Moreover, the offer was for only fifty thousand dollars for the first Selznick picture, encompassing at least twenty weeks of production (the other weeks of the year would be free and clear to Hitchcock). Only after he had directed four additional films for Selznick International, over four years, would Hitchcock’s salary rise to seventy-five thousand dollars. “All of the time that Hitchcock devotes to the story between now and the actual starting date is to be gratis,” the offer stipulated.
In his book Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers, Leo Rosten researched the earnings of Hollywood filmmakers in 1938, listing thirty-four directors (out of sixty-seven voluntary respondents) making salaries of $100,000 or more, and sixteen who earned over $150,000.* The latter group included such studio contract journeymen as Roy Del Ruth, Norman Taurog, Archie Mayo, and Wesley Ruggles.
Not only did Hitchcock’s proposed contract rank him below Del Ruth, Taurog, Mayo, and Ruggles, but it tucked all of his and Mrs. Hitchcock’s scriptwork into his salary (other directors were routinely paid extra for any scriptwork). Plus, it made no allowance for sharing of profits or of gross revenue, which was gradually becoming standard for top directors. No allowances were made for coproducing, which also boosted other directors’ income. There were travel and relocation set-asides, but even these were less than Hitchcock had wanted. And DOS did agree to pick up the moving expenses and salary of Joan Harrison.
Myron assured a disconsolate Hitchcock that it was the best contract he could get under the circumstances; that DOS was superior in every way to Goldwyn; that it was a matter of cachet to work for Selznick International, and this cachet would help Hitchcock obtain a higher salary on his loan-outs. He could direct his one Selznick production a year, and then feel free to direct one or more additional pictures for other Hollywood producers—including Sam Goldwyn if he wanted. In other words, the contract was an open door to America.
Hitchcock accepted. On July 6 Myron hosted the Hitchcocks for a celebratory dinner at his house, with Dan Winkler, Clark Gable, and Carole Lombard the only other guests. Selznick clients both, Gable and Lombard were the uncrowned (and yet unmarried) king and queen of Hollywood. The screwball comedienne was a down-to-earth “Hitchcock blonde” who delighted in risqué humor. Gable laughed hardest whenever the apple of his eye was laughing.
Hitchcock, charmed by Lombard, was also in a laughing mood. Ever the practical artist, he was convinced that everything was probably for the best. And with his high-spirited dinner, Myron sent his client home from Hollywood on a high note.
Furiously left out in the cold was Sam Goldwyn, who had waited patiently for Hitchcock to conclude a deal with the Selznicks that ultimately locked him out. Determined, the producer made one last-ditch effort to contact the Englishman and sign him for at least one Goldwyn production, sometime—anytime—in 1939. Because DOS’s calendar was so “elastic,” Myron knew better, and ordered the agency not to facilitate any communication.
On July 8, the Hitchcocks returned by train to New York. The director finished off an extended sit-down with Russell Maloney for the New Yorker, and spoke on WNYC radio about “The Making of Melodrama” with New Republic film critic Otis Ferguson. Hitchcock “held forth about the possibilities of enterprising B-features as a field for experiment,” reported John Russell Taylor, “using offbeat stories by writers such as O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe—a curious anticipation of what he was going to do with his television series years later.”
Then the Hitchcocks sailed on the Normandie back to England, and again the director sprawled in a deck chair, basking in the blue skies, watching the people, and catching up with his reading. He carried with him, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, “a trunk full of books, articles and contemporary illustrations” about the Titanic disaster. This time his fellow passengers included novelist Theodore Dreiser, actor George Sanders, New York Post entertainment columnist Leonard Lyons, and William Paley, the head of CBS radio—who would one day air Alfred Hitchcock Presents on his television network.
David O. Selznick announced his prize acquisition on July 12, the eve of Hitchcock’s departure for England. The news was carried in the Los Angeles Times and film columns nationwide, but the items were brief—partly because DOS couldn’t elaborate on “Titanic,” reported as the first Selznick-Hitchcock project (“Quite obvious what the last two reels will be,” Hitchcock told one New York newspaperman. “Beyond that nothing”), and partly because Hitchcock’s name meant almost nothing to the general public in America.
In England, the loss of this “national institution,” in C. A. Lejeune’s words, was bigger news. As long feared, England’s onetime boy wonder, its greatest director, was joining the Lost Legion of Hollywood. The applause was tinged with bitterness.
For one thing, the Gaumont films, which had stirred deep admiration from some critics, also added others to the anti-Hitchcock club. Graham Greene was one who detested the illogic and Macguffins of some of Hitchcock’s greatest English films. Commenting on Secret Agent in the Spectator, for example, Greene wrote, “How unfortunate it is that Mr. Hitchcock, a clever director, is allowed to produce and even to write his own films, though as a producer he has no sense of continuity and as a writer he has no sense of life.” John Grierson was another well-known critic who rarely lost an opportunity to accuse Hitchcock of squandering his talent.
Noting that Hitchcock intended to leave London as early as January 1939, after finishing Jamaica Inn, Herbert Thompson, the editor of the fan magazine Film Weekly, wrote: “I do not always applaud these Hollywood captures, but in Hitchcock’s case I am sure experience of Hollywood’s mass-production methods will improve his work. Hitchcock, still probably Britain’s most talented director, certainly the most individualist, has suffered for too long from being unchallenged in his own field and from being allowed to make his pictures almost exactly as he pleases. There is a strain of willfulness in Hitchcock, which has become more and more apparent with every picture he has made.
“He is a man with a cold and sardonic eye. He sees the grotesque side of his fellow men. And he is always more than ready to include one scarifying, impish touch, even at the risk of sacrificing the mood of a scene or a whole picture. He pleases himself.”
In spite of all that, Thompson arrived at a hopeful conclusion: “There is a suggestion that Hitchcock may decide to remain in America after he has made his ‘Titanic’ film. I doubt the truth of that. Hitchcock is one of our few directors who can be called essentially British.
“When he returns he will, I predict, be a finer and more popular director than ever.”
Hitchcock didn’t care a fig about Jamaica Inn; he had agreed to direct it largely out of desperation. But he did have an affectionate regard for Charles Laughton, and thought he would enjoy directing the oft hammy, always charismatic actor, whose physical bulk rivaled his own. Hitchcock and Laughton had known each other since the late 1920s, when they lunched together occasionally. A frequent guest at Cromwell Road and Shamley Green (he had his own cottage in the vicinity), Laughton was as chimerical in private life as he was flamboyant and arresting on-screen (he had already played Claudius, Rembrandt, and Henry VIII, winning the 1933 Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII). Hitchcock found him to be “a very charming man,” in his words, “very nice and also very troubled.”
Laughton’s partnership with Erich Pommer, who in Berlin in the 1920s had supervised the Ufa masterpieces of Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst, had been launched with fanfare. Pommer’s résumé certainly commanded respect, but Hitchcock knew the producer only glancingly from his time in Berlin and “hadn’t seen him since.” Now a refugee from Hitler, Pommer was in many ways an edgier man. Reduced to supervising one film at a time, not several simultaneously, Pommer was no longer as laissez-faire in his approach. He hovered over all the decisions, feeling the need to reestablish his reputation outside Germany. He and Hitchcock renewed their acquaintance with instant mutual dislike.
By the time Hi
tchcock returned from America, the Jamaica Inn script, which had been bequeathed to Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, had come under Pommer’s influence. With one eye on the U.S. market, the producer had sent the Clemence Dane version to the New York office of the Production Code Administration, which “had refused to allow a clergyman to be the villain,” in the words of Gilliat. Although that was the whole point of the novel, Pommer had taken the Production Code to heart, and insisted the clergyman be turned into a justice of the peace. On this and any other dispute, Laughton—concerned about his investment, loyal to Pommer, and insecure about his own judgment—sided with his partner, usually by making himself invisible. In Hitchcock’s absence, Pommer had cracked the whip on a revised draft that produced “unashamed characters who were melodrama,” in Gilliat’s words.
With a deep sigh, the director had to acquiesce when Pommer and Laughton now insisted on employing J. B. Priestley, widely revered for his prodigious output of plays and novels, to toil on the star’s part and dialogue, lending period flavor and “Regency touches,” in Gilliat’s words. Priestley churned out “scenes more or less straight out of Ashden’s End of the 18th Century, a famous source book,” according to Gilliat, while the resigned Hitchcock let Laughton develop them almost as apron speeches* The film’s strangest scene takes place in a dining room and involves a horse. Donald Spoto blames this scene on the director—“the appalling exaggeration of a sadistic scene in which the deranged Laughton, protesting how much he is in love with Maureen O’Hara, binds and gags her”—but Priestley wrote it straight from the novel.
Hitchcock showed only a mild interest in the Jamaica Inn script anyway, according to Gilliat. On this film, almost all the pleasure was in the storyboarding. The director focused particularly on “the first scene which was the coach arriving at the Jamaica Inn—all raging surf, whistling wind and violent shadows,” in Gilliat’s words.
The Mayflower partners sought an unknown to play the lead female character, Mary, the young niece who opposes the pirates. Maureen O’Hara had apprenticed with the Abbey Theatre in her native Dublin before playing inconsequential parts in British films, but after an inconclusive screen test the redhead, just eighteen, met Laughton and bewitched him. O’Hara had signed for the role well before Hitchcock agreed to direct.
Leslie Banks, who played the father of the kidnapped girl in The Man Who Knew Too Much, was cast as Joss, the leader of the gang of rogues; his wife, the well-named Patience, would be portrayed by Marie Ney. Rugged Robert Newton was the government infiltrator, flushed out by the pirates and rescued by Mary. Among the gang of rogues, whimsically, the director planted two actors who had also served as writers of Hitchcock films, Emlyn Williams and Edwin Greenwood.
By the time filming began in October, Hitchcock felt he was in the clutches of a two-headed monster. It would be too strong to say he ceased to care, but he knew a futile struggle when he saw one, and he stepped back and let Erich Pommer and Charles Laughton dominate. Looking ahead to America, he had already left Jamaica Inn behind. “Realizing how incongruous it was,” he later told François Truffaut, “I was truly discouraged, but the contract had been signed.”
His detached attitude allowed him to preserve his friendship with the star. It was an unusual problem for Hitchcock: directing an actor he liked and admired, but who wouldn’t listen to him. Laughton was really the first Method actor he had encountered. One scarcely directed Laughton, other than telling him where to stand for the camera angle. “The difficult actor” (as he is dubbed in one biography) carried on most of the debate inside himself—to the exclusion of anyone else. “Laughton versus Laughton” is how the frustrated director described the process. “He frets and strains and argues continuously with himself. And he is never satisfied,” Hitchcock declared in one interview.
From the start of filming, Laughton was thwarted by his inability to deeply communicate what he felt was the core of his character, Sir Humphrey (to get as close as “the sweat in a whore’s bed,” as he declaimed one night at Ciro’s). Laughton insisted Hitchcock frame him only in close or medium shots, for example, until he learned how Sir Humphrey ought to walk. This lasted about a week, until he heard a snatch of the film’s score—from Weber’s Invitation to the Dance—being arranged by composer Eric Fenby. “I’ve found it!” Laughton yelped, whistling the waltz rondo as he proudly demonstrated his peculiar walk. Now, the actor declared, Hitchcock could open up his angles.
One day later in the schedule, they worked for hours to get a close-up of Laughton viciously tying up O’Hara, her hands behind her back. Hitchcock couldn’t get the expression he wanted from the actor, however, and at one point Laughton sat down in a corner and began to weep. Hitchcock went over and consoled him, patting him on the shoulder. Laughton looked up and said, “Aren’t you and I a couple of babies?” (“I wanted to use a Goldwynism and say, ‘Include me out,’” Hitchcock recalled, telling the anecdote, years later.) After a few more takes, Hitchcock finally got what he wanted. “You know how I got it, don’t you?” asked Laughton proudly. “No, Charles, how?” “I thought of myself as a small boy of ten, wetting my knickers.” (“That’s inspiration for you, isn’t it?” Hitchcock liked to top off the story, a smile spreading across his face.)
Laughton exasperated everyone. But “I think to be fair to Laughton,” Sidney Gilliat recalled, “none of us had a completely clear picture of the squire.” The star, explained Gilliat, “could be very fine indeed when he trusted his instinct, but as soon as he got a scene right by instinct—and knew it—he would then try to repeat it by intellect. Now his instinct was sounder than his intellect, but he distrusted the one and cultivated the other.”
It was a torturous production, with Laughton torturing himself, and the entire cast and crew tortured by the torrents of machine-blown wind and water that sent everyone home at night suffering shivers and colds.* Hitchcock perfected his standing-against-the-wall routine, which could be as deceptive as his catnapping habit: sometimes it was a feint, other times it was exactly what it seemed—abject retreat. The director stood against the wall a lot while directing Laughton in the J. B. Priestley scenes, according to Gilliat. And he grumbled more than usual to the press: “Directors can’t direct a Laughton picture. The best they can hope for is a chance to ‘referee.’” Or: “The hardest thing to photograph are dogs, babies, motor boats, and Charles Laughton. Motorboats because they never come back for take two.”
All things told, though, Jamaica Inn was surprisingly well refereed.
Under Hitchcock, Maureen O’Hara gave a fiery performance that established her as a rising star. The director found tenderness in the relationship between Leslie Banks and Marie Ney, and encouraged mugging and colorful behavior from the gang of pirates.
Hitchcock found a surprising tenderness in Charles Laughton’s character, too. At the end of Jamaica Inn, Sir Humphrey has gone mad. Kidnapping Mary, he tries to escape; mumbling like a lunatic, he climbs a ship’s mast surrounded by gawking crowds. As constabulary swarm, he leaps to his death—another Hitchcock villain who dictates his own confessional fate. Besides his softhearted niece, the only person who grieves for him is his much-abused manservant, Chadwick (Horace Hodges). The eerie coda of the film is a final shot of this dazed retainer, Sir Humphrey’s shrill “Chadwick!” still ringing in his ears.
The announcement that Hitchcock had signed a contract with Selznick International may have provoked mixed feelings in England, but the long article about the director in the New Yorker stirred up a real hornet’s nest, and caused permanent repercussions in his relationships with writers.
“A Hitchcock picture is, for better or for worse, about 99.44 per cent Hitchcock,” wrote Russell Maloney. “Hitchcock selects all his stories, and is the leading figure in the adaptation, writing of the dialogue, and preparation of the shooting script.”
At the outset of each project, according to Maloney, Hitchcock “engages a writer, preferably an extrovert who is prolific in ideas and situations rath
er than in fine writing.” Then he convenes daily story conferences for a couple of months around the dining-room table of his flat, attended by the writer, Mrs. Hitchcock, and Joan Harrison.
“First they reduce the story to a bald half-page outline, which sets forth the main situation and the principal characters. Hitchcock next asks himself (and his colleagues), ‘What are these people? What is their station in life? What do they work at? How do they act when they are at home?’ The outline is expanded into a treatment of sixty or seventy typewritten pages. This covers the story scene by scene and action by action, but without dialogue. The dialogue is done by a second writer, who takes over each installment of the treatment as fast as it is turned out by Hitchcock and his idea man. Then Hitchcock and his wife convert the dialogue into the final shooting script, a task for which Hitchcock gallantly allows her exclusive program credit, under her maiden name.”
Published in the September 10, 1938, issue, the article was made available earlier for publicity purposes. It came at an embattled time for screenwriters in England and the United States. In both countries, film writers were busy organizing guilds to demand fair payments and accreditation, and to unite their profession against the high-handed practices of producers.
While Hitchcock was quoted sparsely, and most of the phraseology was Maloney’s (calling the director “the leading figure” in the script development, for example), the New Yorker account was relatively accurate. But the slant in favor of Hitchcock cast his writers in a diminished light, and suggested that sentiment orginated with the director himself.
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