With the débâcle of Under Capricorn behind him, he decided to follow his old principle and ‘run for cover’—when you are out of ideas, and rattled because of it, take refuge in something tried and true, just exercising your craft, until the phase passes. Not that Stage Fright, his next film, worked out quite that way, but it was an attempt in the right direction. After the weightier works of his latest Hollywood period, he determined on a light-weight, black-and-white thriller with a British locale and very much in the style of his pre-war British films. A suitable subject was to hand in the shape of a story with a theatrical background from a book by the English journalist Selwyn Jepson, just published, which reviewers had instantly cited as ideal material for Hitchcock—a suggestion which he thinks he may have accepted a little too uncritically. Certainly he put aside, yet again, I Confess, the other subject (besides Rope) that he had wanted to make since the mid-1930s, as well as Jack Shepherd and Dark Duty, the story of a British prison governor, all three of which he had definitely announced as in the works within the previous year. Instead he set right to work with Alma on a treatment based on two of Jepson’s stories, which was then turned into a screenplay by James Bridie and Whitfield Cook, author of Pat’s second Broadway play.
Pat was of course at this time still in London, at RADA, though she had now moved out of the cousins’ place in Golders Green and taken a flat with a couple of fellow students. Alma and Hitch were consequently able to see a lot of her, and Hitch put her into his new film in a small role as well as using her as a double for the star, Jane Wyman, in some scenes. The film, after the pervasive humourlessness of his last few films, is primarily cheerful. The central characters, played by Jane Wyman and Richard Todd, are rather too dull for us to be very interested in their problems, or who did what to whom, but there is a lot of fun around the edges with a gallery of British character actors such as Alastair Sim (suggested by Bridie, whose greatest interpreter he was), Sybil Thorndike, Kay Walsh, Miles Malleson and Joyce Grenfell, not to mention Marlene Dietrich magisterially intoning Cole Porter’s song ‘The Laziest Girl in Town’ and flashing her famous legs.
Hitch had trouble keeping Jane Wyman, who was supposed to be playing a very plain girl, from surreptitiously glamorizing herself to rival Dietrich. But then he really had fun with the extravagant theatrical-benefit garden party, and in parts of the film the sense of enjoyment is infectious. Towards the cast in general he was as usual impassive. Marlene Dietrich recalls: ‘He frightened the daylights out of me. He knew exactly what he wanted, a fact that I adore, but I was never quite sure if I did right. After work he would take us to the Caprice restaurant, and feed us with steaks he had flown in from New York, because he thought they were better than the British meat, and I always thought he did that to show that he was not really disgusted with our work.’ And in the case of Hitch and Dietrich a sterling regard for each other’s supreme professionalism ripened into a warm affection. The problems of the plot were never quite solved—the audience is kept in the dark for too long about who the real villain is, no one is in real danger during the film, and everyone, even the ostensible villains, is scared. These considerations finally seem more important than the curious objections raised at the time that the film is ‘dishonest’ because it begins with a flashback told by Richard Todd which finally proves to be a lie. The camera, it is asserted, should not lie, even if a character in a film can lie verbally. But who says? After the narrative ambiguities of Last Year in Marienbad it is hard to feel so confident of anything in the cinema.
Hitch’s return to Britain had not exactly proved the unmitigated triumph he had hoped and fantasized it to be. But it had not been a total disaster either, and he could return to Hollywood with his reputation only slightly tarnished. He and Pat and Alma all went back together, home after an unusually long break. In Hollywood he now felt more comfortable, and apart from some brief location work on the second Man Who Knew Too Much he would not film in Britain again for some twenty-two years, until Frenzy in 1972. He was by no means down and out. He had been well paid for his producer-director work on the last two films, and he was still news, still very much a name to conjure with. But there was no doubt that at this point in his career he was sorely in need of a hit. Fortunately, one of his biggest was just around the corner, to inaugurate the greatest period in his Hollywood career.
Chapter Twelve
When Strangers on a Train was published in 1950, Patricia Highsmith was an unknown thriller writer, far from the literary eminence she was later to attain, and this was her first novel. It was flattering when her agent was approached by Alfred Hitchcock’s office with an offer to buy the film rights of the book. It was a pity the offer was not larger (only $2,000), but as Hitch said when she met him, really she should pay him to make the film, it would mean so much to her in terms of later reputation and sales. Ruefully she has to admit that he was right, though at the time it was a blow to her vanity as well as her pocket. But the agent said take it, you’re not likely to get a better offer, and she did.
So began the slow process of Hitch’s Hollywood come-back. He prepared a first treatment with Whitfield Cook. To begin with he could find no writer who seemed to see what he saw in the subject—nearly a dozen turned down his treatment because they couldn’t visualize or make sense of it, though to Hitch it seemed clarity itself: it is about an exchange of crimes, and therefore an exchange of guilt, between two men, one of whom happens to be crazy and tries to force the other into doing his murder once he has carried out the other’s murder for him. Despairing of making sense of himself to a Hollywood professional, Hitch decided to turn instead to someone who certainly knew a thing or to about guilt and lunacy: the distinguished thriller-writer Raymond Chandler. Chandler had worked on a couple of scripts before, but was refreshingly unintimidated by Hollywood conventions of what would work and what should and should not be done. On the other hand, he had some fixed ideas of his own, which were to give Hitch a few headaches. Improbably, for someone so careless of detail in his own books (it is recorded that when the makers of the film The Big Sleep consulted him to settle the question of who did commit one of the murders in his original novel he was quite unable to provide a satisfactory answer), he developed a conscience about believable characterization, and so made all kinds of difficulties for Hitch. Hitch would say, in effect, Here we have certain characters at point A, and in five minutes’ screen time they have to be at point B; now it is up to you to get them there. And Chandler would answer, with elaborate scruples, But how do we know, given the characters at point A, that they would ever reach point B? To Hitch it was quite clear: the characters were invented in terms of the actions they had to go through, so you simply ironed out or went back and corrected any inconsistencies; for Chandler they had some mysterious life of their own, which he did not feel qualified to interfere with.
Obviously, the two men could not communicate very well. Chandler was, unlike the other notable literary figures Hitch had worked with, a long-time southern California resident, living with his much older and now semi-invalid wife at La Jolla, near Los Angeles. He had built up a routine (which included a considerable amount of drinking) and did not like to have it disturbed; he preferred to work at home rather than at the studio, felt Hitch’s visits there were an intrusion (one day as Hitch was getting out of his limousine Chandler remarked loudly to his secretary, ‘Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car,’ and when she remonstrated that he could probably be heard snapped back, ‘What do I care?’) and at the same time objected rather pettishly that Hitch did not spend enough time with him, but breezed in every so often, threw off a mass of unrelated ideas, good, bad and indifferent, and vanished again leaving him to cope with all kinds of mutually contradictory or sometimes just plain impossible instructions. Hitch, for his part, felt that Chandler was behaving in too prima donna a fashion, which he did not have the time or the patience to cope with. Chandler made it clear that, as with all his film-writing assignments, he was i
n this largely for the money, and to retain his standing in Hollywood, but then could not prevent his artistic scruples (or his personal neurosis depending which way you look at it) from breaking in.
Hitch found him fascinating as a psychological study, but intensely irritating as a collaborator. Chandler’s communications with his agents and friends on the subject of Hitch grew more and more frantic, mystified and despairing. At the beginning of the job he noted that one reason for it was that he thought he might like Hitch (‘which I do’). A few weeks later he wrote to Ray Stark:
Hitchcock seems to be a very considerate and polite man, but he is full of little suggestions and ideas, which have a cramping effect on a writer’s initiative. You are in a position of a fighter who can’t get set because he is continuously being kept off balance by short jabs. I don’t complain about this at all. Hitchcock is a rather special kind of director. He is always ready to sacrifice dramatic logic (in so far as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect or a mood effect. He is aware of this and accepts the handicap. He knows that in almost all his pictures there is some point where the story ceases to make any sense whatever and becomes a chase, but he doesn’t mind. This is very hard on a writer, especially on a writer who has any ideas of his own, because the writer not only has to make sense out of the foolish plot, if he can, but he has to do that and at the same time do it in such a way that any kind of camera shot or background shot that comes into Hitchcock’s mind can be incorporated into it.
After he had delivered the last pages of the final screenplay (and got himself involved in an argument with Warners over one day’s pay) he wrote indignantly to Finlay McDermid, head of Warners’ story department:
Are you aware that this screenplay was written without one single consultation with Mr. Hitchcock after the writing of the screenplay began? Not even a phone call. Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence then and since. You are much too clever a man to believe that any writer will do his best in conditions like this. There are always things that need to be discussed. There are always places where a writer goes wrong, not being himself a master of the camera. There are always difficult little points which require the meeting of minds, the accommodation of points of view. I had none of this. I find it rather strange. I find it rather ruthless. I find it almost incomparably rude.
When Hitch realized that he had to start shooting in Washington by the beginning of October, before the leaves turned, it became evident that he and Chandler would have to part company. Hitch was left with a draft screenplay strong on atmosphere but weak on construction and dialogue (in Chandler’s novels most is conveyed by atmospheric description, very little by dialogue as such). What he needed at this stage was a brisk professional job of tightening and sharpening. He would have liked Ben Hecht to do it, but Hecht was otherwise occupied. However, he did get one of Hecht’s assistants, Czenzi Ormonde, to work with him on the final script. Despite the disappointments of the collaboration with Chandler, the time does not seem to have been altogether wasted. There are very Chandlerish elements in the film as made, notably in the scene with the murderer’s mother, who turns out to be as crazy as her son—a typical Chandler situation. But for the most part Hitch managed, correctly from his own point of view, to crystallize the psychological drama of the novel into a series of action highlights—the stalking and killing of Guy’s trampy wife in an amusement park (climaxing in the famously baroque shot of the killing reflected in the lens of her dropped spectacles); the party Bruno menacingly crashes and then nearly commits another murder at; the tennis match Guy has to win against the clock in order to get away and prevent Bruno from incriminating him; the final fight on the runaway merry-go-round ending in Bruno’s death. The linking material is not all that brilliant, but serves its function, like the toast in a club sandwich, which is just what Hitch, always economical of effect, wanted.
As usual, Hitch was not entirely happy with the casting, having to take a couple of Warner Brothers contract stars, Ruth Roman and Farley Granger, in order to have his own way with other roles, notably the insane killer Bruno, as whom he cast the hitherto sensitive all-American boy Robert Walker, to dazzling effect. As it happens, Farley Granger, with whom Hitch had worked before on Rope, turned out pretty well as the tennis player Guy, though Hitch had conceived the character ideally as a stronger, William Holden type. The shooting, though technically complicated, went off without any major setbacks, though Hitch claims still occasionally to have nightmares about the little man who had to crawl under the out-of-control merry-go-round in the final sequence, since this was actually as dangerous as it appeared to be and if he had raised his head just an inch or two he would certainly have been killed. And the film did bring him two small personal satisfactions. It began his collaboration with the cameraman Robert Burks, who became a close personal friend and photographed all except one of Hitch’s later films until his tragic death in a domestic fire shortly after the completion of Marnie. And it gave Hitch another chance to work with his daughter Pat, who plays Ruth Roman’s sister in the film.
Immediately after Strangers on a Train was completed, Pat headed eastward again to appear in her third Broadway play, The High Ground, with Marguerite Webster and Leueen McGrath. Yet again the play opened to mixed notices and closed after three weeks—Pat came to regard herself as the queen of the three-week run, since that was the duration of all her appearances on Broadway. Naturally disappointed that the play had not been more successful, she decided to take advantage of the occasion to buy herself a cheap car and take a few weeks’ holiday driving up and down the eastern coast of the States, which she had never had any real chance to experience before. But Hitch, for the third time too late to see her on Broadway, said that he and Alma would be in New York shortly, so why did they not all get on the Italian Line, go to Europe together, and drive around there instead for a family holiday? Pat cheerfully agreed, not realizing that this change of plan was to have a decisive effect on her life. For the second night out on the voyage to Europe she met a young man called Joseph E. O’Connell Jr., a businessman from Watertown, Massachusetts, of a good Catholic family (Cardinal O’Connell of Boston was his great-uncle). It was love at first sight, and somehow, providentially, he managed to turn up at each of the Hitchcocks’ major stopping-places in Europe, so that Hitch and Alma quickly caught on to the idea that this might be serious. And indeed, he could hardly have been a more suitable match, save only that he had no connection whatever with show business, and precious little interest in it. To Pat this was tonic, to Hitch, with his total dedication to the cinema, rather disturbing. But he and Alma really liked the young man, Pat clearly loved him and he her, so without too much ado they gave their blessing, and on 13 September 1951 the engagement was announced.
Pat had rather imagined a quiet wedding. But no way. As soon as Hitch had reconciled himself to the idea that his little girl was going to get married, with his flair for the dramatic he threw himself into organizing a big wedding in New York for 17 January 1952. The opening of Strangers on a Train in June 1951 had put him back on the top of the heap, critically and commercially, and the world was waiting to see what film he would make next, but he decided to take his time, keep them waiting, and see his daughter married and settled down first. In a vague attempt to get his son-in-law involved in the film business he encouraged him to take a job in the studio mailroom (where he was working alongside another son of a notable father, Danny Selznick), to learn the business from the bottom up. But Joe, though willing enough to give it a try, really wanted to go it alone, and after a few months got out and into the trucking business, where he has stayed ever since. This caused a certain amount of head-shaking from Hitch, but, he reckoned, as long as Pat’s happy … And so she clearly was. For the moment she gave up acting, finding herself pregnant with the first of the three granddaughters she was to give Hitch in rapid succession. This, at least, delighted him. He was to prove as attentive and capricious a grandfather as he had a fath
er, though, Pat felt, much more inclined to be indulgent with her daughters than he had been with her.
In Strangers on a Train Hitch had managed, by instinct rather than conscious thought, to find a deeply disturbing subject—that of an exchange of guilt—which could be satisfactorily externalized in thriller form. The film satisfied all the expectations the name Hitchcock attached to a film instantly conjured up—the superficial thrills and show-pieces of cross-cut suspense were close to the centre of what the public chose to think of as ‘typical Hitchcock’—while at the same time having deeper resonances which interested and involved Hitch the thinking, feeling man and gave a depth and subtlety to the subject which Hitch had come in his middle years increasingly to need if he was to be artistically turned on. In Rope and Under Capricorn he had tried to break with the obvious thriller formula his public forced upon him, and had failed. Now, instead of trying head-on to contradict their notions of what to expect from him, he had found a way to creep up on them unawares, sugar the pill of what really interested him in a subject by dressing it up as a thriller and leaving audiences to take it on whatever level they would. This was to be the method of all his great films of the 1950s.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 25