Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Indeed, The Mountain Eagle marked a personal as well as professional milestone: Hitchcock had prevailed upon Malcolm Keen to bring over a ring the young director had secretly picked out in London, and by the time he and Alma left Munich Hitchcock had a private script planned out.

  The return trip to England proved an unusually violent ride. A fierce storm shook the boat; the wind blew and roared, the swells ran high. Desperately seasick, Alma took to bed. “As I tossed fitfully on my bed of pain, there was a knock on my door of my cabin and Hitch came in,” Alma remembered. “It was the first time I had ever seen him in a state of disorder, and the last time too. His hair had been blown about by the wind and his clothes had been soaked with ocean spray.”

  Born salesman and storyteller, Hitchcock was also a born actor. He had rehearsed the moment, with a few lines in his head. “Will you marry me?”

  “I was too ill to lift up my head,” recalled Alma, “but not so ill that I couldn’t make an affirmative gesture.”

  “I thought I’d catch you when you were too weak to say no,” Hitchcock told her.

  Several versions of this anecdote have come down through the years, though their details vary. “It was one of my greatest scenes, a little weak on dialogue, perhaps, but beautifully staged and not overplayed,” Hitchcock boasted on one occasion. “Alma’s acceptance stood for complete triumph. I had wanted to become, first, a movie director and, second, Alma’s husband—not in order of emotional preference, to be sure, but because I felt the bargaining power implicit in the first was necessary in obtaining the second.”

  Then again, maybe Alma was the instigator. “I married her, because she asked me to,” Hitchcock told Oriana Fallaci on another occasion. “We’d been traveling around and working together for years, and I’d never so much as touched her little finger.” That is certainly the way it plays in Champagne, a 1928 Hitchcock silent picture featuring a shipboard betrothal, with Betty Balfour proposing to woozy Jean Bradin.

  Foreign Correspondent and Lifeboat also feature marriage proposals at sea, and there are shipboard romances in Rich and Strange and Torn Curtain. Hitchcock was among the most personal of directors, and autobiography with subtle variations was a staple of the archetypal Hitchcock story line. Even Alma’s shipboard nausea would find its way on-screen: “I always get seasick,” Ingrid Bergman complains in Notorious—and what is Lifeboat if not the ultimate seasickness film?

  Back in England, Gainsborough completed the acquisition of Islington and announced an ambitious slate of nine pictures for 1926, with rental magnate C. M. Woolf returning to the directorate and promising a fresh infusion of capital. Significant U.S. interest was reported in the reinvigorated company, and Michael Balcon and Charles Lapworth traveled to New York to firm up distribution. Nevertheless, Gainsborough’s publicity emphasized that the studio program would be “British in every way save for the inclusion in each of one American actor or actress.”

  Parliament was already debating a “quota act” to limit the nefarious influence of Hollywood, and to stimulate native English filmmaking. Some form of the controversial 1927 Cinematograph Films Act would be in place up through the 1930s. The days of American stars and international coproduction were numbered—one reason the next decade would become known as Hitchcock’s “most English.”

  For the moment, though, Alfred Hitchcock was England’s most German director. Before the Emelka films were released, he was still relatively unknown outside the small realm of Islington. Indeed, Alma Reville was the bigger celebrity. She had been lionized in the trades as early as October 1925, in an article (with photograph) describing her as “clever and experienced,” attesting that “she had much to do with the finish of all Graham Cutts’s big pictures.” In December 1925, Alma was featured in a full-page profile in the Picturegoer.

  Hitchcock was still experimenting with his image. His caricature was drawn and identified as “A. J. Hitchcock” in The Motion Picture Studio in 1923, and he was promoted as “Alfred J. Hitchcock” in earliest publicity. He wore a duster’s mustache for publicity stills, and still favored a bow tie. He toyed with a personal logo sketch linking his three initials. The exact billing and Hitchcock persona were still in formation, still fluid.

  But Balcon had faith in Hitchcock, and he reserved one of Gainsborough’s most prestigious projects of 1926 for the young Englishman fresh from his German triumph. In early December 1925 the trade papers carried this notice: “Almost immediately on his return Hitchcock will take up the megaphone on a third production for Gainsborough, The Lodger by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes.”

  * Sydenham’s chorea, not the incurable and hereditary Huntington’s chorea.

  * Knighted in 1929, John Greet toured incessantly in productions of Shakespeare and other English classics, bringing theater to a generation of Britons, especially schoolchildren.

  * Besides Number Thirteen, Clare Greet appeared in The Ring, The Manxman, Murder!, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Sabotage, Jamaica Inn, and the Hitchcock-produced Lord Camber’s Ladies.

  * Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography makes a point of the London fascination with suicide, pointing out that the city was known as the “suicide capital” of Europe.

  * Except once: Hitchcock said in one interview that he observed a director at Paramount during a tour of that studio on his first visit to Hollywood. Hitchcock said he was astonished to note that this man—who must have been Cecil B. De Mille, judging by the description—worked with a loudspeaker system. All the drama in the picture, he sniffed in a subsequent interview, seemed to be on the set.

  * She may have needed those heels to appear statuesque: if press materials can be trusted, Naldi was five feet four.

  ** Like Willie (Walter Slezak) in Lifeboat, Hitchcock could wax nostalgic about the pot roast in his favorite Munich restaurant.

  FOUR

  1925–1929

  In Germany, Hitchcock had immersed himself in expressionism. Now, returning to London, partly through the newly organized Film Society of London, he grew equally attentive to Soviet film, and the theories of Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and V. I. Pudovkin.

  “Film-art,” wrote Pudovkin, “begins from the moment when the director begins to combine and join the various pieces of film.”

  Or “pure cinema,” as Hitchcock liked to say, “is complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody.”

  He familiarized himself with Kuleshov’s experiments with editing, as described by Pudovkin. Hitchcock could precisely describe Kuleshov’s famous experiment with a stage matinee idol, whose blank face Kuleshov intercut with a bowl of hot soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear, obtaining different audience reactions with each new combination. Hitchcock knew the experiment so well he could pronounce the actor’s name, and spell it for interviewers: Ivan Mozhukin.* He even demonstrated Kuleshov’s idea during a 1965 television program, filming himself with a suggestive smile, then intercutting the image first with tenderhearted footage of a mother and a baby, then with a beautiful young woman in a sexy bikini, winkingly making his point that the order and arrangement of the images—the editing—drastically altered the message.

  Hitchcock was still in Munich in October 1925, when the Film Society launched its first official subscription event. The program featured comedy shorts by the nonconformist Adrian Brunel, a Western by “Bronco Billy” Anderson, and two celebrated German pictures—an experimental work by Walter Ruttmann, and the three-part Waxworks by Paul Leni.

  German and Russian films were standard Film Society fare. Besides foreign films, the Sunday afternoon showings at the New Gallery and (later) the Tivoli also featured overlooked American pictures, controversial British works frowned on by government censors, and avant-garde films scorned by the official industry, which regarded the Film Society as anti-commercial, artistically highbrow, and faintly communistic.

  Although Hitchcock missed the premiere, he took enthusiastic part i
n the Film Society, and knew all the movers and shakers. These included Iris Barry, the film critic of the Spectator; Walter Mycroft, an editor and critic of the Evening Standard; the up-and-coming filmmakers Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu; actor Hugh Miller (from The Prude’s Fall); the sculptor Frank Dobson; and Sidney Bernstein, then managing his family’s chain of cinemas. Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw also lent the luster of their names.

  Montagu, the son of the banker Lord Swaythling, was the translator of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and typical of the affluent, literate people spearheading the organization—the type of Cambridge- or Oxford-educated Englishmen Hitchcock preferred to associate with personally and professionally. (The nearest Hitchcock got to Cambridge was cropping his face into an alumni reunion photograph in Dial M for Murder—one of his best cameo chuckles.)

  Hitchcock would benefit from collaboration with Montagu, and with Angus MacPhail, a red-haired Scot who briefly succeeded Montagu as film critic of the Observer. “Tall and thin and shortsighted,” in the words of T. E. B. Clarke, MacPhail had such “a scholarly air, he might have been taken for a don.” MacPhail desperately wanted to join the film trade; he would begin by hanging out on the set of The Lodger—and remain by Hitchcock’s side, off and on, for three decades. The handsome, dapper Bernstein was another lifelong ally; Hitchcock would also work, with differing degrees of intimacy, with Mycroft and Brunel. They were all part of a small circle Hitchcock joined, who convened at Brunel’s flat after screenings, holding what they dubbed “Hate Parties” to dissect what they had just seen.

  Another Film Society and Hate Party regular was the somewhat older writer Eliot Stannard. Born in 1888, Stannard was the son of novelist Henrietta Winter (who wrote as John Strange Winter); Winter’s children’s book Bootle’s Baby accounted for Stannard’s cuddly nickname: “Bootles.” Whether Stannard was a onetime man of the theater or a former Fleet Street journalist is uncertain. Michael Powell described him as “a dark, wildly handsome, untidy man”; another Hitchcock collaborator, Sidney Gilliat, painted him with the “lantern-haggard, long-haired look of an unsuccessful touring actor.”

  This much is known: Stannard entered film in 1915 as the scenarist of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and between 1915 and 1922, when he turned up at Islington as the author of Paddy the Next Best Thing—a Graham Cutts picture sandwiched between the British Famous Players-Lasky dissolution and Woman to Woman—Stannard wrote roughly two dozen features. These included high-minded adaptations of plays and fiction by John Galsworthy, Arthur Wing Piñero, Henry Fielding, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as many original potboilers. Stannard boasted a lengthy association with director Maurice Elvey; indeed, Alma Reville worked with Stannard on the Elvey productions, and may have recommended him to Hitchcock and Michael Balcon.

  Steeped in literature and theater, Stannard knew most of the novels and plays that film producers were buying, in an era when best-selling books and West End hits were considered sure box-office bets. Known for his equable temperament, his admirable detachment from ego, and his perpetual air of resignation, Stannard was also recognized for his willingness to take on multiple assignments, turning them out with speed. “His method,” in the words of Ivor Montagu, was “to sit down and tap it straight out on the typewriter as he thought of it, without change or erasure.” Even more important to Hitchcock, he was just as proficient a talker. Stannard “could talk like an angel and forever,” recalled Michael Powell.

  Stannard was well established by the time he was partnered with Hitchcock on The Pleasure Garden, and, like W A. Moore at Henley’s or Michael Morton before him, he offered Hitchcock the wisdom of an elder. In addition to the two Emelka pictures, Stannard would work on the scenarios of seven other silent Hitchcock features; he would, in fact, write at least a part of every silent Hitchcock film. After him, no other scenarist would last as long with the director, who grew to be—to say the least—demanding of his writers.

  Hitchcock liked to get close to his writing partners. He needed to feel an affinity with his closest creative collaborators, and in a sense he and a given writer got “married” for the duration of a given project, spending all day, and then evenings and weekends, together. But the writer he trusted most from the start, the collaborator for whom he felt the greatest affinity, was the woman he would marry: Alma Reville. She was a constant, if somewhat mysterious, presence in the writing sessions—sometimes saying very little, though whatever she said counted. Hitchcock felt that it helped everyone to have a billiards-like “triangulated” discussion, to have “three Hitchcocks” in the room.

  In later interviews Hitchcock said that The Lodger was the first property that he himself chose from the studio’s available properties. (That was a proviso he often invoked when discussing his story choices—that he’d made the best choice possible “from the available properties.”) But The Lodger was also a novel Hitchcock professed to love. The story of a psycho killer stalking London, it was the kind of material that struck a deep chord with him. And though in his later work he would often drastically change the novels he filmed, revising their stories to meet his own needs, in this first important instance he tried to be faithful.

  Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel, published in 1913, concerns a mysterious lodger suspected by his landlords of being the Avenger, a Jack the Ripper-style killer responsible for a series of “curious and brutal murders” in London. The novel had been a best-seller, and was followed by a well-received stage version, seen by Hitchcock, in 1916. The play was quite different from the book, tinged with comedy; it introduced the idea of the lodger wandering about at night in search of homeless people, presenting them with buns concealing gold pieces—an activity that is misinterpreted by Scotland Yard.

  The film had its own reasons to depart from the book. For as keen as the director was on the novel, from the outset the three Hitchcocks were faced with two issues that dictated the singularities and peculiarities of the final script. Both involved their prospective star, Ivor Novello, a British boy wonder who had risen to the fore as a composer of popular wartime songs.

  Michael Balcon had scored a coup by signing the Welsh matinee idol to a Gainsborough contract. Novello had made only a few films, including an American picture for D. W. Griffith, and he was principally a musical comedy performer. With his boyish grin and brilliantined hair, it is tempting to see Novello as Hitchcock’s initial foray into “countercasting,” or casting against type—the director’s first golden opportunity to exploit a familiar persona to play off audience expectations. Novello might become the first dashing Hitchcock killer.

  Yet Hitchcock was undermined, not for the last time, by a front-office decision: Novello had to be cleared, by the end of the film, of any wrongdoing. It was probably the dreaded C. M. Woolf who insisted that the success of The Lodger depended on Novello’s female fans, who might be repulsed if he proved to be the bloodthirsty Avenger. “It would never have done for Ivor’s many fans to think him capable of villainy,” wrote Novello biographer James Harding.

  This went directly against the book Hitchcock prized, in which the lodger is revealed almost undoubtedly as the killer, a lunatic who is suffering from acute religious mania. At the end of Mrs. Lowndes’s novel, the lodger even manages to elude police, who—in true Hitchcockian fashion—have been slow to evince “the slightest interest” in him as the obvious culprit. Then, just like Jack the Ripper, the Avenger disappears from public view, his ultimate fate unknown.

  Hitchcock often said that if he hadn’t become a film director, he might have become a lawyer. He was a master negotiator, and spent his career picking his way through minefields of casting, censorship, and front-office resistance to achieve ingenious compromises in his filmmaking. The way he solved the Ivor Novello problem in The Lodger became a reliable—though not perfect—blueprint for much of the rest of his career.

  First, the three Hitchcocks made the telling decision to build up the part of young Daisy Bun
ting, the landlady’s daughter. Daisy doesn’t even meet the lodger until three-quarters of the way into Mrs. Lowndes’s novel; there the story is viewed almost entirely through Mrs. Bunting’s eyes. In Hitchcock’s film, Daisy would become an equal lead character.

  Just as telling: Daisy is described in the book as fair-haired, but in the film her character would become a “curly blonde”—a more specific detail that links her closely to the suspense, for curly blondes are said to arouse bloodlust in the Avenger. The book has an assortment of victims, but in the film all the Avenger’s victims would be “curly blondes.” It was the first instance of blonde fixation in a Hitchcock film—and an invention entirely his own.

  Although hardly an icy, elegant Hitchcock blonde—in fact she’s rather sweet and down-to-earth—Daisy has a charged sexuality that heightens her vulnerability. In one scene, Hitchcock has Daisy’s boyfriend, the hapless policeman Joe, jokingly clap her in painful handcuffs—a prank intended to hint at “fetishism,” as Hitchcock admitted to François Truffaut. He leaped at the chance to point out the obvious “sexual connotation” of handcuffs to his French colleague. “When I visited the Vice Museum in Paris,” Hitchcock explained, “I noticed there was considerable evidence of sexual aberrations through restraint. You should try to go there sometime. Of course they also have knives, the guillotine, and all sorts of information.”

  The handcuffs aren’t in Mrs. Lowndes’s version; nor is another scene showing Daisy undressing for her bath, her pale skin glowing as though irradiated. (Hitchcock’s beautiful women are never so beautiful as when they strip to their undergarments, unaware of being observed.)