Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  Nevertheless he wanted to begin again under new auspices. He had agreed with an entrepreneur and independent producer, Tom Watson, to direct Waltzes from Vienna, a run-of-the-mill musical comedy concerning the professional relationship between Strauss senior and Strauss junior. It is an elaborate setting for the waltz “The Blue Danube.” It is not clear why he accepted the assignment. He may have needed the money; he may have wanted to keep busy after his displacement from Elstree. It is not an unsuccessful musical, as musicals go, and Hitchcock made some effort to knit the songs with the narrative in the interests of formal coherence. It is light comedy which manages to be engaging and entertaining.

  But he was not happy with the enterprise, and vented some of his frustration on the leading players. Jessie Matthews, the star of the film, complained that “he was then just an imperious young man who knew nothing about musicals. I felt unnerved when he tried to get me to adopt a mincing operetta style. He was out of his depth and showed that he knew it by ordering me around…I thought the film was perfectly dreadful.” She said also that “he sent me up mercilessly” as “the Quota Queen” and that she “was always anticipating some ghastly practical joke.” Hitchcock himself best summed up the experience when he announced on the set that “I hate this sort of stuff. Melodrama is the only thing I can do.”

  The film was shot at the studios of Gaumont British, at Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush, of which Michael Balcon was now head of production. Balcon had of course worked with Hitchcock at the Islington Studios, a period which Hitchcock regarded with increasing pleasure. It was Balcon, after all, who had given him his first directorial role. That may have been one of the reasons Hitchcock accepted Waltzes from Vienna. Now Balcon was about to rescue his career once more. They had been discussing possible future projects, and Hitchcock mentioned that he had been working from time to time on a script concerning Bulldog Drummond, a gentleman of adventure who might be described as the James Bond of the 1920s and ’30s, and Balcon reacted enthusiastically. So a partnership was re-formed that lasted for a further four years.

  Another member of this partnership was Charles Bennett. Bennett had originally been a playwright but it was he who had written Blackmail and had subsequently written a screenplay entitled Bulldog Drummond’s Baby; this was the script which Hitchcock mentioned to Balcon. The time was right. Bennett had also left BIP and was looking for a new studio. Hitchcock and Bennett were back in business under the benign management of Balcon.

  Bennett recalled that “Hitchcock and I used to go to a local pub—not far from the studio—and we used to spend most of the afternoon just talking. Sometimes we talked very little about the film we were writing.” This was Hitchcock’s preferred way of working, allowing the scenes and ideas to emerge unprompted rather than in the forcing house of office sessions. Bennett added that “Hitch referred to me as his constructionist and felt I was the best. For dialogue he would bring in someone else—but no one else could build a story like I could.” Hitchcock always needed a strong story on which to hang his own ideas. He seems to have worked out individual scenes and images in his head, but had no real idea of how to connect them in a living whole. This was where Bennett was at his best.

  Hitchcock had imagined two distinct settings for the new film. One was of Alpine bleakness and the other was of the dark mass of London streets. He was a poet of cinematic imagery. At some point he suggested to his writer that “we just drop the Drummond business”; and out of their new scenario emerged The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hitchcock and Bennett would walk the streets or take bus rides in search of possible settings; in particular Hitchcock liked the ambience of the Royal Albert Hall.

  Eventually Bennett would work on four of Hitchcock’s films, and Balcon would produce them. These were the people substantially responsible for Hitchcock’s first great period of English thrillers, and Bennett in particular has never received the credit for his close collaboration with the director. Consistency was further maintained by working again with cinematographer Bernard Knowles, the art directors Otto Wendorff and Albert Juillon, and the editor Charles Frend. All of these now almost forgotten names also contributed in part to the essential spark of the “light thrillers” or “thriller sextet,” combining comedy and suspense, which rescued Hitchcock’s reputation in the early 1930s.

  Charles Bennett and the Hitchcocks started final work on the script in Cromwell Road. What did Hitchcock know about Switzerland, where the film begins? “They have milk chocolate,” he said, “they have the Alps, they have village dances, and they have lakes. All of these national ingredients were woven into the picture.” He had scenes in mind even before he could assimilate them. But darker elements were also at work. Ordinary people, living in a familiar setting, are suddenly plunged into a “chaos world” where no one is safe. That is where all the suspense and terror start. On the first day of shooting, 29 May 1934, Hitchcock walked on to the set and put the finished script on a table, announcing “Another picture in the bag!”

  Peter Lorre, fresh from his success as a child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, had already arrived in London to play one of the central roles. Hitchcock liked Lorre’s combination of menace, sarcasm and decorum. Lorre recalled that “all I knew in English was yes and no, and I couldn’t say no because I would have had to explain it. Sidney [Bernstein] put me wise to the fact that Hitchy liked to tell stories; so I used to watch him like a hawk and whenever I thought the end of a story was coming and that was the point, I used to roar with laughter and somehow he got the impression that I spoke English and I got the part.”

  Hitchcock’s judgement was correct and Lorre’s fascinating manner, like that of a snake hypnotising a victim, came to dominate The Man Who Knew Too Much. It was his visage that was most prominent on the film posters. He plays the leader of a group of assassins who intend to murder a foreign leader but, alas, their secret is revealed to an ordinary English couple on an Alpine holiday, whereupon their daughter is kidnapped by Lorre and his associates; his previous role as child murderer no doubt added a frisson to the adventure. The chase is now on for the daughter, and it takes various turns through a temple of sun-worshippers, a dentist’s surgery in the East End and the Royal Albert Hall, before culminating in a siege within the dark streets of Wapping.

  Hitchcock made another version of the same film twenty-two years later, with Doris Day and James Stewart, but the differences are far more interesting than the similarities. The American product is more technically assured and more carefully executed, while the English version is funnier, faster and lighter.

  He had crafted a thriller of his own devising that would profoundly affect the nature of his later films. The idea that civilisation is as thin as ice, beneath which lie depths and darknesses, is one that stayed with him. The idea that the course of ordinary life is unexpected and full of threat is another of his constant themes. So also is his association of terror with comedy, of threat with pantomime, of the most subdued realism with the most contrived theatricality. It is a cockney vision, adumbrated by Dickens and Chaplin. He had first explored it in such films as Downhill and Rich and Strange, but now it came fully to fruition. Yet it can also be construed as a Catholic vision which is designed to have power that is emotional and unconscious, rather than rational and intellectual. Hitchcock did not want his audiences to think. He would rather titillate them, bludgeon them, or excite them with unbearable suspense. Hidden laws govern the universe. Individuals are at the mercy of impersonal forces. That is all you know or need to know.

  Another device, unveiled in The Man Who Knew Too Much, came to be known as the “MacGuffin”; it might be described as the nonsense clause in his films which ties together the improbabilities and implausibilities. It is, to use a more familiar phrase, the red herring, the device that sends the plot and the characters on their way—such as the attempt to assassinate a foreign leader in this film—but remains of little or no interest to the audience; it is simply an excuse for all the activity on the screen.<
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  With Balcon temporarily away in the United States, the managers of Gaumont British, as well as the cinema bookers, were cautious, not to say cool, about the new film. They had seen nothing quite like it before, and their collective suspicions seemed about to consign it to the shelf; but Balcon returned to the studio, not a moment too soon, and persuaded the doubters with a financial agreement in their interest. When it was released in December 1934 it was, much to everyone’s surprise (except perhaps the director’s), a great success. The reviewer of the Daily Express wrote that “Hitchcock leaps once again into the front rank of British directors.” Hitchcock concurred, stating on one occasion that “I think you’ll find the real start of my career was The Man Who Knew Too Much.” He also said later that the popularity of the film “re-established my creative prestige.” At the beginning of 1935 he received a gold medal from the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers for the best English film of the previous twelve months.

  . . .

  So the “Hitchcock thriller” was fully born. It defined him, sometimes to his dismay. He once said that if he made a film out of Cinderella, a corpse would have to roll out of the golden coach. Yet this had become the genre of his choice and, buoyed by his success, he set to work almost immediately on a thriller by John Buchan entitled The Thirty-Nine Steps. He collaborated once more with Charles Bennett on a script which began as a half-page scenario and concluded as a seventy-page outline of the film, scene by scene. This visual emphasis was deepened as Hitchcock began to produce the drawings or storyboards that helped the cameraman and the set designers. The dialogue could come later, a task for which other writers were employed. Hitchcock and Buchan had broadly similar sensibilities. Both compared the thriller to the fairy tale, conflating an atmosphere of fantasy and wish-fulfilment with the essential narrative of good and evil. Hitchcock remembered reading The Thirty-Nine Steps in his teenage years, and said that it once more impressed upon him his “fear of policemen.” He said also that “what I find appealing in Buchan’s work is his understatement of highly dramatic ideas.”

  He wanted to build on the strengths of his previous film by creating a fast pace of humour and suspense, charting the perils of the world when order breaks down. So scene follows scene, and climax follows climax, in quick succession. There is no opportunity for the characters, or for the audience, to pause for breath. As he said in an interview, “you use one idea after another and eliminate anything that interferes with the swift pace.” Logic and plausibility are not to be considered. The audience did not expect to see a documentary. The hero, Richard Hannay, becomes unintentionally involved in the murder of a strange woman and in the theft of national secrets by a ring of foreign spies. He has to clear his name of the former and thwart the latter. The narrative moves from London to the North, leaving the murdered woman behind, from a jump off the Forth Bridge to a crofter’s cottage, from the mansion of the leader of the spy ring to a small town where Hannay tries to evade his pursuers by twice changing his identity; he is handcuffed to Pamela, his initially unwilling fellow traveller, but they flee across the moors and find a remote inn. And then back to London where the conspiracy is unravelled.

  It may be baffling in cold print but on the screen it is pure flight and pursuit, rapid changes and fleeting moments. If it needed a composer it would be Mozart with his high spirits and extraordinary technical virtuosity. One “switch” follows another with such speed that the audience registers only panic and excitement. An innocent man is being hunted to his death. That is all they need to know. Hitchcock adopted the technique of cutting to a second person while the first person is still speaking, and explained that it was “one of the devices which help the talkies tell a story faster than a silent film could tell it.” Once the narrative is set in motion it never for a moment stops. That is the true music of Alfred Hitchcock.

  Yet he always said that audiences should see his films at least twice, simply because on the first occasion they are swallowed up in a delirium of images and scenes, surprises and disasters. He wanted them to look carefully at what was being projected on the screen. If the film were to be slowed down, for example, scene gradually dissolving into scene, they would become aware of the craft and care that fill every frame. A shot taken from a high angle communicates fate or doom; a rapid montage suggests a subjective point of view; shots down a train corridor are signals of anxiety or panic; the camera itself is part of the action, a good or bad companion to the players who themselves are trying to express what it is like to be trapped in a Hitchcock film.

  The 39 Steps (Hitchcock deliberately used the numerals, perhaps to distinguish it from the novel) begins and ends in the same London music hall, as ornate and shabby as anything painted by Sickert, and it never once loses its serio-comic tone or its reliance on a series of variety acts or performances for the delectation of the audience. Hannay himself leads the dance, since he is caught in a trap and must escape it. So he takes on a number of roles, impersonating in turn a milkman, a car mechanic, a member of the Salvation Army, a professional politician, a murderer and a devoted husband. In the fifth chapter of the novel Hannay is told “that the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it. You could never keep it up…unless you could manage to convince yourself that you were it.” It was Hitchcock’s habit to read aloud to his actors. He may have read this passage.

  Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, the two leaders of the ensemble, were distinguished film actors; but Hitchcock did not care much for actors’ distinction. On the first day of shooting the scene obliged the two of them to be handcuffed together, one of the most intimate of all possible unions with just the mildest hint of sex and pain. At some stage in the proceedings Hitchcock professed to have lost the key. It was one of his practical jokes. Exaggerated reports circulated that they had been locked together for hours, but Hitchcock would never have allowed filming to be delayed for so long. Perhaps a few minutes interposed, long enough for Donat and Carroll to become used to one another’s company. In another scene Robert Donat and Peggy Ashcroft began to giggle uncontrollably; Hitchcock walked to the side of the stage and smashed a lamp with his fist. The actors recovered themselves and gave a sterling performance.

  When he was once asked if he would like to film the Titanic disaster he replied, “Oh yes, I’ve had experience with icebergs. Don’t forget, I directed Madeleine Carroll.” It seems that he decided to break down, or at least roughen, her conventionally cool demeanour. The episode with the handcuffs is one example. He also explained to Donat that he must really drag his co-star through the briars and heather and rocks of the moorland set. Carroll’s father was a professor at Birmingham University, from which she graduated, and Hitchcock would call out, “Bring on the Birmingham tart.” But these were not privately motivated jibes. He wanted to make sure that the actress came as close as possible to her role. “Nothing gives me more pleasure,” he said, “than to knock the lady-likeness out.” But she took it well, and her part was more fully developed as filming continued.

  When The 39 Steps opened in June 1935, it was at once a huge success. This seemed to be what the cinema was made for. The Sunday Times reviewer pointed out that “In The 39 Steps the identity and mind of Alfred Hitchcock are continuously discernible, in fact supreme. There is no doubt that Hitchcock is a genius. He is the real star of the film.”

  . . .

  After the film was released Hitchcock took his wife and young daughter on a holiday or, rather, “we did manage a few weekends at our summer cottage.” By this time, however, he had acquired another member of his more extended film family. He had advertised for a secretary and, perhaps to his surprise, a chic blonde graduate by the name of Joan Harrison arrived at his door. He seems to have put her through his usual tests of humour and unshockability—he read out to her, for example, the more obscene passages of James Joyce’s Ulysses—and she passed the audition.

  After The 39 Steps Hitchcock was looking for a project on a grander and more adventurous scal
e. Instead Balcon offered him another spy story, Secret Agent, which he felt obliged to accept. There was not much to it. Based on two of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Ashenden” stories, it is set in Switzerland and the Alps at the time of the First World War. Ashenden is a British agent despatched to kill a German spy; by misadventure he follows the track of the wrong man, who is duly pushed off an Alpine cliff. The wrong man is always on hand in a Hitchcock plot. So Ashenden must dust himself down and find the right victim until a convenient train crash solves the problem for him.

  John Gielgud was chosen to play Ashenden, although he was not in any way suited to the role. Hitchcock had given him the impression that he would be portrayed in the mould of a modern Hamlet, divided over his dilemmas, but this was only to tempt him into the part. The actor soon discovered as much himself.

  Hitchcock may have divined the fact that Gielgud believed himself to be slumming by selling himself to film; it was for the actor, at this stage in his career, a decidedly inferior medium. In his memoirs he says that Hitchcock made him “feel like a jelly and…nearly sick with nervousness.” Hitchcock said in turn of Gielgud that “his stage experience is of no use to him here. I’ve had to make him rub out everything and start blank.” This may have been good advice, but Gielgud could not so readily unlearn what he had been taught to do. Hitchcock then began to treat him with indifference. “My performance was taken for granted,” Gielgud recalled, “and I was unaccustomed to being taken for granted.”

  Gielgud also resented the fact that the director seemed to pay far more interest to his co-stars, Madeleine Carroll and Peter Lorre. They enjoyed his practical jokes, which Gielgud did not. Hitchcock seemed to adore Carroll, even though he sometimes treated her with scant respect. The icing on the cake was Lorre, who played the role of Ashenden’s sly and shady assistant with a luscious lasciviousness that could only have been helped by his regular injections of morphine by a Harley Street doctor. He was sometimes permitted to improvise his own dialogue, which took the more subdued Gielgud completely by surprise. In the theatre the script was sacrosanct. It was like a mad pantomime in the tradition of Harlequin Jack Frost.