In real life, initial suspicions that the Normandie was sabotaged were later ruled out. But audiences of the time, watching Hitchcock’s crafty composite of newsreel and staged fiction, experienced the intended frisson. This “shows a man [Hitchcock],” reflected Lloyd years later, “who was really on his toes and aware of any opportunity to create something for his film: to take history at the moment and incorporate it into a script—in character, story and action.”
Ironically, “the U.S. Navy was incensed at the Normandie shots and demanded that they be removed,” wrote film historian George Turner, and the sabotage implication was omitted until the 1948 reissue.**
Even as principal photography began, a week before Christmas 1941, the director returned to the script. Peter Viertel came back on the job, conferring with Hitchcock “every evening, while he was shooting, lunching with him on weekends and spending Sundays together working out the scenes and trying to make them better under his tutelage,” according to Viertel.
Hitchcock’s life at the time, the writer recalled, was “very spartan—work, the cutting room, home.” There were no vacations, or open-door parties of the sort that had characterized his life in London. Sunday was the only day he wasn’t at the studio, and on that day Viertel visited St. Cloud Road for script sessions, followed by lunch. Mrs. Hitchcock had grown alarmed over her husband’s weight, and he was again dieting. Yet Viertel was convinced that, except when striking a pose for publicity, Hitchcock wasn’t really given to stuffing himself. Viertel was not the only close associate to believe Hitchcock may have had a glandular condition that caused him to retain weight. Hitchcock believed so himself, and kept regular appointments with his Beverly Hills physician, Dr. Ralph M. Tandowsky, for diuretic (and B-vitamin) shots.
The director owned a book of famous menus from which he liked to read aloud, sighing ruefully, for example, over a glorious repast served to King George on a state visit to Paris in 1914. “The menu was full of succulent delights,” recalled Viertel, “and Hitch would get his kicks just out of reading it, but then lunch would be spartan, maybe a salad with a side of lamb. Hitch ate, but not an astonishing amount. He didn’t really drink that much, and you never saw him drunk.”
In spite of budget constraints and casting disappointments, Hitchcock seemed positively ebullient now that he was on his own at Universal, far away in miles and spirit from the Selznick penitentiary. He had collected a new team, including a young art director, Robert Boyle, whose abilities as a sketch and design artist recommended him to Hitchcock for the future. His cameraman was the highest paid on the lot: Joseph Valentine, who filmed the slapstick comedies and Deanna Durbin musicals that were Universal’s bread and butter. (Valentine had also shot The Wolf Man, an atmospheric horror picture Hitchcock particularly admired.)
His stars may have been compromise choices, but he didn’t mind so very much. He saw them as bargains. “All that stuff about him saying, ‘Actors are cattle’—I’m sure that was just publicity,” recalled Priscilla Lane. “He was very exacting—unswervable in getting you to do exactly what he wanted. But he was always pulling little gags to keep the set a happy place.”
Hitchcock didn’t speak to the actors very much about acting anyway, according to Viertel—except in the case of Otto Kruger, who just couldn’t please him. Kruger never fit his picture of the villain, no matter how hard Hitchcock prodded him. (“I think you should do it a little more pointedly, Otto.”) In general, Hitchcock “worked with actors against the Stanislavsky or Group Theater method,” said Viertel. “He let them, very much like John Huston, do the scene in a rehearsal, and then most any direction he gave had to do with timing.” The director believed he could solve any acting problem with camera work, and his solutions were often ingenious—as when he filmed the villain’s lengthy soliloquy with Kruger seated on a sofa and the camera fixed an eerie distance from the actor across the room.
Universal grew “alarmed at the 50-odd sets Hitchcock ordered,” reported George Turner, “especially a vast Stage 12 desert, a reconstruction of a part of the turbulent Kern River including a waterfall, and the grand ballroom of a Park Avenue mansion.” Hitchcock assured Skirball that he would cut some corners, though, and Skirball in turn reassured the studio. Hitchcock budgets were like Hitchcock’s weight: he might prefer to gorge himself, but he was a genius at shedding pounds—a master of scrimping, happy to film only a corner of a building set to avoid having to construct the entire facade. Strapped for cash, Hitchcock would all the more resort to mattes, miniatures, and background plates, blended masterfully by the effects wizards.
The film’s mansion set was built onto a stairway left over from a Deanna Durbin vehicle. A back-lot storage building (“an old scene dock with big sliding doors that happened to be there,” in Boyle’s words) was easily transformed into an aircraft factory. When the doors opened and a crowd of workers poured out, the audience would glimpse a vast dark interior with rows of airplanes under construction—actually a scenic backing. Hitchcock knew “the chances that almost any shot will not hold longer than five seconds,” according to art director Boyle, “and that a matte in particular is going to be on for no more than five seconds. Then the audience doesn’t have time to find the problems.”
For the actual sabotage, the film needed some kind of impressive explosion—and even that Hitchcock managed to pull off on the cheap. He visualized it as a simple, eerily effective shot, with black smoke gradually billowing under the sliding doors of the factory, followed by a tremendous bang and roar. “Hitch made a drawing,” Boyle remembered, “in which he drew just the big doors and then he did a big scribble. He said, ‘There will be an explosion.’ And I thought that scribble was more illuminating than the finest drawing you could make.”
Scene after scene stimulated his creativity. The night sequence involving the circus caravan gave Hitchcock the opportunity to quote from F. W. Murnau, creating a variation on the lesson he had learned on the set of The Last Laugh in 1925. “We had a shot from the back of this long train in which we had a full-size truck, and then a smaller truck,” Boyle recalled. “After that we began to get into miniatures, and finally, as we got way off in the distance, we got into just cutouts. Now the problem was the people, because the police were searching the whole train, which meant we needed people all the way back. We had full-size people in the foreground truck, smaller people behind, and still smaller people behind that. For the first three trucks we used people of regular heights, from six-footers down to five-footers. After that we went into midgets. Then way in the background were small, articulated, cutout figures whose arms could be worked like puppets, and we had tiny flashlights on their hands. I don’t know many directors nowadays that would stand still for that; they’re afraid of it. Hitchcock was never afraid to try anything, and if it didn’t work exactly as he wished it didn’t bother him that much, as long as he got the sensation correct.”
Rarely in his career did Hitchcock enjoy the luxury of an unrestricted budget. Yet if Saboteur was hurried and inexpensive; if the script was flawed (“I would say that the script lacks discipline,” Hitchcock, again his own harshest critic, told Truffaut, and “the whole thing should have been pruned and tightly edited long before the actual shooting”); if the stars were bland—well, none of it mattered. Audiences were dazzled. Edited and released quickly in the spring of 1942, Saboteur soared at the box office. While today it may not have the same electrifying immediacy, the film is still full of vigor and panache. Then as now, critics regarded it as minor Hitchcock, but in 1942 Hollywood saw it differently. Saboteur was the first film by the English director that truly looked American.
Although Saboteur ultimately inched over budget (by roughly three thousand dollars), Skirball fought for Hitchcock’s bonus anyway—and ended up deducting the extra money from his own profit share. Hitchcock received an extra fifteen thousand dollars, directly from the producer. It was a victory all around.
As usually happened, while making Saboteur the director wa
s already preoccupied with finding a subject for his second film under the Universal deal. “During that period,” said Peter Viertel, “he was always starting on another one right away.”
Once again Hitchcock harked back to John Buchan, proposing yet again to adapt Greenmantle, this time with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in mind. His backup choice was No Other Tiger by A. E. W Mason, the author of Four Feathers, an adventure that begins during an Indian tiger hunt before shifting to British high society. “Hitch enthused particularly,” Selznick story editor Margaret McDonell reported, “about the climax where the beautiful dancer is found hanging from the chandelier.”
But rights to the Buchan novel were as elusive as ever, so he returned to another persistent idea. Though stymied from remaking The Lodger, he thought about crafting a Hitchcock original about a more modern serial killer. Steeped in crime lore since boyhood, Hitchcock had well-honed reflexes when fashioning such a film. These stories were so deeply rooted within him, so instinctual, that he gave them a name: “run-for-cover” films.
“Whenever you feel yourself entering an area of doubt or vagueness,” he once said, “whether it be in respect to the writer, the subject matter, or whatever it is, you’ve got to run for cover. When you feel you’re at a loss, you must go for the tried and true.”
Margaret McDonell was married to the British-born author Gordon McDonell, whose adventure stories and crime novels, influenced by James M. Cain, were often sold as film material. When McDonell told her husband that Hitchcock was anxious to find a run-for-cover crime story, McDonell reminded his wife of a yarn he had dreamed up in 1938, when their car broke down and they were stranded in Hanford, south of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, waiting for repairs. Hitchcock agreed to hear the story over lunch at the Brown Derby.
In the first week of May 1942, Hitchcock first heard the bare bones of the story McDonell was calling “Uncle Charlie.” It concerned a “handsome, successful, debonair” man, in McDonell’s words, who arrives in a California town to visit his sister’s family. The family—middle-aged parents, a nineteen-year-old son, and an eighteen-year-old daughter—haven’t seen Uncle Charlie for ten years. The daughter is Charlotte, young Charlie, named in her uncle’s honor—his favored niece, and a young woman with “great potentialities of charm.” But young Charlie begins to suspect—rightly—that Uncle Charlie is a serial murderer on the run from police; when he realizes she knows the truth, he decides to kill her to protect his secret. McDonell’s original story concluded at a country picnic, where, lunging at his niece, Uncle Charlie topples off a cliff.
A debonair serial killer in small-town America: this was pure run-for-cover. Years later the director told crime historian Jay Robert Nash that “Uncle Charlie” instantly reminded him of the notorious 1920s trial of Earle Leonard Nelson, who traveled from coast to coast in America, slaying matronly types. Another time he said it evoked the case of mass murderer Henri Landru, a Parisian confidence man and killer who murdered at least ten women and a boy between 1915 and 1919, and whose trial was held in 1921. (Landru’s case later inspired Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux.) The more real-life echoes a crime story had for Hitchcock, the bigger his pool of references, the greater his enthusiasm.
Before he could start on “Uncle Charlie,” though, Hitchcock had to patch together a new agreement with Selznick International. He couldn’t make “Uncle Charlie” for Universal fast enough to finish filming inside of the one-year time frame of his contract, and thus he would be unable to fulfill his obligation to Selznick of two pictures per year. This was the constant subtext in his dealings with Selznick; over time it had proven the most troublesome clause in his contract. At Hitchcock’s urging Myron Selznick even consulted outside lawyers to see if he could get around the problem, but the lawyers weren’t confident, and Dan O’Shea refused to budge.
Once again the labyrinthine, patched-over Selznick contract prevailed, and on May 7, after meeting with Gordon McDonell, Skirball approved a memorandum specifying “Uncle Charlie” as the second picture of the Universal contract—in conjunction with Selznick, extending Hitchcock’s availability to the studio into the late fall of 1942. McDonell supplied a six-page synopsis of his story. Although Hitchcock asked him for a lengthier treatment, the author didn’t want to interrupt the novel he was writing, and never augmented the six pages.
It was up to Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock to brainstorm the initial “Notes on Possible Development of Uncle Charlie Story for Screen Play,” which they did on May 11, 1942, outlining the director’s formative vision for the film. Although McDonell had posited “a typical small American town” with “little people, leading unimportant little lives,” Hitchcock was worried about that word “typical,” wary that it suggested a cast of stock figures. So he and his wife modified the town into a place invaded by modern evils (“movies, radio, juke boxes, etc.; in other words, as it were, life in a small town lit by neon signs”), with a sympathetic, individualized family whose members would lend themselves to plenty of comedy—especially “from the characters ‘not in the know.’ ”
Working without Joan Harrison for the first time in nearly a decade, and needing to flesh out McDonell’s brief story, Hitchcock wanted a writer with more experience than Peter Viertel. Just as he sprinkled his films with American landmarks, Hitchcock liked to add a dash of literary prominence to their credits—and now he went looking for “the best available example of a writer of Americana,” as he later put it. Miriam Howell, producer Sam Goldwyn’s literary agent in New York, made a suggestion: Thornton Wilder.
Fond of casting against type, Hitchcock sometimes tried it with writers too. Wilder was best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Our Town, a panorama of life in a small, bucolic New England town, as viewed by the dead in the local graveyard. Hitchcock, who had seen and admired the play, fired off a one-thousand-word telegram synopsizing “Uncle Charlie,” and asking Wilder if he would be interested in writing a Hitchcock film that would be the dark underbelly of Our Town.
Despite the apparent folksiness of his work, Wilder was a sophisticated writer with a sure technique rooted in Greek and Roman drama. He had won his first Pulitzer with the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which was later adapted into a film; when Our Town was adapted in 1940, Wilder collaborated on the screenplay. When Hitchcock wired him, Wilder had just completed The Skin of Our Teeth, destined to become another stage classic.
Wilder had one free month before he was due to join army intelligence. Though he was intrigued by the prospect of writing a Hitchcock film, he complained to his friend, the famous journalist Alexander Woollcott, that the story idea sounded “corny.” Yet Wilder also wanted to make some quick money to tide over his mother and sister while he was in the army. His agent requested fifteen thousand dollars for the script, payable in increments for five weeks of work. It was a princely sum, but Wilder was a princely name, and Jack Skirball immediately authorized the contract. On May 18 Wilder boarded a train; three days later he was meeting with Hitchcock, staying at Hollywood’s Villa Carlotta and commuting to Universal.
The director and his bard of Americana seemed to find the same wavelength at once. Openings were as important as endings to Hitchcock, and he wasn’t sure yet how he wanted to open the film. In McDonell’s sketchy version of the story Uncle Charlie isn’t introduced until he materializes in the small California town. Hitchcock wanted some kind of prelude that would show Uncle Charlie before his arrival, already frantic and on the run.
Most comfortable with East Coast settings, Wilder proposed an opening sequence showing Uncle Charlie holed up in a New Jersey boarding-house. The police are shadowing him, and he is pondering his next move. “There’s this short story by [Ernest] Hemingway,” suggested Wilder, “where a man is lying in bed in the dark, waiting to be killed. That would make a good opening.” Hitchcock was taken aback. The great Wilder was a practical craftsman, it turned out—just like him—not above a little pilfering to get the job done. The New Jersey openin
g would give the film a more national scope. And that is just how Shadow of a Doubt would begin, with a tacit nod to Hemingway’s well-known story “The Killers.”
Hitchcock knew that his style and methods weren’t familiar to everyone, so just as he had with Samson Raphaelson, the director screened his earlier work for the writer, showing Suspicion and other Hitchcock films to Wilder, “whispering technical procedures in Thornton’s ear,” according to biographer Gilbert A. Harrison. Mornings were for discussion; in the afternoon Wilder wrote, usually by longhand on notepaper. “He never worked consecutively,” said Hitchcock, “but jumped about from one scene to another, according to his fancy.”
Sparking off each other, the two made galloping progress. “In long story conferences,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott, “we think up new twists to the plot and gaze at each other in appalled silence: as much to say, ‘Do you think an audience can bear it?’ ”
“Work, work, work,” Wilder wrote to his sister on May 26. “But it’s really good. For hours Hitchcock and I, with glowing eyes and excited laughter, plot out how the information—the dreadful information—is gradually revealed to the audience and the characters. And I will say I’ve written some scenes. And that old Wilder poignance about family life [is] going on behind it. There’s no satisfaction like giving satisfaction to your employer.”
They began by tinkering with young Charlie’s family. Gordon McDonell had presented the mother as a “semi-invalid social climber,” according to film scholar Bill Krohn in Hitchcock at Work, while Uncle Charlie was posited as a kind of “fairy godfather” who brings momentary hope and change to the family’s drab existence. Gradually, under Wilder (and later, Sally Benson), the family characters became more positive, more engaging.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 44