Since Hitch already had shot for the silent version the strongly visual opening montage, the killing when the heroine knifes her would-be seducer in his studio apartment, and the final chase through the British Museum, he felt he could afford to experiment a bit elsewhere with the conspicuous use of sound, instead of just adding dialogue. And at this point he invented the scene which figures in every textbook and impressed critics and public alike as much as the glass ceiling with Ivor Novello’s feet pacing had in The Lodger, This occurs just after the killing. The heroine has managed to sneak home unobserved, and is trying to pretend that everything is as usual. Her mother rouses her from the bed she has just got into, fully clothed, and she comes down to breakfast. There the conversation is all about this mysterious stabbing the night before, and gradually we hear what is being said as though through her hypersensitive ears: ‘What a terrible way to kill a man,’ says the chattering neighbour. ‘With a knife in his back. 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 …,’ and so on, as the words become an almost indistinguishable litany with just the word ‘knife’ stabbing out with full volume and clarity. This kind of subjective distortion was a complete novelty at the time, and if today it seems perhaps a little too obtrusive and self-conscious (like the ceiling shot in The Lodger), it was a sensation in 1929.
The film has another point of similarity with The Lodger: in it Hitch was not allowed to use the ending he had originally intended, but was forced to settle for a more conventional happy ending. What he originally intended was to bring back at the end the same sequence of events in the arrest and imprisonment of a suspect as he had used at the beginning, only this time the suspect would be the heroine. Again the arresting officer would be her boy-friend, but there would be no sign between them—he would just mechanically do his job, and at the end, after she has been led away, the other policeman would ask him, as before, ‘Well, what are you doing tonight, going out with your girl?’ He would answer without apparent emotion, ‘No, not tonight,’ and walk out. Obviously this would be an ironically effective conclusion; equally obviously it would be distressingly downbeat for an audience which has been suffering along with the heroine and empathizing with her attempts to get away with it. In the process, of course, the audience has been persuaded to lay aside or suspend judgement on the question of her guilt, which, when you look at it dispassionately, is more than a little problematic. After all, the victim had only taken her up to his apartment (willingly enough on her part) and made a fairly violent pass at her—it would be difficult even to maintain that she killed him while resisting rape. So she would seem to be guilty of at least an unpremeditated panic killing, worse than manslaughter. The script obligingly switches our attention from this to the red herring of the blackmailer, both to gain sympathy for the heroine as the victim of such a low, sneaky criminal and to convince us, by dramatic sleight-of-hand, that his detection and pursuit are a parallel to the discovery of the real murderer in The Lodger which let the unjustly suspected hero off the hook. Some commentators eager to find the deep-laid Christian morality they argue is present in all of Hitchcock, read into the end of the film as it stands a strong suggestion that though the heroine does escape prosecution she and her policeman fiancé will be unable to escape the agony of a shared secret guilt for the rest of their lives. It is hardly likely, however, that Hitch intended anything so deep (or so trite, depending which way you look at it): for him the ending was and remains a ‘happy ending’ forced on him as a compromise, and amusing mainly because it was a successful early exercise in wilfully warping an audience’s moral perceptions to such a point that they would cheerfully applaud the spectacle of a murderer getting away scot-free.
The film has a number of other incidental whimsical touches which show Hitch privately enjoying himself. There is, for example, the characterization of the would-be seducer, who is not really in any important sense a villain, and is in fact played by Cyril Ritchard, later famous in America as the king of light comedy and musicals. His talents in the musical direction are even employed in Blackmail by having him do a musical number at the piano before he is knifed. But he is, after all, out to lead the girl astray, which whimsically suggested to Hitch the moustachioed villain of melodrama. Actually he is clean-shaven, but in one shot Hitch arranged the lighting so that a shadow from a wrought-iron chandelier fell across his face in precisely the shape of a twirlable moustache. ‘My farewell to silent pictures,’ he calls it.
A lot of the technique Hitch used in Blackmail was far more sophisticated than that, though—in particular the near-final chase through the British Museum, none of which could actually be shot in the British Museum, on account mainly of the poor light there. But Hitch, with his developing penchant for locating his action sequences in curious and visually striking places, had set his heart on the British Museum. So it all had to be done in the studio—with the aid of some quite complicated examples of the Schufftan process. Hitch had long-exposure photographs taken from the nine viewpoints from which he would have chosen to shoot in the Museum, made transparencies of them so that they could be back-lit to give the desired clarity and luminosity, then had the parts of the slides corresponding to the places where he wanted to put the live actors scraped away. The slide was then placed close to the camera and only the parts of the original setting immediately surrounding the actors built full-size so that when photographed the slide and the set fused together. All one might see, therefore, on the stage was a man by a door frame looking intently at nothing: the rooms on either side of the door frame and the cases of exhibits into which he appeared to be gazing were all on the slide.
All this had to be done in great secrecy, because Maxwell was worried about how long the film was taking to shoot and no one in the studio management knew much about the Schufftan process except that they mistrusted it as a new-fangled contraption which might well go wrong. As a cover, Hitch set up a second camera on the sidelines apparently photographing a letter for an insert. A lookout was posted, and if anybody from the front office was sighted approaching they would all drop what they were doing and suddenly be very intent on the letter until the danger was past. So successful was the stratagem that when the rough cut of the film was shown to Maxwell and his staff everybody wanted to know exactly when and how Hitch had found time to shoot this whole elaborate chase sequence on location in the British Museum. Indeed, even today it is hard to tell what was shot in the studio and what, if any, on the spot—even the shot of the blackmailer being chased across the roof of the Reading Room was done in the studio with a miniature combined in the camera with a skeleton ramp.
Blackmail is also a first in another respect—inessential, perhaps, but immediately noticeable: it is the first film in which Hitch makes one of his cameo appearances. Admittedly he is visible, just, in The Lodger, but in Blackmail he makes a characteristic gag appearance which more or less requires him to be recognized. There he sits on the London Underground, a portly figure in a pork-pie hat, quietly reading a book, while a horrible little boy leans over the back of the next seat to torment him and receives a sharp but ineffectual jab for his pains. It is the precursor of and model for many other such moments, and it somehow symbolizes Hitch’s emergence as a public figure—a position unique among British film-makers and ultimately to make him one of the most familiar faces and figures in the world.
The immediate effect of the film was very gratifying too. It was a considerable commercial success, and moreover was received with universal delight by the critics. The Lodger had encouraged the notion that perhaps, just possibly, there might be such a thing as a British film which could seriously be held up to comparison with the best that foreign film-makers could produce. Since then, British critics had been hopefully looking for something more to support this idea. True, Hitch’s films—or some of them—had been pretty good, good enough to make the critics feel that their confidence was not misplaced. At the same
time there were a lot of excuses and back-handed praise, a lot of head-shaking about the quality of the story material he had to work with. But now, with a communal sigh of relief, the film press could discover a worthy successor—and a film, moreover, which seemed to advance the medium itself, to put Hitchcock and the British cinema in the forefront of world development in the tricky new medium of the talkie. Even the usually superior Close-Up, though it deprecated the way the ‘knife … knife … knife’ sequence had been ‘glorified in the English press’, did still admit that it gave one ‘a clear idea of the potentialities of the medium’ and concluded that in consequence ‘some of us are already beginning to say that talkies are an art.’
Among such might well have been Alfred Hitchcock, though, then and since, he was chary of striking any too pretentious a public pose on the subject of his private convictions: he would make the movies, and let the art take care of itself. And indeed his next assignment had precious little to do with art of any kind. Nearly all the major Hollywood companies had greeted the arrival of sound with some kind of spectacular revue film which would show off the talking (and singing) abilities of as many as possible of their stars in the most economical and easy-to-take form. Warners had The Show of Shows, with everyone from John Barrymore and Loretta Young to Bea Lillie and Rin Tin Tin; MGM offered The Hollywood Revue of 1929, with Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Jack Benny and many more; from Paramount there was Glorifying the American Girl, put together by Florenz Ziegfeld, and from Universal there was The King of Jazz, glorifying Paul Whiteman among others. So what more natural than that Elstree Studios should come out quickly with their own home-made counterpart, Elstree Calling?
Alas, there is many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, or the script and the screen. Elstree Calling is a truly dreadful compendium of terrible stage variety acts, mostly shot in as near theatrical conditions as possible by an array of cinematically inexperienced directors, including Jack Hulbert and André Chariot, under the general supervision of Adrian Brunel. Some of the songs were by Hitch’s old collaborator Ivor Novello, and among the performers unhappily involved were Anna May Wong and the hero-to-be of British wartime radio, Tommy Handley. Hitch would seem to have had nothing at all to do with most of this: his contribution was the framing device which has a working-class family, not totally unlike those in The Lodger and Blackmail, trying frantically to tune in to the show on their new television set (which in early 1930 was more science fiction than science fact) and being constantly frustrated by the incompetence and irascibility of the father and the gleeful descriptions of what their more fortunate next-door neighbours have seen. The only point of interest now (and quite possibly to Hitch at the time) is that the father is played by the English comic Gordon Harker, who had already played substantial roles for Hitch in The Ring, The Farmer’s Wife and Champagne. But otherwise Hitch’s sequences (which cannot have taken more than a day or two to shoot), though they are the only bearable parts of the film, can hardly be said to occupy a meaningful place in the canon or in his life.
Indeed, Elstree Calling was only a strange interlude while he was preparing his next film, a far more imposing project and his first to be conceived from the start as a fully fledged talkie. Altogether too much of a talkie from Hitch’s point of view, in fact, for nowadays he tends to dismiss Juno and the Paycock as just a photograph of the stage play. This is not actually fair—it is, if anything, rather less so than Dial M for Murder or Rope, but one can see what he means and he seems to have little love for either of those later movies either. And Juno and the Paycock (like Rope, unlike Dial M for Murder) was something which he specifically wanted to do. He had seen Sean O’Casey’s original play set during the Irish Troubles several times, and been immensely impressed by it and by the acting of the Abbey Theatre company from Dublin. He particularly liked their simplicity and directness of effect, as opposed to the elaboration of C. B. Cochran’s then recent production of O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, which he felt was too ‘gussied up’, and was very struck by the last scene, which pushed humour to the point where it became deliberately sickening. He had mentioned this enthusiasm to Ivor Montagu, still a friend although they had gone separate ways professionally, and one day Montagu engineered a meeting between Hitch and the playwright on the set of Blackmail. O’Casey, who had never set foot in a film studio before, arrived exotically dressed in a tweed knickerbocker suit, and after looking around uncomprehendingly for a few moments, delivered himself of the rather surprising observation: ‘There’s no education like the education of life’—a curious reaction, Hitch thought, to this world of illusion. His only comment on the idea of filming Juno was ‘Why do you want to do the bloody thing?’ However, Hitch and O’Casey immediately hit it off, and the deal to bring Juno and the Paycock to the screen with some of the original Abbey Theatre cast, notably Sara Allgood as Juno, was soon finalized.
So here was the very English Hitch set to direct a very Irish subject—and one, moreover, which as an outstanding stage success had its own coherence and consistency and would brook very little modification, even if he had thought this a good thing to do. In fashioning the screenplay Hitch and Alma stuck very close to the original: he kept thinking desperately ‘How can I get out of the room?’ but the only important point at which he felt the text could stand some expansion was at the opening. He wanted anyway to show the pub where they drank, a very important part of their lives, so he persuaded O’Casey to write a new scene in the pub leading up to an energetically staged riot and shooting. The rest of the film follows the play so exactly that it has, Hitch says, nothing to do with cinema, as he could see no way of narrating the story in cinematic form. He did, though, photograph the stage play with a lot of imagination and sometimes considerable technical ingenuity. The imagination is still of course apparent, but it frequently needs an exercise in historical reconstruction to be fully aware of the technical ingenuity. There is a scene, for instance, in which the family is talking in the living room, gathered excitedly round the new phonograph, oblivious of the fact that the son is crouched in anguish by the fireplace. Their conversation is interrupted by a funeral passing in the street outside, and then by gunfire, and meanwhile the camera moves in from a general view of the room and the family, past them to a close-up of the guilty boy by the fire and his reactions.
Easy enough, one would say, in terms of modern film-making. But what one forgets is that at the time the film was made all the sound had to be produced and recorded on the spot. So there had to be a phonograph playing ‘If You’re Irish, Come into the Parlour’, and the sound of the Marian hymn being sung by the funeral procession as it passes, and the gunfire, and the conversation all created on one tiny stage. Unfortunately, to complicate matters, they could not find a suitable recording of the required song, so that too had to be done on the stage. Consequently, as well as the actors and the camera crew, there were present a small orchestra without basses to simulate the right tinny, distant sound, a prop man singing the song while holding his nose to sound as though it was coming from a phonograph, an effects man at the ready with the machinegun effect, and a choir of about twenty people to represent the funeral. All to be synchronized with the dialogue and fluctuating in relative volume and intensity as the window is opened and closed. It is a tribute to the success of the result that one would never guess at the problems involved.
Despite Hitch’s anxieties about making the text cinematic, the film turned out very successfully, and was praised by the critics of the time to such an extent that it seriously embarrassed him. James Agate, famously difficult to please, wrote in the Tatler, ‘Juno and the Paycock appears to me to be very nearly a masterpiece. Bravo Mr. Hitchcock! Bravo the Irish Players and bravo Edward Chapman! This is a magnificent British picture.’ Others did not lag far behind. Hitch was flattered, but felt rather guilty, as though he was stealing the praise which should really have gone elsewhere, since the qualities of the film, in his view, had little to do wi
th cinema. At least, it would seem, O’Casey did not share this view: he was so happy with the result that he and Hitch began almost immediately working together on an original screenplay to be called The Park, which would use the comings and goings in a small public park during one day as a sort of microcosm of city life. Some minor failure of communication—as simple as a misunderstanding about who should call whom—caused the project to fall by the wayside, but O’Casey subsequently went on to reshape the script into his play Within the Gate. Hitch, though he saw little or nothing of O’Casey in later years, retained an affectionate memory of him, not untinged with malice, and confesses that some of both went into the character of the old bum prophesying the imminent end of the world in The Birds.
Much more to Hitch’s taste, and in the perspective of his later films much closer to ‘typical Hitchcock’, was his next film, Murder. Not that, in one important respect, it is ‘typical Hitchcock’; it is a whodunit, a genre which Hitch in general disapproves of, or at least finds relatively uninteresting, as it falls foul of his oft-stated belief in suspense as opposed to surprise—too much attention is concentrated on the purely mechanical matter of the conclusion and working out which of the various possible characters did actually do whatever it was that was done. The story of Murder is derived from a detective thriller by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson called Enter Sir John; a theatrical knight turns amateur sleuth when he becomes uncertain that a jury he has been on was right to convict a young woman of murder. In the tradition of many a gentleman detective he sets out to solve the case himself, quite disinterestedly, to set his own mind at rest, and finally comes up with the odd but reasonably convincing conclusion that the real culprit is a transvestite half-caste acrobat.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 11