Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  “Do you think that, as it is Marlene Dietrich playing the part,” Hitchcock had asked Bridie as filming approached, “we could round her off [at the end] a little more strongly than we have done at the moment? I wondered if you could give her something with a little philosophy. I know that Dietrich herself (who is no fool) would like to go out of the picture not feeling sorry for herself as she is doing at the moment. Naturally it doesn’t call for any profundities, but something a little longer than we have now. It might be possible, do you think?”

  Even as filming on Stage Fright began, Hitchcock continued to “rough in” his own changes to Dietrich’s dialogue, asking Bridie to critique his tinkering. It wasn’t until mid-July, midway through photography, that work on her lines ceased. Bridie said he heartily approved of Hitchcock’s “cuts and alterations.” Bridie added, “Charlotte particularly at last comes to life. In neither the Alma-Whitfield version nor in mine was she worth a damn.”

  The best available man, Wilkie Cooper (who had shot The Hasty Heart), was the cameraman when photography began on June 1, and the largely English cast included Kay Walsh (then married to David Lean) as Charlotte’s mercenary “dresser,” and toothy comedienne Joyce Grenfell, who runs the shooting gallery at the theatrical garden party.

  In the book, Eve has no mother, just an aunt. One character Hitchcock created expressly for the film was the Commodore’s estranged wife, a role earmarked for the preeminent stage actress Sybil Thorndike. Mrs. Gill is depicted as a vague, distracted character, not without charm, who never quite catches up to what is going on. Speaking to Films in Review shortly after the New York opening of Stage Fright in 1950, Hitchcock made a point of calling the film’s characters “quite normal people,” and remarking that “I know the kind of people.” Moreover, he added, “the heroine’s mother,” Mrs. Gill, was “like my mother”—the only time he ever compared Emma Hitchcock to one of his fictional characters.

  “Casting is characterization,” Hitchcock often said, and once again the characters he liked were the actors he liked, a fact borne out on the screen. He never got past Richard Todd’s personality, which disappointed him off- and on-camera. (“Nice but nothing there,” Dietrich decided.) Todd wondered why the director seemed so “cold and diagrammatic in his approach” during filming, “as if he were not really very interested in the picture.” He certainly didn’t seem very interested in Todd—whose importance, already tainted by the script debate, dwindled—except for Hitchcock telling Todd that he possessed “expressive eyes,” and then squandering “a lot of time doing shots on me where only the eyes were lit.”

  If the film’s putative hero disappointed the director, so, alas, did the heroine. According to Hitchcock, Jane Wyman burst into tears when she first saw herself in homely drag in the rushes, for the scenes where she is disguised as Dietrich’s maid. Not only did Dietrich have better dialogue in the film, the older actress looked ten times more beautiful. Eve’s disguise is a fundamental conceit of the novel, and had been dutifully written into the script as part of the reality-versus-illusion theme. Yet after seeing the dailies, Wyman insisted on spiffing herself up in obvious ways. Hitchcock spoke to the actress about it more than once, in his suite and in her trailer, yet she persisted—with the backing of Warner’s, which saw no advantage in having one of the studio’s marquee attractions look drab and feel worse.

  “The lack of reality” in her character hurt the film, Hitchcock said later. “She should have been a pimply-faced girl. Wyman just refused to be that and I was stuck with her.”

  In reaction, the director turned his gaze to someone who wouldn’t let him down. Just as Hitchcock had indulged Tallulah Bankhead, allowing her to tyrannize the cast of Lifeboat, now he stood back while Marlene Dietrich “directed” Stage Fright. She mothered the ensemble. She rehearsed her production numbers to a fault. She advised the director on her lighting.

  “La Vie en Rose” is heard twice in the film, both times incompletely. “The Laziest Gal in Town,” the song Hitchcock forced on Dietrich, is heard in full—with Dietrich giving a full-throttle performance, before an auditorium of rapt extras whose presence she demanded. The extras gave her a standing ovation. Hitchcock’s camera is fixed on her throughout the song. Vincente Minnelli couldn’t have filmed it more simply, or effectively. A highlight of the film, the Cole Porter song entered Dietrich’s permanent repertoire.

  Singing or acting, her hypnotic performance holds the film together. Dietrich played only a handful of important roles after World War II, but Stage Fright is one of the best. Although the film was Hitchcock’s homage to Dietrich, still he “frightened the daylights” out of her, the actress told John Russell Taylor. “A strange little man,” she told her daughter, Maria Riva. “I don’t like him. Why they all think he is so great, I don’t know. The film is bad—maybe in the cutting he does all his famous ‘suspense’ but he certainly didn’t do it in the shooting.”

  Hitchcock “knew exactly what he wanted,” Dietrich conceded in her interview with Taylor for his biography, “a fact that I adore, but I was never quite sure if I did it right. After work he would take us to the Caprice restaurant and feed us with steaks he had flown in from New York, because he thought they were better than the British meat, and I always thought he did that to show that he was not really disgusted with our work.”

  So Hitchcock didn’t cuddle with Dietrich. That was a job for Michael Wilding, the self-effacing third-billed star, who was swept up in an affair with the diva. Wilding had the sneaky feeling that as their romance heated up, so did his value to Hitchcock and the film. “At her suggestion my role was greatly enlarged,” Wilding said, “and without being the least bit patronizing, she started giving me helpful suggestions, which brought out the best in me.”

  Wilding was putty in Dietrich’s hands. The Hitchcocks, silently observing, were amused.

  Whitfield Cook flew back to America on June 25. Alma, who initially stayed behind to help monitor the dailies, “wrote me letters about what was going on in the cast,” Cook recalled, “who was sleeping with whom.” When Mrs. Hitchcock returned to Hollywood on August 9 ahead of her husband, Cook met her at the airport. The next week the two enjoyed each other’s company in Santa Cruz, swimming and taking long walks in sublime weather. With her editorial instincts, Alma enjoyed listening to Cook’s story ideas and giving him advice.

  But she was apprehensive about the forthcoming release of Under Capricorn. During postproduction Sidney Bernstein had convinced Hitchcock to abbreviate some of the long takes he had persisted in filming, but early screenings hadn’t generated enthusiasm for the film’s style or its subject matter. Mrs. Hitchcock blamed herself—her initial championing of the story, and her early role in the development of the script.

  Under Capricorn opened at Radio City Music Hall in mid-September, while the director was still occupied overseas. Although the film was a disappointment from Ingrid Bergman and Hitchcock, the critical reaction was mild. Howard Barnes of the New York World Telegram wrote, for example, merely that Hitchcock had “stumbled.”

  Regardless of reviews, Transatlantic was counting on Bergman to draw in audiences. But dramatic events had overtaken her life. Bergman had joined Roberto Rossellini in Italy, and by the end of the summer of 1949 their romance was news, her out-of-wedlock pregnancy a growing scandal. Catholic organizations were quick to condemn her morals; a few congressmen even got into the act, excoriating Bergman on the floor of the House. And across the United States, exhibitors shrank from booking Under Capricorn.

  Upset at the blackening of her name, Bergman refused to do publicity for Hitchcock’s film, refusing even to appear at its London opening. “I don’t intend ever again of my own free will to see the press and answer questions,” the actress wrote Sidney Bernstein from Stromboli. Hitchcock was mystified; he might have been jealous that Bergman had left him and Hollywood for a different sort of career, but he really didn’t care whom Bergman was sleeping with. What bothered him more was that she was sh
irking her responsibility to the film.

  The London reviews were worse, and Under Capricorn soon became a debacle outstripping even Rope or The Paradine Case. The banks moved to repossess it; more galling, the second Transatlantic film was then handed over to Dan O’Shea, who thought he might be able to squeeze additional revenue out of it as a Selznick release. Hitchcock suspected O’Shea of bearing him a permanent grudge, and neglecting Under Capricorn; indeed, when the Museum of Modern Art presented its Hitchcock retrospective in 1963, O’Shea refused to loan the film. To this day, it remains the least widely seen film of Hitchcock’s American period.

  And it’s not a terrible film. Though strange and awkward, it’s stylish and heartfelt at its center, with a loyalty between the married Fluskys that ultimately is stirring. In France Under Capricorn claims a cult reputation, and Hitchcock himself never lost his fondness for it. “I would have liked it to have been a success, even outside of commercial considerations,” he told François Truffaut. “With all the enthusiasm we invested in that picture, it was a shame that it didn’t amount to anything.” The French appreciated the film, the director told Peter Bogdanovich, “because they looked at it for what it was and not what people expected.”

  In Santa Cruz, where she and Cook had repaired for the weekend, Alma read the notices. Cook was astonished at how distraught she was. Alma wept and wept. He could not console her.

  * In the play the two characters are Charles Cranillo and Wyndham Brandon. In the film Cranillo, the weaker of the two, became Phillip (Farley Granger), and the other became simply Brandon (John Dall).

  * Stewart, who had only recently become a free agent, was earning somewhere in the neighborhood of $175,000–200,000 per picture. Ultimately, he would clear $300,000 in percentage fees for his services on Rope.

  * In one of his symmetrical career strokes, all but irrelevant to general audiences, Evanson would play a small role in another Hitchcock film—an office charwoman in Marnie—for the film’s most elaborately staged sequence, which plays similar games with her character and doorways and silent suspense.

  * All three principals slurred their Irishness. “I saw the film again recently on television,” wrote Michael Wilding in his memoir, “and we certainly made a strange-sounding trio—Joe with his American accent, my own clipped English and Ingrid’s Swedish-Irish.” But mingled nationalities had long been accepted in Hitchcock’s films—and this was hardly the worst thing about Under Capricorn.

  * But they stayed good friends off-camera, and Hitchcock eventually buried the old grudge by calling on Cotten to star in the premiere episode he planned for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (It was later broadcast second.)

  * The diva’s name in the book is changed to Inwood in the film.

  * The author of the Perry Mason mystery novels.

  TWELVE

  1950–1953

  Alma Reville was never again credited with writing a film. Although she remained the gatekeeper of all Hitchcock’s films—from choice of story to a film’s final cut—she never officially wrote another script.

  Years later, the Hitchcocks both went to lengths to deny that Mrs. Hitchcock had ever written scripts at all. When in 1974 an author asked to include her in a book about “The Women Who Wrote the Movies,” her husband shielded her by declining on her behalf, insisting that Alma was never a real writer. Early in her career she had been obliged to “make notes on the set,” Hitchcock explained, “and afterwards her main job would be to cut and assemble the film for the first showing to the director.” She evolved into a “technical writer,” merely “cutting it up into shots and so forth,” he said, but “never a creative writer in the sense we know it today.”

  But Mrs. Hitchcock’s involvement with her husband’s films was far deeper than that suggests, on both a creative and an emotional level. If a Hitchcock film failed it was painful to Alma, while her husband was capable of shrugging off reviews or box-office failures. Once asked “the secret of his serenity,” Hitchcock replied, “I always try to look at things as though I were remembering them three years later.” He always did look ahead. After a film was done, it was “gone,” recalled Whitfield Cook, “and he was interested in the next thing.” In spite of what has been written about him, Hitchcock was far from a perfectionist. He didn’t set out to make masterpieces. He was a master of accepting flaws, papering over them, and moving on.

  Once, in an interview, film historian William K. Everson asked the director if he would like to remake certain of his pictures and correct their faults. Hitchcock quickly replied, “I don’t think I would care to do that,” adding, “I’ll go further. I wish I didn’t have to make them” in the first instance. After the script has been finished, the director explained, “sixty per cent of the original conception” was all he ever dared hope to realize on the screen.

  Then why make the films at all? Everson asked. Well, “there’s some fun,” Hitchcock admitted. “There’s tempo involved, and size of image”—and then there’s the cutting, one last chance to “get it right.”

  Before the failure of Under Capricorn, Alma had produced a fresh treatment for I Confess, transferring the setting from San Francisco to Quebec. But after she said she didn’t want to write any more scripts, the project needed a new and deft writer, for the bulk of the task remained of moving the nineteenth-century French play across the Atlantic, and forward to a contemporary time.

  After meeting with Hitchcock in London during the making of Stage Fright, Lesley Storm—a.k.a. Mabel Margaret Clark, the novelist and dramatist, who cowrote the Carol Reed film The Fallen Idol—was engaged for the job. Everyone felt encouraged when Storm brought her notes and pages to Paris for a script conference with Hitchcock, Sidney Bernstein, and Victor Peers. The project seemed finally on the verge of a breakthrough—until Storm went incommunicado for weeks, leaving Bernstein and Hitchcock angry and mystified as they awaited her revised treatment. Ultimately, Storm was discharged.

  Hitchcock had a stubborn faith in I Confess. Priests intrigued him; he found it amusing when the ones he met confessed their enjoyment for his sexiest, most violent films. The director had casual friendships with faculty members of the Catholic Marymount College (later Loyola Marymount), and a longtime friend in Father Thomas James Sullivan, whom Hitchcock met at the time of The Paradine Case, and then stayed in regular touch with for thirty years. Priests found Hitchcock a willing donor to Catholic charities, and although it became well known that he contributed a generous amount (twenty thousand dollars) to building a new chapel at his alma mater, St. Ignatius College, in 1962, less reported is the fact that several times the Hitchcocks were benefactors of new chapels and churches scattered around California.

  I Confess was steeped in Catholicism as well as Hitchcockery, and he was reluctant to let go of either. He stubbornly refused to abandon the story’s most controversial elements: the illegitimate child whose existence the priest is unaware of; and the ending where the priest is hanged. Even though Bernstein supported whatever Hitchcock wanted to do, he also warned the director repeatedly that censorship in England as well as America would zero in on these, his pet ideas for I Confess.

  Showing himself fearless where writers were concerned, Hitchcock made a stab at hiring another renowned novelist with ambivalent views of the cinema. Graham Greene, a Catholic convert whose thrillers were often suffused with religious and political themes, rarely worked directly for film and loathed most of the screen adaptations of his fiction. A harsh critic of Hitchcock during his stint as a reviewer for the Spectator and Night and Day in the 1930s, Greene had denounced the director in his heyday for his “inferior sense of reality,” and more than once said that he vastly preferred the films of the “German Hitchcock”—Fritz Lang.

  After Storm let Transatlantic down, Hitchcock thought of Greene, whose talent, prestige, and deep-dyed Catholicism might yet salvage I Confess. The director spoke directly to Greene’s agent; then Bernstein followed up with a formal offer, to which Greene replied that
he didn’t write pictures for hire. “It is a resolution I made some years ago,” Greene wrote, “and I don’t want to break it, even for Hitchcock. Thank you very much, however, for asking me.”*

  Shortly thereafter Hitchcock visited Samson Raphaelson in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and performed his bedtime-story routine, enthusiastically telling the writer the whole story of the film (thus far). Perhaps the writer of Suspicion, which had been hampered by the Production Code, might be tempted by another Hitchcock film full of opportunities for even more flagrant code breaking. When Raphaelson sniffed that I Confess wasn’t his type of material, the director went away cross, and stymied.

  This was shortly after the East Coast previews of Stage Fright. It was on the train back to California that the director was reading a new book by a first-time author named Patricia Highsmith. He was accompanied by Mrs. Hitchcock and Whitfield Cook, who passed around the galleys. Highsmith’s story concerns two people who meet accidentally on a train. One is a psychopath who enunciates his theory of a perfect crime: swapping murders with a total stranger.

  Turning the pages of the new book excitedly, the three Hitchcocks began to talk about how easily Strangers on a Train could be transformed into another run-for-cover crime film, allowing for yet another postponement of I Confess. The screen rights wouldn’t be very expensive, for High-smith was still an unknown commodity—and the story would lend itself to being photographed in black and white, inside the studio on a modest budget, even without major stars.

  What Hitchcock really coveted was the springboard situation: the crisscrossing of two passengers on a train, one with murder on his mind. Otherwise, he thought the rest of the story was pretty expendable. Even before the rights had been sewn up, then, as the three Hitchcocks crossed the country by train and talked among themselves, they began replotting the story for film. With Alma eschewing actual writing, Cook got the job of integrating the torrent of ideas into a coherent treatment.