Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  HITCHCOCK: Have you been a good girl?

  ONDRA [LAUGHING]: Oh, no!

  HITCHCOCK: No? Have you slept with men?

  ONDRA: No!

  HITCHCOCK: No?

  ONDRA: Oh, Hitch, you make me embarrassed! [She giggles.]

  HITCHCOCK: Now come right over here, Miss Ondra, and stand still in your place—or it won’t come out right, as the girl said to the soldier.

  Courtesy of Imagno

  On the set of Blackmail, showing primitive audio equipment, 1929. Hitchcock can be seen in the top right of the photograph.

  It is perhaps worth adding that Hitchcock would have known exactly when and with whom Anny Ondra was sleeping. He was an indefatigable gossip on sexual matters. He was fascinated by what would be ordinarily concealed and what might be called the hidden life of those he met. One of his screenwriters, Arthur Laurents, remarked that “he thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door—except himself.” The fat boy was still watching alone while the others played.

  The plot itself is intriguing. A cockney shop-girl stabs to death a man attempting to rape her but her boyfriend, a detective, manages to pin the murder on a petty criminal; the girl is seized with guilt and confusion throughout the action, but on this occasion she is relieved of any consequences when the criminal falls to his death during a pursuit. It leaves her guilt unresolved and cannot be seen as a conventional happy ending.

  There were problems with the sound. Anny Ondra, playing the shop assistant, had a strong accent. There was no question of dubbing in those early days, so the leading lady moved her lips to pronounce the words while an English actress spoke them into a microphone. The sound equipment was cumbersome in the extreme, introducing into the film studio an obstacle course of booths and boxes, cables and lamps. The camera itself had to be placed in a soundproof booth to conceal its cranking noise, while the players had to position themselves immediately below the low-hanging microphones. The new lamps, designed not to hum or splutter, created intense heat. The director, wearing outsize earphones, was close to suffocation in a tiny recording booth.

  Yet Hitchcock was already proving himself to be a master of sound. One of the first indications of this emerges in a scene where the heroine, distraught after the stabbing, returns to her family shop. A garrulous neighbour has already heard the news of the horrible murder. “What a terrible way to kill a man. With a knife! Now I would have used a brick maybe, but I’d never use a knife. A knife is a terrible thing. A knife is so messy and dreadful.” The sound is so modified that the word rings out like a clarion, thus augmenting the heroine’s fear.

  The final sequence of pursuit is equally significant, but only as a triumph of the soon-to-be-outmoded silent genre. The wrongly suspected murderer escapes from the detectives into the Reading Room of the British Museum, the great dome itself filmed as a work of mystery. In a climactic moment the fleeing man is seen dangling from a thin rope beside the giant visage of Rameses the Great, a monstrous image of imperturbability and indifference before the man’s imminent death. Hitchcock used the effect later, with the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur and the heads of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. The image also recalls the sphinx-like demeanour he himself used to affect, concealing his permanent state of anxiety; it might also be considered as a way of representing death.

  Blackmail is often considered to be Britain’s first “talkie,” but that honour must be conferred upon The Clue of the New Pin, which cannot now be found in the haystack. The advertising poster for Blackmail, however, did not hold back. “The First Full Length All Talkie Film Made In Great Britain…See & Hear Our Mother Tongue As It Should Be—Spoken…Hold Everything Till You’ve Heard This One!” The film was, perhaps inevitably, a popular success in Britain. The Daily Chronicle celebrated the fact that after the nasal sound of American accents, “the English voices in Blackmail…are like music.”

  At the public screening in the Regal cinema in the summer of 1929 the film was, according to To-day’s Cinema, “punctuated at times with almost continual bursts of applause,” one of which lasted for seven minutes. This was a wholly new way of understanding the world, and when it was accompanied by Hitchcock’s brilliant renditions of the London ambience—the traffic, the streets, the advertisements, the domestic interiors, the Lyons tea shops, the back alleys—it amounted to a unique vision of the city. In an interview with the Evening News at the time of the film’s release, Hitchcock remarked that “it has created a demand for realism that is not demanded in the ordinary theatre.” He also had a private response. According to their daughter, “my parents were in heaven.”

  4

  I WAS GREY

  Blackmail had not been a success in foreign markets, and American audiences professed not to understand English accents. So the profits, if any, were very modest. Elstree needed a more solid and durable product. Despite Hitchcock’s growing fame he was still a professional working for a company, and he was obliged to turn his hand to whatever the managers considered feasible.

  In the summer of 1929 he met Sean O’Casey to discuss an adaptation of the playwright’s Juno and the Paycock, performed five years before to great acclaim. It would be Hitchcock’s first thoroughly conceived and consistent talkie, and it was most certainly filled with talk. Juno and the Paycock, as it had been played by the actors of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, was sustained by O’Casey’s particular blend of wild declamation, impassioned prayer and broad Gaelic humour with a music of its own.

  The Hitchcocks visited O’Casey at his home in St. John’s Wood to discuss this and other future projects. O’Casey recalled that Hitchcock “was a hulk of a man, unwieldy in his gait, seeming as if he had to hoist himself into every movement, like an overblown seal,” whereas Alma was “sitting silent but attentive, registering every gesture and every word.” He soon realised that it was she who would make the final decisions. Alma was in fact responsible, with her husband, for the script; it does not differ markedly from the theatrical version, except for two or three exterior scenes to lend a degree of verisimilitude.

  Sound was always the key question. In one scene a record is being played on a brand-new phonograph but, as family and friends sing along with it, their voices are joined by those of a passing funeral procession which are in turn interrupted by machine-gun fire. Hitchcock had to improvise. A prop man held his nose to create the “tinny” sound of a phonograph while, on camera, the players sang along with him; in another part of the studio a choir began their funeral dirge, while the stagehands beat with canes on pieces of leather to simulate gunfire. Nothing could be pre-recorded. It was as surprising as any performance at an avant-garde concert.

  Otherwise Hitchcock remained faithful to the rhetoric and melodrama of the original. Since most of the cast actually came from the Abbey Theatre in the first place, the director let them get on with it. In the process he was plunged into the faith of his childhood. That is why he treats the story with a respect bordering on sentimentality. It would not be wise to be ironic about invocations of the Virgin. It is a lurid narrative of betrayal and vengeance during the Irish Civil War but set in the half-comic and half-pathetic world of the Boyles, a lower-class Dublin family with a drunken father and a perpetually frustrated mother. The studio may have hoped that an American audience would be better able to understand an Irish, rather than an English, accent.

  It was a success, largely because of the writing and acting, rather than Hitchcock’s own contribution. James Agate in Tatler believed that it “appears to me to be very nearly a masterpiece. Bravo, Mr. Hitchcock!,” but the director himself confessed that he had been “kind of rather ashamed when it got terrific notices.” He did not believe himself responsible for its quality. But he never disavowed it, as he did others of his early films. It evoked the Irishness of his immediate ancestry, and the prevailing note of piety and prayer was deeply congenial to him. He was asked if he had been bored by it. “No,” he replied, “because the charact
ers were so interesting.”

  The success of Juno and the Paycock confirmed the nature of Hitchcock’s next films. He and Alma would now be the principal screenwriters of four successive pictures, all of which would be based on successful novels or stage plays. They may have been a long way from Hitchcock’s concept of “pure cinema” but, as he knew well enough, business was business. He directed, for example, portions of what was essentially a musical variety show called Elstree Calling. Hitchcock told one interviewer that it was “of no interest whatsoever”; and so it has proved.

  Immediately afterwards he began work on Murder! which, as its name suggests, is in part a detective thriller. In later life he disparaged this genre as reliant upon the elements of a puzzle, rather than on genuine suspense or fear, but he brings to the narrative a certain wit and inventiveness. A leading actress has been convicted of murdering a female colleague but one of the jurors, who happens to be a distinguished actor-manager by the name of Sir John Menier, disagrees with the verdict; he must find the real killer.

  The crime is essentially set in the theatre, or at least in a theatrical atmosphere, and Hitchcock lights a circle of stage fire to contain his characters. In a world of stage doors and dressing rooms, the proscenium arch is never far away. By the time the murderer turns out to be a transvestite circus acrobat, trying to conceal the fact that he is a “half-caste” (we can justifiably read “homosexual”), the curtain is almost ready to fall. Except that, in the closing scene, it is revealed that the whole story is being played as a drama on the London stage.

  What is real and what is unreal? Is performance an intrinsic aspect of the human condition? Is London simply a great stage on which we all are players? Who knows? Who cares? Hitchcock does not. It is on one level simply entertainment, similar to that of the theatre and the circus which provide the settings. There are moments, however, which show the director at his best. In one early scene the amateur detective muses in front of the shaving mirror, thus providing the first example of interior monologue in the British cinema. He is mentally soliloquising to the music of Tristan and Isolde issuing from the wireless, but Hitchcock found it necessary to import a thirty-piece orchestra to play the music on the set while the actor’s pre-recorded voice is being heard. It was a very ingenious use of sound, although some at the time considered it to be too highbrow.

  In the autumn of 1930, after Murder! had been completed, Hitchcock picked up another play ripe for filming. He began negotiations with John Galsworthy whose play The Skin Game had been a popular success ten years before. It dramatised a case of class warfare, when a parvenu industrialist wishes to buy up land contiguous to the estate of a member of the classic agricultural order known then as “old money.” In advance of filming Hitchcock explained to the players the gestures, words and intonations that he wanted; there was to be none of the improvisation which he had allowed in Murder!

  The Skin Game is a genuinely arresting and intriguing film, with an auction scene as good as any; the camera weaves and ducks with the characters as they bid for the disputed land, displaying that technical mastery which was Hitchcock’s most important asset. The filming was completed in three months and, after its release in January 1931, it proved to be a success with both critics and public. Hitchcock was still the wunderkind of British cinema.

  . . .

  After The Skin Game, the Hitchcocks embarked upon a cruise. Ever since he had charted the progress of ships across the Atlantic as a schoolboy, he had relished the idea of travel without inconvenient complications—such as disembarking. They sailed down the coast of West Africa before crossing to the West Indies, and returned to England by way of Gambia, but perhaps Hitchcock was too much of a cockney to pay much attention to foreign attractions. He said that the most important lesson was that cruise passengers “get to hate one another after being cooped up for a while on board ship.”

  Travel may not broaden the mind, but it may stir the imagination. It seems that in the course of their journey Hitchcock conceived an idea for his next film. Rich and Strange would consist of the perilous adventures of a middle-class London couple, the Hills, who find out that travel can mean nothing but trouble. It could be viewed as a fantastic reworking of the Hitchcocks’ own cruise, but it is performed in a quite different key. The couple, having unexpectedly acquired funds, leave tedious London for the delights of the Orient. They fall out during the course of the voyage and are only reunited by a series of threats and perils that seem to come out of nowhere.

  Their funds are depleted; they are obliged to travel on a second-rate liner; the liner sinks; they are picked up by the Chinese crew of a pirates’ junk; inadvertently they eat cat in a chop suey before the skin of the cat is shown stretched out to dry. They have entered a fantasy world full of threat, the sum of all their fears. The husband is awkward, bad-tempered and petulant, while the wife has a more amiable or at least less excitable temperament. Allusions to the Hitchcocks themselves are permissible but perhaps not appropriate. The ordeal leaves the Hills none the wiser, however, and when they return to their suburban home they begin once more to bicker in the old fashion. That is, more or less, that.

  Much of the film is silent, shot by a second crew in exotic locations where sound equipment would have been too cumbersome. The point of the exercise, if any, is not immediately clear. Rich and Strange turned out to be neither. It might be classed a comic melodrama, except that it is not particularly funny. In a cameo at the end, later cut, the two unfortunate travellers talk to Hitchcock himself about their travails. “No,” Hitchcock tells them, “I don’t think it will make a movie.” The sequence may have been discarded for stating the obvious. The veteran film-maker John Grierson wrote that “in trying new material Hitchcock has found himself outside both his experience and imagination…his mind does not quite appreciate the wonders of the world he is trying to use.” He was in effect accusing Hitchcock of being parochial. The director himself defended the film for having “lots of ideas…I liked the picture. It should have been more successful.” The English public did not agree. His relations with British International Pictures were in any case becoming strained.

  He had taken the precaution of arranging his own publicity. He could not, and did not, rely upon BIP. He formed a small company, Hitchcock Baker Productions Limited, the sole purpose of which was to keep Hitchcock’s name and achievements before the public; he had embarked, in other words, upon an endless course of self-advertisement. He had already explained to Ivor Montagu, and others of the Hate Club, the importance of the critics and the press in general in creating a marketable “name.” Now he was to achieve it in a thoroughly professional manner. There was self-regard, but not necessarily vanity, in his desire to present himself to the public. He realised, for example, that his weight could be used to advantage in conveying an image of himself and on occasion he granted interviews with journalists while wearing pyjamas and dressing gown to amplify the figure of a fat man. He never ceased using similar techniques throughout his career. He also pondered the financial possibilities of his position, and employed a tax adviser to manage his earnings and his investments.

  Even as he was editing Rich and Strange he was asked to direct at Elstree Studios what was known in the business as a “quota quickie,” a film hastily brought out to complete the number of English productions stipulated by the Films Act of 1927. The picture chosen for him, Number Seventeen, was not to his taste. The rambling narrative of jewel thieves, mysterious detectives and hanging bodies borders on the incomprehensible. Hitchcock could not take it seriously, and in fact made sure that no one else took it seriously either. It became a parody of an adventure thriller, played out in what could easily be a haunted mansion. The sinister interiors become the setting for the cheapest thrills, with sudden shadows, locked rooms, disappearing corpses and footsteps without feet. “It’s like the pictures, isn’t it?” one character suggests. “Too much for my liking,” comes the reply.

  Hitchcock was essentially playing
with his audience and perhaps also with his employers. There are moments in most of his films when the cinematic illusion is displayed, when the audience knows in his words that “it’s only a movie.” But Number Seventeen is based on that premise. The climactic chase scene, for example, is comprised of what are obviously toy models of cars and trains, adding to the atmosphere of farce. He later confessed that the whole enterprise had been a “disaster”; but he had only himself to blame.

  There was one last gasp. In the summer of 1932 it was reported in The Times that Hitchcock had been “recently appointed by British International Pictures Limited to supervise all their productions at the Elstree Studio.” It is not clear of what this “supervision” consisted, except for the fact that he was credited as producer rather than director of another “quota quickie” entitled Lord Camber’s Ladies. He described it as “a poison thing. I gave it to Benn Levy to direct.” It had an illustrious cast, including Gerald du Maurier and Gertrude Lawrence, but it seems notable only for the practical jokes that Hitchcock as producer played on the leading actors. Du Maurier’s daughter, Daphne, recalled that “hardly a moment would pass without some fateful telegram arriving, some bogus message being delivered, some supposed telephone bell ringing, until the practical jokers were haggard and worn with their tremendous efforts.” This may have been a sign of Hitchcock’s contempt for BIP. His contract was terminated shortly afterwards.

  He was already dreaming of America. He was beginning to feel that he was in the backwaters of cinematic development. England was too insular. There was no appreciation, except by a few, of Soviet and German cinema. He also believed that American film was technically superior, with its larger resources combined with much greater sense of purpose. He complained in a newspaper article that “one of the chief disadvantages of British film production is the scarcity of people with an instinct for films—who can, in fact, think pictorially.” So he set his sights across the Atlantic. He allowed an American agency to suggest his name to various studios, but the time was not appropriate; the Hollywood industry was about to enter a slump. His opportunity would come a little later.