Alfred Hitchcock
Page 27
When the cartoon’s Cupid slays Cock Robin with an arrow, it triggers the pointed musical refrain: “Who Killed Cock Robin?” Mrs. Verloc gives a start, and sets her jaw to return for a showdown with her husband. The result: another famous Hitchcockian scene in the “knife, knife, knife!” vein.
If progress on the script was fitful, it was because the three Hitchcocks couldn’t settle on a proper ending. Hitchcock agonized over his endings. There had to be a crescendo to top everything that came before, and then “closure”—a note of pointed ambiguity to round things off. Above all he wanted to avoid the kind of ending he called a “hat-grabber”: he wanted to catch audiences before they fled up the aisles.
The ending to Conrad’s novel features the despondent, guilt-ridden Mrs. Verloc committing suicide, throwing herself off a ferry bound for France. That was impossible, Hitchcock knew; the studio would never accept it, and for good reason—it would leave the audience without any hope. Someone came up with the idea of one of the bird-shop bombs destroying the theater, but how would they deal with the fact that Mrs. Verloc has already killed her husband?
When Hitchcock got stuck, he inevitably borrowed from his earlier work. (“Self-plagiarism is style,” he was known to observe wryly.) He borrowed, quite transparently in this instance, from Blackmail. In the final scenes of Sabotage, the policeman, Ted, tries desperately to dissuade Mrs. Verloc from giving herself up for the killing. He loves her too much to sacrifice her to the whims of justice. “What chance would you stand with a judge and jury?” he asks.
She rushes up to another officer, managing only to gasp “He’s dead!” before Ted cuts her off—just as another hopelessly enamored detective does in Blackmail. Then an explosion rocks the theater, burying Verloc and his bird-shop comrade. Afterward the second officer thinks over what she said, and muses, “She said it before—or was it after? I can’t remember.” And the blast has destroyed all the evidence—a nice touch.
When Bennett had completed his draft, Hitchcock called in the reinforcements: writers Ian Hay, Helen Simpson, and the multitalented E. V. H. “Ted” Emmett worked away polishing scenes as the autumn start of filming approached.
Before he met her, Hitchcock admired the American actress Sylvia Sidney, who was held in high regard for sensitive performances full of dignified suffering. He, in fact, had spoken with Charles Bennett about crafting an original story to showcase “the masochistic Sidney,” and before Sabotage (as the Conrad film was retitled) they spent time compiling notes for a “Sylvia Sidney Subject” that would exploit her ability to “suffer every torture, then react with arresting and explosive assertiveness,” according to Bennett. Their notes were tabled in favor of Sabotage.
On one of his Hollywood trips, producer Michael Balcon managed to sign the petite brunet star, who had just finished Fury for Fritz Lang at MGM. Hitchcock was so excited about the casting that he made the exceptional gesture of phoning the actress aboard her ocean liner via two-way radio as Sidney made the journey across the Atlantic. (Hitchcock relished protracted, expensive overseas phone calls and lengthy telegrams.)
The character of Mrs. Verloc’s brother, Stevie, saw minor changes: around fourteen and “addled” in the novel, in Hitchcock’s film he is merely boyish. England’s leading boy actor, wavy-haired Desmond Tester, who looked younger than his seventeen years, got the part.
Peter Lorre would have been right for Mr. Verloc, if Hitchcock hadn’t washed his hands of him. But the director snapped up another refugee passing through London—Oscar Homolka, a veteran of stage and screen in Vienna and Berlin, who may have lacked Lorre’s sly, humorous quality, but at least evinced the same world-weariness.
Unquestionably, though, the greatest disappointment was the loss of Robert Donat. Donat had accepted the role of Ted and been announced for the film in the spring of 1936, but he suffered from chronic asthma, and when he came down with acute bronchitis, Hitchcock was forced by Sidney’s arrival and the pressing schedule to proceed without him.
Hitchcock bore the actor no grudge. While Donat was recuperating, the director sent him joke gifts at the hospital: kippers, to coax back his ailing sense of smell. Over the years the two stayed friends, keeping up a warm, kidding correspondence, which often centered around reuniting for another film. Unfortunate timing of the projects, as well as Donat’s chronic indecisiveness, managed to conspire against such a reunion.
At the eleventh hour, though, Hitchcock and his team were forced to rewrite the part for John Loder, a tall, dashing heartthrob under studio contract. Loder had film experience dating back to 1926, but he just wasn’t “suitable” as Ted, as Hitchcock later told François Truffaut. Loder lacked the nuance—the emotional dynamism—of Donat, and his casting pushed the film toward a more single-minded solemnity. But when it came to casting his leads, even at the height of his reputation in England Hitchcock often had to compromise.
Unsuitable actors didn’t bother Hitchcock as much as those who refused of their own accord to accommodate him—to do what he believed they were capable of doing. He couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about Sylvia Sidney, which is why her contrariness came as a surprise.
The real problem, according to Charles Bennett, was that when Hitchcock and the leading lady met, they didn’t hit it off. “Sylvia just wasn’t Hitchcock’s type,” recalled Bennett. It was a problem for Hitchcock if he didn’t like an actress, particularly one who was going to be playing a deeply sympathetic character in one of his films.
Sidney’s problem with Hitchcock took an odd form: although she ought to have known better—she’d been appearing in pictures since 1929—she behaved like a female Gielgud, unable to fathom the process of filmmaking in preordained shots and angles. “She could not piece together in her mind what Hitchcock was after, the meaning of separate shots and how the scene could be constructed from them,” recalled Ivor Montagu. “She had always acted a scene right through, and she badly needed words, a single sentence or even a phrase, to start a mood off for her, as a singer needs a note to find the key.
“We were happy with her work. She felt uncertain and would not be reassured. As befits a great star, she had, in Hollywood fashion, been built a little tent on the [Shepherd’s] Bush studio floor so that she could rest between shots from inquisitive eyes. Many were the times I was called up from my office, in which emergency of course it is the AP’s [associate producer’s] duty to embrace and comfort her as best he can.”
It was almost a day-to-day struggle with Sidney. One of her most important scenes took place after the Disney-cartoon sequence—when, knowing that Verloc’s bomb has killed her brother, Stevie, she returns to their living quarters to serve him supper.
This was one sequence that Hitchcock had faithfully extracted from Conrad:
“Her right hand skimmed slightly the end of the table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish. Mr. Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor, and was content. He waited. Mrs. Verloc was coming. As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes. But Mr. Verloc did not see that. He was lying on his back and staring upward. He saw partly on the ceiling a clenched hand holding a carving knife.
“It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely.”
In the novel Verloc is reclining on a sofa; the director restaged it, putting Verloc at a table waiting for his evening meal. Mrs. Verloc brings a plate of food to him and begins to serve the roast. The knife she is carrying appears to act “as a magnet,” in Hitchcock’s description. “It’s almost as if her hand, against her will, is compelled to grab it. The camera frames her hand, then her eyes, moving back and forth between the two until suddenly her look makes it clear that she’s become aware of the potential meaning of the knife.”
The sequence was pulled together in a hurry, and Hitchcock, Montagu, and editor Charles Frend joined Sidney in the screening room. The actress couldn’t help but be impressed by the rough cut—it was a powerful montage, destined to become one of the most famous sequences in Hitchcock’s oeuvre. The actress emerged from the projection room, shaken. “Hollywood must hear of this!” she declared, appeased.
Yet the truce was only temporary. Sidney took offense at Hitchcock’s sense of humor, his way of summoning young Desmond Tester to the set: “Where’s the testicle?”* The director teased Tester for general “amusement of the cast and crew,” Sidney said later, to the “total mortification of the kid.” Perhaps—Hitchcock wasn’t above mortifying a “kid” if he was in the mood. But this kid was also seventeen years old, and the character he was playing was the buffoon of the film. Tester himself insisted in subsequent interviews that he enjoyed working for Hitchcock “because he was funny” and played “lovely practical jokes.”
The truce finally collapsed when Hitchcock called for retakes in the carving-knife scene. He needed more close-ups of Sidney’s hands. She asked for rehearsal. Calmly, Hitchcock assured Sidney, “You don’t need any rehearsal in this shot, darling, you’ve already killed him!” But she couldn’t be mollified, and tried to pull rank. After all, she was the star, and making a higher salary than the director (or so she insisted, in later interviews). “I went right to Lord so-and-so [Balcon] who was the producer and told him, ‘This man is impossible. I can’t do a scene when we haven’t come to that part in that scene. I can’t look down, terrified, when there is nothing to be terrified about. And he just wanted to shoot my hands. Lord so-and-so listened patiently and then said, ‘Sylvie … you have to trust him … he knows what he is doing.’ And no matter how much money I was making, neither Hitchcock nor the producer could be moved, and I ended up looking down with my hands out in front of me.”
Sidney lived to a ripe age, and gave other interviews that sniped at Hitchcock, helping to stoke the myth of a man who regarded actors as cattle.
And the director, for his part, returned the favor. Hitchcock claimed that even Sidney’s hands were disappointing, that he cheated with close-ups of another actress’s. He found it difficult to get “any shading” into her face. (He wasn’t the only director with such complaints; Fritz Lang, who used Sidney in three films, once fired off a gun near the actress without warning, so desperate was he to disrupt her customary placid expression.) “On the other hand,” Hitchcock conceded to François Truffaut, “she had nice understatement.”
No matter what day-to-day problems he might have endured, Hitchcock had been shielded for several years by Ivor Montagu and Michael Balcon. All the sadder, then, that a disagreement with the two producers caused friction during the filming of Sabotage, and that because of this—and a mounting studio crisis—Hitchcock never again worked with either man.
The director had asked to build a facsimile tram for the scene where Stevie is crammed on a slow-moving public transport, unwittingly carrying Mr. Verloc’s time bomb. Citing the deteriorating financial situation at Gaumont, Montagu said no. Building a tram and laying tracks would drive up the budget, and the footage was expected to consume less than a minute of screen time. Montagu thought that a simple bus would do as well.
Hitchcock insisted that a tram would communicate “London” to American audiences in a way that a mere bus would not. He tried going over Montagu’s head, but Balcon backed Montagu. Regardless, Montagu asked to be released from Hitchcock’s unit, feeling he had lost the director’s respect over the issue. Years later Montagu insisted he carried no grudge, and added, in retrospect, that Hitchcock had probably been right about the tram.
But Montagu was right about the financial emergency. Just after photography on Sabotage was completed, in December 1936, Isidore Ostrer arrived at Lime Grove with a list of cost-saving dictates, including people to be fired—starting with well-paid executives like Montagu and Balcon. Balcon had been feuding with the Ostrers, and Montagu was merely expendable. The Ostrers announced drastic cutbacks in production, and Gaumont was reorganized under Balcon’s former assistant, Edward “Ted” Black.
Hitchcock remained intermittently cordial with Balcon over the years, and he saw Montagu at least once more, after World War II, when he was making a film in England. Montagu and Angus MacPhail joined the director for dinner in his Claridge’s suite. “He was as humorous, amiable and affable as ever,” recalled Montagu. “A splendid evening.”
Although today Sabotage is considered a near masterwork, the Joseph Conrad adaptation upset some critics in 1936, with its bleak vision of misguided politics.
C. A. Lejeune, the reviewer for the Observer, felt betrayed, angrily confronting the director after the premiere (“with clenched fists held in the air,” according to Hitchcock) and reproaching him for callously blowing up the boy, Stevie, in full view of the audience. As Lejeune later reported in one of her columns, they had “a very acid talk on that occasion, and for quite twenty-four hours we didn’t think well of each other.”
Hitchcock had a sophisticated attitude about critics. He thought they had a job to do, and sometimes they wrote foolish things, but he prided himself on never having written “a letter of protest over a bad review to a paper or magazine in my whole lifetime.” Sometimes, too, they wrote well, and what they wrote stayed with him. Lejeune was a friend and frequent visitor to Cromwell Road. “As a family man” he took her comments personally, and “apparently brooded,” said Lejeune. “I have his own word for that, and his wife’s, and his secretary’s.”
“Aside from a few scenes” he could take pride in, Sabotage turned out “a little messy,” Hitchcock reflected in later interviews. He often said that if he’d had it to do all over again he would stage Stevie’s death differently, going for gradations of suspense rather than a shock effect. Probably, he allowed, Stevie’s death should have taken place offscreen.
Ironically, in the United States, where the gloomy social context was less threatening—and where Sabotage was retitled The Woman Alone–the film found more appreciative critics. After years of having his work weakly distributed, snipped by censors, or underrated by reviewers, Hitchcock was finally making an impression in the States. Though his films were still shown mainly in houses that catered to foreign-language or “art” films (indeed, the New Yorker, assessing the vogue for Hitchcock films, declared it was “mainly a local phenomenon” confined to Manhattan), The Woman Alone—following The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Secret Agent—solidified the director’s growing reputation, becoming his fourth Gaumont film to rack up critical praise.
The New York Times had written that if The 39 Steps had “any single rival as the most original, literate and entertaining melodrama of 1935, then it must be The Man Who Knew Too Much,” released in the United States the same year. “A master of shock and suspense, of cold horror and slyly incongruous wit,” wrote Andre Sennwald in the nation’s most important newspaper, “he [Hitchcock] uses his camera the way a painter uses his brush, stylizing his story and giving it values which the scenarists could hardly have supposed.”
One of the most thoughtful American critics, Otis Ferguson of the New Republic, declared that Secret Agent elevated the Englishman to “among the best” directors in the world. Now, reviewing The Woman Alone for the Nation, Mark Van Doren agreed with that opinion, extolling Hitchcock as “the best film director now flourishing” in the English language, “a master” with “the simplest, the deepest, and the most accurate imagination.”
As troubling to English audiences as it was to English critics,
Sabotage was one Hitchcock film to which the English public never warmed. The Ostrers watched its failure with a jaundiced eye. The director had survived the Christmas massacre at Gaumont, but only because he still owed the studio two pictures. Already in the hopper—and now under the stewardship of Ted Black—was Hitchcock’s adaptation of A Shilling for Candles, a 1936 mystery by Scottish writer Josephine Tey (pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh).
The man who replaced Michael Balcon, fortunately, turned out to be—surprisingly, to some in the trade—every bit a first-rate producer. Less well known than his older brother George, who ran a string of music halls including the London Palladium, Ted Black had served as a theater circuit owner and manager until 1930, when he switched over to the film production side. He started out by managing the studios at Islington and Lime Grove for Balcon.
If Balcon was the very image of a producer, Black was more the working ideal. Nowadays relatively unsung (he died prematurely in 1948), Black was “one of the very best producers I ever worked for,” recalled Val Guest, who started out as a contract writer under Black at Gainsborough and Gaumont. “Ted Black was a solid, hardworking producer. You could go to Michael Balcon with a problem and Michael would put you on to somebody else to solve the problem. Ted would solve it.”
If Balcon hobnobbed with the elite, Black was more a regular fellow—“one of the gang,” according to Guest, “whereas you could never call Mickey Balcon one of the gang.” Balcon reveled in the glamour and publicity, while the down-to-earth Black was notorious for skipping the parties and galas, eschewing the press, and giving intellectuals wide berth.