Towards the end of shooting things were getting altogether too complicated for Cutts, and one day he just vanished with his girlfriend, leaving Hitch and Alma to finish the film and make their way home as best they might. The next anyone heard of Cutts he had settled in Calais with the Estonian, gazing eagerly but in vain across the English Channel. It appeared that the girl was a stateless person and could not enter Britain on the papers she had. Cutts was frantic and kept firing off telegrams to Balcon and other persons of influence threatening suicide or, alternatively, that he would go off with his girl-friend to South America and become a professional tango dancer if they did not do something about entry papers and a work permit for his beloved.
Unaware of what was going on back home, Hitch had been reaching a momentous decision of his own. He and Alma were returning from Germany on the overnight boat from Kiel, and a very stormy night it was. Alma was lying down in her cabin, not feeling at all well, when Hitch suddenly appeared and, after making a couple of practical remarks about the job in hand, quite out of the blue asked her to marry him. He says, perhaps with hindsight, that he had chosen the moment because the journey was one of the few chances they had to be alone and also because he felt that Alma’s resistance would be low at this point and she would be least likely to turn him down.
So when Hitch arrived back in Islington he was engaged. It was more doubtful whether he had a job. Cutts was still fuming and fretting at Calais, and nobody knew how the next film planned would be made, if it was to be made. There was a project, though; Gainsborough had acquired the rights to a play by Rudolph Besier, later of Barretts of Wimpole Street fame, called The Prude’s Fall, and Hitch was as usual assigned to shape it into a script. He worked on it alone; it was mailed to Calais, came back with alterations, was revised and sent again to Cutts, until finally, at this distance, it was completed and ready to go. There was some urgency in the matter since Jane Novak had been brought over on a two-picture deal, and the faster The Prude’s Fall followed The Blackguard the better and cheaper for Gainsborough.
As Cutts would not come back to England the rest of the production team had to go to him. Hitch and one of Balcon’s assistants set off to go with Cutts on a location-finding tour, since the film required shooting in various glamorous parts of western Europe. They met Cutts in Calais, but he seemed very happy there and sent them on to Paris. In Paris after a couple of days they were joined by Cutts and his girl-friend. She liked it in Paris, so Cutts decided they would stay on there while Hitch and his associate went on to St. Moritz. After a week Cutts and the girl-friend arrived in St. Moritz. She liked it there too, so Hitch was sent on to Venice to pick further locations and meet the cast and the rest of the crew. Which was all very well, until Cutts arrived with his girl-friend. She didn’t like Venice—all that water was unhealthy and lugubrious. So the whole group upped stakes and went on to Lake Como. The day they arrived, there was a storm on the lake, and she didn’t like it. Well, obviously she’s right, said Cutts, the weather is impossible here. So on they all moved to St. Moritz. Or towards St. Moritz: an hour away by train they discovered that the line had been blocked by an avalanche. Well, that’s it, said Cutts: let’s go back to England. Which they did, having trailed the whole cast and crew around Europe at great expense and shot not a single foot of film.
The script had to be revamped to let all the exotic locations originally envisaged be substituted for in the studio: the result, inevitably, was rather half-hearted and nobody liked it. Moreover, Cutts never did manage to get the Estonian into England, so he was not happy on any score. And by now Hitch had really become conscious of a certain underlying hostility in Cutts’s attitude towards him. There were just too many slighting references to the ‘wonder boy’, and malicious ones in the studio were all too ready to stoke up the fires of Cutts’s resentment by suggesting that Hitch was getting too much credit for the over-all effect of Cutts’s films—after all, his name appeared all over them. In particular the cameraman Hal Young, a tough and cynical character noted for his habit of reading the racing reports while he cranked the camera with his free hand, had taken against Hitch for whatever reason and delighted to poison Cutts’s mind against him.
Of course, Cutts himself was not in such a strong position, with a pretty steady decline in the critical and commercial standing of his films since Woman to Woman. But he was a partner, and could not just be dumped, however eccentric his behaviour. Nor, really, did Gainsborough have anyone in mind to replace him as their star director. Balcon had no ambition to direct, and neither at this point did Saville, though he was later on to become one of Britain’s leading directors. Nor, despite some talk already, and a little experience in that area, did the ‘wonder boy’—incredible as it seems in relation to what came after, Hitch claims that he never thought of becoming a film director, being perfectly happy doing what he was doing. It came as a complete surprise to him when one day Balcon came to tell him that Cutts was set to direct a film version of the very successful stage melodrama, The Rat, featuring its brilliant young author-star Ivor Novello, and did not want Hitch to work on it.
Hitch accepted this with outward stoicism, but could not help worrying what he would do next—especially seeing that the British cinema was going through one of its periodic crises, and work was not so easy to find. But again it was Balcon who came up unexpectedly with the solution. A couple of weeks later he suddenly asked how Hitch would like to direct a film himself. It was a new idea, but he might have been systematically preparing himself for just this moment, learning every detail of the craft through scripting, designing and assisting Cutts on all aspects of his films. He knew he could do it, and had no hesitation in answering with perfect nonchalance, ‘All right. When do we start?’
Chapter Four
The answer was, that they started right away. Balcon’s gesture was not one of impulse: he had been watching Hitch for a couple of years, he liked him, but more importantly he was impressed by what he could do and how skilful he was at selling other people on his ability to do it. A confidence trick, perhaps, but if so it was a confidence trick Hitch had played on himself first of all. He not only seemed confident; he really was confident. He knew with remarkable clarity what he could and could not do. If he was in any doubt, he would go away, think about it, and come back with an answer both sensible and correct. Balcon had no doubt that Hitch could direct a film because Hitch had no doubt.
Balcon’s opinion was not shared by some of those around him. Cutts was jealous of the attention Hitch had been getting, and made it very clear that he wanted Hitch stopped. However, after his erratic behaviour on The Blackguard and The Prude’s Fall, he was in no position to insist. The company’s activities were expanding to such an extent that Cutts could not possibly direct all their films himself, and, Balcon argued, it would be silly to bring in a possibly expensive outsider when they had in their employ someone who might have been specifically trained for this purpose. Anyway, Cutts had his hands full with The Rat, which turned out when released late in 1925 to be a sensational success, so honour was satisfied all round.
The other problem Balcon had over the Hitchcock project was to raise money for it. None of the English distributors was willing to put up money for a film directed by an unknown. His German contacts were more enterprising—or not so choosy, depending which way you look at it: in collaboration with a Munich-based company called Emelka, Balcon was able to raise the shoe-string budget envisaged for The Pleasure Garden, adapted from a melodramatic novel by Oliver Sandys, about the contrasting temperaments and fates of two chorus girls. Although the action of the story took place mainly in England and the Far East, it was part of the deal that the film must be shot in Europe, and that the female stars, as usual, should be American: this time Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty. To add to the international tone of the picture, the script-writer was English, the cameraman was Italian (the Baron Ventimiglia) and the art directors were respectively English and German. The assistant d
irector, though, was a reliable friend and ally, since it was none other than Hitch’s fiancee, Alma Reville.
The actual shooting of the picture was a succession of nightmares, most of them connected with money, or the chronic lack of it. Though the production was centred on Munich, the film actually started shooting with location scenes in Genoa, San Remo and on Lake Como. Hitch and Alma went out to Munich for some pre-production work with the English male lead, Miles Mander. There they were to separate, Alma heading back to Cherbourg to pick up the American star, Virginia Valli, and her friend Carmelita Geraghty, who was to play the second lead, from the Aquitania, while Hitch went on to the Mediterranean locations to get a few incidental sequences in the can. First he, Miles Mander, and the cameraman, Ventimiglia, were going down to Genoa with a newsreel cameraman and a girl playing Mander’s native wife, who had to get drowned in the sea in a sequence they would shoot immediately afterwards at San Remo. The newsreel cameraman was to enable them to cover from all angles the departure of a liner from Genoa, one camera being on the ship and the other on the shore.
Almost immediately, problems. Shortly before the train is to leave for Genoa Miles Mander suddenly realizes he has left his make-up case in the taxi and goes scooting off to get it, with Hitch shouting instructions after him about how to get to Genoa the next day in time for the filming. But then the train is ten minutes late in leaving and suddenly through a commotion at the end of the platform Hitch sees his leading man sprinting towards the train and managing to leap on just as it picks up speed. So far, so good. But then as they approach the Italian border Ventimiglia gives Hitch a nasty surprise. Because the camera and the unexposed film they are carrying are liable to duty, he says, they must smuggle them through. And where are they to be hidden? Right under Hitch’s berth in their sleeper, of course. Hitch, with his famous terror of the police and authority, is instantly in a cold sweat, and rightly so, as it turns out, since though the customs do not find the camera they do find the 10,000 feet of film and confiscate it because it has not been declared. The unit arrives in Genoa on a Sunday, prepared to shoot the sequence at noon on Tuesday, with no film.
All day they search Genoa for some, to no avail. Monday in desperation Hitch dispatches the newsreel cameraman to Kodak in Milan with £20, a sizeable sum in relation to their tiny budget, to buy the necessary film. He has just arrived back with it when they are informed that the confiscated film has also arrived and they now have to pay the duty on it. So they have wasted the £20 and have, as far as Hitch can judge with all the complicated juggling from pounds to marks to lire, scarcely enough money with them to get through the location scenes. Comes Tuesday, everything seems to be going smoothly: the ship, a Lloyd Triestino liner, will leave for South America at noon, and the unit succeed in hiring a tugboat to pick up the members on board ship just outside the harbour and return them to land. But it’s another £10, and when Hitch reaches for his wallet to pay he discovers that he has been robbed during the night at the hotel and has no money left at all. Frantic, he borrows the necessary £10 from his cameraman, another £15 from his star, and shoots the first scene of his career as a fully fledged director.
Delight. Euphoria. And then a bumpy return to earth. Whatever are they going to do? Hitch composes two letters, one to London urgently requesting an advance on his salary, the other to Munich tactfully conveying to Emelka that they may need a little more money. On consideration, he posts the first and tears up the second—for what an instant indication it would be of the incompetence he suspects they attribute to him if he must admit, for whatever reasons, to going over budget so early in the shooting of his first film. This decision taken, they have lunch at the Bristol Palace before setting off for San Remo to shoot the drowning. But then another complication comes up, one hitherto absolutely unexpected by Hitch, but undeniably educational. He finds his cameraman, the newsreel cameraman and the actress who is to play the native girl in this scene deep in a serious discussion. Ventimiglia breaks the news: she can’t go into the water. Why ever not? Well, you know, it’s that time of month.… What time of month? asks Hitch innocently. And there and then he gets a careful and detailed description of periods and the physical processes of women. Aged twenty-six, and already himself engaged to be married, he has never heard of such a thing. And all he can think of is, why the hell couldn’t she have told us before we spent all that money bringing her down from Munich?—Whither, along with the newsreel cameraman, who has now completed his work, she is instantly shipped back.
But this means they have at a moment’s notice to find another girl who looks vaguely right and is willing to be dunked in the Mediterranean (standing in for the tropical seas of the Far East, where the film’s climax takes place). Fortunately, all that is needed is a back view and some distant action: the heroine’s husband, depraved by life in the tropics, decides to dispose of his native ‘wife’ and make it look like a suicide, so he has to swim out after her, hold her head under water, and then drag her body back to shore claiming he could not save her. But alas, the replacement girl they have found is decidedly heftier than the original, and though the drowning can be accomplished effectively enough, when it comes time for Mander to lift her out of the water and bring her back to shore, he cannot do it, and keeps dropping her, take after take, to the great delight of a hundred or so interested onlookers on the beach. And when at last he does manage it, a little old lady gathering shells wanders right in front of the camera, gazing straight at it, so they have to do it all again.
Now for the third sequence of the film to be shot: it is a romantic one, of the heroine’s honeymoon at the Villa d’Este on Lake Como with the rotter who is subsequently to give her a few nasty shocks in the tropics. It is at Como that Hitch is to meet Alma, and be introduced to his two American leading ladies. The first thing he asks Alma, of course, is whether she has any money. The answer is no: it transpires that she too has had her troubles. To her alarm, both the actresses arrived with tons of luggage and expected big-star treatment (understandably, since Virginia Valli was one of the biggest stars at Universal in those days, but very different from Betty Compson with her cheery practicality.) The wardrobe Alma was to buy them in Paris ended up costing a lot more than expected, and all attempts to get them into the modest but comfortable Hotel Westminster in the Rue de la Paix were brushed aside: it was the Hotel Claridge or nothing. Hitch dares not let Virginia Valli know this is his first film, and tries throughout to cut the confident figure he feels he should. Only Alma is allowed to see his doubts and perplexities: each time he makes a shot he turns to her to ask urgently, ‘Was it all right?’
Somehow the Lake Como sequence gets shot: the advance on Hitch’s salary arrives, and his leading man, mistrustful, insists on getting back his £15 immediately, on the rather improbable grounds that he has to pay his tailor. By now Hitch has screwed up enough courage to wire Munich for more money, and more—a very little more—does arrive. But the hotel bills are mounting (Carmelita Geraghty is not in these scenes, and her presence was not accounted for in the budget), there are motorboats to be hired and all kinds of incidentals. Hitch meanly manages to exert some emotional blackmail on Alma by giving her to understand it’s really her fault Carmelita Geraghty is there at all, and so persuades her that she must borrow $200 from Virginia Valli. Naturally he can’t, because the star must not suspect either how inexperienced he is or how short money is. Alma, practical as ever, thinks up some story and gets the money, so that at least Hitch can pay the hotel bill and buy their sleeper tickets back to Munich. He can even, just, pay the excess-baggage charge on the Americans’ impressive array of carriage trunks.
On board the train he slyly asks the American actresses whether they really want to eat in the restaurant car, implying that only an idiot would drink the water in these dangerous foreign parts. Mercifully, they have come to the same conclusion, and opt for staying in their compartment and eating sandwiches from the hotel; this means that the rest of the unit can afford to
have dinner. Then Hitch starts figuring again and discovers that they will lose money by changing lire into Swiss francs. Luckily they have only to change trains in Zurich, so that should not be much of a problem. Except that their first train is late, and they arrive to see their connection slowly steaming out of the station. Another extra expense: a night in Zurich. But then, miraculously, the departing train comes to a halt. Waving away porters (too expensive), Hitch begins desperately loading the unit’s luggage through the train windows himself. More haste, less speed: there is a terrible crash of breaking glass and again he is hauled up, quaking, before authority and fined 35 Swiss francs by the stationmaster for breaking the window. They arrive in Munich exhausted with literally one pfennig in the kitty.
After this baptism of fire things could only get better. And once safely back in the studios the rest of the shooting went off without any major difficulties. The early sequences of the film at any rate took place in a world with which Hitch was very familiar: the workaday English theatre—the ‘pleasure garden’ of the title, where Virginia Valli, the apparently hard-boiled but really idealistic showgirl, gets a job for Carmelita Geraghty, the wide-eyed innocent from the country who instantly goes to the bad, steals the man her benefactress really loves and leaves the theatre for a life of gilded excess paid for by a gallery of male admirers. Even working away from home, in Munich, Hitch has no trouble in vividly recreating this very English scene. But Munich, anyway, was very different from the bustle of Neubabelsberg, much quieter and more provincial. Hitch was able to go his own way with a minimum of interference or even outside influence. In fact, the only noticeable professional differences he had were with Alma, the hot-shot editor, who edited the film in what Hitch considered an unduly flashy way. She did not think so, but their first big argument ended, like most others, in a happy compromise. When Michael Balcon came over to the first screening of the completed film he was amazed that it did not look at all like a German film: in its lighting and its cutting style it seemed completely American. But this, as Hitch points out, was only to be expected: all his formation in films had been American.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 6