Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock

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Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 12

by John Russell Taylor


  Even if the whodunit structure was not particularly appealing to Hitch, he obviously found a lot to enjoy in the film itself, which gave him many opportunities to explore odd by-ways of human behaviour and is packed full of invention and recollection. The rather grand theatrical knight (an excellent performance by Herbert Marshall) is at once approved of and lightly mocked—he can be a proper gentleman, as when he considerately eats his soup with the same spoon as his ineradicably ‘common’ guest has chosen and gives subtle pointers as to what to do with the cherry in a cocktail, but also he comes in for his share of sly humour, as when he is beset with his landlady’s many terrible children in bed at the crummy lodgings he has taken to inspect the scene and milieu of the crime. Hitch’s memories of the grandeur of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre came in handy when Sir John is receiving the humble theatricals from the provinces: the vast expanse of very thick-pile carpet the trembling visitor had to traverse to reach Tree’s desk in the office is exaggerated, in the film, by putting a mattress under the carpet to give the subjective impression that the visitor is actually sinking in knee deep. And the vision of his mother struggling to get both legs into one knicker leg during an air raid is recreated in the opening sequence when screams signalling that a murder has taken place awaken a whole neighbourhood, causing various kinds of response as the camera tracks along outside a row of windows.

  Since so much in the story turns, or seems to turn, on nice class distinctions, a lot of attempts have been made to pin down Hitch’s attitudes in the matter, snob or anti-snob, rebellious or grovelling towards the Establishment. In fact, as we might expect, he is too cagey, or naturally given to paradox, or just bound up in the dramatic values of the story from scene to scene, to commit himself unambiguously. There is no doubt that the workings of the jury in the early scenes (and consequently the conviction of the innocent young actress) turn on the most obvious kind of social one-upmanship and the class prejudice of the shakily genteel against the evidently common. And there are certainly points at which the loftiness of Sir John is humorously deflated. On the other hand one might detect a certain patronizing of people who don’t know which is a soup spoon and are allowed to make fools of themselves in social games which are not worth playing anyway. No doubt a lot of this can be accounted for by the conventions of the period, such as the source of the trouble involving the real murderer being located in the secret information that he is a half-caste (it is a threat to reveal this which causes the murder)—in those days obviously, no position, liberal or otherwise, had to be taken on race prejudice and no serious question was raised over the use of terms like ‘half-caste’ in an evidently derogatory sense. Whether this should be pushed further, to assume (given the character’s habit of performing in drag) that half-caste is a sort of code word for homosexual, is more arguable: despite the rather affected, effeminate presence of Esmé Percy in the role, there does not seem to be any real evidence of this intention in the film, and Hitch was even then too sophisticated in his knowledge of sexual peculiarities to make the naïve equation of transvestism (especially merely theatrical transvestism) with homosexuality.

  In the course of shooting the film Hitch decided to experiment with improvised dialogue in order to get a feeling of spontaneity. He would discuss with the actors what the scene was about and, in general terms, what they should be saying, then set them to invent their own dialogue as they went along. Unfortunately the results were none too happy—the actors seemed embarrassed and self-conscious, and Hitch decided that whatever good effects others might get that way, improvisation was not for him. Other innovations in the film were more fruitful. In accord, perhaps, with the frequent references to Hamlet in the script (a trap is laid for a suspect with a play within a play, for instance), the hero is given a soliloquy, an interior monologue delivered on the sound track while we see Herbert Marshall’s face unmoving in camera. This has the advantage of revealing his inner thoughts and providing a very direct, natural-seeming piece of exposition, and though the studio thought audiences would find it obscure (where was the voice coming from?) in practice it seems to have presented no problem. There was also a scene in which Herbert Marshall is shown shaving in his bathroom with the sound of the radio playing the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde—another problem, in the primitive recording conditions then prevailing, which could be solved only by tucking a thirty-piece orchestra somewhere behind the wash-basin.

  Whatever problems Hitch may have had in shooting Murder, they were more than doubled by his having undertaken to shoot at the same time a German-language version, Mary. This making of versions in two or three different languages, often with widely varying casts, was a habit of early talkies, intended to counteract the sudden sharp limitation of potential audiences for any given film in Europe with the coming of dialogue. It had even been done in the silent cinema occasionally—Hitch’s Champagne, for example, also exists in a German version directed by Géza von Bolvary. With Hitch’s hard-won grasp of German he seemed to be a good person to direct both versions of this talkie, but he found it was a lot more difficult than he thought. He did go to Berlin in advance to discuss the script, and was sufficiently confident to turn down most of the suggestions the German producers made for modifications—mistakenly, he came to feel. In English he knew the audience, he knew what would be funny and what would not, he was in complete control of the pacing and tone. But in German he was not, and constantly found his attempts to keep the German version as close as possible to the English (for budget reasons if nothing else) being thwarted by the discomfort of the German actors and sometimes their flat refusal to do things which seemed very simple and acceptable to their English counter-parts.

  Alfred Abel, who played the role taken in the English version by Herbert Marshall, would not play the scene in which the actor has to be tormented by his landlady’s children while taking his morning cup of tea in bed: this was not suitable treatment for such a distinguished man, he insisted. When the character goes to visit the convicted (but innocent) supposed murderess in prison, Herbert Marshall wore a raincoat and tweeds, having shed his slightly ridiculous actor-manager garb of black jacket and striped trousers for clothes more suitable for the role of detective. Abel insisted on wearing formal clothes, since he was going (whatever the circumstances) to meet a young lady, and anything less grand would have been to German audiences not rather funny but merely unseemly. Needless to say, Hitch did not get on too well with Abel (though he enjoyed working with Olga Tchekowa, later a favourite actress of Hitler’s, who played opposite Abel in the German version), but he had to admit that maybe Abel was correct, in that he had for once bitten off rather more than he could chew.

  Still, Murder, the English version anyway, did maintain his reputation with critics and public, and his next film, if a photographed stage play on much the same pattern as Juno and the Paycock, was a safe and intellectually respectable venture from which he extracted himself as usual with credit. John Galsworthy’s play The Skin Game had been produced in London back in 1920, and concerned a fight to the death between two families, one country gentry, the other nouveaux riches industrialists, over a piece of land near the country town where they both live. It is talky, serious and meticulously constructed, offering little opportunity for opening out or unmistakably cinematic effects. In the circumstances Hitch decided to make a virtue of necessity by tackling it head on: the virtues and the faults are much more of Galsworthy than of Hitchcock. Hitch, indeed, hardly obtrudes himself apart from some big subjective close-ups to dramatize a faint, and the whole style of the film is cool and simple, very different from the almost expressionist feeling of Murder. In the preparation of the film Hitch, still an avid playgoer, did get to meet the aging playwright and was invited down to a week-end at Galsworthy’s country house. He found Galsworthy living in some style (the success of The Forsyte Saga in particular had made him rich as well as famous) surrounded by a large household. Hitch put his foot in it immediately
. Mrs. Galsworthy asked him what kind of music he liked. ‘Wagner,’ replied Hitch; ‘he’s so melodramatic’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs. Galsworthy conclusively; ‘we like Bach.’ Then over dinner Hitch discovered that Galsworthy prescribed the subjects of conversation. ‘We shall talk about …’ he began, and everyone tried manfully to do as he said. Then when he was tired of the subject he would begin another with ‘And now we shall discuss …’ Hitch recalls, as through a haze, a rather surrealistic part of the conversation in which Galsworthy announced they would discuss the relations of objects and then said, ‘Now suppose I have one grain of sago on this side, and one on that. Neither is aware of the other. Yet there must be some connection.…’ Why sago, wondered Hitch, as his attention mercifully drifted away. Hitch was amused as much as impressed by Galsworthy’s assumption of the grand manner, and some of his own ambiguous feelings surely filtered into the film, where things seem ultimately to be weighted against the gentry rather more heavily than in the play.

  After making these rather enclosed, theatrical pictures which did not permit him to wander very far from the studios, Hitch was beginning to feel the need for a change of pace. Also, he and Alma had not had much of a holiday for some time, so the idea of a film subject which would involve foreign travel, documenting and shooting in strange places, was immediately attractive. Rich and Strange (eventually called in America East of Shanghai) was therefore a project close to Hitch’s heart, and the first of his films since The Ring to be based on a story originally conceived for the screen, by Hitch himself developing a ‘theme’ by Dale Collins. The basic notion is that an ordinary surburban couple win a lot of money which changes their life, mostly for the worse, as they set off, two innocents abroad, to go round the world on a cruise.

  As it happened, Hitch and Alma had themselves recently been on a cruise, with Pat, now four. They decided it would make an agreeable winter holiday to head for the sun, on a cruise ship which went down the coast of West Africa, then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and back. Things went along quite smoothly and restfully until they got to Bathhurst, in Gambia. There, each member of the party was given a car and a driver for the day, mostly friendly volunteers happy to see new people. By chance Hitch and Alma were assigned the local priest, who took them out to his mission church in the jungle. As they arrived they saw a native family with a small son stark naked sitting outside. The father motioned to the boy to go inside and put something on; after a moment he reappeared wearing a shirt down to the navel and nothing else, which seemed to satisfy everyone that the proprieties were being observed. On the way back the priest suddenly said as they approached a crowd, ‘I can’t come any further with you—this is a demonstration for tourists.’ What it turned out to be was a very decorous dance, presumably originating in some fertility cult, involving two sheaves of corn from which a smaller sheaf eventually emerged—scarcely more exciting or indecorous than a harvest festival in the average English village church. The cruise probably had little specific effect on the conception of Rich and Strange, except, Hitch says darkly, that it gave him and Alma a vivid sense of how rapidly cruise members, decent people all, get to hate one another after being cooped up for a while on board ship.

  Before starting work in earnest on Rich and Strange, Hitch and Alma (who was writing the screenplay with Val Valentine) went to Paris to do some research on the background. They were planning a scene in which the central couple of the film, Fred and Em, go to the Folies Bergère and are taken in the interval to see some genuine belly-dancing. So Hitch and Alma went along to the Folies Bergère and in the interval asked a young man in a dinner jacket where they could see belly-dancing. He took them into the street and called a taxi: when they seemed surprised he told them the dancing was in an annexe. This was obviously odd, so Hitch guessed there must be some mistake, and when they stopped in front of a shady, anonymous-looking house he said to Alma, ‘I bet this is a brothel.’ In his innocent youth he had never been to such a place, and neither of course had she, so, greatly daring, they decided to go in anyway. The girls all came down and paraded in front of them, they carried off the situation as best they could by offering champagne for all, and then the madam matter-of-factly inquired which of the girls best suited Hitch’s tastes and how they might accommodate the lady. Taking refuge in an exaggeratedly shaky grasp of French, the two of them beat a hasty retreat and headed straight back to the theatre, only to discover that they had not been at the Folies Bergère at all, but at the Casino de Paris, and were obviously behaving about as naively in foreign parts as the principal characters in their story.

  Back in England they completed the script, cast it, and Hitch sent a second unit off to shoot the location scenes with a small group of actors and a skeleton crew, all of whom went on an actual cruise from Marseilles through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean out to Colombo. Because of the unusual length of the shooting schedule enforced by all this location work, he could not afford important stars, but recruited capable character actors from the West End stage: the central couple were played by Henry Kendall and Joan Barry (finally showing her face in a Hitchcock film after lending her voice to Anny Ondra in Blackmail), while Betty Amann played the phoney princess who attracts the husband’s attention on board ship, Percy Marmont the young man who courts her, and Elsie Randolph, a charming musical-comedy star on stage, was grotesquely dressed and made up to play the rather cruelly caricatured role of the inevitable old maid and cruise bore.

  The little background scenes for an Arab market, riding around in a rickshaw in the Orient and so on, were all shot without mishap, and the unit came back to the studio, where sets had been constructed with miraculous fidelity to match the location material, for most of the film. The story they were shooting is curious, to say the least—oddly bitter and gloomy, an adventure story in which all the adventures turn out badly. One thing everyone would agree: it could not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as ‘typical Hitchcock’, whatever that phrase might mean. It has been rediscovered and enthusiastically praised in recent years, probably because of all his English films it is the closest in its density and ambiguity to the great films of his Hollywood years. Despite this, and despite the fact that it is, as Hitch himself says, ‘full of ideas’, it does not finally seem very satisfactory. As so often in such cases, Hitch blames himself for casting wrongly—in particular, for putting Henry Kendall, a sophisticated West End comic actor and fairly obvious homosexual, in the role of Fred, the quintessential ordinary suburban husband.

  But even though not ideally cast, and endowed with a curiously primitive quality in parts because most of the location scenes had to be shot silent and pieced together with titles of almost silent-movie profusion, Rich and Strange does have an oddly haunting quality. The opening scene sets the tone, with Fred melodramatically demanding LIFE, and maintaining that as they are, the best thing for them is the gas oven—it is at once farcical and curiously convincing in its bitterness, and should prepare us for a black comedy. The comedy which ensues is not quite black, but it is certainly very grotesque. The misadventures of the innocents abroad begin harmlessly enough with a drunken evening in Paris, and the odd little gag in which each thinks the other is praying as they stagger incapably to bed. But soon they are not so innocent—snobbery rampant leads both of them into trying to appear much grander than they are, particularly Fred, who becomes enamoured of the obviously bogus princess. Much of the comedy on shipboard turns on social humiliation of various kinds, and it should not come as a complete surprise when things take a nasty turn.

  Still, it does—probably because the turn they take is quite as nasty as it is. What has begun as romantic dalliance comes seriously to threaten the couple’s marriage and ends in total humiliation for him after a very unpleasant scene of confrontation between the two of them. Then they are shipwrecked, and as they prepare themselves for death they come to a sort of reconciliation: ‘Do you mind very much?’ ‘Not now—I did at first. I’m scared, Em.’ S
till the comedy persists here and there—on the deserted, waterlogged ship Em still worries with surburban refinement about whether it would be all right for her to use the Gents. But the turn towards harrowing drama has been made. Being rescued by Chinese on a junk brings further trials: they see sudden death accompanied by a total unconcern for human life, they see a cat tortured and later, when its skin is pinned up, realize that they have eaten it, and finally they observe a woman giving birth in the most primitive, animal conditions imaginable. Perhaps they have learned their lesson; at least they return with relief to a nice steak-and-kidney pudding, the daily papers, and a wireless with new batteries—all the once-despised paraphernalia of suburban existence. And end where they began, with a minor marital squabble.

  Have they been ennobled by suffering? Is the whole thing a simple morality demonstrating that one should know one’s place and stick to it? What, finally, is Hitch’s attitude to these silly but not totally despicable characters? These are not the sort of question which can usually be profitably asked about a Hitchcock movie, though the temptation remains strong, allied to the feeling that if Hitch is a dramatic thinker his dramas must contain something which can be isolated and defined as thought. As a rule his films, those perfectly tooled cinematic machines, contrive to fend off the speculations of those who seek a corpus of philosophy which can be independently articulated. But occasionally there are films which trail enough loose ends or set off resonances so intense and rationally unjustified—Vertigo is one, Marnie another, and in its own crude way Rich and Strange is another—as to set one wondering what they mean, or meant, to him. Today he is evasive, or forgetful: it was an eccentric adventure story, it had nice things in it, but it didn’t come off. And that is that. Or is it? We are still left with an obscure sense that here Hitch is somehow wearing his heart on his sleeve, or at least showing his hand more than he intends. Misanthropy might be an explanation; rejection of a particular class, the class from which he comes, might be another. Something lies beyond the scene, but what?

 

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