And now, after an unusually long holiday from film-making following Strangers on a Train, he finally felt ready to tackle a subject which had always haunted him, ever since he had first come across Paul Anthelme’s play Nos deux consciences (Our Two Consciences) in the early 1930s. The play itself dated back to 1902, and concerned a subject very real to someone of Hitch’s Catholic upbringing—if, he had to admit, slightly specialized to anyone else: the unbreakable secrecy of the confessional, and the situation of a priest implicated in a murder of which he can clear himself only by breaking this seal. But Hitch felt the time was ripe, and he could see a way to plot the film so as to make it make sense and hold suspense even for non-Catholics. The film as finally shot had the advantage of unfamiliar locations, in Quebec, and a star in the role of the tormented priest, Montgomery Clift, who, though Hitch found difficulty in relating to him because of his Method background and personal neuroticism, was able powerfully to project the torment of the character and to make his dilemma comprehensible in human terms rather than merely as a theological puzzle.
Otherwise, things did not go so well with I Confess, as the picture came to be called. For the role of the woman in the case, a Quebec society woman who had had an affair with the priest in the days before he was a priest (hence the somewhat flimsy grounds for blackmail), Hitch wanted to import someone unknown to American audiences, with some kind of European accent. He signed up the Swedish actress Anita Björk, famous on the art-house circuit at that time as Miss Julie in Alf Sjöberg’s film of the Strindberg play. Unfortunately when she arrived in America, two weeks from the start of shooting, she had a lover in tow, and an illegitimate baby. In 1953 Hollywood was still plagued by bodies like the Catholic Legion of Decency, the gossip columnists took a high moral tone, and film stars just did not do things like that—or at least, not openly. Warner Brothers had fits when they heard, and insisted Miss Bjórk be sent packing immediately. A substitute had to be found, and Hitch settled, none too happily, for Anne Baxter, who was neither unknown nor equipped with a European accent. And the rather awkwardly constructed screenplay by George Tabori and William Archibald did not finally come up with a solution to the problem of what meaning, if any, the subject would have for non-Catholic audiences. When the film failed at the box office Hitch had to admit that he had allowed his long attachment to the subject and his specialized knowledge as a Catholic to get the better of his judgement as a film-maker.
In consequence, he is perhaps a little hard on the film. It has wonderful things in it, and the public’s difficulties with it seem now to have been less because of its specialized plot material than because it was far from the stereotypical Hitchcock thriller formula as it then existed in the mind of critics and public. The slow-burning intensity of the film, its doom-laden atmosphere, are much easier to take now than they were then, and it seems to have been more than anything another example of Hitch being ahead of his time. Certainly he took a great deal of care with it, meticulously filling every corner with telling detail—even to the point of taking an extra in the hostile crowd outside the courtroom where the priest has just been grudgingly acquitted of a murder charge and directing her just exactly how to eat an apple so as to convey callous unconcern and fierce greed.
The failure of such a long-cherished project as I Confess was inevitably upsetting to Hitch. Was he, he wondered, losing touch with the public and its tastes? There was, after all, so little knowing. Shortly befor I Confess he had had a curious experience in San Francisco. At that time he and Alma had an Italian couple and their daughter working for them, none of whom spoke any noticeable amount of English. One day they went into San Francisco from Scots Valley with the wife and girl so that Alma and the girl could do some shopping. Bicycle Thieves was playing at a local art house, and stumped as to what to do with Mrs. Chiesa meanwhile, Hitch thought to take her to the cinema, as it was a film in her own language. She watched throughout without any reaction, except to gasp when the father hit the child. When they left the cinema, Hitch asked her what she thought of the film. Oh, she said, it was all right, but why didn’t the father borrow a bicycle? To this practical objection there could hardly be any reply, so he then asked her what sort of films she did like. Her face broke into a broad smile. ‘Betty Grable musicals,’ she replied. Well, the world might not be made up of Mrs. Chiesas, but they were certainly an important part of the American public, and their tastes and interests were not after all so easy to predict. So much of film-making consisted of directing the audience, guessing how it would react to this or that stimulus. Hitch had guessed wrong in the case of the seal-of-the-confessional stimulus, he had not been able to make the subject generally accessible. He had not, for that matter, been having too much luck in that department for some years, and maybe Strangers on a Train was just a happy fluke.
Anyway, he was not in a position to brood on it. He had a contract with Warners, and more movies to make. The question was, what? He had a pet subject in mind, a book by Francis Iles (author of the novel on which Suspicion was based) about a timid country doctor who murders his wife—a perfect role, he felt, for Alec Guinness. But before that he intended to make The Bramble Bush, a David Duncan story Warners owned the rights to about a man who steals another man’s identity in Mexico, only to discover that the man he has become is wanted for murder—a very similar idea to that eventually filmed by Antonioni in The Passenger, Hitch liked the subject, and put in a lot of work on the scripting, but somehow could never contrive to get a satisfactory script out of it, and finally gave it up as a bad job. But meanwhile, here he was without a movie to make. So he determined to ‘run for cover’.
To do so he chose Frederick Knott’s very successful stage thriller Dial M for Murder, and working along with the author tightened it and sharpened it while staying very close indeed to the original structure, but emphasizing if anything the theatrical neatness and contrivance of the piece. He then proceeded to shoot it as far as possible in one complex set representing the apartment in which the principal characters lived, with an absolute minimum of action carried outside, and completed the whole thing in thirty-six days. It was, in a sense, a technical exercise, perfecting his ideas on how to film such a stage subject along the lines of his earlier essays in the genre, Juno and the Paycock and Rope; it was also his first (and last) essay in the then briefly popular 3-D process, which he used, as one would expect, with greater subtlety than anyone else, avoiding completely the cliché shots in which things were emptied over the audience or lobbed at them for an instant shock effect. Hitch contented himself with emphasizing the relief by a lot of low-angle shots and a very few from above, analytical shots showing the movement of characters around the apartment, plus one very effective use of recession when the heroine—a wife whose husband plans to have her murdered for her money—reaches anguishedly for a pair of scissors in the sharp foreground to defend herself against her attacker.
But for an entirely unpretentious technical exercise it turned out remarkably well. Perhaps Hitch was, as he claims, not really conscious of the connections between Dial M for Murder and Strangers on a Train; but it is curious, to say the least, that the murderous husband is an ex-tennis pro who has married well—as it might be, Guy from Strangers on a Train a few years on—and that he does plan his murder precisely by blackmailing someone totally unconnected to do it, as though he has, after all, learnt a thing or two from Bruno. Be that as it may, the film improves on the play in intensity and concentration, and seems to give everything an extra neurotic edge which is not totally explicable in rational terms. And, for Hitch personally, it brought a bonus in the person of Grace Kelly. He had never worked with her before, and was delighted to find an actress who fitted in so perfectly with his oft-summarized requirements—a cool blond surface with fire underneath—and a person whose Catholic background and unexpectedly earthy sense of humour chimed so perfectly with his own. Grace Kelly rapidly became not only one of his favourite actresses, but a close personal friend of himself
and Alma; still today she and her husband Prince Rainier are among the very few honoured by being asked to eat en famille in the Hitchcock kitchen whenever they come to Hollywood.
Immediately, Hitch liked her well enough to put her in his next two films—something unique in his relations with actresses. With Dial M for Murder he had completed the letter of his contract with Warners (though later on, in 1957, he was to go back to them and make one more film, The Wrong Man, completely without fee because he felt he owed them something), and now he was free to sign a much more advantageous contract with Paramount—one which gave him almost complete freedom and even guaranteed him that the later films he was to make for them would revert completely to his ownership after a period of eight years from the Paramount release. This is the reason that The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much (second version) and Vertigo—along with Rope, which he also now owns outright—were unseeable for several years, pending their reissue as a group.
The reasons the first film he made for Paramount, Rear Window, has become one of the most difficult of all Hitchcock films to see are rather different. The plot line was derived, remotely, from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote the books on which Truffaut’s films The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid are based. The rights had passed through various hands, including those of the songwriter-producer Buddy de Sylva, and were acquired in the normal way. After Cornell Woolrich’s death, however, a legal firm which had bought up residual copyrights in Woolrich’s works instituted a case against Paramount and Hitchcock to prevent them, under an obscure legal provison, from screening the film until the deceased author’s estate was settled.
At the time, though, Rear Window was just another movie subject to make just another movie. Except that it happened to make a Hitchcock classic—many would say the Hitchcock classic. Exploring further the idea of confinement he had played with so effectively in Dial M for Murder, Hitch chose as his protagonist this time a photographer who is confined to his New York apartment with a broken leg. Naturally he passes his time by looking out at the courtyard his apartment gives on to. And naturally in particular at the people in the other apartments—someone in the film remarks, ‘We’ve become a race of peeping Toms,’ and as Hitch points out, a degree of voyeurism is only natural: the film-maker’s art and the photographer’s are based on it. What he sees, of course, since this is a thriller, includes some evidence that the man over the way has murdered his wife, and the latter half of the film brings in some curiously disturbing undertones: there comes to be an element almost of complicity (much what film audiences feel when they are somehow rooting for the villain to get away with his crime), as the photographer and his society girl-friend seem gradually to want there to have been a murder, just to prove themselves right, and what began as a reasonably harmless parlour game ends up as a fight to the death.
In film-making terms the subject presented just the kind of problem in logistics that Hitch loved. Obviously human as well as film logic required that everything the central character sees be photographed from his point of view, and nothing be admitted which does not fit in with this requirement. Nor is it, except for two shots inserted in the sequence for special emphasis when it is discovered that the childless woman’s little dog has been killed by the murderer (a specially traumatic moment for the shamelessly dog-doting Hitch). The film is a masterpiece of economy and ingenuity, in which the extremely sober style works like a pressure-cooker, building up intensity because nothing is dissipated in bravura displays of virtuosity (as it is even, to an extent, in Strangers on a Train). The implications are there, but are left as implications—the photographer’s by-play with his telephoto lens does seem to be deliberately phallic (and after all he is in a sense turned on by what he sees), but at the same time it does have a clear plot function on the most literal level. And whatever Hitch is saying about human nature, he is saying totally without emphasis—the meaning of the film is completely articulated in its action.
On the personal side of professional, Hitch had seldom been happier. To begin with, he had two stars he had worked with very happily before, knew and trusted—James Stewart as the photographer and Grace Kelly as his society girl-friend. He had a subject that really excited him, and a new script-writer from radio, John Michael Hayes, in whom he discovered the perfect complement to himself for this film and the three that followed—not too strong on construction (Hitch could supply that) but great in the creation of lively, funny, sophisticated dialogue and smoothly believable characterization. Hitch was relaxed and at ease again, after his long period of uncertainty. He was moving into his most productive period since the mid-1930s—he would make, in the years 1954-60, no fewer than nine theatrical features as well as two hour-long television films and seventeen half-hour. Despite his crowded schedule, he still contrived to give the impression that he had all the time in the world, would play little games on set, and generally keep his cast and technicians relaxed and happy. In Rear Window, for instance, he took time out to show James Stewart amiably that actors, if not quite cattle, are at least all pawns in the hand of the film-maker, by editing the same shot of him in at two points in the movie, one at which he is supposed to be looking at a girl undressing (in which of course his expression is read as lascivious) and the other at which he is supposed to be watching a mother and baby (at which point he is taken to be projecting tenderness). It is all, as the early Russian experimenters pointed out, in the editing and what is juxtaposed with what—and it certainly takes an actor down a peg or two.
Hitch still cites Rear Window, along with Shadow of a Doubt, as among his own favourites of his films. From it he went straight into something very different, though still with Grace Kelly as female star and John Michael Hayes as script-writer. He had been planning it while making Rear Window, just as he had been planning Rear Window while making Dial M for Murder—quite against his usual practice of finishing one film before starting work on another. But his juices were flowing, he had just made two fairly intense films in rapid succession, and now he felt like a diversion. The South of France, with some of his favourite restaurants in the world, sounded good, and so did a comedy thriller with the accent very much on the comedy. Not that comedies are any easier to make than dramas, but this one clearly was—To Catch a Thief breathes relaxation and good humour throughout. It is a loose-limbed whodunit which depends very little on the shock of the ending, which is almost an excuse, and much more on the pleasant, unpredictable things that happen along the way. And the story gives him room to expand on his pet topics—the icy blonde who when it comes to the point takes the initiative from her suave would-be lover (Cary Grant) and herself makes the romantic running; the fetishism in her attraction to him, rather like a comic version of that in Marnie (in Marnie the man is attracted to the woman because she is a thief; in To Catch a Thief the woman is attracted to the man because she thinks he is a thief).
Certainly not Hitch, for whom the shooting was a happy family affair, with Alma plotting out the car chase for him, Grace Kelly much in evidence, even though she did happen to meet a certain Prince Rainier of Monaco during the shooting, and Cary Grant brought back from semi-retirement by a cable sent halfway round the world to where he and his wife were on a cruise, asking simply how he’d like to work with Grace Kelly and Hitch—no more details than that. And since he was among friends, Hitch relaxed his usual rules and allowed quite a lot of improvisation. In the scene shot high above the Riviera (almost on the spot, curiously enough, where later Grace Kelly would have a house built) Cary Grant and Grace Kelly found themselves in a cheerful, silly mood, all mussed up with chicken feathers on their lips and in their hair, and just began to make up the dialogue as they went along, bringing in, of course, the necessary plot points; Hitch did three takes of the scene, each completely different, and loved it. Of course they were all celebrities, and tended to find themselves mobbed wherever they went. But while there was a side of Hitch that hated that, there was also a side that
loved it, so things balanced out pretty well. And, Hitch even got to express his unending hatred of eggs by slipping in a shot in which Grace Kelly’s mother in the film, Jessie Royce Landis, coolly stubs out her cigarette in an egg, all glutinous and sunny-side-up on her plate.
Hitch followed up this happy holiday film by doing a bit of PR for his new studio, Paramount, in the form of a two-month tour of Paramount offices round the world. He hit the headlines when he was reported missing in the Orient. Then it turned out that plane delays had enforced the last-minute cancellation of a projected visit to Singapore, but he was quite safe and unruffled at the next port of call. He took the occasion to announce that when he got back he was going to start work on Flamingo Feather, by Laurens van der Post, and From Among the Dead, by Boileau and Narcejac; the latter ended up three years later as Vertigo, but Flamingo Feather never got beyond the planning stage. Hitch was intrigued by Van der Post’s tale of a situation which he had rejected for Notorious but continued to think about: the creation and training of a secret army, this time of blacks in South Africa by the Russians. He went to South Africa to do some research and scout for locations, but found, unsurprisingly, that the authorities were not very co-operative, It would be impossible to get all the black extras he needed, for the flimsy reason given that every black in South Africa was employed full time and work could certainly not be stopped just for a movie. Also he found that the scenery of the story’s original locations was virtually indistinguishable from that within a hundred miles of Los Angeles. All of which confirmed his initial doubts about political subject-matter, so he decided to drop his option on the property. In any case, when he got back to Hollywood he had two other new enterprises all ready to go: a new theatrical movie, The Trouble with Harry, and, much more far-reaching in its effects, a television series to be called Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 26