Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Reliable veterans Charles Coburn and Leo G. Carroll (appearing in hi fourth Hitchcock film) portrayed Keane’s partner and the prosecuting attorney, respectively. The “best characters in the picture are some of the secondary figures,” the director informed Truffaut.

  By the end of August 1946 all the research and second-unit work was done, the casting was firm, James Bridie’s script had been handed in, and Hitchcock was awaiting the go-ahead. None was forthcoming. Probably none was expected. Long before Bridie submitted his draft of the script, Selznick had decided it would be inadequate. The producer wanted to supervise his own final revisions, but it was hard to set aside the time he needed. He was immersed in postproduction for Duel in the Sun and pre-production for Portrait of Jennie—his twin Jennifer Jones showpieces. His debt steadily mounting, Selznick was floating around on uppers and downers. “I am on the verge of collapse,” he confided to Dan O’Shea.

  Hitchcock thought Bridie had done a better than acceptable job under the circumstances, and he stayed in contact with the writer about The Paradine Case long after his draft was done. He relied upon Bridie, particularly, for fine points of British legal rigmarole (“the only serious bloomer I can find,” Bridie wrote after perusing one later draft, “is the use of the Scots Law word PRECOGNITION instead of DEPOSITION”). And Hitchcock even tried to hire Bridie to start the script of Under Capricorn for Transatlantic. The Scottish playwright declined. “I don’t mind helping to turn The Paradine Case from a bad book into a good film,” Bridie explained, “but it is another story when the book is a good book but based on a philosophy of life that means nothing to me. If you get the right script writer, Under Capricorn ought to be really memorable. But it is not up my street.”

  Meanwhile, Ben Hecht—still in the good graces of Selznick and Hitchcock alike—was recruited, at his usual extraordinary expense, to turn out the final draft. Mrs. Hitchcock also returned to the job, holding conferences with her husband and Hecht that were sporadically attended by Selznick. In November and December the producer became a more regular participant, but even after Hecht finished, Selznick still wouldn’t approve the script.

  By now it was clear: Selznick was teaching Hitchcock a lesson. The producer was the supreme power when it came to his own productions, and the script was the supreme act of creation. Long a frustrated writer, Selznick had begun signing his names to scripts (Since You Went Away and Duel in the Sun were the first). Now he took over the writing reins himself.

  Well, Hecht certainly didn’t want his name on the screen, and off in Scotland, Bridie—not a member of the Writers Guild—cared even less. To make himself all the more important, DOS even toyed with omitting Mrs. Hitchcock from the credits (“even though,” he admitted, “she was a contributor to the early scripts, which were thrown out, and was helpful editorially in conferences”). But in the end Alma’s involvement was too pervasive to ignore, and Selznick was obliged to take the gracious road and give her credit.

  Just as Hitchcock’s practicality and equanimity always preserved him as a creative force, David O. Selznick’s manic intensity destroyed him. The financial state of the Selznick organization was “dreadful,” according to David Thomson, and the producer was gambling its future on The Paradine Case. Filming finally began on December 19, and almost instantly fell behind. Already bloated by a year of preproduction, the budget continued to swell and groan.

  The Paradine Case was an uneven battleground. For Hitchcock, it would be one last exercise in professional subservience. The producer had anointed the stars and, at the eleventh hour, commandeered the script. DOS did everything he could to second-guess the camera work. All of this Selznick had done before with Hitchcock, but never to such an extent, never so thoroughly and destructively.

  Fussing with the script, page by page, Selznick fell so far behind the production schedule that he had to stay up all night, some nights, dictating to his secretary the line changes for the next day’s shooting. The new pages had to be rushed to the studio for the director and cast to read and study, and then by limousine to the Hays Office, where last-minute adjustments were de rigueur. Hanging fire until this process was completed, the first shot of the day was sometimes delayed until after lunch.

  Although Ben Hecht and Mrs. Hitchcock tried to offer assistance, Selznick shouldered most of the burden—a burden that amounted, after all, to satisfying his own ego. One lesson the producer was reteaching Hitchcock was fidelity to the book. But DOS’s scriptwork suffered, ironically, because the writing was “too novelistic,” wrote Leonard Leff. Indeed, in scene after scene, the producer simply transcribed the novel. Turning the pages of the book as he wrote, Selznick restored whole stretches of Robert Hichens’s wordy dialogue, drowning the drama in a sea of verbiage.

  Forced to wait for his daily ration of script, Hitchcock lost the only power he ever had over Selznick: control of the set, and of his preplanned vision of the film. Pages that arrived freshly baked from the producer’s oven seemed to him merely warmed-over, and more than once the director was overheard muttering, “What am I to do? I can’t take it anymore.”

  “The dialogue was invariably worse, not better,” recalled Gregory Peck. As the filming dragged on, according to Peck, Hitchcock “seemed really bored with the whole thing, and often we would look over to his chair after a take and he would be—or pretended to be—asleep. Something was troubling him even more than during Spellbound, I think.” But as Hume Cronyn pointed out in one interview, Hitchcock hadn’t done much falling asleep in public since he lost weight during Lifeboat. The truth was, he was disconsolate. And more than once his frustration turned to anger—at himself, or anyone in the vicinity.

  Hitchcock feuded furiously with cameraman Lee Garmes, a first-rate veteran who came highly recommended; Garmes was a favorite of Selznick’s, but also of Hecht’s, having photographed and helped direct the brash Hecht and Charles MacArthur films. Trapped between Hitchcock and Selznick, Garmes couldn’t find a middle ground.

  In spite of everything, the director strived to implement the Hitchcock style—fluid camera movements and a mingling of darkness and light, his trademark chiaroscuro. But Selznick insisted on shots to break up the camera fluidity and on soft Hollywood glamour. The evil people, in a Hitchcock film, were always warped somehow. It bothered Hitchcock that the producer decreed such beautiful photography and costuming for Mrs. Paradine. “People in Arizona have got to know you’re rich,” Selznick told Alida Valli.

  The producer ordered Garmes to crank up the lighting. After seeing the prison visiting-room scenes, he decreed retakes. He wanted a Selznick leading lady idealized in every scene.

  At several points in the story, Hitchcock had planned his most elaborate tracking shots to date. In the courtroom sequence there were often four cameras trained on the principals, which created a bramble of equipment and wires underfoot. Faced with constantly changing dialogue, the actors felt doubly under the gun, forced to deliver Selznick’s awkward lines while they walked through Hitchcock’s virtual obstacle course.

  In one scene, as Ann Todd recalled in her memoirs, a camera tracked her smoothly as she entered the front door of her house, called to her husband (Peck), doffed her coat and kicked off her shoes, ran upstairs two flights, entered her sitting room, and made a long telephone call, all the time speaking nonstop to Peck, “who was off screen with his feet up reading his few lines.” Thereupon—with the camera still rolling—Peck entered the frame, and “we had a long and elaborate love scene to play. …

  “We had to film all this 35 times! First the front door kept sticking,” the actress recalled, “then there were many difficulties with the camera crane that had to follow me all the way up the stairs, then the trouble for camera, microphone, etc., getting through the doors—either I went too quickly or the camera was too slow, and various people on the set had to crouch on the floor to pull away the furniture as the camera and I passed. Last of all, on the twentieth take, I started to forget my lines and we had to go right ba
ck to the beginning again. I think it was a marvelous notion of Hitchcock’s because it gave a flow of continuity to the scenes. Unfortunately it was mechanically very nearly impossible to hold for so long.”

  Also unfortunately, the producer hated it. After seeing the dailies, Selznick stormed down to the set screaming, “We’re not doing a theater piece!” The Hitchcockian approach was ordered reshot “conventionally.” For this and other attempts at bravura camera work, the producer took pains to curtail Hitchcock’s vision during filming and editing.

  Hitchcock’s favorite effect, he told Charles Higham, had been planned since the inception of The Paradine Case. Keane (Peck) and Sir Simon Flaquer (Charles Coburn) walk toward the camera as they enter Lincoln’s Inn, part of the venerable fourteenth-century London law complex. The two are seen entering the building, closing the door, walking up the stairs, turning the corner, heading along a landing into an office, and then continuing into the office, all without a single cut. It was one of Hitchcock’s signature composites, using background projection and a treadmill, elaborately planned and prepared in advance by his second unit in London. Opposed to the long take, and oblivious of the significance of Lincoln’s Inn, Selznick deleted the shot.

  Indeed, Selznick threw out so much of Hitchcock’s second-unit footage that any sense of English atmosphere the film might have boasted was lost. In every way he could manage, the producer, in the throes of the tragic psychodrama that ruined his career, sabotaged his own film.

  Curiously, right up through the end of the filming—even as he persisted with his script “improvements,” directorial second-guessing, and memos ever darkening in tone—Selznick was still trying to sign Hitchcock to a contract extension: offering to split his annual workload with Transatlantic, boost him to six thousand dollars weekly, even offering him a seat on the Selznick directorate.

  “Hitchcock may have written the picture off in his own mind,” wrote David Thomson. “Perhaps he was allowing disaster to mount.” Perhaps—but given his nature, Hitchcock was more likely trying to stave off disaster, while looking beyond The Paradine Case.

  The stars knew a disaster was happening around them, but they were left to fend for themselves. Most of the director’s goodwill flowed toward the subsidiary cast. Ann Todd, playing the one character who captured Hitchcock’s attention, found the director kind and helpful to her. “He takes the trouble to study his actors quite apart from what they are playing,” Todd said, “and so is able to bring hidden things out from them. He always realized how nervous I was and used to wait for the silence before ‘Action’ and then tell a naughty, sometimes shocking story that either galvanized me into action or collapsed me into giggles.”

  But at times Hitchcock erupted in bursts of strange behavior that couldn’t be easily explained—except by the nonstop tension swirling around the production. One time, Todd recalled, she was preparing for a scene in her bed, reclining in an elegant dressing gown, when all of a sudden, to her amazement, he “took a flying leap and jumped on me, shouting “Relax!’ For a moment I thought he might have broken my bones.”

  Records, not bones, were broken when the filming finally ground to a halt on May 7, with the budget estimated at $4.258 million, “or nearly exactly the cost of [Gone With the] Wind,” in Thomson’s words. Ninety-two days of principal photography: that was a Hitchcock record.

  So was the initial three-hour version of The Paradine Case eventually approved by the director. Hitchcock conducted a few retakes in early summer, but only after demanding and receiving one thousand dollars per day. Then Selznick took over, supervising Hal Kern’s intrusive editing, Franz Waxman’s overdone score. The producer made final trims to bring the picture to 131 minutes, in time for its premiere on the last day of 1947.

  The last Selznick-Hitchcock production was stillborn, a lifeless picture critics rightly blamed on the producer. Audiences stayed away, and by June 1950 it was in the books as a permanent loser. Worldwide income as of that date: $2.119 million. Once asked which of his pictures he’d like to burn, Gregory Peck replied without hesitation: The Paradine Case.

  * Incidentally, that offensive word is never used in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat—although the narrator of Steinbeck’s novelette had referred to Joe repeatedly as a “buck nigger.”

  ** In her autobiography Bankhead reasonably attributed the slight in part to the fact that she wasn’t a contract player who could count on studio bloc votes.

  * In the Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis, Volney P. Gay observed that Hitchcock’s similar attitude toward psychoanalysis in Vertigo—where, according to Midge’s psychiatrist, Scottie needs a shock equal to what caused his vertigo in order to cure it—amounts to “folk beliefs about mental illness.”

  * Although Hunter did not appear in Spellbound, Hitchcock remembered her dutiful screen-testing and successfully recommended her to Michael Powell for his classic 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death (known in the United States as Stairway to Heaven).

  * Hitchcock told Truffaut that Notorious cost $2 million to make, but grossed $8 million.

  * An American film won the Grand Prize at Cannes that first year—Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, which also defeated Spellbound for the Best Picture Oscar. Notorious’s chances at Cannes were not improved by the fact that some of its reels were projected in the wrong order.

  * Hitchcock was also an aficionado of famous judges. The most controversial case presided over by Lord Goddard, lord chief justice of England from 1946 to 1958, was probably that of two youths accused of murdering a policeman during a warehouse burglary in 1953. The young man who fired the fatal shot could not be executed because of his age, but his accomplice, who was actually under arrest when the killing occurred, was found guilty and hanged. This incident was later turned into the film Let Him Have It (1991). Lord Humphreys was a junior solicitor in the Oscar Wilde case, the Dr. Crippen murder trial, and the trial that found Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson guilty of the murder of Thompson’s husband. As a judge he later tried many famous cases, including that of John George Haigh, the acid-bath murderer.

  PART 4

  THE TRANSATLANTIC DREAM

  ELEVEN

  1947–1950

  Transatlantic’s search for stories that it could purchase cheaply and quietly—stories that might appeal equally to English and American moviegoers, to bank loan officers, Warner Bros. executives, and Hollywood stars—continued to be problematic. Ingrid Bergman’s commitments forced Under Capricorn to be reslotted as the second Transatlantic production, but strong candidates for the first remained elusive. One project that met a fast demise was the idea of a Hitchcockian Hamlet starring Cary Grant. For one thing, a professor who had written a contemporary novel based on Shakespeare’s play began threatening a lawsuit after reading of Hitchcock’s similar idea in Transatlantic’s inaugural announcement. The new company couldn’t open for business under a cloud of litigation. Besides, the partners concluded, transplanting Hamlet to modern America was easier said than done.

  Scrambling to find another vehicle for Cary Grant, Hitchcock turned to a provocative drama that had intrigued him ever since it was first staged at the Ambassadors Theater in 1929. The plot of Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope was billed as “suggested by Thomas De Quincey”—Hitchcock enjoyed quoting his Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts—but drew its more obvious inspiration from a notorious American crime of 1924.

  Hitchcock had followed the newspaper stories about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, a pair of reportedly brilliant University of Chicago students and homosexual lovers who were obsessed with the superman theories of Nietzsche. In order to prove their superior intellects, Leopold and Loeb had committed a completely motiveless killing—murdering a young acquaintance just for the thrill of it. Their “perfect crime” was marred, however, by a series of stupid mistakes that led to their arrest. Despite being defended by famed attorney Clarence Darrow, the two were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

  Hitchcock had
seen and admired Hamilton’s play about two similarly well-bred friends who murder a classmate for sadistic reasons and stash his body in a trunk in the living room of their London flat. Inviting the victim’s parents and others to a get-together at the apartment, the killers then entertain their guests in the presence of the corpse.

  The director had always talked about actresses as dormant volcanoes, but over the years he had found himself saddled with actors who curiously resisted smoldering in love scenes. Several of them—Ivor Novello, Henry Kendall, John Gielgud, and Michael Redgrave—were homosexual or bisexual in real life, and notably diffident about women. The Lodger, Rich and Strange, Secret Agent, and The Lady Vanishes had been, to some extent, hampered by their unromantic performances. Hitchcock had already shown, with Handel Fane in Murder!, a fascination with blurred sexual identity; and now, by making that idea the cornerstone of a Hitchcock film, he took a bold leap in his thinking.

  Hitchcock had been thinking about Rope for several years; he mentioned the play to Peter Viertel while working on Saboteur, suggesting that it might lend itself to being shot in continuous, carefully planned single-shot takes. He had tried that technique on The Paradine Case, only to be stymied by Selznick. Now, during one of their Transatlantic meetings, Bernstein happened to mention his feeling that the most important West End plays ought to be filmed just as they had been staged, preserving them as landmarks of English culture. Hitchcock seized the opportunity to raise the idea of filming Rope.

  Hamilton’s play had thus far scared off film producers, the director observed, so the rights would probably be inexpensive to obtain; and the play had been performed on Broadway, so American audiences would recognize it. As Hamilton had transplanted the Chicago case to London, Hitchcock saw no problem in moving it back to New York. Cary Grant could play one of the major roles. And the idea of filming it in sequential long takes, he perceived early on, would yield side benefits in both costs and publicity.