And so, probably, Cutts did: in particular Hitch would seem to have picked up from him some hints on dealing with actors, on and off stage. But in his obvious area of expertise, the wonderful world of girls, Cutts seems to have had no influence at all. Hitch was by no means uninterested, but he had already, secretively, formed a very specific interest of his own, Alma. One result of his recruiting her as continuity girl on Woman to Woman was that, as assistant director, he was on the set every hour of the working day, right next to her. Whatever else he might learn from Balcon, Saville and Cutts, he was not interested in anything they might teach him about seeing girls.
Which was no doubt just as well, considering that the connection with Cutts was to lead him into some rather bizarre situations. For the moment, though, things went on calmly enough. Woman to Woman started production in June 1923 and was finished by August. It was, Hitch thinks, the best of the Cutts films, and it was certainly the most successful. By the standards of the time it was both lavish and sophisticated: the script Hitch and Cutts had devised from a successful play of the previous season concerned an Englishman fighting in France during the First World War. He has an affair with a dancer at the Moulin Rouge who bears his child, then goes back to the trenches, is wounded and becomes amnesiac, and back in England marries another girl, completely unaware of his unfinished business in France. The grand finale has the girl from the Moulin Rouge, now known as ‘the English Dancer’, come to dance at his mansion, in an elaborate routine which begins with her being borne in by four ‘Nubian’ slaves—actually the McLaglen brothers in black-face, this being one of Victor McLaglen’s more unlikely early appearances in films. Hitch confidently elaborated the character of the fallen woman as though he was intimately familiar with the breed, and to his relief no one questioned what he wrote.
The settings too involved unknown territory, since he was required to design several elaborate Parisian scenes, including a complete reconstruction of the Moulin Rouge, without ever having set foot outside England. He dispatched someone to France to do research for the décor, but then decided that he didn’t really trust the researcher, and suddenly told Alma that she would have to keep an eye on things for a couple of days, as he was taking the night ferry to France himself. On this first trip, one might expect he would try acquainting himself with some of the fine food and drink for which the French capital was famed. But no; this was business. And the first thing Hitch did, arriving off the boat train at 7 a.m. was to go to early mass at the Madeleine. Sharp firsthand observation and native intelligence covered for lack of practical experience, and Hitch suddenly found that as ‘art director’ of the film he could just calmly state as a fact that the set had to be shot from this angle, in this way, and people would listen. Though he did not know it at the time, he was taking the first steps towards assuming complete control of a film.
An important part of the film’s success with the public, apart from a story which had been sure-fire in one form or another since Enoch Arden, was the presence in it of a big Hollywood star. Realizing how important it had been to Cutts’s previous films to have Mae Marsh in them as a selling-point for America, Victor Saville had been dispatched to Hollywood to sign up an American star for the company’s first venture, and had the good luck to find Betty Compson momentarily at a loose end, haying just refused to sign a new contact with Famous Players because they would not pay her enough money for the drawing-power she had achieved with them in the previous two years. He offered her £1,000 a week—a very generous amount for British films at that time—and she accepted, on condition that the contract should be for two films made back-to-back. Which proved to be a big mistake for the British company, since they had no property ready to exploit their expensive star and had to rush into production with another film, The White Shadow, advertised hopefully as ‘The same Star, Producer, Author, Hero, Cameraman, Scenic Artist, Staff, Studio, Renting Company as Woman to Woman’. Unfortunately the same formula (or almost the same—this time the script was written by Michael Morton, author of the stage play on which Woman to Woman was based) did not have the same results, and the film was a box-office disaster. But for the moment the Balcon-Saville-Freedman company was riding high on the enormous success of Woman to Woman all over Europe and in the United States too, where Lewis J. Selznick put it into every Paramount theatre and it made a big profit for practically everybody concerned—except its makers, who had had to sign away most of their rights in order to get a foot in the door of their desired markets.
Hitch was known as a good fellow, full of ideas and always good for a laugh. The veteran film-maker George Pearson recalled that while filming at Islington in 1923, he used regularly to adjourn to Hitch’s office to gamble for pennies on a toy race game he had invented. But for Hitch the most enjoyable personal experience of working on the two Cutts films was his meeting with Betty Compson, a jolly, effervescent and yet firmly practical young woman who put on no airs and graces as the visiting star and was very kind and friendly towards the fledgling designer. Hitch never forgot this, and years later, when Betty Compson was no longer a star but a hardworking utility actress in Hollywood, he repaid his debt with a nice little role for her as a ‘good-time girl’ in his screwball comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But something in the long run much more influential on his future was to result from Woman to Woman. Balcon went to the States with the film, to find that the Selznick company, its distributors there, were in a temporary state of financial embarrassment and in the hands of the receivers, and both Lewis J.’s sons, David and Myron, were jobless. When Balcon returned to England, Myron came with him; he married in England, settled down and founded the Joyce-Selznick agency in London. Very rapidly, Hitch and Myron were to become firm friends, this being Hitch’s first connection with the Selznicks and so finally a contributory factor to his coming to Hollywood under contract to David O. Selznick some fifteen years later.
Meanwhile, though, all question of long-term career planning was far from Hitch’s mind. The success of Woman to Woman was good, but it was instantly cancelled out by the abject failure of The White Shadow. C. M. Woolf, the film renter who handled their product, had lost confidence and would not give the company a distribution advance. It looked as though Balcon-Saville-Freedman in its present form would have to be dissolved. But Balcon, as so often in his long career, pulled a surprise out of the hat. One morning he came into Hitch’s office and announced casually that he had decided to set up a new company. It would be called Gainsborough Pictures, and had a capital of £100. Why Gainsborough? Because there was a particular Gainsborough portrait Balcon had always liked, and he thought it would make a good trademark, suggestive of art and gentility and class. He had worked out an arrangement with one of the leading distribution companies, Gaumont, for a new film, made on the same lines as the first two, with the same production team. The Passionate Adventure, ready for showing in August 1924, was a reasonably adroit mixture of glamorous high life and picturesque low life, scripted by Hitch and Michael Morton from a popular novel by Frank Stayton about a frustrated husband-in-name-only who found escape in visits to the East End slums disguised as a derelict. Clive Brook starred in it with another American import, Alice Joyce, and playing a featured role, this time his own colour, was Victor McLaglen. Hitch had to design and build a complete stretch of canal with houses beside it all on a 90-foot stage for this film, but such professional problems were just grist to his mill. The film was a much more modest production than its predecessors, but as such it was a safe beginning for the new company, and the first of a long line of pictures which were going to make Gainsborough and its nodding lady one of the most familiar features of the British cinema for some thirty years.
For the moment, however, it was scratching around for finance and facilities. In the parlous state of British films it was scarcely possible to plan more than one picture at a time. And for his next production for Gainsborough Balcon looked across the Channel to set up a co-production deal: to Germany, where the
giant UFA organization had become one of the most powerful and successful production companies in the world. They agreed to try out a new pattern of production with an adaptation (by Hitch, of course) of The Blackguard, a novel by Raymond Paton about a violinist’s tempestuous career. It would be made in Berlin at the Neubabelsberg Studios with a largely German cast and an American female star, Jane Novak; UFA provided the financing, the British side undertook to distribute the film throughout the English-speaking world, and of course brought in the services of Balcon as producer (with Erich Pommer, a figure who was to cross Hitch’s path again in Britain years later, as his associate), Cutts as director, and Hitch as writer, designer, assistant director and general odd-job man.
At first the English contingent in Berlin, strangers in a strange land, had to stick together. Hitch, faced with the problems of communicating with his German draughtsman, found that they had both been title-designers and could make some sense to each other by sketching out their messages. But he soon got fed up with the limitations of this method and began learning German in earnest. He began learning a number of other things in earnest too. Cutts was in the midst of another affair, with an Estonian dancer. When his ‘wife’ arrived in Berlin he found himself in something of a dilemma, and recruited Hitch and Alma as cover. They were asked to stay with the Cuttses in a flat they had taken, Alma having a small bedroom of her own and Hitch sleeping on a sofa in the living room. Cutts then suddenly found himself surprisingly often ‘working late at the studio’—which meant that Hitch and Alma had to meet Cutts and his girl-friend and the cameraman and his girl-friend and go round to a famous café called the Barbarina, where they would sit drinking and eating sandwiches until it was time for them to drive home via Cutts’s girl-friend’s place in the Dorotheenstrasse, behind the Reichstag. There Cutts would disappear upstairs for a while; Hitch and Alma would sit in the car and watch as the light went off and in due course was switched on again. Then Cutts would reappear and carry them off home, very late, to a heavy English meal prepared by Mrs. Cutts (steak-and-kidney pudding and such)—which of course they could not refuse without arousing suspicion, so that Hitch got to the point of regularly excusing himself from table to run out, throw up and return for the rest of the ordeal.
Hitch did not always find himself waiting downstairs in the car. On at least one occasion he discovered that Weimar Germany featured some diversions undreamed of in Leytonstone (as far as he knew, anyway). One evening he and Cutts were invited out by the family of one of their UFA bosses. To their surprise, after dinner they were taken to a night-club where men danced with men and women with women. Eventually, two German girls in the party, one of them still in her teens, the other thirtyish, offered to drive them back to their lodgings. But there was a little diversion: on the way they stopped at a hotel and the two Englishmen and their party were dragged in. In the room the girls made various propositions, which perhaps fortunately the terrified Hitch did not understand too exactly; he thought the safest thing to do was to keep saying ‘Nein, nein’ until they got discouraged. At this point, perhaps suspecting that the Englishmen were united by some special interest of their own, the two girls got into bed together. Hitch was surprised but fairly uncomprehending. Not so the other young girl of the party, a student daughter of the UFA director: she sat down comfortably and put on her glasses to be sure of not missing anything. It seems unlikely that this interesting and exotic experience had any very deep effect on Hitch, though he admits to an abiding interest in abnormal psychology and sees the bedroom scene between the two showgirls in his first independent film, The Pleasure Garden, which has a faint lesbian overtone, as a reflection of this scene. Meanwhile, he tended in off-duty moments to stick even closer to Alma.
Professionally, working at Neubabelsberg was an enormously productive experience for Hitch. Up to then he had worked entirely in the one small British studio, making his own mistakes and finding his own way without much reference to the techniques of other filmmakers. Now suddenly he was dropped in the middle of the most innovative area of film-making at that epoch. On neighbouring sets the great F. W. Murnau was making his most famous movie, The Last Laugh, which was designed to be the last word in visual story-telling, showing audiences every stage in the decline and fall of the grandly uniformed hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) without a single explanatory title. Hitch watched fascinated whenever he had the chance, and was particularly impressed by the art of Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, Murnau’s art directors. There seemed to be no trick in the book that they did not know and exploit: one day Hitch watched Murnau setting up and shooting a short scene on the platform of a railway station where a train has just come in. The carriage nearest the camera was the real thing, with passengers getting on and off. Then the next few carriages were constructed in forced perspective to give the impression of receding into the distance in a very small space. But such was Murnau’s concern for detail that to give life to the background he had placed another full-size railway carriage in the far distance across the lot, with passengers getting in and out of it, in such a way that when photographed the foreshortened fake carriages would neatly join up the two far-separated real carriages. What you can see on the set does not matter, explained Murnau—the only truth that counts is what you see on the screen. It was a lesson Hitch was never to forget.
But his opportunities for visiting other sets were not so extensive. Once they started shooting he had more than enough problems of his own. Cutts’s behaviour was becoming more erratic and unpredictable, and he left more and more decisions up to Hitch while in pursuit of his Estonian dancer and on the run from his wife. Hitch was used to handling little incidental scenes, odd shots with extras and the other details that an assistant director might normally be left to take care of. But now for whole sequences he was left to his own devices. The principal thing Alma recalls of Hitch at this time is how very impressed she was (even though she would rather have died than admit it) at the way nothing seemed to faze him: in the midst of all the frenzy he was a still centre of calm and confidence, acting for all the world as though he had behind him a lifetime’s experience of big studios, foreign parts, and ordering around artists and technicians of considerable seniority and distinction. On at least one occasion he had to use all the authority he could muster. One of the sequences he was to shoot all by himself was a dream in which the violinist sees himself ascending to heaven accompanied by the hosannas of welcoming angel hosts. There was in Neubabelsberg a stage which would be perfect for this, as it was already fitted with a solidly constructed, unevenly sloping floor, as for a hillside forest glade. The trouble was, that was precisely what it had last been used for—the giant trees constructed by Fritz Lang’s set-designers for the forest scenes in his legendary epic Siegfried, recently completed, were still there, the pride and joy of the studio. And now this young Englishman came in and wantonly demanded they be destroyed. The studio begged and pleaded, but he was adamant—this was the stage he needed and he was determined to use it.
He got his way; usually, even then, he got his way. Tearfully, the art department moved in, demolished Lang’s forest, and built in its place fancy tiers of narrow platforms disguised with rather solid cut-out clouds, through which the violinist would wend his way by a winding path, playing away the while, to heaven’s door. But now there was another problem: how to convey the idea of an infinite host of angels in the generous but still limited space of the studio. Hitch decided to use the human equivalent of forced perspective, and sent his minions out to hire the tallest players they could find, and the shortest children and midgets. (The search for enough midgets involved further plunges into the odder kinds of Berlin night life, which Hitch was, with some relief, able to depute to his German assistants.) Having got them all dressed up in suitably angelic white shifts, Hitch then proceeded to arrange them on the tiers in order of size, starting with the giants at the front, then normal-sized extras, children and midgets, so that the scene appeared to be populated by an inf
inite number of uniformly sized angels stretching away into the far distance. Right at the top, at the back, he carried the process to its logical conclusion with dressed dolls. The only movement all the figures, live and stuffed, had to make, was a raising of their right arms in greeting, and to get the dolls to do this too Hitch devised an ingenious system whereby each doll’s arm was attached at its base to a cord which dangled down through the sloping floor of the set and at the other end was tied to a long timber, which in its turn stood on a set of trestles. The arrangement was repeated for each row of doll-angels. At a given signal the scene-shifters would push the logs off the trestles, they would fall to the ground, and the sudden jerk in the cords would make all the doll arms pop up at the same time. The only remaining difficulty was that the set was so solidly constructed, there seemed to be no way the director on the outside could communicate instantly with the scene-shifters on the inside. Finally, the problem was resolved by cueing to a gun shot, and visitors to the set were somewhat taken aback to see the usually mild, peaceable Hitch running up and down apparently threatening his angels with a pistol and getting them to jump to his orders with a plentiful expenditure of blanks.
Despite the expertise of the UFA studio, all the learning does not seem to have been on the part of the Britishers. Hitch had been familiar, for instance, with the use of certain process shots, such as the Hall process, an ancestor of the Schufftan process, which enabled the cameraman to combine a painted area with an actual set in the camera; it had been brought over to Islington by the Americans he first worked with. On one occasion he used it in The Blackguard for a scene in Milan Cathedral which required tourists to pass through looking around and pointing out features of interest which were present only on the painted section. Hitch had to get a British set-painter to paint it, and UFA was so interested in what he was doing, as they had never seen anything like it, that they wanted to set up another camera to photograph it. Hitch had to explain gently that it would not make the slightest sense visually except from exactly the angle his camera would take—but he did promise to hand on his know-how before he left, enjoying to the full the odd situation of being deferred to by the experts of UFA.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 5