One night not long after the opening of The Lodger, as Film Society habitués mingled at Brunel’s flat, someone asked, “For whom, primarily, do we make films? Whom is it most important to please?”
“The public” was considered too obvious an answer for Hitchcock, Montagu recalled. Equally unsatisfying was “the Boss”—the studio chief. “Hitch,” said Montagu, “would have none of either answer.”
Citing C. M. Woolf’s qualms about The Lodger, which had delayed its release, people suggested that the proper party to please might be “the distributors”—acknowledging, in Montagu’s words, “the validity of what they thought was Hitch’s point that, unless the distributor liked and would push the picture, the public might never have a chance to give it a fair box office reaction, even if you had your own boss’s support.”
To all of these Hitchcock shook his head. “Hitch’s deeper answer,” Montagu recalled, was that “you make pictures for the press. This, he explained quite frankly, was the reason for ‘the Hitchcock touches’—novel shots that the critics would pick out and comment upon—as well as those flash appearances that gradually became a trademark in his films. He went on to explain that, if you made yourself publicly known as a director—and this you could only do by getting mention in the press in connection with your directing—this would be the only way you became free to do what you wanted.
“If your name were known to the public, you would not be the prisoner of where you happened to be working—you could move on. Any newly founded company (there were many in the U.K. in those days) would be glad to have the cachet of your name as an asset in its prospectus. Any established company would like to sign you in order to score over its rivals.”
This declaration astonished some present. But close Film Society friends recognized its unique truth for Hitchcock, who was farsighted in his dealings with the press.
“We all knew this was right,” Montague wrote. “We all knew him well enough to know that while the fame and money of success might be to him a pleasant side-effect, it was not, could not be, his primary motive. He lived to make pictures. To make them better was his use for freedom. But we also knew he would never have admitted this, and so he spoke after his manner, dryly, sarcastically, cynically, teasingly, and we did not mind. He was the only one of us who might succeed in reaching his objective.”
The joy was in the process—compromises notwithstanding. A film could be illogical, and still please—himself first and foremost, but also critics and audiences. The wrong-man theme was potentially a powerful one, even if its first clear outing in The Lodger was a practical solution to a script and casting dilemma. Art always involved practical challenges. The stars were always going to fall short of one’s imagination.
Hitchcock was far from a perfectionist. When André Bazin interviewed him in 1954 on the set of To Catch a Thief, Bazin asked the director what ideal he pursued in filmmaking. Hitchcock answered: “The quality of imperfection.” Bazin was baffled by “this rather oracular line,” he later wrote. “My interpreter, Hitchcock and I spent a good quarter of an hour on this one point … but it never became perfectly clear.” Bazin thought perhaps Hitchcock was jesting—but he was never more serious.
From his first films, he would learn to field front-office dicta, cope with forced casting and censorship, tinker with endings, and create different versions of Hitchcock films for different audiences.
As blithely as he accepted the imperfections of The Lodger, however, he resented its idiocies, and some critics have suggested that he spent much of the rest of his career trying in one way or another to remake it without compromise. As much as he recognized the value of compromise, he loathed second-guessing—the destabilizing effects of C. M. Woolf, who had nearly consigned his first major film to the dustbin, and of Michael Balcon, who had vacillated at a critical moment.
Time and again in his career, Hitchcock would break away from the easy path and take brave steps toward risk and independence. Time and again he met resistance and opposition with decisive action. The success of The Lodger came after he had directed only three pictures, but his confidence was already strong; he recognized that his name would mean something on any studio’s prospectus.
And so he set about trying to divorce himself from Gainsborough.
Even as The Lodger was being reshot and reedited in the summer, a startling item appeared in the trade papers, announcing that “the brilliant young English director” had been signed away by a new production entity, British National Pictures, Ltd. Hitchcock still owed Gainsborough six months on his contract, but after that, it was reported, he would move over to a new studio being constructed on fifty acres on the outskirts of Elstree. Not much was known about the new studio, except that it had signed a U.S. distribution deal with Paramount.
As a man who prided himself on inside knowledge of his profession, Hitchcock realized that Gainsborough was in mounting disarray, losing money “through a series of unfortunate associations which made it a constantly moot point who was really in charge of things,” in Cedric Belfrage’s words. Charles Lapworth had left the directorate. Joining the board now was actor Carlyle Blackwell, who arrived with a financial portfolio (he was married to a diamond millionairess). But the studio’s long-term financial fortunes could be secured only by successful films, and Woolf and Balcon were still vying for control of production.
Hitchcock waged an impressive power struggle with Gainsborough. The studio announced that his next directing project would be The Silent Warrior, starring Blackwell. But Hitchcock refused, and the picture was reassigned to Graham Cutts. Hitchcock planted squibs in the press, reminding the industry that his future lay with British National. Then a series of other odd items appeared, repudiating “rumors … circulating in the trade” about Hitchcock projects. In a deliberate slap at budget-strapped Gainsborough, Hitchcock announced he was shaping four ambitious future films, two of which would “require locations on a big scale outside England.”
Three months went by, after the triumphant press showing of The Lodger, with no activity from England’s hottest director. Hitchcock was determined to let his contract run out.
He also had personal cause to be preoccupied. Alma Reville was taking Catholic instruction, and the Hitchcocks’ wedding was scheduled for early December. He and Alma had been working and traveling together for almost four years now, and they had become inseparable. By day they went together to the studio; by night they went out to restaurants, premieres, nightclubs, gallery openings. In large and small ways they complemented each other: She drove; he read the maps. She watched the budget; he was a spendthrift. They never disagreed about anything important.
Now marriage would formalize the Hitchcock love story. At Brompton Oratory on Knightsbridge, the most fashionable church in London, they exchanged vows on December 2, 1926. Hitchcock’s brother, William, stood up for him; Alma’s younger sister, Eva, was maid of honor.
It has been speculated that Alma was obliged to convert to Catholicism at “the insistence of Hitchcock’s mother” before any ceremony could take place, but this was not the case. As the church records where the ceremony was performed state uncategorically, “Dispensatione obtenta super impedimentum mixtae religionis.”* The bride was not a baptized Catholic at the time of the nuptials; and although she was eventually baptized, her Catholicism failed to “stick” as the years went on, according to one of Hitchcock’s private letters.
The newlyweds left England for their honeymoon, launching the “annual pilgrimage” they would follow at Christmas for most of their lives. First they stopped in Paris, spending a day with Nita Naldi, who was living there with her older gentleman friend; then they continued on to Lake Como and St. Moritz.
When they returned to London, the newlyweds took up residence on the top two floors of a tall brick Georgian at 153 Cromwell Road, along a continuous line of fashionable houses west of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Their flat backed on to the Underground—“like a cliff,” in the words
of Michael Powell, “so that the thunder of the passing trains was distant like the waves on the pebbles of Sandgate beach.”
The calendar now said 1927, and the nascent British National was looking less and less like a viable reality.
J. D. Williams, the new studio’s dynamic managing director, had made his first fortune selling his First National circuit of several hundred theaters to Warner Bros. Williams signed D. W Griffith star Dorothy Gish for the first three British National pictures, to be directed by Herbert Wilcox. But Williams soon alienated his business partners with his autocratic decision making and imperial lifestyle. He was fired in December, shortly after returning from a dealmaking trip to America, and the much-publicized Gish films were canceled. Wilcox, a founding partner, left to form his own studio. Rumors spread that British National was down for the count. And so, desperate to stall, British National lent Hitchcock back to Gainsborough.
When Gainsborough announced a new production called Downhill in early December there was no director attached, but by the end of the year Hitchcock had surfaced as a likely candidate. When the boy wonder returned from his honeymoon in January, it wasn’t hard to convince him that, rather than stagnating, it made sense to follow The Lodger with another picture capitalizing on the rage for Ivor Novello—who, along with Constance Collier (under their pen name, David L’Estrange)—had written the hit play from which Downhill would be adapted.*
Novello was poised to re-create his West End role as a public school rugby hero who shoulders the blame for his friend, the son of a clergyman, when a girl becomes pregnant. In France (inevitably), the hero suffers disgrace, becomes a race driver, and worse.
Hitchcock had little choice but to reconcile himself to filming “a rather poor play,” as he told Truffaut. But he could take satisfaction from the fact that his new overlords were able to farm him back to Gainsborough for a sum “exactly six times what he previously received,” according to Cedric Belfrage. Although the difference between his former salary and the loan-out salary went to British National, not to him—an industrywide injustice the director suffered long before encountering David O. Selznick and Hollywood—Hitchcock did receive a fat starting bonus.
Shooting began as quickly as possible, on January 17. Once again Alma, now Mrs. Hitchcock, was his assistant director, with Claude McDonnell behind the camera. Besides Novello, the all-English ensemble included Isabel Jeans, once a leading lady of Harley Granville Barker’s theater company, and Ian Hunter, in his first of three Hitchcock roles.
Working closely with Angus MacPhail, now head of the story department at Gainsborough, Eliot Stannard had crafted a straight-line adaptation. Some last-minute remedial work and “visualizing” was the extent of Hitchcock’s contribution to the screenplay. (As if secretly relishing the script, however, he was fond of quoting Novello’s fatuous lament upon expulsion from school: “Does this mean I won’t be able to play in the Old Boy’s match, sir?”)
Though the actor was in his thirties, the early scenes required Novello to play a lad in his teens—a trick that worked better on the stage. Hitchcock didn’t think much of the whole business. “Terrible!” he always muttered about Downhill, pointing out the ham-handed imagery of a scene in which Novello is tossed out of his home by his father and then heads “Down” an escalator into the Underground. As he often did when saddled with tedious drama, the director tried to lighten things up with Hitch-cockian comedy; one scene he staged—a mock donnybrook—he would recall later as “ahead of its time.” The studio thought so too, insisting that he cut it out, along with other comedy flourishes.
Hitchcock would often find more affection for his memories of making a given film than for the finished product. The “Down” sequence had to be photographed after midnight, Hitchcock recalled, after the last train had gone home. “We went to the theater first,” the director said, “and in those days we used to go to a first night in white tie and tails and opera hats. So, after the theater, I directed this scene in white tie and top hat. The most elegant moment of direction I’ve ever had.”
He always performed to the best of his abilities, however. Hitchcock was farsighted enough to perceive that impersonal studio projects would be counted as credit toward more ambitious and worthwhile films. And Downhill was far from worthless: scene after scene was enhanced by his imaginative staging, expressive lighting and composition, and unusual camera work.
One particularly inventive sequence began with a close-up of a man in evening dress—a swell, one judges, until the camera sweeps back to reveal that the man is a waiter. When a nearby couple begins to dance energetically, the waiter seems to join in, before the camera swoops farther back and around to reveal that the action is all part of a revue staged for a nightclub audience. This very Hitchcockian sleight of hand—“a sort of Chinese box of illusion within an illusion,” in John Russell Taylor’s words—had nothing to do with the main plot. It was merely an opportunity to try something interesting.
For Hitchcock the storyteller, the means would always be as important as the end. The director didn’t mind if a scene didn’t quite work, if the tricks were worth trying. “It should be fun!” people remember him saying in his days as a boy wonder. “Fun!”
As long as it was fun.
The tricks could be internalized, Hitchcock knew, and the techniques streamlined for reuse in better films later on. Experimentation was the inevitable by-product of the director’s constantly spinning mind.
Hitchcock was working at a restless clip. By the last week of March 1927 he was already in Nice and the Riviera for location work on his next Gainsborough picture, an adaptation of Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue. In France he would shoot backgrounds and exteriors for the new project while polishing off final shots of Downhill, with Ivor Novello emoting in front of English backdrops on the rooftop of a French hotel.
A Noel Coward play was automatically an undertaking of higher quality and prestige than a work by “David L’Estrange.” Coward, already among the royalty of show business, stopped by Islington to confer with Hitchcock during the making of Downhill; their subsequent friendship was more professional than personal, but would last for years. Yet Coward had little or nothing to do with the Hitchcock film. Once again Eliot Stannard adapted the 1925 play, with editorial input from Ivor Montagu and Angus MacPhail.
Four of the main players carried over from Downhill: Isabel Jeans as the persecuted victim of social hypocrisy who twice makes headlines in divorce proceedings; Ian Hunter as a lawyer; and Robin Irvine and Violet Farebrother as an upper-crust suitor and his mother.
Hitchcock could certainly feel comfortable with the play’s theme, which indicted blind justice and conventional attitudes toward divorce. Yet as a silent picture, Easy Virtue limited Coward’s brittle dialogue to the occasional intertitle—and the upshot was a thin shadow of the original.
Again, though, Hitchcock’s touches kept it from being a terrible film. The director told François Truffaut that it contained the worst intertitle he ever wrote: Isabel Jeans, scarred from her treatment by the yellow press, cringes in terror every time she spots a newsman lurking with a camera. Her last line to picture snatchers covering the second divorce: “Shoot. There’s nothing left to kill.” (Again, Hitchcock’s sly mention of it ensured that it wouldn’t be forgotten.)
With Hitchcock, games involving lenses could be murderous, or simply games. Another Hitchcockian highlight in Easy Virtue is the vignette of a divorce court judge peering at the plaintiff’s counsel through his monocle—an ocular image followed seamlessly by a cut to a matching close-up. In those early days, that was an impossible special effect to achieve. “I had to make the monocle oversized so it would be in focus at close range,” Hitchcock explained later. “Then I put a mirror in it instead of clear glass, and put the attorney character behind the camera, with a double for him in the long shot. And so when the monocle came up to the camera, you saw the man in close-up, without a cut.”
Hitchcock not only dreamed up such un
usual camera stunts, he took delight in figuring out how to execute them before the specialists did. He was like a brilliant symphony conductor who prides himself on knowing how to play every instrument in the orchestra.
Already, Hitchcock could boast more technical know-how than most directors accumulated in a lifetime. When Claude McDonnell took ill during the making of Easy Virtue, he gleefully took over, supervising his own lighting and camera setups. England’s boy wonder was also a workhorse who filled in behind the lens more than once, in the silent era, when one of his cameramen took sick. He never lost a day on that score.
Easy Virtue, which was completed in May, would be Hitchcock’s last film for Gainsborough. In June the director joined the newly reorganized, and renamed, British International Pictures, and undertook his third film in the first six months of the productive year 1927.
After its near financial collapse, British National had been forced to welcome a savior in the person of John Maxwell. A former solicitor from Scotland, Maxwell had been in film exhibition since 1912, heading up an expanding circuit of halls. Branching into rentals, he had built up Wardour Films as a rival to C. M. Woolf’s empire. After J. D. Williams was ousted from the British National directorate, Maxwell effected a merger with Wardour, becoming chairman of the new company, British International Pictures, or B.I.P.
The I was important. In the year-end issue of the Bioscope, Michael Balcon, retrenching at Gainsborough, contributed an article entitled “Cutting Down Production Costs”; in the same issue, Maxwell wrote on “The International Film.” Balcon was every bit the internationalist, but Maxwell had the fresh swagger and ambition to carve a niche out of foreign markets. Before the year was out B.I.P. would purchase a former Emelka chain as a foothold in Germany, make a deal with Sascha Films of Austria for distribution in eastern Europe, and sign with Pathé for France. Then came the announcement that B.I.P. films would be distributed by a new firm in the United States, headed by none other than J. D. Williams.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 13