B.I.P. was initially willing to gamble more money on production, and Maxwell promised his directors creative freedom. At Borehamwood, near Elstree Station, the new B.I.P. studio boasted up-to-date facilities, including two enormous interior stages. All of this, as much as his salary increase, lured Hitchcock away from Michael Balcon and Gainsborough.
“Selling angle,” one trade paper trumpeted as early as Downhill, “the name of Hitchcock.”
His sixth film as director—and the first British International Pictures movie by any director—was first mentioned in the trades in April 1927, when the director told the Bioscope about The Ring, a grand-scale boxing drama he was planning. By then a draft of the script had already been completed. Eliot Stannard was reported as the writer, and Stannard’s name was cited again as late as one week before photography commenced. But when Hitchcock and Stannard had a falling-out, Walter Mycroft, the newspaperman associated with the Evening Standard (and another stalwart of the Film Society), was brought in for touch-ups, and technical advice on the boxing sequences. The director also knew boxing; he could discourse knowledgeably on both the rules and the fighters, and routinely attended soccer and tennis as well as boxing matches.*
Boxing, like everything else, was grist. Hitchcock stored up observations and references like an academic. In 1937’s Young and Innocent, Erica (Nova Pilbeam) employs rough first-aid measures that she explains (without elaborating) she learned in a boxer’s dressing room. Forty years after The Ring, directing the final sequence of Marnie—an emotionally exhausting scene in which Marnie and her mother revisit the past—Hitchcock told Tippi Hedren the feeling was like two boxers who have fought to a draw. “He was pulling things out of his memory all the time,” Hedren recalled.
Hitchcock’s eventual credit as sole author of the original story and script—a credit unique in his career—underlines his proprietary feeling for The Ring, the picture he left Gainsborough to make.
The first act of The Ring takes place against the backdrop of a fairground, where One-Round Jack, an amateur pugilist, takes on all comers. A nattily dressed stranger flirts with Mabel, a comely ticket taker, and then decides to fight Jack. Mabel roots for Jack, who is her boyfriend, but Jack is beaten by the natty newcomer. The winner is revealed as the Australian heavyweight champion, Bob Corby. With one eye on Mabel, Bob invites Jack to take a job with him as his sparring partner, and train professionally.
The story then shifts to Hitchcock’s own East End. After winning his first professional match, Jack marries Mabel, and his fortunes rise. But his pride is dampened when he sees Bob aggressively wooing his wife at wild parties. Jack’s jealousy leads to friction with Bob, and a violent confrontation with Mabel. Just as he and Bob finally are matched for a championship bout, Mabel leaves Jack. On the night of the showdown, Mabel is among the crowd. The audience must wait to see who will triumph.
Starting out at the new studio, Hitchcock had more leverage with the casting. He handpicked his lead actress, Lilian Hall-Davis, whom Hitchcock had admired as far back as The Passionate Adventure. (“An amazing girl,” he once said of her. “On the set she suffered from an acute self-consciousness,” but in private life “she possessed a terrific personality and amazing vivacity.”) The actress was against type in his canon, a brunette playing a goodhearted, salt-of-the-earth character.
As One-Round Jack, the director cast Carl Brisson, a former Danish middleweight champion turned musical comedy entertainer. Brisson’s only previous appearance on the screen had been in an obscure Danish picture; Hitchcock could thus claim to have launched Brisson into film, and this would be the more appealing of two leads Brisson would play for him.
Ian Hunter, from Downhill and Easy Virtue, was chosen to play Bob Corby, the Australian heavyweight, while Gordon Harker, who had begun his long career as a stage prompter in 1902, turned up as Jack’s trainer and friend to the last. The son of Joseph C. Harker, a well-known stage scenic artist, Harker was a true Cockney—born, as they say, within the sound of Bow Bells.* He had played cheeky Cockneys in Edgar Wallace plays, and would supply similar comedy in several Hitchcock-B.I.P. films.
It may or may not be true that Claude McDonnell was slated to photograph The Ring, before illness felled him, or that McDonnell bucked about his salary and quit the production at the eleventh hour. Certainly it is not true, no matter what the director told Peter Bogdanovich, that Hitchcock “taught” photography to the eleventh-hour replacement—John Jaffray Cox, known as “Jack”—or that before The Ring Cox was any kind of “second” cameraman.
Jack Cox had worked in pictures since 1913, logging five years in the early 1920s as chief cameraman for Maurice Elvey, during which time, according to Duncan Petrie in The British Cinematographer, he had already demonstrated his promise as “one of the first important British cameramen.” Alma would have known Cox from her stint with Elvey; he might have been another of her recommendations. In any case, when Cox succeeded Baron Ventimiglia and Claude McDonnell, it marked a clear division in the camera department between the Hitchcock films made at Gainsborough and those made at B.I.P.
Cox was an “effects” cameraman—an expert in “blurred images, overlays, dissolves and double exposures,” in the words of Petrie. (His longstanding advertisement in the trade papers read: “Thoroughly experienced in Trick Work, etc.”) That was more important to Hitchcock than framing or lighting genius. Hitchcock really didn’t need compositional advice; his staging within the frame was always strongly in his mind, and annotated in the script. What Hitchcock wanted was a cameraman who would take a dare. And even veterans like Cox were sometimes taken aback by Hitchcock’s taunts and demands.
For the film’s first fight scene, which takes place under a fairgrounds tent, Hitchcock insisted that Cox remove the usual array of kliegs and shoot the bout from a distance, with the only lighting a solitary bulb dangling over the ring. Not only that, he wanted the camera’s point of view—Mabel’s subjective point of view from outside a gap in the tent—heavily obstructed. In the foreground, shadowed figures in the crowd watch the fight, and like Mabel the movie audience is forced to peer at the action as if through a long-lens keyhole.
Hitchcock didn’t teach Cox photography, but he did teach the old dog new tricks. Cameramen learned to trust Hitchcock’s instincts; he not only stipulated the setups, but, with his art training, would whip out a sketchpad, draw the image, and specify the focus.
“Hitchcock would draw it so wonderfully,” recalled Bryan Langley, then an assistant to Cox, “that he could say, ‘I want you to use a 50 mm lens’ or a 35 mm lens or three-inch lens. He had drawn the perspective in, so the background was correct in relation to the foreground. I’ve never seen anyone else who can even approach doing that. Hitchcock was marvelous in being able to draw what the camera could see. And it was like he was saying to the cameraman, ‘If you get that, then I don’t have to look through the camera.’
“There have been many stories [about Hitchcock] down the years. There was one cameraman, later on, who supposedly was given such a drawing, and he got the frame and foreground correct, but used a different lens [from the one specified], so the background was twice as large, or half the size. I heard that cameraman made a rapid exit.”
Starting with The Ring, Cox would photograph all ten of Hitchcock’s B.I.P. films during the prolific years between 1927 and 1932. Then, after an interval of several years, they would reunite on The Lady Vanishes. Eleven Hitchcock pictures: only Robert Burks, another virtuoso cameraman, whom Hitchcock found at Warner Bros. in America, would work with him more.
The filming took place in July and August 1927. The ample budget enabled a spectacular set, a full-scale fairgrounds built on the Elstree lot for the film’s establishing sequence. Hundreds of extras were hired. Hitchcock created a dream of a carnival glimpsed in twirling rides, common folk gorging themselves, games of chance and skill. The Germanic images go by in a Soviet whirl. Now and then there are odd close-ups of people and objects, images somet
imes so extreme and distorted that they become modernist abstractions. (He would use this technique throughout his career: think of the lingering close-up of a ladder rung at the beginning of Vertigo.)
The boy wonder himself moved in a blur in these years. Colleagues and coworkers were struck by Hitchcock’s perpetual motion, his boundless energy, his zest for the job. Michael Powell recalled the director vaulting up flights of stairs, ahead of everybody else. “It is amazing,” wrote one journalist who stopped by to watch him stage the climax of The Ring, “how he manages to maintain his energy and keenness, considering that since the beginning of the year he has been on the [studio] floor, working practically every day.”
The film’s climactic Albert Hall match was a triumph of illusion, indebted to the recently invented Schüfftan process, first exploited by Fritz Lang in Metropolis, and which Hitchcock had brought home from Germany as his most valuable souvenir. The new process enabled him to stage scenes in public places, without the expense (or permission) of actually filming there, by blending live action in the foreground against miniatures, photographs, or painted scenery. Many of Hitchcock’s most famous special effects were Schüfftan-style composites: real backgrounds mixed with re-creations.
Smoke and glare, images reflected in water and mirrors, crazily tilted framing, split-screen staging, and superimpositions were among the film’s other Teutonic flourishes. One surreal sequence cuts back and forth between drunken revelers, fantastically elongated piano keys, and a hypnotically spinning long-playing record. Ultimately, The Ring is “the most Germanic in style of Hitchcock’s silent films,” as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum observed—a drama conventional in its story line, but shot in a dense, experimental style. Though in neither scope nor theme as sweeping as Metropolis, The Ring is as dark and velvety as a Fritz Lang epic.
A first-rate boxing saga, with all the ritual and well-observed detail of the sport, it is also a surprisingly intimate film. Unlike Lang (and other Germans), Hitchcock was adept at incidental humor (the carnival guests at the church wedding were a hilarious rehearsal for the circus freaks in Saboteur) and warmth. This was the young, uninhibited Hitchcock, who showed tremendous curiosity and feeling for his characters: fresh from his own marriage, he was sensitive to the tensions of fidelity. This is, too, the rare Hitchcock film without a single murder victim, a man falsely accused, or a woman living in dread of sex or violence.
With the speed characteristic of picture making in that era, the photography was completed by summer’s end, the footage was assembled by early September, and the finished film was screened later that month. The new Hitchcock film was swiftly hailed as another “masterpiece” by the Observer, and as “the greatest production ever made” in England by Iris Barry in the Daily Mail. “Mr. Hitchcock has done more for British pictures than a dozen acts of Parliament,” opined the Evening Standard.
The Bioscope addressed Hitchcock presciently in a special editorial: “Our first hope is that you will long continue to make films in this country, because the producing industry—which owes you a debt of gratitude—can ill afford to be without your talent.”
Another souvenir Hitchcock brought back from Germany was the playful tyranny in his persona; a tyranny that was very German, mingled with a playfulness that was very much his own.
At Elstree in the late 1920s emerge the first eyewitness accounts of a director who sometimes ruled the set like a führer, manipulating the people and the atmosphere the way he manipulated pieces of film—achieving darkness or light according to his mood.
To get what he wanted on film, he was capable of behaving like a dictator, or a circus clown. Like other tales of Hitchcock hubris, these stories have grown and been exaggerated over the years. The penchant for elaborate, sometimes borderline-ugly practical jokes was widespread during this era. Hitchcock was not the only practical joker at B.I.P. (or, later, Gaumont); the trend was industrywide. People say, for example, that whenever Monta Bell—an American who was “literary editor” of Chaplin’s A Woman in Paris before turning director—was on the lot, the madness was rife.
Sometimes Hitchcock’s “odd behavior” was simply good publicity. Teatime, for example, was a treasured afternoon break, and so it was fodder for the columnists when Hitchcock took to hurling crockery over his shoulder, signaling “Back to work!” after drinking his cuppa. “I always do it when I’m feeling good,” Hitchcock explained one time. “I like to get up onto a high rostrum with a camera, and tip the tray over. Or push cups over the edge of a platform. Or just open my hand and let the whole thing drop. Wouldn’t you?”
The first time he did it, Hitchcock told the press, one of his favorite crew members split his sides with laughter—a sure invitation to repeat performances. Soon he was expected to smash all his teacups. Such eccentricity woke people up, and made for an exclamation mark in an otherwise humdrum day. The crew relished it, which was sensible policy.
Hitchcock also hated uninvited visitors to the set, especially members of the general public on courtesy tours (ironic considering his later association with Universal Studios, packager of the most lucrative studio tour in film history). So, when such tours materialized, Hitchcock would switch to German, shouting curses and obscenities—all the more amusing when the visitors were priests accompanied by ecclesiastical students.
Most of his practical jokes were innocent: hosting formal dinners with all the food tinged with blue coloring, placing whoopee cushions under the behinds of stuffy guests, plying uptight people with strong drink and watching as they came unglued. Some were elaborate and expensive: tying quantities of kippers onto the bumpers of a victim’s fancy car, ordering a load of coal to be dumped on someone’s front doorsill.
But practical joking was also a matter of one-upmanship—a game Hitchcock was driven to win at all costs. Assistant cameraman Alfred Roome recalled how the director used to poke fun at his posh, beetle-size Austin-Healey, and one day requisitioned the car for a conference with floor manager Richard “Dickie” Beville. Both hefty men, Hitchcock and Beville squeezed inside the vehicle, pointedly annoying Roome, who felt his private vehicle ought to be off-limits. Roome went in search of a smoke pot, found one in storage, placed it underneath the Austin-Healey, and then lit the fuse. “You never saw two fat men get out of a car quicker,” recalled Roome. “Hitch never tried anything again on me. He respected you if you hit back. If you didn’t, he’d have another go.”
No question, some of his jokes had a bullying quality that disturbed people. Actors he didn’t like or considered “phony” were special targets for sarcasm or pranks. Hitchcock said defensively in a 1972 televised interview that he never meant to harm or denigrate anyone. But everyone knew his jokes were at their worst when a film wasn’t going right.
Oh, my son couldn’t be a murderer, Bruno’s mother (Marion Lorne) exclaims in Strangers on a Train; it must be one of his practical jokes. “Sometimes he goes a little too far,” she sighs.
People reflexively cite the case of Dickie Beville. Beville always seemed to suffer the worst, most humiliating Hitchcock persecution. One notorious time, Hitchcock bet Beville he couldn’t last a night in handcuffs. Before Hitchcock locked the cuffs, however, he tricked Beville into drinking coffee laced with a strong laxative. Even though there are wildly conflicting versions of this anecdote—the only consistent touch is the handcuffs—the story is widely accepted as gospel in English film annals. Poor Beville, it is said, spent a long diarrheic night, thanks to cruel Hitchcock.*
But many directors (not only Germans) enjoyed having court jesters on the set, and Alfred Roome, assistant cameraman on The Ring, insisted later that he knew “for a fact” that Beville and other underlings relished their immersion into “Hitchcockery.” Roome said Beville willingly served as dupe, and as the director’s beloved guinea pig he received bonuses and promotions for his suffering. Hitchcock considered him a friend; forty years on, ensconced at Universal in Hollywood, he sentimentally kept a small photo of Beville on his desk, amid his
important awards and celebrity photographs.
Alma only half tried to temper his jokes. At home she was his best audience, her only complaint an occasional exasperated “Oh, Hitch!” But his staunchest ally during the B.I.P. years, his reliable straight man, was cameraman Jack Cox, who loathed pomposity as much as Hitchcock. Cox was a storied character: happy-go-lucky, a protean drinker, a sharp dresser, a ladies’ man. Like Hitchcock he had a Cockney sense of mischief. They bantered ceaselessly on the set and conspired on many practical jokes, and when the worst, rottenest tricks were played, often there were only two people left laughing: Cox and Hitchcock.
Alma became pregnant in late 1927, and soon she was absenting herself more and more from the studio. A young woman—bright, attractive Renee Pargenter—was employed as the director’s new secretary and script girl. The Arnold brothers continued as Hitchcock’s art directors, while Emile de Ruelle supervised the editing of his pictures. Along with Cox, these people were the nucleus of the group that supplanted the Gainsborough team.
But Hitchcock and his staff weren’t in London to read the complimentary notices for The Ring. Amazingly, the director was already immersed in his fourth production of the year, away on the coast of Devon shooting exteriors for The Farmer’s Wife, a bucolic comedy about a widowed farmer sorting through local candidates for marriage. The Eden Phillpotts play had had a long run in 1924, and a popular 1928 revival. Eliot Stannard’s adaptation adhered closely to the play, so closely that Hitchcock never felt right in claiming it. “It was a routine job,” he told Peter Bogdanovich, “a stage play with lots of titles instead of dialogue.”
Alfred Hitchcock Page 14