Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  But Hitchcock loved to wave his magic wand over insoluble problems; throughout his career he gulled studios by consigning worries to the back burner while plowing ahead on his own terms.

  In the helter-skelter tradition of English film, which he would carry on for the rest of his career, even in the stricter confines of Hollywood, Hitchcock shot the prologue with the second unit—and with John Longden, the only principal required—before the script was even finished. If the police rigmarole seems overdone from today’s viewpoint, it held an inherent fascination for audiences of the time, and would have served a symmetrical purpose if Hitchcock had been allowed his original ending. Shot without sound, the prologue stayed silent—“a compendium of the art of the silent film,” in the words of British film historian Tom Ryall.

  Partly because Hitchcock often started with a second unit before the script was completed, there could be a surprising amount of tinkering during filming, for a director who prided himself on careful planning. Another young man behind the scenes of Blackmail was Freddie Young, destined to become the illustrious cinematographer of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Young was delegated by Hitchcock to create a minor montage, and he recalled instructions as exacting as they were changeable.

  Nowadays, each shot of a montage is photographed separately; then the sequence is folded together easily on a digital editing system. In the silent era, all the dissolves had to be created inside the camera. Before starting one had to know precisely how many feet of film to expose for each image, and the exact order of the images. “During filming it was often necessary to wind the film back or forward in the camera,” Young explained, “and every time you did that you ran the risk of scratching it in the gate. If only one thing went wrong it would ruin the whole lot and you’d have to start all over again.”

  Hitchcock handed Young one page of the Blackmail script, “indicating—I forget the exact details—a shot of feet walking, followed by thunderclouds, a train, horses galloping.” Young dutifully went off to create the prescribed sequence. “When I’d finished,” recalled Young in his autobiography, “I showed it to him in the viewing room, and he said, ‘That’s fine, Freddie, but I’ve changed my mind. I’d like you to start with the train, then go to the feet and the horses’ hooves, and finish with the clouds.’” Thus he had to start again from scratch.

  Major and minor scenes of Blackmail were filmed in just such a fashion, shot by laborious shot, during February and March. Act One of the film climaxed with an especially bold sequence, in which Alice fends off the artist-seducer, finally stabbing him to death. It was a highlight carried over from the play, which Hitchcock restaged as pure cinema—pieces of film orchestrated into a series of viscerally thrilling chords.

  In the scene Alice is quarreling with her detective boyfriend. She sneaks off for what is intended as a platonic tryst with the artist, and their date ends with him inviting Alice up to his flat to see his paintings. As they enter his apartment building, they are observed by the seedy Tracy (Donald Calthrop), lurking to collect a debt.

  Upstairs in the flat, Alice is coaxed into putting on a tutu worn by the artist’s models. She dances around like a flirtatious firefly, but when the artist steals a kiss, she stops cold; she decides to leave, but, still playfully, he hides her street clothing. Then he grabs her.

  Lightness turns to dark. The struggle grows serious. They stumble around violently and slip behind a curtain. It’s hard to tell what is happening: Hitchcock was always forcing his audiences to participate in the danger, to fill in gaps with their imagination.

  Wrestling shadows. Writhing curtains. Alice’s hand reaches out from behind the drapery, just her hand—groping frantically—until her fingers finally close on a large table knife. The knife is pulled behind the curtain. Intense struggle, and then, after a beat, all movement ceases. The artist’s arm pierces the curtain, lifelessly outstretched.

  All of it was done very simply—a counterpoint to the British Museum climax, a more complicated, expensive, and decidedly Germanic highlight. Because the museum wouldn’t allow a full cast and crew to occupy its premises (and the budget couldn’t indulge the location work), the Hitchcock magic required the talents of the studio’s effects wizards—and the Schüfftan process. According to Hitchcock, the studio knew “nothing” about the process, and officials “might have raised objections, so I did all of this without their knowledge.”

  As with The Ring, the famous backdrops were photographed first, and then the actors went through their paces separately; what the audience saw was a composite. Years hence, the director still reveled in the accomplishment, describing the technical challenges to a T. “You have a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees,” Hitchcock recalled, “and in it you reflect a full picture of the British Museum. I had some photos taken with half-hour exposures—nine of them taken in various rooms in the museum—and we made them into transparencies so that we could backlight them. That is more luminous than a flat photograph. It was like a big lantern slide, about twelve by fourteen. And then I scraped the silvering away in the mirror only in the portions where I wanted the man to be seen running, and those portions we built on the stage. For example, one room was the Egyptian room—there were glass cases in there. All we built were the door frames from one room to another. We even had a man looking into a case, and he wasn’t looking into anything on the stage. I did nine shots like this.”

  Meticulous staging and special effects sequences always took an inordinate amount of time, but Hitchcock seemed almost to dawdle during the filming. John Maxwell dropped by more than once to check the slow progress of Blackmail. Hitchcock and his complicit cameraman were ready for the B.I.P. boss. They arranged a dummy camera and lights on a nearby stage, on the pretense that they were photographing “a letter for an insert,” in the director’s words. Whenever Maxwell materialized, they started shooting the insert. The studio head grew bored and left.

  By late March the weather had improved, and they could venture outdoors. One night, a screen trade columnist watched the filming at the Lyons Corner House, a well-known West End restaurant. Police tried to keep “the homegoing theater crowds” away, but the Saturday night throng refused to budge, watching Hitchcock shoot exteriors for the first scene between Alice and Frank, when they quarrel at dinner. The public was invited to merge with extras to form the crowd in the film, and it was “early on Sunday morning [before] Hitchcock and Jack Cox were satisfied with the results,” the columnist wrote.

  As far as anyone knew, Blackmail was still officially a silent picture.

  In early April came the news that B.I.P. had completed temporary sound-stages. The larger permanent facilities would not be ready until midsummer, but John Maxwell felt confident enough to announce an ambitious program of fifteen to twenty talking pictures for 1928–29. And the first of these, according to the trade papers, would be Blackmail—a newly scheduled “talkie version,” with dialogue inserts already being hastily written by Hitchcock and Benn Levy.

  Levy was a young Oxford-educated playwright who had just returned from Hollywood, and writing talkies there. (He would shortly marry the well-known American actress Constance Cummings.) Foreseeing the need for dialogue, Hitchcock had begun meeting with Levy in the spring, early enough that Levy’s pages were ready by mid-April.

  Maxwell only authorized the addition of “limited” sound to scenes already photographed. Yet, anticipating this cost-conscious approach, Hitchcock had shot key scenes with parts in mind that he could substitute out, and earmarked sections leading into or out of the silent scenes, “where sound could be tacked on afterward,” in his words. According to British film historian Charles Barr, who compared both versions of Blackmail, “while shooting the silent version of the film sanctioned by Maxwell, Hitchcock was also shooting separate takes of each shot in order to prepare a negative for the sound version of the film.”

  “Since I suspected the producers might change their minds, and might eventually want an all-sound picture,”
Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “I worked it out that way.”

  Anny Ondra was the most delicate issue. Hitchcock adored her; by all accounts, everyone did. Besides being adorable, she was funny, intelligent, down-to-earth. The director preferred a leading lady he could flirt with, and the ones that flirted back fared best with him. Ondra was a flirt, but also a genuine friend. (Later in life Hitchcock would visit her whenever he passed through Germany.) Accent or no accent, he was going to stick with Ondra.

  Ondra spoke with a thick Czech pronunciation, however, which wasn’t right for an actress playing the daughter of a typically English newsagent. Hitchcock had had a potential solution in mind all along, but first he went to the bother of arranging a sound test for Ondra. The test would demonstrate the barrier of her accent—so that she would understand his dilemma.

  The test footage, undated, survives in British Film Institute archives, and transcripts have been reprinted in books and documentaries about Hitchcock. He is seen standing next to Ondra, reassuring her, prodding her to speak, while also teasing her mercilessly.

  HITCHCOCK: Now, Miss Ondra, we are going to do a sound test. Isn’t that what you wanted? Now come right over here.

  ONDRA: I don’t know what to say. I’m so nervous.

  HITCHCOCK: Have you been a good girl?

  ONDRA (laughing): Oh, no.

  HITCHCOCK: No? Have you slept with men?

  ONDRA: No!

  HITCHCOCK: No?!

  ONDRA: Oh, Hitch, you make me so embarrassed! (giggling helplessly)

  HITCHCOCK: Now come over here, and stand still in your place, or it won’t come out right, as the girl said to the soldier. (Anny Ondra cracks up completely)

  HITCHCOCK (grinning): Cut!

  Lewd repartee was business as usual for Hitchcock during camera tests, according to those who worked with him. He liked to shout out at actresses, “Have you ever slept with anyone?”—a most unusual question in those days. Besides actually being keen to know whom his leading ladies were sleeping with, Hitchcock relished the chance to elicit a spontaneous reaction, look, or expression—a peek behind the professional mask.

  Ondra’s voice test, along with Hitchcock’s “home movies” of Blackmail, confirm that she and the director had a warm, playful chemistry. There is footage of Hitchcock lifting up her dress and grabbing at her underwear, of her shooing him away through gusts of laughter. The director’s leading men were treated much the same way. Actor Henry Kendall, for example, recalled that during his test for Rich and Strange Hitchcock “talked to me from behind the camera and would in the ordinary way have been asking me about my experience and for details of my career, but this time the conversation took a very Rabelaisian turn, and he kept me in fits of laughter so that I could hardly do more than stand in front of the camera and shake.”

  The test convinced Ondra, and voilà!—Hitchcock brought out his Alice-in-reserve: Joan Barry, a young British actress whose diction had been refined by study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Ondra would mouth her lines while Barry stood outside the framing of the camera and gave simultaneous voice to Alice’s dialogue. (Never mind that Barry’s upper-class accent was totally inappropriate for the character.) Hitchcock’s solution meant more pressure all around—all three had to rehearse the exact timing of the scenes, every night after filming, in order to be ready for the next day.

  The director’s loyalty to Ondra carried the day, though her best scenes, as it turned out, are the silent ones without the distracting “voice double”—those that take place after the killing, when she is traumatized. But Hitchcock’s fondness for Ondra didn’t keep him from reducing her (as he had another favorite actress, Lilian Hall-Davis) to tears, until she gave him the suffering quality he wanted.

  If there is one film, one character, one actress at the heart of Hitchcock’s work, it is Anny Ondra in Blackmail. Hitchcock’s male heroes generally do all right in the end, except for the guilt and shame. His women must kill or die, be humiliated, or endure a frustrating romance with an impotent hero on the run. One way or another the beautiful women always suffered.

  Blackmail moved into B.I.P.’s new temporary soundstage: a padded house on the Elstree grounds.* The walls were cushioned with blankets. Draped felt was sandwiched under the corrugated-iron roof. The sound cameras were motor driven, and the motors made constant noise, so the cameras had to be encased in telephone-booth-like kiosks on wheels. The camera couldn’t track or dolly without wheeling the entire booth around the room. Camera movement—already a Hitchcock trademark—basically ground to a halt.

  The standard carbon arc lamps produced an incessant hum and splutter, so the cameramen began experimenting with five- and ten-kilowatt incandescents. This worked out well for illumination purposes, but created a near-suffocating heat inside the stage area—“like being in a bakehouse,” as Freddie Young recalled. “In between calls, the actors lay down on the floor and napped as best they could in the sweltering heat.”

  The camera booth, a smaller confined space, was hellish—an even more punishing sweatbox. It was covered in front by a thick glass panel that had to be wiped clean constantly with alcohol. The crew even grabbed their tea breaks inside. “The operator was locked inside,” recalled Young, who was assistant cameraman on another B.I.P. talkie (which actually preceded Blackmail in the temporary sound facility), “and there he’d stay until the end of the take, when he’d stagger out sweating and gasping for air.”

  “My first impression was of a largish room packed to capacity with a vast amount of junk,” recalled Arthur Graham, a B.I.P. cameraman who dropped by to watch. “There were flats everywhere, cables snaking all over the place and a floor covered with a jungle of lamp stands.”

  Hitchcock, most of the time, was stationed in a separate recording booth that was every bit as hot and suffocating, wearing outsize earphones to monitor the audio quality.

  “Utter chaos,” thought cameraman Graham. Under the circumstances the director had to radiate confidence enough for everybody, but Hitchcock never lacked for confidence. It should have been embossed on his business card: Authority and Confidence. While every other British director was half paralyzed by the new equipment, Hitchcock methodically added not only key dialogue to the script, but incidental music and sound effects as well.

  The effects specialists lined up on the sidelines, letting forth screams and laughter, making doors slam, horns honk, and birds sing—filling the film with noise.

  The director sat Cyril Ritchard down at the piano and had him sing a snippet of a popular song just before his stabbing death. In another scene, where John Longden nonchalantly paced around a room, searching for clues, the director suggested that the actor whistle “Sonny Boy” from The Jazz Singer—the first American talkie, which was still the rage in British theaters. Longden thought that the cheekiest Hitchcock touch of all.

  Hitchcock was quick to see sound as another means of editing, which could link images in novel fashion—as when he cut from the outstretched hand of a tramp Alice spies on the street to the scream of a landlady discovering the stiff, protruding limb of the dead artist.

  He even deliberately distorted sound. The most audacious example comes after the murder, when Alice sits, trancelike, at the breakfast table with her parents, her secret weighing on her mind. Just behind them, a neighbor woman, standing in the family’s news shop, loudly discusses the murder. She complains about the very “un-British” method of stabbing someone with a knife. “Now I would have used a brick maybe, but I’d never use a knife. A knife is a terrible thing. A knife is so messy and dreadful. …” Over and over the offending word is repeated, magnified, exaggerated, becoming, in Hitchcock’s words, “a confusion of vague noises.”

  Hitchcock intercut this hilarious “knife” recitative with close shots of Alice, her eyes darting back and forth guiltily. The tension builds as Alice’s father asks for a slice of bread. Alice’s hand edges slowly toward the bread knife, until the word “knife” is heard one last sh
arply accusing time. She gives a start, and hurls the blade from the table.

  There wasn’t the budget to reconvene extras or rebuild entire sets in the padded building. For the Corner House supper shared by Frank and Alice at the beginning of the story, Hitchcock had planned ahead, and now restricted the new setup to one table, with the camera focused on the two principals. Now and then Frank steps busily out of the frame, and Hitchcock cuts to shots of other diners from the silent version. The effects specialists furnished the dining-room clatter.

  Their sly dialogue reminds the audience they are watching a film. Hitchcock’s characters go to films; they talk about films; and in Rope, they even advertise another Hitchcock film. It’s another one of the director’s Chinese-box qualities.

  In this scene Frank has invited Alice to the premiere of a new crime film (not unlike the one the audience is watching). When Frank mentions Scotland Yard, however, Alice stifles a yawn. “If it weren’t for Edgar Wallace,* no one would have ever heard of it [the Yard],” she says. Frank insists that the picture should be amusing. “However, they’re bound to get all the details wrong,” Frank chuckles—a gibe at Hitchcock’s own craft! While others were deep-thinking sound, Hitchcock was having fun.

  Sound was Hitchcock’s brand new toy. Chortling over his own cleverness, he handed his personal 16 mm camera to Ronald Neame, and guided him through the making of a backstage “home movie” about the filming of Blackmail. With his penchant for teasing the boundaries between artifice and reality, Hitchcock positioned Neame behind the curtain during the scene where Alice stabs the artist, urging him to get plenty of footage of the property man lathering blood on the knife.

  All England sensed the historic moment. The duke and duchess of York (later queen to George VI, and then Queen Mother) visited the Blackmail soundstage in May. The duchess, known to be a motion picture fan, wanted to witness the making of a talkie. “I remember taking her into one of those camera booths,” Hitchcock recalled, “and it was an awful crush, since they were very tiny.” (She squeezed in with him, the cameraman, and the focus boy—“It was almost a matter of committing lèse-majesté”) Then the duchess visited the sound booth, where Hitchcock encouraged the royal visitor to do what, traditionally, royalty never did—doff her hat—and try on the earphones. That was just what she did.