From here Hitch would have liked to go on to make more films which would combine this very personal exploration of the dark sides of human personality and passion with the wide popular appeal Notorious achieved. But instead, much to his resentment, he had to go back to Selznick and make for him the final film under his contract, The Paradine Case. He was very unhappy. He did not care for the subject, a novel by Robert Hichens turning on the trial of a mysterious femme fatale for the murder of her husband. It had been kicking around Hollywood for years and no writer had managed to lick it into satisfactory dramatic shape. (Selznick himself had tried unsuccessfully to sell Garbo on the idea back at MGM in the early 1930s.) Now Selznick, who was paying Hitch $5,000 a week for doing nothing, remembered the property, bought it from MGM, and decreed that it had to be done immediately. To make matters worse, he insisted on writing the script himself. Hitch and Alma had done the first adaptation, which Selznick needed for budgeting, and then had wanted James Bridie to work on the script with them. Bridie was brought over by Selznick, but when he was not met off the plane in New York took the first flight back, and tried to write the script in Britain—a not very satisfactory arrangement. Old faithful Ben Hecht was then called in, but left for another job with the script still very incomplete; and Selznick, with some show of reluctance (though this was what he had wanted all along), took over. And even though he confided to one of his aides a couple of weeks before the film was to go into production, in December 1946, that he did not have the time and feared that the film would ‘not be what it should be, and may even be dangerous at its present cost’, economic necessity forced him and Hitch on with it, all unprepared as they were.
Also, Selznick was compelled, and therefore compelled Hitch, to cast the film as far as possible from his own contract players. Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier, or possibly Ronald Colman, as the very straight English lawyer hopelessly in love with the woman he has to defend; instead he got Gregory Peck, who was then big box-office but whom he thought totally wrong. As the woman herself, the mysterious Mrs. Paradine, he wanted Garbo, but Garbo was still dead set against the subject and instead he got Alida Valli, a new European discovery of Selznick’s whom he hoped to make into a second Bergman now that his contract with the original was terminating. That was not so bad—she had the right mixture of passion and frigidity, and Hitch liked her personally, to such an extent that when, years later, he visited Italy again she was the only person there he specifically requested to see. But the third piece of imposed casting was the real disaster. As the story turns out, Mrs. Paradine did actually murder her husband, because she is hopelessly in the sexual power of her husband’s groom, a rough brute of a man smelling of manure who satisfyingly degrades her and enlivens her overcivilized senses. To make sense, Hitch thought, the role should be played by someone like Robert Newton—thus, at least, the relationship would be powerfully perverse, something which would interest him dramatically. But instead he was forced to use another Selznick contract artist, the sleek continental charmer Louis Jourdan, who could hardly have been further from what the part required.
Hitch therefore went into the film in a very contrary mood, hopeless from the outset, for one of the very few times in his professional life, of being able to make anything of the project he had been assigned. Oddly enough, almost like a bird of ill-omen, there in the cast, in the supporting role of the lecherous judge, was Charles Laughton, who had been in the last film he had felt this way about, Jamaica Inn. Actually on this occasion Laughton and Hitch got along very well—they were able to inject into the role of the hanging judge, mercilessly mistreating his own wife (Ethel Barrymore) and drooling over the lawyer’s beautiful young wife (Ann Todd), a lot of the strangeness and perversity which was so signally lacking from the main intrigue. Right from the start, though, Hitch and Selznick were constantly at loggerheads. Selznick was endlessly writing and rewriting against the clock, sending down new scenes on the very morning they were due to be shot. Hitch complained to an old friend, ‘What am I to do? I can’t take it any more—he comes down every day, he rewrites the scene, I can’t shoot it, it’s so bad.’ He also berated Selznick for the absurdity of going into such a picture with technical equipment, he claimed, twenty years behind the times. Selznick for his part accused Hitch of deliberately going slow and disregarding spiralling costs, out of some obscure kind of revenge. ‘This I can assure you,’ he told his aides; ‘you will see an entirely different result when he starts on his own picture; and you can also be sure that he will attribute this to efficiency in his own operation, against the gross inefficiency with which he charges us.’
Probably both parties were right to an extent in sensing ill will on the other’s part. Hitch, certainly, had come to the end of that period in his career when he could cheerfully and philosophically brook the constant interference of a creative producer, however well-intentioned, and he was surely correct in feeling that Selznick’s natural tendency to dominate his productions had taken a neurotically authoritarian turn. It is quite possible, on the other hand, that Selznick, who was no fool, was also on to something when he found Hitch’s slowing-down ‘unaccountable’. The later 1940s, though externally a period of advance for Hitch, in which he would become his own master, his own producer and as near as might be the complete creator of his own films, were also a strange period of dissatisfaction and lack of direction for him. He would not, of course, be the first man who has undergone some kind of change of life in his later forties, and it does seem that at this period, though generally in remarkable health, as he has always been, he was subject to all kinds of minor ailments, probably of nervous or psychosomatic origin, and that the hypochondria he has remarked on as an hereditary trait in his family had him for the moment particularly in its power.
This may explain the curious aridity many sense in his films of this time—The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, Stage Fright. Again and again the most vivid interest he can seem to summon up in them is that of playing games with himself, setting himself purely technical challenges which he then sets out with the utmost ingenuity to solve. In The Paradine Case he found distraction from his woes with Selznick by shooting the courtroom scenes in an entirely new way for him: instead of set-up by set-up, he placed four cameras, each with its own crew, in different parts of his expensive Hollywood reproduction of the Old Bailey, each trained on a different character or group of characters, then let them run, recording the continuous scenes from all these angles, to edit together the most telling parts in the cutting room. In his next two films he approached the problem of the continuous scene from the opposite direction, by cutting down the role of editing dramatically and introducing the controversial ‘ten-minute take’.
Once The Paradine Case finally went into release in December 1947 he felt an exhilarating sense of freedom. It was the end of an era, for him, for Selznick and for Hollywood. For Selznick, The Paradine Case meant the drastic winding-down of his independent releasing organization, his last challenge to the major Hollywood studios. The picture had cost an astronomical $4 million, and did not come anywhere near repaying the investment. And the organization proved uneconomical: he could not keep up a sufficient flow of product to occupy his employees all the year round, and from now on he had to admit defeat and retreated more and more into the dependent position of a producer or co-producer releasing his films through the major distributing organizations. The end was also in sight, though no one then fully appreciated it, for the old Hollywood studio system of factory-style production, contract artists and technicians, and tycoon heads of production ultimately in charge of it all. Though Hitch, ever cautious, felt a certain trepidation in launching out on his own as a complete independent, without a contract to fall back on or a producer to blame if things went wrong, he had certainly chosen the psychological moment to make the change.
But now he had the freedom, where should he go and what should he do with it? Ironically, the most attractive offer came from Britain. During his wart
ime visit to London in 1944 Hitch and his producer Sidney Bernstein had discussed a long-standing project of Bernstein’s, the very sober, simple filming of stage plays. At that point Bernstein had been particularly interested in it as part of the war effort, a way of recording an important part of British culture and selling it to other nations. Hitch had not seemed too interested—this sort of canned theatre, rather like what was subsequently done by the American Film Theatre, was far indeed from his own preoccupations in the cinema. But now Hitch was free and eager to work, Bernstein offered him a production set-up of his own, something to be called Transatlantic Pictures which would enable him to make films in Britain or America, co-produce them with Bernstein, and have complete control of subjects, casting and budgets. Hitch was delighted: he said, ‘The only thing that matters is who I work with day-to-day.’ By this time he was fairly well settled into the American manner of film-making, was respected and encouraged in the States, while in the frivolous and, curiously, more cynical atmosphere of Britain his fanaticism for films was a problem. But obviously on his own terms he could work anywhere.
And at this point, to Bernstein’s surprise, Hitch reverted to the subject of the filmed stage play. How if, for their first production, they were to return to his old project Rope, which by now dated back at least ten years in his mind? He said he would like to make a play on film, ‘but not Shakespeare’, and thought Patrick Hamilton’s thriller, loosely based on the Leopold-Loeb case in which two young Chicagoans murdered a third boy for kicks and to prove that they had super-intelligences, would do perfectly. He saw it as being a very inexpensive film, with a very short shooting schedule, and planned to put into operation this old idea of doing it as nearly as possible in one take—actually in takes of ten minutes’ (one reel’s) duration which would run imperceptibly into each other on screen.
This sounded like a slightly odd idea to Bernstein, but if that was what Hitch wanted to do, that was what he wanted to do, and his enthusiasm for the whole project was a good sign. Hitch wanted to make the film in America, planned on shifting the locale of the story back to America, and wanted James Stewart, recently returned from the war, in the lead role of the professor who taught the two murderers philosophy and now unmasks their crime. During his absence from the screen on war service Stewart had dropped a bit from public view, and was now not considered a big enough name for the financiers, but he was tentatively offered $100,000 to play the role. He replied that he would play it free for a percentage of the profits, if any, but finally they settled on a fee of $300,000, a significant slice of the $1.5 million the film eventually cost. Hitch worked on the adaptation with his actor friend Hume Cronyn, who had appeared in Lifeboat for him, and the final screenplay was written by the American dramatist Arthur Laurents. In May 1948 Hitch assembled his cast around him on a stage in the Warner Brothers Studios, Burbank, and embarked on this new adventure.
Here, for ten days, they rehearsed very much as they would a play on stage. They were all word-perfect for the whole script, as they would be in the theatre, and Hitch occupied himself mainly with working out the intricate camera moves that would be necessary to shoot the whole thing continuously in actual time. By design, all the actors were very competent, with some stage experience, so that they could be more or less left to look after themselves, evolving a collective reading under Hitch’s watchful eye. Even so, the most seasoned professional of them all, Constance Collier, was absolutely terrified to go to the studio when they were actually shooting—the long takes not only required theatrical feats of memory, but also imposed the added tension of worrying, if you made some slip, about the tremendous expense of reshooting, and the whole idea that this performance was about to be recorded, once for all, definitively on film even as you were giving it, with no possibility of manipulation and correction in the cutting room. James Stewart took the whole thing with his usual calm—though he did once inquire of Hitch why he was bothering to film it at all: why not just put up bleachers in the studio and sell tickets to live audiences?
During the shooting, Hitch encountered more problems than he had anticipated. For one thing, this was his first film in colour, and he insisted that he must have rushes in colour, which at that time was unheard-of from Technicolor: usually the rushes were in black-and-white, and the film-maker saw how his work looked in colour only weeks later. It was just as well Hitch made this stipulation, however, for when he saw the rushes he was horrified to discover that his dusk and sunset effects, carefully graded on the cyclorama outside the set’s apartment window, had turned out a bilious orange, so that he had to reshoot five of the film’s eight reels to obtain a quieter, more realistic effect. This nearly doubled his shooting time in the studio, though the work was still accomplished in a brisk eighteen days, despite the untimely illness of the cameraman after the first four or five days, so that the photography had to be completed by the Technicolor consultant with the aid of the chief electrician.
Maybe it was Hitch’s curious denying himself of cutting, the very resource which had always meant most to him in the cinema. Maybe it was the deadening effect of the limitations of sound this kind of shooting involved—it was so meticulously disciplined, with all the furniture, props and camera carefully muffled so that the sound track could all be recorded directly with virtually no need for looping dialogue. Or maybe it was just that the project so long planned had finally gone cold on him (the best advice for any filmmaker who finally gets the chance to realize his lifetime’s dream seems to be, Don’t). For whatever reason, Rope, despite its gimmick value and some effective moments, which earned its money back with a modest profit, seems strangely flat and ponderous, all played at a uniform pace which kills most of the excitement and suspense built into the subject-matter. At least Hitch had got it finally out of his system, which was all to the good, but it was saddening that his first independent production was such a disappointment, and left critics and public making excuses and hoping for better things.
Unfortunately, his next film, Under Capricorn, offered little for their comfort. It was the second (and last) of the Transatlantic Pictures productions, made in England, a period piece (a genre for which Hitch feels he has no talent, since he does not know how much the characters earn, how they go to the lavatory), and cost $2.5 million, much more than Hitch or anyone else thought it should. It was also a complete financial failure which brought about the liquidation of the company, and was repossessed by the bank which had financed it, so that it was unseeable for a number of years. During that time it developed a healthy underground reputation in France, where it was often regarded as one of Hitch’s masterpieces—a view in which he clearly does not concur. His recollections of the filming are nearly all unhappy, and he tends to talk of the film itself as a total miscalculation.
The trouble? Hitch says casting and his own vanity, closely interlinked. The casting because he sacrificed everything to the idea of grabbing Ingrid Bergman from all other Hollywood producers, without bearing in mind that she would cost so much as to make the whole project, given what it was, uneconomic, and also that she was at this time very nervous and preoccupied because of her new liaison with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Vanity because, having successfully laid his snare with an English novel he was not specially keen on but thought might appeal to Bergman, he was so delighted with his producer’s coup and his triumphal return to Britain to make the picture that he began to play the star himself and paid insufficient attention to getting the film itself right. He was inattentive to scripting: he had Hume Cronyn adapt the story again, though he was not an experienced enough writer, and finally achieved his earlier desire of getting James Bridie to write a screenplay for him without considering that Bridie was, after all, famed for his brilliantly paradoxical dialogue and notorious for his lackadaisical construction and the weakness of his last acts, both faults well in evidence in this screenplay. Finally, he did not pay enough attention to the casting of the lesser roles: in particular the role of the gro
om for whom the heroine sacrifices all (a variation on the theme of The Paradine Case), which he assigned to one of his pet actors, Joseph Cotten, though he was much too intelligent and refined for the part, which might ideally have been played by someone like Burt Lancaster.
Hitch calls his own behaviour at this point in his career ‘stupid and juvenile’, but he also admits to a lot of enthusiasm invested in the picture, and he seems to undervalue now his own enterprise in trying, however unsuccessfully, to do something different, something to break the thriller mould at this stage in his career. For the subject is not in any way a thriller—it hardly contains more than one or two momentary shocks, like the shrunken head placed in the heroine’s bed by the sinister housekeeper (a close relation of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca) to keep her dubious of her own sanity. It is a slowly developing psychological drama set in a strange place and period (nineteenth-century Australia) and Hitch does not even try to make it look like a thriller. His style is as leisurely and smooth-flowing as the story itself, with considerable use of the long takes (seven to ten minutes) which he had perfected in Rope. These were much commented on at the time, mostly unfavourably, as reducing the thriller potential of the story, but are now totally unnoticeable, so far have they become part of the normal language of the cinema since 1949.
On the other hand, it is true that the film is not very good; it does seem heavy and uncomfortable, as though nobody on it was communicating very well with anyone else. Certainly Hitch had a number of quarrels with Ingrid Bergman, with whom up to then he had got on perfectly. Once she was complaining so violently about the method of working, the long takes and the disappearing scenery, that Hitch, refusing to argue, just walked out of the room while her back was turned and went home, only to discover afterwards that she had been so wound up she had continued her monologue without even noticing his absence for another twenty minutes. On another occasion they were shooting a drunk scene on the stairs and Bergman could not, or would not, keep to her marks. Why should she anyway? she asked. She was supposed to be drunk. Couldn’t they just let her act the scene the way she felt it, and follow her? This time Hitch decided on a little demonstration, so he agreed to shoot the scene her way if she would play it his, and leave the decision of which version to use up to her. Once she saw the rushes of their respective versions she was in no doubt that Hitch’s was better, and generously admitted as much. But in general the film, odd and in a way compulsive as it is (particularly on television), does reek of compromise and discomfort, and Hitch was glad to forget it, if he could be allowed to. In fact, the only long-term advantage he gained from the Under Capricorn adventure was that through it he first met Peggy Robertson, the young Englishwoman taken on as continuity girl, who impressed him so much that the next time a chance came up he teasingly informed her that no, he did not this time need a continuity girl but—after a suitable pause for suspense—he did, if she might possibly be interested, need a personal assistant. And so another permanent member was added to the Hitchcock ‘family’.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 24