The film was frankly a self-indulgence. The most English of his American films, Hitch calls it; ironically, since just before starting it he had completed the last stage of his Americanization by taking out American citizenship. Alma had already done so, in 1950. Hitch, less impulsive, considered the matter carefully, decided that it was after all the right thing to do, and took out naturalization papers five years later, in 1955. Shortly after this, Sidney Bernstein recalls inviting Hitch and Charles Chaplin to dinner together in London. They were both friendly with him, and inevitably knew each other slightly, guardedly, having little more than their ultimate Britishness in common. On this occasion the talk turned, inevitably, to the vexed question of nationality. Chaplin, for all his years in America, had seen no reason to change his nationality: he was a citizen of the world, and any country, he implied, ought to be willing to welcome him on the strength of his art, with no chauvinistic strings attached. Hitch thought differently: he felt that if you were going to live in a country, work in a country, pay that country’s taxes, you should accept the full responsibility of the situation by taking on that country’s nationality and all the duties that imposed. Both positions were entirely logical, and neither man could fully understand or sympathize with the other’s: as on most other subjects, there was a polite exchange and they agreed to differ.
Despite Hitch’s change of nationality, no one could ever easily mistake him for an American; he remained in his outlook and his manner totally English. And as though to re-emphasize this, The Trouble with Harry is indeed very thoroughly and consistently English in tone, full of a curious poker-faced English humour on subjects which others are supposed to take very seriously, like death. It is based on an English novel, by Jack Trevor Story, about a dead body which mysteriously turns up in the countryside, and the bizarre reactions of the various people on the spot. Hitch shifted the locale to Vermont at the magical moment when the leaves are turning, which meant he had to make it very quickly, with almost a television technique (though like To Catch a Thief it was made in Vista-Vision, Paramount’s pet new wide-screen process), and used a cast of reliable character actors and unknowns. Among the unknowns, or virtual unknowns, were Shirley MacLaine and John Forsythe, while among the older character people was Edmund Gwenn, whose career with Hitch went back to The Skin Game in 1931. Hitch made the film largely to please himself, and therefore as cheaply as he could, since he had his doubts about its commercial potential—correct, as it turned out. The film obviously needed special handling which Paramount was not able to give it, and died a death in America, though it did quite well in England and France, where they are weird enough to find this sort of thing funny. Well, anyway, Hitch still likes it, seeing it as the ultimate in his comedy of understatement. And, as is so often the case with Hitchcock films, its reputation has constantly increased through the years.
At the time, the film’s importance was eclipsed by the début, on 2 October 1955, of a new television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It is difficult now to reconstruct how revolutionary it was, back in those relatively early days of television, for a front-rank, top-class movie director to involve himself in any way with this trashy, despised medium. Hollywood was still burying its head in the sand, trying to shrug off the competition of television and pretend it did not exist. Despite which, stay-at-home audiences glued to the small screen were already making big inroads into the attendance figures at movie houses. The various gimmicks of presentation in the early 1950s—triple-screen Cinerama, CinemaScope, Vista Vision, 3-D—were one form of response to the danger; the theatrical movie could give you something television could not—spectacle, colour, sheer size. There were other indirect responses, like the gradual erosion of the notorious Production Code, with all its absurd puritanical restrictions on what could and could not be shown in movies; if television was of necessity a family entertainment, theatrical movies could offer something it couldn’t, more outspoken, more sexy, more violent and sometimes even more adult entertainment.
But as yet few of the majors had had the sense to see that the thing to do, if you couldn’t beat them, was to join them. Not so MCA, the giant conglomerate which had evolved from agencies like Joyce-Selznick and Leland Hayward, publishing companies (the initials stand for Music Corporation of America) and production companies, and was to become, among other things, the parent company of Universal Pictures. The heads of MCA had early seen the potential of television, and got more and more involved on the production side. And at the same time Hitch was deeply involved with them. In the process of accretion, the agency which represented him had been incorporated into MCA, and so from 1945 he was represented in all his business dealings by MCA and in particular by Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA, who became one of his closest personal friends. When Lew Wasserman talked, he listened. And in 1955 Wasserman did some very effective talking.
At a managerial conference the question of new television shows for the company to produce came up. Wasserman suddenly said, ‘We ought to put Hitch on the air.’ Exactly how he did not know, but Hitch’s name, his reputation and his eccentric personality seemed to make him a natural. There was some scepticism. Could he do it? Would he do it? Would it work if he did? To all of which Wasserman answered, practically, that it would do no harm to ask, and to test the market in the usual way with preliminary research. So Wasserman went to Hitch with the idea. Hitch was cautious but open-minded. He had nothing against television, and the financial advantages if the series turned out well would be considerable. On the other hand, did he need this at a time when his theatrical movie-making was immensely successful and satisfying, and he had more projects buzzing round in his head than he could ever find time to do? Finally, he asked Wasserman’s opinion as a friend as well as an agent—did he think Hitch should do it? Very decidedly, Wasserman did. He did not see how it could do anything but good, and strengthen Hitch’s position in the cinema as well. In his most sanguine moments, though, he had no idea how much.
Once he was decided, Hitch acted speedily. He set up a company nostalgically named Shamley Productions and called in his old associate Joan Harrison to act as producer on the series. She gathered together a small staff which was eventually to include as her assistant—and later successor—Norman Lloyd, who had worked with Hitch as an actor in Saboteur and Spellbound, writers such as Francis Cockrell, who wrote an amazingly high proportion of the early scripts, including seven of the episodes directed by Hitch himself, the photographer John L. Russell and a nucleus of readers and editors, as well as James Allardyce, whose job was to write the brief framing discourses for each episode delivered by the master himself. The organization was tight and efficient, and once the pattern was established Hitch found it possible to delegate most of the work. He was most closely involved with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as the new series was called, for the first two years, at the end of which MCA signed up with NBC to deliver another series of forty-two hour-long shows called Suspicion. Of these, twenty-two were to be done live in New York and twenty on film in Los Angeles—and Shamley Productions were to do ten of the latter as well as the weekly half-hours. It was for this that Norman Lloyd was brought in from New York to provide the additional help needed, and stayed on in the expanded organization for another seven years as Hitch gradually had less and less directly to do with it.
But from the outset he knew very precisely what he wanted. Since television, he felt, deals in stereotypes, it was the perfect place for the stereotyped view of him and what he did—which otherwise he might rather resent—to be turned to advantage. He wanted the shows, which were half-hour for six seasons and then hour-length for one, to live up exactly to what people expected when they saw his name—thrillers with a twist in the tail, outrageously cynical black comedy. He directed his group’s attention to some of his favourites among the older short-story writers, like John Collier, and some younger writers, such as Roald Dahl, who thought along the same lines as himself. And having laid down the guide-lines he left them very
much to themselves. Of course, he could trust them completely not to do anything which would devalue the image, which was very necessary since he did not have time to read all the stories and scripts himself, let alone supervise the actual production at all closely. He did have synopses of the stories projected, and went through them rapidly each week giving a yes or a no. Usually it was yes, but whenever he found it necessary to say no he gave very clear and succinct reasons for his refusal.
Of course he had the pick of the stories for those he would direct himself. From the outset it was part of the idea that he should direct some of the shows—the pilots, the keynote shows, whatever else he fancied and had time to do. He has repeatedly disclaimed any special interest in those shows he did direct—twenty out of an estimated 365 Shamley productions—pretending that he merely took up whatever was in preparation when he had a gap in his schedule. In fact he seems to have chosen his own shows with great care, using many of his favourite actors in them and selecting stories which particularly appealed to him. In every other way he religiously observed the limitations imposed on the series in general. Normally the half-hour shows were permitted two days of rehearsal and three days of shooting; Hitch always brought his in on time. He found it an interesting discipline. He would pick out in each show the two or three most important shots, and concentrate on them. If they were right, the rest could be left to fall respectably into place.
Not surprisingly, among the twenty shows Hitch directed are several of those that everyone remembers best out of the whole series. Revenge, for example, in which Vera Miles is attacked by a man, later recognizes him in the street and after her husband has beaten to death the man she pointed out promptly recognizes another. Or Banquo’s Chair, in which John Williams as a detective hires an actress to pretend to be a murder victim’s ghost in order to flush out the killer, then discovers after his scheme has worked successfully that the actress was unable to keep the appointment … Or, most famous of all perhaps, Lamb to the Slaughter, from a story by Roald Dahl, in which Barbara Bel Geddes kills her husband with a deep-frozen leg of lamb, then cooks it to feed the policemen investigating the crime as they talk about the mysterious disappearance of the murder weapon. These could hardly have come about by some mere happy accident.
Nor could the introductions, which really made the series, and incidentally made Hitch one of the most famous people in the world, a star wherever he went. He came up right away with the format when the series was first mooted. The familiar profile caricature, which he had started doing of himself in his twenties, and had varied since only by the disappearance of the three wavy hairs on top; the same profile in his actual shadow; and the little joky chat with the audience, making cynical comments on the story to be shown and even—something totally taboo at the time on television—saying slighting things about the sponsor. The problem was to find a writer who could consistently hit just the right note, capture Hitch’s personality in this very brief compass week after week. Finding James Allardyce was a stroke of great good fortune. He met Hitch a couple of times, and Hitch showed him a rough cut of The Trouble with Harry as the best indication of what he wanted. (Bernard Herrmann, the composer who first worked with Hitch on The Trouble with Harry, also seems to have seen the film as a sort of Hitchcock self-portrait, and later arranged his music for it as a concert portrait of Hitch.) Allardyce at once created just the right material, and continued to write the introductions throughout the series.
It was a source of constant amazement to the rest of the staff of Shamley Productions the things Hitch could be persuaded to do on screen. That a great director, and one usually so protective of his dignity, should appear as a child in knickerbockers, or with a hatchet buried in his head, or variously, grotesquely disguised in moustaches and beards, or even sometimes play his own brother—that was really beyond imagination, especially since in some mysterious way he always managed to emerge from the most absurd stunts with his dignity intact. Yet another aspect of the Hitchcock enigma. And it was through these appearances, far more than his serious work, that most people got to know Hitch and have an opinion about him. He would drop in periodically at the studio and shoot them very casually at the rate of eight or nine a day—and the rest is history.
But the television shows were only the beginning of what was to turn into a whole industry. They spawned a lengthy series of short-story anthologies with titles like Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV and Tales My Mother Never Told Me, collections of the kind of funny/macabre story made familiar and permanently associated with Hitch’s name as a result of the television show. And then there was the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which was sold largely on the strength of the show (though it still continues today, long after the show ceased production) and also provided a useful source of material. Pat Hitchcock came back to work on the magazine, and also ran something called the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Fan Club, for which she had to write four circulars a year to feed the tremendous interest engendered in Hitch as a personality—a task she found rather difficult, since he was so busy actually making films that he did not do much that was sufficiently colourful to provide circular copy. And there were records, there were games, there were toys—all the usual spin-offs of a successful television show.
Hitch was not only famous beyond his wildest dreams; he was also rich, or rapidly becoming so. The television shows themselves were immensely profitable, and so were all the ancillary activities. Some years later, while touring Europe on a promotional trip, Hitch noticed a display of the German editions of the books in a Zurich bookshop window, stepped in, as he had never seen them before, was mobbed and spent more than an hour talking to customers, autographing books and so on. His companion remarked afterwards on his generosity in doing that at such a busy time. ‘Well,’ replied Hitch, ‘I thought it was the least I could do, seeing that the foreign-language versions of the books alone bring in about a $100,000 a year!’ Which, since they have been translated into dozens of languages all over the world, one can well believe. In 1962, when the series ended production, MCA was forced by application of the anti-trust laws to choose between being an artists’ agency and being a producer, so it unloaded its agency interests and Herman Citron left to set up independently as an agent—notably, Alfred Hitchcock’s agent. But his links with MCA remained close, for in 1964 he sold his interests in the television show to MCA in return for stock in the company—a deal which made him the fifth (or some say the third) largest stockholder in MCA and therefore in Universal, among other companies. Both parties did well: Hitch’s stock rapidly quadrupled in value, and the shows, put into syndication in 1965, have been on the screens of the world in re-run ever since.
So, Hitch’s television adventure made him independently wealthy—probably the wealthiest director in Hollywood today. From a financial point of view, he would never need to work again, and the major pay-off came, as it happens, at sixty-five, the age many consider that of retirement. But of course anyone who knew Hitch could no more imagine him retiring than flying over the roofs of Universal City. And in 1955, when it all started, he was absolutely at his peak of energy and creativity. The films flowed out of him in a seemingly endless stream; he had got back his confidence, and even a small set-back like the commercial disappointment of The Trouble with Harry could not deter him. Though never a gambler, he knew when he had a winning hand, and was determined to play it, all the way.
Chapter Thirteen
Exactly why Hitch, who had always made a point of not repeating himself, wanted to remake The Man Who Knew Too Much remains a mystery. Sometimes he shrugs it off by saying that he wanted a new vehicle for James Stewart quickly, and the property was there lying to hand, so he used it. He also said at the time that the original version had never been shown in America, or hardly—which is as it happens quite untrue. We know that he had seriously considered a remake some years previously, so this was not a sudden decision. He has often listed the original version as one of his own favourite
s among his films, which one might think constituted a good case for not tampering again with the subject; there would be more reason if he had some nagging dissatisfaction with the way he did it first time round. To Truffaut he said simply, ‘Let’s say that the first version was the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.’
At any rate it does not seem to have been a case of ‘running for cover’, since it was quite an expensive and elaborate film to set up, with extensive locations in Morocco and London as well as major shooting in Hollywood. And it was, incidentally if not primarily, a way of being kind to his old friend and colleague Angus McPhail, who had fallen on hard times since they had last worked together on the Ministry of Information films during the war, and who benefited enormously from Hitch’s solicitude in bringing him out to work in Hollywood on two scripts, The Man Who Knew Too Much and his subsequent film, The Wrong Man. The script of The Man Who Knew Too Much, written on this occasion by Angus McPhail and John Michael Hayes, followed the first in general outline, though changing the opening sequence completely, relocating it in Morocco instead of Switzerland, altering the ending to a sequence in which Doris Day sings at an embassy to track down her kidnapped boy (where Edna Best had to practise her marksmanship to get back her kidnapped girl) and substituting a feeble red-herring sequence in a taxidermist’s around the middle of the film for the original terrifying encounter of the hero with a villainous dentist. Over-all the treatment was much more expansive, so that the second version, at 106 minutes, runs twenty-two minutes longer than the first.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 27