Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock

by John Russell Taylor

  One other thing little remarked at the time—as how should it be?—which later became an important gimmick in his films was Hitch’s own personal appearance. In a scene in a newspaper office he is to be glimpsed sitting with his back to the camera, but reasonably recognizable—he claims it was just because they needed another extra there and no one was to hand. It has also been said that he is part of the crowd by the railings at the end of the final chase, but having examined the sequence carefully I suspect that it is someone who, in the darkness, from certain angles, looks like him. The point is immaterial: this was the first of the famous personal appearances Hitch has made through the years as his trademark—another instance of his remarkable gift for publicity and catching the public’s attention as a personality, a recognizable person, at a time when film directors were generally mysterious beings who stayed behind the camera and hardly impinged in any way on the awareness of the moviegoing public.

  For the moment, though, Hitch was set to work on a much more routine project which did not particularly appeal to him but had certain practical advantages. It was Downhill, starring Ivor Novello, and based like The Rat on a play Novello had written for himself in collaboration with the actress Constance Collier under the collective pseudonym of David Lestrange. It is not, one would gather, among the films Hitch feels particularly proud of nowadays—he is the first to make fun of titles such as (when the hero is about to be expelled from public school for supposedly getting a local shop-girl in trouble) ‘Does this mean I won’t be able to play in the Old Boys’ match, sir?’ And the film undeniably does have its moments of absurdity (though the example cited is surely not as absurd as all that—not anyway if one takes the hero as the age he is supposed to be rather than the age Ivor Novello appears), as well as its naïve illustrative touches, like the literal setting out of the hero on the downward path after his father has turned him out by going down a ‘Down’ escalator in the London Underground. (The shot in question was made late at night in Maida Vale station, Hitch coming straight on from the theatre to do it, incongruously dressed in white tie and tails.)

  But seen today Downhill comes over as one of his liveliest and most joyously inventive silent films—possibly a lack of any great sympathy with the material (‘A poor play’, Hitch says) made it easier to regard the film as an exercise in technique. His attitude to the public school in which the drama starts (a little grander than but not so different from Hitch’s own boarding school of St. Ignatius) is, seemingly, not over-romantic—this is no starry-eyed Goodbye Mr. Chips view of upper-class youth at school from the viewpoint of the deprived petit-bourgeois. But, as so often, the real pleasures are all out of school: some hint of what Hitchcock can do comes right away in the scene at Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe where the hero, Roddy, and his best chum toy with the willing shop-girl’s affections to a battery of Germanic lighting effects and a lot of play with the motion of a bead curtain (not to mention a little comic distraction of the kind Hitchcock was to use over and over again in suspense contexts, when a little boy comes into the shop with a penny and is served by one of the visitors).

  Perhaps the most astonishing moment of all comes later on, in a shot which prefaces Roddy’s sojourn in the ‘world of make-believe’. He has just been turned out of his own home by an irate father. Now we see him in close-up, looking reasonably cheerful, in evening dress. Then the camera pulls back and we realize that he is in fact a waiter. The couple he is waiting on then get up from the table and move on to the dance floor, where they seem to be performing with slightly surprising abandon for a thé-dansant. And suddenly, while the camera continues to move out and round, the ‘waiter’ joins in the dance also, and we are able now to see that this is all taking place on a stage, before an audience as part of a musical comedy—it is a sort of Chinese box of illusion within illusion. The first time it works by surprise and suddenly making us conscious that the filmmaker’s art and ingenuity are being applied; on further viewing it continues to work, but with the added interest of our being able simultaneously to see exactly how it does work. And at the time Downhill was made absolutely no one else in the British cinema was working with this kind of cinematic imagination, telling a film story with this mind-grabbing command of the medium’s possibilities—which, one senses, Hitch was incapable of not doing, even with a subject not at all to his taste.

  The shooting of the film did not go off entirely without incident. For one thing, Hitch had a quarrel over a rather strange matter of principle with Ivor Montagu, who had helped him change the apparent disaster of The Lodger into a triumph and was now working on the scripting and editing of Downhill. Montagu, as befitted a young intellectual invader of the cinema, had all sorts of principles about what could and couldn’t, or should and shouldn’t, be done in films. He objected particularly to shots which seemed to contain a built-in impossibility, or to be cheating in some way. He himself admits to a measure of inconsistency: he introduced into The Lodger a shot of a hand switching off an electric light a split second before the light actually goes out—a practical impossibility which nevertheless had to be put up with if the gesture was going to be read on screen. But a shot Hitch was determined to include in Downhill stuck in Montagu’s gullet. It was a scene in a taxi with the knees of the hero, his new love and her older protector all touching in a rather equivocal manner, photographed from directly above. Montagu complained that the shot was from an impossible viewpoint—not even a fly on the ceiling of the taxi could see things that way, unless the taxi was ten feet tall. Hitch, characteristically, didn’t care: the shot showed what he wanted it to show, and that was that. Montagu was irritated at his inability to put over his point, and though he remained quite friendly with Hitch he departed after preliminary work on Easy Virtue, and he and Hitch did not work together again until seven years later, when fate and Michael Balcon reunited them on the first Man Who Knew Too Much.

  Ivor Novello was very different to work with. Six years older than Hitch, he had become known first as a song-writer, then as an actor and dramatist, and with the original stage production of The Rat in 1924 had got well on the way to being the great matinée idol of his generation. He was a romantic star in the classic manner, eventually to be associated mainly with a long series of sentimental operattas in which he himself usually starred, beautiful and lovelorn, dutiful and sad. His private personality was very different—funny and charming, homosexual in a somewhat swishy way, and a toughly practical businessman. Different as they were, he and Hitch became quite friendly during the two films they made together, and Downhill is really the only film Novello appeared in which suggests something of his sense of mischief and fun. Originally it suggested even more of this. Hitch shot a scene in which Novello and Ian Hunter, rivals for the affections of the same woman, have a knockdown fight which starts quite seriously with them formally dressed, Hunter in morning coat and striped trousers. Then they start throwing things which get bigger and bigger until they are each wrestling with pedestals almost as large as themselves which end by knocking them both down. But the studio took a dim view of this farcical turn of events—it was, they said, no way to present a romantic idol, and out the scene had to come.

  Hitch was intrigued to note Novello’s skill in managing publicity. When the rest of Downhill was completed they still had a couple of necessary close-up shots left to do of Novello staggering through the East End of London on his return to England. Hitch had already begun work on his next film, Easy Virtue, and was on location on the Riviera. Novello came down very grandly, checked into the Hotel de Paris in Nice for one night, gave a lot of interviews there in his suite, and then, having got that out of the way, vanished to a very humble pension for the rest of his time on location. The shots were done on the flat roof of the pension, with a couple of men holding a painted backdrop of the London docks while Novello walked on the spot in front of it in the bright Mediterranean sunlight and the natives looked on incredulously, speculating as to what on earth these crazy Englishmen could b
e doing.

  The second of the straight assignments Hitch found himself working on in 1927 (started, as will be gathered, so hot on the heels of Downhill he had not even finished the one before he was well into the other) was on an even more unlikely subject. At least the play of Downhill was episodic and featured a variety of locales. But Noël Coward’s play Easy Virtue was almost completely dialogue-bound, a deliberate evocation of the kind of problem drama about women with pasts and families with principles which had been enormously popular some thirty years earlier. A perverse subject to make into a silent movie, evidently, but Hitch was not to be easily beaten by it. The story is spread out to include locations in the South of France and the English countryside, and framed by two sessions in court to establish the hapless Larita’s shady background and unfortunate fate. (As she leaves the court for the second time she says to the photographers outside, in what Hitch calls the worst title he ever wrote, ‘Shoot—there’s nothing left to kill’). Everything which is explained in the play about Larita’s guilty secret and her wooing by an idealistic young man who knows nothing of it is shown in the film—in fact the play as written by Coward does not begin till about halfway through the film.

  Hitch never actually worked directly with Noël Coward on the film—he scripted it himself with Eliot Stannard and, to start with, Ivor Montagu. It is curious to speculate on how Coward and Hitchcock would have got on at this stage in their respective careers: they were almost exact contemporaries and came from very similar backgrounds, but had gone in very different directions right from their professional beginnings. Coward was already Novello’s chief rival as a theatrical idol, though while Novello’s was the traditional romantic image, Coward’s was that of the sophisticated, cynical, bright-young-thing generation, whose most publicized representative he had become with the phenomenal success of his play The Vortex in 1924. Coincidentally, The Vortex had been filmed almost at the same time as Easy Virtue by Adrian Brunel, fellow member of the Hate Club, and starring none other than Ivor Novello—not too successfully, since that film just plodded along in the wake of the play, loaded with dialogue titles, where Hitch’s film took off gleefully on its own.

  Easy Virtue contains some great Hitchcock ideas and a few out-and-out Hitchcock tricks—the kind of thing he took pleasure in doing as much as anything because no one could guess how he did it. There is a classic instance of this near the beginning of the film when he makes the judge in the divorce court look at the attorney through a spyglass. He wanted to match this gesture with a close-up of the attorney from the judge’s point of view, but for technical reasons it was impossible to change the focus quickly enough to achieve the effect directly. So instead Hitch had a giant plaster hand and a huge spyglass made, to look, when photographed, like the judge’s hand and glass close to the camera. He then used a double of the actor playing the attorney in the long shot which is instantly obscured by the raising of the spyglass, put the real actor behind camera in the same pose reversed, and had the giant pseudo-spyglass fitted with a mirror, so that when it was raised into shot the apparently magnified image through the spyglass was actually a natural-sized image reflected in the mirror.

  Such intricate exercises in mechanical ingenuity do not make up the whole of the film’s inventiveness, though. One of its most charming scenes turns on a very functional story-telling idea, and a little personal discovery. Larita (played by Isabel Jeans) is being courted by a respectable, idealistic young man who does not know about her past. Finally he asks her to marry him, and she, torn between fear and desire, tells him to telephone her that evening for her answer. He does so, and the whole of the ensuing scene is played not on either of the principals, but on the switchboard operator. She hooks them up, pays little attention to their conversation for a moment, then starts to listen in, and we see the to-and-fro of their discussion on her face, concluding with a triumphant smile as Larita finally says yes. By doing it this way Hitch saved the cost of two sets, found a witty visual way of getting over what would otherwise be a boring exchange of dialogue—and gave a first chance to a new girl he had noticed on stage, who went on to be an important star and a lifelong friend, Benita Hume.

  By the time Easy Virtue was completed and released there was already a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, on the horizon of world cinema. On 6 October 1927 The Jazz Singer, the first part-talkie feature had its New York première and the days of the silent movie, whether many people then realized it or not, were numbered. For the moment, though, the news had relatively little effect in Britain. No British film producers could afford to invest in all the new equipment required for a still-experimental process, which might well prove to be just a flash in the pan. And anyway at this time they were having their work cut out for them, as usual, just to keep functioning even on the much more modest level normal in Britain. So much so that the generally apathetic Government was persuaded late in 1927 to pass the Cinematograph Films Act, which set up a quota of British films required to be booked into British cinemas. Though there was some violent opposition to the act from those who saw in it a danger that the cinemas would be flooded with poor-quality British films taking advantage of their protected situation, at least it was a shot in the arm for the industry—even while the bill was passing slowly through Parliament (May-December 1927) finance became a lot easier.

  One incidental result of this period of optimism and expansion was the setting up of a new company called British International Pictures, headed by John Maxwell, a solicitor from Glasgow who had been involved in film exhibition and distribution since 1912. The company rapidly gathered assets—a couple of distributing companies, cinemas, subsidiary production companies, and Elstree film studios. It also signed up as much talent as it could to back up its claims to eminence in the newly secure-seeming British film industry. Most importantly, it acquired Alfred Hitchcock, who was prized away from Michael Balcon and Gainsborough with promises of new freedom, bigger and better budgets—a considerable inducement since Gainsborough’s finances were painfully modest and Hitch had not been too happy with either of his assignments since The Lodger.

  At least the first film he made for BIP was a subject of his own choice, an original script by himself and Eliot Stannard (whom he had brought with him from Gainsborough) set in the world of boxing and entitled The Ring. Hitch had never felt any great interest in boxing, any more than any other sport, but he used to go quite often to the Albert Hall for the big fights, as much as anything to observe the curious rituals: the smart audience all dressed up in black tie to sit around the ring; the habit of pouring a whole bottle of champagne over a fighter to revive him at the thirteenth round. All of which contributed to the later stages of the film. The tawdry side-shows among which the early scenes are set represented another aspect of that seamy underside of show business which had always fascinated Hitch, and did give him the chance to show with vivid location reality a whole spectrum of lower-class English life which at that time had rarely if ever been seen on the screen. Since meticulous realism is seldom an end in itself in Hitchcock films (even in The Wrong Man, which makes a big point of telling a real-life story just as it happened) it has not been too much noticed as one of the effects he has at his disposal. But many of the most memorable parts of The Ring are these incidental scenes of almost documentary material in the fairground and later in the fight crowds. And some of the details Hitch was most proud of at the time were the little realistic notations which few if any in his audience would consciously notice—like the contrast between the very battered, worn card indicating the first round in the fights of ‘One Round Jack’ against all challengers and the brand-new, unused card they have to get out when one challenger unexpectedly manages to hold out till round two.

  The story of The Ring is none too subtle: a side-show fighter (played by the Danish actor Carl Brisson) is discovered and taken up by a professional promoter and the reigning champion (Ian Hunter). His discovery enables him to marry his girl-friend from the fun-fair, eve
n though she is undecided which she is more interested in, him or the champion, and after her marriage she continues to wear the snake bracelet the champion gave her and to go out with him in spite of her husband’s understandable jealousy. The title refers to the boxing ring, the wedding ring and possibly also the bracelet, and there are some strong visual effects (of the kind Hitch was later to label naïve) emphasizing these symbolic identifications, such as the shot of the heroine’s hand as the wedding ring is put on her finger and simultaneously the bracelet falls down over her wrist from where it has been concealed under her sleeve. And there is a lot of rather Germanic play with mirrors, usually returning deceptive images, as when it looks as though the heroine and the champion are flirting at a party because of the angle from which the husband is observing their reflection. Compared with the intricacy of some of these effects, there are moments which at the time do indeed seem naïve, like the passage of time being indicated by the champagne at the boxer’s celebration party going flat as they all wait for his wife to come home, or his professional progress marked by his name moving further and further up a billboard while round about the seasons change (snow is succeeded by blossom and so on).

  Still, noticed such effects were. The critic of the Bioscope announced enthusiastically that it was ‘the most magnificent British film ever made’, and most of the other critics were inclined to agree that it was pretty good. Admittedly Hugh Castle, in the highbrow magazine Close-Up, said that ‘Hitchcock just missed great things in The Ring’, but then he rarely praised British films anyway. The film did not do very well commercially, but it helped to forward Hitch’s career, gave him the satisfaction of receiving a round of applause at the première for an elaborate montage in which the hero fantasizes a kiss between his wife and his rival to a welter of distortions, with a piano keyboard twisted into abstract patterns, and constituted in his estimation the second real Hitchcock film. He certainly felt, and feels, much happier about it than about any of the next three films he made for British International. His assessment of these films is arguable, and probably influenced by various adverse circumstances associated with their production at the time. Also, maybe, by their failure to make much mark either critically or commercially. Two of them, The Farmer’s Wife and The Manxman, were derived from works in other media which had already had considerable success in their own right, with the consequent limitations on what a film-maker could hope to do with them. The third, Champagne, which came in between, was at least based on an original story in which Hitch had some hand, but he was absolutely prevented from shooting the story he wanted, so that was not too pleasing an experience either.