Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Some actors “laughed and entered into the fun,” Knight admitted, but not him—like Matthews, Knight felt “continually on the qui vive for some elaborate leg pull at my expense, which automatically produced a feeling of nervousness.” One of the laughers was Fay Compton, whom Hitchcock had adored onstage in Mary Rose and engaged to portray the Countess. He also relied upon on the good-natured personality of Edmund Gwenn, playing Strauss Sr.

  Those who didn’t cooperate ran the familiar risk of being minimized by Hitchcock’s camera work. Jessie Matthews, pointedly, ended up seeming “a not too important part of the film’s design,” as the critic for the Times later pointed out. Film scholar Charles Barr has described one such scene in the Countess’s house, which Hitchcock cleverly staged in order to push “the possibilities of the long take”—while also abbreviating the screen time of its leading lady.

  “His Excellency (her husband) gets out of bed, and the camera tracks back with him along the corridor as he reads some provocative love lyrics written by her, and goes to her room to confront her. From off screen left, behind a closed door, she replies that ‘I wrote these verses to the river Danube,’ thus mollifying him, though she will in fact be giving the verses to Schani [Strauss Jr.]. His valet enters from off screen right to call him for his bath, her maid enters from the left, and, after some by-play, the camera pans right with His Excellency as he goes across the corridor into his bathroom.

  “After a moment, the valet emerges, and we pan back left with him as he joins the maid. This develops into a protracted close-shot embrace between the two servants, while they act as relay for a conversation between husband and wife, both of whom remain from now on in their respective off screen quarters. She calls out a question to the maid, who repeats it at close range to the valet, who calls it out to the husband, and so on, between the kisses. This take lasts two minutes, fifty seconds.”

  When Waltzes from Vienna was released in February 1934, prevailing opinion saw the latest Hitchcock film as an abysmal failure. Today it’s among the rarest of Hitchcock films, not even available on video. Too bad: it’s a deft, glittering imitation of a German light musical, chuckling more winningly than Number Seventeen at its own conventions.

  And Hitchcock’s Islington homecoming was awkward for another reason: hat in hand, he encountered an old friend, Michael Balcon, who had just been placed in charge of Gaumont. Gaumont was a new studio under the control of the banker brothers Maurice and Isidore Ostrer, who had acquired a holding interest in Gainsborough and C. M. Woolf’s rental firm. Although Gaumont took over Islington, the enterprise was headquartered at Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush, a facility dating from 1914, but recently upgraded into a state-of-the-art complex. The new main building, which opened in 1931, was a white, flat-roofed monolith almost ninety feet high. The studio boasted five stages, a processing laboratory, three theaters, a hall for orchestra recording, and a six-hundred-seat restaurant.

  Balcon was visiting the set of Waltzes from Vienna, ostensibly to say hello to Glen MacWilliams, the frequent cameraman of Jessie Matthews vehicles, when MacWilliams reminded him who was directing and brought the two men together. Hitchcock shook Balcon’s hand uncomfortably, but as the two made small talk they gradually warmed up to each other. Balcon asked his old friend what he had next on his lineup. “Nothing yet,” replied Hitchcock mildly.

  Hitchcock told Balcon about a script he had begun to develop while still at B.I.P., in collaboration with Blackmail playwright Charles Bennett. The script was based on the Bulldog Drummond stories by Herman Cyril McNeile (a.k.a. “Sapper”). B.I.P. owned the rights to the novel, its many sequels, and all of Sapper’s characters. Their initial treatment had Drummond, a debonair ex-war hero turned sleuth, stumbling onto an international spy ring while vacationing in Switzerland. The spies, in order to enforce Drummond’s silence, kidnap his baby. Hence their working title: “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby.”

  Their scenario had rung budget alarms with John Maxwell, who had killed the project. Balcon was intrigued. Could Hitchcock retrieve the rights? The director thought so, and promptly bought back “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby” for £250—then resold it to Balcon at twice that sum. “I was so ashamed of the one hundred per cent profit,” Hitchcock admitted later, “that I had the sculptor Jacob Epstein do a bust of Balcon with the money.”*

  Balcon had given him his first directing job; now he rescued him from embarrassing freelancing. Hitchcock was eternally grateful. “It’s to the credit of Michael Balcon that he originally started me as a director,” he told François Truffaut, “and later gave me a second chance.”

  Buoyed with optimism, the director signed a multipicture contract and took up new offices at Lime Grove. For Gaumont, from 1933 to 1938, he would have freer rein than ever before. Balcon still had approval over stories, casting, and budgets, yet now their relationship was reshaped by Hitchcock’s reputation as England’s most important director. Balcon still made the vital business decisions, but creatively he left Hitchcock alone.

  * The weenie stage of the process was less necessary if Hitchcock intended to follow a produced play strictly, as was the case with Blackmail and several films he made for B.I.P.

  * Powell had also underrated the chase at the end of The Lodger, and the Albert Hall finale of The Ring.

  * The biggest sacrifice to the extended shooting schedule was Phyllis Konstam, who was playing the gossiping neighbor (“Knife! Knife! Knife!”). Konstam had to fulfill a previous stage engagement, and Phyllis Monkman stepped into her part, refilming the scenes with sound. To simplify the billing, neither actress was credited. In ads for the talkie Blackmail, as Charles Barr has pointed out, it is the “silent” Konstam who is shown.

  * Prolific British author Edgar Wallace, known as the “king of the thriller” for his suspenseful books and plays, often involving Scotland Yard.

  * Kitty’s dialogue was written, incidentally, by Benn Levy—probably where Hitchcock got the idea to hire him.

  * One foreign star Hitchcock never worked with again was Anny Ondra. She returned to Germany shortly after Blackmail; she married boxer Max Schmeling and later retired from film.

  * A publicity photo in the Picturegoer showed the director tending bar, though sadly the cameo was dropped from the final film, when Hitchcock had second thoughts about intruding on the famous play.

  * In his account of Hitchcock’s visit, O’Casey refers to himself in the third person.

  * Murder! is often cited as based on a stage play—but, as Charles Barr points out in English Hitchcock, if it was in fact written for the theater, it was never produced on stage.

  * Although this was a ghosted article, it was “retyped from dictation” and has the ring of Hitchcock’s own speech.

  * The New York-born, Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein was vilified early in his career as a threat to the English art establishment, though in his lifetime he would come to be considered a modern master. Commissioning an Epstein bust of Balcon was a gesture eloquent in its generosity and as a statement of Hitchcock’s artistic sensibility. Later, Hitchcock would also commission Epstein to create a sculpture of his daughter, Pat.

  SIX

  1933–1937

  Enter Charles Bennett, the latest, some might say the greatest, of the third Hitchcocks. The director may have been the master of suspense, Bennett liked to boast, but suspense was his middle name.

  Born in Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex in the same month and year as Hitchcock, Bennett was the son of actress Lillian Langrishe Bennett. Once an actor himself—he was charming and handsome in the leading-man mold—Bennett turned playwright in 1927. The Return was his first produced play, Blackmail his second.

  Bennett had had little to do with Hitchcock’s film of Blackmail. But the two did meet during the production, and they struck up a friendship. Rakish, jovial, and sharp-witted, Bennett was boon company: a talker and a drinker. In the early 1930s, when the West End playhouses began to “tumble like ninepins,” in Bennett’s words, he j
oined the enemy: motion pictures.

  Under contract at B.I.P. at the same time as Hitchcock, Bennett mainly wrote low-budget thrillers, often for director George King. His forte, like Michael Morton and Eliot Stannard before him, was organizing the cause and effect of suspense, the undergirding and sequencing of the drama. Once Hitchcock committed himself to a film project, this was the step of the process he plunged into first: laying out the continuity, usually in one of the prose treatments that he found so useful. Adding context, refining the characters, and creating a proper script came later.

  Hitchcock often said that playwrights or novelists, with their structural expertise, delivered the best first strike on film scripts—especially when it came to Hitchcock originals. Professional scenarists familiar with screen conventions were more useful, he felt, after the treatment or first draft. Hitchcock had a derisive, if affectionate, term for the professionals: “stooge writers.” Bennett was both: a produced playwright but, by 1933, also a “stooge” seasoned in film. Hitchcock would come to call him “the world’s finest stooge.”

  Their relationship would be dictated, nevertheless, by Hitchcock’s formidable reputation, and by a subtle change in his attitude toward scriptwriting, which first manifested itself at Gaumont. Until now the director had shared writing credit for most of his films, but in the future Hitchcock would write only in a pinch, only crucial scenes, and he would never again take a script credit. Directing, he had grown to believe, took precedence over the writing. While he was forced to negotiate with producers throughout most of his career, he would always insist on dominating the writers he worked with.

  “Without in any way detracting from the importance of the contribution made by the writer of either basic story material or screenplay,” Hitchcock explained in an unusual deposition for the Directors Guild of America in 1967, offered to aid in a battle with the Writers Guild over possessory credits, “the writing is but a single element in the production of a film. It is the director who bears the primary responsibility to produce the integrated film and to edit it in such a manner that the various elements are perfectly combined.

  “This has sometimes been referred to as ‘creative magic,’ but in every day terms it is not magic but tremendously hard work and effort on the part of the director which creates the film.”

  Just as Jack the Ripper inspired the many Hitchcock films featuring psychotic murderers, World War I—and its historical doppelgänger, World War II—loomed over his political films.

  In January of the same year that Hitchcock joined Gaumont, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany; a month later the Reichstag burned down mysteriously, paving the way for the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers. The world seemed to be igniting with hate and violence. The feeling extended even to America, where, the same month as the Reichstag fire, a crazed man tried to assassinate President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a speech in Miami, missing his target but killing the mayor of Chicago.

  The Man Who Knew Too Much was written in the shadow of these events.

  After Hitchcock moved to Lime Grove, he and Charles Bennett began revising “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby,” their first order of business being to remove Bulldog Drummond (for Sapper’s fictional hero still belonged to B.I.P.) and the baby.*

  Hitchcock didn’t like to drive, so he hitched a ride to the studio with Bennett most mornings. They always began with small talk, Bennett recalled; sometimes they were joined by the studio barber, who gave Hitchcock a shave and cut his increasingly sparse hair—“so there really wasn’t much that went on before lunch at all,” in Bennett’s words. At 12:30 P.M., the two would adjourn to the Mayflower Hotel for lunch, after which they’d return to the studio, where Hitchcock usually stole a nap, according to Bennett. When the director woke up they’d talk some more; around five, they’d repair to Cromwell Road.

  Bennett liked to make it sound as though it were all idle conversation, with the real writing left up to him. But for Hitchcock collaboration was always a seduction, its goal a productive marriage. Hitchcock set the tone with idle talk, which lowered his writers’ defenses. He lured them with digressions, gossip, tasteless jokes. He would offer up preposterous ideas for Bennett to dismiss, and resist perfectly sensible ideas himself. He studied each new idea endlessly, and from all sides, as though it were a polyhedron. He insisted that his writers “fill in the tapestry.”

  Bennett boiled with ideas. And he fought for them, too, which the young, feisty Hitchcock liked—up to a point. “Hitch was, always, so exasperated [by Bennett] that he was stimulated to action—or counteraction as the case might be,” recalled story editor Angus MacPhail. “Bang him, bash him, vilify him, and up he [Bennett] comes smiling.”

  Everybody at the studio seemed to boil with ideas. Hitchcock thrived on interaction with writers—the more, the merrier. He told and retold the stories of his films to anyone who would listen, filing away their reactions for future reference. Now at Lime Grove he was reunited with his old friends Ivor Montagu and Angus MacPhail; their involvement would become integral to the style and quality of the Hitchcock films over the next several years.

  At B.I.P. he had sorely missed the sophistication and constructive criticism of Montagu, who had spent time in Hollywood after leaving Gainsborough, working at Paramount with the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Their projects never quite jelled, however, and Montagu had returned to England, disgusted with the film business and intent on staying out of it. Balcon coaxed him over to Gaumont as Hitchcock’s supervisory producer.

  MacPhail was still the head of Michael Balcon’s story department, and Hitchcock trusted his expertise. Although MacPhail’s “filmic knowledge was encyclopedic and his memory so good that he could find a parallel in almost any suggested story situation,” according to writer T. E. B. Clarke, “this made him, as a writer, rather too prone to rely on film clichés” to be a good screenwriter; “but it equipped him to be a marvelous scenario editor.” Personally, Hitchcock and MacPhail were even more the kindred spirits; MacPhail, too, was a lover of lowbrow music hall and high-minded theater, and an incorrigible, egregious punster. He was also among the few to humble the great Hitchcock, reminding him once a year in his Christmas card of the inane title cards of Downhill.

  Although the heavy lifting was done by Hitchcock and Bennett at the studio, some of the best ideas for The Man Who Knew Too Much surfaced at night at Cromwell Road, where the director presided over an informal film society of friends and associates. Regularly taking part in these evening sessions, besides Bennett, Montagu, and MacPhail, was their hostess, Mrs. Hitchcock. Others stopped by. Dinner was served; drinks flowed.

  The nights at Cromwell Road were deliberately playful, “a feast of fancy and dialectic,” in Montagu’s words, “a mixture of composing crosswords and solving them.” The underlying goal might be serious, but the dedicated clowning oiled the gears of creativity. Hitchcock told lewd anecdotes, and played his favorite musical recordings (the director was in a Hungarian phase in the early 1930s, Bennett recalled, and forced everyone to listen to “Play, Gypsy, Play” ad infinitum).* People sang along with the recordings, or got up and danced.

  The group dynamic made for scripts that were more decidedly topical, more freewheeling and densely packed with allusion, than the films Hitchcock had made at Islington or B.I.P. “The unfolding story was elaborated with suggestions from all of us,” Montagu remembered. “Everything was always welcome, if not always agreed. Like anyone else, Hitch would sometimes reject an idea when it was put forward, sleep on it, and return with it next morning as his own; which by then it undoubtedly was, since it could only be incorporated when adjusted in his own head to make it fit.”

  If there was an overriding philosophy, it was symbolized by a little book called Plotto that Hitchcock flourished—a book boasting a compendium of master plots with interchangeable conflicts and situations. Never mind that sometimes the inserts were implausible. “I’m not concerned with plausibility,” Hitchcock l
iked to boast. “That’s the easiest part, so why bother?” Or, as he put it on another occasion, “Must a picture be logical, when life is not?”

  The daily newspapers were a constant source of inspiration. Although Hitchcock shied away from taking political stands himself, his circle was thoroughly socialist and antifascist, even including Communists like Montagu. (Montagu and Sidney Bernstein were among the earliest organizers of the British Committee for Victims of German Fascism.) The influence of this group affected the tough-edged world view of his Gaumont films.

  Newspapers were good not only for headlines, but as a steady supply of tidbits in all categories. “We would search for ideas in books, in plays, odd scenes in the street. Not straight copying, usually, but ideas to prompt ideas,” Montagu recalled.

  With Bennett in charge of the main plot line, and the Cromwell Road friends chipping in, “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby” evolved into The Man Who Knew Too Much—an action-filled thriller that was broader in scope and more politically charged than any previous Hitchcock film.

  The story mirrored the fragile state of the world, with Hitchcock capitalizing, in small and large ways, on English fears of a resurgent Germany. The title character—the distraught father of the kidnapped child—is forced into the role of sleuth and hero when he intercepts a coded message, which reveals the planned assassination of a foreign dignitary on British soil. (In one pointed scene, a representative of the Home Office reminds the father of the consequences of inaction—mentioning June 1914 Sarajevo.)

  The intercepted message is the film’s Macguffin—the storytelling device that was MacPhail’s mantra, if not his actual invention. Hitchcock, who adopted the Macguffin gleefully for this and other films, gave the standard explanation to François Truffaut: “There are two men,” he related, “sitting in a train going to Scotland and one man says to the other, ‘Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?’ ‘Oh,’ says the other, ‘that’s a Macguffin.’ ‘Well,’ says the first man, ‘what’s a Macguffin?’ The other answers, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘But,’ says the first man, ‘there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘Well,’ says the other, ‘then that’s no Macguffin.’”