The Macguffin in any Hitchcock film represented “the unknown plot objective which you did not need to choose until the story planning was complete,” as Montagu put it. The final elucidation of Mr. Memory, just before he dies in The 39 Steps: that’s the Macguffin. What is secreted in the wine bottle in Notorious? The Macguffin. Other spy pictures had inadvertently absurd plot goals; in a Hitchcock film, whether the Macguffin turns out to be an assassination or a clandestine alliance (echoing World War I) or, often enough, a super-secret weapon, by the time it’s clarified in the film it has become an absurdity—and deliberately beside the point.
Yet who hatched the first Macguffin for The Man Who Knew Too Much, or devised any particular element of his Gaumont films, is maddeningly elusive to pinpoint, considering—at Cromwell Road, as later in Hollywood—the complicated give-and-take of Hitchcock’s creative process.
Hitchcock had set a previous climax in Albert Hall; now he thought of setting the assassination attempt in that massive building, beloved by Londoners for its concerts, charity balls, exhibitions—even, in bygone days, boxing. Someone suggested that the targeted foreign official might be attending the London Symphony. Someone else suggested that gunshots might be drowned out by drums, or a cymbal crash. They were all devotees of Punch; Hitchcock collected bound volumes of the humor magazine, and several times recruited writers from its staff. Now one of the group evoked “The One-Note Man” by H. M. Bateman, from a 1921 back issue—a panel cartoon depicting a musician whose job consisted of preparing all day to play a single horn note in the evening orchestra program.
That was enough for Hitchcock to roar to life—envisioning a sequence built around an original choral piece climaxing with cymbal crashes from the one-note musician. He gleefully planned a nail-biting sequence that would crosscut between the lurking assassin, the foreign dignitary, the mother of the kidnap victim (positioned to spot the crime and cry warning), and the cymbalist awaiting his cue.
That crescendo had to be followed by an even bigger one—it was a Hitchcock rule. The director would have to top the Albert Hall sequence with an exciting rescue of the kidnapped girl. Someone suggested a shootout between the kidnappers and police; then someone else mentioned a headline-making incident from 1911. Hitchcock remembered it from his youth: the Sidney Street Siege, in which then home secretary Winston Churchill directed a shoot-out by squads of police against a small group of Bolshevik anarchists holed up in a building.
Re-creating such a shoot-out on film could have been pro forma in other hands, but Hitchcock was inspired by the Sidney Street reference. He eagerly planned every moment, every shot of the sequence, building the action to a frenzied pitch, then topping it off with one of those symmetrical strokes that epitomize the best Hitchcock scripts: At the height of the shoot-out the kidnapped girl escapes her captors and flees across a high rooftop, chased by the same villain who bested the mother in target shooting earlier in the film. When the police marksman proves a shaky aim, the mother grabs the rifle and coolly shoots the man dead.
The ideas may have come from every direction, but there was no question who was in charge of “the integrated film.” After the script of The Man Who Knew Too Much evolved virtually “by consensus” over the winter of 1933–34, according to Montagu, “the scenes of course were finalized by Hitch, and his verbal texts then duplicated from the writer’s [Bennett’s] notes.”
This kind of group writing, however, was competitive as well as collaborative. After the silent era, Hitchcock tended to stack up writer after writer on each new project; they were expected to augment and improve upon their predecessors’ work. It was an approach more typical of producers—but Hitchcock had already begun to function as his own de facto producer, and he was expert at manipulating writers.
Hitchcock saw Bennett, “the world’s finest stooge,” as basically a carpenter, whose foundations and framing required sanding and ornamentation. That didn’t bother Bennett as much in the carefree Gaumont era as it would later on, though it was always a disappointment for a Hitchcock writer when the director’s seduction ended. A surprising number of scribes stopped by the studio or Cromwell Road, and joined the pool who added nuance to The Man Who Knew Too Much. The Australian composer Arthur Benjamin, who taught at the Royal College of Opera, was commissioned to compose the original cantata for the Albert Hall sequence; the well-known satirist D. B. “Bevan” Wyndham-Lewis, who wrote occasional poesy for his “Beachcomber” column in the London Daily Express, also did spot writing for the film, including the cantata lyrics.
The Cambridge-educated playwright A. R. (Arthur Richard) Rawlinson and the actor-writer Edwin Greenwood signed up for “additional dialogue.” A close friend of the director’s, Greenwood was one of the “multifaceted” types Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock seemed to collect; himself a film director in the silent era, Greenwood now stayed busy as a character actor and as a mirthful crime novelist who was praised for his English atmosphere.*
Even as filming was about to start, the script touch-ups continued. Angus MacPhail phoned the Welsh actor and playwright Emlyn Williams to ask if he might add “zing” to a few scenes. He did—but Williams never even met with Hitchcock, such was the director’s trust in MacPhail.
Pierre Fresnay, the Frenchman known for his appearances onstage with the Comedie Francaise and in Marcel Pagnol films (and later for his famous role in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion), was starring in a London play with his wife, Yvonne Printemps. Hitchcock, who was in the audience on opening night, engaged Fresnay to play the small part of the secret agent whose murder triggers the plot—although, as the director later insisted to François Truffaut, “I didn’t especially want a Frenchman. I believe that came from the producer’s side.”*
The well-known actor (and playwright) Frank Vosper was cast as the oily hit man Ramon, with Hugh Wakefield as Clive, the father’s sidekick, who figures in the film’s Plotto-comedy—a trip to a sinister dentist,* and then a visit to a church of supposed sun worshipers.
The Bulldog Drummond character had been downgraded from dashing to merely fatherly, but at the same time his wife had evolved into more of a heroine. Leslie Banks, in the early stages of a lengthy screen career (“Quiet, cultured and charming,” Hitchcock said of him, “he plays his scenes with ease and without worry to the director”), and Edna Best, a respected actress married to Herbert Marshall, would play the parents of the kidnapped girl.
For the kidnapped daughter, Gaumont offered one of its youngest contract players: Nova Pilbeam, an appealing fourteen-year-old who had just finished a gripping film, Little Friend, in which she played a youngster driven to suicide by her parents’ divorce. The combination of Little Friend, which broke box-office records (and audience hearts) across England, and The Man Who Knew Too Much would make Pilbeam one of the country’s preeminent child stars. “Even at that time,” Hitchcock said of Pilbeam, “she had the intelligence of a fully grown woman. She had plenty of confidence and ideas of her own.”
But the masterstroke of the casting—cementing the script’s political implications—was undoubtedly Hungarian-born Peter Lorre as the chief of the subversives. Lorre, who catapulted to fame in Brecht plays and as the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, had fled Berlin and Hitler in 1933. He made pit stops in Vienna and Paris, where in September 1933 Ivor Montagu heard of his plight and joined forces with Michael Balcon and Sidney Bernstein to bring him to London. When he arrived, Lorre stayed at Bernstein’s flat.
According to Lorre biographer Stephen D. Youngkin, the actor was an “afterthought” for Hitchcock’s film, and was cast initially in the smaller role of Ramon, the hit man responsible for the Albert Hall assassination. When Hitchcock and Montagu met with him at London’s Hotel Mayfair, the only English words the refugee knew were yes and no, but he shrewdly said yes to everything. “I had heard that he [Hitchcock] loved to tell stories and so I watched him like a hawk and when I was of the opinion he had just told the punch line of a story,” recalled Lorre, “I broke out
in such laughter that I almost fell off my chair.”
Smitten by the man from M, Hitchcock decided Lorre would be better as the criminal mastermind Abbott, “unctuous but deadly” according to the script, willing to go to any lengths to achieve his diabolical ends. Lorre’s role was then expanded in the ongoing rewrites; Hitchcock even inserted a subtle allusion to the Lang film, when Lorre, in his first scene, shows his chiming watch to Nova Pilbeam—and the girl, alone among the crowd, finds him repulsive. Lorre’s performance so delighted the director that his role steadily continued to grow throughout the filming. In the end, though he was second-billed, it was Lorre’s face that graced the poster, along with the tag line “Public Enemy No. 1 of the World.”
Hitchcock’s longtime assistant director Frank Mills, his editor Emile de Ruelle, art directors Norman and Charles Wilfred Arnold, and cameraman Jack Cox were under contract to B.I.P., and stayed behind. Now that he had landed at Gaumont, Hitchcock—as he would be forced to do so often over his long, studio-hopping career—had to organize a new team.
As his new assistant director, Michael Balcon offered up a twenty-year-old Eton and Oxford graduate named Penrose Tennyson. Once the boy wonder, Hitchcock now began to evince a marked pleasure in playing mentor to younger people. He took “Pen” under his wing, patiently explaining his thinking on each question that arose, as well as his more general theories on filmmaking. More than a few young Englishmen, schooled by him, informally dubbed themselves “Hitch’s boys”—and Tennyson wasn’t the only one who later graduated to director.
Balcon, meanwhile, had been laboring to make London attractive to all kinds of film-world refugees from Germany. The many émigrés he placed under contract would contribute to the German flavoring of Hitchcock’s films in the 1930s. These included art directors Alfred Junge (who had designed E. A. Dupont’s Waxworks at Ufa, and moved with Dupont to England) and Austrian-born Oscar Werndorff (who art-directed Dupont’s Variety as well as, previously for Hitchcock, Number Seventeen) and cameramen Günther Krampf (who had shot Pandora’s Box for Murnau) and the Czech-born Otto Kanturek and Curt Courant (cophotographers of Fritz Lang’s Die Frau im Mond). Junge would be the art director for The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Courant the cameraman.
For his editor, though, Hitchcock wanted a native Englishman with whom he could communicate easily. He rarely deigned to spend five minutes in the cutting room, but he stayed in constant close communication with his editors. For some scenes Hitchcock deliberately left few editing options, but for others, regardless of what his trusty storyboards showed, the director shot a handful of variations, which were typically shuffled and debated until the eleventh hour before a premiere. He usually made sure to include extra shots for the montages, not to mention alternative codas in case he wasn’t satisfied with his first-choice ending.
Balcon offered up a junior cutter named Hugh Stewart, but first the twenty-three-year-old had to pass muster with Hitchcock. Muster had little to do with his editing ability, however. After he was hired, Stewart was asked over to Cromwell Road, where he joined a party in progress and was handed a glass of something that looked and tasted vaguely like orangeade. The drink was spiked with gin, but Stewart didn’t notice until he’d imbibed so much that he was acting like a crazy man; by the end he was almost stupefied. The next morning, when the young editor blearily appeared on the set, Hitchcock made a point of halting the action and announcing, “Stop, everybody! Turn the lights on that man. This young fellow disgraced me last night!” Stewart took it all in good spirits—and thereby passed the test. Stewart kept on task, always grateful that Hitchcock had shown faith in him on his first film. Another of “Hitch’s boys,” he eventually became a producer.
Not least important, the director needed an intelligent, highly organized personal assistant, who according to industry custom was likely to be a charming young woman. At B.I.P., this job had belonged to Renee Pargenter, but, shortly after Hitchcock joined Gaumont, Pargenter got married and gave notice. Hitchcock placed an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph and other publications seeking a “young lady, highest educational qualifications, must be able to speak, read and write French and German fluently, by producer of films.”
Twenty-six-year-old Joan Harrison spotted the ad and applied. Although she was a graduate of St. Hugh’s and the Sorbonne, her résumé modestly boasted only college stints as a film critic and sales experience in a London dress shop. On her mother’s advice Harrison wore a hat to the job interview. She found herself last in a long queue, and it was nearly lunchtime before she was beckoned into Hitchcock’s office. The director stared at her momentarily, then asked her to take off her hat. She was revealed to be exactly the sort of well-bred young lady he was looking for.
Petite, with coiffed blond hair and flashing blue eyes—then, as always, immaculately dressed—Harrison was beautiful enough to be a leading lady. When Curt Courant first met her, he thought she ought to be in the film, not holding a script on the sidelines. The cameraman talked Hitchcock into giving her a screen test. (Well, it wasn’t too hard to convince him: “Who have you slept with, Miss Harrison?!”) But that is far as it went.
Could Harrison speak any German? Hitchcock needed her to bridge the communication gap with the art director and cameraman. No, she admitted, but her French was not so bad. (“High honors” at the Sorbonne, according to Charles Bennett.) Well, Hitchcock sighed, his own German would suffice. Anyway, he was famished, he said; Harrison could have the job if she joined him in a meal.
At lunch, they talked easily. Harrison’s uncle, it turned out, was Harold Harrison, keeper of the Old Bailey—the official who assigned cases to different courts for trial. She had taken to following the courts herself, and could recount the particulars of a succession of trials with superb recall and evident relish. Uncle Harry “was one of those uncles young girls adore,” Harrison once recalled. “He not only took you to lunch, but he knew the grisly details of all the most shocking crimes. For years I’ve read the transcript of every interesting trial I could lay hands on.”
She was every bit as much an aficionado of show business. In college, recalled classmate Rita Landale, Harrison was “always reading a play.” She had an encyclopedic recall of actors. Although her formal film experience was limited to a few reviews in college and for the Advertiser, her father’s Guildford, Surrey, biweekly (“when I was a girl, so I could get passes”), she was also an avid, knowledgeable moviegoer.
So Harrison was hired as Hitchcock’s assistant, working informally in the same capacity for Mrs. Hitchcock as well, helping out with synopses and treatments. Right away she was given promising plays and novels and told to weed out extraneous matter and boil the stories down for possible screen adaptation. Right away she began to learn “continuity.”
Starting with The Man Who Knew Too Much, then, Harrison got a crash course in every aspect of the film business from a master professor. At first Harrison was the lowliest member of the team, but swiftly she rose up; she would ultimately become as important to Hitchcock’s career as anyone but Mrs. Hitchcock.
“I think you’ll find the real start of my career was The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Hitchcock once said, and it’s true: the film turned a corner for him, conclusively establishing his greatness.
Hugh Stewart always remembered how, on the first day of filming in June 1934, Hitchcock arrived on the set and made a show of slapping the script down on a desk and announcing, “Another picture in the bag!” It was Hitchcock back on top, confidence renewed—and the first recorded instance of his public credo that the job was done long before the cameras rolled.
As credos go, this one was mainly for show. “One of the reasons against that argument,” explained Peggy Robertson, his longtime personal assistant in Hollywood, “is that the script was very seldom finished before we started shooting. We always had trouble with endings. ‘What are we going to do? How is it going to end?’ We’d have minute sketches of the tiniest camera movement, but how would the who
le sequence end? He didn’t know.”
“He’s a master of well thought out effects,” colleague George Cukor mused in one interview, but not all the effects were manifest in the script or storyboards. Himself renowned as an “actor’s director,” Cukor knew Hitchcock personally and admired him professionally for, among other things, the extraordinary performances he often extracted. But “I’m not quite sure that he is telling the complete truth [about having everything planned so carefully in advance]. He must improvise with performances sometimes. … [And] he is hiding things from you; he doesn’t say how he works, how he achieves effects—easier to say it was all planned in the script and the rest is mechanics.”
One thing that didn’t change when “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby” became The Man Who Knew Too Much was the St. Moritz opening. Hitchcock made a habit of wielding such opening scenes in his films to lull his audiences into a false security. He often chose what he liked to call picture-postcard or sightseeing clichés to establish a setting. “Local topographical features,” he said: Think of Holland, and you think of windmills. Think of Switzerland, and what comes to mind? Skiing and winter games.
This time, Hitchcock began with the guests of an exclusive hotel engaged in outdoor contests. Edna Best is a lovely sharpshooter distracted by her precocious daughter, Nova Pilbeam, during a skeet shoot. The audience would do well to remember the mother’s skill with a gun.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 23