Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock

by John Russell Taylor

  It was in connection with Shadow of a Doubt, incidentally, that the Hitchcocks finally moved into their second American home. Exploring northern California in 1940, they had found and fallen in love with a then peaceful, hilly area between Santa Cruz and the southern end of the peninsula on which San Francisco stands. Scots Valley was remote-seeming, yet accessible to Santa Cruz and San Francisco—an ideal equivalent to their English country refuge at Shamley Green. They soon found a house in its own grounds, with a spectacular view out over the hillside, and bought it, but then they were so tied up in Hollywood they never got round to moving in until 1942, when Shadow of a Doubt brought them much more to the north in the line of work. By early 1943 they had fallen comfortably into a new routine of weeks in Bel Air, week-ends near Santa Cruz, interrupted only when Hitch was actually shooting a film. Or, of course, was out of the country, back in England, as he was to be for several months the following year.

  Before his return to England he did make one more film, however—his third obvious contribution to the war effort, Lifeboat. He was, of course, still under contract to the currently quiescent Selznick, who remained in general control of his career. The only thing he did directly for Selznick at this time was to direct one of the tiny Buy-War-Bonds appeal films which happened to feature Jennifer Jones, now the apple of Selznick’s eye and centre of his personal and professional preoccupations, though they were not free to get married until 1949. To Hitch all the effort seemed rather disproportionate: himself in the director’s chair, a top cameraman, top make-up artist and the whole of a large studio sound-stage (though they were using only a tiny corner of it) occupied for a day just to capture on film one shot of Jennifer Jones delivering a stereotyped patriotic appeal straight to the camera. However, he was rather amused and touched by Selznick’s evident vulnerability and anxiety that everything possible and impossible should be done to show off his new love’s talent and beauty in the best imaginable light, so he submitted with good grace.

  Meanwhile, Selznick was constantly wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, buying and selling properties and people, and at the beginning of 1943, when still officially out of pictures, he took time to rap Samuel Goldwyn firmly over the knuckles for trying to lure Hitch away from him:

  You recently have sent direct for one of my people, Alfred Hitchcock, and talked with him without so much as either asking us, or even letting us know after the fact. I wonder just how you would behave if I reciprocated in kind—or if any of the big companies did it with your people. Hitch has a minimum of two years to go with me, and longer if it takes him more time to finish four pictures, two of which I have sold to Twentieth Century-Fox. And not alone did you try to seduce him, but you tried something which I have never experienced before with any company or individual—you sought to make him unhappy with my management of him. When you told Hitch that he shouldn’t be wasting his talents on stories like Shadow of a Doubt, and that this wouldn’t be the case if he were working for you, what you didn’t know was that Hitchcock personally chose the story and created the script—and moreover that he is very happy about the picture, which I think he has every right to be. Further, that in the years since I brought Hitchcock over here from England (at a time when nobody in the industry, including yourself, was willing to give him the same opportunity …) and established him as one of the most important directors in the world with the production and exploitation of Rebecca, he has never once had to do a story that he was not enthusiastic about. This has always been my attitude about directors, and I happen to know that it has not always been your attitude toward directors under contract to you …

  Clearly Selznick could still be possessive and jealous over his prerogatives and what he regarded as his property. When Joseph Cotten, who had just been making Shadow of a Doubt with Hitch, heard that Selznick had sold Hitch to Twentieth Century-Fox for two projected features, Lifeboat to be the first of them, he observed ‘I see they’re selling directors like cattle now.’ And Selznick for all his passionate involvement in the film-making process, was also a tough businessman, ever ready to make a buck when he could see how. Hitch was caught between two fires. On the one hand while he was working for Selznick he was inevitably subject to day-to-day interference; on the other he never knew when he might not be sold off, ‘like cattle’, as part of some deal Selznick was cooking up. But at least Selznick came to place unique confidence in Hitch: as he wrote later on

  Increasingly, I learned to have great respect for Hitchcock. Thus, while I worked very closely with him on preparation, and while he left the editing to me, I left him entirely alone on set. During Spellbound, I don’t think I was on the set twice during the entire film.

  However, Hitch had nothing to complain of in his new situation at 20th (where, in the event, he made only one film). He got something very like red-carpet treatment, Kenneth Macgowan, the intellectual of the outfit, to produce the film for him, and a completely free hand in his choice of subject, writers and cast. Hitch considered. He was still nagged by a feeling that he wanted to do more, through the medium he knew best, to help with the war effort and make some kind of significant statement. On the other hand, he deeply doubted the efficacy of the straight message picture in any circumstances, and was convinced that he could not make one. What he knew about was making thrillers—hence Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur. But there might perhaps be another way of combining the elements …

  At which point he bethought himself of an idea which had attracted him, as a sheer technical challenge, for many years: the idea, as he summed it up, of making a whole film in a telephone booth. The possibility of denying oneself the scope and mobility normal in the cinema and yet making a film that was purely cinematic appealed enormously to him. Later the notion, or something akin to it, was to produce one of his greatest triumphs in Rear Window. Lifeboat, though the subject of some controversy, is certainly less than that. But its basic idea is sound enough: the whole thing is shot in and around a lifeboat, the occupants of which present a microcosm of the war-torn world, and their story a sort of thriller in which a disguised Nazi tries to steer the boat towards a German supply ship and is finally unmasked and thwarted.

  So far, so good. But the writing up of the project offered many problems which were never satisfactorily resolved. The subject was first assigned to another major literary figure, John Steinbeck, but at the end of some weeks’ work all he turned in was a very incomplete scenario. Hitch then hired the poet and novelist MacKin-lay Kantor (later known as the author of The Best Tears of Our Lives), but did not like what he did and paid him off after two weeks. The third writer on the project was Jo Swerling, an old Hollywood professional who soon licked the disparate materials into some sort of shape, though still too loose and shapeless for Hitch, who went through it again before shooting, ruthlessly cutting and tightening to give it some dramatic cohesion. Finally, the script is well enough crafted. The trouble is that, despite all Hitch’s attempts to make it otherwise, it remains naively didactic in its tone and dialogue—the characters never really transcend their basic roles in the structure of ideas—the ruthless Nazi, the communist, the pacific religious black, the millionaire and so on. The message—of the free world’s need to sink its differences and unite in the face of fascism, lest the fascist’s single-minded sense of purpose defeat the muddle and impotence of all right-thinking men when it comes to cooperation—is presented loud and clear. But finally too loud and clear: Lifeboat is the only one of Hitch’s films that ever gives us the uncomfortable feeling that we are being preached to, that makes us too aware of being manipulated for the manipulation really to come off.

  The one exception to these strictures is Tallulah Bankhead in the leading role of the shipwrecked fashion writer. The casting is wilfully bizarre in the best Hitchcock manner—who, he asked himself, would be the last person one would expect to meet, immaculately groomed, on a lifeboat adrift in the middle of the Atlantic? Tallulah was a sufficiently unfamiliar face to the cinema audie
nces of the world, having made very few films, and anyway Hitch liked her. They had a tough, no-nonsense relationship during the shooting, and off screen became great friends—Hitch enjoyed wandering round the galleries of Beverly Hills with her, respected her taste and bought one of his larger modern paintings, a Milton Avery, at her encouragement. He found her cheerful unreasonableness amusing—she took a violent dislike to Walter Slezak, the firmly anti-Nazi German actor who played the Nazi in the film, and persistently kicked him around growling ‘You God-damn Nazi’ and other insults whenever the mood took her. Hitch also enjoyed and shared her often bawdy sense of humour. Once on set a rather delicate (or indelicate) problem came up. Tallulah, it was fairly well known, disliked wearing underclothes, and in a scene involving a lot of rough water in the studio tank it became evident to the onlookers that she was wearing no panties. As word spread more and more visitors from other films in production kept appearing, and finally the chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, heard about it. After checking for himself he had Hitch called aside and told he must clearly do something about this, as it was disrupting the work of the whole studio. ‘Willingly,’ replied Hitch blandly, ‘but of course it will have to go through the correct channels. And I don’t know which to go through—make-up, wardrobe or hairdressing!’

  There was one other small difficulty connected with the film. How, in the limited compass of the lifeboat and its occupants, was Hitch to make his by now traditional brief guest appearance? He could hardly be quietly swimming by disguised as a dolphin. He considered being a dead body floating in the water. Then a thought occurred to him. He had just been on one of his periodic diets, by far the strictest and most effective of his life, fining himself down from over 20 stone to a much more reasonable 13 stone. So he took ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of himself, and had them made up into an advertisement for an imaginary product called Reduco. This is prominently placed in an old newspaper lying around in the boat, which William Bendix reads at one point. The audience response, Hitch says, was gratifying—he received hundreds of requests for information about Reduco and where it might be obtained.

  The film had a very mixed reception, much of the hostile response being for the rather naïve reason that the Nazi character was made more competent and more determined than any of the representatives of democracy: what was intended as a warning note was seen, incredibly, as an attack on the Allied cause. Still, such criticism did not seem to worry Hitch himself very much. He was already planning his next film, which would once again be made directly for Selznick: it was to be an adaptation of a novel by Francis Beeding called The House of Doctor Edwardes, about a lunatic who takes over the running of an asylum. Pure escapism, nothing to do with the war. But before he did that he had for his own peace of mind to do something even more direct for Britain and the war effort. He was too old and too much overweight to be called up for military service, but he felt if he did not get right into the atmosphere of the war and make some kind of self-denying contribution he would always regret it and feel guilty.

  So before starting on The House of Doctor Edwardes he took some months off and flew back to England, arriving in London in spring 1944. Already the atmosphere was a lot more hopeful than on his earlier visits—the tide of war seemed at last to be turning, and the idea of invading the French coast again was very much in the air—D-Day actually came early in June, while Hitch was still there. And what should Hitch do in England? Well, make films presumably. And sure enough his old friend Sidney Bernstein, who was then head of the film division of the Ministry of Information, asked him if he would help out by making two short French-language films for them, as tributes to the work of the French Resistance. He had already worked in German, and his French was more than passable, so he met with the Molière Players, a group of French refugees in England, and began to work out scripts for the two films with his old friend Angus McPhail. While in England he settled at Claridge’s and for a few weeks his room was constantly crowded with Free French officers, actors and so on, all of them contributing their conflicting views on what the first film should be about and what it ought to be saying.

  Bon Voyage was based on a story idea by Arthur Calder-Marshall; Hitch wrote it with Angus McPhail and J. O. C. Orton, and the actor Claude Dauphin helped them with the French dialogue. It was intended to be shown in newly liberated areas of France to help re-indoctrinate the French in the role the Resistance had been playing. It turns on a simple but ingenious change of viewpoint. First an RAF man is questioned by the Free French in London on the details of his escape from France with the aid of the Maquis. He tells his story, then he and we are told that his ‘Polish’ escort was really a German spy. Now we see the whole thing again, but filling in the details he had not noticed and reinterpreting what he did see in the light of this new information.

  In the course of elaborating Bon Voyage Hitch became very conscious of just how divided a house the Free French were—always quarrelling with one another and sometimes it seemed more bitter towards their supposed allies than towards their undoubted enemies. Indeed, it was the situation of Lifeboat all over again. Consequently, he had the notion of dramatizing these differences and divisions for his second French-language film, Aventure Malgache. This all takes place on Madagascar, where the situation between the Vichy French and the Free French hung for some time in the balance—it is the true story of a lawyer now turned actor with the Molière Players, called Clarousse, who had proved such a thorn in the side of everyone he knew in Madagascar that he was as likely to be imprisoned by the Free French as by Vichy. The film has typical Hitchcock ambiguities and some brilliantly expressive uses of composition, as in the long-held shot in which the boy’s fiancée is told (against orders) of the new mission and the telephone peeping significantly into frame already hints to us that she is immediately going to use it to inform on him. But clearly the film’s subtleties and contradictions did not suit the French liberation forces, who would have preferred something far more uncomplicatedly heroic and upbeat, so it seems never to have got shown.

  In all, Hitch spent some eight months in England during the summer and autumn of 1944, his salary when working on the MOI films being the modest standard £10 a week. The two films were made in Associated British Studios at Welwyn Garden City, whither he travelled each day from Claridge’s. He also had time to look up family and old friends, make his peace with Michael Balcon if any rancour still persisted from Balcon’s hasty words of criticism in the first days of the war, and take stock of his situation in relation to England. He had made a satisfying new life for himself in America. And now his links with England were breaking one by one. His mother was beginning to fail, and would die before the war was over. His brother William, with whom he had never been very close anyway, seemed to have been shattered by his wartime experiences, and did not outlive the war either. With his mother and brother both gone, Shamley Green would be empty and impossible to keep that way in the intense post-war housing shortage, so Hitch foresaw another link about to be unavoidably broken.

  It is always difficult and uncomfortable to make a clean break with places and people that embody happy memories, and he would remain inescapably the perfect English bourgeois to the end of his days. But to an astonishing degree, though an unmistakable product of his time, his place, his class, he was his own man, an intensely private person who carried his own world around with him and made his own home anywhere that he and Alma and Pat could be gathered together. Typically, the ultimate proof of his Englishness was his ability to reject England, to escape from it. Wherever he was was a bit of England; the England of the others he really did not need.

  As work drew to an end on the two shorts there was some desultory discussion of his staying on to make a new feature in England, on the subject of prison camps. But nothing definite came of it, and instead he began working with Angus McPhail on the first draft script of The House of Doctor Edwardes, in anticipation of his return to Hollywood. The subject was pretty weird, and he was
not satisfied that he and McPhail had managed to make sense of it. He longed for Hollywood polish, Hollywood know-how. He even longed, loath though he was to admit it, for the sounding-board of David O. Selznick. As the year moved into autumn he packed up and returned to America, not really conscious even of having made a decision. Life, as so often, had done that for him.

  Chapter Eleven

  Spellbound, as The House of Doctor Edwardes came to be called, was in the event the first of Hitch’s post-war films, and the one that marked in some mysterious way his definitive absorption into the American cinema. It is hard to put one’s finger on the difference. But up to this point Hitch had either been making English films in America, or films in which he was consciously a propagandist trying to sell the American public on something which might not seem natural to them. Even in Shadow of a Doubt a lot of the film’s extraordinary perceptiveness about small-town America seems to come, as in other films by foreigners such as Renoir’s Swamp Water or Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy or Forman’s Taking Off, from the very fact that there is a different angle of vision, that many things which would be taken for granted by an American are seen as exciting and exotic. From Spellbound on that all changes—Hitch has become, quite simply, an American film-maker.