Whatever one makes of Marnie today, there was no denying it was then a failure, both critically and commercially—the first Hitch had had in nearly a decade. It was also to prove the end of an era in other ways. It was to be the last Hitchcock film photographed by Robert Burks, edited by George Tomasini, with a score by Bernard Hermann and, for that matter, starring Tippi Hedren. Shortly after it was completed Robert Burks, Hitch’s faithful cinematographer since Strangers on a Train, died with his wife in a fire at their home—a deep distress to Hitch, since Burks was a personal friend as well as a trusted professional associate. Shortly afterwards George Tomasini died. Bernard Hermann stuck around a while longer, since despite his spiky, rather perverse personality Hitch liked him and respected his work. But the fates were set against his completing work on any other Hitchcock film. And then there was Tippi Hedren, still under contract, but obviously not the most popular person around.
Even so, Hitch did not immediately drop the idea of making another film with her. He had what seems on the face of it a very strange and uncharacteristic idea. Back in 1920 he had seen in London a curious piece of Celtic whimsy by J. M. Barrie, Mary Rose—a play about a young woman who is spirited away on a haunted island during a belated honeymoon, and reappears years later totally unmarked by the passage of time, though her husband is now middle aged and her infant son grown up and run away to sea. The play was taken at the time as a dainty, wistful fantasy, its more sinister undertones disregarded (like those of Barrie’s most famous play, Peter Pan). Hitch was immune to the charm, but was fascinated by the horrific element he perceived in the story. What, after all, could be more horrifying than the idea of a young man dandling his even younger mother on his knee? And beneath the fey, Celtic-twilight surface lay an almost science-fictional premise, and an alarming question: if the dead did come back to life, would we really want them and what would we do with them? Also, the subject seemed like a suitable vehicle for ‘that Hedren girl’, as Hitch was then off-handedly calling her. He had a script written on this basis, and planned out in detail how he would make the figure of Mary Rose herself convincingly corporeal yet ghostly with a bluish neon tube inside her clothes. This was obviously a project he was really set on, which he continued to talk about making for several years. But Universal were hesitant about the idea from the start, and finally said a flat no; even today it is specifically laid down in his contract that he may not do Mary Rose.
This was the last role he seriously considered Tippi Hedren for. In 1966 she was lent out to another Universal production, curiously enough directed by the other great British survivor from silent days, Charles Chaplin. But after The Countess from Hong Kong her connection with Hitch terminated, coolly but quite amicably. And Hitch’s other two projects at this time had nothing to do with her.
For a while he worked on adapting the John Buchan novel The Three Hostages, another story featuring Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps. It is a complicated story about three children of important people kidnapped by enemies of the British Empire, and Hannay’s roundabout pursuit and rescue of them. Finally Hitch decided he could not escape the basic problem of a plot based on hypnotism (the main villain is supposed to be a hypnotist of incredible power), which never seemed to work out convincingly on screen. And then, for even longer, Hitch worked on R.R.R.R.R. an idea which, like the two others, went back originally in his experience to before the war and his arrival in America. It was then that he had developed, particularly at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz, a lifelong fascination with the mechanics of a major hotel, the details of its day-to-day running. Now he thought he saw a way to get this into a film, with a story about an Italian immigrant hotelier who has worked his way up from the bottom and now decides to share his success with his family; they turn out to be a gang of thieves and have in various ways to be prevented from stealing the jewels of a rich woman staying at the hotel. To write the script Hitch brought over the Italian writing team of Age and Scarpelli, who had not long before had a big success with a kindred subject in the Monicelli film Big Deal on Madonna Street, about a group of amateurish crooks trying to rob a department store. But language problems were almost insuperable, and Hitch discovered to his distress that discipline and construction were not exactly the strong suit of the Italians. He continued to play with the idea for a couple of years, but finally despaired of getting it into satisfactory shape, and abandoned it after a final attempt when he had completed Torn Curtain.
Difficulties seemed to be inescapable at this period in Hitch’s life. Not that everything had always gone that smoothly before. There was always a certain amount of wastage, in the shape of properties worked on which never somehow reached the screen—though even there Hitch was persistent, as with Rope and I Confess. And the seeming casualness and simplicity of a film like North by Northwest was often the end product of a lot of anguish and hard work. Occasionally something would actually go very smoothly—the films written by John Michael Hayes, Psycho—but these were the exceptions rather than the rule. Happily the exceptions had predominated during the 1950s; but in the 1960s the rule was reasserting itself, with a vengeance.
Torn Curtain was certainly no exception. The germ of the idea had come to Hitch back in 1951, when two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected to Russia amid a great deal of publicity. What intrigued Hitch was the figure least considered: Mrs. Maclean. How did she feel? What, if anything, had she known or suspected? And if it came as a complete shock, how did she cope with it? That was the starting-point of a story about defection, told from the woman’s point of view. Truth to tell, this is not very clear from the film—something evidently got lost along the way. Again various writers played around with the idea, under Hitch’s direction. Eventually the Ulster novelist Brian Moore came up with a treatment that seemed to hold water, and a screenplay based on that treatment. But still Hitch was not satisfied: in particular he was unhappy with the dialogue and brought in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, authors of the big stage success Billy Liar, who seemed at that time to be writing practically every film made in Britain, to do a rewrite job on it. Their contribution to the screenplay was considerable enough for Hitch to feel strongly that they should receive screen credit. But Brian Moore disputed this, and an adjudication by the Screen Writers Guild gave him sole credit, to Hitch’s irritation.
Then there was the question of casting. Hitch now admits to major miscalculations where the two principals, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, were concerned. Why? Well, pressure from Universal and his other advisers. Julie Andrews had just become about the biggest thing in films with The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, a fact which was hardly lost on Hitch, however much he might torment Ernest Lehman (who wrote The Sound of Music) with the assertion that it became the biggest money-maker ever only because most of the people who saw it thought they were seeing Mary Poppins. In principle it did seem that Julie Andrews might have the makings of a Hitchcock woman—cool, crisply in command of things, able to be elegant, able to be blond, and perhaps able to produce the requisite sizzle of understated sexiness. To emphasize the ‘you’ve never seen Julie Andrews like this’ aspect, the film opens with a scene in which she is seen (or rather, considering the amount of covering, understood to be) in bed with her fiancé before they are married. Well, it might have worked, but it did not. No one seems to know why. Hitch speaks politely of her; she speaks politely of him. But obviously there was no spark of communication between them.
Paul Newman was something else again. Hitch’s impatience with the affectations of the Method actors was well known, but he had managed to do wonders with Eva Marie Saint, whom he liked, and Montgomery Clift, whom he didn’t. And there was no reason why he should not be able to use Paul Newman equally well as a star rather than an actor—an almost equally conservative director, Mark Robson, had done so with encouraging results a couple of years before in The Prize, a thriller with many obvious echoes of North by Northwest, also written by Ernest Lehman. But t
he first real social encounter between Hitch and Newman got them off on the wrong foot. Hitch invited Newman home to a small dinner party. The first thing Newman did was to take off his jacket at table and drape it over the back of his chair. Then he refused Hitch’s carefully chosen vintage wine and asked for beer instead. And to make matters worse, he insisted on going and getting it himself out of the refrigerator in the kitchen and drinking it from the can. With someone who would behave like that—who would feel it necessary to behave like that to make some point of showing he was not intimidated—Hitch could clearly not relate, and the whole of the shooting was overshadowed by the judgements reached that evening.
To make matters worse, the two stars were expensive: so expensive the budget was tight in other respects. Hitch was not too devoted to location shooting anyway, and would no doubt have regarded Universal City, Long Beach, the campus of the University of Southern California and a farm in Camarillo as just as good as the German locations they are made to represent, even if the money had not been tight. But he did regret he could not send an American camera team to Germany to shoot material for back-projections, but had to rely on the, as it proved, inferior work of a German team. All the same, the film commits a cardinal error, and a very unusual one for Hitch: it is for the most part flat and dull. The real emotional drama of the woman’s angle gets lost, the stars seem un-involved, and there is remarkably little suspense at any point, not because invention and construction have failed, but because we just do not care about anyone in the story.
There is, however, one exception—the sequence which in the final script seems to have been the only one that really turned Hitch on. Watching other people’s films, and observing ‘how they do it in the movies’, Hitch had always been struck by the unnatural ease with which people killed one another. A slight tap on the head or a desultory squeeze of the throat was apparently infallible, and a rank amateur who had never handled a gun before could still be relied on to shoot to kill first time. How different things were in life: what he observed from the famous trials he loved to read was, over and over, the extreme difficulty of actually killing anybody. And he wanted to show that in a film. Torn Curtain gave him a chance in the sequence where Paul Newman’s status as an undercover agent is discovered by a police spy who has followed him to an isolated farm, and the only thing he can do, inexperienced intellectual that he is, is to kill the man. The scene is the most successful in the film as an example of Hitch’s attempt to get entirely natural-looking lighting through the use of diffusion and gauzes, but what makes it memorable is its completely justified nastiness. It has to be a silent killing, as another Communist agent is just outside, and it has to be accomplished with the weapons to hand in an ordinary farm kitchen. And slowly, horrifyingly, the man refuses to die—he is battered, stabbed, nearly strangled, and finally, in desperation, has his head thrust into a gas oven. After seeing this, no one could ever think again that killing is simple for the amateur.
Unfortunately, this is the only sequence in the film which really lights up, and in general the shooting was an unhappy experience for Hitch. Perhaps the worst experience came when the shooting was over. Universal signified to Hitch that they did not want Bernard Herrmann to write the score—they would like something less ‘old-fashioned’, more obviously saleable in the form of a soundtrack album. Hitch stood up for Herrmann, and went out on a limb for him. But he made clear to Herrmann, as usual, exactly what he wanted: nothing too heavy, not obvious thriller music, and particularly so in the rather light-hearted opening. Herrmann played him sketches, which he felt were a bit on the heavy side. But Herrmann said he could fix it. Came the day of the recording, at Goldwyn Studios. Hitch was there, hearing the completed score for the first time. The credit music was played and recorded heavy with menace. Hitch was unhappy, but Herrmann said, ‘Wait till you hear the next cut’, and began to conduct that. Whatever its virtues as music, it was just what Hitch had said he did not want. Hitch was furious. He felt he had been betrayed, and after the second cut told Herrmann that it was not according to their agreement, he did not want to hear any more, and left the recording, shaking and silent. He was driven back to the studio, was let off at the gate and went straight to the head of the music department to accept responsibility and offer to pay off Herrmann himself. A new score was commissioned from John Addison, whose most notable film score up to then was for Tom Jones. The break between the old collaborators was decisive, with each feeling that the other had deliberately let him down. In fact both were under a strain at the time: Hitch had had a more than usually gruelling period of shooting with Torn Curtain, and Herrmann was in the middle of a marital break-up. Later tempers cooled a bit, and Herrmann, who shortly afterwards moved to London, did drop into Hitch’s office happily with his new wife the next time he was in Hollywood. But Hitch avoided seeing him, and they never worked together on a film again.
Torn Curtain was almost universally slated by the critics, and the public was lukewarm. After Marnie, this was a real reverse, and Hitch, despite his big holding of MCA stock, was in the rockiest position he had been for many years. Films were getting ever more expensive to make, and the moderate success hardly existed any more—commercially films were either a triumph or a disaster, and no director, however distinguished, could expect to be staked by a production company to many disasters in a row. Of course, Hitch did have a contract with Universal, but they had to agree to the projects under consideration—certainly if they were going to cost more than $3 million. After Torn Curtain Hitch was looking for a new property that excited him and would also be acceptable to Universal. Mary Rose was out of the question, though he was still talking about it as a possibility (or a hope) after Frenzy in 1972. He gave up the battle over R.R.R.R.R. himself. He returned to the first version of Frenzy, but could still not overcome the problem of the ‘third act’.
At least at this period of his life Hitch had some greater opportunity for social life, and for some small adventures outside the charmed circle of the movies. In January 1965, before starting work on Torn Curtain, he and Alma went with the Wassermans to President Johnson’s inauguration in Washington. They parked in the area where the Justices parked, so there were only eight or ten other cars there. Alma got very cold during the outdoor ceremony, so they rushed away immediately it was over to head back to the hotel. Making a quick getaway from the car park they turned out into Pennsylvania Avenue, only to discover that they were heading the wrong way, right in front of the President’s cavalcade. There was nothing they could do except continue, the Wassermans and Alma slumped down in the back hissing to Hitch, who whenever possible sits in the front, ‘For heaven’s sake wave.’ Which he did, thoroughly relishing the situation, and that way they travelled in style all the way. Strangely enough, it never occurred to anyone to question his right to be there: Alfred Hitchcock head of the inaugural parade? Well, why not, after all?
After Torn Curtain he had to attend to some of his investments. Among them were many head of cattle, out on the range somewhere hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. They had been bought on the advice of his investment counsellor, and Hitch would probably never have seen them except that it proved necessary to establish legally that there were so many specific head of cattle and that the owner did have a more than merely nominal connection with them. So off Hitch went in his usual business suit to meet and be photographed with his herd. He was fascinated to observe that all the cowboys were mechanized, with no horses in sight except for show, and they rounded up the few token head of Hitch’s cattle in Land-rovers. He found the hospitality of the cowboys overwhelming—in particular, the giant steaks they ate for breakfast were rather too much for him—and he loved to observe the exotic details of life on the range as it really was, rather than as they did it in the movies. He was particularly curious about the rather 1984ish compound in which they lived, all fenced off and surrounded by a wide area brightly illuminated all night by floodlights. Were the cattle, he wondered, his mind running alon
e the lines of The Birds, seriously expected to attack?
But as time went by and no definite project was under way, or even on the horizon, he began to get desperate. He hated not working, and was getting to the point where he would consider anything, pretty well, just to continue exercising his craft. The obvious answer seemed to be to take direction from Universal: what properties did they own which might be turned to his purposes? A rummage through the books and plays they had acquired came up with nothing very promising except Leon Uris’s sprawling and complicated espionage novel Topaz. It was not ideal, and his previous essay in espionage and Iron Curtain politics had not been too happy. But it was better than nothing, and Hitch set to work with a will. Uris himself was involved in writing the screenplay, but Hitch did not see how he could use this, and was forced to go into production with nothing like his usual preparation. The film was going to be expensive—around $4 million—with a lot of location shooting in Copenhagen, Paris and New York, though for obvious reasons the studio had to stand in for Cuba, where the central section of the film takes place. There was also a detailed and expensive studio reconstruction of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where Castro had stayed on his last visit to the States, and which had since been pulled down.
Production values, at any rate, were not lacking. But the large cast was mostly undistinguished (John Forsythe, from The Trouble with Harry, was the only familiar Hitchcock face), and Hitch was very unhappy at being rushed into production without working everything out in advance, and without even having a final script. He was already in London picking locations when he decided to throw out the script he had, and cabled Sam Taylor, who had written Vertigo for him, to fly in and rewrite the script completely at twenty-four hours’ notice. Hitch did not even let him read the Uris script: Taylor started from scratch, writing the script scene by scene, sometimes only hours before it was due to be shot. This meant that Hitch had to stage the scenes in an improvisatory way greatly at odds with his usual practice, and though there are individual scenes which work rather well, like the death of the hero’s Cuban mistress staged as a love scene which ends with her collapse in a flowing purple dress on to a black-and-white marble floor, the film as a whole lacks the careful structure, the building and relaxing of tension in a meaningful pattern over the whole span of the drama, which is the hallmark of Hitch’s finest work.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 33