Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  In Hollywood it was rather expected of the best directors that they buck censorship, but Hitchcock would buck the Hays Office with exceptional tenacity in the American phase of his career, pushing the boundaries of sex and violence in film after film. And he usually did so deviously, rather than in direct confrontation—stalling, surrendering by degrees, swapping off one cherished transgression for another.

  The Production Code had been written by a Jesuit priest and a crusading Catholic layman, and it existed partly as a check against the proliferation of local and civic censorship groups across America. These included the Legion of Decency, the Church’s official—and even more stringent—ratings board. Catholics ran the Hays Office in Hollywood. Hitchcock met frequently and ungrudgingly with head censor Joseph Breen, and his assistant, Englishman Geoffrey Shurlock. He had an ease with them that others lacked, and they were as amused as they were alarmed by his ability to sneak “inescapable inferences” past them.

  Even after the sins of a Hitchcock script had been washed away by the Hays Office, such inferences often remained. Although the censors gradually eliminated any dialogue that suggested an improper relationship between Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers, Hitchcock got around the problem by clever atmospherics and intimate two-shots, with Mrs. Danvers hovering over the second Mrs. de Winter while stroking Rebecca’s lingerie, recalling their precious closeness. (Mrs. Danvers’s line about Rebecca’s underwear being handmade by cloistered nuns probably looked chaste on paper, but what a hoot: of course it’s a Hitchcock line, not in the book.)

  To help Anderson with her performance, though she was an actress acclaimed for interpreting Shakespeare and the classics, Hitchock assumed the character in rehearsals and showed Anderson how to position herself for optimum camera effect. “I knew I was in the presence of a master,” she said afterward. “I had utter trust and faith in him.”

  But Rebecca would have to rise or fall on the shoulders of its least seasoned player. Nearly every scene revolved around the second Mrs. de Winter, Joan Fontaine. Hitchcock had to play Pygmalion with Fontaine: slathering the young actress with support and advice while at the same time isolating her from the other actors and whispering against them (reminding Fontaine constantly that Olivier disliked her, hinting that she was in danger of being replaced). Hitchcock built up his power over Fontaine while keeping her nervous and vulnerable enough to enhance the nervous, vulnerable character she was playing.

  She was not, it must be said, all that popular. Olivier, still smarting over the fact that Fontaine had beaten out Vivien Leigh, treated his costar with transparent disdain. Olivier’s “attitude helped me subconsciously,” Fontaine later conceded in No Bed of Roses. “His resentment made me feel so dreadfully intimidated that I was believable in my portrayal.”

  Hitchcock encouraged these tensions as grist for the scenes between his two stars. When, during the first week of shooting, Fontaine expressed shock after Olivier used a four-letter word, Hitchcock stepped in. “I say, Larry old boy, do be careful,” he cautioned. “Joan is just a new bride.” When Olivier asked who the husband was, Fontaine replied that she had married Brian Aherne. “Couldn’t you do better than that?” he flung over his shoulder before striding off imperiously. The retort demolished her; Aherne was a lightweight, often typecast as an English gentleman, and Fontaine said later that she could never look at him with the same eyes again. (An impulsive marriage to begin with, it would also be a short-lived one.)

  Not just Oliver, but the entire cast, behaved like a “cliquey lot.” United by their superiority and their purer Englishness, they sneered at the least-seasoned player behind her back, or so Fontaine believed. Hitchcock took advantage of this, too, drawing on Fontaine’s insecurity to inform her performance in Rebecca. Ordering Fontaine to the set on her day off, the director surprised the actress by throwing her a birthday party. She was equally surprised that the important cast members didn’t bother to show up; they stayed in their dressing rooms. Hitchcock could have summoned them—but their absence suited his strategy.

  It wasn’t really a matter of “Divide and Conquer,” as Fontaine described it in her autobiography. It was Hitchcock forcing a novice actress to become her character, by treating Fontaine like Mrs. de Winter. The actress felt as alone, as terrified, as de Winter’s young bride felt in Rebecca’s world.

  This was one of the director’s techniques, but there were others. Fontaine recalled Hitchcock drawing for cameraman George Barnes a sketch of one shot that featured her character, cringing in an oversize wing chair, the light slanting across her face so that only her frightened eyes peered out. The sketch proved helpful to the cameraman, but also to the actress. “We all could see precisely what he wished to photograph,” Fontaine said.

  If sketches didn’t work, Hitchcock was capable of ruder measures: In one scene, Fontaine was supposed to break down into tears. (Selznick’s fidelity to the book meant that Fontaine’s character would spend many scenes on the verge of tears.) After multiple takes, Hitchcock still wasn’t satisfied. The actress pleaded that she was all out of tears. “I asked her what it would take to make her resume crying,” recalled Hitchcock. “She said, ‘Well, maybe if you slapped me.’ I did, and she instantly started bawling.”

  The only other person Hitchcock had to manipulate was the producer. In England producers made self-important visits to sets, but those visits were ceremonial, and easily tolerated. David O. Selznick had a different habit: he made ostentatious on-set appearances to monitor his directors, and often insisted on approving the staging of key scenes before they were filmed.

  In England, producers were master businessmen in charge of financial decisions. In Hollywood, producers regarded themselves as creative forces. Selznick’s droit du seigneur as a creative producer had sometimes extended to firing directors when they clashed with—or disappointed—him. Although the director’s contract made his firing unlikely, once he had launched photography, Hitchcock recognized the wisdom of following local custom.

  “Would you say Selznick was a producer who interfered?” Peter Bogdanovich asked Hitchcock. “Oh yes,” he replied. “Very much so. In fact, the big shock I had was after I had rehearsed a scene and said, ‘Well, let’s go,’ and the script girl said, ‘Oh, wait a minute—I have to send for Mr. Selznick.’ Before a scene was shot, he had to come down.”

  Selznick’s visits to the set of Rebecca tapered off rather quickly, however. For one thing, Hitchcock made his displeasure clear. For another, the first preview of Gone With the Wind took place shortly after Rebecca began filming; after that, Selznick’s calendar was taken up with retakes and reediting, and the producer’s grandiose promotional plans. “It was my good fortune that he was extremely busy,” Hitchcock said later. Watching Rebecca’s dailies became Selznick’s main involvement, and there the producer swiftly discovered that Hitchcock didn’t direct like any other director he had under contract—or like anyone in Hollywood.

  Blanket “coverage” was an orthodoxy in Hollywood: DOS expected a full complement of close-ups, medium shots, establishing shots, angles, and two-shots of virtually every page of script, allowing the producer to have every conceivable option in the editing room. In Hollywood, directors may have presided on the set, but producers ruled the editing roost.

  If the scriptwriting had been a game of checkers for Hitchcock, with producer and director jumping and kinging to a draw, the filming was chess with a champion. Hitchcock called the shots with the camera. And although there was usually extra coverage and alternative takes on a Hitchcock film, the director would shoot as little extra as possible on Rebecca.

  Watching the dailies, Selznick tore his hair out. He didn’t understand “my goddamm jigsaw method of cutting,” in Hitchcock’s words, or what the director was doing with Joan Fontaine, giving Olivier the day off while an off-camera script girl fed de Winter’s lines to the already jittery actress for her close-ups. Convinced that Fontaine was underplaying her role, DOS advised Hitchcock to strive for “a lit
tle more Yiddish Art Theater, a little less English repertory theater” in his approach. Selznick eventually grew worried enough that, in early October, he considered closing down the filming, getting more involved, and bearing down on Hitchcock (as he’d done with other directors). And yet, when he showed Hitchcock’s cumulative footage to his wife, Irene, she assured him it was superb.

  The producer continued worrying aloud in his memos: wasn’t Hitchcock taking too much time with rehearsals, with lights, with his elaborate setups? But the most taxing delays weren’t the director’s fault: actors blew their lines, Fontaine came down with the flu, the technicians’ union held a wildcat strike. It’s a myth that Hitchcock ate up inordinate time on his first Selznick production, but it was a myth that proved useful to DOS—who gleefully adopted it and spread it via his staff.

  The producer’s memos grumbled that he was getting “less cut film per day” than he expected from “a man who shoots twice as many angles” as other Hollywood directors. Hitchcock was shooting only what he intended to use. Checkmate: whenever the producer made a suggestion that the director was forced to adopt, whenever he ordered retakes, even then Selznick found himself subverted. “Rather than minimize Selznick’s additions,” wrote Leonard Leff, “Hitchcock actually enhanced them.”

  When, for example, Selznick insisted that a dinner-table scene between Olivier and Fontaine be reshot because Fontaine seemed “more self-conscious in this scene than in most others,” Hitchcock complied. He re-filmed, incorporating Selznick’s dialogue changes faithfully. Yet he also restaged the scene, obliterating the dialogue by having his camera sweep back dramatically away from the couple at the table. “In the act of withdrawal, a movement duplicated elsewhere in the film,” in Leonard Leff’s words, “the camera contributes to the young bride’s feelings of unworthiness and abandonment.”

  Toward the end of Rebecca—when Rebecca’s body is discovered, and questions arise about why de Winter earlier misidentified his wife’s corpse—an inquest ensues. This is followed by a visit to Rebecca’s London doctor, who reveals her cancer diagnosis. De Winter is cleared—and the film ends with the crescendo scene from du Maurier’s novel, in which, rather than accept her new mistress, Mrs. Danvers burns Manderley (and herself) to the ground.

  The battle between producer and director extended even down to the film’s final image. DOS wanted the flames to form the letter R. “Imagine!” Hitchcock sniffed in later interviews. They argued about it throughout the filming, until Hitchcock finally prevailed with his own variation: the camera pushing slowly into the burning bedroom to show flames licking at Rebecca’s initialed pillow.

  DOS won the script and lost the filming. After the last take in December, the director, already looking ahead to his next, more Hitchcockian film, left Rebecca in the hands of the producer, who did his best to reassert his authority and apply “the Selznick touch.” DOS had Fontaine extensively rerecorded; he supervised remedial retakes; he fooled with the editing. He also supervised the score, adding music to underline nearly every scene.

  The film’s running time indicates that the producer utilized every available scrap of footage, arriving at 130 hand-wringing minutes, the longest Hitchcock film to date. Hitchcock’s films did expand in length in Hollywood, but in his body of work that time is exceeded only by another Selznick collaboration, The Paradine Case (132 minutes), and by North by Northwest (136 minutes).

  The length was one of Selznick’s small victories. “The lesson of working with Hitchcock,” David Thomson wrote, “was that no matter how much the producer involved himself, there were secrets of craft, nuance, and meaning that only a director controlled. It was a war from which David [Selznick] emerged not just beaten, but demoralized.”

  Even with everything Selznick could think to do to “improve” Rebecca, the film was ready for a sneak preview on the day after Christmas. The audience reacted with “great acclaim,” wrote Thomson, and Rebecca was slated to open in U.S. theaters in March 1940.

  The Hitchcocks celebrated their first American Christmas at their leased St. Cloud Road home, opening presents and sharing egg nog with former tenants Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, who regaled them with tales of the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind.

  By Christmas, the Hitchcocks and Joan Harrison had fashioned a fresh approach to Personal History, incorporating their nationality and politics. Vincent Sheean’s memoir lacked a linear plot; the events of the book took place entirely in the 1920s, with long chapters set in Chicago, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Tangier, Tehran, Moscow, and Shanghai. The first thing the three Hitchcocks did was narrow the focus to London, barely glimpsed in the Sheean book. London, the Hitchcocks’ home, became the film’s home.

  Although in England the director had been routinely praised for his “gentleman adventurers,” for his first Hollywood original Hitchcock would consciously replace this hero with an American John Doe—“the man in the street,” as he sometimes put it. The foreign correspondent would even boast a generic name, Johnny Jones.* A street-savvy New York newspaper reporter, Jones is described as having a reputation for toughness (he once beat up a policeman in the line of duty). At the beginning of the story the reporter is posted overseas because the other foreign correspondents are viewed as too namby-pamby to expose certain European leaders as the gangsters they really are. The fact that England was at war with Germany was very much on everyone’s minds, so upon his arrival in London, the naïve American would be thrust into the middle of a global conspiracy intended to force England into war.

  Although the hero was a marked change, the treatment, penned by Alma and Joan Harrison, was generously sprinkled with ingredients “in line with my earlier films,” in Hitchcock’s words: spies and traitors, a kidnapping and attempted assassination, a love story mingled with wrong-man comedy—all climaxed by the downing of a transatlantic airliner and its crash into the ocean. Since Hitchcock had been rereading Greenmantle, the script also borrowed at least one item from that novel—the involvement of a faux peace organization, echoing Buchan’s bogus League of Democrats Against Aggression.

  The politics of the film would have been even more explicit if not for the Neutrality Act and the Hollywood censors. Unwilling to write off the German-speaking market (in or outside of Germany), the Hays Office objected, for example, to the villains speaking identifiable German. Borrowing a note from The Lady Vanishes then, Hitchcock converted the language of the villains to a made-up vernacular. The enemy, for whom the main villain is spying, is offhandedly identified as “Borovian”—another country on Hitchcock’s fictitious map of Europe, bordering, one suspects, on Bandrieka.

  The proposed storyline was audacious, going so far as to make the Neutrality Act part of its message, placing the legislation squarely in opposition to the Bill of Rights. At the very end of the film, the American captain of the ship that rescues the airliner’s passengers would cite neutrality in refusing to allow the foreign correspondent to report the disaster from sea. But this violates freedom of the press, the reporter argues (and then tricks the captain by shouting his argument—and the news—into a transatlantic phone call).

  Walter Wanger heartily endorsed the three Hitchcocks’ bold approach. Wanger was more laissez-faire than Selznick, and didn’t constantly second-guess his directors. From the outset of the project, the director and his new producer got along like co-conspirators.

  The contrast with DOS was thrown into relief when Wanger schemed with Hitchcock against Selznick International. A naïf financially, Hitchcock had lived reasonably well from film to film, but the move from England had been costly. Hitchcock had no investments, his savings were modest. His reserves were still in London banks, and the new British Defence Finance Regulations barred transfers of currency out of the country. (Not until well after the war would Hitchcock get his hands on his London savings.)

  The director’s financial problems were behind his peripheral involvement in a minor Walter Wanger production, The House Across the Bay, in January 1940.
George Raft, the star, was unhappy with the climactic scenes, and wanted someone other than Archie Mayo, who had guided the rest of the film, to direct an alternative ending. Wanger called in Alfred Hitchcock, who dazzled Raft by outlining a pepped-up crescendo, with brief scenes that he himself would write and supervise. Wanger phoned DOS on the spot to get approval for Hitchcock to interrupt progress on Personal History and devote a few days to retakes.

  Wanger then bestowed a small sum of money on Hitchcock, and Dan Winkler of the Selznick Agency approached DOS and argued that, having come up with a “story twist” everyone endorsed, Hitchcock deserved a bonus. But DOS thought otherwise; any Hitchcock income, he claimed, was owed directly to Selznick International.

  After the creative tug-of-war over Rebecca, here was another taste of how tight the Selznick straitjacket would be. Hitchcock was upset about turning his bonus over to DOS, but Myron said he could do nothing about it. Fed up with this and other frustrations, Winkler quit the agency and took an associate producer’s post at RKO.

  In February, at Hitchcock’s behest, Walter Wanger engaged Charles Bennett at one thousand dollars a week for four weeks—the amount of time Hitchcock thought he would need to transform the treatment into a decent script. Old misunderstandings between Hitchcock and his once and favorite stooge were set aside as Bennett, the capable constructionist who had worked with the director on seven of his best-known films in England, bent to the task of organizing the elements and ideas into coherent suspense. Recreating their past formula, the two worked in as genial and leisurely a manner as possible. “If we got stuck on the plot,” recalled Bennett, “we’d take a drive to Palm Springs or somewhere.”

  Bennett was a security blanket for Hitchcock. The director had enlisted him partly for auld lang syne, partly because the revamped Personal History needed his English background, and partly because Bennett could be counted on to reinforce the antineutrality politique that was at the story’s core.