The fate of the first Transatlantic film, however, would spell trouble for the future of the fledgling company, and Hitchcock had to fight his sinking feelings about Under Capricorn.
For the part of Sam Flusky, a former Irish stablehand the novel describes as a coarsely spoken “flabby bulk” of a man, Hitchcock sought Burt Lancaster, who he thought might credibly play a “horny, manure-smelling stable hand” locked into a fatal chemistry with Ingrid Bergman. But Lancaster cost too much, and for the moment he was booked up anyway—and Hitchcock knew that if Transatlantic’s schedule fell behind, the banks would start calling in their loans.
Enter Joseph Cotten. Hitchcock’s friend, he was available (“by arrangement with David O. Selznick”) for the part, though as a southern gentleman he didn’t smell much like manure, and he was leery of the Irish accent. Cotten would do his best, but he was “wrong” for the part, Hitchcock conceded later, and asking audiences to accept him as a former farmhand feared by civilized Sydney as a “violent brute” was asking too much.
The director needed at least one English star for a film purporting to be “Transatlantic” in appeal, so he went to lengths to woo Michael Wilding for the third-billed Adare, the newly arrived Irishman who falls in love with Mrs. Flusky. Wilding was a name only in England, where he’d served as a lightweight leading man opposite Anna Neagle. (“A British version of [Jimmy] Stewart” was how Marlene Dietrich thought of him.)
The English actor had his first meeting with Hitchcock in New York earlier in the spring. “Do you know New York well?” Hitchcock asked after they shook hands and ordered drinks in his St. Regis suite. When Wilding said it was his first visit, Hitchcock exclaimed, “Oh, we must remedy that.” With the director as guide they launched a three-day tour, from Harlem to the Empire State Building. The whirlwind ended with a ferry trip from Staten Island to the Statue of Liberty; Hitchcock gazed up at the national shrine that had starred in Saboteur, then handed over his field glasses to Wilding and remarked, “Take a look at the lady’s anatomy. Can’t you guess that a Frenchman had a hand in constructing those bosoms?”
Wilding enjoyed the sightseeing, but began to wonder when Hitchcock would mention Under Capricorn, “or, even more important open up about his attitudes to filmmaking. But he did let one remark slip about his approach to directing: ‘The secret of suspense in a film,’ he told me, ‘is never to begin a scene at the beginning and never let it go on to the end.’ ”
At last Hitchcock did bring up the pending job, and Wilding got the part. Alone among the principals, Wilding would maintain enough good humor throughout filming to preserve their rapport. Like the character he played, the actor didn’t take himself too seriously. There wasn’t “enough humor” in Under Capricorn, Hitchcock ruefully told François Truffaut, but what little there was—on- and off-camera—came from Wilding.
The remaining cast and crew openings were filled out by English personnel. Margaret Leighton, prominent on the stage in the reborn Old Vic, was cast as Milly, the psychopathic maid who plies Mrs. Flusky with drugged drink; Jack Watling was Flusky’s secretary (a character more prominent in the book); Cecil Parker, ignoble in The Lady Vanishes, was the Governor.
As his cameraman Hitchcock secured one of England’s finest: Jack Cardiff, who’d served as an operator on The Skin Game. Cardiff had a reputation for his sensual color photography of Michael Powell films, and earlier in the year had picked up an Oscar for Black Narcissus. Hitchcock beamed as he screened Rope for Cardiff. The cameraman couldn’t help but admire the vision, and gamely accepted the “daunting challenge” of shooting Under Capricorn in single takes—all the while thinking it was “rather crazy.”
Ingrid Bergman’s salary was not the only drain on the budget, which would eventually soar above $2 million. Set design and construction costs rose beyond all estimates. The Flusky mansion boasted two floors and a half dozen rooms, and had to be built in sections that could slide open electronically to allow giant camera cranes to float through doorways and walls. It covered the largest Elstree stage.
Hitchcock’s cast was ready for action by mid-June, but construction lagged behind, and then a wildcat technicians’ strike forced an additional delay. The strike cost not only money but goodwill; when Ingrid Bergman first visited the set, she was stunned by the “hostile feeling” emanating from the crew.
The script also lagged, and it never jelled into a satisfying whole. Cronyn was inexperienced, and although James Bridie wrote for Hitchcock several times, he “was a semi-intellectual playwright and not in my opinion a very thorough craftsman,” the director reflected years later. The ending of Under Capricorn remained anticlimactic—a rare failure for Hitchcock. “On thinking it over later on,” said the director, “I realized that he [Bridie] always had very good first and second acts, but he never succeeded in ending his plays.”
July 1 arrived. The leads grew restless. Bergman, whose inflated (financial and script) importance had already thrown Hitchcock off stride, had time to kill. She ate, drank, gained weight—and she stewed. The Irish lilt required by Lady Flusky worried her. Characteristically, the director told Bergman not to worry, but to her, Hitchcock seemed worried about everything—the script, the set, the elaborate camera work—except her.
Bergman was in a personal and professional muddle. Her marriage, weakened by her love affairs, was falling apart. She had grown to loathe Hollywood’s factory-line production system, and was anxious to move in a new direction and reinvigorate her career. After seeing Open City and Paisan, she found herself swept away by the truthfulness of Italian neorealism. In April, she wrote a letter to filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, declaring her eagerness to break away during Under Capricorn and meet him and discuss the possibility of working with him in the future. These plans did not escape Hitchcock’s notice.
Joseph Cotten dined nightly with the Hitchcocks and Bergman. To him, Hitchcock seemed on edge, complaining about the rationing that was still in effect in England—and, it seemed, “all things British.”
Not until July 19 did Hitchcock call the first take of Under Capricorn: In-grid Bergman’s introductory scene—where Lady Flusky enters the dining room, barefoot, drunk, and disheveled, to meet her husband’s guests and exchanges meaningful dialogue with Michael Wilding about their common Irish past. Bergman sailed through, Irish accent and all. When Hitchcock called “Cut!” there was relieved applause.
Bowing to Bergman’s nervousness, Hitchcock shot the actress’s first scene without resorting to a maximum-length take. Bowing to Sidney Bernstein’s, the director had already modified his vision and started breaking up a few scenes for planned cuts and camera angles. But the very resistance Hitchcock had encountered while touting his fluid camera ideas had also hardened his resolve to shoot the key scenes in long takes.
The long takes were a “technical nightmare,” according to cameraman Jack Cardiff. As with Rope, all the actors’ movements had to be chalked on the floor, amid the miles of cable that lay underfoot. As the cast spoke their lines, the camera had to move and the walls disappear; electricians had to rush lamps on dollies into place, then scramble out of view. Hitchcock was kept busy shouting to the cast and crew “like the captain of a fishing fleet exhorting his crew to pull in the nets,” according to Michael Wilding.
Prolonged rehearsal was again necessary, once more testing his stars’ rusty memory skills. The extraordinary physical effort required by Hitchcock’s technique also taxed the crew’s patience, and technical glitches ruined take after take. When the actors finally got a scene right, they had to perform it all over again, sans camera, to record the dialogue.
They would rehearse one day and shoot the next, recalled Cardiff. “Good recorded sound was impossible: the noise was indescribable. The electric crane lumbered through sets like a tank at Sebastopol, whole walls cracked open, furniture was whisked away by panting prop men and then frantically replaced in position as the crane made a return trip. The sound department did exceptionally well just to get a
‘guide track’ (picking up dialogue above the din so that the correct soundtrack could be matched to it later). When we had made a successful ten-minute ‘take,’ everyone had to leave the studio except the sound people, Hitch, the script girl, and the cast, who would then go through the motions with dialogue without the camera. Amazingly, by sliding the sound tape backwards and forwards it all came together.”
Under the circumstances, Hitchcock had to violate his own principles and pay more attention to the words than to the pictures—to the sound of the acting rather than the acting itself.
“I watched him once, during a ten minute take,” Cardiff remembered. “He had his back to the actors, aimlessly looking down at the floor, and at the end, when he had said ‘Cut,’ he made only one comment to my camera operator Paul Beeson: ‘How was that for you, Paul?’ On Paul’s nod, he would signal his acceptance of the whole reel.”
Pained by such pressures and problems, Hitchcock got his only “pleasure out of doing those camera tricks,” according to Ingrid Bergman. One filming anecdote is curiously poignant: Hitchcock was guiding a quiet interlude between Bergman and Wilding, watching them intensely as they were photographed, when suddenly he let out a howl. Then, in a gentle tone, he said, “Please move the camera a little to the right. You have just run over my foot.” The enormous camera had indeed broken Hitchcock’s big toe.
The camera afforded pleasure and pain to the director—but only pain to the cast, Bergman especially. “The prop men had the job of moving all the furniture while the camera was rolling forward and backward, or from this side to that,” remembered the actress, “and the walls were flying up into the rafters as we walked by, so that huge Technicolor camera could follow us. It just drove us all crazy! A chair or a table for an actor appeared the minute before a cue. The floor was marked with numbers and everybody and every piece of furniture had to be on the cued number at the right moment.
“What a nightmare! It’s the only time I broke down and cried on a movie set.”
Her last Hitchcock film, Notorious, had been pure joy. But now, even more than on Spellbound, their first film together, Bergman questioned Hitchcock’s judgment, his authority. “The other day I burst,” the actress wrote to a friend. “How I hate this new technique of his. How I suffer and loathe every moment on the set. My two leading men, Michael Wilding and Joe Cotten, just sat there and said nothing, but I know they agree with me.”
One day, frustrated by a long-take scene in which she traipsed around the mansion, trying to recall pages of dialogue as the huge camera crane relentlessly pursued her, she erupted with expletives, telling off Hitchcock. “I said enough for the whole cast,” Bergman said. “Little Hitch just left. Never said a word. Just went home … oh dear …”
“Later on,” Hitchcock told Truffaut, confirming the incident, “someone called to inform me that she hadn’t noticed my departure and was still complaining twenty minutes after I’d gone.”
There was one other confrontation—although “confrontation” is the wrong word, for Hitchcock had perfected his disappearing act. One night after a particularly rough day of filming, the director was sitting having a drink with his three main players in a restaurant. Bergman started in with her griping. Once her back was turned, Hitchcock simply rose from the table and left. “That’s the trouble with him,” she told her fellow actors; “he won’t fight.”
Cotten was as miserable as Bergman. He was no less intimidated by the perpetual-motion camera (which he dubbed “the Monster”), and by the Irish accent that permanently eluded him.* Like Bergman, he too was having personal troubles; during the filming, his wife actually tried to commit suicide after learning of Cotten’s affair with an actress back in the United States. The incident was hushed up by Transatlantic.
Hitchcock, who hadn’t really wanted Cotten, tried to be sympathetic, and at one point went so far as to summon James Bridie from Glasgow to address the actor’s concerns about specific dialogue (“no word, no punctuation of which was ever changed” without Bridie’s “conference and approval,” the actor recalled). Although he hated London, Bridie boarded a train to meet with Cotten, Hitchcock, and Sidney Bernstein at the studio.
“I hear you are having trouble with the speech about your background,” Bridie began, lighting up one of the flat Turkish cigarettes he preferred.
“Oh no, not at all,” replied Cotten reassuringly. “It’s a beautiful speech, a pleasure to learn, and I look forward to reciting it.”
“Well, exactly what are we talking about?” asked Bridie, glancing with puzzlement at Hitchcock and Bernstein.
“It’s only the first five words,” said Cotten. “I simply find it impossible to say them with any conviction.”
“What are the first five words?” prodded Bridie.
“I was born in Dublin.”
“Where were you born?” asked Bridie.
“Virginia,” said Cotten hesitantly.
“Well, change the line to read, ‘I was born in Virginia,’ ” declared Bridie.
Later that day, however, Cotten, who had grown to dislike his character and the film intensely, made a slip of the tongue in front of Hitchcock and Bridie, referring to Under Capricorn as “Under Cornycrap.” Eyebrows were raised, but nothing said. Cotten later regretted the gaffe, and blamed it for the fact that Hitchcock never invited him to act in another film.*
Over time, the atmosphere gradually improved. Hitchcock did his best to spread cheer, reviving his old prankishness. He found kindred souls in Wilding, who was always laughing, and sound mixer Peter Handford, who had the difficult task of trying to record all the dialogue at the proper levels. Handford shared with Hitchcock a love of trains, which they discussed during the breaks. They had a set routine: Hitchcock tugged off the sound mixer’s headphones, whispering something obscene in his ears; then, when Handford broke into laughter, the director would announce huffily, “Well, when the sound mixer is ready, we’ll start shooting.”
As of old, Hitchcock found a court jester in stuffy assistant director Cecil Foster Kemp, who was the butt of his jokes for general amusement. But the jokes were mild, and tonic. Sidney Bernstein left the director to his own devices on the set, but after hours the producer was a helpful diplomat, smoothing ruffled feathers and holding a nightly open house (or, as Hitchcock called it, “open office”). Cotten served as bartender for the ice-cold martinis handed around.
Eventually the patience, the jokes, and the martinis won out. Bergman flew to Paris late in August, met Roberto Rossellini, and soon fell in love. Although this started her on a road that led deep into scandal and controversy, and away from Hitchcock and Hollywood, for the time being it left her feeling happier and revitalized. At last, Bergman too relaxed.
Early in the shooting Hitchcock had been unusually tentative with the actress, and in this, their third film, his camera work is the least intimate. But Mrs. Flusky’s “confession,” Bergman’s key scene, had been scheduled for late in the filming, in September. The confession was cursory in the novel—only a few lines, nothing more—but the script stretched it out into a cathartic scene, a showcase for the actress. This time Hitchcock stuck to his guns and filmed the scene as one protracted take. It would be one of the few such takes to survive the final cut.
To her surprise, Bergman had grown accustomed to the camera stalking her. “I talked all the time,” she wrote to a friend. “The camera never left me and it worked fine. I must say much better than being cut up and edited.”
The result is one of the highlights of a film with few to recommend it.
The original plan had been to finish by early September. But Michael Wilding took ill with pleurisy, causing further delay. The problems plaguing Under Capricorn never really abated.
The delays and postponements sent Mrs. Hitchcock back to America in the third week of September, ahead of her husband, who had three weeks to go before wrapping up photography in England. A number of exteriors were then slated to be filmed at the Warner’s ranch. Alma
returned alone, leaving her daughter in the care of her husband’s favorite spinster cousins, with whom Pat would reside while attending RADA.
It is impossible to know all we’d like to know about Alma Reville Hitchcock’s state of mind, then or ever. If Mr. Hitchcock was notorious among even close friends for guarding his innermost thoughts and the secrets of his heart, Mrs. Hitchcock surpassed him. Alma offered only one image to the world: that of a happily devoted spouse. She gave interviews, but they were almost entirely about her husband; she didn’t expatiate on her own feelings. His career was her career. His friends were her friends—and one of those mutual friends was Whitfield Cook.
If Hitchcock was sexually impotent, what about Alma? He could make wisecracks about his impotence, his lack of sexual activity, but how did Alma feel?
He could flirt with or try to kiss an actress, but what about Alma?
Wasn’t she a perfectly normal woman, with a sexual appetite that wasn’t being satisfied? Didn’t Mrs. Hitchcock entertain her own normal fears and desires?
Mrs. Hitchcock and Whitfield Cook had begun to meet for lunch and dinner at restaurants which, if not quite obscure or out of the way, nonetheless fell outside the regular beat of Hollywood columnists. For the next three weeks, she and her cowriter enjoyed quiet get-togethers at the Ready Room and LaRue’s, discussing the script they were developing.
Did Hitchcock believe that Cook was homosexual? It might have been reasonable for Hitchcock to assume as much; though Cook would later marry, at the time he was a bachelor with homosexual friends. Did Hitchcock believe Cook was therefore “safe” as a regular companion for his wife? Or did the director guess that the two felt an attraction, and sympathetically allow the flirtation to progress? Might Hitchcock even, under the circumstances, have approved of the direction their closeness was taking? After Alma came home from England, she appears to have seized the opportunity of her family’s absence to open her heart to Cook. On the evidence of his journal, she said some thing to him on September 20 that took him by astonished surprise. If she told him of her feelings, he would have been astonished indeed, for according to his journal he spent as much time with men as with women.
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