Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Shortly after the war broke out, a small group of British expatriates in Hollywood began to meet to devise ways to confront American neutrality and promote England’s cause. Congregating regularly at the office of Cecil B. De Mille, this group felt obliged to keep its existence secret, not only because the Neutrality Act made prowar agitation illegal, but because of political tensions within the film industry. Hollywood mirrored America with its split between citizens anxious to join the fight against Hitler and those—a peculiar alliance of America Firsters and Communists abiding by the Hitler-Stalin pact—who preached isolationism.

  For two years, this small expatriate group would operate as a virtual cell of British intelligence, with the goal of nudging America toward involvement in the war. Its key figures included actors Boris Karloff (whose brother John Pratt was in the London office of MI6) and Reginald Gardiner, directors Robert Stevenson and Victor Saville, and Charles Bennett. Either Bennett or Saville, the group’s informal leader, brought Hitchcock to meetings.

  The new Hitchcock project was developed in the midst of this stealth campaign on England’s behalf, and indeed in March 1940—the month that Bennett handed in his draft—the Hollywood cell group set in motion another quasi-Hitchcock film: an unusual charity production designed to glorify England. Hitchcock joined Saville, Cedric Hardwicke, and Herbert Wilcox in sending out a general call to British natives in Hollywood. Actors, writers, and directors were asked to show their patriotism by donating their services to an anthology picture whose earnings would be pledged to war-related causes.

  Pledges of support were quickly received from Ronald Colman, Errol Flynn, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Herbert Marshall, Ray Milland, Basil Rathbone, George Sanders, Merle Oberon, and many others. Hitchcock was named to the Board of Governors of Charitable Productions producing the anthology film and distributing its proceeds. He also agreed to direct one of its five segments. The proposed story of Forever and a Day, as the picture was to be called, would follow two families, masters and servants, living in a London house over the course of thirty years (1899–1929).

  Hitchcock also volunteered to cochair, with Dame May Whitty in London, a drive to raise funds to evacuate children from the Actors’ Orphanage in England, to safe havens in Canada and the United States.

  What was true in England still obtained in Hollywood: after Charles Bennett completed his four weeks, Hitchcock went looking for other writers to shore up the script. This time, however, when Bennett left Hitchcock’s employ he left it forever. The two stayed cordial, meeting over the years for lunch or drinks. But the fact that Hitchcock never again called on him as a writer puzzled and hurt Bennett; he lived to the age of ninety-five, granting interviews about Hitchcock that reflected his wounded pride.

  It may have been that Hitchcock, over time, needed a constructionist less. Or it may have been that Bennett was coming increasingly under the influence of the politically conservative Cecil B. De Mille in the 1940s, eventually developing into an anti-Communist zealot, which offended Hitchcock’s mild brand of socialism. Just as likely, it was that the films of De Mille, once one of Hitchcock’s idols, began to decline in quality around the time Bennett joined his staff; the De Mille films written by Bennett—Reap the Wild Wind, The Story of Dr. Wassell, Unconquered—were the object of private ridicule in Hitchcock’s camp.

  After Bennett left the fold, a slew of credited and uncredited writers joined Hitchcock and Joan Harrison in the script relays. Another fellow Englishman, James Hilton, the best-selling author of Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr. Chips (and screenwriter of such quality films as George Cukor’s Camille) put in the longest stint, and was undoubtedly the highest paid.

  The humorist Robert Benchley was also among the writing platoon. A Myron Selznick client, and the second New Yorker and Algonquin writer to be drawn into collaboration with Hitchcock, Benchley had appeared mainly in acclaimed comedy shorts, and Hitchcock guaranteed him a part in the film: from the earliest drafts, one of Johnny Jones’s colleagues, a dipsomaniacal American reporter stationed in London, was dubbed “Benchley.”

  “My part is still very nebulous and quite unnecessary,” Benchley wrote his wife in a March 27, 1940, letter, “and right now the picture itself seems to be in pretty sloppy shape.” The script would almost certainly have to “rely on the Hitchcock touch,” he added, with what must have been an audible Benchley sigh. “The story has absolutely nothing to do with the book and never did have. We are now trying to think up a new title. It is an out-and-out melodrama like The Lady Vanishes or 39 Steps, only not so good.”

  Hitchcock got along so splendidly with Benchley that his small role, while remaining nebulous and unnecessary, kept growing in the script—and the director then encouraged him to improvise during filming; even after Benchley had finished his written scenes (as he complained to Myron Selznick), Hitchcock still wouldn’t let him go. He was paid to stick around, just in case.

  The young writer Richard Maibaum* was borrowed from Paramount at the eleventh hour, uncredited, for extra work on the most Hiltonian of the dramatis personae, the kidnapped elderly idealist Van Meer. (“I feel very old and sad,” he says when questioned about Europe’s political crisis, “and very helpless.”) Van Meer is the only man in Europe who knows the secret “Clause 27” of the endangered peace treaty.

  “It’s not very logical,” Maibaum told Hitchcock after reading the latest script draft.

  “Oh, dear boy,” the director responded with a grimace, “don’t be dull. I’m not interested in logic, I’m interested in effect. If the audience ever thinks about logic, it’s on their way home after the show, and by that time, you see, they’ve paid for their tickets.”

  As the writing was being completed, the design and second-unit teams raced along their parallel tracks. Operating on his philosophy that foreign locales called for signature sights, Hitchcock set a handful of scenes among London tourist stops, including Waterloo Station and Westminster Cathedral, and also in Holland (barely mentioned in Vincent Sheean’s book), in a countryside of windmills and in the Rembrandtsplein, one of Amsterdam’s public squares. A British unit was delegated to photograph these sites for design and back-projection purposes.

  In America, sets were meanwhile constructed under the supervision of William Cameron Menzies. In the last week of February 1940, Menzies had won the Oscar for Best Art Direction for Gone With the Wind; a legend among production designers, now Menzies oversaw the creation of an array of new sets on the Goldwyn soundstages, including a field of windmills, facsimiles of the public square in Amsterdam, Waterloo Station, a high lookout on the tower of Westminster Cathedral, and a full-size airplane and fuselage. Hitchcock hired as his cameraman Rudolph Maté, born in Cracow, whose distinguished record included European films with Alexander Korda, Carl Dreyer, Fritz Lang, and René Clair.

  Give Walter Wanger credit: as a producer, he had convictions and guts. He okayed all expenditures as the budget crept above $1 million and then, during shooting, to almost $1.5 million, “more than double Wanger’s average negative costs,” in the words of Wanger biographer Matthew Bernstein. All this with Rebecca still untested at the box office. More decisive and expeditious than Selznick, Wanger also admired Hitchcock more unreservedly, and he accepted the expensive sets and special effects as the cost of doing business with the Englishman.

  With principal photography scheduled for mid-March, the casting had to hurry to keep pace. From the start in Hollywood, Hitchcock was eager to shake the label “British director,” and it was evidence of his ambition for the new film that he had crafted his leading roles for Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck—magical, all-American casting that would have followed closely on the pair’s starring in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe.

  But having signed to play Capra’s John Doe, Cooper had little appetite for a John Doe film for Hitchcock—or, as the director preferred to put it, “I think the people around him advised him against it.” When Hitchcock referred in interviews to ce
rtain Hollywood stars who looked down their noses at “my type of film,” he was thinking of this first incident—and of the many others that followed. Bad timing may also have been a factor: Cooper was heavily booked, and Meet John Doe would tie him up from July through September of 1940. Finally, Wanger might not have been able to squeeze enough money out of his strapped budget to afford the star’s salary, reputedly the highest in Hollywood.

  Cooper’s rejection was a blow. Hitchcock had to settle for tall, lanky Joel McCrea, who was versatile and well liked, but “a second choice Cooper,” by McCrea’s own admission. At least, Hitchcock hoped, McCrea’s casting would clinch Barbara Stanwyck, the actor’s frequent costar. And Stanwyck was agreeable to McCrea—but her schedule was also intractable; she was available after Meet John Doe, but not before. Personal History couldn’t wait, and all the other top actresses were also tied up.

  Wanger needed a decision by the end of February, and he lobbied hard for Laraine Day, an MGM actress best known as Nurse Mary Lamont in the Dr. Kildare series. Hitchcock watched a few of her films, then skipped a screen test in favor of an informal meeting. Day made a good impression when she came to his office; she was bright, pleasant, and unassuming, and Hitchcock cast her as McCrea’s love interest. Still, “I would like to have bigger star names,” he said ruefully years later.

  The rest of the cast were Hitchcock recidivists: Herbert Marshall, the well-respected star of Murder!, would play Stephen Fisher, the head of the fraudulent Universal Peace Party and the film’s smooth-talking villain—Laraine Day’s father. George Sanders would portray Scott ffolliott (the two small fs are a running joke), another correspondent on the truth trail—a less sinister and better part for Sanders than his turn in Rebecca. The ever agreeable Edmund Gwenn was fifth-billed as Rowley, the hit man who flubs McCrea’s assassination from the heights of Westminster Cathedral.

  Jane Novak, whose friendship with Hitchcock dated from The Prude’s Fall and The Blackguard, was also given a small part. Novak is the blond woman traveling on the plane with her mother, at the end of the film; later she’s seen hysterically trying to open the hatch while oil splashes across the window, then drowning as the water rises to the ceiling.

  The director dipped into his German file for Van Meer, the film’s symbol of hope. Albert Basserman was hired to play the elderly diplomat, kidnapped and tortured (with jazz recordings!) into divulging the secret treaty clause. (“Our Macguffin,” the director proudly told Truffaut.) That Basserman was a veteran of Max Reinhardt’s theater and German silent film, and a refugee newly arrived from Nazi Germany, doubled the symbolism. (He had written the ministry of propaganda in 1933, saying he refused to perform in a country where his wife, a Jew, was a second-class citizen.) In his mid-seventies, Basserman invested his well-written role with unusual dignity, and in the end was nominated for an Academy Award.

  Promoted by the Selznick publicity department as “the master of melodrama,” Hitchcock took a break before filming to give interviews promoting the release of Rebecca.

  When Hitchcock’s first American film opened at the end of March, the reviews were spectacular. “Artistically,” proclaimed Variety, Rebecca was “one of the finest productional efforts of the past year.” “A splendid job,” according to Time. The Hollywood Spectator singled out the “brilliant direction,” and the New Yorker found the film of Rebecca “even more stirring than the novel.” Theatre Arts said it was “a piece of suspenseful Hitchcock magic,” while Frank Nugent in the New York Times, though he praised Hitchcock’s guiding hand, noted disapprovingly that the Englishman had become “less individualized” by Hollywood.

  The audience numbers were very good, if not also spectacular, with an eventual $700,000 profit recorded for Selznick International. (“Only two of more than one hundred RKO releases between 1939 and 1949 earned over $700,000,” according to Leonard Leff.) Hitchcock had never had such figures in England, or comparable publicity, advertising, and distribution. It was a quantum leap in the magnitude of his success.

  Though justly proud, his pride was tempered by his feeling that Rebecca was more David O. Selznick’s package—so much “the supreme Hollywood package,” in the words of latter-day critic Leslie Halliwell, that any top contract director (say, Victor Fleming) could have done it. Hitchcock was poised, in 1939, to become Selznick’s next Victor Fleming: an all-purpose master of any kind of melodrama for the producer. Only his individuality prevented it.

  “Well, it’s not a Hitchcock picture,” Hitchcock told Truffaut. “It’s a novelette really.” As if genuinely bemused by Rebecca’s success, he added, “It has stood up quite well over the years. I don’t know why.”

  With Joel McCrea instead of Gary Cooper, the director may have lost some interest in the John Doe of Foreign Correspondent, as Personal History was renamed halfway through filming. The production went smoothly—so smoothly that anecdotes have emphasized the overweight Hitchcock all but sound asleep most of the time. But he had just finished an arduous year: moving to a foreign land and absorbing a new system of production; coping with the added activity and anxieties engendered by the war; working hard for months on Rebecca, followed by similarly unrelieved toil on Foreign Correspondent.

  Behind the scenes, his financial difficulties were mounting. Even as the cameras rolled on his first Walter Wanger production, Hitchcock was desperately trying to convince David O. Selznick to let him line up a second Wanger project, lest he find himself with idle—that is, unsalaried—time. He was working days, nights, weekends; he was drinking more heavily than usual, and his weight had reached an all-time peak of around three hundred pounds.

  McCrea recalled in an interview how Hitchcock liked to imbibe a pint of champagne at lunch, then doze off during the early afternoon’s filming. One afternoon, after uttering a mouthful of dialogue, McCrea looked to Hitchcock for approval, expecting to hear, “Cut!” The director was “snoring with his lips sticking out,” in McCrea’s words. So instead the leading man yelled, “Cut!” and that woke the master up. “Was it any good?” Hitchcock inquired. “The best in the picture,” replied McCrea. “Print it!” declared the director.

  The pint of champagne is probably an exaggeration; and if the actor remembered Hitchcock as disengaged, perhaps it was because of their lack of rapport. Born and raised in California, a laid-back actor who was entirely a product of the studio system, McCrea, from Hitchcock’s point of view, lacked credibility as the street-smart New York reporter he was playing. (“He was too easygoing,” Hitchcock told Truffaut.) Hitchcock never gave him enough credit; McCrea’s talent was entering its stride, and, after a fitful start, his performance in Foreign Correspondent grows—as even Hitchcock’s camera seems to notice.

  Was the snoring partly an act? Laraine Day recalled Hitchcock falling asleep after lunch nearly every day, but she said he never closed his eyes while a scene was being rehearsed, or filmed. Hitchcock dozed only until the cameras and lighting were ready; then an assistant director nudged him awake for the actual photography.

  She also recalled the director laboring to create a camaraderie on the set. Hitchcock made bad jokes and pulled pranks, though they were mostly old-fashioned ones—nothing overboard like in the old days.

  Was he snoozing and snoring because he could direct Foreign Correspondent with one hand behind his back? Because on most shooting days there was little to rouse his instincts?

  One of the most electrifying sequences in his body of work is the planecrash climax at the end of Foreign Correspondent. This sequence begins with Fisher (Herbert Marshall) and Carol (Laraine Day) fleeing to America aboard the transatlantic flight. Father and daughter face each other awkwardly across their seats. Feeling Carol’s silent accusation and shame, Fisher delivers a heartfelt apology for lying to her, for what he has done and how he has done it—“for using the tactics of the country I grew up with.”

  They are joined by Jones (McCrea) and ffolliott (Sanders), who have been sequestered in the rear cabin. Ffolliott tells Fish
er that he will be arrested upon his arrival in New York, and Johnny proclaims his love for Carol. Suddenly the plane, which has been mistaken for a bomber by a German destroyer, is fired upon from below, and a mad scramble ensues among the passengers.

  Then and now, critics rotely praise this sequence for its technical wizardry. But as was so often the case with Hitchcock, bravura technique disguised remarkable content. The violence in a Hitchcock film could be randomly cruel—killing women, children, even a passing cyclist during the Van Meer assassination. In his political films, tellingly, the innocent victims really added up.

  The hysteria, as the plane plunges toward the ocean, is chilling. A well-dressed Englishwoman haughtily refuses to don a safety vest, stands up in the aisle, and demands to see the British consul—only to be cut down by flak. When the plane hits, the water slowly rises in the cabins as the trapped occupants desperately grope toward the steadily lowering ceiling.

  Hitchcock devised one particularly moving vignette that comes after the plane has all but submerged, with only a handful of survivors clinging to the wreckage. A pilot (the picture of American pluck) bobs up from beneath the waves and climbs on top of the sinking tail section, waves exhaustedly, then jumps into the roiling sea to swim exhaustedly toward the others. One passenger mutters that they don’t have enough life preservers—they’d better not help the pilot or they’ll be swamped. Facing arrest and his daughter’s shame, Fisher overhears the remark, then silently unbuckles his life preserver and slips off the wreckage into the sea. His daughter spots him, screams in anguish. Jones jumps in to save the father … but fails.

  The crash was certainly the film’s most technically audacious sequence. Hitchcock had the well-known stunt pilot Paul Mantz fly out over the Pacific and execute nosedives with a camera affixed to the front of his plane, pulling out of the dives at the last instant so the plane almost grazed the water. Then the director had a glass-fronted cockpit built, in which the two actors playing pilots were suspended above a huge water tank. The Mantz footage was projected onto screens in front of the men as the plane plunged downward on rails. The plane’s wings were rigged to break away; two dump tanks with chutes were concealed from view by screens of rice paper, and at the crucial instant a button was pushed and hundreds of gallons of water tore through the screens for the crash effect.