Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  O’Connell, from Newton, Massachusetts, was educated at Georgetown Prep in Garret Park, Maryland, and served in the navy during World War II. He was the treasurer of the Thomas M. Dalby Mills for children’s clothing, part owned by his family—an entrenched, well-to-do Catholic family. Indeed, Pat’s beau was the grandnephew of Boston’s late Cardinal William O’Connell.

  In London, Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein had finally settled on another Transatlantic project: a 1948 novel called The Bramble Bush by David Duncan. At its core this was another wrong-man story, about a fugitive from police who is forced to adopt the identity of a murder suspect. But the intriguing thing about The Bramble Bush is that it signaled a political shift for Hitchcock. The wrong man of The Bramble Bush is a disillusioned Communist agitator; increasingly in the coming years, as the international political climate changed, Hitchcock would leave behind Hitler and Germany as his reference points for evil, and find a new villain in the Soviet Union.

  It had been almost three years since Under Capricorn, and Bernstein was itching to produce another film. The Bramble Bush was intended to follow I Confess; but since both required development, whichever script developed fastest would be the next Transatlantic production.

  Hitchcock decided to work simultaneously on both projects during the second half of 1951, while Sidney Bernstein in London aggressively optioned other properties for the future. The director took Bernstein’s advice to stay away from the office and indulge in “a spell of living at home”—at Bellagio Road, but also as much as possible up in Santa Cruz.

  When the Hitchcocks made up their minds, they moved like the wind, and at home the most important business was planning for Pat’s wedding. Friends say that Hitchcock was initially taken aback at the whirlwind romance, but always supported his daughter’s decisions and grew fond of his prospective son-in-law. Mrs. Hitchcock took the lead in organizing the nuptials, and the wedding took place in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, on January 17, 1952. Afterward, a breakfast reception was held on the roof of the St. Regis. As tradition dictated, Hitchcock was the first to dance with his daughter, and after the celebration the newlyweds left for their honeymoon in Havana.

  Two writers—whose collaboration involved working closely with Hitchcock but never actually with each other—worked on I Confess and The Bramble Bush simultaneously.

  William Archibald, born in Trinidad, had sung and danced professionally before turning playwright. His play The Turn of the Screw, an adaptation of Henry James’s novel, was one of the hits of the 1950 season. (It later became the 1961 film The Innocents.)

  George Tabori, born in Budapest, was a journalist in London before serving in the British army during World War II. His fiction was suffused with European history, and often fixated on the German national character. His novel Original Sin was a crime story and when Hitchcock found him, his first play, Flight into Egypt, about concentration-camp refugees, was about to open on Broadway.

  I Confess was Hitchcock’s personal priority, and therefore, much to Warner’s chagrin, the wronged-priest project achieved momentum. First Archibald worked on a new story line; then, in the late winter of 1951–52, Tabori followed up with a dialogue draft that finally satisfied the director. According to Tabori, throughout their several months of close association he and Hitchcock got along splendidly. They held fruitful discussions, and then Hitchcock “left me alone,” he said, to write the script. It was only after Tabori had finished the revisions to Hitchcock’s apparent satisfaction that the director went ahead and “changed the whole thing,” for reasons the writer never understood.

  It wasn’t because of the Catholic Church. In April 1952, Hitchcock, Tabori, and Sidney Bernstein visited Quebec to receive assurances of local cooperation, soak up the atmosphere, and recruit Quebecois actors for secondary roles. Bernstein took the lead in talks with religious authorities, seeking their approval; and surprisingly the Canadian Church found I Confess profoundly Catholic—for the priest, in spite of his illegitimate child and execution, was greatly ennobled by the script. The Transatlantic partners wisely employed a local priest with a doctorate in theology, Father Paul La Couline, as “technical consultant”; and Father La Couline bridged the discussions with the Church, reading the script to authenticate the ecclesiastical reality and recommending trims to avoid censorship.

  It was Warner Bros. that finally rebelled. For years Hitchcock had staved off the studio’s nervousness, hoping somehow to slip his ideas onto the screen. But as the midsummer start of filming loomed, Hitchcock was forced to circulate the latest script by Tabori, and studio officials were shocked to discover that the wrong-man priest still had an illegitimate child in the story—and still was destined to be executed at the end of the film. In late April, the studio put its foot down: it couldn’t produce such a film, which was bound to provoke an overwhelming outcry in America.

  James Stewart was no longer being touted by Hitchcock as the major star who could make the priest film palatable to the studio. Trying to find maneuvering room, Hitchcock now floated the possibility of Laurence Olivier, but Warner’s said no, thank you. Even after the objectionable elements were purged from the script, the studio insisted on having an American lead.

  In April, Hitchcock for the first time suggested a refugee from Rope—Montgomery Clift. Clift was at the height of his popularity; having just completed A Place in the Sun (for which he garnered his second Best Actor nomination), he would have a brief availability for I Confess before appearing in From Here to Eternity (which would bring him his third). Clift was willing to play the wronged priest, named Father Michel in the Tabori script (later renamed Father Michael Logan, as one of the Boys Town touches Warner’s demanded). Clift even looked like a priest, possessing, his costar Karl Malden observed, “the face of a saint but when you looked into the eyes you saw a tortured soul trying to make its way out of utter bewilderment.”

  Playing a noble priest was a better career move than playing a homosexual killer: Clift said yes, and was happily accepted by Warner Bros. It so happened that the actor was friendly with a French monk who lived in a cloistered monastery in Quebec, and he was glad to spend a week there before filming. Unfortunately, it was the Tabori script that won Clift over, illegitimate child, wrong-man execution, and all. Only when he arrived in New York for camera tests—when it was too late to back out—did the actor discover that that version would never make it to the screen.

  Hitchcock was finally forced by Warner Bros. to gut from the script the very ideas that had most interested him in the first place. The studio called on him to drop not only the out-of-wedlock child—his and Mrs. Hitchcock’s invention—but the wrong-man execution, which dated from the original play. He worked feverishly alongside the faithful Barbara Keon to create a new subplot: Father Logan (Clift) and his old girlfriend (the character eventually played by Anne Baxter) are blackmailed for having slept together one stormy night. True, it’s an extramarital fling for the girlfriend, but she doesn’t tell the priest that she is married—and he isn’t even a priest yet! That took care of the illegitimate baby (there just isn’t one), while the execution was removed in favor of the priest’s trial and acquittal, a last-reel chase, and cornering of the true villain.

  Archibald polished the Hitchcock-Keon rewrite of Tabori’s ill-fated draft. Counting a Canadian writer recruited to hang around the set and contribute “Quebec atmosphere,” upwards of a dozen writers toiled on I Confess over the years; it was a dispiriting record for a Hitchcock film.

  Back when his spirits were high, the director had courted Olivia de Havilland for the leading-lady role—that of the priest’s “girlfriend.” But as that role changed in the rewrites, it declined in credibility and actual screen time, and a star of de Havilland’s importance (and salary) had to be discounted. Hitchcock backpedaled with Warner Bros., arguing for a hitherto unknown actress. He proposed Suzanne Cloutier—Orson Welles’s Desdemona in Othello—or perhaps the German actress Ursula Thies
s, who had not yet appeared in Hollywood films.

  Jack Warner’s desire to reconquer European markets sealed off by the war was always part of the Transatlantic-Warner’s bond, and now it enabled Hitchcock to get away with signing Anita Björk, a protégée of the great Swedish director Alf Sjoberg. Björk had just given an intense performance as the title character of Miss Julie, Sjoberg’s masterful adaptation of Strindberg’s play which had tied for the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1951.

  The filming of I Confess was scheduled to begin on August 21, in Quebec, and on July 23 Hitchcock traveled ahead to New York for camera tests with Clift and Björk. When Kay Brown greeted Björk at the airport, however, she found the Swedish actress accompanied by her lover—the poet, novelist, and playwright Stig Dagerman—and their illegitimate baby daughter. (Björk was estranged from her husband in Sweden.) Instantly aware that this spelled trouble, Brown alerted Hitchcock, who told Bernstein, who phoned Jack Warner.

  On July 24, Hitchcock gamely went ahead and shot a day of wardrobe, makeup, and other tests with Clift and Björk, while Bernstein sparred with the head of the studio. Warner Bros. had just spent weeks expunging the priest’s girlfriend and his illegitimate child from I Confess; now the leading lady had shown up in America flaunting her own out-of-wedlock baby. “You simply can’t do this,” Jack Warner told Bernstein, “not again. Not with another Swedish girl.” Warner recommended that Björk obtain a quickie divorce and marry the child’s father, a proposal reportedly relayed to the Swedish actress—and hotly refused. Warner then insisted that Björk be replaced and simply paid off; Hitchcock protested, but was overruled.

  Willing, under the circumstances, to assume all liabilities, the studio offered to buy out Transatlantic and make I Confess, at this eleventh hour, a 100 percent Warner Bros. production. All the fight went out of Bernstein; he had never felt comfortable with Warner Bros. (he had sued the studio over advertising rebates from Rope and Under Capricorn), and was aghast at the latest predicament. Bernstein “felt that there were too many compromises involved,” according to his biographer Caroline Moorehead, and resigned from the film.

  Hitchcock had a different dilemma. He had spent years, including almost the entirety of 1951, preparing a film that was suddenly on the brink of cancellation. He was above all a professional; he had never quit a production, never at the last minute, or in the midst of shooting. He had thirty years of experience with studio vicissitudes; he had experienced and withstood worse indignities. Walking away from I Confess, Hitchcock knew, would cause an irreparable breach with Warner Bros. and inflict damage on his reputation in Hollywood.

  Surrendering I Confess to the studio was the only course to take. Moorehead reported that Hitchcock and Bernstein parted “amicably,” and that Hitchcock was “far too deeply committed to the film to pull out.” Transatlantic intended to stay together for The Bramble Bush and future films, but for the moment the fledgling company was put on hiatus.

  Hitchcock felt Björk was an extraordinary actress, and he wasn’t overjoyed by the phone call from Jack Warner informing him of her replacement—the more ordinary Anne Baxter. Baxter had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as a dipsomaniac in The Razor’s Edge in 1946, and was nominated again for All About Eve in 1950. And Hitchcock knew her socially (her husband was John Hodiak). But he never spoke to the actress about I Confess before she arrived in Quebec a week before the start of filming. After ordering her bleached blond hair dyed even blonder (“I felt I wasn’t as pretty as he wanted a woman to be in his films, and as he wanted me to be,” Baxter told Donald Spoto), Hitchcock rushed the new leading lady before the cameras so fast that the costumes designed for Björk were simply altered to fit the Hollywood actress.

  “When you compare Anita Björk and Anne Baxter,” Hitchcock said ruefully to François Truffaut, “wouldn’t you say that was a pretty awkward substitution?”

  The cast and crew stayed at the Château Élysée, with the Hitchcocks at the more elegant Château Frontenac. Most of the exteriors were filmed in Quebec City, and a number of scenes were shot at the house of parliament and city hall. St. Zephirin-de-Stadacona was the main church.

  Robert Burks was again Hitchcock’s chosen cameraman. Rudi Fehr was the editor. The score was another by Dimitri Tiomkin, but one of his more interesting, including some elements of a mock-Gregorian chant.

  The secondary characters included the pivotal married couple who work in the rectory—the killer who confesses to the priest, and his abused wife. In Tabori’s draft they became German émigrés—“displaced persons,” in Hitchcock’s words. The director cast O. E. Hasse, a powerful character actor trained by Max Reinhardt who had started his screen career as an extra for F. W. Murnau, as the killer; Dolly Haas, a popular German star of the early 1930s before fleeing Hitler, was cast as his wife. Hitchcock remembered Haas fondly from the British remake of D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, where she acquitted herself in the Lillian Gish role.

  Karl Malden, a close friend of Clift’s who had just won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire, was cast as the detective who stubbornly tries to pin the crime on Father Logan. The studio knew enough to be concerned about Clift, already a notorious drinker and troubled soul, and hoped that Malden would keep him steady.

  Brain Aherne didn’t become the Crown Prosecutor until the last minute. Besides his fleeting status as Joan Fontaine’s first husband, Aherne was an even-tempered professional whom Hitchcock knew dating as far back as the West End production of Rope, in which Aherne played the original Brandon, the dominant partner in the killing. The director phoned his old friend from Canada and asked him to come and play a role in I Confess—for less than his customary salary, Hitchcock apologized, because the budget was already overspent.

  Dozens of journalists descended on Quebec City to cover the filming, which was plagued by inclement weather (nonetheless augmented for story purposes by wind machines and fire hoses) and observed by huge crowds. Eight thousand people watched Hitchcock shoot the scenes with Clift and Baxter on the promenade overlooking the St. Lawrence River.

  Accounts disagree as to whether Clift began to drink heavily in Canada, or later on in Hollywood during the studio filming. Haas thought the star was usually sober on the set, but “mighty unhappy about something.” Malden thought Clift’s erratic behavior had very little to do with the script or Hitchcock; and that the actor was “tragically beginning to fall apart.”

  Drunk or sober, Clift was “very neurotic and a Method actor,” according to Hitchcock, and couldn’t relax under the director’s stony gaze. Clift resisted Hitchcock’s preordained camera setups, while trying to draw inspiration from “obscure” sources. “I remember when he came out of the court [in one scene],” Hitchcock recalled. “I asked him to look up, so that I could cut to his point of view of the building across the street. He said, ‘I don’t know if I would look up.’ Well, imagine. I said, ‘If you don’t look up, I can’t cut.’ ”

  Clift had his drama coach, Mira Rostova, close by at all times; she had been made part of his contract, and was umbilically attached to his performance. Rostova rehearsed with the sensitive actor daily, and then stood just out of sight whenever the cameras rolled. Clift waited for her nod of approval, not Hitchcock’s, before moving on.

  Malden thought Rostova’s presence created “a deep division and tension” on the set, a gulf between the star and the director—but if so it remained a largely unspoken gulf. Hitchcock left Clift and Rostova alone. What would be gained otherwise? Wasn’t everything about I Confess a fait accompli? If anything, Hitchcock was extraordinarily patient, exceptionally polite, as he went about collecting his shots and angles.

  The director realized that, if anything, Rostova helped the production by soothing Clift’s wounded psyche. Although Hitchcock dubbed her the “little pigeon,” he treated the drama coach with elaborate courtesy, and made a point of including her in the cast dinners he hosted at the Château Frontenac in August and September,
and later at Bellagio Road.

  Holding court at the cast dinners up in Canada, Hitchcock steered the conversation toward a recent trial in a Quebec courtroom: a Quebec jeweler had wanted to murder his wife so he could collect on her insurance policy and marry his mistress. His girlfriend’s brother made a bomb with a timing device, and the mistress express-mailed it on an aircraft carrying the wife. It was timed to explode over the St. Lawrence River, theoretically destroying evidence of the crime, but instead blew up forty miles outside Quebec at seven thousand feet, killing the wife and twenty-two others. The man and his accomplices were arrested and convicted, and in 1950 they were hanged—all for a ten-thousand-dollar policy.

  With the disheartening prospect of I Confess all around him, he distracted himself with talk of how a bomb on an airplane might make an exciting Hitchcock film.

  Inevitably, I Confess suffered from its patched-together script (“lacking in humor and subtlety,” as Hitchcock told François Truffaut) and disappointing leads. Montgomery Clift proved a disappointment not only to the director, but also to his friend Karl Malden. Malden and Clift had a falling-out during the filming: Malden thought the star was trying to upstage him in their scenes together, and he became convinced that Clift and Rostova were whispering against him. Silently seething, Malden felt betrayed by Clift’s behavior. After he was invited to view a rough cut of I Confess, Malden realized that Hitchcock must have seen and understood everything that passed between them. The editing subtly favored Malden. When Malden thanked him, Hitchcock murmured, “I thought you’d like it.” (“I felt it was his way of offering me a little prize for staying cool about Monty and Mira,” wrote Malden.)

  Anne Baxter never had much of a chance: the final absurdity of the script was her character leaving the grand ballroom on the arm of her husband (Roger Dann), even before the violent denouement of I Confess. Her character’s scenes were rewritten one last time on location; by then Hitchcock felt hamstrung by the casting. His camera preferred the exquisite Dolly Haas, playing the sympathetic character named for his wife, Alma.