Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Some critics argue that Hitchcock had more feeling for technical wizardry than for the emotional truth of situations, and the director himself fostered this impression by dwelling, in publicity, on his vaunted techniques. He did spend less time communing with actors as time went on—less in Hollywood than in London, when he was younger and freer with people. Sometimes he could even let an entire film go by without saying very much to principal performers. Yet he knew when the emotional truth was the indispensable element—as it was in such a scene.

  To Robert Benchley, whose heavy lids veiled his expression, Hitchcock gave only one morsel of advice: “Come now, Bob, let’s open those naughty little eyes.” With the female star of Foreign Correspondent he was also stingy with direction, starting Laraine Day off in her scenes with McCrea before he’d even introduced them properly. (Yet Day realized later that this created a freshness between her and her costar, whom she barely knew at the outset of filming—a freshness that was integral to their developing relationship in the film.)

  Only once during the filming, Day recalled, did Hitchcock give the actress specific pointers. He paused in the midst of setting up an intricate water-tank shot for the aftermath of the plane crash, and took the actress aside. He quietly explained the feeling she ought to convey in her tear-filled close-up, which lets the audience know that her character has admitted to herself that her father was a traitor—and that she accepts his redemptive suicide.*

  In that final moment Hitchcock’s film, deceptively light throughout, turns irremediably dark.

  All but the coda of Foreign Correspondent was completed by mid-June 1941, when, in utter secrecy, Hitchcock and Joan Harrison departed for a quick, unpublicized trip to England.

  In Canada they had to wait for berths on a ship traveling in a convoy across the Atlantic, according to John Russell Taylor, and then sleep in crowded spaces with a shortage of bathrooms. But Hitchcock was a man who traveled intrepidly all his life and often on punishing timetables, and he wanted to see his mother and try one last time to persuade her to come to the United States. When Emma Hitchcock refused, Hitchcock helped to resettle her at Shamley Green; according to Taylor, she was later joined there by his brother William, “bombed out of his south London fish shop in the blitz.”

  Checking on the availability of his English funds was another matter of urgency—he had begun to suffer embarrassing overdrafts in Hollywood. He also needed to ship his furniture and belongings to America, now that the Hitchcocks had moved into a house.

  There were also business motives for the trip. After the success of Rebecca, it seemed that every studio in Hollywood wanted him to direct a picture. But the two DOSs at Selznick International—David O. Selznick and chief financial officer Dan O’Shea—seemed to block his every preference.

  Selznick and O’Shea had a good cop-bad cop routine. The producer made all the charitable gestures: he allowed Hitchcock to pick up guest fees on radio programs; he authorized expenses for a week in Palm Springs, so Hitchcock and Charles Bennett could spend a working holiday there during Foreign Correspondent; and after Rebecca opened, he instructed O’Shea to bestow a five-thousand-dollar bonus on the director. Yet these were seen as mere crumbs by the director, who quipped that all the money was fast funneled into a “Fund for Starving Hitchcocks.” Indeed, the producer’s “extras” were intended as crumbs; it was Selznick’s philosophy (privately expressed in memos Hitchcock never saw) to keep his studio employees “economically dependent upon us in order to be better able to control them,” in the words of O’Shea. When it came to bigger money matters, Selznick deferred to O’Shea, who then weighed in negatively.

  Selznick refused to approve a second Wanger-Hitchcock production after Foreign Correspondent, insisting on reviewing all the other offers piling up. It was a game DOS loved to play, setting rival buyers against each other to drive up the value. At the same time, an increasingly nervous Hitchcock would be less likely to resist his final decision.

  Well into June, with the bulk of Foreign Correspondent in the can, Walter Wanger was still hoping for a future with Hitchcock. Wanger liked the Englishman enough to stipulate a bonus and profit participation for the next Wanger-Hitchcock project. More reluctantly, the producer even agreed to take over any Selznick-imposed layoff period, putting Hitchcock at ease by promising to keep him on continuous salary after Foreign Correspondent was completed—even though the two men had not yet agreed on their second subject.

  Once again Hitchcock raised the idea of a sequel to The 39 Steps—the adaptation of Greenmantle with Robert Donat—and once again Wanger was perfectly amenable. Hitchcock went so far as to contact Donat, but the actor couldn’t commit to coming to America, and besides, the Buchan estate was still asking for too much money.

  Wanger was coming to the end of his distribution deal with United Artists, and he had to find a niche at another studio. Hal Wallis at Warner Bros. seemed eager to sign up Wanger and Hitchcock for several pictures, until Wallis backed out over the expense projections for Greenmantle. Wanger then took the Hitchcock-Greenmantle package over to Twentieth Century–Fox, where Darryl Zanuck expressed initial enthusiasm. But Zanuck also voiced concerns over the budget estimates, and asked for other ideas.

  What Hitchcock really treasured in the evolving deal with Wanger was a prospect DOS firmly vetoed. The director pleaded to make his second Wanger film “off contract”—in effect setting the Selznick clauses aside for a period of several months while working exclusively for Wanger and taking home all the remuneration. This, Hitchcock explained, would give him a chance to catch up with his financial crises. But DOS didn’t intend to give Hitchcock time or money off his contract; he insisted not only on the letter of the contract, but on being cut in on anything else Wanger was whispering about—bonus money or profit participation. Weighing in, Myron Selznick said the agency also was entitled to its 10 percent of any off-contract monies.

  Hitchcock was outraged. He groused freely around Hollywood about the unfairness of it all, which did nothing to improve his relations with either Selznick. When, in mid-1940, O’Shea officially informed him not to expect any of the concessions he so sorely desired—no abrogation of the layoff period, no profit participation without DOS drawing half, no “immediate outside picture”—O’Shea unofficially warned Hitchcock that his “chances of getting anything above your contract are not bettered by remarks attributed to you concerning collusion to your detriment between David and Myron.”

  Wanger felt a mounting frustration with the Selznick brothers; so Hitchcock, ever practical, started meeting with other producers. He lunched with Charles “Buddy” Rogers, the former actor now married to Mary Pickford, and with Arthur Hornblow Jr., an emissary from Paramount. He talked several times with Benny Thau about an MGM deal. These people eagerly sought his services, and he would stay friendly with Hornblow and Thau for the rest of their lives.

  MGM had a script about a scarred lady criminal who undergoes cosmetic surgery, yet is haunted by her shady past. A Woman’s Face was ready to be filmed. Hitchcock was open to the possibility, although he objected to the penciled-in star, MGM diva Joan Crawford. He also objected to the studio-appointed producer, Lawrence Weingarten, and asked for “a non-interfering producer like [Sidney] Franklin” rather than Weingarten. MGM tried to meet his demands. The studio tentatively agreed to Margaret Sullavan (Hitchcock’s suggestion) or Olivia de Havilland as the film’s leading lady, while drafting Hitchcock’s friend Victor Saville as the producer. The studio also agreed to consider Greenmantle as the second picture in a longer-term Hitchcock contract, and to pay the salaries of his assistant director, Eddie Bernoudy (who had worked on Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent), secretary Carol Shourds, and Joan Harrison.

  When the two DOSs spoke to MGM, though, the terms ballooned. Selznick International demanded the loan-out of a top studio name in exchange for Hitchcock—a James Stewart or King Vidor. (Selznick International placed similar demands on Warner Bros. and Universal.) But MGM wasn’t e
asily deterred, and just kept asking: How soon before Hitchcock could start at the studio? How long before he could begin filming?

  The amount of time Hitchcock preferred to spend on a project was always glossed over in negotiations. Ideally, the director preferred to start at the script stage and be paid straight through to the end of postproduction. MGM and other studios typically didn’t care about having him for the script stage; they wanted Hitchcock to be available for a prescribed number of weeks after a script was already approved in-house, its cast and budget okayed. That is why MGM pushed A Woman’s Face, while Hitchcock characteristically asked for a two-picture deal. He gambled on preparing a second, personal film while directing the studio package.

  Hitchcock was overoptimistic in estimating the amount of time it would take him from start to finish on a film, but so were the two DOSs—because it behooved them to imply that Hitchcock could wrap up an entire film inside of ten weeks rather than risk the “tip-off,” as O’Shea put it, that with the customary delays it would take at least fifteen, probably more.

  The studios, with their approved projects, maintained an edge over Wanger, who didn’t yet have a Hitchcock-style property at the ready. Developing a script for Wanger would take four to six months. Wanger was willing to pay Hitchcock’s salary over that time, but Selznick preferred to see his top director helming two studio films, rather than developing one Hitchcock original for a rival independent producer. Higher productivity would make Hitchcock more valuable to Selznick International. DOS thought Wanger had “spoiled” Hitchcock by letting him spend so much time and money on Foreign Correspondent.

  Just as MGM was encountering turbulence, though, another studio entered the competition with a similar two-picture offer. In late spring Hitchcock lunched with Harry Edington, the new production head of RKO. Dan Winkler was at RKO now, and he had joined an internal campaign to recruit Hitchcock. Edington, a former talent agent, had once represented such stars as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joel McCrea, and Cary Grant, with whom he had a particularly close relationship. Edington knew Hitchcock from the Islington days, when he had been a unit manager for MGM in Europe; his Canadian-born wife, Barbara Kent, once Harold Lloyd’s leading lady, was part of Hollywood’s British colony, and involved with Hitchcock in war-support activities.

  Although he had scant producing experience, Edington had been appointed to fill the vacancy created by the sudden resignation of Pandro S. Berman. RKO was busy putting out the welcome mat for Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, and the freedoms guaranteed to Welles had Hollywood buzzing. Walter Wanger would ultimately end up at RKO, and Jean Renoir also had an upcoming project there. Studio head George Schaefer was cultivating a reputation for the studio as a haven for émigrés, outsiders, and iconoclasts.

  RKO had a comedy script, tentatively titled “Mr. and Mrs.,” in which Carole Lombard had agreed to star, ideally opposite Cary Grant—but only if the picture could be shot inside of five weeks, and only if her friend Hitchcock directed. Her box-office clout had elevated her to the status of de facto producer.

  Yet there was a second, more intriguing RKO property, which Edington mentioned during his lunch with Hitchcock: an English suspense novel called Before the Fact by Francis Iles, about a charming cad planning to murder his wife for inheritance money. The director’s ears pricked up. Of course he was familiar with the 1932 suspense novel, now considered a landmark of crime fiction. Hitchcock had mentioned Iles admiringly to interviewers, and said he’d like to film one of his books—they would make precisely “his type of film.”

  As much as he adored Lombard, however, Hitchcock stubbornly resisted the first project, “Mr. and Mrs.” Screwball comedy was a dauntingly American genre, and the studio didn’t want him to so much as tinker with the script.

  He still preferred Greenmantle, and tried selling Edington on making Before the Fact first for the studio, then the Buchan film. But of all the studios, RKO was the least interested in Greenmantle. What Edington really wanted was for Carole Lombard to be happy, and what Lombard wanted was to be directed by Hitchcock in “Mr. and Mrs.”

  Edington sent the “Mr. and Mrs.” script over to Hitchcock early in May, but a month later the director had to admit he still hadn’t cracked it open. When Hitchcock finally did get around to reading the script, he confessed that he found the humor awfully familiar; perhaps, he ventured, Mrs. Hitchcock might write a better comedy, a Hitchcock original for Lombard. But “Mr. and Mrs.” was already bought and accepted, and RKO said no.

  Warner’s sent over The Constant Nymph, an intense love story that had been filmed twice before, once in England—and with a script by Alma Reville. The intended star was another incentive for Hitchcock: Joan Fontaine.

  Twentieth Century–Fox proposed the anti-Hitler Rogue Male, while Columbia producer Sam Briskin wooed Hitchcock with “Royal Mail,” also to star Cary Grant. Hitchcock hedged on Male and “Mail”; the latter was “a costume picture,” he explained in a memo, and he was “a modernistic director.” But he did express a firm interest in working with Grant.

  Hitchcock knew that Columbia owned James Hilton’s And Now Goodbye, which revolved around a nonconformist English clergyman, an unlikely romance, and a train wreck. That kind of material, he said, would interest him more than “Royal Mail”—perhaps with Laurence Olivier as the clergyman. Perhaps he could direct And Now Goodbye as his first Columbia picture, Greenmantle as his second. Columbia was open-minded; Hitchcock even visited the studio to pitch the two films, and explain how he’d handle the “censorable angles,” according to memos.

  Except for the not unimportant fact that he didn’t want to miss a payday between Foreign Correspondent and his next assignment, in truth Hitchcock wasn’t very excited about any of the “go” projects the studios had at hand. He cared more about the second film in any contract—the kind of project he could develop himself—and about whatever subsidiary clauses might boost his income.

  Indeed, so many scripts and offers piled up, and so confusing were the constantly shifting array of prospects, that just before he left for England in early June, the Selznick Agency asked the director to rank the studios and projects that appealed to him most. Hitchcock listed Greenmantle first, then A Woman’s Face—undoubtedly because he nursed hopes of directing both for MGM, the Cartier of Hollywood studios. Third was Before the Fact, followed by The Constant Nymph or—his own surprising last-minute addition—a remake of The Lodger. Then, in descending order of interest: Jupiter Laughs by Scottish author A. J. Cronin, a play set in a sanatorium; And Now Goodbye; Rogue Male, which Hitchcock admitted he hadn’t yet read in book or script form* ; and lastly, “Royal Mail.”

  Note that “Mr. and Mrs.,” pushed hardest by RKO, Carole Lombard, and both Selznicks, didn’t even make the list. Note also that Hitchcock’s idea to remake his silent-era hit The Lodger came in at number four. He had never really liked the original, Hitchcock told American producers. Maurice Elvey had made a sound version in 1932, also starring Ivor Novello, but Hitchcock would give Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’s story a fresh cachet by shooting it in color: the American Lodger would be the first Hitchcock film in color. He announced his intention to coproduce the remake—paying for half the rights, sharing half the risk and profits.

  Lately he had been thinking quite a bit about color—reaching typically iconoclastic conclusions. Color would always be subtle in a Hitchcock film, as deliberately coded as everything else. “Color should be no different from the voice which starts muted and finally arrives at a scream,” he declaimed in one interview. “Color should start with the nearest equivalent to black and white,” he said on another occasion. Or, as he put it another time, “Color for reason, not just color to knock people’s eyes out. Make color an actor, a defined part of the whole. Make it work as an actor instead of scenery.”

  He foresaw “natural color used naturally,” not “all those outdoor things with long ranges of smoky blue mountains and violent ground hues and a staring blue sky, they’re wrong.
They are postcard in effect.” A color version of The Lodger, he said, would be more painterly than postcard; Hitchcock vowed, for example, to definitively capture the dense yellow fog that blanketed London. “I want to show how street lamps seem to drop deeper yellow tears into that swirling mess of vaporous sulfur,” he rhapsodized.

  He described how he might photograph “a London family in a dismal basement dining room, all browns and grays and blacks when suddenly the plaster in the ceiling gets first damp, then pink, then red, and a drop of red falls down and splashes onto a white tablecloth and spreads out as another drop joins it. When we rush upstairs, expecting the worst, we find a man has upset a bottle of red ink and it is dripping through his floor and the ceiling below. I can even see a closeup of two murderous eyes, the white of the eyeballs stained by crimson veins, inflamed eyes. Not makeup, actually inflamed eyes.”

  Hitchcock first tried this mesmerizing pitch on Walter Wanger, who was intrigued by the notion of remaking The Lodger. But when David Selznick heard about it, he decided that if Hitchcock was going to remake one of his silent hits, it ought to be a Selznick International production. Inquiring about the rights, DOS learned from his London representatives that Mrs. Belloc Lowndes was reluctant to sell them to any producer connected with Hitchcock, for she had detested the silent film version. The price she was asking was high: twenty thousand dollars. Hitchcock himself contacted Mrs. Lowndes to iron out their differences, explaining that the idiocies of the 1926 film weren’t his fault. But her price didn’t budge.