This was perhaps in line with a new mellowness in Hitch’s work, a consistent tendency, ever since Strangers on a Train, to move away from the straight thriller such as audiences thought they expected of him. That they could now get on television every week in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, so in his theatrical films he was freed for other things—precisely for ‘stories they wouldn’t let me do on TV.’ The films of the 1950s clearly mirror his own happiness, health and confidence—the confidence to do what he wanted, develop the aspects he found interesting, and to look for more than the mechanical thrills of his early British masterpieces. Those had been the products in their time of a similar happiness and professional confidence (Hitch underestimates his younger self when he calls him ‘a talented amateur’), but now the mature Hitch is more at ease with emotion, more eager to explore atmosphere, psychology and, at times, the darker areas of neurotic and obsessive behaviour which he had skimmed over before. The films are still springes to catch woodcocks, machines to play on the audience’s responses—it was not for nothing that during a tipsy moment on North by Northwest he actually fantasized about a time when it might not even be necessary to make the movies, but simply to wire up the audience with electrodes to produce the desired responses and play on them as on a giant organ console.
The results of this new attitude include some of his finest films—Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie—but only when the material is right for the weight of the treatment it is given. The Man Who Knew Too Much, despite the ingenious working-over it has been given, is not. An enchanting diversion has become weighed down with gloss and the sort of psychological elaboration it cannot really bear. The only occasion when he actually, verbally directed Doris Day, playing the distraught mother, is a case in point. In one of her big scenes she suddenly burst into convulsive sobs, which had not been specified in the script. Hitch stopped and asked her why she was doing that. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘my child has been kidnapped, I don’t know if I’ll ever see him alive again, and I have to go through all this pretence meanwhile. Of course I’m crying.’ Hitch had to admit she was right and give her her head. But this indicates the intrusion of a sort of psychological realism alien to his earlier method and to this material—as soon as it was admitted, the tight plotting of the story as a series of emotional directions to the audience went by the board: they were left watching emotions rather than experiencing them.
Still, the casting of Doris Day proved in general a happy (if for Hitch improbable) inspiration. Back in 1959 Hitch had one evening met her in a corner where they had both taken refuge from some vast and noisy Hollywood party. Impulsively, he had introduced himself, told her how good he thought she was in Storm Warning, up to then her only dramatic role, and promised one day to cast her in a picture of his own. Now he took up that promise, casting her to star with James Stewart. She was frankly terrified of the travel involved, never before having left the United States, but by the time she arrived in Marrakesh after stopovers in London and Paris (for costume fittings) she was sufficiently confident to put her foot down about the treatment of any animals featured in the filming and to get them specially fed. Hitch was not too happy about the heat of Marrakesh, but still chose to vary little from his normal formal attire for filming. James Stewart retains a vivid image of Hitch shooting one of the big scenes in the main square in Marrakesh. They had hired a lot of extras, and a rumour had somehow spread that if they weren’t able to see the camera they wouldn’t get paid. So here were Doris Day and hundreds of extras, all backed up behind the action and staring fixedly at the camera. Things were getting ugly, the police had to be called in, and there was nearly a riot. And there, in the middle of it all, in temperature of well over 100°, sat Hitch, under a big umbrella, dressed in his ritual dark suit, white shirt, tie, calmly waiting for it all to be sorted out as though this was the most normal, restful situation in the world.
For Doris Day he was all too unrufflable. She was rattled by the strange food and lack of hygiene, and even more worried because Hitch never said anything to her. Oh, he was polite and friendly enough, and perfectly charming over the dinners which he often had flown in specially from Paris or London. But never a word about her performance. The same when they moved back to London for further location scenes. She became convinced that he was deeply unhappy with her, and demanded a serious meeting as soon as they returned to Hollywood. Hitch was amazed. He explained gently that the reason he had said nothing was that she had been perfect in everything she had done; if he had wanted her any different he would certainly have told her. He also confided to her that he was quite as nervous as she was—he was nervous every time he walked into the Paramount commissary. She was totally reassured and finished the taxing studio scenes without any problem.
James Stewart, of course, was very used to Hitch’s working methods and by now had complete confidence in him. But even he was taken somewhat by surprise when they were rehearsing and shooting the climactic sequence of the film, in which Doris Day foils an attempted assassination during a concert at the Albert Hall. The plot called for a reunion of husband and wife in the passage running round the outside of the auditorium, and, since they have been functioning separately for some time, a quick exchange of information between them. The shot was intricately set up, with a lot of swirling camera-movement up and down the corridor and a lot of explanatory dialogue for Stewart to speak. They rehearsed it that way, and then Hitch suddenly said, ‘I’m not hearing the London Symphony.’ Stewart said, ‘What?’ And Hitch repeated, ‘I’m not hearing the London Symphony. You’re talking far too much. Why don’t you cut the dialogue and let us hear the music?’ They thought he was crazy, but after all it was his movie. And sure enough the scene was far more effective with the audience left to imagine the dialogue, while all they hear is the music.
Hitch was not long in London—the time he could afford to spend there was strictly limited by the British tax regulations—but he managed to do some research of his own on a nice point of casting. Knowing the British film industry of old, he was not surprised that in the casting of small parts they were lazy and convention-bound. When he asked to see actors for the small but visually important role of the ambassador he was sent dozens of small bearded men, all of whom had made a career out of playing politicians and diplomats. Out of curiosity, Hitch got hold of pictures of all the ambassadors in London at that time from a newspaper office, and found that not one was a small man with a beard. So instead he cast a big, smooth, bald man, a prominent stage actor in Copenhagen. So much for the inspirations of the casting department.
Back in Hollywood Hitch had to catch up with the television series and immediately got involved in a very unlikely theatrical film project—the most unlikely he had undertaken for some years. He had completed the work required of him under his contract with Warners before he moved over to Paramount to make Rear Window, but he was not satisfied that he had given them full value for money. In addition, they, along with other companies in Hollywood, were in something of a crisis in 1957, and so Hitch undertook to make them a movie for no fee. As it happened, they had at that time a property which interested him—a real-life story of wrongful arrest which he had first read in Life some five years before. A musician called Manny Balestrero had been arrested and charged with armed robbery. All the circumstantial evidence was against him, he was imprisoned, brought to trial (or mistrial, as it was declared, since one of the jurors showed himself too convinced of the accused’s guilt before the proceedings were completed), and meanwhile his wife went mad before the real culprit, an astonishing near-double, was accidentally discovered. Hitch decided to make this story as The Wrong Man.
It is easy enough to see what in it would have appealed to him. It reflected his long-standing neurotic fear of the police, and Balestrero’s predicament could be some Kafkaesque nightmare of his own. What was less predictable was the way he chose to film it. He decided—he, the master of fantasy and film-for-film’s-sake—to film it in a semi-d
ocumentary fashion, following the real course of events exactly. The script, by Angus McPhail and the distinguished playwright Maxwell Anderson, took an absolute minimum of dramatic licence, and though Hitch did originally shoot one of his usual cameo appearances in it he decided to suppress that in the interests of total credibility, and instead appeared himself on camera in a prologue telling us that everything we are about to see actually happened. Later on he came to see that that is an insufficient defence for dramatic weaknesses. Life, we always say, is stranger than fiction; but how do you convince an audience of that in a dramatized story? The dialogue people utter in life tends to be banal, prolix and stereotyped, a pale reflection often of something they have heard in the movies. Is that any excuse for putting it back into the movies unedited? In life someone may just go mad, as Balestrero’s wife did, suddenly giving way under a strain. But will that be acceptable in a dramatization of these same facts?
Hitch knew the depressing answers to these questions already, but the challenge fascinated him. In the role of Balestrero he cast an actor he had long admired but never worked with, Henry Fonda, whose face and acting style made him perfect for the victim role. In the difficult (indeed, impossible) role of the wife Hitch cast his latest protégée, Vera Miles, whom he had put under personal contract after working with her on his television series. Physically she had the makings of his favourite cool blonde type, and he thought he could manoeuvre her into it. He set to work to mould her career, choose her other roles for her, give her an image by selecting the colours she should wear and the way her hair should be styled. But he came up against a problem he had not anticipated: she was an excellent actress—better, probably, than some of the others he had given the same treatment to—and she looked more or less right, but temperamentally she was all wrong. On screen she came over as strong, practical, earthy. Not ethereal at all, not cool and mysterious. Nor, perhaps, the material really big, big stars are made of. In the end Hitch used her in two theatrical movies, playing the problematic Mrs. Balestrero and the lesser role of Janet Leigh’s sister in Psycho, as well as in his most ambitious television show, the Ford Star Time hour Incident on a Corner. But the real test of his transformative skills, Vertigo, was foiled when Vera Miles got pregnant and had to be replaced by Kim Novak. It is difficult to imagine Vera Miles in the role; but then one should never underestimate Hitch. He did subsequently recognize that he had probably miscalculated with Vera Miles, but, lacking the clinching evidence Vertigo should have provided, it is difficult to know for sure.
In any case, her role in The Wrong Man was really peripheral, and Hitch, hoist on his own petard of documentary veracity, rather resented having to take so much time out from the main story of Balestrero’s imprisonment to show what was happening meanwhile to the wife. What he strongly responded to, and threw himself wholeheartedly into, was the detailed business of the arrest, the booking and the imprisonment of Balestrero, all shown very much from his point of view. Throughout all this part of the film we see only what he sees: when he is handcuffed and too ashamed to look up, we never see who he is handcuffed to, or any more than the legs of the police officers involved. When he is put in prison Hitch documented down to the smallest detail how the prisoners had to fold and carry their bedclothes, what exactly was the routine of their cell life, and then made Henry Fonda reconstruct it exactly in as far as possible the actual locations where the original events took place. For the insanity of the wife he even shot in the same nursing home and used many of the actual doctors and staff who had originally attended her to recreate their roles in the film. He used dramatic licence only at one or two points—most notably that in which we dissolve from Balestrero, in despair and praying for help and guidance, to the face of the real culprit, on his way to rob another store and be caught. Balestrero was apparently a religious man and did pray, but the coincidence here has a Hitchcockian logic and neatness (and maybe even mirrors his own religious convictions) rather than the smack of real life.
The Wrong Man was little more than an interlude, rapidly made in black-and-white, before Hitch could get on to the picture he really wanted to make, both for himself and for Vera Miles. When he had announced three years earlier his intention of filming a novel by the French thriller-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called D’entre les Morts (From Among the Dead), which had been acquired for him by Paramount, he had, curiously enough, been falling in exactly with a deep-laid plan of the writers: they had heard that Hitch had been interested in acquiring rights to their novel Les Diaboliques, very successfully filmed by Clouzot, and inspired by this they had set out to write a novel deliberately designed to attract Hitch’s attention. He did not know this until some time after he had made the film, when Truffaut told him, but clearly Boileau and Narcejac had been right on target with their guess of what would turn Hitchcock on.
The preparation of the film was a lot longer and more complicated than Hitch had envisaged, hence the delay and the intermediate films. For one thing, he had trouble getting a workable screenplay out of the book, which, like Les Diaboliques, relied heavily on tricks which were permissible only because the reader was kept quite in the dark on several crucial issues till the end and therefore was in no position to ask awkward questions. But as Hitch always said, ‘It’s fine to be mysterious, but you cannot mystify the audience.’ He wanted to transform shock into suspense, and make the film more of a meditation on illusion and reality, a portrait of an obsession, than a simple mechanical thriller. The basic theme of the story is a seeming return from the dead, and it is an intense love story. Very early in his preparations Hitch decided to set the story in the San Francisco area; he had many of the sequences clearly visualized, but somehow structurally it would not pull together. He had worked for some time on a script with Alec Coppel, but despaired of structuring it satisfactorily. In 1957 he had contracted James Stewart to play the leading role of the obsessed detective (a strange role for him, but he claims he never considered that—if Hitch asked him to do something, he just did it without question), with Vera Miles as the elusive object of his desires, and had everything ready to go except the script.
So in desperation he called in Sam Taylor. Taylor never read the novel he was supposedly adapting, and never read the previous screenplay. Instead, he just listened to Hitch, let him tell the story the way he saw it over and over again, and took it from there. Hitch saw it, as usual, in a series of powerful visual images. The hero, who has just discovered he suffers from acute vertigo, is set to watch the wife of a client who is supposedly suicidal and obsessed with the story of an ill-fated ancestor of hers. First he follows her without contact, then, saving her from a suicide attempt, falls in love with her, but is unable, because of his vertigo, to save her a second time. Shortly afterwards, he meets a girl who looks just like her, though very different in personality, and sets about trying to make her over into his lost love, dressing her the same way, dyeing her hair and so on. Finally he discovers he has been the dupe in a murder, that the second girl is the same as the first, and then loses her again, this time for keeps. Hitch had all of this clear in his mind—the silent pursuit around San Francisco, the death and resurrection—but how to construct it, telling the audience enough to be mysterious but not mystifying?
Taylor suggested adding a character, a placid, understanding girl-friend for Stewart who would act as a sounding-board. Hitch told Taylor that he planned to reveal to the audience almost as soon as the heroine reappeared in her second incarnation that she was in fact the same person as the first, and had simply reverted to normal after doing her job in disguise. Taylor was amazed: wasn’t this giving away the point of the story much too early? (A number of critics thought the same when the film came out.) Hitch explained carefully to him the concept of suspense versus shock: if the audience knew this well in advance of the hero, then their minds would be clear to sympathize, to anticipate her reactions and his—they would know exactly what was going on in the minds of the two characters, and
that was where the real drama lay. Hitch and Taylor worked smoothly together, fleshing out and humanizing the characters, particularly the James Stewart character, and made a number of location-scouting trips together in the Bay area. Taylor contributed one or two suggestions, like the drive under Fort Point, but most of the visualization of the story was already there in Hitch’s mind.
In July 1957, in the middle of directing a couple of shows for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitch had to go into hospital for an umbilical hernia and gallstones to be operated on, followed by a bout of colitis. But that did not stop him from bouncing right back into the television work and preparations for Vertigo. When at the last moment it turned out that Vera Miles was pregnant, and would not be able to make the film, Hitch could not delay it any further because of other commitments, and decided, unwillingly, to replace her with Kim Novak. The situation was not of the happiest, since Kim Novak was well aware she was very much second choice, and was not in any case the most secure of actresses. As usual with a Hitchcock script, the clothes and colours the characters wore in each scene were carefully indicated. Kim Novak began on her first meeting with the designer Edith Head (one of Hitch’s most regular collaborators, on eleven films in all) by saying that there were just a couple of things she had to insist on—she never wore tailored suits, never wore grey, and never wore black shoes. Since the whole film hinged on our (and the hero’s) first sight of her in the museum wearing a grey tailored suit and black shoes, this obviously caused something of a problem. Edith Head asked Hitch to talk to her. He invited her to his house, and said to her simply, ‘My dear Miss Novak, you can wear anything you want, anything—provided it is what the script calls for.’ However he said it, it seemed to have the required effect, since in the scene in question she did wear a grey tailored suit and black shoes—hating it all the time.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 28