Alfred Hitchcock

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by Patrick McGilligan

That night, in the hotel ballroom, the rakish Pierre Fresnay whisks Best onto the dance floor, in a buoyant sequence that begins deceptively—with the two of them getting tangled up in a skein of yarn, which has been pinned to their clothing by Best’s sulking husband, Leslie Banks. When an unseen enemy shoots Fresnay, the music muffles the gunfire; dying in Best’s arms, the dashing Frenchman whispers the Macguffin.

  He started the film that way, the director once explained, “to show that death comes when you least expect it.” Light shifts into darkness, and the real Hitchcock dance begins.

  Ironically, given John Maxwell’s cost-conscious opposition to “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby,” the Gaumont films were among Hitchcock’s cheapest. One of Hitchcock’s unsung virtues as a director was his ingenuity at saving money, at creating the illusion of luxury under constrained conditions. Only small crews traveled to locations beyond England in the mid-1930s, so Hitchcock conjured up his beloved Swiss scenery out of bits and pieces of precisely stipulated second-unit footage and a few painted backdrops; the lavish-seeming Albert Hall and Sidney Street highlights were also modestly budgeted, ingeniously fabricated illusions.

  For the first climax, Hitchcock returned to the Schüfftan process, which he had employed for The Ring and Blackmail. Gaumont couldn’t afford hundreds of extras; nor, in any case, would the studio be allowed to take over Albert Hall for protracted filming. So Hitchcock had long exposures made of various angles of the auditorium, which were then blown up into oversize transparencies. The Italian-born artist Fortunino Matania, a frequent contributor to all the finest London periodicals, made realistic paintings of the audience on each transparency. “We went back to the Albert Hall and set up the Schüfftan camera in exactly the same spots where the original photographs were taken,” Hitchcock proudly explained to Peter Bogdanovich. “Now the mirror reflected this little transparency with a full audience, and we scraped the silvering here and there—a box near the entrance and the whole of the orchestra. Then in the box we had a real woman opening a program and so forth, and the eye immediately went to the movement. All the rest was static.”

  The Albert Hall scene remains an unforgettable mosaic, a shoo-in for any highlight reel of the greatest sequences in film history. Hitchcock’s camera begins on the faces of the audience and the orchestra as the cantata begins and the searching mother arrives. As the haunting music swells, his camera returns to the mother, her despair growing ever deeper. From the mother he cuts to a gun barrel gradually protruding from behind the curtain; at first the image seems like an abstraction out of modern art, but as the gun slowly wheels to point toward the camera—and its target—the frightening image merges with the gunshot and the mother’s scream.

  As always with the best Hitchcock films, the director set aside privileged moments for his preferred actors—usually those playing the most innocent characters, or the most depraved. The director doted on Pilbeam, and his tenderness toward the sacrificial lamb of the story (the young, kidnapped daughter) is the beating heart beneath the film’s essential cruelty.

  The other actor who fascinated him was the sardonic, moonfaced Peter Lorre. Among other things the two men shared a malicious sense of humor. Lorre’s first line, “Better ask my nurse,” the director made him repeat over and over, mocking his pronunciation. (“What? Pederast my nurse?!” Hitchcock echoed incredulously from behind the camera.) Their banter switched back and forth from English to German slang. “That may have been a little Hitchcockery,” editor Hugh Stewart said, “because nobody else except Lorre understood Hitchcock.”

  Hitchcock dubbed Lorre “the Walking Overcoat” for the long coat the actor habitually wore, which drooped down to his shoes. Evenings and weekends, Lorre and actress Celia Lovsky (whom he married during the filming) became frequent guests at Cromwell Road, along with others from the production. During filming, the Hitchcocks were eager hosts, rotating a guest list that included both stars and lesser members of the company. The parties served to bolster the on-set camaraderie, which could sag during the long, tedious days.

  After hours, when sufficiently libated, the director of The Man Who Knew Too Much needed little coaxing to perform his most notorious shtick: the host doffed his shirt, wrapped a shawl around his shoulders, and became a sexy belly dancer with enormous breasts, undulating to music and hysterical applause. Nobody laughed louder than Lorre.

  The only thing that bored Hitchcock more than a straight hero was a bland villain. His villains could be as handsome and impotent as his heroes, but the best of them evoked pity. Lorre offscreen was a tortured soul, already saddled with a drug habit that would grow worse as he aged. He was the Reggie Dunn character of The Man Who Knew Too Much, but also the most personable, most fully human being in the film: Hitchcock’s first great villain, before Bruno Anthony or Norman Bates.

  The Sidney Street-style siege begins with an incisive succession of police vignettes. One officer, after boasting of his prospective overtime (“Looks like an all-night job to me!”), is sent to try the front door of the hideout, and promptly gunned down. Another, after similar side-of-the-mouth comments to ingratiate himself with audiences, props a mattress up in front of a window to shield himself from gunfire—he meets a predictable fate. That is when the action breaks out on several levels of the street and buildings.

  The siege, like the Albert Hall sequence, is a stunning montage, a director’s showcase. But it was also acted to the hilt by Lorre, who proved a tremendous asset to the film. His final scenes seal the magnificence of The Man Who Knew Too Much. First comes the two-shot of a smiling Lorre and his horse-faced adjutant (“nurse” Cicely Oates), just before she is sprayed with bullets. His reaction to her death tells us how much he loved her (despite the hints that she was very likely a lesbian). His implacability is shattered, and for just a moment we feel for him. Then, consumed by rage, Lorre finally grabs a gun and joins in.

  Lorre is the only member of the gang to survive the chaotic shoot-out. We don’t see him, hiding behind a door as the police edge into the room. That is the excuse for a small but marvelous Hitchcock touch: the chiming of his watch (heard at strategic moments throughout the film) signals his last act of bravado and self-destruction.

  But Hitchcock loathed happy endings, and the last shot of the reunited family isn’t very comforting. Our ultimate glimpse of the mother, after her deadeye rifle shot, reveals a face crushed by the realization of what she has done. The father will have a scar from his wound; the young daughter would surely be in therapy for the rest of her life.

  The film was disturbing—so much so that its quality was not immediately apparent to studio officials. When Hitchcock previewed The Man Who Knew Too Much for Maurice and Isidore Ostrer, the banker brothers who presided over Gaumont’s board of directors, he was baffled by their response. After the lights went up, the Ostrers scurried out of the screening room without uttering a polite word. Sitting alone with editor Hugh Stewart, Hitchcock furrowed his brow. “Are they always like that?” he asked. “I don’t think,” Stewart replied diplomatically, “they know what to say.”

  The Ostrers thought The Man Who Knew Too Much might be “too artistic.” They asked for a second opinion from an expert on films too artistic: C. M. Woolf, Hitchcock’s old nemesis, still a fixture on the Gaumont board. As it happened, Woolf was virtually in charge of the studio while Michael Balcon was out of reach in the United States, making distribution and talent deals. After watching Hitchcock’s film, Woolf summoned the director and told him it was appalling rubbish. Woolf ordered up a set of new, mild scenes to be shot and inserted by Maurice Elvey. “Hitch was practically suicidal,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “and begged Woolf on his knees to let the film be shown as it was shot.”

  “Our personal suspense, Hitch’s and mine, went on for days,” said Charles Bennett. Hitchcock told Bennett that until the impasse was broken they might as well set aside their next project—The 39 Steps. Bennett switched to working on “a cheap original I knew would pay for the milk.”r />
  His suspicions piqued, Woolf asked to read the script for the next Hitchcock project—and tried to nip The 39 Steps in the bud too. Hitchcock and Ivor Montagu were called on the carpet. Woolf diagnosed the new script as “highbrow stuff” that would only give rise to “another piece of rubbish,” and gave the director and associate producer one month to shape up or ship out. Worse yet, he ordered Hitchcock to develop a musical based on the life of music hall composer Leslie Stuart, best known for his turn-of-the-century hit Floradora. That was the sort of English picture that English audiences would flock to see, Woolf declared.

  In the meantime, Hitchcock had been desperately trying to reach Michael Balcon; now his emergency telegrams finally got through—fortunately in time for Balcon to overrule Woolf. Such postproduction interference would never happen again, Balcon vowed—a promise he kept as long as he remained in charge at Gaumont. The Man Who Knew Too Much was then scheduled for release, and The 39 Steps was allowed to proceed. The Hitchcocks took Bennett and Joan Harrison with them to St. Moritz at Christmas to work on the script and take a much-needed holiday.

  The Man Who Knew Too Much chalked up incomparable reviews in London (“glorious melodrama,” raved the Kinematograph Weekly, “artless fiction, staged on a spectacular scale”) and went on to tremendous popularity in England. Not only that: it became the first Hitchcock film to score with critics—and audiences—in the United States. Wherever it played in the world, people saw a film as enthralling as any other made in 1934.

  C. M. Woolf never really relented where Hitchcock was concerned. The rental magnate insisted on booking The Man Who Knew Too Much into his own chain as the lower half of double bills headed by routine Hollywood first features. Although the Hitchcock picture “broke attendance records for almost every theater it played,” in Montagu’s words, its percentage of the take was assigned to the first feature, and thus it earned only nominal fees. Woolf, who saw Hitchcock as a loser with audiences, recorded his film as a loser too.

  A “B” movie in Hollywood budget terms—its entire cost was roughly forty thousand pounds—The Man Who Knew Too Much made a relative fortune over the years, and still plays widely in museums, in repertory, and on television. But in the short term, the experience finally taught Hitchcock the dangers of relying on a system so dependent on its distributors. Woolf could be kept at bay only so long. Early in 1935, Hitchcock resumed his flirtation with the Joyce-Selznick office, asking its London representative, Harry Ham, if he would again sound out American studios. This move was short-circuited, however, when Balcon found out about it, and warned Ham that Hitchcock had a Gaumont contract. Having just defended Hitchcock against a big investor, Balcon had no intentions of loaning him out.

  The Man Who Knew Too Much was hailed by English critics as a fresh Hitchcock varietal, a politically urgent blend of comedy and suspense that minimized his usual aesthetic experimentation in favor of sweepingly entertaining set pieces. “At last he has thrown critics and intellectuals overboard with one of his incomparable rude gestures,” declared C. A. Lejeune in the Observer, “and gone in for making pictures for the people.”

  It was true: at each stage of his career, he excelled at creating variations on familiar, favorite ideas. Before The Man Who Knew Too Much, spy-saboteur pictures weren’t really Hitchcock’s specialty. Now, suddenly, he discovered that they fit him like a second skin—and The 39 Steps, based on a John Buchan novel that dated back to World War I, gave him a chance to explore the genre further.

  Hitchcock often commented that in his youth he had devoured the books of Buchan, the Scottish barrister and highly regarded author known for his adventures with debonair gentleman heroes. Buchan liked to refer to his novels as “shockers”—a word Herbert Marshall uses in Murder! to describe one of his crime plays, and a word Hitchcock adopted in interviews to characterize his own films. Hitchcock said that he identified with Buchan’s “understatement of highly dramatic ideas,” and told François Truffaut that “Buchan was a strong influence a long time before I undertook The 39 Steps.”

  In truth Hitchcock was probably fonder of Greenmantle, the sequel to The Thirty-nine Steps, which follows lead character Richard Hannay on a secret mission during World War I.* Hitchcock and Charles Bennett talked about adapting Greenmantle before opting for The Thirty-nine Steps, partly for practical reasons. The Thirty-nine Steps was a “smaller subject,” in Hitchcock’s words, set entirely in England, while Greenmantle would have called for German and Turkish scenes. The Thirty-nine Steps, in contrast, could be shot almost entirely at Lime Grove.

  But Buchan’s book, a thriller in 1915, was quaint by the 1930s—full of coincidences and uncinematic elements, as Hitchcock realized when he reread it for the project. “When I did so,” he said later, “I received a shock. I had learned a lot about filmmaking in the fifteen-odd years that had elapsed” since his first reading. “Though I could still see the reason for my first enthusiasm—the book was full of action—I found that the story as it stood was not in the least suitable for the screen.” He and Bennett launched a new treatment during the filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and then finished the first draft in the winter of 1934–35.

  If any film supports Hitchcock’s typical boast, that when he selected a book he felt free to extract what he pleased and throw out the rest, it was this alleged favorite, a book he insisted he loved—and which he transformed into arguably the grandest of his Gaumont films.

  He reshaped The Thirty-nine Steps into a Hitchcock film that bore scant similarity to the book. The story was updated, and turned into a romance. Buchan scenes were dropped, Hitchcock scenes inserted. As usual, the director added not only major elements to the plot and characters, but many smaller, delightful touches throughout. Once again, work on the script was divided between the studio and Cromwell Road. Once again, though Alma and Charles Bennett were the main writers, an informal group congregated to help out with ideas, borrowing from other films, books, newspapers—whatever was handy.

  Novelists never claimed the same control over film adaptations as playwrights—and Hitchcock was through with plays, for the time being. The West End was in its worst slump, so there was less available material anyway; but more to the point, Hitchcock had more power now, and he preferred the freedom of working with novels.

  The differences between the book and film began with a subtlety in the meaning of the title. The “Thirty-nine Steps” of the novel refers to a flight of steps leading down to the sea from the headquarters of the German spy organization; in the film there are no such steps, and the title signifies the organization itself—“conducting information on behalf of foreign spies.”

  Buchan’s “double chase” concerns a wronged man fleeing from police while racing against time to foil a foreign conspiracy; that much, at least, was carried over from the book. Remarkably, however, Buchan’s novel is entirely devoid of a love story—indeed, of any character even faintly resembling Pamela (Madeleine Carroll). Pamela was Hitchcock’s vital addition to the film: a train passenger who first betrays Hannay to the police, and then, when coincidence forces her to join him on the run, handcuffed together, falls in love with him.

  Two of the film’s most famous sequences were also original: the haunting interlude on an isolated farm with Hannay given shelter by a suspicious crofter (tenant farmer) and his fetching young wife; and the music hall finale, where Mr. Memory—on point of honor—spurs his own death by reciting the secret of “The 39 Steps.”

  John Russell Taylor said the crofter scene was consciously derived from “a slightly risqué story about a lustful wife, a watchful husband, a traveler and a chicken pie.” In at least one interview the director referred to another inspiration, a novel about an authoritarian South African Boer, his young, sex-starved wife, and a handsome overseer who comes between them—Claude and Alice Askew’s The Shulamite. Hitchcock often worked just this way, borrowing from two or more references, then patching the related ideas together and blending the whole into something
wholly new, leaving only a hint of the original inspiration.

  Charles Bennett insisted in later interviews that it was he who thought of Mr. Memory—the man “doomed by his sense of duty,” in Hitchcock’s words. But Mr. Memory had a real-life counterpart, an entertainer named Datas, a.k.a the Memory Man, well known in England for his mnemonic performances—and well-known to Hitchcock, who fondly recalled seeing his performances as a boy. “He always concluded his act by having a stooge ask when Good Friday fell on a Tuesday,” he recalled. “He would then answer that a horse called Good Friday fell in a particular race on Tuesday, June 2, 1874.” The Cromwell Road group passed around a copy of Datas’s autobiography, and there on page 202 was the famous capper from his act—which in turn inspired Mr. Memory’s climactic utterance in the film.*

  Whoever thought of an idea, of course, in the end it was Hitchcock who chose whether to use it in the film. Bennett’s job was to link up the Plotto-pieces, write it all down, and turn in a coherent draft. Then—in what was now an established Hitchcock tradition—came other writers to help polish the diamond.

  On The 39 Steps, only one other was credited: Ian Hay (the pseudonym of Ian Hay Beith). Hay was a well-regarded light humorist whose novels and plays wittily skewered English life. Odd characters and colorful dialogue were his forte. This was the first of three instances where Hay, who seemed to be friends with everyone (including Bennett), made the final emendations on a Hitchcock script before shooting.

  Everybody heard about what happened when cameraman Curt Courant, told by Hitchcock exactly what size lens to use for a particular scene of The Man Who Knew Too Much, didn’t follow orders. When Hitchcock noticed the change in dailies, he was furious. “Applying his own opinions didn’t exactly meet the story requirements,” the director recalled. “So in a light but halting German I said a few things.”

  The director wanted a more accommodating cameraman for The 39 Steps. He chose Bernard Knowles, whom he’d known as far back as 1923, when Knowles assisted Claude McDonnell on Graham Cutts’s Flames of Passion. A full-fledged cameraman since the late 1920s, with a reputation for fluidity and atmospheric lighting, Knowles would shoot The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, and (with Harry Stradling) Jamaica Inn for Hitchcock.

 

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