If Balcon prided himself on being cosmopolitan, Black was as English as they come, and he made no bones about it. He had a mandate from the Ostrers to make English films for English audiences, and “like his brother George at the London Palladium,” according to Robert Murphy in Gainsborough Pictures, “Ted had an almost superstitious faith in his ability to divine popular taste and was wary of involving himself with anything that might dilute it.”
Rather than pining after Hollywood names, Black placed his bets on English personalities. Rather than cobbling together star vehicles, he promoted a solid script as the basis of a well-made film. The script was for Black “the be-all and the end-all,” in Frank Launder’s words. Unlike Balcon, Black delighted in script conferences and went in for them “whole-sale,” according to Launder, joining in the general critique and tossing out ideas without his ego running rampant.
Best of all, Black was an unabashed Hitchcock fan. He and his brother were both longtime acquaintances of the director; now Black made it his business to be helpful, clearing all obstacles from Hitchcock’s path and stretching the budget wherever possible. He took over as Hitchcock’s buffer with the Ostrers. The two films Hitchcock made with Black as his producer are among his most enjoyable. Indeed, having gotten brooding out of his system with Sabotage, now he came up with his most happy-go-lucky story.
The script for A Shilling for Candles had benefited from input from Ivor Montagu before he left the studio, and from initial construction by Charles Bennett. The Hitchcocks, Bennett, and Joan Harrison vacationed at St. Moritz at Christmas 1936, interspersing brainstorming with skiing. (Well, Bennett, Joan Harrison, and Alma went skiing; the director simply stuffed himself into skiwear and sat on the veranda, reading.) When a telegram from Myron Selznick arrived, offering Bennett a contract with Universal in Hollywood, Bennett decided to leave the project. Hitchcock threw the bon voyage party.
The script was far from finished, however, and somehow Hitchcock had to compensate for the loss of the world’s finest stooge. He did so in characteristic fashion, melding drafts and contributions from a slew of other stooges, including his friend Edwin Greenwood, the Punch humorist Anthony Armstrong, and rising young playwright Gerald Savory. Loosely presiding over the procession of scribes was Hitchcock’s friend and story editor Angus MacPhail, still at Gaumont. Counting Montagu, Bennett, Harrison, and both Hitchcocks, that added up to eight or nine writers on this script—a not atypical number over the course of his career.
Tey’s novel starts with the discovery of a woman’s body washed up on a beach. The victim is a famous actress; the only clue to her murder is a button entangled in her hair. Suspicion is directed at a young man, acquainted with the deceased, who cannot account for a missing button on his mackintosh. Protesting his arrest, he escapes the police and sets out to clear himself, aided by a detective’s daughter who believes in his innocence.
Hitchcock kept the dead body on the beach (with gulls circling overhead in brief, haunting slow motion), the young man on the run (his profession changed, amusingly, from “unemployed waiter” to unproduced screenwriter), and the policeman’s daughter (who becomes much more important than Tey’s series detective, Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, whom Hitchcock eliminated). The film thus opened up what was a straight-ahead murder mystery into a blend of chase, comedy, and romance, rendering the initial crime almost irrelevant.
The point of the film, after all, is not the missing clue, or the mystery detection, but the irresistible attraction between the wronged man and the policeman’s daughter. (Only the barest hint of any romantic chemistry exists between the two characters in the book.) And, as usual, the very best scenes—the blindman’s buff at a child’s birthday party (darkly reprised in The Birds) and the stunningly choreographed hotel ballroom crescendo that reveals the killer’s identity—have no counterpart in Tey’s book. In the end, the novel was altered so drastically that the studio looked kindly upon Hitchcock’s new title: Young and Innocent.
Hitchcock’s returning cameraman was Bernard Knowles, and his editor again was Charles Frend. Ufa alumnus Alfred Junge, busy elsewhere since The Man Who Knew Too Much, would return to oversee the spectacular sets (all the more spectacular for being manufactured on a strict budget): one of Junge’s triumphs is the collapsible mine shaft, down which plunges the escaping couple’s car, along with their sole witness.
In keeping with Black’s policy, the stars were English. Although the story was episodic and the settings were multiple, the leading man and lady—the writer on the lam and the tagalong who falls in love with him—would appear, singly or together, in virtually every scene.
For the wronged man, the director cast Derrick de Marney, conventionally handsome and lightweight in the emerging Hitchcock tradition, who had been onstage since a teenager and in pictures since 1928. For the constable’s daughter Hitchcock could have had anyone in England, but he returned to sweet Nova Pilbeam, now eighteen and blossoming.
After this production, Hitchcock would have only one picture remaining on his Gaumont contract, and that was never far from his mind during the filming of Young and Innocent.
It hasn’t generally been appreciated what obstacles he endured in his career. His first film as director was halted for lack of money. He was one of a handful who survived the massive layoffs at Islington in 1923. The Lodger was all but stolen away from him in postproduction. At B.I.P. he went within weeks from acclaim for making the first British talkie to dodging another round of mass firings. Within months of Blackmail, he was making virtual “quota quickies.” At the peak of his fame in the early 1930s, he was discharged in England and cold-shouldered in Hollywood, forced into freelancing on fly-by-night pictures. Now, in the summer of 1937, his sixth or seventh professional crisis was bearing down on him.
One could see it in his weight, which had swollen grotesquely. One could see it in the first published accounts of the director nodding off to sleep on the set. Derrick de Marney had no compunction about telling the press that Hitchcock stole catnaps between takes, and rushed him and his costar at least once through a scene at “express train tempo.” When the take was over, however, Hitchcock did open his eyes “with difficulty,” according to de Marney, in order to consult his watch. “Too slow,” the director murmured; “I had that scene marked for thirty seconds and it took you fifty seconds. We’ll have to retake.”
One could see it, too, in the upsurge of pranks and defensive sarcasm that marked Hitchcock’s behavior during these months. De Marney complained to the press that the director subjected his actors to “merciless ribbing.” Not all the cast: one he exempted was Nova Pilbeam, who was indeed a young and innocent actress—playing a constable’s rebellious daughter (a little like Hitchcock’s mother) who happens to be a whiz with automobiles (a little like Hitchcock’s wife). With Pilbeam, Hitchcock seemed remarkably “deferential,” de Marney said a little resentfully, “both on and off the lot.”
Better than deferential: years later, Pilbeam still recalled Young and Innocent as “quite the sunniest film I was involved with.” Yes, she conceded, “one was rather moved around and manipulated, but, having said that, I liked him [Hitchcock] very much.”
Hitchcock went out of his way to spoil his young star: Her character had a pet dog in the story, she recalled, and both she and the director doted on the animal. When the dog finished its scenes, a handler stood by to take it away. “We were both so upset,” Pilbeam said, “that Hitch decided to write him another sequence, so we kept him for another five or six days.”
Hitchcock could be tender—or he could be merciless, if the scene he was shooting brought that out in him. Pilbeam recalled that when the car driven by Robert (de Marney) crashes through the floor of an abandoned mine, Robert and Old Will the Hobo (Edward Rigby) manage to leap to safety, but Erica (Pilbeam) just barely hangs on between the collapsing vehicle and the edge of the pit. Crawling toward her, Robert reaches out and grabs her hand. “I was terrified!” recalled Pilbeam. “But Hitch ha
d this quirky sense of humor and made that scene go on and on, so that I thought my arm would come out of its socket.”*
The mine-shaft sequence is thrilling, but it’s topped by the film’s final, brilliant crescendo, which takes place at a thronged thé dansant in the ballroom of a seaside hotel. In this sequence, Erica and Old Will have staked out the ballroom, searching for the elusive killer. They only have one clue: the man’s eyes twitch uncontrollably—a detail that isn’t in the book, of course; it’s a classic Hitchcock touch.
They sit at a table and survey the crowd. Couples are dancing to a band playing a song first heard over the opening credits. The musical refrain is insistent: “He’s right here, it’s the Drummer Man …” Hitchcock made the song as specific to the scene as the camera work. The music and pointed lyrics were assigned to three Americans in England: Sammy Lerner, Al Goodhart, and Al Hoffman.*
The tour de force shot Hitchcock planned required a special camera boom and lens, and then two days to block and shoot the elaborately rehearsed action. The camera starts high on a crane above a chandelier at the far end of the dance floor, then lowers itself onto the floor and maneuvers past whirling dancers to gradually approach the bandstand, where the musicians are finally seen—performing in blackface. The camera creeps closer to the faces, finally halting only a few inches from the drummer’s eyes. An extreme close-up reveals the “drummer man”—the killer—his white eyes madly darting and twitching.
“At that moment,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut thirty years later, “I cut right back to the old man and the girl, still sitting at the other end of the room. Now, the audience has the information and the question is: How are this girl and this old boy going to spot the man? A policeman outside sees the girl, who is the daughter of his chief. He goes to the phone. Meanwhile, the band has stopped for a break, and the drummer, having a smoke outside in the alley, sees a group of police hurrying toward the rear entrance of the hotel. Since he’s guilty, he quickly ducks back inside to the bandstand, where the music resumes.
“Now the jittery drummer sees the policeman talking to the tramp and the girl at the other end of the ballroom. He thinks they’re looking for him, and his nervousness is reflected in the drumbeat, which is out of tune with the rest of the band. The rhythm gets worse and worse. Meanwhile, the tramp, the girl, and the police are preparing to leave through an exit near the bandstand. In fact, the drummer is out of danger, but he doesn’t know it. All he can see are those uniforms moving in his direction, and his twitching eyes indicate that he’s in a panic. Finally, his beat is so far out of rhythm that the band stops playing and the dancers stop their dancing. And just as the little group is making its way out the door, he falls with a loud crash into his drum.
“They stop to find out the reason for the commotion, and the girl and the tramp move over to the unconscious man. At the beginning of the story we had established that the heroine is a Girl Scout and an expert on first aid. In fact, she and the hero first got together when he fainted in the police station and she took care of him. So now she volunteers to help the unconscious drummer, and as she leans over him, she notices the twitching eyes. Very quietly she says, ‘Will someone please get me a wet cloth to wipe his face off,’ at the same time beckoning the tramp to come over. A waiter hands her the towel—she wipes the man’s face of its black makeup and looks up at the tramp, who nods and says, ‘Yes, that’s the man.’”
This justly celebrated sequence is followed by a quick, tenderhearted coda. The vindicated Erica proudly drags Robert over to reintroduce him to her father, the chief constable, who has chased him futilely throughout the film. As the policeman and the wronged man awkwardly shake hands, the camera inches back to frame the trio standing together. Erica beams as her gaze shifts ambiguously from her father to her new beau.
Pilbeam was never pluckier. No Hitchcock heroine was ever treated as gallantly. De Marney, sometimes as off balance on the screen as he must have felt on the set, was nonetheless winning. The cops are Keystone, the tone almost that of a screwball comedy. Such pleasures abound in Young and Innocent, a clear, confident gem of Hitchcockery, yet one that was created under duress by a director who was gazing upon an uncertain future.
* The “baby” was a five-year-old boy in the treatment for “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby”; in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the “baby” became a prepubescent girl—closer in age and spirit to the director’s own daughter, Pat.
* Hitchcock saved up Gypsy-style Hungarian accordion music for deep in the background score of Rope—as Brandon’s (John Dall) “atmospheric music” for the guests.
* Greenwood’s books include French Farce, Miracle in the Drawing Room, The Fair Devil, The Deadly Dowager, and Old Goat, the last of which is dedicated: “To Alfred Hitchcock (‘Hitch’), Good Maker of Good Pictures, Good Judge of Good Things, Good Friend.”
* One wonders, therefore, why Hitchcock chose another Frenchman, Daniel Gelin, for the remake.
* Originally Hitchcock intended to shoot this scene in a barbershop, but that was before he saw a Hollywood movie he often cited among his favorites—Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), with Paul Muni. Fugitive “had a scene just like it” in a barbershop, “so I transposed it to a dentist’s office.”
* There is a slight difference between the published title of the novel and that of the film, with Hitchcock playing one of his word games. The Buchan book is The Thirty-nine Steps, while the Hitchcock film is The 39 Steps.
* From Datas: The Memory of Man: “On Tuesday, December the 26th, 1899, which was Boxing Day, the horse fell at a fence in the Thornycroft Steeplechase at Wolverhampton, broke his leg and was shot on the course.”
* He catnapped notoriously, even during plays in which he had invested money—for example, Rodney Ackland’s adaptation of Hugh Walpole’s novel The Old Ladies, starring John Gielgud. “If it’s one he was very keen on seeing,” Alma once explained, “but he has fallen asleep, then he asks me what happened.”
* Not far removed from “Hitch, without the cock.”
* It surely reassured Pilbeam, and amused Hitchcock (who liked to use his inside knowledge of actors for or against them in a scene), that the hands he actually photographed—the man who actually grabbed the actress and kept her from falling—belonged to assistant director Pen Tennyson. Hitchcock knew that Pilbeam had a crush on Pen, and indeed shortly after making Young and Innocent they were married.
* Hoffman had been a real-life “drummer man” in vaudeville and nightclub bands, while Lerner, most famous for his ditty “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man,” would write similar specialty material—ersatz folk songs and dances—for The Lady Vanishes.
SEVEN
1937–1939
Michael Balcon was snapped up by MGM in mid-1937 to head its new studio in London, an operation largely intended to fulfill the English “quota laws” that forced U.S. companies to invest in English film production. Balcon immediately tried to recruit Hitchcock to MGM-British, offering the seeming security of a two-year, multipicture contract. The majority of the films would have to be shot in England, but the offer included the possibility of loan-outs to MGM proper in Hollywood. A tempting offer it was, and given Balcon’s long, fruitful association with Hitchcock, MGM-British was optimistic about signing the director.
But the temptation of America had become irresistible. And after the Christmas 1936 massacre, and a fresh rash of bankruptcies that swept the film industry, Hitchcock was resolved to leave England.
Hitchcock often said that London’s gloomy weather was his signal motivation. “The sky was always gray, the rain was gray, the mud was gray, and I was gray,” he told matte artist Albert Whitlock. (Even the kindly old diplomat visiting London in Foreign Correspondent complains about the fog and rain.)
In February 1937, Hitchcock penned an article for the New York Times complaining that the “greatest difficulty we have in making films in England is to combat the climate.” He described his discouragement one
night as he waited for the rain to stop and the sky to clear, in order to shoot an outdoor scene for Sabotage. “The cameras are covered up, the microphone is shrouded,” the director wrote. “The crowds stand huddled against the shops. I crouch, muffled up and chilled to the marrow, in a temporary shelter; my stars, Sylvia Sidney and John Loder, wait desolate and frozen in a doorway. And why? Because it is raining as it has never rained before, rain which drips off my hat and down my collar and which has held us up till tempers are frayed for three nights running.”
The climate fueled his discontent, but the perpetual woes of the English film industry were just as important an impetus behind increasingly public hints that he wanted a U.S. contract. In America, after ten years as a relative unknown, his Gaumont films had finally conquered the critics and compelled the attention of Hollywood producers—even though his films still boasted only modest revenue, their distribution limited to select theaters in big cities.
Myron Selznick resumed his intensive lobbying on behalf of the Englishman in the spring of 1937. Frank Joyce, after a year’s illness, had died in 1935, leaving the new Selznick Agency—“the biggest talent agency in Hollywood,” in the words of one trade publication—under Myron’s sole stewardship. Myron piqued the interest of two independent producers: Walter Wanger and David O. Selznick.
Wanger, whose films were financed and released through United Artists, knew Hitchcock from time he’d spent in England in the early 1920s, when the young executive had been a theater administrator in London for Paramount. A versatile, respected producer inclined toward serious material, Wanger had supervised pictures by Frank Capra, Rouben Mamoulian, and Fritz Lang, among other leading directors. Now he expressed his willingness to meet with Hitchcock and strike a deal, if the terms could be worked out.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 28