Now as it happens Korda, a crazed anglophile from way back, had come over, some say at the personal request of Churchill, and certainly with Churchill’s active support, to continue making British films, films which would project British values and the British way of life for American audiences, at a time when they could not be made in Britain. The fact could not be made public at the time, and his actions were wildly misconstrued—even when he continued in Hollywood to make defiantly patriotic British films such as Lady Hamilton (or That Hamilton Woman as it was known in the States) with Vivien Leigh, and with Laurence Olivier specially relieved of his wartime duties for the sake of the good propaganda embodied in his magnetic portrayal of Nelson.
Naturally, in all this flurry of accusation Hitch came in for his share. The most hurtful was from his old friend and associate Michael Balcon, who made an ill-considered statement to the press naming Hitch as one of those who had deserted Britain when she needed them most. Hitch and Alma were deeply upset that he of all people, who should have known better, had taken this line; and he himself soon regretted it, since he was unofficially informed that Hitch, like Korda, was continuing film-making in America at the express request of the British Government. But the harm had been done. Alma especially found it hard to forgive a number of the things which had been said about Hitch in Britain during the early days of the war, and it all hardened her resolve to stay permanently in their new home. As soon as she possibly could she went over to Britain to collect her mother and sister and bring them back to America, and she embraced the country and its ways wholeheartedly. Almost as soon as she was legally qualified to do so she took out naturalization papers, five years before Hitch resolved to do so.
Meanwhile, Hitch looked around for what he could most usefully do to help the British war effort in America. This was not such a simple matter. Though there were few direct Nazi sympathizers in Hollywood, and many with good reason to be hostile, the official policy was to retain strict neutrality. More and more films were creeping into production in which the bad guys had German accents and audiences could get the general idea that they were Nazis, even if they were not specifically identified as such. But any producer undertaking an explicitly anti-Nazi film still ran the risk of State Department displeasure, and so they were few and far between. Providentially, at this moment one of the bolder producers came to Hitch with just such a proposition. It was Walter Wanger, and he had, it transpired, recently purchased the rights to Vincent Sheean’s autobiographical Personal History, for $10,000. The background to the book, that of a politically conscious correspondent in disastrously unsettled Europe, with a major war looming, was appealing and dramatic. Unfortunately there was no foreground in sharp focus—no coherent narrative, no telling characters, no specific incidents that lent themselves to filming. What, Wanger wanted to know, could Hitch do with this if he were given a free hand?
Hitch did not know offhand, but he was sure he could do something—for Wanger and for Britain. So calling in his old script collaborator Charles Bennett, who had been settled in Hollywood since 1937, he and Joan Harrison began laboriously to construct a workable plot line. Almost the only thing they took from Sheean’s book was the opening location, Holland. And true to his old principle, the first thing Hitch asked was, what do they have in Holland? Answer: windmills and tulips. Consequently, two images: one, of a windmill with the sails revolving in the wrong direction, as a signal of some kind; two, of a murder in a field of tulips, concluding with a shot in which blood spattered on a pure, pristine white tulip. The second image he decided was impractical, as it needed colour for its full realization, and anyway he could not see quite how to work it in. But the first provided the starting-point for the film as it was to be, a complicated story of an innocent bystander’s gradual unwilling involvement in the toils of war. The hero, an American correspondent in Europe on assignment, with no political parti pris, could in this way stand in place of the average uncommitted American. He first of all gets involved on a personal level, with a nice old Dutchman and an attractive English girl, and through them with a complicated spy intrigue concerning a kidnapped Dutch diplomat and stolen papers, and finally finds himself wholly committed to the fight against Nazism, broadcasting to America at the fade-out:
JONES: Hello America. I’ve been watching a part of the world being blown to pieces. A part of the world as nice as Vermont, Ohio, Virginia, California and Illinois lies ripped up bleeding like a steer in a slaughterhouse. And I’ve seen things that make the history of the savages read like Pollyanna legend.
ANNOUNCER: We’re going to have to postpone the broadcast.
(At this point sirens begin to wail and lights flash as bombs begin to burst outside the studio.)
JONES: Don’t postpone nothing, let’s go on as long as we can.
ANNOUNCER (to Carol): Ma’am, we’ve got a shelter downstairs.
JONES: How about it, Carol?
CAROL: They’re listening in America, Johnny.
JONES: O.K. We’ll tell them. I can’t read the rest of this speech I have because the lights have gone out. So I’ll just have to talk off the cuff. All that noise you hear isn’t static, it’s death coming to London. Yes, they’re coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and homes. Don’t tune me out—hang on—this is a big story—and you’re part of it. It’s too late now to do anything except stand in the dark and let them come as if the lights are all out everywhere except in America. (Music—‘America’—begins to play softly in background of speech and continues through end credits.)
JONES: Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they’re the only lights in the world.
The script turned out to be one of those on which Hitch had most trouble: in the course of preparation he went through fourteen writers, only four of whose names finally appear on the film—Joan Harrison and Charles Bennett, who are credited with the original scenario, and James Hilton and Robert Benchley, who are credited with the dialogue. Benchley’s inclusion is a special case anyway. Hitch had seen several of the shorts the woebegone, disenchanted comic had made, illustrated lectures by himself on such subjects as How to Sleep, A Night at the Movies and The Sex Life of the Polyp, and had appreciated a dry, grotesque sense of humour not unlike his own. Years later he was to remember the tone and format when devising his own famous introductory monologues for Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television. He had the notion that Benchley, who was more of a writer than an actor at that point and had been hired just to write dialogue, would be good casting as the semi-alcoholic reporter the hero is sent to replace at the beginning of the film. His main scene is largely exposition, and so to give it character the obvious solution was to get Benchley to write the role as Benchley, and play it himself. During the shooting Hitch constantly admonished Benchley just to be himself, and everything would be fine—the camera would simply ‘eavesdrop’. The most radical piece of direction Hitch was heard to offer Benchley in the whole course of the movie, in fact, was on one occasion when he said to the heavy-lidded actor, ‘Come, now, Bob, let’s open those naughty little eyes.’
For the principal role he wanted a big star like Gary Cooper. Cooper was approached, but feeling that the script was, after all, ‘only a thriller’, and therefore beneath his dignity, refused. (Later he told Hitch he thought he had made quite a bad mistake in doing so.) Instead Hitch got Joel McCrea, with Laraine Day as his leading lady, supported by an excellent cast of character players, among them Herbert Marshall, another of Hollywood’s English colony, as the sauve English undercover-agent for the Nazis, George Sanders, with whom Hitch had just been working in Rebecca, as the hero’s spruce English sidekick, the distinguished German refugee actor Albert Bassermann as the Dutch diplomat, and Edmund Gwenn, whom Hitch had worked with in England back in the days of The Skin Game and Waltzes from Vienna, as a vicious but not too efficient kill
er. He even managed to find a small place in the film for the star of The Blackguard, Jane Novak, now, fifteen years later, a busy Hollywood bit player, like Betty Compson, of Woman to Woman, whom he was similarly to work into his next film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Hitch’s memory in such matters was proverbial—and proverbially generous. He even knew when not to remember: while looking for suitable locations for Notorious, he found himself humbly being offered something by an assistant of an assistant in the location department, whom he recognized as the man in Famous Players who had looked at his sketches and given him his first job back in 1919. Then he thought it kinder to give no sign, but when there was anything practical he could do unobtrusively to help old friends (or even old enemies like Jack Cutts) who had fallen on hard times, he invariably did it.
In his book on Hitchcock, François Truffaut refers to Foreign Correspondent as something of a come-down for Hitch after Rebecca, ‘definitely in the “B” category.’ Hitch politely does not contradict him, but in fact this is far from the truth. Despite its lack of big star names, it was an ambitious and expensive picture, and finally cost over $1.5 million, as against Rebecca’s $1 million. The reason for this is evident if one looks closely at the film. In addition to costly second-unit shooting in London and Amsterdam, which had to be done again because the first time the ship in which the cameraman went over was torpedoed and all his stock and equipment lost, the sets that had to be built in Hollywood were numerous and in some cases enormous. The square in Amsterdam in which the feigned murder takes place took a month to build, with three crews working round the clock, sported an elaborate drainage system because the whole sequence, with its hundreds of umbrellas, takes place in torrential rain, and covered some ten acres. There were also a strip of Dutch countryside, with windmills, several parts of London, and a large plane, interior and exterior, the latter also requiring the use of a giant studio tank for the spectacular air-crash sequence. To achieve vividness, authenticity and artistic quality in all of these Hitch was pleased to be working with William Cameron Menzies, who had just completed a mammoth job as production designer for Selznick on Gone With the Wind and was the man primarily responsible for its visual consistency and sumptuous appearance through all the chopping and changing that chequered production underwent.
After the enclosed psychological drama of Rebecca, Hitch was back with Foreign Correspondent in his own chosen territory, the action-packed thriller. And having his largest budget ever to play with (though little of it came his way: he was maddened to discover he was getting $2,500 a week from Selznick, while Wanger was paying Selznick $7,500 for his services), he was able to have a ball with the virtuoso passages like the murder in Amsterdam, the attempted murder in London (by precipitation from the top of the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral tower, an incidental detail with which religiously minded commentators have had a field day) and the crashing of the transatlantic airliner into the sea. For this latter sequence he devised some of his most mystifying effects. The crash itself is done in one continuous shot over the pilot and copilot’s shoulders, showing the water getting nearer and nearer and finally, on impact, pouring through the windscreen and drowning them and the camera. The procedure, actually, is relatively simple once you know how. Hitch shot a back-projection from a plane zooming towards the water. He then had it projected on to a tissue-paper screen the other side of the cockpit from the camera. And beyond the screen he had a body of water which was released at the moment the plane appeared to hit the sea, breaking through the screen and surging into the cockpit so fast that it was impossible to see the paper tearing under its impact. For the following scene, with the survivors struggling in the water, he wanted to show a wing breaking from the body of the plane and veering away, and to do this he had an elaborate pattern of rails and branch lines built under the surface of the water in the studio tank, so that the pieces of the plane could be manoeuvred exactly on the hidden equivalent of a giant child’s toy train set.
He was a lot happier with Foreign Correspondent than he had been with Rebecca. This, at least, was an unmistakable ‘Hitchcock picture’ and was greeted as such. It also did something he very much wanted to do: as the Herald Tribune said, it ‘blends escapist entertainment with challenging propaganda in film terms.’ When it opened on 16 August 1940 the United States was still eighteen months away from resigning its neutrality and entering the war, but Hitch’s anti-Nazi, pro-Britain message came over loud and clear. When asked about the conclusion now he is liable to back away from it, saying that it was all the doing of Walter Wanger and Ben Hecht, but it is hard to believe that, in those very emotional days, he did not endorse it and find in it something very close to his own sentiments, even if left to himself he would have hesitated to wear his heart so flagrantly on his sleeve.
After completing the picture, he got involved in a minor, incidental way in two other films which were then in the works. First, as a favour to Walter Wanger, whom he had enjoyed working with (he at least, unlike Selznick, would leave well enough alone) he shot some additional scenes for the Archie Mayo film The House Across the Bay, sequences involving Walter Pidgeon, Lloyd Nolan and Joan Bennett in a plane, a setting he was felt to be expert at following Foreign Correspondent. Then he was roped into a more wholehearted, single- (or simple-) minded piece of British flag-waving than Foreign Correspondent, an episodic tribute to the English spirit called Forever and a Day, to which most of the British colony in Hollywood, along with many sympathetic Americans, donated their services. Among the others concerned were Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle, Jessie Matthews, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Laughton and Ida Lupino. Hitch prepared and was about to direct the sequence in which Ida Lupino, a little cockney maid, runs up and down behind a crowd trying to see over. But then his schedule did not permit him to make it, so René Clair, a recently arrived refugee from the German invasion of France, took over and directed it instead, from Hitch’s script.
On the domestic front, the Hitchcocks were rapidly settling in. After a few months of apartment living at the Wilshire Palms, they found themselves hankering for a house, and rented a suitable one, an English-style cottage, once Carol Lombard’s, in St. Cloud Road, Bel Air. Socially, Hitch was extending and amplifying his reputation as a harmless eccentric. There was his habit of sleeping in public. Once at a social evening he was deep in conversation with Thomas Mann and Louis Bromfield one minute; the next he was fast asleep, while they continued to talk fascinatingly over him. On another occasion he took Loretta Young and Carol Lombard to Chasens’ and in the middle of dinner fell sound asleep between two of the most glamorous women in Hollywood. Once he went to sleep at a dinner party and continued to sleep until all the other guests had tiptoed away. At last Alma ventured to wake him and suggest that they might perhaps think of going. ‘Wouldn’t it be rude to leave so soon?’ asked Hitch hazily.
No one was ever quite sure how far these naps were genuine and how far he staged them impishly to test other people’s reactions. Certainly he continued with his practical jokes. One of the most famous took place at Chasens’ one evening. He arranged a dinner party to celebrate Alma’s birthday, in the back garden, or yard as they called it, where there were two or three table-tennis tables, a small semi-circular bar, and one table for about fourteen people. And at the head of the table he sat a very grand-looking old lady, beautifully dressed and groomed, grey-haired and evidently very distinguished (actually a dress extra he had hired for the occasion). When guests started to arrive and gathered for drinks at the bar they all began asking sotto voce, ‘Who’s the old lady?’ And Hitch, with extreme embarrassment, muttered that he didn’t know, she must be at the wrong table, but he didn’t like to say anything. Dave Chasen, who was in on the joke, was nowhere in evidence until the dinner was about to begin, then he went over at Hitch’s instructions to the table and bent down to exchange a few words with the old lady, then came back and reported, ‘She says she’s with Mr. Hitchcock’s party.’
Well, there seemed to be no
thing much to be done, and so everyone sat down with the old lady and had a good if slightly surrealistic dinner, people occasionally trying to engage her in conversation and subtly place her, but all being foiled by her well-bred vagueness and apparent deafness from making any sense of the situation. Among the guests was the producer Collier Young, then in the Myron Selznick story department, and his very attractive wife. At the last moment they had called to ask if they could bring along their house guest, and though Hitch did not like having a stranger introduced in this way to what was ostensibly a family occasion, he agreed. At dinner he was intrigued to notice that the house guest was very evidently making a play for Young’s wife, just to add to the drama of the situation. And one invited guest, Harry Hand, from Myron Selznick’s London office, was late, so everyone concluded that the old lady must be with him. But when he arrived and went round the table shaking hands with everyone, including the old lady, he of course denied all knowledge too. At last, when the meal was nearly over, Charles Bennett, who knew Hitch’s ways of old, suddenly slapped his hand on the table and cried, ‘I’ve got it—it’s a gag. I know it’s a gag.’ Then he gazed round the table, his eyes lighted on the other stranger, the Collier Youngs’ house guest, and pointing an accusing finger at him he added, ‘And you’re a gag too!’
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 19