By late August, the newly christened Master of Suspense was over at RKO, directing a most unsuspenseful screwball comedy. Over the summer Cary Grant had dropped out of the project, and Robert Montgomery, a reasonable facsimile, became Carole Lombard’s costar.
Screenwriter Norman Krasna had written several highly-regarded films, including the Oscar-nominated The Richest Girl in the World, Hands Across the Table (another Carole Lombard comedy, and a hit), and a pair of films for Fritz Lang—the antilynching Fury and a quasi musical called You and Me. Yet Krasna was also a frustrated playwright who sometimes slighted film in favor of periodic assaults on “serious” theater. Famous for his verbal sales pitches, Krasna dazzled in meetings, but didn’t always deliver a script that lived up to his pitch.
“Mr. and Mrs.” concerned a Park Avenue couple who learn their marriage has been voided by a technicality, a discovery that triggers what are intended to be madcap complications. As Hitchcock realized when he finally got around to reading the script in June, it was less than Krasna’s best. But because of the schedule—and because Lombard was so gung ho about it—Hitchcock had to accept the script as it was.
As Hitchcock later told François Truffaut, he undertook Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as the film was retitled, as a “friendly gesture” to the leading lady. But it was equally true, as he told Truffaut, that he accepted the assignment at a “weak moment” in his career. “Since I didn’t really understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film,” Hitchcock explained forthrightly, “all I did was to photograph the scenes as followed [in the script].”
Hitchcock was eager to honor his RKO contract, with its promise of a second film, and so he put on the happiest possible face during the six weeks he spent directing Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the early fall of 1940. On the set, he and his leading lady had a kidding relationship that kept spirits high. The director chalked up lines for the “screwball blonde” on an “idiot board,” while the lead actress (and ex officio producer) turned the tables on him, directing the customary Hitchcock walk-on—and gleefully driving him through repeated takes.
One day, Lombard famously twitted Hitchcock by setting up a miniature cattle pen on the set. The pen enclosed three young heifers, adorned by ribbons, that were emblazoned with the names of the three stars: Lombard, Montgomery, and Gene Raymond (playing the husband’s rival). The prank was intended to generate widespread publicity, and it did, helping to make his maxim “Actors are cattle” as well known in Hollywood as it was in England.
But directors sometimes feel like cattle too. One attraction of the RKO contract was its built-in bonus structure, and almost as soon as he started filming, Hitchcock began bombarding Myron Selznick with pleas that he wangle from his brother the fifteen thousand dollars he had been promised for completing two RKO films inside of a year. Dan O’Shea complained that the agency harassed him almost daily on the subject.
Again feeling pinched for cash, Hitchcock even started grumbling in public. On one celebrity radio appearance he thanked the show for compensating him, saying he had suffered “extraordinary relocation expense.” This infuriated David O. Selznick, who seethed in a memo, “Hitchcock had better not make himself ridiculous by such statements.”
After Gone With the Wind, Selznick had plunged into a midlife crisis from which he would never quite recover. DOS moved to Connecticut in the summer of 1940, then to New York City, then back to California. Most of the time he was “unreachable,” but when Hitchcock’s pleas for the extra fifteen thousand dollars finally did reach him, DOS declined; no bonus would be paid until after completion of both RKO films. Hitchcock threatened the only Selznick he could find, telling Myron he might be forced to sell his half of The Lodger. Myron didn’t blink.
Desperate to supplement his income, Hitchcock asked Sig Marcus in the Selznick Agency’s London office if some kickback scheme might be cooked up, whereby compensation for some nominal service in Hollywood might be channeled back to his older brother, William, in England. William, through Hitchcock’s accountant, could then option stories for filming, independent of Selznick. A flabbergasted Marcus informed the director that such a conspiracy only spelled legal trouble—and he warned the agency that Hitchcock seemed to be under terrible strain.
The director’s anxiety was stoked further by Carole Lombard and Dan Winkler, who reminded the director over and over during the filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith that he was getting a raw deal from the Selznicks, and that what he really needed to do was break his Selznick International contract and join RKO permanently.
All this may not have been conducive to lighthearted farce. When Mr. and Mrs. Smith was released in January 1941, though, critics found it “chucklesome” (New York Times) and “extremely funny in spots” (Newsweek); and at the box office the Hitchcock comedy coasted to profits on the strength of Lombard’s popularity. If there were a few sharply negative reviews (“as commonplace a film as one may find anywhere,” John Mosher wrote in the New Yorker), they didn’t hurt Hitchcock in Hollywood, where duty and versatility were expected of a director.
Hitchcock had already switched his focus to Before the Fact. Author A. B. (Anthony Berkeley) Cox was an Englishman of Hitchcock’s generation, who wrote detective stories under the pseudonym Anthony Berkeley, and crime novels under the name Francis Iles; it was these last—and eliminating the whodunit aspect in favor of an intense identification with the murderer or victim—that many critics believed his greatest accomplishment. The first Francis Iles book, 1931’s Malice Aforethought, had announced the intentions of its murderer on the first page, and came to be considered a masterpiece of its type. Its follow-up, 1932’s Before the Fact, once again let readers know from the outset that the victim-to-be’s husband intended to slay her.
RKO had owned the rights to Iles’s novel since publication, but the studio had failed over the years to produce a script that satisfied the Hays Office. The crime of murder always had to meet with punishment in Hollywood films, yet it was a central conceit of Before the Fact that a ne’er-do-well husband cheerfully succeeds in murdering his rich father-in-law and wallflower wife.
And Iles had a story twist that posed an even worse challenge to censorship: after the devoted wife realizes that her husband intends to murder her, she stages her own death as a suicide, to spare her husband punishment for the deed. (Hence the title, referring to the legal phrase “accessory before the fact”—since the wife proves an accessory to her own murder.) Suicide was also explicitly condemned by the Production Code when it offered “a means to an end, escape from justice, disgrace, etc.”.
Successful murderers and willful suicides were taboo in Hollywood. But telling Hitchcock what he couldn’t do exerted a kind of aphrodisiac effect on his creativity. He had evoked lesbianism in Rebecca, and staged not only Rebecca’s quasi suicide but Mrs. Danvers’s self-immolation. He had even flouted the U.S. government itself with his swipe at the Neutrality Act in Foreign Correspondent.
Now he smoothly assured RKO that he would tell Before the Fact “through the eyes of the woman and have her husband be villainous in her imagination only,” in the words of John Russell Taylor—even though this turned the very crux of the novel, the springboard which so appealed to him, on its head. At the same time he was busy courting Cary Grant, who had rejected Mr. and Mrs. Smith because it smacked of typecasting, telling him the Iles story would be a great chance for Grant to break out of his rut, and play a murderer. Hitchcock figured he could develop a working script, assuage the censors with petty concessions as the drafts progressed, and then slip Grant as a murderer past the authorities just before the closing bell.
The first treatment fell to Mrs. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison. After they finished in November, Samson Raphaelson was called in to develop the full script. Apart from being another Myron Selznick client, Raphaelson was a topflight dramatist, whose play The Jazz Singer had been made into America’s first talking picture. In Hollywood, Raphaelson had subsequently enjoyed collaboration with Ernst Lubits
ch on several sparkling films. Arriving from New York in early December, Raphaelson met daily with the director (and usually Joan Harrison), often at St. Cloud Road, where RKO had given them permission to work. Raphaelson did most of the actual writing at the nearby Riviera Country Club, where he was staying, sending fresh pages over to the Hitchcock house by limousine.
Raphaelson recalled the Reville-Harrison treatment as incomplete, with “dummy” dialogue, and rather “long-winded” at that. Its main accomplishment was in paring down the book’s characters and subplots. (In the novel, both the cad of a husband and the wife-victim have extra lovers, who would gradually be excised as a sop to censors.) Right off, Raphaelson told Hitchcock that the treatment “didn’t agree at all with the way I would get at it [the film],” and asked if he could try his own ideas, adding, “If you don’t like what I write, we’ll fight it out.” To his surprise, Hitchcock—almost matter-of-factly—said yes.
“That story broke more easily for me than anything I have ever written,” Raphaelson reflected years later. “Everything I brought to him [Hitchcock], he’d read instantly and it was fine. I drank more than I ever drank in my life. He was drinking a lot then. He was very fat. I would come to his home in Bel Air, he would be behind the bar, shaking orange juice and gin, and he’d say, ‘Have a drink, Rafe. Got it with you?’ I’d put some pages of script down and while I was having the drink, he would lean over the edge of the bar and turn the pages. You’d think he was scanning it. Then he’d say, ‘That’s fine, that’s fine, Rafe.’”
Hitchcock rarely offered any criticism of his pages, Raphaelson recalled. Once in a while, the director would warn the writer, “We’ve got to be careful with this scene, it’s censorable,” and Raphaelson would put on the brakes a bit. Or Hitchcock would point to a line of dialogue and say, “I’d like a little more something here, because when I photograph it I’d like to have the wind blowing through her hair.”
At night, Mr. and Mrs. Raphaelson (the actress Dorothy Wegman) went to dinner, parties, and premieres with the Hitchcocks, and soon the initially wary Raphaelson grew to like “this odd, weird, little faggish man and this sweet little boyish woman.”
Hitchcock was still falling asleep at dinner parties, and one night Raphaelson and Mrs. Hitchcock contrived to turn the tables with a little joke of their own. They slipped a Benzedrine into his cocktail; the other guests received sleeping tablets. “The dinner ended,” said Raphaelson, “with Hitch wide awake and all his guests asleep. Hitch couldn’t go to sleep, and spent the evening trying to find something to amuse himself. Finally he was able to arouse the guests sufficiently to send them yawning on their way home. Mrs. Hitchcock slept peacefully the rest of the night, and the rising sun found Hitch still wide awake.”
When Raphaelson finished his draft, Hitchcock asked the writer, rather timidly, if he would mind if Mrs. Hitchcock—who, again, was being paid separately by RKO for her contribution—was given the continuity credit that had been customary on his English films. “It pleases her,” he explained. “Good God,” answered Raphaelson, “I couldn’t care less.” Then Hitchcock broached the issue of his assistant, explaining that Joan Harrison was like “family” to him. “You know, Rafe,” explained the director, “Joan is very ambitious and she wants the credit in order to get other jobs. Of course she doesn’t want to stay with me forever. Do you mind if I add her name to yours?” Again, Raphaelson didn’t mind.
After a five-week stint Raphaelson returned to New York; for the rest of his life he would recall collaborating with Hitchcock as “the easiest and most pleasant” experience he ever had in the film industry. The two couples remained close, exchanging visits, letters, and phone calls over the years. “We had a much more affectionate relationship with Hitch and his wife,” Raphaelson recalled, “than we had with Lubitsch.”
While the script was being refined, the sets built, and the cast and crew finalized—over the winter of 1940–41—Hitchcock stole time to keep a promise he’d made to Sidney Bernstein.
One of Bernstein’s documentaries, Men of the Lightship, had been offered to Twentieth Century–Fox and RKO, but both studios refused to distribute the short war film, “chiefly because the commentary and voices were unsuitable for those markets,” according to Bernstein. Bernstein cabled Hitchcock to ask how much it would cost to alter the narration, engage American actors in Hollywood, and redub everything in Yankee vernacular. Hitchcock said money was no object; he would pay the cost out of his pocket.
So he enlisted Robert Sherwood from Rebecca for the rewrites and Robert Montgomery from Mr. and Mrs. Smith as narrator. And then Hitchcock himself supervised the reediting and dubbing. Cost: $4,428. There is no evidence he was ever reimbursed.
Men of the Lightship was subsequently accepted by Fox, and retitled Men of Lightship 61.* Hitchcock declined any credit. He would perform the same function later that year for Target for Tonight, a Ministry of Information film about an RAF bombing raid on Germany that earned a special Oscar. Again, his contribution went uncredited.
Meanwhile, the director’s burgeoning relationship with Cary Grant led to the announcement that Grant would star with Ida Lupino in the planned Hitchcock segment of the pro-British anthology film Forever and a Day. Between stints on Before the Fact, Hitchcock sandwiched in meetings with Alma and Charles Bennett to prepare the episode, in which Queen Victoria’s funeral procession passes by a wealthy home, and the camera picks up the handyman (Grant) and housemaid (Lupino)—a couple dreaming of escape to America. This was scheduled to be shot after Before the Fact, in the late spring or summer of 1941.
Unfortunately, Before the Fact was destined for delays and crises, and in the summer of 1941 the Hitchcock episode had to be handed off to French director René Clair, considered an “honorary member” of the British colony because he had directed a few pictures in England in the mid-1930s. Brian Aherne replaced the equivocating Grant. Yet the Aherne-Lupino segment of Forever and a Day might be considered another “quasi Hitchcock,” for he developed the story, which is distinguished from the rest of the film by its Anglo-American spirit.
Before he began filming Before the Fact, Hitchcock also took time out to attend his first Academy Awards.
Rebecca led the field in 1940 with a remarkable eleven nominations: Best Production, Director, Actor and Actress (Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine), Supporting Actress (Judith Anderson), Adapted Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison), Cinematography (George Barnes), Interior Decoration (Lyle Wheeler), Original Score (Franz Waxman), Editing (Hal C. Kern), and Special Effects (Jack Cosgrove).
One of Rebecca’s rivals for Best Production, ironically, was Hitchcock’s other film from 1940, Foreign Correspondent, which garnered five other Oscar nominations: Original Screenplay (Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison), Supporting Actor (Albert Basserman), Cinematography (Rudolph Maté), Black-and-White Interior Decoration (Alexander Golitzen), and Special Effects (Paul Eagler, photographic; Thomas T. Moulton, sound).
But 1940 was among Hollywood’s finest years, and the list of other Best Picture candidates was impressive: All This, and Heaven Too, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town, and The Philadelphia Story. One other director, John Ford, had two Best Picture nominees, although managing to pick up two in his first year of Hollywood residency made Hitchcock’s the more astounding achievement. (Indeed, it would be over thirty years—with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 Best Picture nominations for The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II—before the feat was repeated.)
With four out of the ten Best Picture nominees directed by either Hitchcock or Ford, one of the two seemed bound to win as Best Director. Ford’s stirring adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Okies vacating their dust bowl homes, was considered the Hollywood favorite, while Rebecca had the edge in national critics’ polls (receiving 391 first-place votes over 367 for The Grapes of Wrath in Film Daily’s annual poll of 546 profess
ional critics).
“Rebecca had been out of circulation for several months,” according to Mason Wiley and Damien Boa in Inside Oscar, “so the day after the nominations were announced, Selznick held a second gala ‘premiere’ for Rebecca at the newly-opened Hawaii Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. At this second premiere, Selznick read a joint resolution he had managed to wangle from the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, temporarily changing the name of Hollywood Boulevard to ‘Rebecca Lane.’ He also unveiled an extremely large seat that had been installed in the Hawaii with the inscription ‘Reserved for Alfred Hitchcock.’”
On February 27, 1941, the Hitchcocks attended the preceremony banquet at the Biltmore Hotel, joining David O. Selznick and Joan Fontaine at the table reserved for Rebecca. Foreign Correspondent producer Walter Wanger, the then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, hosted the actual ceremony, which was broadcast nationally on radio and preceded by an address from President Roosevelt.
Almost to the end of the evening, Hitchcock and his two nominated pictures threatened to be among the also-rans* (Indeed, Foreign Correspondent didn’t win a single award.) When the time came to reveal the Best Director winner, presenter Frank Capra invited the nominees up to the podium, suggesting they “shake each other’s hands for jobs well done. Warily, George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Wood and William Wyler followed orders,” according to Inside Oscar. John Ford was conspicuously absent; earlier, he had crustily informed reporters that he and Henry Fonda (a Best Actor nominee for The Grapes of Wrath) would be fishing off the coast of Mexico. Ford insisted he didn’t care about Oscars (“a trivial thing to be concerned with at times like these,” he told writer Dudley Nichols). But the American director was widely recognized as Hollywood’s greatest—and Ford was the leading contender each of the five times he was nominated in his career.* Moreover, The Grapes of Wrath was distinguished Americana, as opposed to Rebecca’s vision of haunted England. So it was hardly surprising when Ford won for The Grapes of Wrath.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 40