When it opened, the film got slightly more mixed reviews than its two predecessors in what Hitch already recognized as his ‘spy trilogy’, and was not quite so popular, though popular enough still to pay its way. On reflection Hitch decided this was because of a problem inherent in the subject: audiences want to identify with a hero who wants to do something and eventually succeeds in doing it (whether they would morally endorse his actions or not), and The Secret Agent was instead about a hero who does not want to do something (kill a man for political reasons), muffs it the first time, and has fate take the matter out of his hands at the second chance. Consequently audiences just did not care about the hero—certainly not in a thriller context, anyway—while the possibility of capturing their attention in another way by going into his moral dilemma (the whole Hamlet side of it) had been carefully ignored as inimical to the thriller form. To that extent Gielgud was right, and so in another way was Ivor Montagu—there was either not enough of the Hamlet or too much, depending which way you looked at it.
But at least Hitch had managed in it to try out some of his more provocative ideas and had got away with them, in particular the idea he had long been toying with that villains did not need necessarily to look like villains. Indeed, the more charming and presentable and reassuring their appearance and manner were, the more chilling their villainy would be, once revealed. In The Secret Agent Hitch deliberately made the villain, Robert Young, more charming and amusing and attractive than the rather moody, indecisive hero, and audiences loved it; he became, like so many subsequent Hitchcock heavies, the man you hate to love, but find irresistibly attractive anyway—a pattern repeated, with variations, right up to Frenzy. For the French critics this tends to signify moral ambiguity and complexity, deriving in part from Hitch’s Catholic upbringing. But maybe it is no more than the born tease’s instinctive grasp of how to string an audience along, or the timid man’s joyful realization that people can be manipulated to accept almost anything you want them to accept.
In his next film, Sabotage, Hitch was to string his audiences along even further, and in one sequence to pull a bluff-and-counter-bluff trick so outrageous that its reputation still haunts him; he is even inclined nowadays to suggest that it was a mistake. This is the notorious sequence in which the back-room anarchist sends his wife’s young brother to deliver a time-bomb; the boy is distracted and delayed for so long that the hour of detonation comes and goes and then, just when the audience is breathing a sigh of relief that the worst is not after all going to happen (of course, we always knew it wouldn’t), the bomb does go off and the boy is killed. At the press show this episode upset one of the senior members of the British press so much that she had to be restrained from attacking Hitch bodily for his cruelty. Which would seem, actually, to be a measure of his success in involving his audience and motivating his heroine so satisfactorily that she can kill her husband with a carving knife and not in any way lose audience sympathy. The sequence is also, incidentally, a textbook example of Hitch’s famous definition of suspense versus shock. If you show a group of people playing cards round a table and then suddenly there is an explosion, you achieve merely a very dull scene terminated by a shock. If, on the other hand, you show exactly the same scene but preface it by showing a time-bomb sitting under the table before ever the card game starts, then you have suspense and an involved audience. Hitch claims to believe today that after setting up such a scene you should never let the bomb actually go off, because then the audience feels cheated and angry. But his practice in several spectacular instances (Psycho for one) contradicts this, and it would be hard to agree with him that his decision in Sabotage was all that wrong. Of course, he may have been wrong to twist the knife by showing a cute little dog on the bus as well as the boy, and also presumably blown up—that, for the animal-loving British, could just be the last straw.…
In any case, the matter does not seem to have given him any sleepless nights at the time. He himself selected the Conrad novel entitled The Secret Agent (confusingly enough, so the title had to be changed for the film), and scripted it in his usual fashion by starting round the dining-room table in Cromwell Road, then flying with Charles Bennett to Basel, and motoring from there to the Jungfrau, where he acquired his aforementioned taste for cheap Swiss cider. Oddly, given his frequently expressed qualms about adapting any literary classic to the screen, Hitch felt no hesitation about working from a near-classic novel in this case and freely reshaping its story to his own thriller requirements. Partly this was because Conrad had not yet been canonized by the academic critics as a great novelist; Hitch felt reasonably enough that one of Conrad’s important talents was as a spellbinding teller of tales, not so different from John Buchan, and there at least his work was not sacrosanct.
All the same, Hitch did feel that the whole subject was a bit messy and confused, lacking the clear lines of his favourite films. And he ran into some problems in the shooting. To begin with, he had cast Robert Donat in the important role of the plain-clothes policeman who is set to watch the anarchist Verloc (Oscar Homolka) while pretending to work at the near-by greengrocers. Donat had the kind of easy charm and humanity which would round out the rather sketchy outlines of the character and make audiences warm to him. But then at the last moment Korda, who had Donat under contract, refused to release him, and Hitch had to make do with the rather stolid John Loder. This entailed a lot of rewriting during the actual shooting—something which never makes the orderly Hitch happy—and left the character still rather unattractive and negative. Then Hitch had trouble with one of the two Hollywood stars, Sylvia Sidney. She had had stage training, had never appeared in silent films, and found it very difficult to act without the support of words. Also, she was used to the Hollywood style of shooting, in which scenes would be played right through, photographed continuously from first one angle, then another, and cut together afterwards. She found Hitch’s manner of shooting in tiny little sections according to the editing scheme in his mind unnerving, as she felt deprived of all control over what she was doing. She finally got quite hysterical over Oscar Homolka’s death scene, in which, half accidentally, she had to stab him with a carving knife and say virtually nothing: she was certain it was terrible and she was terrible. Hitch had to calm her by asking her please to wait and see how it would look when cut together. When she finally saw it she was delighted and amazed, and left the screening room grandly observing, ‘Hollywood must hear of this!’
Undeniably what one remembers from the film is bits and pieces rather than the whole. Controlled essays in virtuosity like the stabbing scene, the boy’s journey with the bomb and the stroke of genius which counterpointed the wife’s anguish over the news of her brother’s death with the delighted reactions of a cinema audience to Disney’s Silly Symphony Who Killed Cock Robin? But also Sabotage is the richest and most detailed picture in Hitch’s work of the London he grew up in and knew like the back of his hand. Much of the detail is drawn from his own experience: the greengrocer’s shop which the detective uses as cover recalls his own childhood home, the little East End cinema the kind where he had his own experiences of the flicks. When the detective takes Mrs. Verloc and her brother out to lunch he takes them to Simpson’s in the Strand, Hitch’s own favourite restaurant in his City days. The quirkily vivid scenes in the streets markets, the back-street shops, the cheery by-play of the peddlers and the darker sense of crime behind closed doors in mean streets all summon up Hitch’s own childhood and his early fascination with the domestic details of the murder cases he loved to read. And even something like the scene in which the cinema audience get nasty when their entertainment is interrupted by a power cut owes a lot to Hitch’s experience of an audience turning like that at the Pierre Fresnay/Yvonne Printemps first night, or at another, acutely embarrassing, occasion when a comic with a sense of grievance insisted on making a curtain speech at the Empire castigating the management and his fellow artists, to a similarly hostile response.
For the mos
t part the film was very modestly budgeted and made. But Hitch insisted on one big splurge. At the cost of £3,000, which was then a considerable amount, he had a whole tramline laid from the Lime Grove studios to near-by White City, and operated it complete with functional tram for just one day’s shooting. Ivor Montagu, as associate producer, remonstrated with him—this was absurd expenditure for a few seconds of screen time. But no: Hitch knew exactly what he was doing—this was one of the Hitchcock touches deliberately put in to impress American audiences and, particularly, American producers, who would recognize exactly what the production values involved in these few shots were. It was expensive, but it was meant to be, and the impression of extravagance it created was worth it.
As it happened, Sabotage marked something like the end of an era in British films. But no one realized it at the time. Hitch was by now in an unchallenged, and virtually unchallengeable, position as the leading British film-maker, with his films recognized and successful on both sides of the Atlantic. He was certainly the biggest fish in a pretty small pond, and it was no doubt not without reason that Michael Balcon feared he might be snatched away by Hollywood. But for the moment life was very comfortable in England. He could move around freely, according to his whim of the moment, and script collaborators recall story conferences on a train to the Riviera, at a bullfight in Barcelona, in a funicular at St. Moritz, going up and down all day, or, less exotic, on the roof of Croydon Airport. At home he went to the theatre several times a week, and now that Pat was nine he and Alma felt she was old enough, when at home on school holidays, to stay up in the evening and go to the theatre if there was anything vaguely suitable. So she found herself seeing a lot of musicals and light comedies; in particular she was taken to Careless Rapture and all of Ivor Novello’s subsequent spectacular musical shows. Novello was still a personal friend, and Pat recalls that at one of his shows she and Alma and Hitch were sitting in a box, and Hitch went right off to sleep in the first act. During the interval a note was brought round from Ivor observing, ‘Of all the people seeing this show, you seem to be enjoying it the least.’ But then he knew better than to take Hitch’s sleeping personally: Hitch made a habit of it, even at shows with which he was personally involved. He was reputed to have slept soundly through the whole première of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and even slept at the first night of The Old Ladies, a play in which he had money invested.
He found other ways of spending his money too. His passion for the painting of Paul Klee resulted in his circling round and round one particular painting in a London exhibition, wondering and wondering whether he could afford it, until finally he took the plunge, to the tune of some £600—quite a steep price considering that Klee was little known in Britain at the time and that first-day sales totalling £250 at Dali’s 1936 London exhibition were considered spectacular enough to be reported in the papers. Hitch used also to seize every occasion for holidays with his family, in his beloved Switzerland or, almost equally beloved, the south of Italy. In 1937 he took Alma, Pat and his mother to stay in Naples, which had the slight drawback that every time she went there Alma was prostrated with a strep throat—a condition Hitch irreverently attributed to having had to kiss the Pope’s ring during an audience with him on their way, since after all you never knew who else had been kissing it that day. Be that as it might, she was laid up in their hotel while Hitch took his mother and Pat out to Capri to see the Blue Grotto. The trip went very well until, right outside the Grotto, they were required to transfer from the motorboat in which they had come to a small rowing-boat. Hitch’s mother flatly refused, and the director at whose words film stars trembled was left helplessly saying, ‘But you’ve got to—you’ve come all this way to see the Blue Grotto and, well, you’ve just got to.’ Mrs. Hitchcock senior remained as formidable as ever, and as stubborn, so it was a long battle before she actually did get to see the pride of Capri.
Oddly enough, given his fascination from childhood with America and things American, his detailed theoretical knowledge of the geography of New York, and his frequent professional contacts with Americans right since the earliest days with Famous Players at Islington, Hitch had never seriously considered visiting America. But the time was approaching fast. First, Gaumont-British, to which he was currently under contract, was summarily closed down in 1937, shortly after shooting on Sabotage was completed. One day Isidore Ostrer, who had at last acquired total control of the company, arrived at the Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush and called Victor Peers, one of the vice-presidents, into his office. He gave him a list of names, headed by that of Michael Balcon himself, and said ‘Go and fire all these today.’ The man stammered, ‘But I can’t fire them; they’re my bosses.’ ‘Fire them,’ said Ostrer, ‘or fire yourself.’ Hitch was in the studios that day, and remembers it as ‘like Christmas, but without the booze’. Everyone was in and out of everyone else’s offices, comparing notes, as the news spread like wildfire, and by the end of the day Balcon and Ivor Montagu had been fired, the film production company dissolved, and the whole Gaumont-British operation was no more, except as a title for a distributing company. This did not make any immediate difference to Hitch, since he was not fired and his contract was taken over by the associated company, Gainsborough, for which he had been working at the start of his career. But it was the break-up of a successful team. Balcon went almost immediately to take over the direction of a newly set up MGM production programme in Britain, and Ivor Montagu abandoned feature films altogether. Even closer, Charles Bennett had received an offer of a contract from Universal to go to Hollywood as a script-writer, and decided to accept. His work on the new script, called Young and Innocent, was confined to the now traditional trip to Switzerland, this time St. Moritz, where he would ski during the day while Hitch stayed in and read, then in the evening they would eat and drink and work out the scenario together. After that he bade Hitch a sad farewell and went off to Hollywood, leaving him to complete the script with other collaborators. His summing-up on Hitch at this period: ‘Biggest bully in the world; one of the kindest men I have ever met in my life.’
Chapter Eight
Young and Innocent is sheer delight, a perfect Hitchcockian demonstration that less is more. The featherweight plot, vaguely suggested by the first two chapters of Josephine Tey’s novel A Shilling for Candles, is a simple chase. The police are after our hero, because they believe, for no sufficient reason, that he murdered a woman, and he is after the man who really did it, in order to clear his name. In the process he takes up with the police chief’s daughter, she helps him, a romance develops, and in the end they run the missing man to earth, playing in a blackface band at a thé dansant and only revealed, at the end of one of Hitch’s most spectacular moving-camera shots, by the twitching of one eye in extreme close-up. And that is really all there is to it. It has no political overtones, no pretensions whatever to significance. It is perfectly crisp and clear and pure and to the point, an almost abstract exercise in film-making saved from aridity by its sheer joie de vivre. It looks as if everyone concerned had a good time making it, and though such impressions are often deceptive, on this occasion it is no more nor less than the truth.
Apart from an awkward move from Lime Grove to Pinewood Studios in the middle of shooting, Hitch had no troubles at all with this one. It had no important stars to be dealt with, just two young players in the principal roles, Derrick de Marney and Nova Pilbeam, remarkably matured in the three years since she played the kidnapped child in The Man Who Knew Too Much, and a solid support of reliable character actors. The simple story all fell into action set-pieces which left him plenty of room for his little private jokes and included some of the most shameless model-shots ever seriously shown on the professional screen (the cars in parts of the chase sequence are so evidently children’s toys on a table-top that it makes one wonder if these shots were not after all done very much tongue in cheek). The only really irritating thing about the film was the decision to cut its already spare 80 minutes by
another 10 for distribution in America, thereby removing one of Hitch’s own favourite scenes, in which a children’s tea party becomes menacing to the hero and heroine because of the situation they are in with the police. Still, even that was no doubt better than the total ban imposed on Sabotage in Brazil because it was judged liable to foment public unrest—though how or why that might be was never indicated.
Liberated from spies and secret agents for one picture, Hitch could not wait to get back to them for his next, The Lady Vanishes. But in other respects this follows the lead of Young and Innocent, in that it is the lightest and purest of diversions, with little claim to logic (‘The first thing I throw out is logic,’ observed Hitch at the time) and none at all to deeper meaning. He got two young writers, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliatt, to put the screenplay together for him from a novel by Ethel Lina White, The Wheel Spins. As usual, the ostensible basis was hardly more than a pretext: what really interested Hitch was the idea of the old story set in Paris about a mother and daughter staying at a hotel when the mother is taken ill, the daughter is sent on a wild-goose chase in search of medicine, and when she gets back everyone pretends not to know her, her mother has vanished, along with all trace of the room they were staying in. The story has been adapted straight on several occasions, including one of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents half-hours and the British film So Long at the Fair, but here it was twisted slightly so that the old lady vanishes on a transcontinental train and all the passengers except the heroine either have not seen her or pretend they have not for various reasons, understandable or sinister.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 16