The adaptation by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat had turned a dramatic and somewhat monochromatic novel inside out; the result was an eccentric and hilarious script in the Hitchcock style, even before Hitchcock himself became involved. Launder and Gilliat added a pair of Englishmen more curious about cricket scores than the fate of the vanished governess, and a blossoming romance between the socialite and a folklore scholar, the only train passenger who believes her tale. Then everything was tied into a web of politics and spies.
Launder and Gilliant were at the beginning of their remarkable hyphenated careers. Earlier scripts for pictures like Rome Express (1932) had already demonstrated their penchant for ripping train adventures, but largely on the strength of The Lady Vanishes they would be catapulted behind the camera, jointly writing, directing, and producing such classic English films as Night Train to Munich, Millions Like Us, The Young Mr. Pitt, The Happiest Days of Your Life, Geordie, and The Belles of St. Trinians.
Launder was an ex-civil servant turned actor and playwright, Gilliat the son of the managing editor of the Evening Standard, and a protégé of Walter Mycroft. Entering the film business as Mycroft’s assistant, Gilliat rode to his first day of work at Elstree in 1928 in the same taxicab as Mycroft, and rode home the same day with Mycroft and Alfred Hitchcock in the director’s car.
Gilliat started out as a low-level reader for Mycroft, sifting through the B.I.P. “tripe pile” of stories. He knew Hitchcock only in passing from those days. Hitchcock, Gilliat recalled, relished sending the worst “penny dreadfuls” over to the story department for Mycroft’s consideration; more than once, Gilliat said, he sent Hitchcock back a report on a submission (“without reading it, of course”), trumpeting an embryonic Madame Butterfly. He took pleasure in tweaking the great director, conjuring a love story with heroine attracted to hero by “the healthful glow of his countenance,” and ending with the two passionately “sharing the same kimono.”
According to Gilliat, Hitchcock was in distinctly bad odor with Gaumont when he returned from the United States, because of negative reaction to Young and Innocent at studio previews. “The Ostrer brothers who owned the outfit,” Gilliat recalled, “were ready to settle Hitch’s contract, pay him off and not make the last one. He was never regarded by the more commercial end of the business as particularly good box-office. They told Ted Black this and he said, ‘He’s got one picture to do.’ The Ostrers asked Black if Hitchcock had a suitable subject and Ted said, ‘I think I have.’ Hitch hadn’t found one on his own.”
The director’s nose twitched as he read Launder and Gilliat’s blend of comedy, romance, and suspense, with all the Hitchcock ingredients: a missing body, a speeding train, a young man and woman linked by distrust and danger. If he hadn’t yet read the Ethel Lina White novel, he certainly recognized its inspiration. The legend of an ailing elderly lady who vanished from a hotel in the place de la Concorde during the Paris Exposition of 1889 had been fictionalized by Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes in her 1913 novel, The End of Her Honeymoon, and retold by Alexander Woollcott in “The Vanishing Lady” in his book While Rome Burns. Changing the film’s title to The Lady Vanishes was a nod to Woollcott, one of the writers Hitchcock devoutly read in his favorite U.S. magazine, the New Yorker.*
Even though there was already a script, there is nonetheless debate over what Hitchcock contributed to the Launder-Gilliat draft, which had already been stamped with front-office approval a year earlier. According to Gilliat, Hitchcock approached their script the way he would a play, restricting his tinkering mainly to the beginning and ending.
Launder “agreed some new scenes with Hitch,” recalled Gilliat on one occasion, and “because Ted Black admired Hitch, they had decided to put a little extra in the budget, so they were able to extend the ending, which Frank rewrote. They also knocked off the opening, so, essentially, the parts that were ‘authored’ by Hitch were the beginning and the end. There were odd alterations in the middle, which Frank did with Hitch.”
Yet that doesn’t do credit to the scope of the tinkering, which involved not only Hitchcock, Launder, and Gilliat, but others at the studio. It was “all in the family,” according to Val Guest. Guest and Marriott Edgar (known as George) interrupted their work on Will Hay vehicles to kick in ideas. “We always used to wander in and out,” recalled Guest, “and Hitchcock used to wander in and out, and he would ask, ‘Got a better line for this?’”
The new opening was one of Hitchcock’s andantes: A revolving-door introduction of guests crowding into a small inn on the night before the train departs. (“Originally, I had written a much longer opening which took place on a lake steamer in the Balkans,” recalled Gilliat.) And the original Launder-Gilliat script ended, according to the director, “when the lady is removed on a stretcher.” Instead, Hitchcock came up with a shootout between border police and train passengers committed to defending the elderly lady. The former established the setup and characters (“rather like jumping half a reel into the picture, in comparison to the original,” in Gilliat’s words), while the latter provided the big-bang finish.
Along with these crucial changes—without which it’s hard to imagine the film today—there were those “odd alterations in the middle.” It was always Hitchcock’s policy to build up the supporting characters. In this case, he enlarged the parts of the cricket-obsessed Englishmen—he already had the actors in mind—and transformed a banker, who in the Launder-Gilliat draft shared a compartment with the socialite and governess, into a stage illusionist whose “Vanishing Lady” specialty would add to the conceit.
The original script was full of allusions to foreign ministers of propaganda and “England on the brink,” but the rewrites also strengthened the sly political commentary. The absurd Macguffin (a coded song) is linked to the meddling of a fictional Mittel European nation (Bandrieka, “one of Europe’s few undiscovered corners”), replete with its own pretend language. Audience members would have fun guessing at the real Bandrieka.
The train shoot-out reinforced the politics. The hero and heroine try to rally their countrymen away from teatime, but the English passengers are stubbornly complacent: “They can’t possibly do anything to us, we’re British subjects!” One Englishman—an adulterer, and worse, a heel—declares himself neutral, and steps from the train waving a white flag. He is promptly shot dead. The message is clear: England is kidding itself to think it can appease Hitler.
Especially in light of the bad feeling that developed between him and the two scenarists, it must be said conclusively that Hitchcock (or, rather, both Hitchcocks, for Alma was credited with “continuity”) put his stamp on The Lady Vanishes—as a writer, before he’d even set foot on the set.
The Lady Vanishes would be a reunion with cameraman Jack Cox, and one last Hitchcock film produced at Islington. Cox had to summon his old resourcefulness on the once-grand soundstages, now small and threadbare compared to Lime Grove. The pictures shot at Islington during this era were conveniently set in train compartments and lighthouses and cramped prison cells. Alex Vetchinsky, the resident designer, had become an expert at that sort of inexpensive single set, and his influence is conspicuous on The Lady Vanishes. Hitchcock was encouraged to make abundant use of his full arsenal of back-projection, trick shots, and miniatures to maintain the illusion of a real train in constant motion.
Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford (Nova Pilbeam’s uncle in Young and Innocent) were teamed up by Hitchcock as the cricket-mad Englishmen. The two actors had never performed together, but their rapport was so instantaneous that their parts grew during filming, and The Lady Vanishes cemented them as a team for other films.
The duplicitous brain specialist was Paul Lukas. Cecil Parker and Linden Travers were the adulterous couple. Philip Leaver was the magician Doppo, and Catherine Lacey was memorable as the accomplice whose high heels clash with her nun’s habit—another Hitchcock touch. The frumpy “vanishing lady,” Miss Froy—“rhymes with joy”—was a part for Dame May Whitty, a stage
star on both sides of the Atlantic since the turn of the century.
Launder and Gilliat didn’t want a regulation hero, so they had changed Ethel Lina White’s dam engineer into Gilbert, a folklore scholar. It was probably Hitchcock who nudged the character further along this path into “a scholar of folk music”—which allowed for the comedy sequence that introduces Gilbert, and the tune that will save the world (self-plagiarism from The 39 Steps, where the tune inside of Robert Donat’s head finally reminds him of Mr. Memory).
Ted Black urged Hitchcock to test Michael Redgrave, who had carved his reputation in classics on the stage (he was then appearing nightly in the Chekhov play The Three Sisters). Although inexperienced in film—and as wary of the rival medium as John Gielgud—Redgrave was persuaded by the generous long-term contract proffered by Gaumont.
For Iris, the producer championed Margaret Lockwood, a pert brunette rising in audience polls who had never met her costar before she was cast in The Lady Vanishes. “We were introduced at a charity film ball at the Royal Albert Hall, where we danced together and were photographed in a tight embrace which suggested that, to say the least, we knew each other quite well,” Redgrave recalled in his autobiography.
Characteristically, the director was counting on an awkwardness between them. Hitchcock was up to his usual tricks, choosing the first day of filming to shoot the scene where Gilbert and Iris “meet cute.” The folk-music scholar has collected members of the hotel staff in his room to noisily reproduce a local dance. The dancers are making too much commotion for Iris, who is trying to go to sleep in the room just below; she convinces the hotel manager to evict Gilbert. Gilbert then vengefully barges into her room, booming out the march later used famously in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
“It is possibly the gravest disadvantage of acting for the camera,” Redgrave later reflected, “that one must do an important scene with someone one has never acted with, perhaps never even met, or, as with Margaret Lockwood and myself, met only briefly and in somewhat artificial circumstances. After some initial parrying, Margaret and I got along well, though we remained suspicious of each other for some time.”
In the film, as Hitchcock well knew, the two characters also meet at a disadvantage and remain suspicious of each other for some time—their romance developing stealthily.
“Something of an intellectual snob,” in his own words, Redgrave harbored suspicions of Hitchcock and film in general. The director’s slashing brand of humor Redgrave never got used to: he couldn’t understand why, at one cast party at Cromwell Road, Hitchcock poured drink after drink for Mary Clare (the aunt in Young and Innocent, the baroness in The Lady Vanishes) until, to his obvious satisfaction, the actress got roaring drunk.
Like others before him Redgrave couldn’t understand Hitchcock’s “shock tactics,” in his words—his fallible belief “that actors take themselves too seriously, and that those who have an infinite capacity for taking praise will sometimes perform better if they are humorously insulted. He evidently thought that I had a romantic reverence for the theater, and he could see that I had the newcomer’s disdain for the working conditions of the studio.”
The writers begrudged Hitchcock. The leading man regarded him warily. The budget was shoestring. The director was fat and pale, his future gray and cloudy.
The months spent making The Lady Vanishes were filled with nervousness and difficulty, and once again there were published reports of a fatigued director stealing forty winks during filming. “He was a dozing, nodding Buddha with an enigmatic smile on his face,” recalled Lockwood. Once again there were reports of a Hitchcock, literally backing away from confrontations with people—standing as far away against a wall as he could, staring sullenly at someone who had trapped him, stabbing a finger at him.
It’s a curious fact, but nobody has been able to date the origins of that most notorious of Hitchcock pronouncements: “Actors are cattle.” The director himself recalled that he might first have said something along those lines in the late 1920s, thinking of stage actors who took a snobbish attitude toward motion pictures. The purity of theater was a pretension that Hitchcock, himself a theater aficionado, couldn’t abide. “I do not know whether his famous ‘Actors are cattle’ remarks was coined for my benefit, but I well remember his saying it in my presence,” Redgrave remembered.
“When we started,” Hitchcock recalled, “we rehearsed a scene and then I told him [Redgrave] we were ready to shoot it. He said he wasn’t ready. ‘In the theater, we’d have three weeks to rehearse this.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘in this medium, we have three minutes.’”
The leading man was subsequently taken aback when fellow actor Paul Lukas, whom he “greatly admired and liked,” wondered aloud why Redgrave didn’t even seem to be trying to fit into the film world. Redgrave felt chastened: he hadn’t been trying. Hitchcock had advised him to “do as I was told and not worry so much.” When Redgrave finally decided to follow this advice, he finally started to relax—and began to like the director.
It is a virtue to know one’s solace, and Hitchcock found ways of nurturing his spirit in the worst of times. As striking as any anecdote of friction or unpleasantness on the set of The Lady Vanishes is the one about an event the director orchestrated for an important visitor. One day, at lunchtime, he had the stage cleared. Mood lighting was ordered, and a small group of studio musicians on the sidelines struck up an arranged playlist. He had a favorite menu drawn up, and juice served in champagne glasses. Then he and nine-year-old Pat, just father and daughter, ate a special lunch aboard the dining car of the mock train.
Even while he was making The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock kept one eye on America. The Selznick Agency was working to reignite interest in bringing him to Hollywood. Producer Bob Kane seemed eager to employ the director for the new London unit of Twentieth Century–Fox, and RKO in Hollywood floated a long-term producer-director pact. Most promising of all, independent producer Sam Goldwyn reentered the competition.
The new prospects were encouraged by the Selznick Agency mainly to heat up the lukewarm discussions with David O. Selznick. The agency went so far at one point as to wire DOS in his drawing room aboard the Santa Fe Chief, advising him that it was “really urgent” for him to focus on the matter “as propositions are coming up for Hitchcock elsewhere.”
But DOS, consumed with preparations for Gone With the Wind, couldn’t seem to think ahead. He couldn’t focus on Hitchcock. When Jock Whitney and Kay Brown dined with the director at the Connaught Grill in London at the end of November 1937, they were again impressed with the man in the ample flesh. When Whitney took in Young and Innocent at a subsequent preview, however, his reaction was dismay. His transmission to DOS warned that the latest Hitchcock “establishes new low for both Pilbeam and himself. Please see it before further negotiation.” Brown didn’t learn of this rash, mistaken verdict for several weeks; when she did, she weighed in belatedly: “Regret do not agree with Jock.”
Yet Brown, along with Jenia Reissar—Selznick’s talent and literary scout in London—also warned DOS repeatedly that Hitchcock was reputed to be a “slow worker.” Bob Burnside was another Selznick adviser who informed his boss crudely that Hitchcock was “a fat man and a little lazy.” These reports—unfair to Hitchcock’s true efficiency and productivity—gave DOS pause. Furthermore, whenever DOS asked about the director’s present salary, he was told a sum equal to less than forty thousand dollars. He couldn’t figure out why Hitchcock was asking for so much more.
When DOS himself finally saw Young and Innocent in February 1938, he emerged from the screening to proclaim Hitchcock “the greatest master of this particular type of melodrama.”* Yet the Hollywood producer continued to balk at the salary the Englishman was requesting, and continued to prefer a one-picture contract; and DOS didn’t want to sign any contract until he knew what the first Selznick-Hitchcock production was going to be.
Halfway through the filming of The Lady Vanishes, his last commitment under the
Gaumont contract, Hitchcock still didn’t know what his next project was going to be. So he was nearly frantic when he met with Charles Laughton in the spring of 1938.
After his break with producer Alexander Korda, and following the disaster of the unfinished Josef von Sternberg film I, Claudius, Laughton had gone into business with German émigré Erich Pommer to set up Mayflower Films. There had already been two successful Mayflower productions, and the next was going to be Jamaica Inn, based on a 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier, and Laughton wanted Hitchcock as his director. Set in the nineteenth century, Jamaica Inn concerned a band of cutthroats who wreck and plunder ships off the Cornish coast, under the secret leadership of a local vicar (the starring part earmarked for Laughton). Their piracy is threatened by a young, upstanding maiden—the niece of one pirate—and an undercover naval officer.
It was while considering Laughton’s proposition that Hitchcock also read the latest Daphne du Maurier novel in galleys. Rebecca was a gothic suspense thriller about the English lord of a manor who is haunted by the memory of his first wife, the never-glimpsed Rebecca, who has perished in a mysterious boating accident before the story begins. The book’s narrator is his new wife, who must unravel the horror of the past.
Hitchcock promptly tried to option Rebecca, but flinched at paying the asking price himself. This, finally, spurred DOS into some semblance of action. Jenia Reissar, who had started in the business working for Gerald du Maurier, set about acquiring the book for the American producer, which the Selznick Agency considered the first step toward a contract with Hitchcock. But DOS optioned many properties, and his talk was still vague.
In the spring of 1938 Hitchcock told a London columnist, “If I do go to Hollywood, I’d only work for Selznick.” But he was merely keeping the hook baited. Not until the final days of The Lady Vanishes did he receive the equivalent of a nibble. DOS telegraphed his brother’s office in London, proposing a Hitchcock film TO BE BASED UPON AND CALLED QUOTE TITANIC UNQUOTE.” There was no script, but Hitchcock could name his preferred writer, the producer’s telegram said, and go straight to work. Filming could be under way by mid-August.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 30