the twentieth century it was part of still rural England surrounded by farmland and distant hills. They bought a large cottage of Tudor origins, “Winter’s Grace,” with comfortable if rackety rooms and a large garden; it was renovated in the 1930s, and made more imposing. The new family, in traditional fashion, spent the weekdays in London and their weekends in the country. In Shamley Green he seemed noticeably to relax. They employed a housekeeper, Mary Condon, who remarked of her employer that “you could not meet a nicer gentleman and a very good Catholic, too.” His religious observances might have been part of the duty he felt to his daughter, and to his mother who paid regular visits.

  Life in Cromwell Road and in Shamley Green was well ordered and well directed; Alma reported that “our home had to be as orderly and tidy as one of Hitch’s film sets.” Everything had its place; the taps were shining; the wood well polished, and the meals (generally cooked by Alma) always arrived on time. The lawns and garden beds were tended by employees who were rarely visible. The Hitchcocks worked in both locations, sometimes on the dining table of Cromwell Road and sometimes in the garden of Shamley Green. Hitchcock still had the high spirits of ambition and achievement; as a party trick he would strip to the waist and paint a sailor’s face on his belly so that the guests might see the sailor’s expressions gyrate. On at least one occasion he dressed up in drag as “Lady Agatha”; a surviving photograph shows a most respectable middle-aged lady.

  . . .

  Then he was off again, to the coast of Cornwall, to make The Manxman, based on a novel by Hall Caine of a suitably melodramatic nature. The harbour of Polperro posed as the Isle of Man for the setting of a film that rings changes on the triangle of love which Hitchcock had already used in earlier films. It was an altogether more serious production than its predecessor, Champagne, with the wild seas and cliffs of Cornwall providing the setting of overwhelming passion, guilt and loss which are for once not dissipated by a happy ending. It is in some respects a simple piece, but one of the highest distinction; the simplicity and directness are compelling and, with the concentration upon facial expressiveness, it draws on the best qualities of the silent cinema. No sound or dialogue could achieve more significant effects. Silent drama can evoke the fears and fantasies of the audience in a unique fashion. He remarked later that “it was a very banal picture,” but he was wrong. The Manxman is one of the best of Britain’s silent films.

  It is also one of the last. Change was in the air. In the autumn of 1927 The Jazz Singer had proved the possibilities of synchronised sound, and in the following year Lights of New York became the first all-talking picture. Hitchcock was more attuned than most to the development of film and by the close of 1928, after the completion of The Manxman, he was ready to take advantage of the new situation. He orchestrated another change; the scriptwriter on his silent films, Eliot Stannard, was no longer considered suitable.

  Hitchcock had agreed to direct Blackmail, a capable thriller derived from a West End success. The chronology is unclear, but it seems that he had already begun a silent version of the film
when it was decided to issue a sound version as well. Hitchcock had in fact anticipated the studio’s instructions. An assistant cameraman on Blackmail, Ronald Neame, agreed that Hitchcock “loved the idea of sound.” Unlike Charles Chaplin, who considered it to be a blow to “pure film,” Hitchcock was immediately aware of its possibilities. He planned the sound version even while he was working on the silent alternative; he imagined dialogue even before the first words were spoken. In an article for the News Chronicle he revealed that “I did it by shooting a lot of scenes where sound could be tacked on afterwards and making a lot of other scenes, not in the script, with sound. When they were all assembled the whole picture was a talkie.” The first reel remains essentially silent but the rest of the film takes advantage of a new range of sound effects. The earliest scenes, showing the arrest of a thief, are played entirely in the old tradition of silent melodrama; after booking their man, the two detectives walk down a corridor in Scotland Yard. Slowly but subtly their voices begin to be heard and the audience is formally introduced to the world of sound. This moment was doubtless both unsettling and exciting.

  He had first to test his players. A short piece of unrehearsed film survives of his conversation with his leading lady from Czechoslovakia, Anny Ondra, which gives some clue to his relationships with his actors.

  HITCHCOCK: Now, Miss Ondra, we are going to do a sound test. Isn’t that what you wanted? Now come right over here.

  ONDRA: I don’t know what to say. I’m so nervous!