Though these charades put a strain on Hitchcock’s relationship with Cutts, they also cemented his growing love affair with Alma. The unspoken bond between the first and second assistant, their glances mingling horror and amusement, were like those of Robert (Derrick de Marney) and Erica (Nova Pilbeam), trapped in the game of blindman’s buff in Young and Innocent—their mission a shared secret. If anything summed up the Hitchcocks’ kinship, it was this sense of unspoken communion, the mutual amusement and horror of a shared adventure.
Things went from bad to worse with Cutts, until one day the director fled Berlin with his Estonian mistress, bequeathing the few remaining scenes to his somewhat relieved assistant. The Blackguard wasn’t completed until early December, but it might be considered another quasi Hitchcock. Seen today, the film has the scope and flavor of an Ufa spectacular, including stirring crowd scenes, magnificent sets, and passionate acting, with a hypnotic performance by Bernhard Goetzke.
Returning to London shortly thereafter, Hitchcock learned that Graham Cutts had retreated to Calais on the coast of France, where he was stranded with the Estonian, who lacked the proper papers to be admitted to England. The script Hitchcock was working on—the next planned Gainsborough film, The Prude’s Fall, based on a play by Rudolf Besier and May Edginton—had to be messengered to Calais. The new film was slated to be shot in the winter of 1924–25, and Jane Novak was staying on salary.
To keep ahead of schedule, Cutts decided to photograph exteriors on the Continent, even as the script was still being written. This was common in the English film industry, and would become all too common in Hitchcock’s career as well. Cutts led a small unit (including Hitchcock, Alma Reville, and Jane Novak) first to Italy, where they filmed exteriors around Lake Como and Venice, then on to St. Moritz, Switzerland. But the weather was miserable everywhere they went, the Estonian was prickly, and Cutts was distracted by his romantic problems; they ended up collecting little usable footage. The lark turned sour, and the unit returned to England in general ill temper. Sans Estonian, Cutts was forced to shoot The Prude’s Fall at Islington, and as expeditiously as possible.
After The Blackguard, The Prude’s Fall was a disappointment. The last Cutts-Hitchcock picture reflected its troubled history, with a disjointed story line and scenes that looked hastily assembled for interior stages.
And the conflicts behind the scenes tolled the demise of the team. Cutts was fourteen years older than Hitchcock, and increasingly saw him as a rival. Behind Hitchcock’s back, Cutts bad-mouthed the upstart. Years later, Alma said that Cutts “wasn’t really a pleasant man; he knew very little, so we literally carried him.” Hitchcock himself averred that in those days he was “running even the director,” adding, “I used to whisper in his ear. I was the soul of discretion in asserting myself.”
But Hitchcock always claimed to be oblivious of any tension between them. Years later, the once prominent silent-era director, down on his luck, applied for remedial work on The 39 Steps; by then the leading figure in English film, Hitchcock quietly arranged for Cutts to shoot close-ups of the film’s star, Robert Donat. Later still, he gave Cutts’s daughter an uncredited walk-on in North by Northwest.
In 1924, though, Cutts was still the big name, and it was up to Michael Balcon to devise a Solomonic solution. Balcon did just that. The Ufa deal had fallen through, but the producer had just negotiated a fresh agreement between Gainsborough and Emelka, a Munich-based competitor of Ufa. Balcon sent Hitchcock back to Germany as a bona fide director, and chose him to guide the first Gainsborough-Emelka coproduction.
Although he was a man who had always acted consciously and decisively, who had already directed, at least partially, a handful of film, and who once admitted that by 1924 “I was already toying with the idea of directing,” Hitchcock usually gave credit for this turning point to Balcon. “Balcon is really the man responsible for Hitchcock,” the director told Peter Bogdanovich. “I had been quite content at the time, writing scripts and designing.” This statement seems all the more generous, considering the strong differences and misunderstandings that would arise over the years between the two.
Like Ufa, Münchener Lichtspielkunst was known by the phonetic reading of its initials, MLK, or “Em-el-ka.” Formed in 1918 as a distinctly Bavarian alternative to Berlin’s domination of the German film industry, Emelka was a leading proponent of mountain, Heimat (homeland), Krimis (crime), and other frankly commercial genres, as compared to Ufa’s avowed artistic mission. Michael Balcon’s five-picture deal was intended to help Emelka surpass Ufa, in and outside Germany.
The first Gainsborough-Emelka coproduction was to be The Pleasure Garden, based on a 1923 novel by Oliver Sandys, the nom de plume of Marguerite Florence Barclay. The plot revolved around the friendship and intertwined fates of two nightclub dancers. One of the chorus girls is corrupted by success and marriage, while the other is betrayed by her husband, who leads a double life in a foreign land with a native mistress.
The film needed a recognizable star, “a name the public would know, which at that time meant it had to be a Hollywood name,” in Michael Balcon’s words. This time it was Virginia Valli, who had launched her career at the old Essanay Studio in Chicago in 1915, before achieving stardom with Fox and Universal. Valli would play the chorus girl with an unfaithful husband, while another American actress, Carmelita Geraghty—the daughter of former Islington story editor Tom Geraghty—would portray her ingenuous friend. Englishman Miles Mander was cast as Valli’s unscrupulous husband. The smaller parts would be filled on location, with the bouillabaisse of nationalities that would become another Hitchcock trademark.
The scenario was by Eliot Stannard, who would remain an important colleague behind the scenes for the rest of Hitchcock’s silent period. The cameraman, Baron Gaetano Ventimiglia, was a Sicilian descended from Italian nobility, but he had also worked in the United States for the Associated Press and the Newark Times before switching to film. He had shot pictures in Hollywood, Berlin, Nice, and, most recently, Islington.
From Hitchcock’s point of view, though, the key member of his small band traveling from London to Munich late in the spring of 1925 was Alma Reville. Her official functions were as editor and assistant director, but her actual role was far more important. Over the brief time they had worked together, Hitchcock and his assistant had enjoyed total rapport. They loved food and art and music and theater. They shared a similar sense of humor. Alma complemented Hitchcock’s ideas about storytelling and performance and decor. She was willing to listen at length to him, sometimes finishing his dangling sentences. Already Alma was his muse.
The arrangement with Emelka stipulated that interiors would be shot at the Geiselgasteig studio outside Munich on a clearing of fifty acres in a forested area dotted with thirty to forty permanent outdoor sets. Although the main story took place in England, the violent climax was set in an African outpost. The exteriors would be shot first in Italy while the nightclub and other sets were being constructed at Geiselgasteig.
Photography was set to start at the seaport of Genoa on the Italian Riviera. Alma journeyed ahead to Cherbourg to collect the two Americans, Valli and Geraghty, arriving on the Aquitania. She escorted them to Paris, where the stars insisted on stretching the budget and staying at the Claridge on the Champs-élysées. It was Alma who then took the women to Paris shops, selecting their frocks and arranging their hairdos.
After the farmer decides to marry the housemaid in Hitchcock’s 1928 film The Farmer’s Wife, he insists she must immediately change her hair and put on new clothes. “To mark the change,” the farmer declares, “you must blossom out this very minute!” From the outset of his career, Hitchcock’s actresses, to mark their transformation into leading roles, also had to “blossom out.”
It’s a mystery where his firm ideas in the wardrobe and hair department came from. Perhaps he dealt with models in art classes, or at Henley’s; he may have learned something from his sister, Nellie, who was a model. But resh
aping the look of his leading ladies, from head to heels, was also part of his process of arousal—“putting himself through it” before the audience. And, starting with The Pleasure Garden, Alma also helped to shape his aesthetic of feminine beauty.
The first Hitchcock film was a trial by fire. So much went wrong that the experience prepared him for all future disasters; he never tired of telling the anecdotes.
How simple life was in the silent era; how lightly a director and his company traveled! Hitchcock could recall the precise time he left Munich for Italy (“at twenty minutes to eight one Saturday evening”), accompanied only by Miles Mander (whom Hitchcock later admitted he disliked from the start), Baron Ventimiglia, and a “newsreel man” invited along to shoot the shipboard scenes in newsreel style. (This too became a typical Hitchcock gambit—engaging quick, adaptable, and inexpensive newsreel men to work independent of the primary unit, shooting filler scenes to his detailed instructions.)
Besides the main cameras, the small company carried little in the way of equipment. “No lighting, no reflectors, nothing else at all, except the film—ten thousand feet of it.” Alma was still in Paris as they proceeded by train to Italy. According to Hitchcock, Ventimiglia told him not to declare their film stock to customs when they reached the Brenner Pass, to save on surcharges. The officials discovered the film, however, and “confiscated the lot.” They had to pay a fine, and arrived in Genoa on a Monday morning “without any film and on Tuesday noon I had to shoot the departure on an ocean liner from the port,” Hitchcock recalled. They had to send to Milan for a fresh supply.
The filming began in the last week of May 1925, though inauspiciously. The young German actress playing Mander’s mistress had to be replaced when she informed Hitchcock she couldn’t wade into the water for her big scene. “Heute darf ich nicht ins Wasser gehen,” she said, and the translation (“Today, I should not go into the water”) supposedly baffled Hitchcock. Why, he later protested to interviewers, he had never even heard of menstruation! Scrambling for a replacement, the director finally enlisted the waitress of a local hotel. But the waitress was too plump; a series of retakes was necessary for the scene where Mander had to carry her into the water.
The budget had already been taxed by the Paris luxuries and the added film-stock expenses, and the crises mounted. Hitchcock had to wire to London for some of his own money; at one point, his wallet was even stolen. Hitchcock was kept busy with his least favorite pastime: bookkeeping. “Most of my evenings were spent translating marks into lira via pounds,” he recalled. He borrowed small sums from the deep-pocketed stars. (“They weren’t very nice about that,” Hitchcock said.) Returning by rail via Belgrade, Vienna, and Zurich, they had to stint on meals. After paying a surtax on the Hollywood actresses’ excess luggage, and another penalty for a window accidentally broken in the Zurich train station, Hitchcock returned to Munich—with only one pfenning in his pocket, he claimed, “the smallest German coin minted, worth considerably less than a farthing.”
He wouldn’t have gotten through it without his muse. Alma Reville caught up with them at the Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como, where they were shooting the picturesque honeymoon scenes. Feeling very much a beginner, Hitchcock found himself in a “cold sweat” staring at the famous Virginia Valli. “I was terrified at giving her instructions,” he said. “I’ve no idea how many times I asked my future wife if I was doing the right thing.”
Alma was a Rock of Gibraltar, staying close by Hitchcock’s side for every shot on location, and then later in the studio. After photographing each take, Hitchcock would turn to her and ask, “Was it all right?” A satisfied nod, and he could move on to the next.
Back in Munich by the last week of July, they shot the nightclub dance numbers in a Glashaus (glass-roofed studio), under conditions made unbearable by the scorching summer heat. The dance sequences required intricate staging and endless retakes. Although by now Hitchcock had picked up a smattering of German—enough to fling colorful phrases around for years to come, lampooning the geniuses he had first observed at Ufa—the German trade publications noted that the Englishman needed a translator to give precise technical instructions.
Nonetheless, Hitchcock, whose sensitivity to budget and schedule was inculcated from childhood and reinforced by the rude exigencies of British film, finished photography by the end of August. Michael Balcon went to Munich for the first screening, proudly declaring that the young director’s debut possessed an “American look,” which was what Gainsborough and Emelka needed if the film was going to have any serious international prospects. To anyone who sees The Pleasure Garden today, its “German look” (full of “witty angles and camera movements,” in the words of Philip Kemp) seems equally acute.
In the meantime, Michael Balcon was busy raising money to take Islington over from British Famous Players-Lasky.
Charles Lapworth, a well-traveled Englishman who had worked as a journalist and as an agent in Hollywood, and then as a publicist for the Goldwyn organization in London, joined Gainsborough as its editorial director. Lapworth had written a story called “Fear o’ God,” which was announced as the second Gainsborough-Emelka production, and the second to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. There was only a two-month interlude before the start of filming, but Hitchcock and Alma returned to London to consult with Eliot Stannard, who was crafting the scenario from Lapworth’s story.
“Fear o’ God” concerned a mountain-town schoolteacher who is first courted and then persecuted by a possessive justice of the peace, who drives her into the arms of a mysterious hermit. The hermit, dubbed Fear o’ God, was to be played by Britain’s Malcolm Keen; Bernhard Goetzke, whom Hitchcock had befriended on the set of The Blackguard, agreed to portray the judge. The schoolteacher would be played by Nita Naldi, the sexy vamp in Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments and the temptress opposite Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand. The casting, thus, covered the three target markets: England, Germany, and the United States.
The director returned to Munich early in November, to shoot initial exteriors while the script was still being completed. In need of “a nice thatched village with snowy mountains in the background and nice tree stuff in the foreground and no modern stuff,” as Hitchcock recalled, the director spotted a postcard depicting picturesque Obergurgl in the Tyrolean Alps near the Italian border. The trip involved a long train ride to Innsbruck and then another long ride by automobile to Obergurgl. Upon arrival Hitchcock declared the setting perfect, and went to bed feeling fine. But it snowed heavily that night, and when Hitchcock and his crew woke up Obergurgl was blanketed in white. They switched to nearby Umhaus; then it snowed in Umhaus. It took all the director’s powers of persuasion—and extra money from the beleaguered budget—to convince local firemen to get out their hoses and wash away the snow.
After a week or two of outdoor photography, Hitchcock hastened back to Munich to greet his leading lady, just then arriving from Hollywood. But when Nita Naldi stepped off the train, he recalled, “Munich quite audibly gasped.” The heroine of the picture was supposed to be a “demure” schoolmarm; yet the glamorous Naldi was “dark, Latin, Junoesque, statuesque,* slinky, with slanting eyes, four-inch heels, nails like a mandarin’s, and a black dog to match her black swathed dress,” according to Hitchcock. She was accompanied by an elderly gentleman who looked old enough to be her father; indeed, that is how she introduced him—as “Papa” (though Hitchcock had his doubts).
How to transform this glamorous vision into a rustic mountain woman? Of course the high heels, long nails, sultry makeup, and hairdo had to go. “Nita put up a magnificent fight for the appearance that had made her,” Hitchcock recalled. She fought her new hairdo, her designated makeup and wardrobe, but lost every battle to the director. Alma took the star “round and made her buy cotton aprons instead of silk and compelled her to choose cloth instead of satin frocks,” in Hitchcock’s words.
This time the interiors were photographed at Orbis-Studio, also in
Munich. A replica mountain town was designed and built by Willy Reiber, who had created the London settings for The Pleasure Garden. But there were rewrites, and other vexing delays; Hitchcock was learning to be philosophical about such problems. The Mountain Eagle, or Der Bergadler—as “Fear o’ God” was retitled—was scheduled to finish filming by Christmas 1925, but it would be January before it wrapped.
For all the crises and emergencies of the Emelka productions, Hitchcock was having the time of his life. Filmmaking was never as fun: the crises seemed to invigorate him. In spite of his doubts, Naldi turned out to be “a grand person,” a born trouper who ultimately did whatever Hitchcock asked, no matter how many takes were required. Keen and Goetzke were equally professional, equally grand.
The Mountain Eagle may have turned out an inferior picture (“a very bad movie,” Hitchcock flatly told Truffaut), but the director’s memories of that time were only fond ones. For years thereafter the Hitchcocks returned together to Lake Como, St. Moritz, and Munich; these were the places where he and Alma first made films, and where they fell in love.**
Returning to England after the filming, Hitchcock had reason to feel flushed with pride. “The career of this young man reads like a romance,” his old Henley’s boss, W. A. Moore, boasted. Only twenty-six, just four years out of the advertising department of Henley’s, Hitchcock was now a film director with two pictures under his belt. He had done almost everything there was to do behind the camera, except step in front of it himself. (And of course, even that would come shortly.)
Alfred Hitchcock Page 10