Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  The stage at Elstree was packed on the day they shot that scene, the director recalled proudly years later. Hitchcock couldn’t find the precise recording he wanted—so, off-camera, a small orchestra played “If You’re Irish, Come into the Parlor,” while a sound man sang the song with a clothespin attached to his nose for tinny effect. A group of people marched and chanted off to one side of the set, simulating the funeral procession, while an effects man beat on a sofa with two canes to evoke the gunshots. As the actors spoke their lines, the camera slowly dollied in to a close shot of the terror-stricken Johnny. On screen, it worked seamlessly—a bravura stunt for the young director, and a tryout for similar camerawork in the future.

  On the strength of stellar acting and such dazzling flourishes, Juno and the Paycock was warmly received upon its release in the spring of 1930. James Agate in the Tatler declared that the O’Casey adaptation “appears to me to be very nearly a masterpiece. Bravo, Mr. Hitchcock!” Today, however, the reputation of Hitchcock’s first “100% talking picture” is uneven: it’s intense, rewarding in parts, but talky. The director himself, modestly, later said he was “kind of rather ashamed when it got terrific notices.”

  As for the embittered O’Casey, he always insisted he never actually saw the Hitchcock film—though that didn’t stop him from taking potshots at the director for the rest of his life. Although he didn’t reciprocate publicly, Hitchcock’s reminiscences of O’Casey were “not untinged with malice,” according to John Russell Taylor, and the prickly playwright helped to inspire “the character of the old bum prophesying the imminent end of the world in The Birds.”

  And yet Hitchcock never lost affection for his version of Juno and the Paycock. “Were you bored with it?” Peter Bogdanovich asked him, referring to the obligation to be so faithful to O’Casey’s play. “No,” Hitchcock replied quickly to the baited question, “because the characters were so interesting.”

  Nineteen twenty-nine should have gone down as a banner year for the man who had steered the first British talkie to fruition. But instead it was a year of roller-coaster twists and turns.

  Hitchcock did his best to stay in favor with the management. He wasn’t above directing a ten-minute short in late 1929 called An Elastic Affair, which showcased two young aspirants who had just won acting scholarships and a tryout with the studio.

  Nor, as Christmas neared, did he mind helping with Elstree Calling, a buffet film of variety acts that was being produced by Adrian Brunel. At least the gesture allowed him to satisfy the front-office clamor for a Hitchcock musical while adding a third production credit for 1929—not unimportant at a studio suddenly obsessed with cost efficiency.

  Walter Mycroft, the head of the story department, and contract writer Val Valentine had collaborated with Brunel in stitching together the semblance of a story line spotlighting the best-known routines of vaudeville and radio personalities. The cast included radio star Tommy Handley, music hall star Lily Morris, musical comedy stars Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert, and a sprinkling of legitimate actors familiar to Hitchcock, including John Longden, Jameson Thomas, Donald Calthrop, and Gordon Harker.

  Elstree Calling had been low-budgeted for a twelve-day schedule, starting a week before Christmas. At first Hitchcock guided only the unmusical framing segments, with Harker and Hannah Jones playing a couple who are trying in vain to tune in their primitive television set. They are reduced to hearing all about shows, secondhand, from neighbors.

  Brunel was reaching for a bright, satirical quality, but when John Maxwell saw the rough assembly in the screening room, he found Elstree Calling a crashing bore. Brunel insisted that some of the humor was subtle, that it would all come into focus during the final editing. “Every shot should be funny by itself,” Maxwell declared, ordering retakes. Brunel tried to win over Mycroft. They met in secrecy, with Mycroft muttering paranoiacally that he couldn’t appear to side with Brunel, or he would be reported to Maxwell by studio spies. There were many, Hitchcock included, who had begun to think Mycroft was the chief spy.

  In the end, Mycroft sided with Maxwell; Brunel was relieved of his responsibilities, and the studio ordered retakes and reediting. Hitchcock was ordered back to work, fixing up the segments of other directors. He was obliged to reshoot Brunel’s burlesque of The Taming of the Shrew, with Calthrop and Anna May Wong, and the comic sketch about a jealous husband (Jameson Thomas) who breaks into a flat and shoots the wrong lovers (not far from “And There Was No Rainbow,” Hitchcock’s early short story for Henley’s).

  Hitchcock claimed he worked on the picture for all of a day, but the retakes must have made it longer. Although he was a fan of radio and music hall, Hitchcock didn’t feel it was his film, and it certainly wasn’t counted when his final feature, Family Plot, was advertised as his fifty-third. When François Truffaut asked about Elstree Calling, Hitchcock discouraged any discussion. “Of no interest whatever.”

  Walter Mycroft also helped the Hitchcocks adapt Enter Sir John—the last time he served as any sort of “third Hitchcock.” By 1930, Mycroft had ascended to lofty heights: he was not just the head of the story department, but the de facto head of production, answering only to the top boss—John Maxwell. Mycroft’s importance was eclipsed only by his self-importance, and he was growingly despised as an arbitrary manager and a despot. He became the object of vicious practical jokes concocted by Hitchcock and others on the lot. “If you break Mycroft’s back,” Hitchcock cracked nastily, alluding to Mycroft’s abnormal curvature, “you’ll find chocolate inside, poisoned.”

  Enter Sir John owed its premise to a novel cowritten by Clemence Dane (the nom de plume of Winifred Ashton) and Helen Simpson. Dane was an actress turned playwright, best known for her 1921 stage hit A Bill of Divorcement; Simpson was a versatile writer from Sydney, Australia, convent- and Oxford-educated. Although Simpson’s most famous novel, Boomerang, was still in the future, she was already regarded as a first-rate novelist of romantic history, psychological crime, and mysteries (sometimes in collaboration with Dane). Hitchcock would work with Simpson later on Sabotage, and in 1949 he would film her novel Under Capricorn.

  Enter Sir John concerned the discovery of a dead woman in the flat of a young actress, who is caught standing over the victim, staring in shock, holding a bloodied poker. Both victim and apparent murderess are members of a traveling troupe, yet no one else is suspected of the crime because of the telling circumstances. A jury convicts the woman, who insists she cannot remember exactly what transpired. A date is set for her execution. Puzzled by the case, and feeling guilty because he once rejected the defendant for his repertory ensemble, one of the jurors—Sir John, a Ben Greet-type knight of the theater—turns amateur sleuth, engaging two former troupe members to help him find the real killer.

  Adapting a book always allowed Hitchcock more room for his quirks and conceits. Producers inevitably saw and remembered the plays, while they could be counted on never to have read the novels. Hitchcock thus got out of the business of adapting plays in England in the early 1930s, as soon as he could, in favor of transforming novels like Enter Sir John—whose most Hitchcockian scenes, not surprisingly, aren’t in the book.

  The first of Hitchcock’s enhancements takes place early in the film, just after the dead body has been discovered and the circumstances of the murder established. The police embark on a prolonged excursion to the backstage of a theater, where they attempt to interrogate other actors in the troupe as they prepare for their entrances. The actors evince split personalities: they show one face while being questioned by police, then break off in midsentence and race onstage in character. As the play is seen and overheard from the wings, and the stage audience roars in delight, the policemen are left scratching their heads.

  The film’s memorable third act isn’t in the book either. In the novel, Sir John’s detective efforts lead him to suspect Handel Fane, a onetime member of the ensemble, who has murdered accidentally to hide the fact that he is a “half-caste.”

>   First, Hitchcock tinkered with Fane himself. The book’s Fane is a trapeze artist who doubles as a music hall clown. Hitchcock had just finished a film chock-full of music hall, though, so rather than repeating himself he switched to another pet venue—a circus. He found inspiration in Vander Barbette, a Texas-born trapeze artist who toured the world, wearing women’s clothing in an act that ended with the revelation that he was a man. Man Ray had photographed Barbette, and Jean Cocteau showcased him in Blood of a Poet, putting him in a Chanel gown and having him applaud a card game that ends in a suicide.

  In the last act of Hitchcock’s film, Fane is tracked down at the circus, one of those arenas the director relished for their resonance with the public. Fane is risking his life nightly, performing in drag in a high-wire act. (In the cost-cutting spirit of B.I.P., the circus is a small, humble one, compared to the lavish fairgrounds of The Ring.)

  But the film’s crescendo is anything but humble. In the book, Fane escapes being apprehended, leaving his ultimate fate up in the air. But in Hitchcock’s hand the story takes a more sensational turn. After Fane realizes he’s been found out—that he’s fated for arrest—he takes his place high above the sawdust for the evening performance. In a long, silent film-style sequence, backed by pulsing circus music, the camera swings along with the trapeze. Multiple images are superimposed for a vertiginous effect. Suddenly Fane stops his routine; then, as though in a trance, he slowly takes a rope and knots it around his neck. The crowd and orchestra are silenced—and then screams erupt as Fane plunges from the heights.

  The death of a villain in a Hitchcock film is always confessional, and this was one of Hitchcock’s most thrilling—done with an expressiveness worthy of the early German masters.

  Filming on Murder! (as Enter Sir John was retitled) was originally set to begin in January 1930, but it had to be delayed for a few months as B.I.P. prepared to add the film to its newest moneymaking scheme. The only foreign market John Maxwell hadn’t given up on was Germany, and now he persuaded Hitchcock to direct a German-language version of Murder! concurrent with his English production. The studio was feverishly producing such foreign-language “bilinguals,” as they were called, and so Hitchcock squeezed in a whirlwind trip to Berlin to meet with representatives of Sudfilm, B.I.P.’s new German partner. There he consulted on the casting of German leads, and met with Herbert Juttke (a London-born writer active in Berlin as a mainstream and expressionist scenarist) and Georg C. Klaren, Juttke’s frequent writing partner.

  Juttke and Klaren made an attempt to “Germanize” the script. “They proposed many changes that I turned down,” Hitchcock said later. “As it happened, I was wrong.”

  The British cast was already chosen. Herbert Marshall, who had established himself as a suave lead of both English and American stage hits, was set to make his screen debut in a talkie as Sir John, while the director chose Norah Baring, heretofore best-known as the star of Anthony Asquith’s Cottage on Dartmoor (1928), for Diana, the framed murderess. Edward Chapman from Juno and the Paycock, and Phyllis Konstam, who’d been deleted from the sound version of Blackmail, were cast as the Markhams, the colorful couple who assist Sir John’s investigation. Miles Mander and Donald Calthrop also returned to work for Hitchcock as shady characters.

  Every director of the era prided himself on launching stars. Hitchcock extended his pride to what he liked to call the “incidental cast,” finding unusual secondary players—often stage actors—for eccentric or villainous parts. After all, the leads “are simple and immediately apparent characters with whom the audience quickly identifies itself,” he reasoned in one interview. “The incidental cast, the character actors, are the complicated personalities. I choose unfamiliar performers for these subsidiary roles so as to mystify the audience as well as the hero and heroine.”

  The prime example in Murder! was Esmé Percy, who had studied in Brussels at the Conservatoire and in Paris under Sarah Bernhardt, and who was closely associated with George Bernard Shaw’s plays. For this, his screen debut, Percy would bring piquancy as well as a sympathetic quality to Handel Fane, the cross-dresser shamed by his half-caste heritage—Hitchcock’s first sketch of a character later realized as Norman Bates in Psycho.

  The film had a split personality when it finally went before the cameras in March. The German cast of Sir John greift ein! (the tentative German title) had to wait on the sidelines, ready to leap in and hit their marks after the English actors had executed scenes for Murder! The German Sir John was Alfred Abel, notably a leading player of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; Olga Tschechowa, a Moscow Arts Theater veteran who had been striking in F. W. Murnau’s Schloss Vogelod, was Norah Baring’s counterpart. Wherever possible, English actors who spoke passable German were employed for small parts. Alone among the English principals, only Miles Mander appeared in both versions, as the murder victim’s husband.

  One of the German-speaking Englishmen recruited for Sir John greift ein! was Charles Landstone, a London theater administrator and playwright, who’d been spotted in a minor role in a German-language play at the Arts Theater Club. The studio casting department rang his agent, asking if he would consider moonlighting in a bilingual. Feeling uncertain—he wasn’t a full-time actor—Landstone headed over to Elstree, where, after rattling off a few German phrases, he was engaged as one of the jury. Landstone’s memoir offers a window onto the filming, and a portrait of the young Hitchcock ruling the set.

  The jury scene was “full of serious discussion,” wrote Landstone, “and each man had to give his views—Norah Baring was being tried on a murder charge—and Hitchcock had the idea of planting each juryman with a solo shot that displayed his personality. The Englishman in my part was Kenneth Kove, quite a well-known feature actor of the day and a member of the famous Aldwych farce team. I watched him carefully as he went on the set, and thought that if I could copy him I might get through. When it came to my turn I did all the things that he had done, and I was through without being sacked as some of the others had been. I saw Hitchcock give me a knowing grin; he hadn’t been fooled, but he didn’t care. For the twelve days that the shooting of the jury scene lasted I followed the same procedure, carefully aping everything that Kove did. Nobody seemed to notice, not even Kove.”

  Hitchcock’s behavior on the set sometimes seemed daft to Landstone. The director “fooled about” ceaselessly between shots, he remembered, and took every opportunity to exploit the bilingual situation for laughs. “He had a clapper-boy named Harold, and he cast him in the role of the King’s Jester. His cry would be ‘Haro-old!’, and when Harold dutifully came to heel he would be sent off on one fool’s errand after the other. He made ‘Haro-old’ learn off by heart a sentence in German which he told him to go and repeat to the young actress who was Norah Baring’s counterpart. I forget what it was exactly, but it was the sort of remark that one might expect in the most permissive of today’s scripts. In 1930 it was outrageous. ‘Haro-old’ dutifully repeated it; the girl was startled out of her life and ‘Haro-old’ stammered: ‘ ’E told me to say it.’ The actress, catching sight of Hitchcock roaring his head off, wagged her finger at him in admonition.”

  Yet there was a method to Hitchcock’s madness, Landstone realized. The director transparently disliked Alfred Abel, a stuffy man who didn’t share his sense of humor. Abel refused, for example, to wear the same tweeds-and-raincoat costume as the English star, Herbert Marshall, because it didn’t suit his idea of formality. And he refused to follow Hitchcock’s directions for the scene where a landlady’s children climb over Sir John, who is trying to relax in bed while sipping his morning cup of tea. It is a memorable interlude in Murder! (experimenting with overlapping sound, Hitchcock has a baby bawling throughout), but it had to be restaged for Abel and Sir John greift ein! “Things that were funny to the Anglo-Saxon mind were not at all funny to Germans,” Hitchcock said later.

  Abel finally stepped into the crosshairs when he objected to Marshall’s special lounge chair. No such privilege h
ad been accorded the German lead. “Hitchcock didn’t trouble to explain,” wrote Landstone, “that Marshall was a 1914–18 war casualty and had a wooden leg, but simply said that provision would be made for the German to rest between the shots. He gave his orders to Haro-old, and after lunch a magnificent-looking armchair, far more luxurious than Marshall’s, appeared at the side of the set. On it was Abel’s name, and the latter thanked Hitchcock profusely. Noticing, however, the director’s puckish grin, the German went over to the chair and touched it gingerly with his finger, whereupon the whole contraption collapsed to the ground. Hitchcock’s roar of laughter filled the studio.”

  The double filming dragged on well into May; then the double editing took the bulk of the summer. Hitchcock admitted later that he overreached on this project. “Although I spoke German, I didn’t know cadences of speech,” he explained, “and I was lost on the set. The actors sounded colloquial to me, but I really couldn’t understand what they were saying.” Not only was he experimenting with bilingual filmmaking, he had encouraged a rare degree of improvisation from the actors. “I would explain the meaning of the scene to the actors and suggest that they make up their own dialogue,” he recalled. “The result wasn’t good; there was too much faltering.”

  In the end the film suffered a mixed fate. The colloquial title Sir John greift ein! did not translate well in Germany, and even the name of the accused murderess had to be changed there from Diana to Mary—which became the German title. The secret of Fane’s motive was also too English, so in the bilingual, Fane murders not because of his “half-caste” blood, but to conceal the fact that he’s a prisoner on the run. The tampering was so drastic that the bilingual was barely recognizable as a Hitchcock film, and Mary achieved only a limited release in Germany.

  Murder! did better when it was shown in London in the fall of 1930 (though it was “too sophisticated for the provinces,” Hitchcock told Truffaut). The new Hitchcock film was hailed by the London critics as a sharp and entertaining advance in talkies. The director’s camera, rooted to one spot for most of Blackmail, had been freed up, and it was now darting and whirling like a dervish. The aural experimentation, too, was incessant: actors overlapped their lines; there were interior monologues and constant background noise; music blared throughout.