Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  FEDORA

  A play of a year or two back provided a situation of a little man seeking the goal of worldly greatness. In order that we should return home with a feeling of satisfaction, the author allowed the hero to attain his object, but not without the usual obstacles experienced by all great men. His earliest efforts included self-education, and I can clearly remember his model line for an exercise in handwriting. It was, “Great things grow from small.” I believe this obvious aphorism was the pivot of the whole plot, and also of all our plots. Because every person has a plot (I don’t mean allotment) and every plot is the same.

  I don’t know if you have ever seen a puny young nanny goat alone in a field in a rainstorm. If so, you have seen Fedora. Fedora is the heroine of this disquisition. She is small, simple, unassuming, and noiseless, yet she commands profound attention on all sides. People stop to observe her, and I believe it to be on record that one of the policemen on point duty at the Bank has held up the traffic—all for Fedora. You suggest she is beautiful—no, not definitely—I say not definitely, because I hold out hopes. Her appearance:—“Starting with the top,” as the guide book says, there is an abundance of dark brown hair, under which peeps out a tiny perky face consisting of two greeny brown eyes, an aquiline nose (usual in these cases), and a faded, rose-bud lipped mouth. Her figure is small, possessing some of that buoyance of youth when walking with the aid of a pair of unassuming legs or, shall I say, to get away from the suggestion of artificiality, inconspicuously regular.

  “Great woman labour leader hits out …” Can that be? I had hoped for better, but no worse. Perhaps an actress? I can see a storm of emotion exploding in the face of a helpless, juvenile lead … the fury of a woman scorned. Then the vociferous applause from all, except her victim. What will be his feeling? Perhaps he will be overcome by her dazzling personality. Dare he ask her to be his … wait, if our Fedora is to marry, surely she shall be a real wife, a worthy figure of womanly charm and grace—this, of course, depends upon the realisation of my hopes. Let me suggest the wife of the Mayor. Shall I put it, as it were, the power behind the chair. “My dear George the tram service lately has been disgusting, you must see that …”

  “Yes, my dear, I will mention …” At functions she will be the recipient of bouquets from the daughter of the local contractor.

  Sometimes, I imagine, she will write brilliant novels, profound essays and learned works. But it is all mere conjecture on my part. Whatever may be … but I am no prophet, neither is she. Time will tell.

  Shortly before “Fedora” was published, Hitchcock read a bulletin in the trade papers: Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a branch studio in London. The American executives promised a multitude of jobs for English applicants, including openings for “captioneers,” the writers and illustrators of the explanatory intertitles that gave silent film its voice.

  The trade papers reported that the first property to be wholly produced in England by Famous Players-Lasky British Producers Ltd. would be The Sorrows of Satan, based on a book by the popular novelist Marie Corelli. Hitchcock promptly obtained a copy of The Sorrows of Satan and read it cover to cover. W. A. Moore helped him prepare a portfolio of his designs, including sketchwork from his art classes, samples of his Henley’s layouts, and a continuity of the Corelli novel laid out in title cards. (“It showed wrong-doers tempting a top-hatted Satan,” Hitchcock recalled.) Moore turned a blind eye while others in the advertising section pitched in.

  When Hitchcock presented his portfolio (“large, black, paper-covered board with this printed title”), he learned a reality of the business: The Sorrows of Satan had been indefinitely postponed. Yet the man in charge was impressed by Hitchcock’s dedication in compiling an entire script of title cards, and he encouraged the young applicant to stay in touch. When a film based on the play The Great Day was announced, Hitchcock went back and prepared another series of intertitles, impressing Famous Players-Lasky with his “demonstrative persistence.”

  For a brief period thereafter, Hitchcock kept up his job at Henley’s while moonlighting as a title artist, kicking back a portion of his earnings to boss and co-conspirator Moore. Until the day came when he was offered a permanent position with British Famous Players-Lasky, and on that day Hitchcock resigned.

  “I must have been a bit of a psychologist,” he recalled years later. “They offered me seven pounds a week, but I insisted that was too much, asked for less and told them to give me a raise later if it worked out.” From his first niche in film throughout most of his career, Hitchcock took less salary while promising extra work, for love of the job.

  His last day at Henley’s was April 27, 1921. The first issue of the Telegraph published without a contribution from the young spark plug contained a blurb about Hitchcock’s departure, slightly exaggerating the status of his new position, while allowing that the many friends he had made during almost seven years of employment at the company would miss him.

  “He has gone into the film business, not as a film actor, as you might easily suppose,” read the warm, regretful statement, probably written by Moore, but “to take charge of the Art Title Department” of “one of the biggest Anglo-American Producing Companies. We shall miss him in many ways, but we wish him all success.”

  * The original English spelling and punctuation of The Henley Telegraph pieces have been preserved.

  THREE

  1921–1925

  Paramount’s Famous Players-Lasky was then the leading film producer and dominated the business “as no company ever had or would,” in the words of film historian Douglas Gomery. So there was tremendous excitement when, in April 1919, British Famous Players-Lasky, Limited, was established. Its stated goal was to produce pictures exploiting “the personality of British artists, the genius of British authors, the beauty and atmosphere of British settings and scenery,” according to the press announcement, “with the advantage of that technical knowledge which the American cameraman has had exceptional opportunities of perfecting” after World War I.

  Compared to Hollywood, the British industry was a perennially weak sister. English films were fewer in quantity, and generally considered inferior in quality. The production equipment and values were often second-rate. Even the Bioscope, which existed to promote English filmmaking, often complained that the films it covered were “devoid of merit.”

  Even if an English picture showed obvious merit, it led a beleaguered existence. Many English exhibitors and distributors supported their own industry only halfheartedly, preferring to book American films with American stars; and the plushest picture palaces were owned by U.S. companies. Moreover, English films rarely penetrated the world’s biggest marketplace—America. Although Hollywood counted on England for extra profits, America did not reciprocate by showing English films in the United States. Americans found English films “too English,” with their colloquialisms and “stars” unknown across the Atlantic.

  The English film industry therefore endured a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. England’s top talent was always defecting to Hollywood, and the exodus was so steady that wags referred to the deserters as a “Lost Legion,” wandering in a parched culture.

  The inequity of the relationship led to endless attempts at a fair adjustment. Again and again ambitious coproduction plans tried to address the discrepancies. British Famous Players-Lasky was one such partnership, intended to build London bridges to the land of Hollywood know-how.

  It wasn’t until October 1919 that Islington was pinpointed as the location of the new British Famous Players-Lasky studio.

  Unpretentious Poole Street, which turned off New North Road in close proximity to the Canal Bridge, was the site of a dirty, dilapidated building surrounded by slums. Originally a power station of the Metropolitan Railway, more recently a tent and tarpaulin factory, this massive glass-roofed structure would lend itself to renovation. While the company might have preferred a less working-class address, pre
ss reports emphasized that Islington was only fifteen minutes by public transport from the West End.

  The company signed an optimistic twenty-eight-year lease on the building; and then the architects and builders took over. They carved out two immense stages, publicized as the largest in England; a deep well tank for undersea filming; offices and workshops; and a restaurant, seating sixty, which offered West End-type meals at affordable prices.

  Construction began in October 1919, and by the late spring of 1920, when the first production was inaugurated, the transformation was complete. The facility was trumpeted as thoroughly up-to-date, on par with the best of Hollywood. The cameras and lights were the most modern and expensive; the film was Kodak; the equipment and operators alike were brought over from America.

  In spite of the English boosterism, there was an American tinge to everything. Moreover, the first scenes of the first British Famous Players-Lasky production were photographed not at Islington but on the Continent, where English filmmakers habitually fled to escape their foggy, soggy climate. English film already had a long-standing (one film historian says “obsessional”) involvement with countries across the Channel, especially Switzerland, France, Spain, and Italy. The weather in those nations could be counted on, unlike in London, where the notorious “particular” could create darkness at noon.

  This attitude about escaping to sunny, picturesque locations was embedded in English culture, and also in Hitchcock’s sensibility. From youth, he had always been fascinated by travel. Now, going on location became essential to Hitchcock’s filmmaking approach as well. Films had to go places. The studio was his laboratory, but shooting on location allowed Hitchcock to poach a little reality to blend into his studio-made dreamscapes.

  It was an American, Hugh Ford, who crossed from Islington to Switzerland in late May 1920 to launch the first British Famous Players-Lasky production, The Great Day. Ford hailed from the stage and New York, where he had managed the Fifty-sixth Street studio of Famous Players-Lasky, U.S. He had also directed in Hollywood for D. W. Griffith’s company. Although most of the top business echelon of Islington were Londoners, the key creative personnel were often Americans, or returning Lost Legionnaires.

  The directors, in particular, came from Hollywood and Famous Players-Lasky, U.S.: The first batch included Donald Crisp (a native Londoner who advertised himself as a Scot, and another Griffith alumnus), John S. Robertson (a Vitagraph veteran born in London, but not the English London, the Canadian one in Ontario), George Fitzmaurice (Paris-born), and Paul Powell (American, who had directed Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford).

  The first head of the scenario department also came from Hollywood. Tom Geraghty was a former New York Herald reporter who had written pictures for Dustin Farnum, Wallace Reid, and Douglas Fairbanks. His assistant was the Englishman Mordaunt Hall, who later moved to the United States and became the first bylined film critic of the New York Times.

  Although Islington made a point of buying and filming English stories, the studio’s scenarists were also usually from Hollywood, and often enough these writers were women. On more than one occasion, Hitchcock would point out that he was steeped in script philosophies he learned from the “middle-aged American women” who reigned at Islington.

  Eve Unsell, an editor-scenarist who had written an estimated one hundred scenarios for such actresses as Elsie Ferguson, Marguerite Clark, and Mary Pickford, was the first important writer to arrive at Islington. In late 1920 she was followed by Margaret Turnbull, a novelist and playwright as well as prolific author of films. Scottish by birth (she had sailed with her parents for the United States at age two), Turnbull took over from Unsell as the chief continuity writer, then was joined in April 1921 by Mary O’Connor (who had worked with Powell), and the well-known Jeanie Macpherson, Cecil B. De Mille’s close collaborator.

  The first scripts Hitchcock read and helped produce, then, were written by Hollywood women versed in Hollywood ways. More so than in England, American films were centered on a glamorous star system, with stories that plunged beautiful heroines into crises or emergencies. Distaff scenarists were often employed to help flesh out the characterizations of the leading ladies, to lend scripts the emotional nuances that were thought to appeal particularly to the female sector. From the beginning of his career Hitchcock learned to focus on actresses, emphasize the female characters, accent their performances, highlight their appearances. And he learned early to have women surrounding him to help toward that goal.

  Although it’s hard to confirm the credits, Hitchcock is believed to be responsible for the lettering and title illustrating for at least eight pictures in his first two years. These include The Great Day (directed by Hugh Ford, 1920), The Call of Youth (Ford, 1920), Appearances (Donald Crisp, 1920), The Princess of New York (Crisp, 1921), Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (Crisp, 1921), The Mystery Road (Paul Powell, 1921), Dangerous Lies (Powell, 1921), and Perpetua (John S. Robertson, 1921).

  At Henley’s the advertising staff had been expected to write as well as draw, and that was precisely the job of the “captioneer,” a combination writer and sketch artist. At Islington, Hitchcock’s title cards featured “birds flying, hearts breaking, candles guttering,” as he recalled in one interview. One that read “John’s wife was worried about the kind of life he was leading” was accompanied by the drawing of a horizontal candle burning at both ends.

  Hitchcock took his assignments from Norman Gregory Arnold, Islington’s supervising art director and the man who hired him. Arnold’s younger brother, Charles Wilfred Arnold, was another art director who became a Hitchcock friend. The head of the camera department was Claude McDonnell, whose frazzled air masked his competence. From these three men Hitchcock would learn all the ground rules of filmmaking. He was a fast learner. All three—both Arnold brothers and McDonnell—would end up taking orders from Hitchcock a few short years later, when he became a full-fledged director.

  Sketching title cards was good training for an art director, whose job it is to sketch decor and sets. There is some controversy over just how accomplished a sketch artist Hitchcock was. “If I wanted to,” he told film historian Charles Thomas Samuels, “I could draw every frame of the finished picture.” It was especially true, early in his career, that Hitchcock drew shots for cameramen, and that his drawings could be expressive. But eventually he hired his own small army of artists, and by the 1960s his matte specialist, Albert Whitlock, who rarely saw this side of him, insisted that “Hitch was no real draughtsman and rarely attempted sketching.”

  In mid-1921, Hitchcock moved up the ladder. His first picture as art director was probably Three Live Ghosts, a comedy directed by George Fitzmaurice in late 1921, starring Clare Greet and Cyril Chadwick. Fitzmaurice was married to the scenarist Ouida Bergere, a former theatrical agent and actress who had been in film since the days of one-reelers. Bergere was more than a writer; she was Fitzmaurice’s muse. She slaved on all stages of her husband’s films, even sitting beside him in the cutting room.

  Fitzmaurice’s favored cameraman, an American named Arthur C. Miller, recalled meeting Hitchcock when he was an enterprising young art director at Islington. “I went along with him to a rather shabby residence where he spent some time bargaining with the woman of the house for all her old furniture to be replaced entirely by new,” said Miller. “He used her old furniture to dress the set he had designed at the studio.”

  “Success to our researches!” Sir John (Herbert Marshall) exclaims as he plays detective in Murder! Research was Hitchcock’s detective work, and already a key component of his methodology. He relished the process of “putting himself through it” in preproduction, scouting out real-life settings and real-life counterparts for the characters. He compiled notes and sketches and photographs partly for authenticity (“I’m very concerned with the authenticity of settings and furnishings,” Hitchcock told Truffaut), but also as a springboard for his imagination. He always tinkered with the reality.

  Af
ter Three Live Ghosts Hitchcock art-directed The Man from Home (another film by Fitzmaurice and Bergere) and The Spanish Jade (directed by Robertson), both shot in late 1921. For The Spanish Jade, cast and crew traveled to Spain. For The Man from Home Hitchcock visited France and Italy. He might have explored those countries earlier, on vacation from Henley’s, but overseas travel became routine in the Islington years.

  While art-directing his first films, Hitchcock also tried his hand at writing his first script, adapting on a speculative basis a novella owned by the story department. He also performed spot directing on what were called “crowd days” at Islington, capturing faces among the extras, and he was occasionally “given odd jobs of going out to shoot odd little entrances and exits on interiors.”

  Though still an art director, Hitchcock later observed, he was already acting like a director, designing not only the sets but the camera angles. “I was quite dogmatic,” Hitchcock said. “I mean, I would build a set and say to the director, ‘Here’s where it’s shot from.’”

  In all of film history only a small percentage of directors have come from the ranks of production design. This foothold gave Hitchcock a distinct edge when thinking in pictures. From the start, the “right look”—for people and places—was integral to his vision.

  At Islington, Hitchcock also found his soulmate, an Englishwoman among all those Americans, a woman who made a greater contribution to his films than any other person.

  Alma Reville was born one day after Hitchcock, on August 14, 1899, in Nottingham in central England. Nottingham was known for its lace, and Alma’s father served as the London representative of a local lace firm; the family was comfortably middle-class, and Alma was educated at a private school for girls.

  As a young teenager Alma took ill with chorea, or St. Vitus’s dance, a nervous disorder that often follows as a complication of rheumatic fever.* She was forced to miss roughly two years of schooling, which she forever regretted. Regaining her strength and reacting against her childhood illness, Alma developed into a tomboy; she would always be more athletic than her husband, more drawn to exercise and physical activity.