Not that Spellbound is, in anyone’s opinion as far as I know, one of Hitchcock’s better films. Disarmingly, he calls it ‘just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis’. In the process of scripting, with Hitch, Ben Hecht and the inevitable Selznick working over the original idea, almost nothing of the novel is left except, remotely, the idea of the villain turning out to be the asylum director, who is of course mad. The new story line sorts itself out as a straightforward vehicle for Selznick’s two biggest new stars at that time, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Ingrid Bergman, playing a psychiatrist who falls in love with her new boss before discovering that he is an amnesiac who is substituting for and has possibly murdered the real Doctor Edwardes, fits in very well with the Hitchcock world. Gregory Peck, who plays the amnesiac in question, does not. Hitch and Bergman took to one another right away, and she obviously conforms to his developing stereotype of the cool blonde with fire underneath, going through very much the classic Hitchcock development in Spellbound as she melts, under the influence of love, from a brisk, businesslike doctor into a soft, passionate woman. Between Hitch and Peck there seems to have been little communication—Peck speaks rather cooly of Hitch’s tremendous technical skill; Hitch makes it clear that Peck was cast in a second of his films, The Paradine Case, against his wishes, simply because he was under contract to Selznick at the time.
The most significant thing about Spellbound in general was that in it Hitch, with his usual flair for catching ideas in the wind at the time, had happened to hit on what was to become a major preoccupation of American cinema in the next few years—the subject of psychoanalysis as popularly, over-simply understood. Glamorous psychiatrists (or villainous psychiatrists, successors of many generations of crazed scientists) became staple characters in American films, somewhat to Hitch’s amusement. He himself did not take it all too seriously, seeing it mainly as a new twist on an old theme. In Spellbound he benefited to the maximum from the superior production values Selznick could bring to the film (benefited too much, some might say, since the film is after all rather ponderous and tends to get bogged down in its own gloss), and mercifully, once shooting had begun, was very little interfered with by Selznick’s active on-set supervision.
Though Hitch did not noticeably suffer from it on Spellbound, Selznick had changed quite a lot in his attitudes since Rebecca. Many around him felt it was the success of Gone With the Wind; suddenly he saw himself tagged for the rest of his life as the producer of Gone With the Wind, and became obsessed with the necessity of equalling or surpassing it. Also, his business activities had not gone so well since, and he seemed to be seeking new satisfaction in taking over every aspect of his own productions—especially, of course, if they included Jennifer Jones’s interests to be lovingly cared for. His own taste tended to the rather over-literary and dialogue-bound, and Hitch found himself having to fight on their later films together to keep the dialogue within limits, and the action flowing. However, Selznick undoubtedly respected him, even if he did not always understand exactly what he was up to.
In Spellbound, specifically, he was mystified as to why Hitch wanted to bring in Salvador Dali to work on the dream sequences. But just as a newsworthy gimmick he could approve of the idea, and acted as go-between for the arrangement. Hitch had never met the eccentric Spanish painter, but had a certain guarded admiration for his work, along with that of another Surrealist, now ex-Surrealist, Chirico. What he liked in both men’s painting was the precision and literalness with which they rendered a dream world. This was how Hitch himself saw dreams—no vagueness, no ‘atmosphere’, completely hard-edged. And he wanted Dali to bring this sort of architectural sharpness to the rendering of the amnesiac’s dreams in the film. He wanted to emphasize this even further by shooting all the dream material in the open air, in real sunshine, but Selznick baulked at the expense, and finally it was all shot in the studio. Evidently, from production stills that survive, considerably more was staged and shot than ever reached the finished picture, and Hitch himself vetoed some of Dali’s wilder ideas, like the shot which would show a statue breaking apart to reveal Ingrid Bergman inside, covered with ants. He wanted the tone of the film to be perfectly matter-of-fact, to balance the fantasy elements in the story. In exchange for this, he got to carry out one of the one-shot ideas he had had at the back of his mind for years: at the climax the villainous Doctor Murchison has a gun trained on Ingrid Bergman and then slowly turns it on himself (the camera, that is, the audience) and it discharges with one flash of flame, red in this otherwise all black-and-white film.
Dali apparently enjoyed his stay in Hollywood, which was certainly more productive than his abortive attempt to design a whole animated feature for Disney, to be called Destiny. And he enjoyed Hitch, sensing in him a showman-eccentric very readily comparable to himself. Hitch still today has on his walls a Dali drawing inscribed to him as ‘Le chevalier de la mort’ And he still today retains the warm friendship of Ingrid Bergman, who shares with Grace Kelly alone the distinction of having played the heroine in no fewer than three of his American films, including the one immediately following, Notorious.
If Selznick had forborne to interfere with the shooting of Spellbound, he moved in with a vengeance at the editing stage, seeing it through the regular series of previews, noting with appreciation the enthusiastic audience reactions to Gregory Peck, and, between first preview and opening, cutting some two reels (about twenty minutes) out of the print. Hitch was inured to this, but the experience was still galling, and the irritation was not significantly lessened by the commercial triumph which awaited the film—it cost around $1.5 million, and made $7 million. Or by the fact that Selznick voluntarily gave him special billing above the title: the film was called ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound’. It was some comfort that he had recently made a new agreement with Selznick by which he was paid $150,000 a picture, making supposedly two a year, non-exclusive. But it was still with a certain trepidation that he went straight into another film with almost exactly the same team—Selznick producing, Ben Hecht scripting, and Ingrid Bergman starring with Cary Grant instead of Gregory Peck.
Meanwhile, Pat’s career as an actress was getting unpredictably under way again. She was now seventeen, and another role had come up for her, just as she was about to leave school. A series of stories by Whitfield Cook had been appearing in Red Book, about a little-Miss-Fixit called Violet who pulls together a large family made up of children from several different marriages. Cook decided to turn the stories into a play called Violet, and offered Pat the title role. She took it, though somewhat dismayed to discover that Cook was going to direct it himself, despite the fact that he had no previous directing experience. As it turned out, the result, which should have been light and charming, was heavy-footed and got a drubbing from the critics. The play had been optioned by MGM, so they were guaranteed three weeks, playing rather sinisterly to empty houses. Then, at the end of her second three-weeks’ run on Broadway—with Hitch again not having been able to see the play, as he was tied up with Spellbound—she returned to Los Angeles and began to give some serious thought to how she was going to pursue her career.
She had achieved respectable but not spectacular marks in school, so college did not seem a very good idea unless she had some specific purpose. Her only specific purpose in fact was to become an actress, and that had been accepted almost without question. But what should she now do about it? There were not so many respected drama schools in the US at that time, but one of them happened to be near by, at UCLA, where they already had drama courses as part of the academic curriculum. Pat went down to register, found that the registration fee was $12, and as she had only $9 on her she ran home to get the rest of the money. At which point Hitch suddenly said, out of the blue, ‘How would you like to go to RADA?’
Wouldn’t she just? She had heard Hitch talk about the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and knew that he had enormous respect for it as a repository of English acting trad
itions and technique. He could hardly have shown his confidence in her ability to learn her craft in a more practical, serious way. And evidently he had been secretly thinking it over for some time: he had already, before broaching the subject of RADA with Pat, made arrangements that she should, at least to begin with, live with his two elderly spinster cousins, Mary and Teresa, in Golders Green while she went to school. It was the most spectacular present he could possibly have given her at that point, and like the house for Alma it was given somewhat shamefacedly, spiced with a little teasing which made it a game for Hitch, with the other party only at the last moment, almost grudgingly, let into the secret. Pat, yet again, marvelled at his complexity even as she rejoiced at his kindness.
While all this was happening at home, preparations for Notorious were proceeding, not without problems. Selznick had been preoccupied during the making of Spellbound with his other major production of the time, Duel in the Sun, meant to be his Gone With the Wind of the post-war years and plagued with similar problems of escalating budgets, changing directors and so on. (It was probably more because of this than of any noble self-denial that he was not seen more often on the set of Spellbound.) While Notorious was on the stocks he was busy whipping up a storm of publicity for Duel in the Sun—Pat recalls being drummed at school into a ‘protest of Hollywood children’ against the alleged immorality of the film, and wondering vaguely whether she should say her father worked for the same fellow—but found time to interfere quite extensively with the scripting.
It was Selznick who had first turned Hitch’s mind in the direction of Notorious by showing him a Saturday Evening Post story called ‘The Song of the Flame’, about an actress who has to go to bed with a spy in the course of her counter-espionage duties and later fears this guilty secret may ruin her prospects of marriage. The story had nothing to offer in itself, but it set Hitch thinking around the idea of a woman who has to become sexually involved with a spy to get secret information, and the effect this has on her private life, especially her real love life. From that point (story idea actually credited to Hitch on the screen, which is rare) Hitch and Ben Hecht evolved the story line of the film as it was finally made, with Ingrid Bergman as the counter-spy turned unwilling sex object and Cary Grant as her jealous director of operations, just waiting for her to use her love for him as a reason to back out of her role in the plot.
All well and good, except for the vexed question of what the plot was. For Hitch it was the love story. But there had to be some MacGuffin as a motive force—the ‘secret’ everyone in the action is intent on keeping or revealing, even though it does not mean anything to us, the spectators. At first he and Hecht toyed with the idea of a secret Nazi army being formed in Brazil, but then, as with the secret air force in The Thirty-Nine Steps, he was faced with the problem of what it was for and how to dispose of it, having once introduced it. So instead it had to be some vital but simple object—industrial material, maybe. And how about uranium—the material they might, some day, use to make an atomic bomb? Why not—this was still early in 1945, before Hiroshima, and it seemed like the most remote science fiction. Hitch and Hecht even went to see Dr. Millikan, one of the foremost scientists in America, at Cal Tech to check out the feasibility of the notion, and he talked to them for a couple of hours about the possibility (remote) of scientists’ being able to split the hydrogen atom, but pooh-poohed the idea of uranium. (Even so, Hitch afterwards discovered he had been under surveillance for three months by the FBI as a result of that conversation.)
Well, maybe it was a bit fantastic, but a MacGuffin is a MacGuffin, and into the script the uranium went. A much more serious objection came from Selznick, however. What, he wanted to know, was this uranium stuff concealed in the wine bottles? Hitch carefully explained to him that though it did not matter a damn, it was this stuff they might make an atomic bomb out of. Selznick was not satisfied: how could they make something so remote and fantastic the basis for the whole story? Hitch patiently went over the principle of the MacGuffin again: that the film was ‘about’ the love story, and the uranium was only incidental. He even offered to change it to industrial diamonds if that would make Selznick any happier. But Selznick could not be convinced, and shortly afterwards he sold the whole package, script, stars and Hitchcock, to RKO for $800,000 and 50 per cent of the profits. As Hitch, who then took over as producer as well, remarked, this was very silly of him, for if he had had confidence in the picture and stuck with it he could have had all the profits, over $8 million.
The argument over this bit of MacGuffin has curiously followed Hitch through the years, providing him with a perfect instance of how the MacGuffin works and how even very sophisticated film men often fail to understand it. In 1950 Hitch found himself crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth with Joseph Hazan, a business partner of Hal Wallis, who asked him how he had managed to find out about uranium so early and admitted that he and Wallis had turned down the film when Selznick offered it to them because they thought the fundamental idea of the script (i.e. the uranium) was preposterous. A few years later still, Notorious was being belatedly released in Germany, and the German distributor proudly explained to Hitch how they had saved his bacon for him in the dubbing by changing the uranium to diamonds, because uranium was now so dated no one would accept it as the basis for a plot. More recently still, there was talk of remaking Notorious (perish the thought!), but the producers got stumped on the MacGuffin. After all, who was interested in uranium now? If only it could be changed into drugs of some kind, then possibly …
With Hitch as his own producer and no outside interference at all, Notorious went smoothly through the production process and turned out one of Hitch’s best films. He was happy with his stars, and they with him. As usual, he got the best results by patience and sweet reasonableness. One morning they had to start with Cary Grant’s reply to something Ingrid Bergman had said in the last shot taken the previous evening. She was still not altogether secure in the English language, and for some reason she just could not read the line right again for him to answer in the right way. At nine o’clock Hitch was patient. After a few attempts he talked quietly to Bergman: ‘Ingrid, do you know what this scene is all about?’ ‘Oh yes, Hitch.’ ‘Well then, let’s try it again.’ By eleven o’clock she still had not got it right, and then suddenly, in the middle of her speech, light dawned in her eyes and she read it perfectly. Hitch said ‘Cut,’ then calmly, matter-of-factly said, ‘Good morning, Ingrid’; she replied in the same tone, ‘Good morning, Hitch,’ and they went straight on without further comment.
Hitch was as ever quite imperturbable. One day Grant had difficulty opening a door as he was supposed to do, and complained to Hitch that he couldn’t do it with his right hand as it had his hat in it. Hitch pondered a moment, then asked sweetly, ‘Have you considered the possibility of transferring the hat to the other hand?’ On another occasion a fire broke out at the back of the stage. In the middle of explaining something to the cameraman Hitch simply said, ‘Would someone please put that fire out?’ and kept right on talking. For the famous kissing scene, allegedly the longest kiss on film, Bergman and Grant had to do take after take until they got it absolutely right, and as they embraced they took to murmuring sweet nothings in each other’s ears, different each take, mostly concerned with such unromantic matters as who would do the dishes. Hitch, of course, had his own idea, which he did not at the time confide to anyone else. He had an image in his mind of amorous obsession, derived from a scene he had once witnessed when his train stopped for a few moments at Étaples, just outside Boulogne. He saw a couple standing near a great brick wall embracing while the boy was urinating against the wall. The girl occasionally looked down to see how he was progressing, then looked round, then down again, but never let go of his arm the whole time. Nothing could interrupt romance, even the need for a pee. And that, unknown to his glamour stars and the public at large, was the kind of image Hitch was determined to create in these very different circumstan
ces.
Notorious is one of Hitch’s most romantic, most simple, most secret films. It has bravura pieces of technique like the famous crane shot which begins at the top of a flight of stairs, taking in a whole crowded party scene, and closes in gradually to an enormous close-up of the one significant detail in the scene, the key held tightly in Ingrid Bergman’s hand at the bottom of the stairs, right at the other end of the set. But more importantly it is a model of plotting, and creates its own rather nightmarish, doom-laden atmosphere with such intense conviction it leaves one wondering whether those critics who insist on the importance of Hitch’s Catholic education may not have a point. Certainly the story does seem to turn so significantly on the avowal, the clear verbal admission of love between the two principal characters, that it is hard to find this entirely coincidental. Also it is quite deliberately an exercise in moral ambiguity: ultimately the villain (Claude Rains) is a much more likeable and sympathetic character then the hero (Cary Grant), and the audience is in a strange way pushed into rooting for him, even though they know him to be a Nazi and a cold-blooded killer, because his love for the Bergman character, ruthlessly exploitive as it is, is in many ways deeper and more genuine than the hero’s.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 23