Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  It had taken the director fully nine months to concoct and shoot this Hitchcock original, time that B.I.P. would have preferred he invest in adapting an established play. Postproduction also dragged on while Hitchcock tried to figure out how to fill out the film with as much second-unit footage as possible.

  Rich and Strange was finally released in December 1931, to a critical response that could be summed up in one word: “interesting.” Hitchcock—often his own harshest critic—later said he wasn’t sure it was even all that interesting.

  It was an only intermittently engaging film that never quite transcended its flaws. The stars, Hitchcock later complained, had negligible chemistry. Joan Barry was vivacious, but Kendall came off as flat; later, the director (uncharitably) blamed Kendall for being a “fairly obvious homosexual,” in John Russell Taylor’s words, who lacked any sexual charge with women.

  Some of the most intriguing scenes were cut. Hitchcock told François Truffaut about a sequence he shot in a tank, in which Henry Kendall is swimming with Joan Barry, and she stands with her legs astride, daring him to swim between her legs. He dives, “and when he is about to pass between her legs, she suddenly locks his head between her legs and you see the bubble rising from his mouth. Finally she releases him, and as he comes up, gasping for air, he sputters out, ‘You almost killed me that time,’ and she answers, ‘Wouldn’t that have been a beautiful death?’”

  Deleted—for reasons of length or censorship. And Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich about “an amusing sequence” at the end of the film. “Their cargo ship is wrecked and abandoned in the South China Sea, and they are rescued by some looters on a Chinese junk. Then, after it’s all over, they meet me in the lounge. This is my most devastating appearance in a picture. They tell their story and I say, ‘No, I don’t think it’ll make a movie.’ And it didn’t.”

  This “amusing sequence,” Hitchcock’s flash appearance, had its origins in Dale Collins’s novel, where the “little fat man” the couple meet at the end of the story is actually the author. The cameo became another eleventh-hour deletion; falling prey to the mysterious jinx that surrounded Rich and Strange, the director left his own face on the cutting-room floor.

  Contemporary critics have sparked a movement to reevaluate the film. Donald Spoto labeled Rich and Strange a fascinating “encoded autobiography,” while British film historian Roy Armes has hailed it as a “major work” that underlines “the complexity of Hitchcock’s vision of his fellow men.”

  But Hitchcock encoded everything with elements of autobiography, and compared to later, classic films that learned from its lessons, Rich and Strange looks pinched and lackluster.

  Walter Mycroft had to be obeyed, deceived, or defied—or maybe, as only Hitchcock could, all three combined. By 1931, Mycroft was widely detested as a tinpot dictator, according to contract writer Val Guest.

  One day the head of production decreed a repainting of the Elstree lavatories. Afterward, these words were found scratched onto the newly painted wall of the men’s room: MYCROFT IS A SHIT. People always suspected the culprit was Hitchcock, but years later he swore to Guest that it wasn’t him or any of his confederates. (“Not that we didn’t agree with the message,” Hitchcock added.)

  As Rich and Strange was being edited, Mycroft ordered Hitchcock to start work on a new project. He and Rodney Ackland, a young playwright, were assigned to adapt John Van Druten’s London Wall, a white-collar love story that had been a West End success. When Hitchcock showed apparent interest in the change-of-pace material, Mycroft decided to take his insubordinate employee down a further notch. He shuffled London Wall off to another B.I.P. director, Thomas Bentley (who filmed the Van Druten play as After Office Hours), and reassigned Hitchcock to Number Seventeen.

  “There is also the possibility,” noted Frank Launder, a B.I.P. contract writer (and later the cowriter of The Lady Vanishes), “that Hitch preferred Number Seventeen and merely said he wanted to make After Office Hours in order to fool Mycroft into giving him Number Seventeen.”

  The J. Jefferson Farjeon play was more in the Hitchcock vein, at least on the surface. A comic thriller set in an abandoned house with “No. 17” stamped over the front door, the play, though generally drubbed by critics, had proved to be one of the miracle hits of the 1925 season. Number Seventeen had spurred several revivals, a series of related novels, and, like The Skin Game, a European silent-film version, directed by Geza Von Bolvary in Germany in 1928.

  The thin plot followed a series of mysterious figures who enter No. 17 at cross-purposes. One of the leads is a Cockney named Ben, a shamelessly hammy character played onstage and even in the German silent by Leon M. Lion, whom Hitchcock had suffered as his intermediary with John Galsworthy. If the play wasn’t a bitter pill to Hitchcock, the detested Lion was. As producer and star of the original stage production, though, Lion was so identified with the play and role that he came umbilically attached to the project. Hitchcock thought Lion an “awful old man.” He claimed in later interviews that he had no special affection for the play, either.

  But then again, maybe that was the appeal for Hitchcock—subverting Leon M. Lion and Walter Mycroft. Now he launched a scheme for “teasing the bosses,” according to writer Rodney Ackland, who also switched over to Number Seventeen. Hitchcock, Ackland recalled, deliberately set out to turn the popular Farjeon play into “a burlesque of all the thrillers of which it was a pretty good sample—and do it so subtly that nobody at Elstree would realize the subject was being guyed.”

  All the coincidences and contrivances of the original, Hitchcock saw, could be wildly exaggerated. A dim-witted heroine would become literally dumb: a mute. And “as the climax of a thriller was invariably a chase (generally between a car and a train, at this period),” recalled Ackland, “Number Seventeen’s climax must be a chase-to-end-all-chases—its details so preposterous that excitement would give way to gales of laughter.”

  The “hilarious” script conferences retreated to Cromwell Road, “the atmosphere of which was considerably more stimulating than that of the studio,” Ackland remembered. Evening sessions usually began with a round of the Hitchcocks’ favorite cocktail, which seemed to change from film to film. For Number Seventeen it was the delicious white lady, a concoction of gin, egg whites, light cream, and superfine sugar. Day or night, white lady-inspired ideas for how to tweak the clichés arose “moment to moment,” Ackland recalled.

  Considering the dismal bind he was in at Elstree, it’s no wonder that Hitchcock began to proclaim that all of the really hard work and most of the genuine fun of making pictures was in the writing—which, for him, optimally took place at home, with companionable writers and his beloved wife. No wonder Hitchcock began to adopt the attitude, exaggerated in his many interviews, that once the script was done, the directing was a chore, even a bore.

  The three Hitchcocks stretched out the hilarity for several months, before their new script had to be handed in for filming in the winter of 1931–32. Besides Lion—the only actor carried over from the original cast—the ensemble included Anne Grey (The Girl), and Hitchcock veterans John Stuart (The Detective) and Donald Calthrop (playing yet another shady character).

  Hitchcock gave Lion his mugging close-ups, but no real chance to shine; likewise he immersed the play in a froth of exaggerated special effects and hyperkinetic camera work. The play’s well-known opening—the introduction to the characters and the mysterious house—Hitchcock turned into a Grand Guignol satire, with silly, creepy music, lurid shadows, and the camera lunging around and racing up stairwells to freeze on terrified expressions.

  The ending of the film was the biggest change from the stage. The three Hitchcocks devised a wild sequence with a runaway train chased by detectives in a hijacked bus, ending with the train smashing into a waiting cross-Channel ferry. Hitchcock was an acknowledged master of miniatures, and he sold the idea to Mycroft on the theory that he could stage it all cheaply with models and figurines. But some people think he deli
berately staged the wild crescendo so it simply looked cheap.

  The director was fed up with the studio, and determined to burn his bridges. Bryan Langley, Jack Cox’s co-cameraman, recalled that the budget was badly strained, and the director walked around griping that he was making good films “in spite of the management.” With Number Seventeen, he simply tore up the play and tossed it into the air like confetti. Hitchcock was right in admitting, years later, that the result was “little better than a quota quickie.” Although a minority of modern-day critics find it an exhilarating parody (“a sophisticated deconstruction of the mechanics of the thriller,” wrote Charles Barr), most rank Hitchcock’s last film for B.I.P. as among the least—a sour shrug of the shoulders from the director, and one huge practical joke on management.

  Rich and Strange was still new to theaters and Number Seventeen was as yet unreleased in March 1932, when, to the surprise of many, B.I.P. announced that Hitchcock would supervise a “number of pictures” for the studio in 1933. “It is intended,” according to B.I.P. publicity, “that these pictures will be made by new young directors, who will thus be enabled to develop their talent under the guidance and control of our most skilled craftsmen.”

  Superficially a promotion, the supervisory post was in reality a last-ditch effort by management to bring Hitchcock to heel, and extract a few extra films carrying his magical name. For Hitchcock, it offered one final opportunity to prove himself a company man.

  Hitchcock tapped Benn Levy, the writer of the sound version of Blackmail, to direct the first project, based on an H. A. Vachell play, a crime drama called Lord Camber’s Ladies. The film would have the distinction of starring the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier (“in my opinion, the best actor anywhere,” Hitchcock told Truffaut), along with Gertrude Lawrence as his mysteriously poisoned wife. Hitchcock was expected to guide and assist Levy’s directing debut.

  Hitchcock and du Maurier were longtime friends and rival practical jokers; the director had once, famously, stuffed a dray horse into du Maurier’s dressing room at the St. James Theatre. But Lord Camber’s Ladies was a mutual low point in their careers, and they outdid themselves with fool pranks. “It was a wonder that the picture was ever completed at all,” wrote the novelist Daphne du Maurier, the actor’s daughter, “for hardly a moment would pass without some faked telegram arriving, some bogus message being delivered, some supposed telephone bell ringing, until the practical jokers were haggard and worn with their tremendous efforts.”

  Levy felt upstaged by the practical jokers, and reacted obstinately to Hitchcock’s suggestions. The two men bickered throughout the filming in the summer of 1932, and afterward didn’t speak to each other again for years. “So my handsome gesture in offering him the direction,” Hitchcock told Truffaut, “blew up in my face.”

  Hitchcock briefly nurtured two other projects for the studio. One was an ambitious, yearlong street-life film offered to John Van Druten, but when Van Druten mysteriously pulled out of the directing, and Lord Camber’s Ladies fizzled, Hitchcock was finished at British International Pictures. Walter Mycrof terminated his contract, and suddenly England’s most acclaimed, most famous film director found himself unemployed.

  In the summer of 1932, earlier than has been reported, Hitchcock was already dreaming of America.

  Actress Alice Joyce, who had appeared in The Passionate Adventure, had a brother named Frank Joyce, a Kansas City ex-vaudevillian who had made a killing in hostelries in New York and Florida before moving to Hollywood to manage his sister’s financial affairs. The other Hollywood actress in that 1924 film, Marjorie Daw, got divorced and married Myron Selznick shortly after filming. Frank Joyce and Myron Selznick then formed the Joyce-Selznick Agency, one of the first talent agencies to focus on motion picture clientele.

  After luring Ruth Chatterton, William Powell, and Kay Francis away from Paramount in the early 1930s, and then auctioning them to Warner Bros., the Joyce-Selznick Agency rocketed to prominence; before long they represented Hollywood’s most glamorous and well-paid personalities. Myron Selznick flitted in and out of London, where the agency kept a branch office, run by Harry Ham, a native Canadian who had once been an actor in Islington films. Aided by Ham, Selznick courted Hitchcock, and the English director, despondent after the low point of producing Lord Camber’s Ladies, started to listen.

  Hitchcock didn’t actually have an agent, a publicist, or any staff between productions, other than his wife and a continuing assistant who also served as his secretary. He had a business manager, J. G. Saunders, who advised him on his contracts, investments, and business dealings. British deals were relatively straightforward compared to Hollywood contracts, and Hitchcock wasn’t immediately convinced that he needed representation by Joyce-Selznick. But he allowed the agency to float his name with U.S. producers.

  The independent producer Sam Goldwyn, and Carl Laemmle Jr., the head of Universal, were the first to declare interest. Some studios, Hitchcock liked to say, were Cartiers, while others were more like Woolworths. He was “much more keen to go with” Goldwyn—a first-class producer who already had a reputation for combining entertainment with artistic values—than a Woolworth-type studio that “went in for what I call creaking door pictures and monster movies.” But Laemmle was the more aggressive party, and Joyce-Selznick encouraged his offer. Laemmle was proud of importing foreign directors to America, and he had a special interest in Germany, where the Laemmle family had its roots. Hitchcock’s experience in Anglo-German production counted with Laemmle.

  When Myron Selznick cabled that Laemmle wished to discuss specific terms, Hitchcock replied that the lowest salary he could feel comfortable with was $1,750 a week for a guaranteed eight weeks on one picture, plus round-trip transportation. What he really wanted was $2,500 a week for twenty weeks and two pictures. A two-picture commitment, Hitchcock felt, would allow him to establish a solid footing in America. The first could be a studio project, while the second might be parlayed into a Hitchcock original.

  But this was still wishful thinking in 1932. Hitchcock’s timing was unfortunate. Hollywood, which had passed through the early years of the Depression virtually unscathed, was now headed into a terrible slump. The salary Hitchcock was asking would have put him among the industry’s top-paid directors, and the Englishman’s films did not yet have the box-office track record in America to justify the financial risk to Universal.

  The head of Universal thought it over and wrote the Joyce-Selznick Agency that his plans had changed since first discussing Hitchcock, but he would “certainly keep him in mind for the future.” Prophetic words: the first Hollywood studio to woo Hitchcock would be where he ended up, thirty years later, during the last phase of his career.

  From bad to worse: Hitchcock tried teaming up with the enterprising Hungarian-born Alexander Korda—not yet “Sir” Alexander—who could be found in 1931 at Gaumont. Hitchcock signed a contract with the independent producer, who was trying to whip together an English version of a German picture with the working title “Wings over the Jungle.” They spent nearly a year making plans—even posing for publicity photographs—without succeeding. “It was not my fault,” Hitchcock recalled. “Nor could Korda exactly be blamed. It was just one of those things.” The project later evolved into Sanders of the River (1935), which Hitchcock had nothing to do with, except “some of the preparatory work.”

  Hitchcock was then approached by Tom Arnold, a well-known stage impresario who was making his first foray into motion pictures. Arnold hired Hitchcock to direct Waltzes from Vienna, based on a sugary play about the romantic lives of composers Johann Strauss and his son Johann Jr.

  It was a delightful play—and Hitchcock had been idle for too long. Others might have seen it as a desperate move, but not him. “Nothing to do with conceit,” he told François Truffaut. “It was merely an inner conviction that I was a filmmaker. I don’t ever remember saying to myself, ‘You’re finished; your career is at its lowest ebb.’ And yet outwardly, to other p
eople I was.”

  Waltzes from Vienna was going to be shot at Islington, where Arnold was renting studio space from Gainsborough. For any number of reasons, it was an awkward homecoming.

  For one, Hitchcock did not get along with the film’s predetermined star, Jessie Matthews, England’s musical comedy queen, cast as the pastry cook with whom Johann Jr. falls madly in love. He should have gotten along splendidly with her: Matthews routinely played the lead in musicals of the type he relished, and she knew all the Cockney jokes and slang he loved—indeed, she had spoken with a Cockney accent until elocution converted her.

  But Matthews had buried her Cockney past beneath a glossy facade, and didn’t share Hitchcock’s sense of humor—about herself, or the film. The director never got past the gaffe of trying, at the very first reading, to convince the self-important star to affect a more ironic interpretation. Hitchcock “was then just an imperious young man who knew nothing about musicals,” according to Matthews. “I felt unnerved when he tried to get me to adopt a mincing operetta style. He was out of his depth and he showed that he knew it by ordering me around.”

  The “imperious young man”—who together with Alma adapted Guy Bolton’s play—thought the material cried out for a sophisticated approach. “Instead of the romantic, rather serious story of the play,” recalled Esmond Knight, the only member of the stage cast to turn up in the film (as Strauss Jr.), Hitchcock tried to convert “the whole thing into a light comedy, and his ideas for many of the sequences were extremely funny—on paper.”

  It didn’t help that the leading lady fought him tooth and nail. The Hitchcock means of “taking the mickey out of an actor during rehearsal,” in Knight’s words, didn’t work on Matthews. “He used to call me ‘the Quota Queen’ and send me up mercilessly,” the actress recalled. Matthews said she could never give her best during a take because she was “always anticipating some ghastly practical joke” the director was about to play on her.