Steinbeck, alarmed by the controversy, had authorized his agent, Annie Laurie Williams, to send the unpublished novelette to Crowther. Steinbeck had also received a letter from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) complaining that Joe, the Negro character, was a stereotype. Although Joe was Steinbeck’s creation, the author was concerned about the appearance of racial prejudice, and after seeing Lifeboat, he wrote to his agent that he agreed with the civil rights group. Hitchcock had taken his dignified race representative and turned him into “a stock comedy Negro,” in his words, or “the usual colored travesty.”
As Steinbeck later attested in depositions, Joe is “a colored man, not religious—a very proud man” in his novelette, “and in no way wanting not to do anything with decisions. In fact he makes many decisions. It is quite an opposite character [from the film’s].” Steinbeck’s Joe not only heroically tries to save the mother and baby when the two are floundering in the water, but also tries to save Willie after the German is pushed overboard. And Joe is an accomplished flautist who moonlights in a chamber orchestra.
He plays the flute in the film, too—but it’s more of a recorder, and the music he plays is equally humble. In this and other ways, Hitchcock stripped Joe down: the Negro character makes only a single rescue (the mother and child), his musical talent is modest (he’s no chamber musician), and he has a pickpocket past (the element that really inflamed the civil rights organization). The film also makes Joe deeply religious, a change Steinbeck hated because he saw it as stereotypical. (Joe is the only passenger who, praying for the soul of the dead baby, can recite the Bible from memory: “He leadeth me beside still waters …”)
Hitchcock could never be mistaken for a civil rights pioneer. Black characters are few and far between in his films, which take place in the Anglo-Saxon world where he felt most comfortable. Before Lifeboat one has to go back to 1927’s The Ring, the last Hitchcock film based on the director’s own original story, to find another prominent black character—an appealing trainer who is a friend of the hero. But the script credited solely to Hitchcock also includes a title card referring to a “nigger” boxer.*
The man never mentioned publicly in the Steinbeck-Hitchcock debate was Jo Swerling. Yet it was Swerling who took the lead in reshaping Joe as a character, according to legal documents—Swerling, who was as liberal politically as Steinbeck. And under Swerling, although Joe became a less idealized Negro—he lost his job as a chamber musician and added ex-pickpocket to his résumé—the character acquired other symbolic value. When the anti-German storm finally bursts, for example, it is Joe alone who refuses to join the mob bloodletting—and his decency, his disgust at what the others have done, provides a sharp allusion to Negro lynching that was especially pointed in the 1940s. Hitchcock’s Joe is a character who looks better and better over time.
The newspaper articles were just the tip of the controversy. Behind the scenes, individuals and organized groups complained to Twentieth Century-Fox about the film’s pro-Nazi propaganda value. And almost from the premiere Darryl Zanuck was pressured to withdraw advertising and support. After a good blastoff at the box office, Lifeboat began sinking—and that, along with Hitchcock’s anger that Zanuck had taken nicks out of the film behind his back, ended any lingering hopes that he might direct a second film for the studio.
Zanuck had been right about one thing: Lifeboat did attract awards at the end of the year, and Tallulah Bankhead was a front-runner when the New York Film Critics assembled to name the year’s Best Actress. Still, it took six ballots for her to obtain the majority of votes and defeat Ingrid Bergman, for the less controversial Gaslight. Hitchcock didn’t receive a single Best Director vote for Lifeboat.
Lifeboat did better with Academy voters in Hollywood, where making the sea ordeal believable on a soundstage was recognized as a remarkable achievement. Hitchcock’s direction was Oscar-nominated, along with the original story (Steinbeck), and the black-and-white photography (Glen MacWilliams). Hitchcock lost to Leo McCarey, who was the big winner that year, having also been named Best Director in New York. (McCarey won two Oscars for Going My Way, for the story and directing, while Joseph LaShelle’s camera work won for Laura.) Bankhead, the Best Actress in New York, did worse in Hollywood, where she wasn’t even nominated.**
Yet hers is a magnificent performance—and, Lifeboat remains underrated. “Wow!” Connie Porter exclaims when a German ship bears down on the lifeboat in Hitchcock’s crescendo, narrowly cutting across its bow—a thrilling, mesmerizing process shot. The entire film is as dazzling as that one moment. Fluid and symphonic in its pacing, Lifeboat is as original and searching as any picture made in Hollywood during World War II. Hitchcock made only tough, visceral films about the war—and with his toughest films he braced himself for second-guessing. He deliberately pushed his audiences, and courted critical rejection. “They all thought it was pro-German,” he shrugged in an interview two decades later, “which was idiotic.” But the fate of Lifeboat scarcely affected his momentum.
Returning from England through New York City in mid-March 1944, Hitchcock was a subdued man. He told friends that although he felt patriotic about England, he no longer felt quite like an Englishman. Yet the bombing of London, the food shortages, and the terror he’d experienced firsthand—all these humbled him, and put his troubles with the Selznicks in perspective. Without further protest he accepted Dan O’Shea’s definition of his absence as a suspension, meaning he would still owe those twelve weeks to Selznick International. In London he had begun discussions with Sidney Bernstein about a new venture, a partnership to produce films after the war. And now he felt hopeful about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
The death of Myron Selznick on March 23 was another sign of changing times. Myron had tried many “cures” for his alcoholism, but his drinking finally caused an abdominal hemorrhage that sent him into a fatal coma. His brother David was at his bedside when Myron passed away in a Santa Monica hospital. Once the most powerful agent in Hollywood, he was only forty-six.
Yet Hitchcock didn’t rush back to California to attend the funeral. In truth, he had grown to despise Myron, and to blame him for all his contract problems. After Myron’s death, he informed the agency that he felt under no future obligation to it; he would fulfill his responsibilities to Selznick International, and pay the agency its commissions on that contract; but in the future he would handle his own business, and he reiterated his refusal to pay any percentages on past bonuses, or on future income outside of Selznick productions.
The Selznick Agency threatened to sue over the bonuses and outside income, and for the first time Hitchcock consulted independent attorneys. He wasn’t alone in fighting the agency at this time; under erratic leadership, the agency had fallen into disrepute. Some clients sued to void their contracts; others simply walked away. Hitchcock’s dispute with the agency wasn’t settled for several years, and he never did pay the contested monies.
On his “word of honor,” Hitchcock assured DOS that he would direct the two pictures that remained on his Selznick International contract—if the number was two, that is. The contract had been amended and extended so often that its patchwork was mystifying. But nobody in Hollywood would dare employ Hitchcock until it was cleared with DOS, so the director had little choice but to meet his obligations while counting down to freedom.
The first of the two pictures would be The House of Dr. Edwardes. As previously agreed, Hitchcock lingered at the St. Regis in New York, working on a first draft of the script with writer Ben Hecht, who was then living in nearby Nyack. David O. Selznick trusted Hecht to craft “a well-constructed emotional story on which to hang all of Hitchcock’s wonderful gags,” but the director trusted Hecht for his own reasons.
Hecht had bailed Hitchcock out with the coda for Foreign Correspondent; some sources believe he also consulted on Lifeboat. The director and writer were two of a kind. At the top in their fields, both shared a jaundiced view of Holl
ywood and the world. They knew Hollywood preferred box office to art, and they didn’t kid themselves: in order to satisfy Selznick, The House of Dr. Edwardes would have to strike a plausible psychiatric pose—a pose that both recognized as, in Hitchcock’s phrase, “pseudo-psychoanalysis”—but the bottom line was creating a mystery with a pair of sexy stars that would clean up at the box office.
With DOS safely at arm’s length on the West Coast, Hitchcock and Hecht began, as Hitchcock preferred, by touring the reality that would seed the fiction. They went trawling for verisimilitude in mental hospitals and psychiatric wards in Connecticut and New York before settling down to revise and expand the Hitchcock-MacPhail treatment. They were under no obligation to follow the book, hardly a memorable best-seller, and one Selznick may never have read; they even knew who their two stars were going to be.
At least they thought they knew. With a virtual lock on Ingrid Bergman, who was under contract to Selznick, they began tailoring for her the role of psychoanalyst Constance Petersen, who falls in love with the new superintendent of the mental institution, Anthony Edwardes. The writing team incorporated in-jokes to please Bergman when she read the script: when the troubled Dr. Edwardes starts to act strangely, and he and Petersen decide to seek the advice of Dr. Brulov, her psychiatric mentor, they travel to Rochester, New York—where Bergman would have felt at home, having lived there between films with her husband, Petter Lindstrom, as he studied for his medical degree.
For the character of Edwardes—eventually revealed by psychoanalysis to be an impostor suffering from amnesia, tormented by a dark secret in his past—Hitchcock was hoping for Cary Grant, as he often did. Alan Osbiston, editor of the MOI films, visited from London to consult with Hitchcock, and observed one session with Hecht. “I spent all my time sitting with them watching them,” recalled Osbiston. “It was a staggering experience. Hecht would come in with a few pages of script and read it to Hitchcock and then Hitch would read it back to him, then they’d act the parts. Hitch would say, ‘OK, you’re the girl. I’m Grant. Now, we move from here to there.’ And they’d move all around the hotel suite acting and playing their lines. Hitch would say, ‘I’ll come from over here … no, that doesn’t work because, you see, our camera is over here. I want that dialogue to come over here. Ben, you’ve got to pull that line up to here so that I can play it in front of the camera here.’ The whole thing was worked out in the most minute detail.”
With Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in prospect, the love story was paramount. Hecht, who had undergone analysis, came up with psychiatric explanations for the plot twists as well as suggestions for actual imagery—a corridor of doors swinging open when the two first kiss, for instance, “symbol for the beginning of love between two people,” in Hitchcock’s words.
Although Hitchcock and Hecht swapped roles back and forth while rehearsing the script, the director was really more like Edwardes, who in the film declares, “I don’t believe in dreams. That Freud stuff is a lot of hooey.” The director wasn’t unfamiliar with Freud’s writings, having first browsed them in the 1920s, when Freud cast a shadow over all art and literature; and he was more than capable of expounding, for example, on symbols (preferably sexual) and artifacts. Hitchcock even enjoyed regaling friends with his own dreams—which ranged from prosaic to vivid, sometimes vividly erotic—soliciting their interpretations. But he didn’t take the subconscious too seriously, and in his private life studiously avoided doctors of the mind.
In any event, he and Hecht both realized that The House of Dr. Edwardes wasn’t going to end up as a thoughtful investigation of psychoanalysis. For Hitchcock, the primary allure of the film was the opportunity to give cinematic life to the dreams that help to unravel the amnesiac’s identity. Although Salvador Dalí’s name didn’t surface officially until late spring, from the outset Hitchcock envisioned turning the dreams over to the famed surrealist—holding back on the idea until the script gained acceptance with Selznick. By late spring the latest draft was describing one dream that plainly evoked 1928’s Un Chien Andalou, one of two celebrated surrealist films designed by Dalí and directed by Luis Buñuel. The opening of Un Chien Andalou shows an eyeball sliced with a razor; the Hitchcock script featured a man cutting painted eyes in half with a giant scissors.
Hitchcock felt confident that the prospect of a Hollywood job would tempt the extravagantly mustachioed Spanish artist, and he counted on Dalí’s spicing up the film with his unique fantasies. “Traditionally, up to that time,” he explained later, “dream sequences in film were all in swirling smoke, slightly out of focus with all the figures walking through this mist, made by dry ice with smoke pumped across the top. It was a convention. I decided to do these hallucinatory dreams in his style, which was just the opposite of the swirling misty dreams. I could have chosen [Italian surrealist Giorgio] de Chirico, Max Ernst—there are many who follow that pattern, but none as imaginative and wild as Dalí.”
For two months, March and April, Hitchcock and Hecht stuck to the East Coast. Myron Selznick’s death had plunged his brother into “a deep depression,” according to David Thomson, and it wasn’t until the two arrived in Hollywood in May that the usual whirlwind of meetings and memos commenced.
As usual, Selznick spouted criticisms like a geyser. Hitchcock and Hecht had fashioned a documentary-style opening depicting actual psychiatric techniques; the procedural montage echoed the prelude to Blackmail, but Selznick found it tedious. The early drafts poked fleeting fun at psychiatry—with one intriguing highlight of the Hitchcock-MacPhail treatment being a production by psychiatric inmates of The Way of the World, William Congreve’s masterpiece of Restoration comedy—but as with Rebecca, Hitchcockian humor was unwelcome in Selznick’s world.
One of the Hitchcock-Hecht versions opened teasingly with two men sharing a train compartment. One grabs a fly and pulls its wings off, and the other says, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” One of the two men is a psychoanalyst, and the other is a new patient, but the audience has “to figure out which was the crazy man,” according to Hitchcock. Alas, few such “wonderful gags” would survive Selznick’s blue pencil.
Meanwhile, to authenticate the film’s psychiatric content—and give Dr. Edwardes an official seal of respectability—Selznick called in his own psychiatrist, May Romm, a motherly Freudian who made a specialty of treating celebrities. (She would be credited on-screen as “Psychiatric Advisor.”) Romm’s advice “significantly improved” the script, according to Leonard Leff—although, as usual, Hitchcock didn’t care about tedious authenticity, and the final film’s depiction of psychoanalysis never really rose above the level of simplistic vulgarization.*
Hitchcock’s attitude toward the Selznick-vetted final script, despite his best efforts with Hecht, was less than satisfied. “I used to tell him [Hitchcock] that I got so many really awful scripts that I got so mad I’d throw them at the wall and say I just couldn’t stand it,” recalled Ingrid Bergman in an interview. “Anyway I got this script from Hitchcock and he said, ‘Remove your husband and child before you throw it at the wall!’ ”
Like Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman was obligated to David O. Selznick; she was in no better position to throw the script against the wall than he was. Regardless, the director met with the actress several times to allay her concerns that the love story was illogical and the psychologizing just so much folderol. Don’t worry, Hitchcock assured the actress, love isn’t logical. (Or, as Dr. Brulov says in the film, “The mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of the intellect.”) Nor, he said, was he intending to make a documentary—so she should forget all about any pretensions to realism.
Almost from their first meeting, Hitchcock developed an unusually intense friendship with the sensual Swedish actress. (In his biography of Bergman, Donald Spoto describes it as an “acute, unrequited passion.”) They were kindred spirits. They shared the belief that Selznick contracts had trapped them in an “absolute prison,” in Bergman’s words. Both saw the
mselves as outsiders in Hollywood, and pined for the culture and sophistication they’d left behind in Europe. Both were refreshingly earthy personalities, with blunt senses of humor. Even more than Salvador Dalí, Bergman was sufficient reason for Hitchcock to make Spellbound, as the adaptation of The House of Dr. Edwardes was now retitled.
Cary Grant was another story. Grant could toss an unpromising script whenever he wanted, and often did. His own boss, Grant declined Spellbound. Selznick didn’t mind; he wasn’t looking forward to paying Grant’s sky-high salary, when Hitchcock could just as easily use one of his contract players. Joseph Cotten was Hitchcock’s preference from the Selznick stable, but the producer nominated a tall, darkly handsome younger man with “a rather rugged face”—as Bergman describes him in Spellbound. Gregory Peck had appeared in only two pictures, but he had been catapulted to stardom with his Oscar-nominated role as a saintly missionary in The Keys of the Kingdom.
Hitchcock shrugged, and accepted Peck in the role of the mentally unbalanced Edwardes. Like Joel McCrea, Peck was a California native, and perhaps for that reason Hitchcock initially saw him as “kind of rough around the edges, a small-town American boy.” (In truth, Peck was no such thing: from medium-size La Jolla, he was formally trained in the Stanislavsky Method and had acted on Broadway.)
But the director tried to treat Peck like one of “Hitch’s boys,” mentoring him. He showed him how to comport himself like a gentleman—à la Cary Grant. “I was given to wearing brown suits,” Peck recalled in one interview, “but he pointed me toward gray and dark blue and black. ‘One wears brown in the country, you know, but gray or navy in the city,’ he told me one day. Well, I did what he said. But then one day I showed up in a blue suit with brown shoes. They were dark brown, and I thought they looked pretty good. ‘Oh, Gregory, don’t ever wear brown shoes with a blue suit!’ he scolded me in his avuncular way.”
Alfred Hitchcock Page 51