Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  As often as possible, but especially on weekends and holidays, Alma’s mother took her recuperating daughter to picture shows. By the time she recovered her health, the Revilles had moved to Twickenham, west of London. There she cycled over to the Twickenham Studio, a former skating rink converted by the London Film Company, and watched the filming.

  In 1915 sixteen-year-old Alma entered the screen trade, five years ahead of her future husband. The producer Harold Shaw, an acquaintance of her father’s, secured a job for her in the cutting room of the London Film Company “because it was the only place where it would be possible to work without any experience,” she once explained.

  Editors in those days were called “film joiners.” “Director” and “producer” were still interchangeable titles, and directors often did their own editing, called “cutting.” Cutting-room assistants learned “continuity” by helping the director sequence the footage. An “assistant continuity girl” like Alma Reville was expected to type, file, and know shorthand; besides serving in the cutting room, she held the script during filming, ready to prompt the actors, while recording the shots and script changes. In a pinch, she was looked to for minor writing tasks, and as she gained experience she wrote more, and more often. Effectively, the standard “continuity” credit Alma received on her earliest films indicated that she was working as a combination cutter and script editor—a common career path for women in the silent era.

  Twickenham was a busy studio in those years, and Alma worked on numerous pictures. She served as editor of a lavish Prisoner of Zenda (1915), directed by the American George Loane Tucker. Another picture she toiled on, at least according to her daughter, Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, was D. W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918), parts of which were shot in the vicinity using Twickenham personnel.

  By 1920 Alma had established herself as “floor secretary,” or first assistant director, to Maurice Elvey, one of England’s silent film pioneers. Proving her pluck and resourcefulness, she also stepped in front of the camera for what amounted to the first “Hitchcock cameo,” appearing in Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918), in which she portrayed the wartime prime minister’s daughter.

  Alma spent several years closely partnered with Elvey before moving over to Islington in early 1921. She then became the floor secretary to actor-director Donald Crisp. When she first laid eyes on her future husband, sometime in mid-1921, Hitchcock was but a lowly “editorial errand boy,” in his words; Alma was an established cutter, continuity writer, and production manager.

  Their first encounter was decidedly anticlimactic. “Newcomers who came into our world inevitably reacted with awe and bewilderment, but this one was different,” Alma said. “He strolled across the set with a deadpan expression, stopped to ask me where the production office was, and when I pointed to the building, he nonchalantly disappeared into it without saying another word.”

  She noted his placid face and confident air, but their subsequent encounters went nowhere. “All I can remember about first seeing him,” Alma said, “was that he was always walking round the studios with a large packet of drawings under his arm” and wearing “a rather draggy gray topcoat.”

  For Hitchcock, silence was often strategic: what seemed like caution was cunning. With his tranquil expression, the editorial errand boy watched and waited. Hitchcock said later that at first Alma seemed “a trifle snooty to me. I couldn’t notice Alma without resenting her, and I couldn’t help noticing her.”

  He couldn’t help noticing that she was just five feet, petite, with bobbed reddish blond hair and hazel eyes. Pretty and vivacious—but for the hair color, almost the ideal woman he described in “Fedora.” Yet she was his superior, and he would let three or four years go by before speaking to her again.

  Alas, British Famous Players-Lasky did not last long. By the summer of 1922 the experiment was suspended, and rumors began flying that the American parent company had abandoned the idea of producing pictures in England. Although Paramount was proud of its handful of completed films, the Islington product was regarded as a hybrid, neither English nor American enough to succeed. Moreover, Famous Players had overextended itself by building a new studio on Long Island almost simultaneously with Islington. The company was backing away from grandiose plans for an additional plant in Bombay. On a visit to London, company founder Jesse L. Lasky claimed that the Islington shutdown was temporary, but issued a call for fewer, better pictures.

  Months passed, and work was catch-as-catch-can at Islington. The payroll was trimmed, and Alma Reville was one of the people let go. Hitchcock must have worried over his own future, but he managed to stay on as part of the skeleton crew—and, characteristically, he perceived an opportunity in the unstable situation, and made himself indispensable. Working longer hours for less money, he thrived.

  It was while the studio was in limbo that Alfred Hitchcock took his first turn at directing. Always Tell Your Wife was a two-reeler based on a theatrical sketch by the venerable actor-manager Seymour Hicks. A comedy about a philandering husband, his suspicious wife, and a blackmailing mistress, the story had been filmed before, in a 1914 production with Hicks in the lead; now, in January 1923, director Hugh Croise leased space at Islington to launch a new version, again starring Hicks. When Croise fell ill, Hicks looked around in desperation. His gaze fell on “a fat youth who was in charge of the property room,” according to Hicks, a young fellow “tremendously enthusiastic and anxious to try his hand at producing.”

  Today, only one reel of Always Tell Your Wife survives at the British Film Institute in London. Its footage bears the dominant imprint of Hicks, its star, writer, and producer. The camerawork is static, the comedy broad. Yet one detail is surely of interest to Hitchcockians: this first “quasi Hitchcock” has pointed shots of a fluttering caged bird. Whether the picture was even completed or released is unclear; probably not.

  Or perhaps the obscure Number Thirteen, shot during this same period, was the young aspirant’s true debut. Hitchcock directed Number Thirteen, a.k.a. “Mrs. Peabody,” sometime in late 1922 or early 1923. The story was about low-income residents of a building financed by the Peabody Trust, founded by American banker-philanthropist George Peabody to offer affordable housing to needy Londoners.

  Number Thirteen was written by a woman employed at Islington, her precise identity unknown, whose background included a vague prior affiliation with Charles Chaplin. Hitchcock took on the directing and producing. The star was Clare Greet, the daughter of famed actor-manager John Greet and his wife, Fanny.* Greet knew Hitchcock from Three Live Ghosts; a popular older character actress, she had first appeared onstage before Hitchcock was born.

  The most notable thing about Number Thirteen is that Hitchcock’s uncle John invested in the picture; when the funds ran out, Greet also pitched in money. Still, filming was ultimately shut down with only two reels completed. All that is known to survive of Number Thirteen are a few stills; it would rank high on anyone’s list of important “lost” films.

  The failure of Number Thirteen—and the loss of his uncle’s investment—was “a somewhat chastening experience” that Hitchcock took deeply to heart. In the years that followed, preparation and preproduction would become all the more crucial to his methodology. Storyboarding—sketching all the scenes in advance of filming—became standard policy. He felt keenly responsible for making films efficiently, according to budget. He was proud to be a “commercial” director, one who would turn a reliable profit for his producers.

  Greet’s generosity was another gesture he never forgot. Hitchcock had a soft spot for onetime leading ladies of the stage, whom he often called on for eccentric supporting roles. Greet would turn up in future Hitchcock films more than any other performer.*

  Undoubtedly there would have been an Alfred Hitchcock even if there had never been a British Famous Players-Lasky. But the director was forged in the crucible of Islington. His budding talent and buoyant, self-assured personality set him
apart, and many of his signature ideas and techniques—not to mention long-standing relationships—dated to his first film job. Through thick and thin at Islington, Hitchcock slyly positioned himself at the very heart of the studio.

  Quite apart from what befell British Famous Players-Lasky, the early 1920s marked one in a series of precarious junctures in English film history, with several studios showing huge losses and teetering close to bankruptcy. England never had the wherewithal of Hollywood—the massive capital, the domestic audience numbers, the global marketing organization. But times of crisis always attracted brave young blood, and in the spring of 1923 several people who would loom large in Hitchcock’s future arrived at Islington.

  Michael Balcon and Victor Saville hailed from Birmingham, with backgrounds in film rentals. Saville had handled Midlands sales of the D. W. Griffith epics The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, and after World War I he joined with the brothers Charles and Herbert Wilcox in a cinema-booking partnership. Saville and Balcon then formed a company to make advertising films, and coproduced their first short feature with a promising up-and-comer—the exhibitor Sidney Bernstein.

  One of Herbert Wilcox’s friends was a Newcastle upon Tyne exhibitor named Jack Graham Cutts, another passionate D. W. Griffith promoter. When Wilcox made the plunge into feature production in 1919, he hired Cutts to direct his first picture, The Wonderful Story. Victor Saville was fortuitously married to the niece of C. M. Woolf, who owned England’s largest rental operation, W & F (named for Woolf and his partner, John M. Freedman). When Wilcox and Cutts split up, Balcon, Saville, and Jack Freedman—John M.’s son—formed a new company, and snapped up Cutts as their marquee director.

  Saville and Balcon were intelligent and well-bred. Over time Hitchcock would feel closer to Saville, a witty, artistic-minded kindred spirit who soon turned to directing, creating an underrated body of work in England and Hollywood. Balcon was more a born producer—after Alexander Korda, arguably the single most important in British film history—with an exemplary career that extended from Islington in 1923 to his final film in 1963. Cool and quick-witted, Balcon was a master businessman whose worldly salesmanship was sometimes at odds with his staunchly English (Michael Powell said “suburban”) sensibility. Hitchcock owed a lasting debt to Balcon, although over the years their relationship would sometimes be rocky.

  Not only did Balcon-Saville-Freedman find the financial backing they needed in England, they also traveled to the United States to pave the way for an American distribution deal with the Select Organization, run by Lewis Selznick. A scrappy motion picture production and distribution pioneer on the East Coast before World War I, Selznick had fallen on hard times by the early twenties, and was trying to reorganize. Eager for product, Select was willing to peddle inexpensive British features to a small eastern chain of U.S. theaters.

  Selznick was the father of two go-getter sons. The younger, David, would later become a prestigious producer and give Hitchcock his first contract in America. But the older brother, Myron, was just as important to the director’s future. Serving as his father’s unofficial ambassador to London, Myron first shook hands with Hitchcock on a visit as early as December 1921; in time he would become Hitchcock’s first agent in Hollywood.

  When Balcon-Saville-Freedman became tenants at Islington, Balcon encountered Hitchcock, “obviously a live wire,” a general handyman and draftsman eager to do more. The first-time producer engaged Hitchcock to act as Cutts’s assistant director on Woman to Woman, a 1921 stage play slated as the new company’s maiden film production. “At one of our earliest meetings,” Balcon recalled, “I asked him if he knew of a good scriptwriter, as we had not yet turned the play into film form. Hitch replied immediately, ‘Yes, me.’ I asked him what he had done by way of script-writing, and he produced a script he had written but which had never been filmed. I read it and put Hitch to work at once.”

  Woman to Woman, in Hitchcock’s words, was “the story of a man who has a mistress in Paris, who bangs his head, loses his memory, and starts going with another woman, who gives him a child.” He had to use his imagination in concocting such a story, he explained later, for at the tender age of twenty-three Alfred Hitchcock was still a virgin. He had never even been on a date, and was ignorant of “the mechanics of sex.” “I’d never been with a woman,” Hitchcock recalled in one interview, “and I didn’t have the slightest idea what a woman did to have a child. I had even less idea what a man did when he was with his mistress in Paris, or when he was with another woman who was giving him a child.”

  But he must have had at least a general idea, since he had the benefit of a solid play from which to adapt—and the opportunity to collaborate with the playwright himself: Michael Morton. A Boston native living in London, Morton was a former actor and the brother of well-known Broadway playwright Martha Morton. The author of two decades’ worth of London and New York stage hits, at fifty-nine Morton was old enough to be Hitchcock’s father, and now he set about teaching the younger man the rules of dramaturgy.

  Morton’s play was about a young English army engineer’s affair with a Moulin Rouge dancer in Paris, just before the outbreak of World War I. The Englishman goes off to battle, the dancer gives birth to an out-of-wedlock baby boy, and the soldier, wounded, suffers amnesia. Assuming a new identity, he marries a social butterfly, who denies him the sole wish of his life: a son. Years later, in London, he meets the mistress, an artistic dancer, now gravely ill. The title came from the climactic confrontation between the wife and dancer. After nobly offering to give her son up to the man’s wife, the onetime chorine keeps a dancing engagement that imperils her life. The dance-suicide at the very end of the play (and film) was considered especially unconventional and thrilling; it became the first of a surprising number of “self-murders” to end a Hitchcock film.*

  Woman to Woman called for a research trip to Paris, and off Hitchcock went with Cutts to do a little scouting, according to John Russell Taylor. Paris was already a kind of home away from home. Hitchcock loved the exhibitions (the art as well as vice museums), the restaurants, the street life, and risqué nightclubs.

  The first thing Hitchcock did after arriving, according to Taylor, was attend Mass at the Church of the Madeleine. His next move, one might say, was equally Catholic: he toured Montmartre and visited the Moulin Rouge, the better to soak up the hedonistic atmosphere and create, in Hitchcock’s words, “an exact replica” of the famous cabaret. Though enjoying himself, his mind was also at work. “What’s suggested is always more potent than what’s shown,” he said in a later interview, offering one of his theories on sex appeal. “Look at the girls that dance the can-can. They’re covered in clothes, except for two provocative glimpses of flesh.”

  By now Hitchcock was officially serving as the assistant director and cowriter of Woman to Woman. Someone else had been slated as art director, but when he bowed out Hitchcock told Balcon he’d be happy to do that job, too. With all his accumulating responsibility he was obliged to hire a staff, and Alma Reville was rather astonished to receive a telephone call. Up to this time he had barely acknowledged her existence. Now he announced he was hiring for a new picture; would Alma be available as editor?

  They had both worked at Islington, but this was the first time they collaborated on the same film. Working side by side on five Graham Cutts productions would cement their extraordinary lifelong partnership.

  The romantic Englishman Clive Brook played the amnesiac, but Lewis Selznick insisted on an American leading lady—Hollywood stars were box-office insurance around the world. Victor Saville went to Hollywood to recruit Betty Compson, a stunning but down-to-earth blonde who had made the transition from vaudeville and comedy to serious dramatic parts. A star of her magnitude needed to be convinced she was not “making a mistake with a leap into the dark of a British studio,” wrote Saville in his memoir. “I not only had to sell the screenplay but all the technical aids as well—did the studio use a Bell & Howell camera, had the came
raman a good track record, how experienced was the make-up man, and so on and so forth, right down to the efficiency of the wardrobe mistress.”

  Compson arrived in London in May 1923, and was lavishly feted at a press party at the Savoy. Hitchcock met the American actress there, and they struck up a fast friendship. He was grateful that such a big star would take more than passing note of a young nonentity, and he never lost touch with the actress. Seventeen years later, when she needed work to qualify for guild pension and benefits, he paid Compson back with one of her last roles, the minor part of Gertie in his comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

  When Hitchcock found something that worked, he remembered it and carried it forward. And in Betty Compson—the star of the first finished film he helped direct—he found the first Hitchcock blonde.

  “No pains were spared in photographing the female star,” Saville recalled. “Never less than an hour, and more often longer, was occupied in arranging the oh-so-many lamps and then deftly shading the light so that it only illuminated that part of the face to round the features and flatten out those creases that make-up had not successfully concealed.” There was always a patch of gauze in front of the camera lens; Compson was photographed as “a chocolate box perfection of beauty,” in Saville’s words.

  Most of the filming took place at Islington in May 1923, but the company made a brief excursion to Paramount’s branch studio at Joinville, France, where Hitchcock re-created the Casino de Paris in all its sin and splendor. They borrowed casino dancers from the current show, substituting Compson for the lead dancer. After the last performance on Saturday night, the dancers were transported to the studio, where they toiled for the cameras all night before returning to Paris in time for the Sunday matinee.