Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock

by John Russell Taylor

  Hitch did, it is true, have certain indulgences. He loved to travel in hired cars, though he owned several himself of which he was very proud. On one of his script-writing trips to Switzerland he discovered a very cheap kind of local cider, and developed a real taste for it. Back home in Britain he telephoned all the shops he could think of, only to find that none of them stocked it. So he arranged to have several cases flown in by Imperial Airways, refusing to do any further work on the movie till the cider came—despite the fact that, personally imported in this way, it cost him nearly £1 a bottle. He also loved phoning people from the high seas, and when on shipboard would ring Charles Bennett or some other friend, often talking for an hour at a time. But these, after all, were more in the line of pardonable or picturesque eccentricities. And the stories of Hitch’s extreme impracticality with money seem somewhat exaggerated, or at least a game that Hitch chose to play with himself rather than a serious necessity. The story goes that he decided he had to get someone to control his extravagance, so he arranged that his accountant, a fellow called Jack Saunders, would allow him only £10 a week spending money, and then devised all sorts of ways to cheat—he would get restaurants where he had accounts to charge double the bill and give him the difference in cash, or borrow money all over the place and return it only under duress. If this did ever happen, it must have been a short-lived (and well publicized) fantasy on Hitch’s part, for in general he has always seemed practical to the point of frugality, sharing to the full the fears of his middle-class background about being in debt or not having something saved for a rainy day.

  If such worries beset him at this crucial point in his career, he did not let on. It was certainly worrying for a young man with a wife and child and two homes to support, to find himself as he did in 1933 with no definite prospects of a job. But Michael Balcon had bitten at the proffered bait, and a few days after their meeting on the set of Waltzes from Vienna Hitch received another message. If there was by any chance a property he was interested in, there was room at Gaumont-British proper, as recently reorganized under Balcon’s supervision. Well, said Hitch, there was this thriller story, all ready to go, at British International, and he thought he could get hold of it. How much, asked Balcon. Oh, perhaps £500, said Hitch, morally certain he could get it for £250. And so in fact he did, buying it back from Maxwell for £250 and then selling it to Gaumont-British for £500. But then, being Hitch, he felt so guilty about this bit of shameless profiteering that he commissioned Epstein to do a head of Balcon for the other £250 and gave it to Balcon as a gift.

  So it was that Hitchcock’s great British period began, after years of being promising and a lot of false starts. No one had seriously doubted his talent, but it had taken some time for it to show itself clearly and consistently. From The Man Who Knew Too Much onwards, the pattern was finally set, and the association of Hitchcock with the thriller was confirmed for ever in the public mind. The Man Who Knew Too Much, of course, was the final form of Bulldog Drummond’s Baby, reworked so that all reference to the Sapper character was removed; the hero, though basically the same gentlemanly type, was even more of an amateur at this kind of intrigue. Hitch was ready to start shooting with, at last, a script that really excited him, all shot in his head, as was his habit.

  He did, however, take the opportunity to make a few modifications. At Gaumont-British he found himself reunited with his old associate from silent days Ivor Montagu, who had been brought in to cut the budget on a Jan Kiepura musical and was now to be Balcon’s right-hand man on a string of productions and so associate producer on The Man Who Knew Too Much. With Montagu and Charles Bennett, whom he had brought over with him from British International, Hitch set about reworking certain parts of the screenplay. Originally the idea had been to make the kidnapped girl’s mother, who is established in the opening scenes to be a crack shot, the tool of the bad guys by having her carry out or attempt to carry out (under hypnosis, of course) the climactic assassination. But Hitch finally decided that this was a little far-fetched, even by the generous standards of this kind of thriller, and had her be the witness and foiler of the attempt instead. More immediately, he had a scene of menace laid out in a barber’s shop, with all those present masked by hot towels. But just before shooting commenced he happened to see I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, which contained a very similar sequence, and so he placed his sequence instead in what are for most people circumstances of maximum menace and horror, a dentist’s surgery, and came up with a classic.

  Thus slightly reworked, the film went into production at the tiny Lime Grove Studios, and was shot very rapidly without any major problems. At one point Emlyn Williams, then a promising young playwright, was called in to rewrite some of the dialogue, giving it extra zing, and looked forward to meeting the fabled Hitchcock—but accomplished his task entirely at home and never did. Early in the shooting Hitch found, for one of the very few times in his career, that he had to look through the camera and check what the German cameraman, Curt Courant, was doing, because he did not seem to be following instructions. This made Hitch very unhappy, as it was more than anything else a failure in trust. Courant got told off in ‘light but halting German’, and was sufficiently intimidated to do as he was told for the remainder of the film. Meanwhile, Hitch was doing gentlemanly battle with the film censors of those days over his projected reconstruction, for the closing sequence, of the notorious siege of Sidney Street, an East End incident of his childhood when the unarmed Metropolitan Police ran a group of anarchists to ground and the Army had to be called in to match their guns. This, in fact, proved to be the problem—the censors held that the whole affair was a blot on the record of the police, and should not be referred to: Hitch could not have the Army brought in, and could not have the police armed and shooting. Eventually they reached a compromise. The police might be equipped with guns provided they were seen to be commandeered on the spot from a local gunsmith. Hitch smoothly agreed, then went right ahead and showed a lorry arriving with a load of guns for the police: apparently nobody noticed.

  Considering that the film was made on a very restricted budget, it looks surprisingly elaborate, particularly in the Albert Hall sequence in which assassination is attempted during a crowded concert. Here Hitch’s detailed pre-planning helped enormously. He decided in advance exactly how he was going to shoot the sequence, from eight distinct viewpoints, had photographs taken from these viewpoints of the empty hall, blew up the photographs and got the painter Matania to paint the audience into each still. He then had these composites made into transparencies for the Schufftan process, varying it on the spot by scraping off different parts—the orchestra, a box or two—which would be filled with live movement to catch the spectator’s attention and distract them from noticing the immobility of most of the audience in the film.

  The casting of the film was an adept mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Leslie Banks was playing a variation on his usual ironic, stiff-upper-lip English gentleman role, and as the wife and mother Hitch cast Edna Best, a popular stage actress. One of the villains was played, at Hitch’s special insistence, by Peter Lorre, then a recent refugee from Nazi Germany, whom he had seen and immensely admired as the child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, and found to be an eccentric after his own heart, wild and weird and fascinating to work with. The small role of the marksman killed in the opening sequence was played by Pierre Fresnay, the distinguished French actor then readily to hand as he was appearing with his wife Yvonne Printemps in a play at the St. James’s Theatre. (The first night of this production Hitch recalls, incidentally, as one of the most uncomfortable he has spent in the theatre, since one of the actors forgot his lines, panicked and staggered round the stage beating his brow until the audience became hysterical and a real lynch-mob feeling ran through the house, as though the crowd felt collectively, ‘The dog is dying, put him out of his misery.’) The kidnapped daughter was played by Nova Pilbeam, a child with whom Hitch, despite his often reiterated mistrust
of children, obviously got along very well and whom he was to give her first adult role three years later in Young and Innocent. Interestingly enough, the film has been criticized as heartless, especially by enthusiasts for Hitch’s own American remake of 1956, because the parents do not show more overt emotion over the kidnapping of their child; but the little scene in which mother and ‘uncle’ look at her abandoned toys has a quality of emotion so strong one cannot forget that Hitch himself had a daughter, an only child, not much younger than the child in the film at the time he was making it, and must to an extent have identified with the situation.

  With at last a film shot and completed which was exactly what he wanted to do, made exactly as he wanted and destined for enormous success, Hitch would seem to be sitting pretty at Gaumont-British, definitely restored from his ‘lowest ebb’. He set to work confidently with Bennett on scripting his next project, an adaptation of John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, thereby realizing a long-standing ambition, since Buchan was one of his favourite writers and he had already toyed with the idea of filming an even more elaborate Buchan subject, Greenmantle. Every day Bennett would call Hitch, drive round from his home in Belgrave Square, find Hitch waiting on the doorstep in the Cromwell Road, and take him to the Shepherd’s Bush studios, where they would talk about the script, lunching in great comfort at the Mayfair Hotel or the Kensington Palace Hotel, then returning grandly to the studio for an afternoon session. But when they had almost completed the first draft there was a rude awakening. Michael Balcon went off on a business trip to America, partly to bring back for The Thirty-Nine Steps a Hollywood star, Madeleine Carroll, whom in fact he had originally sent out to Hollywood a few years before. While he was gone, C. M. Woolf was left in charge of the studio. And Woolf, of course, had been an old enemy of Hitch’s back in the days when he shelved The Lodger as incomprehensible and dismissed Hitch as one of those dangerous young intellectuals who would ruin the industry given half a chance.

  There was sure to be trouble, and there was. Woolf screened the completed Man Who Knew Too Much, and gave as his considered opinion that it was appalling, ridiculous, absurd, and they could not possibly put it out as it was. He announced that it would have to be reshot by Maurice Elvey, now also under contract at Gaumont-British and cheerfully characterized by a colleague of that time as ‘the worst director in the world’. Hitch was practically suicidal, and begged Woolf on his knees to let the film be shown as it was shot. However much he might dislike Hitch, Woolf did recognize the great practical advantage he had for the company—he was a valuable property because investors had heard of him, and so his presence under contract made it easier to raise money. He kept Hitch in suspense for a while, made him wriggle on the hook, then finally, grudgingly agreed. The film opened at the Academy Cinema and had the tremendous success everyone but Woolf had expected, getting wildly enthusiastic reviews and running for ages. But Woolf never learned his lesson: determined to prove he was right, in spite of this evidence to the contrary, he deliberately put the film into release as the bottom half of a double bill, second features being generally booked at a flat £5 fee, so that though the programme it was part of broke attendance records because everyone wanted to see it, the film itself actually lost money.

  Woolf had fixed things to prove himself right on paper, but there was no doubt in anyone else’s mind that The Man Who Knew Too Much was a triumph, and that Hitch had really come into his own. His troubles with Woolf were not yet over, but at least he was in a far better position to deal with them. He was ready to go to work on his new picture The Thirty-Nine Steps in the full confidence of a larger budget, stars, and a very respectable subject of his own choosing. And his own shaping, for though he admired and respected Buchan very much as a writer, he was never tempted to make the mistake of supposing that literary story-telling and film story-telling are the same thing. The basic outline of the book is very thoroughly worked over in the film, with a lot added and a lot dropped. Several of the film’s most memorable sequences, like that in which the runaway Hannay is first protected then betrayed by a jealous Highland crofter, have no counterpart in the book at all.

  In the film Hitch deliberately aimed for a brisk, disjointed effect, in which no time would be wasted on transitions: the film would simply move as quickly as possible from one thing to the next, with each episode dealt with almost as a self-sufficient short story. Drama, Hitch has said, is life with the dull bits left out And here the dull bits would be plodding explanations of just how Hannay escapes from the police with one hand in a handcuff—we accept that he does it, in the convention of the comic-strip hero, impossibly beleaguered, who suddenly, with one mighty effort, breaks free And anyway we do not have time for any questions before he is whipped through a Salvation Army band and into a hall where he is instantly mistaken for a belated speaker and rushed on stage. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: speed, says Hitch, is preoccupation, and here the rapidity of the transitions keeps the audience so preoccupied that they are always cheerfully, breathlessly, one step behind and feel that the whole film is flashing past.

  In this respect The Thirty-Nine Steps is most like the much later, American North by Northwest, and usually those who see North by Northwest as Hitch’s best American film also see The Thirty-Nine Steps as his best British film. And both of them certainly are brilliant, beguiling entertainments, with an extraordinary wealth of invention, idea following idea in unbroken succession. But both of them also seem to pay a price in shallowness for what they gain in surface glitter and busyness. In neither do we ever get any clear idea of what the MacGuffin is, even as a MacGuffin—it is just the vaguest us-versus-them plot to be somehow foiled. But what, one might ask, is a MacGuffin anyway? The mysterious term, which has been bandied about a lot by Hitch and by commentators on him, seems to have entered his vocabulary with The Thirty-Nine Steps, and his British films of this time contain the classic examples. The word is derived from a shaggy dog story Hitch liked to tell which, briefly summarized, concerns an inquisitive chap in a Scottish train and a taciturn fellow traveller. There is a large, mysteriously shaped parcel on the rack, and the inquisitive passenger asks the other what it is. ‘A MacGuffin’ is the reply. ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘It’s for trapping lions in the Highlands.’ ‘But there are no lions in the Highlands.’ ‘Well then, there’s no MacGuffin.’ So a MacGuffin is something totally irrelevant and non-existent which is the subject of conversation and action and which everyone within the drama believes to be very important. In The Man Who Knew Too Much the assassination attempt is the MacGuffin, the kidnapping the real subject of the story—i.e. the spies’ plot is what concerns everybody in the film, but the kidnapping is what concerns us, the watchers on the outside. In The Thirty-Nine Steps the MacGuffin is again the uncovering and foiling of a spy ring, but we are never told enough about them to know or care who they are and what they want. In an early draft of the script Hitch considered inserting a sequence showing giant underground aircraft hangers in the Highlands, built by the spies in their dastardly plotting against us. But then what would happen? It would all be much too complicated and unproductive to go into, since all we really care about on the outside is our hero on the run, not where he is running from and what, if anything, he is running to. As in North by Northwest, the chase itself is the point.

  While actually making the film Hitch had an amusing time. It became common gossip (whether true or not) that Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll were having a torrid romance, so no sign of possible wear-and-tear in either was allowed to pass without ribald comment, giving full scope for Hitch’s schoolboy-joker side. He was also up to his teacup-throwing best, putting it all down to ‘temperament’ and the enervating effect of a strict diet. Even the episode with Hannay, the crofter and his wife (one of the few screen performances by Peggy Ashcroft, whom Hitch had seen and much admired on stage), though it is played in the film for suspense and some emotion, derived in Hitch’s mind quite consciously from a joke: a sl
ightly risqué story about a lustful wife, a watchful husband, a traveller and a chicken pie. He took a gleeful delight in devising indignities for Madeleine Carroll to undergo, getting her drenched and dragged about and generally off her super-soignée high Hollywood horse. This was nothing personal, since they actually got on very well together, but he found the Hollywood poise she had acquired in her years away from Britain amusing and longed to break it down a bit. Today it seems like the first obvious instance of his normal treatment of cool blondes, into which all sorts of sadistic sexual motives can be read. Ivor Montagu says, though, that involved as they all were at the time in a rather naïve Freudian search for sexual symbolism in everything, it never then occurred to any of them that this was anything more than straightforward knockabout fun, the comic deflation of phoney dignity. And perhaps it was not, but it is difficult not to wonder.