For the moment, though, Joan Harrison’s departure left Hitch with a treatment but no script on this new story. Selznick seems to have had no intention of producing it himself, but he was eager to have a completed script as part of the package when he got round to selling it—that way he could ask more for Hitch’s services. At this time he had under contract Peter Viertel, a young writer, quite inexperienced, about twenty-one years old. Viertel was assigned to the picture by Selznick, and went along with considerable trepidation to see Hitch. To his delight, Hitch was very charming and fatherly. ‘I’ll teach you to write a screenplay,’ he said, and proceeded to explain that there was nothing to it: just start a scene with an establishing shot, and when you want to emphasize something write ‘close-up’—nobody follows the screenplay anyway.
With this optimistic advice in mind and the original treatment in his hands, Viertel went off and wrote a screenplay in two weeks. It was not very good, and extremely incomplete, but at least there was enough there to sell and start shooting. Hitch was of course not too happy with this state of affairs, so different from his usual orderly practice. Especially since he had been baulked again of Gary Cooper, his first choice to play the hero, and been landed with Robert Cummings, a pleasant enough fellow but ineradicably comic in his physical appearance and unlikely, Hitch felt, to excite the sort of audience sympathy the role needed. Moreover he had had Priscilla Lane forced on him without consultation by Universal, the film’s new owners, after they had specifically agreed as part of the deal that he should have his say in the casting. Even the lesser roles were not in general cast to his taste: Otto Kruger he felt too close to type as the Nazi heavy—he wanted Harry Carey, the western star, as much closer to his concept of an America-First home-bred fascist, but Mrs. Carey put a stop to that with her outrage at the idea of her husband, since the death of Will Rogers the number one idol of the American boy (so she said), being cast in any such unsympathetic role.
So things were not any too happy when Hitch started shooting over at Universal. He comforted himself by bringing in Dorothy Parker to do some work on the script—her contribution is mainly visible in some of the more outrageous and bizarre details of the circus the hero takes refuge in, with its squabbling Siamese twins, its bearded lady in curlers. And he did meet in Norman Lloyd, who plays one of the lesser heavies (he who plummets from the top of the Statue of Liberty at the end), someone who was to become a long and valued associate and, like Joan Harrison, to play a key role in the television series of the later 1950s. After a week or so of shooting Hitch gave Viertel a call and said, ‘You’d better come over here and clear up the mess you’ve started,’ so from then on he was the writer on the picture, on set every day, working alongside Hitch.
Viertel found Hitch kind and helpful, and totally unflappable. One day they had the Robert Cummings character trapped in a file room. How were they to get him out? Viertel couldn’t think of anything. Then Hitch said, ‘Why don’t we have him hold a lighted match to the automatic fire extinguisher, and then cut to him in the crowd outside watching the fire brigade at work?’ But, objected Viertel, how did he get there? ‘How do I know?’ beamed Hitch. ‘But they’ll never ask!’ Viertel also found Hitch quite uninterested in the details of dialogue. While he was worrying over the big speeches for the confrontation of hero and villain, which were meant to make the political message clear (‘Everyone read Clifford Odets then’), Hitch was interested only in setting up a long moving-camera shot, stolen he told Viertel from Young and Innocent crossed with The Thirty-Nine Steps, which went right across a ballroom to end with a close-up showing that the heavy had one finger missing. Hitch was in general impassive with actors and writers, but Viertel noticed that you had to watch out when he started a sentence with ‘You know, old boy …’ It could be a blast; it was never a bouquet.
One phrase which Viertel wrote into the script of Saboteur, and which was much remarked on at the time, he took straight from Hitch’s conversation. It was the Nazi’s reference to ‘the moron masses’, a pet term of Hitch’s to describe his audience, which Viertel felt he tended to despise. When they went together to the first preview of the film, when the audience proved less than enthusiastic, Hitch took him by the arm afterwards and murmured, ‘The moron masses, old boy, the moron masses.’ In general Viertel found the experience of working with Hitch a priceless education in film-writing craft, and Hitch seems to have liked working with Viertel too, though he subsequently went on record as blaming a certain lack of discipline in the script for his own over-all dissatisfaction with the film—too many ideas, insufficiently pruned and refined before shooting began. But this, after all, was his fault, and the fault of Selznick’s rush to sell the package rather than that of the inexperienced Viertel, and Hitch was eager enough to work with him again. While they were making Saboteur he was already discussing the possibility of remaking The Man Who Knew Too Much, still one of his favourites among his British films; he also raised an old project, a notion he had been toying with since the mid-1930s of filming Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope, suggesting that perhaps Viertel might direct it with him standing behind, and do it all in one take. Viertel would have been happy to make his début as a film director in such circumstances, but he did not warm very much to this specific project, and after Saboteur his and Hitch’s careers carried them apart, though leaving both with an agreeable memory of a happy collaboration.
Saboteur is a film which everyone remembers for striking individual moments rather than as a whole. It comes in Hitch’s work right between The Thirty-Nine Steps and North by Northwest; all three of them can be seen as variations on the same subject and the same structure. In Saboteur and North by Northwest Hitch set out consciously to give a feeling of the sheer spread of America, much as he had done for Britain in The Thirty-Nine Steps, covering a lot of ground with a lot of different locations. Though naturally the climactic setting of the Statue of Liberty was recreated in the studio, for much the same reasons as Mount Rushmore was in North by Northwest, Hitch did in fact take his cast and crew on location in New York, and spent a lot of money building exactly what he wanted for the Park Avenue mansion and the desert setting when he could not find it in its natural habitat. He also experimented with shooting at extremely long distance, sometimes upwards of a mile, in his New York locations, to capture the natural quality of the street scenes with a telephoto lens in a way that would have been impossible if the camera crew had been visibly present and the streets cordoned off. One of his on-the-spot inspirations led to some trouble with the Navy afterwards. As the real saboteur (Norman Lloyd) is in a taxi on the way to the Statue of Liberty, he looks out and we cut away to a shot of the burnt-out hulk of the French liner Normandie lying on her side in New York harbour, then back to Lloyd with a faint smile of satisfaction on his face. The Navy felt this was a reflection on them by implying that the burning of the Normandie had something to do with Nazi sabotage, and they managed to get the offending shots removed from some prints of the film.
Apart from the shoulder seam on the suspended saboteur’s coat tearing stitch by stitch (of which Hitch dryly observes that the audience would have cared more if it had been the hero dangling instead of the villain), the scene which sticks in most memories from the film is that in which the hero and heroine find themselves trapped in the most public of places, on the dance floor at a big charity ball which is actually a cover for Nazi spy activity. They are safe (like Hannay at the election meeting, like the hero of North by Northwest at the auction) as long as they stay in the public eye. But as soon as they leave the dance floor they will be lost—and of course no one would believe their plight, it seems so unlikely. This kind of scene recurs so frequently in Hitch’s work it is hard not to suppose that it has some special horror for him—the idea that terror lurks not only in the dark shadows or in solitude, but that sometimes we can be most alone, most threatened, furthest beyond help, in the middle of a crowd of normal, friendly people. Again, anxiety is the point, the mathematic
al closing-in of danger, the feeling of complete helplessness. On its first release the film was actually subtitled in its advertising ‘The Man Behind Your Back’—a worrying enough image of unlocalized menace to suggest a timeless Hitchcock preoccupation as well as playing upon the more immediate worries of espionage-conscious Americans.
During the shooting of Saboteur there was one small, slightly untoward incident. One Sunday in December, when the rest of the studio was deserted, Hitch was working with his art director, Robert Boyle, on story-boarding some sequences for the following week. Suddenly in burst one of the studio guards, clearly surprised to find anyone on the lot. He was wearing the air-raid warden’s outfit that had already, just to be on the safe side, been widely issued. ‘Haven’t you heard, the Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!’ he blurted out, and vanished as quickly as he had come. There was a short silence. ‘Hm,’ said Hitch; ‘curious hat the fellow was wearing …’ and went right on with what he was doing.
This meant, of course, that by the time Saboteur was ready for release, in April 1942, America had entered the war, and the Hitchcocks had decided on another step which was likely to make them feel more permanently settled in America: they were going to buy a house. Hitch had begun to feel that it was rather silly for them to keep on paying rent when they might just as well have a house of their own which they could invest in and improve upon as they thought fit. They had been very comfortable in the ex-Lombard house, liked the neighbourhood of Bel Air, not just because it was convenient to Pat’s school, and determined to look around locally for something they could buy. Alma did most of the looking while Hitch tidied up the last details of Saboteur, and in June she found just what she had been looking for—a small, easily accessible but secluded-seeming house on Bellagio Road, just the other side of the golf course from their present rented home. She dragged Hitch to look at it, and was rather distressed when he responded lukewarmly: it was nice, of course, but really expensive and a bit small.… Glumly Alma started looking again, but did not succeed in coming up with anything she liked half as well. Then on 14 August she received her birthday presents from Hitch. Among them was a very attractive evening bag. Urged on by him she looked inside, to find a small purse. And inside that, a gold key—to the house on Bellagio. Her response, characteristically, was delight mixed with irritation: ‘And what,’ she inquired, ‘if I had found a house I liked a lot better in the meantime? Where would you have been then?’
Despite which, it was an important and entirely successful putting-down of new roots. The house became permanently home to them, even after they had completed occupation of their week-end place near Santa Cruz, in northern California: Alma continued, eccentrically by Hollywood standards, to do all the cooking and keep house entirely by herself, aided by a cleaning woman who came in twice a week, and the house did after all prove big enough for their needs—when they expanded it in the 1960s it was, typically, just the kitchen wing that was enlarged, with Hitch, equally typically, noting that the cost of the new kitchen was more than the original cost of the whole house. Here, though they were never part of the big Hollywood party set, Hitch and Alma could entertain, give little, exquisite but unpretentious dinners to the chosen few, and if you were specially favoured you actually got to eat en famille in the kitchen and inspect Hitch’s walk-in freezer and wine cellar, the pride of his gastronomic life.
The Hitchcocks were indeed becoming more and more a part of American life, as Hitch’s next film, Shadow of a Doubt, very clearly demonstrates. By this time he was easing up into a routine of about one film a year, and after the experience of being rushed into Saboteur before he was ready, he determined that this time he was going to start shooting only when he was good and ready. The subject came to him absolutely by chance—a chance of the kind which nowadays no major figure in Hollywood could afford to indulge, with litigious writers pressing so hard that no unsolicited matter can be accepted unless it comes through a recognized agent. But in those more innocent days things could occasionally happen otherwise. One day Margaret MacDonell, the head of Selznick’s story department, mentioned that her husband Gordon, a novelist, had an idea for a story which he had not yet written down. Hitch liked what he heard, arranged to have lunch at the Brown Derby with the MacDonells, listened to the story as they had it and elaborated it with them while they ate. Gordon MacDonell then went home, typed up what they had discussed as a nine-page outline; Hitch bought it, and the film was under way.
To write the screenplay Hitch decided to go back to his old idea of playing hunches by getting distinguished literary figures to work with him. He had just seen and been very impressed by Our Town, and so his first choice was Thornton Wilder, who had never written a screenplay before. To Hitch’s surprise and delight, Wilder liked the idea and did not in any way look down, as so many American intellectuals did at that time, on the film medium. He came out to Hollywood right away, and Hitch began one of the most harmonious collaborations of his working life. Wilder and he would talk in the morning, then Wilder would go off by himself in the afternoon and write bits and pieces in longhand in a high-school notebook. He had such a clear idea of the milieu and the characters that he never wrote consecutively, but just scenes here and there, as the mood took him, until the outline screenplay was completed. He had already enlisted in the Psychological Warfare Division of the US Army, and in fact wrote the last pages of the script on the train to his military service, with Hitch accompanying him across-country to Florida to complete the collaboration en route.
Hitch would have liked Wilder to make the last revisions to the screenplay himself, but obviously that was not possible, and anyway Hitch wanted a different quality injected into it, a few touches of humour to balance the darkness of the main story—that of the relationship between an attractive, villainous uncle, a murderer of widows, and his idealistic young niece, who penetrates his secret. Wilder suggested the playwright Robert Ardrey, author of an effective ghost play, Thunder Rock, who was then under contract to MGM, but Hitch felt he was a little sober-sided, and instead picked Sally Benson, author of Meet Me in St. Louis, who had a particularly attractive light touch in handling the domestic scenes and those involving the children. The finishing touches were put to the script in the course of shooting, by Patricia Collinge, who plays the mother in the film and wrote the scene between the girl Charlie and the detective when they speak of love and marriage.
Right from its original conception Shadow of a Doubt was built on a principle new to Hitch’s American films, and indeed new to his sound films altogether—that of detailed location realism. He had aimed towards this, tentatively, in the New York scenes of Saboteur, but amid so much studio reconstruction and the manifold extravagances of the thriller plot this was scarcely appreciable. Shadow of a Doubt, on the other hand, was a story of life in a small American town, by the author of a classic piece of Americana, and Hitch wanted it to be as precise and accurate as possible: particularly in his two recent ‘British’ films, Rebecca and Suspicion, Hitch had become conscious of the weaknesses inherent in placing such stories in a studio limbo, without the vivid details of local colour he could have provided, even in a studio, in England. So he was determined not to make the same mistake again when it was not necessary, in his first fully ‘American’ film.
Consequently, even before he and Wilder started detailed work on the screenplay, they picked a specific town for their setting, the northern California town of Santa Rosa, and went there to explore on the spot and drink in the atmosphere and look of the town. They even selected in advance the exact house they would use for the home of the family in the film. Wilder thought Hitch’s suggestion was too big and grand for a bank clerk, but when they investigated they found that the occupant was exactly in the bank clerk income bracket. (Unfortunately, he was so delighted at the idea of having a film made round his house that when they came back to shoot they found he had had it completely repainted and smartened up, so they had to dilapidate it a bit and then put it back to sp
anking newness when the shooting was over.) And though the interiors were shot at Universal City, all the exteriors were made in Santa Rosa, the cast and crew living in close communion with the locals. Some of the performers, notably Edna May Wonacott, who plays the younger sister, were recruited locally (Edna May was the daughter of a Santa Rosa grocer), and even when small roles were played by professionals the natives were more than ready to advise. For example, the policeman on traffic duty who admonishes Teresa Wright (playing Charlie) for running across the street with insufficient care was an actor, but constantly directed by the real traffic cop as to how he should deal with traffic at the intersection—‘Now let some traffic through. Now let some pedestrians cross’—and was so convincing that a woman went up to him to ask directions, as from a real policeman, and was quite surprised when he denied all knowledge with ‘I’m sorry, I’m a stranger here myself.’ The funeral of Uncle Charlie at the end was staged right in the main square, with a few professional extras, but most of the people we see on the street as the funeral cortège passes are ordinary Santa Rosans, as a matter of course stopping and taking off their hats, even to an empty coffin.
Hitch particularly relished this return to giving the violence and menace in his films a local habitation and a name. Much of the effectiveness of his British thrillers had come from setting their extraordinary happenings against very humdrum, everyday surroundings. And, too, he was fascinated by the omnipresence of evil, the fact that there was no refuge from it. He had first had some glimpses of this in his childhood: he became really interested in the idea of poisoning, for instance, when he was seventeen and a blonde was found dead a few blocks from his family home in Leytonstone, killed with a home-made poison. His social contacts with Edith Thompson’s father at the same time made a deep retrospective impression on him—murder, evidently, was or might be a family affair, something happening to friends or relatives, just down the street, behind the most respectable façade. Which was, of course, very much what the good fathers were always warning him of, in school and at church: the Devil was always active, evil was everywhere and must constantly be guarded against. Every little town has its share of evil, and a sleepy backwater like Santa Rosa in the 1940s is not exempt, even if it seems like a paradise of innocence. There is, after all, nowhere to hide, and it is Hitch’s fearful appreciation of this which most vividly dramatizes Shadow of a Doubt, a film which has always been very close to his heart.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 21