That, to his credit, is how Hitchcock often described his “photographed plays.” But The Farmer’s Wife is much better than a routine job. Its nimble comedy, subtle camera work, and excellent acting make it the most unlikely and enjoyable of his silent films.
The trade papers took note of Hitchcock’s adventurous casting: Jameson Thomas, the lanky, laconic actor picked to play the hayseed farmer of the title, wasn’t associated with any of the stage versions. (In fact, the only member of the cast who played the same part on the stage was Maud Gill.) Lilian Hall-Davis once again played a sympathetic figure—a housemaid, the soul of caring, who steals her way into the widower’s heart. And Gordon Harker stole his scenes as Churdles Ash, the uncouth handyman.
The widower might be seen as a stand-in for the romantically bumbling Hitchcock, while the housemaid, who at one point declares, “There’s something magical in the married state,” might be considered an idealization of Mrs. Hitchcock—the perfect helpmate and model wife. Although the comedy sometimes borders on slapstick (a virgin spinster, whom the farmer chases around a table at a party, quivers as much as the gelatin mold she is carrying), the film is sweet and funny—an unabashed paean to true love and marriage.
What a triumphant year: Hitchcock directed four films in 1927, all of them successes.* With a showman’s flair, he and Alma mailed out their first holiday cards as “the Hitchcocks,” celebrating along with Christmas the first anniversary of their marriage. The card was designed as a small wooden puzzle: when assembled, it formed the increasingly familiar outlined profile of “Hitch.”
Yet it wasn’t necessarily great news when B.I.P. announced a new salary for their top director: seventeen thousand pounds annually, for twelve films over the next three years.
For one thing, the figure was an exaggeration. Young writer Sidney Gilliat recalled riding in a taxi late in 1927 with Hitchcock and J. A. Thorpe, a studio executive. Thorpe lowered his voice, warning Hitchcock that he’d better rein in the studio publicity or the tax bureau would try to collect on the inflated figure. Undoubtedly Hitchcock was making “very good money,” said Gilliat—“top money, [but] it wasn’t dizzy money.”
But the public vote of confidence gave Hitchcock a brief, rose-colored opportunity to sketch his ambitions for the future. Whenever he was flush, or his slate was momentarily blank, he dreamed of atypical Hitchcock projects—subjects that would offer him a radical departure, a broader canvas—the kind of grandiose ideas that entranced him in the abstract but eluded him in practice.
While B.I.P. was making its announcement, Hitchcock was envisioning various future projects, including “two epic films dealing with the Mercantile Marine and the English railways.” There was also loose talk of Hitchcock’s chronicling England’s general strike of 1926—a ten-day nationwide stoppage, generally regarded as a historic opportunity and dismal defeat for English labor—in a film that would depict “the fistfights between strikers and undergraduates, pickets, and all the authentic drama of the situation,” in his words.
Already in preproduction, according to B.I.P., was an experimental “film symphony” called “London,” which Hitchcock had written in collaboration with Walter Mycroft. This unusual project was said to be inspired by Walter Ruttmann’s dazzling Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City, made in 1927. But his would not be merely “a mechanical film,” according to the Bioscope: Hitchcock’s “London” would offer a heaping slice of humanity.
None of these experimental, populist, or otherwise out-of-the-ordinary Hitchcock pictures would ever be made. The director’s actual deal with B.I.P. included option clauses that hinged on his ability to churn out four B.I.P. productions a year, maintaining the staggering level of output he had managed in 1927. As fast as he was, Hitchcock couldn’t keep up that pace and hope to make the kind of films that called for the studio to risk more time and expense.
Other factors also conspired against him. Although B.I.P. had strengthened its ties with Europe, the resistance to English films was still entrenched there, and John Maxwell had just about given up hope of extracting significant revenue from America. Instead he increased his number of domestic circuits, and turned his concentration to the home market.
What Maxwell really wanted to do in the foreseeable future was to consolidate his English audience. His twelve-picture, three-year deal with Hitchcock was part of a general speedup, and a studio policy that called for more—and cheaper—films to justify its overhead. Photographing English plays and books, with English actors, was front-office conservatism that took no account of Hitchcock’s higher aspirations. And so the next several years at Elstree, from 1928 to 1932, would prove the busiest of Hitchcock’s career, but also at times the least personal.
One key to the studio’s accelerated production was Walter Mycroft, whom Hitchcock himself championed for hire at B.I.P. A short man with a hunched back, Mycroft quit the journalism profession in late 1927 and joined Elstree as the head of its story department. One of the founders of the Film Society, Mycroft had a reputation for seriousness and intelligence, though he was inexperienced as a scenario editor. It was Mycroft who came up with the inspiration for Hitchcock’s next project, which began life as nothing more than a title: Champagne.
Though he often insisted that he’d never tasted a drop of alcohol until he entered the film business, by now Hitchcock was extremely fond of champagne, as he was of spirits of all kinds. Champagne, brandy, rum, and wine (Saint Paul is quoted approvingly on wine in Shadow of a Doubt) flow like a river through Hitchcock films.
Champagne had already been spotlighted in The Ring, served at the wedding of One-Round Jack and the Girl; later, a glass of bubbly slowly fizzles—in a clever dissolve—when the marriage goes flat. Then, when things look especially bad for Jack in his final fight with the champion, a splash of champagne revives him.
Now Mycroft wanted an entire film on the subject. Hitchcock, after thinking it over, said yes, why not? It was just the kind of challenge he found hard to resist.
He and writer Eliot Stannard tried taking the idea in a meaningful direction. They concocted a serious-minded story “about a girl who worked at Reims [the French champagne capital] in the cellars and always watched the train go off carrying champagne. Then she eventually gravitated to the city and became a kind of whore and was put through the mill and eventually went back to her job, and then every time she saw champagne go out, she knew, ‘Well, that’s going to cause some trouble for somebody.’”
But John Maxwell had gone ahead and signed a homegrown star as big as any in England: Betty Balfour, a talented but sunshiny actress of the Mary Pickford variety. With Balfour playing the lead, the studio insisted upon a purely bubbly Champagne. Partly because of his friendship with Mycroft, partly because he had little choice under the new rules, Hitchcock agreed to a quick rewrite, remaking the solemn drama as a blithe comedy.
Too quick: even though the start of filming was delayed until late February, while Hitchcock and Stannard raced to weave something new out of whole cloth, “they didn’t really have a whole script” when the shooting started, according to assistant cameraman Alfred Roome. “They wrote it on the back of envelopes on the way to the studio. You never knew what was going to happen. It looked like it in the end. It meant nothing.”
Balfour played a Wall Street heiress fleeing to Paris aboard an ocean liner, along with her boyfriend (Jean Bradin). Trailing Balfour was Theo Van Alten, a mystery man hired by her rich father (Gordon Harker) to teach the spoiled young heiress a lesson. Instead of a thematic commentary on the pitfalls of real life, the result was a film filled with references to champagne that were merely cute and fleeting—though the opening and closing images, shot through a champagne glass, would become one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated effects.
“I was the one who had to focus through the bottom of the glass,” remembered assistant cameraman Roome. “Hitch had it made specially by a glass manufacturer who put a lens into the bottom of a giant champagne glass, so we
could shoot through it and get a clear picture of what was happening at the other end of the room. We all said it wouldn’t work. Most people said that of Hitch’s ideas, but they almost always did work.”
One thing Hitchcock salvaged from Champagne was a relationship with a young photographer named Michael Powell. Powell had apprenticed in film with Rex Ingram (who had his own studio in Nice) and Harry Lachman (a painterly director admired by the Hitchcocks). Hired by B.I.P. to take still photographs, Powell saw his job as an opportunity to closely observe the eminent director of The Lodger and The Ring.
According to Powell, Hitchcock was so obviously upset about the casting of Balfour that he refused to let him or anyone else shoot stills of her. (One day Powell overheard Hitchcock refer to Balfour as “a piece of suburban obscenity.”) Powell thought that was partly because Hitchcock had originally had his own leading lady in mind: a golden-haired actress named Anny Ondra, who’d made her name in Berlin cabarets and German and Czech films.
Whenever the studio’s previous still photographer had ventured onto the Hitchcock set and tried to snap a photo of the action, Powell recalled, Jack Cox would yell, “Throw the breakers!” and the lights would go out. Then, suddenly, the director “would stumble and kick over the tripod of the clumsy eight-by-ten stills camera, which went down with a crash. This had been going on for a month. Nobody knew what to do about it.”
Determined to succeed, Powell hefted a tripod and made “rather a noisy entrance” onto the stage. “It was a scene in a manager’s office. Betty Balfour was applying for a job. Everyone looked at me, including Hitch, who was sitting in his director’s chair twiddling his thumbs. He really was the fattest young man I had ever seen. He had a fresh, rosy complexion, his dark hair was sleeked back, and he was correctly dressed in a suit with a watch-chain across the waistcoat. He wore a soft hat. He observed me out of the corner of his piggy eyes sunk in fat cheeks. There was not much that Hitch missed with those piggy eyes.”
The novice didn’t get much encouragement from Hitchcock’s “loyal and tight little unit.” Twice, as the afternoon wore on, the director made a pretense of interrupting the proceedings and inviting the stills man to take his snaps. Twice the young photographer shook his head; the setup wasn’t right for his needs. Twice Hitchcock and Cox exchanged dark looks. Around teatime, Powell spotted some appealing action and asked for a chance to shoot a few stills. Cox glanced at Hitchcock, who nodded. Then, while setting up, Powell wondered if he might change the lighting, lower the arcs. People gasped at his audacity.
“Mr. Cox,” Hitchcock asked dryly, “do you mind if the stills man kills some of your lights?”
The sun arcs might be excellent for filming, Powell explained, but he didn’t need them for his static photography. Hitchcock nodded sleepily. Then Powell asked for some backlight and a softer filter. Wide eyes all around, and more raised eyebrows from Cox and Hitchcock. Powell then proceeded to group the actors, telling them to go through their rehearsed paces, but to freeze their movements when he called out. As they did so, he took one still, then another. “Could I have another, Mr. Hitchcock?” he kept asking.
“Very well, Mr. Powell,” said Hitchcock, who had been watching intently. (“He had known who I was all along,” Powell remembered. “I had underestimated him.”) When the day’s duty was done, the director heaved himself out of his chair and approached the young stills man. “Would you care to join Mr. Cox and myself in a beer, Mr. Powell?” Accompanied by Eliot Stannard, whom Hitchcock introduced to Powell as “the author of this dreadful film,” they went off to a pub by the railway station to drink their fill of beer.
Forty years later Hitchcock’s opinion of Champagne hadn’t mellowed. “I thought it was dreadful,” he often said of the Balfour film. But the luxury-liner comedy was diverting; the oceangoing scenes were useful rehearsals for later films; and the Paris nightclub scenes were invested with uncommon energy and zest. Champagne wasn’t a bad picture, really, just predictable—leaving a sour taste for its director, who thrived on surprise.
The director was done with Champagne by July 1928, just as the Hitchcocks were expecting their first child. When Mrs. Hitchcock went into labor on July 7, her husband suffered a panic attack that reflected less than favorably on his character (though his behavior wasn’t so peculiar for a young Englishman of his generation). He told the story on himself on occasion, but it was verified by his wife in a rare published account.
“I was having the baby at home, as most British women did in those days,” Alma recalled in 1964. “I was expected to deliver early in the morning, but as the hours wore on without anything happening, Hitch found the apartment closing in on him. Suddenly he bolted out the door and disappeared until late afternoon. By the time he returned, I had a daughter for him and he had an exquisite bracelet for me. He had walked and walked, he said, and finally found himself in front of a jewelry store on Bond Street.”
When Hitchcock returned to Cromwell Road, he was contrite. “I’d been wanting to get you a nice bracelet for some time,” the director (whose films are full of such significant trifles) said. Alma recalled, “It was actually a peace offering to make up for deserting me at a crucial time.”
The baby was a girl; the parents christened her Patricia Alma Hitchcock. “Pat” would be the family’s only child. Although Mrs. Hitchcock still took occasional film jobs (she had just finished a script for After the Verdict, another Elstree production for the German director Henrik Galeen), the new mother increasingly stayed home. Her husband must have feared losing her: years hence, the memory of this time would trigger alarm bells whenever leading ladies deserted Hitchcock films for husbands, and several Hitchcock films—Rebecca, Lifeboat, Strangers on a Train, and I Confess—would concoct crises out of ill-scheduled pregnancies or babies.
July was also the month that B.I.P. announced the cast for The Manxman, a drama concerning the complications of out-of-wedlock motherhood. A well-known novel by Sir Hall Caine, The Manxman was about a Manx village fisherman and a boyhood friend, who has since become a distinguished lawyer in line to become a “deemster” (a judge on the Isle of Man). The fisherman falls in love with a tavernkeeper’s daughter, but the lawyer also has a secret love affair with the young woman, which leads to an illegitimate birth.
Although the novel is set on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea (where Manx was the native dialect), most of the location filming was done in narrow-streeted cliffside towns along the Cornish coast, with only a brief excursion to the island. Hitchcock counted on the gorgeous windswept locations to help compensate for the overwrought (“banal,” he told Truffaut) plot. Carl Brisson (the fisherman), Malcolm Keen (the lawyer), and Anny Ondra (the girl) play the characters whose fates cross so destructively.
Cast and crew were out of London in early September but back by the twenty-seventh, when Warner Bros. staged the premiere of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer and other singing-and-talking short subjects, including a trailer for a forthcoming all-dialogue picture with all the artists making brief speeches “in such a natural manner that one forgot one was listening to a film,” according to one contemporary account. (The trailer was rated a highlight on par with the Jolson film.) Although “talkies” had made their debut in the United States in 1927, the English were still skeptical about changing over to the new format. As late as August 1928, B.I.P. chairman John Maxwell was widely quoted dismissing talking pictures as a “fad.”
Hitchcock was undoubtedly at the Piccadilly Theatre event, among the packed audience of government figures and show business celebrities whose storms of applause drowned out the words coming from the screen. What was England’s foremost director thinking? What was his reaction? He left no record.
As it happens, Hitchcock’s very next picture would be a talkie. But even if he had quit in 1928, he would still be remembered for stellar achievements. The Lodger and The Ring are his most widely heralded silent films. But contemporary critics, assessing the eight other films Hitchcock mounted betwee
n 1925 and 1928, have found merit in the least of them, describing overtones of Griffith and von Stroheim in The Pleasure Garden, calling The Farmer’s Wife among his “most underrated work,” and praising even the problematic Easy Virtue as “inventive and cinematic.”
By the end of 1928, the boy wonder was no longer boyish in the least; he was going on thirty, married, and a first-time father. He had come of age professionally as well, directing nine silent pictures since 1924. He would direct forty-four talking pictures over the next five decades.
The poetry of the medium, Hitchcock often told interviewers, suffered with the coming of sound. Too many subsequent films, he often complained, were composed not of pictures of an unfolding story, but of pictures of people talking. And he never lost his preference for pictures over sound.
In nearly every Hitchcock film to come, the most celebrated sequences—the remembered highlights—might as well be silent. If there was sound, it was music, natural noise, or screaming. (He loathed “cued music” that “merely confirms what you can see.”) If there was dialogue, it was unimportant—even unintelligible.
The attempted assassination in Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Norman Lloyd toppling from the heights of the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur. The championship tennis match, followed by the fairgrounds sequence, climaxed by the crash of a carousel in Strangers on a Train. Edith Evanson, clearing the trunk in Rope, quietly observed by a camera eye that pays no heed to anyone else. Cary Grant dodging a crop duster in North by Northwest. Janet Leigh in the shower. The staircase murder in Frenzy.
To many directors who learned their craft in that era, silent pictures always stood as a symbol of a lost, innocent time. Many directors lamented the coming of sound. Acting and scripts in silent pictures were more “elemental,” in Hitchcock’s words—“no nuances or dialogue to be concerned with.” There was always a relaxed, playful atmosphere on the set, with a three-piece orchestra (violin, cello, and piano) to enhance the mood. Everything was simpler, easier, more fun.
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