Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Television was another purgative draining the film business. Although NBC had been on the air with regular programming since 1939, the year 1948 is generally seen as the unofficial birth of national prime-time broadcasting. That was the year the three networks mounted competing full nightly schedules, and the year that the number of television stations and television sets in the country started to skyrocket.

  In a journal he kept during these years, Cook suggests that the anti-Communist crusade sickened everybody in the Hitchcock circle, and that the director openly fretted over the encroachment of television—a medium that rivaled and threatened to undermine the film industry. Later, Hitchcock would find cause to rethink both these issues.

  For the moment, though, Mrs. Hitchcock and Hume Cronyn were finishing a treatment for Under Capricorn, slated to begin production in London immediately following Rope. In Glasgow, James Bridie launched into a script, communicating with Hitchcock by telephone and telegram. Victor Peers returned to London to organize the pre-production.

  The third Transatlantic project was also shaping up. After talks with Hitchcock, Louis Verneuil had finished a first treatment of the story that would eventually become the film I Confess. The treatment transposed the turn-of-the-century French play to a small town outside San Francisco—the second time (after Shadow of a Doubt) that Hitchcock had gravitated to comfortable home territory. Verneuil’s second treatment incorporated an even more adventurous idea of the Hitchcocks’, revealing the wrong-man priest to be the father of an illegitimate baby.

  When columnist Jimmy Fidler leaked news of the wronged priest project, however, Warner Bros. and bank officials reviewed the treatments and expressed concern. But concern was premature, Hitchcock insisted; though Cary Grant was now out, he had discussed the film with James Stewart, who would very likely take over the role. In any event, the director assured everybody, Verneuil’s treatments were just one step in the film’s evolution. Now Mrs. Hitchcock would write a new treatment, changing everything. Meanwhile, Hitchcock said, Outrun the Constable—seen by the studio as the less controversial run for cover—could be moved ahead of I Confess, giving Warner’s its own Hitchcock film way ahead of schedule. This maneuver kept the peace.

  Whitfield Cook went to work on Outrun the Constable, collaborating on a treatment with Alma, who was toiling more or less simultaneously on all her husband’s nascent projects. Although Joan Harrison, off producing films on her own, remained close to the Hitchcocks, Cook now took Harrison’s place as a constant presence among the family—the latest third Hitchcock. In late December 1947, for example, Cook accompanied the couple to the premiere of The Paradine Case. Toward the end of production on Rope, when Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock were asked to a formal dinner party at Constance Collier’s, with a guest list that included the Chaplins and the Aldous Huxleys, Cook was invited along.

  On the weekend that Rope wrapped up filming, Cook and Hume Cronyn were guests of the Hitchcocks in northern California. With his partner, Anne Chapin, Cook was also working on an MGM picture about a navy rescue, but the talk easily drifted among all the Hitchcock projects: Under Capricorn, Outrun the Constable, I Confess. “Alma, Hitch & I take long walks in the afternoon in rain and old clothes,” Cook wrote.

  On March 20, 1948, the three ate dinner at Romanoff’s, joined by Joan Harrison and Sidney Bernstein. While they dined, the Hitchcock party kept up with radio accounts of the Academy Awards. It was the first time in eight years that Hitchcock had neither a film in release nor an Oscar nominee in some category. A week later, when the Hitchcocks sailed for London, they both phoned Cook from the Queen Elizabeth, and Alma sent wires about Outrun the Constable, which the writer would continue to develop in their absence.

  What was it that attracted Hitchcock to the idea of filming Under Capricorn, the novel set in Australia by Helen Simpson? Was it that the rights were inexpensive (according to Donald Spoto, costing a single token dollar)? Was it the subject’s inherent interest to English moviegoers—balancing out its predecessor, Rope, which Hitchcock had reshaped to appeal to American audiences? Or was it that Hitchcock had a soft spot for the author, who had contributed to Murder! and Sabotage?

  Simpson’s 1937 novel concerns the shared secret of a married couple who live in nineteenth-century Sydney, a boomtown populated largely by convicts and soldiers. The husband is a “ticket-of-leave” man, a former prisoner who is now a coarse-mannered landowner and businessman. His crime—killing his wife’s brother—took place in Ireland, with his dipsomaniac wife as the only eyewitness. (It turns out she’s the actual killer.) Smitten by her beauty, a handsome, well-bred newcomer to Sydney sets out to rehabilitate her.

  Well regarded in its day, Under Capricorn was the kind of historical fiction Hitchcock claimed he read habitually in his free time—unlike crime novels, which he said felt too much like work. But he had “no special admiration” for the Simpson novel; only on rare occasions would he even admit to “liking” it. Alma liked it more, and it’s possible that Ingrid Bergman saw in Lady Flusky—the wife of the “emancipist”—her specialty of noble suffering.

  Did anyone involved think it was a potential masterpiece? Reminiscing about Under Capricorn to Truffaut, Hitchcock claimed that Bergman “only wanted to appear in masterpieces. How on earth can anyone know whether a picture is going to turn out to be a masterpiece or not?”

  From the earliest Transatlantic publicity, Bergman’s name had been touted as an asset to the project—a guarantee of box-office voltage. But there was also a downside to her star power. For one thing, Bergman knew her value and demanded a commensurate salary—$200,000, plus 25 percent of the profits. And unlike James Stewart, she wasn’t willing to defer any of her salary in exchange for a profit-sharing agreement.

  As the film’s director, Hitchcock was offended by her salary requirements, and thought his payment should be just as high, or higher. Therefore he gave himself a raise on Under Capricorn to $250,000—along with 30 percent of profits. When Bergman heard of the move, she complained, and was granted an equal 30 percent. Neither would ever collect a dime under the arrangement.

  Years later, Hitchcock admitted that his ego had run amok from start to finish on Under Capricorn. “I made the mistake of thinking that to get Bergman would be a tremendous feat,” Hitchcock said. “It was a victory over the rest of the industry, you know. That was bad thinking, and my behavior was almost infantile. All I could think about was: ‘Here I am, Hitchcock, the onetime English director, returning to London with the biggest star of the day.’ I was literally intoxicated at the thought of the cameras and flashbulbs that would be directed at Bergman and myself at the London airport. All of these externals seemed to be terribly important.”

  Hitchcock’s “confusion,” he told Truffaut, started before Bergman—with the choice of story (“If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d never have tackled a costume picture”). The team of John Colton and Margaret Linden had done an early adaptation. A well-respected playwright whose plays were often transferred to the screen, Colton had dramatized Somerset Maugham’s Rain and also The Shanghai Gesture, which became a Josef von Sternberg film.

  Colton and Linden expunged the book’s casual racism, and restricted the action to the mansion; they deleted a protracted subplot sending the newcomer Adare deep into the Australian interior in search of gold. After completing the adaptation, perhaps initially intended for the stage, Colton died suddenly in 1946.

  Hitchcock invited Arthur Laurents to write the film version, but after absorbing the book, which didn’t excite him, Laurents said no. “Later in the day, Sidney [Bernstein] put his arm around me and friend to friend, for my sake, tried to persuade me to recant,” Laurents recalled. “I had hurt Hitch. I had offended him by my disloyalty. Loyalty was an unquestioning yes; no was ingratitude. For me, however, recanting would not be an act of friendship, it would really make me disloyal. Hitch didn’t see it that way. I never sat at his table at Romanoff’s again. A hard, early lesson in friendship: we had nev
er really been friends.”

  Hume Cronyn, who had also toiled on the script of Rope, was then recruited to collaborate on Under Capricorn, working first with Mrs. Hitchcock in Hollywood, before traveling to England with the director to finish the assignment. Cronyn was again chosen because he was a “friend,” Hitchcock told Truffaut, “a very articulate man who knows how to voice his ideas.”

  James Bridie, meanwhile, was teaming up from his home in Glasgow. Although Bridie had earlier excused himself from adapting Simpson’s book, unlike Laurents he admired the novel, and he was finally won over by Hitchcock’s vow to preserve as much of its flavor as possible. While Hitchcock and Cronyn plotted out the continuity, Bridie fleshed out the characters and wrote dialogue; Alma read and edited the drafts. This was not the close group dynamic of Cromwell Road, however, this was the scattered contributions of four creative minds who were seldom, if ever, in the same place at the same time. Looking back on the process, Hitchcock never quite decided who was the weakest link in the chain; he tended to blame Cronyn, the Johnny-on-the-spot, who was suited to adapting the small-scale Rope (which exploited his familiarity with the stage and New York) but lacked “sufficient experience” for this, more sprawling, period drama.

  Spring in London was always welcome; it painted the future in a sunny glow. Having pulled off the technical challenges of Rope, Hitchcock was feeling proud and optimistic. Between script conferences with Sidney Bernstein and Hume Cronyn, the director finalized the cast and crew for Under Capricorn, and oversaw the ambitious sets being constructed at Elstree. He’d be filming in the old Amalgamated Studios, now maintained by MGM-British, which had used its American financial backing to build modern, Hollywood-style facilities—and the best studio restaurant.

  It was Mrs. Hitchcock’s first trip to England since 1939, and the couple took time to renew friendships and introduce their grown-up daughter to relatives. Outrun the Constable was set in London, and that gave Alma a professional and personal incentive to tour the city with Pat. Nurturing her acting ambitions, Pat was hoping to join the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the leading drama school in England. So mother and daughter visited RADA on Gower Street, and Pat was enrolled for the fall term.

  Although Hitchcock poked fun at Pat’s avocation in interviews, she was the center of her parents’ world, and they supported her goals. “I don’t think they wildly encouraged her but they didn’t discourage her,” recalled Whitfield Cook. “They were with her all the way.”

  Alma brought up the idea of incorporating RADA and the backstage world into Outrun the Constable. One of the main characters in the Selwyn Jepson novel is a glamorous older woman, almost a diva type. The young woman trying to solve the murder must don a maid’s disguise to go under cover and pin the crime on the diva. The novel’s young woman has no real occupation, so Alma suggested making her a RADA student—an aspiring actress like Pat. In the same vein, the diva could be an actual diva of the theater. The amateur then would have to conquer the diva with her sleuthing and her acting. The Hitchcocks talked it over enthusiastically; the doubling and deepening of theatrical motifs would ultimately pervade the script and lead to a new title.

  It was a bad sign that the director’s next film already seemed to be interesting Hitchcock more than the one he was working on. No matter how much he and Cronyn flogged the Under Capricorn script, bolstering Ingrid Bergman’s scenes, the second half of the story remained thin and lumpy; its sole interest derived from a jealous housekeeper. The story had no real crescendo, so ultimately the writing team turned its attention to the love triangle between Flusky, Lady Flusky, and Adare, conjuring up a violent altercation in which a gun is fired accidentally, Adare nearly dies, and Flusky is brought to the brink of arrest, scandal, and ruin.

  Hitchcock always sensed when script talks were going poorly; he knew the auguries. He spent session after desultory session with Cronyn, brainstorming without inspiration. Before long he was violating his own credo, and rushing the solutions.

  One morning in the Transatlantic offices, Cronyn recalled, “Hitch suddenly reared back in his chair, scowling like an angry baby, and announced, ‘This film is going to be a flop. I’m going to lunch.’ And he stalked out of the room, pouting. I was appalled; Sidney [Bernstein] was immediately solicitous. ‘Now, Hume, don’t be upset. You know Hitch: he’ll have a good lunch, come back, and everything will be serene.’ It was true; I’d seen Hitch suffer these tantrums before. He never had them on the set. But during a film’s preparation he could become very mercurial, his emotional thermometer would soar to over a hundred degrees in enthusiasm, only to plunge below freezing in despair.”

  That night the director and writer shared a long, lavish dinner at the Savoy, with Hitchcock insisting they order two expensive bottles of a rare vintage, Schloss Johannisberger and Fürst von Metternich. The evening restored Hitchcock’s “benign humor,” and the daytime conferences resumed in a more optimistic mode. “The trouble was,” wrote Cronyn, “I had the awful, nagging suspicion that Hitch’s premonition was accurate.”

  In the second week of June, Hitchcock returned to Hollywood for a week to approve the postproduction of Rope and help fashion the trailer for its fall release. He was still in good spirits, and all he could talk about were his high ambitions for Under Capricorn. He was going to take the innovative single-take method of Rope one step further—shooting on multilevel sets and even some exteriors. The fluid camera had become a bug with him; this time, though, the bug would prove fatal. Rope may have been a forgivable indulgence, he said later, but filming Under Capricorn that way was patently stupid.

  But there was a hidden agenda behind Hitchcock’s enthusiasm for the fluid camera. He was desperately trying to cast a spell over Ingrid Bergman. He wanted his leading lady to be as excited as he was, to visualize along with him how seamlessly the camera would weave through every scene of Under Capricorn. Flush with overconfidence, the director ran Rope for the actress and Whitfield Cook in a Warner Bros. screening room. “I liked it,” Cook wrote in his journal. “She didn’t much.”

  Neither did executives of Warner Bros. Behind the scenes the management recoiled in horror—not at the long takes, but at what Rope was really “about.” The homosexual subtext was suddenly transparent, though somehow until now it had eluded all the studio officials and censors. Hitchcock had pulled it off: with all his talk about technique, he’d distracted them all long enough to make the film his way, right under their noses.

  The ears of Barney Balaban, the New York-based president of Paramount, pricked up when he heard about Rope, and he wrote privately to Jack Warner, urging him to divorce Warner Bros. from the unsavory Hitchcock film. Balaban warned Warner that the film too closely evoked the Leopold-Loeb case, with its portrait of two killers clearly homosexual and, worse, Jewish.

  “I have talked to Alfred Hitchcock,” the head of Warner’s swiftly (and privately) replied, “and he emphatically told me that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Loeb-Leopold case. Furthermore, the action takes place in New York and no Jewish characters are portrayed in the picture.” Warner added, “Very confidentially, Barney, had you or someone else called my attention to the resemblance between the case and this picture before the picture was made, Warner Bros. would not have made any deal to release the picture. … I also want to impress upon you that it is not our property and that we only have a small financial interest in it and are chiefly concerned with the picture’s distribution.”

  Letters echoing Balaban’s came pouring in from the Anti-Defamation League, film betterment councils, and other citizen organizations. In cities and states across the country the Hitchcock film was forbidden, or passed by local censorship boards only after “eliminations” in certain scenes—often including the strangling scene that opens the film. The National Board of Review consigned Rope to “mature” audiences—over the age of twenty-one—the kiss of death for wide commercial prospects.

  By the time Rope was released in September, its b
ox-office fate was sealed by both the internal reaction of the studio and the external pressure of censorship groups. Warner’s, quite capable of mounting vigorous campaigns on behalf of its own productions, advertised and distributed the Transatlantic picture with scant enthusiasm. Although Rope made an initial box-office splash in New York, receipts quickly dwindled across the nation. And there was no consolation overseas: in Canada the film was snipped; in England the Americanization was met with puzzlement (“it is hard to understand let alone justify the violence he has done to the text,” wrote the Times) or pillory (Lindsay Anderson said it was the “worst” of Hitchcock’s career); in France and Italy Rope was banned outright.

  American critics split their verdict between superlatives and pejoratives. While Howard Barnes hailed Rope as “the work of a master” in the New York Herald Tribune, Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called it “possibly one of the dullest pictures ever made.”

  Ironically, Hitchcock had employed his single-take technique so smoothly, so imperceptibly, that it proved a negligible factor in reviews. The technique was a success, the film a failure. Yet in the end Rope succeeded on Hitchcock’s own terms, as one of those pictures in which he challenged everybody, including himself. It was, he foresaw, a film for posterity, which has marked it with an asterisk. Rope is a near masterwork, not without flaws, not for all tastes, but the singular experiment of a ceaselessly questing artist.