I Confess smolders without ever catching fire. Hitchcock is most comfortable with the secondary characters (the Brian Aherne scenes are especially playful), the brooding Quebec City and Catholic atmosphere, the dreamlike flashbacks. (These silent interludes, depicting the idyllic prewar romance between the priest and his girlfriend, seem almost to achieve the kind of hyperrealism Hitchcock had wanted from Salvador Dalí for Spellbound.) Perhaps the best part of I Confess is the Hitchcockian ending—“which is liturgically and thematically right (transference of guilt healed by confession),” in film scholar Bill Krohn’s words—although it was virtually imposed by the studio as an alternative to hanging the priest.
The ending finds Father Logan, after being acquitted in the courtroom, met outside by hostile reporters and a mob of angry people.* The killer’s wife can’t stifle her conscience any longer, but when she tries to shout the truth, her husband pulls a gun and (somewhat illogically) shoots her. Pandemonium erupts. The priest and police then chase the man through descending levels of the Château Frontenac. Defiantly clutching his gun, the killer winds up—like the Drummer Man or Mr. Memory before him—alone on a stage at the far end of a grand ballroom.
Father Logan dares to approach the killer. The jittery man makes a threatening gesture, and the police shoot him. The killer collapses in the priest’s arms—another villain who has improvised his own self-murder in a Hitchcock film. “I am alone as you are,” he murmurs to Father Logan, pleading for forgiveness. The priest closes his eyes and whispers a prayer over the dying man. Hitchcock was usually compassionate toward his sinners, but this is his most compassionate ending to his most Catholic film.
The time Hitchcock had taken off in 1951 paid off in dividends for the decade ahead.
Unusually for him, by the time I Confess went into postproduction, Hitchcock knew what his next several film projects were going to be. After I Confess, he planned to direct The Bramble Bush for Transatlantic; after that he was going to direct another Transatlantic property, an adaptation of a novel called To Catch a Thief. He had read the book in galleys, and Sidney Bernstein had optioned it on his behalf. They sent it to Cary Grant, who in 1952 tentatively committed to playing the lead, a retired jewel thief living on the Riviera.
While in New York in the fall of 1952, Hitchcock saw a play called Dial M for Murder, a hit imported from London; he filed it away in his mind as a possible run-for-cover subject. He met with Leland Hayward, who wanted to sell him on a Cornell Woolrich short story, which Hayward had optioned in partnership with Josh Logan. Logan, a Broadway director who wanted to move into film, had written a treatment of the story. Hayward wanted Hitchcock to produce the Cornell Woolrich film, with Logan directing James Stewart in the lead; alternatively, Hitchcock might direct the film, from Logan’s script. Around this time Hitchcock also had the idea of Stewart starring in the long-bruited-about remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and he asked Bernstein if he could pin down the rights for Transatlantic.
In his spare time, he was already scribbling notes for an unusual film, based on a book by Jack Trevor Story. It wasn’t a well-known book: not What Happened to Harry?, Hitchcock kept having to correct Bernstein, but a scenic little novel called The Trouble with Harry.
And to journalists who interviewed him on the press tour for Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock had spoken for the first time about a future film, in which he envisioned a wrong-man hero—someone like Cary Grant—hiding inside Abraham Lincoln’s nostril atop Mount Rushmore. What the hero was doing there, or how he got there, the director didn’t have the slightest notion.
In New York, Hitchcock shared drinks at “21” with Otis Guernsey of the New York Herald Tribune. His eyes lit up when Guernsey said he had an idea for a film about an “ingenuous American” saddled with a mistaken identity—the “highly romantic and dangerous identity” of a “masterspy”—being pursued by assassins. Hitchcock turned Guernsey over to Kay Brown, who eventually extracted a treatment from the newspaperman that even Guernsey felt evinced too many “faults of a) logic b) corn or c) overcomplicated devices.” But Hitchcock didn’t mind the faulty logic, the corn, or the overcomplicated devices—and he paid for the sketchy treatment.
Bernstein spoke with Ben Hecht about expanding the wrong-master-spy idea into a vehicle for Cary Grant, but Hecht was too busy, so Hitchcock set it aside. Guernsey’s idea bore obvious similarities to The Bramble Bush, with its politics and wrong-man conceit, yet it offered a fallback if the other project bogged down. “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose” was Hitchcock’s joke title for the idea, which almost a decade later became North by Northwest.
The consent decree that forced the major studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, the surge of television, and the shadow of the blacklist had combined to hobble Hollywood at the beginning of the 1950s. Production was down drastically, and in late 1951 Hitchcock noted in a letter to Bernstein, not without pity, that the much-admired Michael Curtiz had just been cashiered by Warner Bros. after twenty-six years as a contract director. Hitchcock suddenly found himself one of only a handful of filmmakers under long-term agreement—suddenly he was the studio’s star director.
Hitchcock, who had started out in the business writing intertitles for silent pictures, took stock of the dubious trends sweeping the industry, in his letters to Bernstein. He dryly disparaged the quick fixes of Cinema-Scope, Magnascope, Cinerama, 3-D, and “road show” pictures—the official alternatives to television. Warner Bros., Hitchcock knew, was about to jump on the 3-D bandwagon. The veteran director was skeptical of fads, but thought at least they had the merit of distracting the bosses from watching him too closely. While the bosses panicked, Hitchcock crackled with confidence. While they had forgotten how to entertain, he was refining his ideas. Hollywood was adrift—but his films would sail through the gaps.
Hitchcock was fascinated by Darryl Zanuck’s high-wire act amid nervous stockholders at Twentieth Century–Fox, and amused to observe Jack Warner’s sudden pique whenever a Zanuck triumph was reported in the trades. Except for David O. Selznick, who was nominally independent of the major studios, Jack Warner was the mogul Hitchcock got to know best, and the only one still as firmly in control in 1950 as he was when Hitchcock first visited Hollywood. Hitchcock’s letters indicate that many of the final, touchy decisions involving his Warner Bros. films were settled privately between him and the top man.
Most directors who started out in silent pictures were winding down, just as Hitchcock was charging full blast into the coming decade. Jack Warner could take pride in having such a man under contract—at a time when there was little else the studio could point to with pride. Rope and Under Capricorn may have been box-office failures, but Warner’s only handled the distribution on these films; Transatlantic absorbed the losses. Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train, on the other hand, had proved economical and surprisingly profitable. For Warner Bros., Hitchcock was a triple achiever: a man with an audience track record, a consistent awards contender, and a publicity asset.
It was at Warner’s that Hitchcock first began to consult closely with the studio about the promotion of his films, and that the publicity began routinely to refer to him as “the Master of Suspense.” Hitchcock made appearances for the studio at premieres outside of New York and Los Angeles, doing minitours of regions and markets, familiarizing himself with influential local critics and columnists. (When Irv Kupcinet traveled to London in 1953, Hitchcock was able to write ahead, informing Bernstein all about “Kup,” advising that a “tiny red carpet” be thrown for the Chicago Sun Times columnist, who also hosted his own television show.) During his time at Warner Bros., Hitchcock added to his list of friendly media contacts and cultivated a wider network of relationships.
Although the publicity tropes had originated in an earlier time, Hitchcock’s image was cemented during this era. Warner Bros. publicity incorporated all the now familiar Hitchcock anecdotes: a man afraid of police because of his boyhood brush with them; a dictator of actors
who regarded them practically as cattle (“Of course there are some very nice cattle,” he often quipped; or sometimes he’d protest, “I didn’t say they were cattle, I said they should be treated like cattle”); a typecast director growingly concerned about his typecasting (“If I should make a film of another sort, people would come out asking, ‘Well, where was the suspense?’ ”).
Hitchcock cheerfully abetted his publicity, which he knew added to his value to a studio. There was always some truth in the published clichés. In making his point about being typecast, for example, he publicly complained that Hitchcock pictures were prejudged by critics—and this was indeed a source of real and growing resentment, privately. When I Confess was released in England, Hitchcock read over a batch of reviews he’d received in the mail from Bernstein. “Not bad on the whole,” he commented. But he added, “By God, I am typed though, what with the label ‘thriller’ and the search for ‘suspense.’ ”
The U.S. notices were not good, but also “not bad on the whole,” when I Confess was released in March 1953—premiering in New York during Holy Week. (“A nice Lenten date!” the director joked in one letter.) And the third Hitchcock-Warner Bros. film also swiftly turned a profit.
Though the Legion of Decency slapped it with a rating of “Morally Objectionable for Adults,” the film’s Catholicism was not really controversial—the watered-down script and appreciative reviews in the Catholic press took care of that (“an enormously interesting film,” wrote Robert Kass in Catholic World, “thoughtful, adult drama”). But as the director later conceded, one unanticipated weakness of I Confess was that non-Catholics did not feel very strongly involved in the fundamental premise: that priests have a sacred obligation to keep secret the revelations of the confessional.
The final surprise of the censorship saga occurred in Canada. In Quebec, at a cocktail party preceding the world premiere, Hitchcock seemed to be in an upbeat mood; but afterward, at the reception, the director was furious. That is because an obscure member of the government Censor Bureau had insisted on cutting out Anne Baxter’s explicit declaration of love for Montgomery Clift, and that part of the flashback where it is made clear they spent the night together: almost three minutes of footage. After taking pains with the archdiocese, and being forced to give in to the studio, the insult left him livid. “There will be one version for the province of Quebec,” he told a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewer angrily, “and one version for the rest of the world.”
But as confirmed by his letters, he paid more attention to box office than to censors or critics, and in spite of its drawbacks I Confess was a success for Hitchcock and Warner Bros.
In the winter of 1952, the director plunged back into developing The Bramble Bush. He felt he squandered too much time with George Tabori, who came back to Hollywood, met with the director, then went away and wrote a version that was completely different from what Hitchcock expected. In his late-1952 and early-1953 letters, Hitchcock expressed outrage over the “disgraceful” behavior of the independent-minded Tabori, which threw the project off stride, and off schedule. Hitchcock had to wait weeks for William Archibald to become available as Tabori’s replacement, and then to restart the script.
Although he felt more compatible with Archibald (“a good worker [with] sound views of character, etc.”), he faced pressure from Warner’s, which was chagrined by the start-and-stop progress of the project. The studio wanted to have its next Hitchcock film within a year of I Confess. And the director faced growing internal doubts about whether he could give The Bramble Bush “a distinction beyond an ordinary chase story.” Writing to Sidney Bernstein, Hitchcock said he was being urged to speed up, though the script still needed “many weeks” of revising. “It is even quite possible for me to have to tell Warner’s,” Hitchcock wrote in January 1953, “that I cannot lick it and ask them to accept another subject.”
Meanwhile, he asked Bernstein to engage an English writer to launch a treatment of To Catch a Thief “so that I can have something to work from” as soon as he finished The Bramble Bush. “I have been losing a lot of time waiting to complete one film entirely, before starting to think about another,” Hitchcock explained. “This I would like to correct. I could easily have some preliminary discussions with a writer (unless of course one runs into a Tabori who ignores everyone’s ideas) and then he could go to work on a first draft even while I am still shooting another picture. Huston and other Independents have been doing this.”
That is when the Cornell Woolrich project popped up again. James Stewart agreed to star in the film, but only if it could be produced later in 1953, and only if Hitchcock would direct. Hitchcock was inclined to say yes, “assuming I was able to do it [Rear Window] after Thief,” in his words. He awaited Bernstein’s opinion.
Not the least important of several events that occurred in early 1953, Bernstein had departed on a monthlong Far East trip, a dream vacation announced as an ostensible “fact-finding trip” for future Transatlantic productions. But in truth the vacation spelled the demise of Transatlantic; when he returned from his vacation, Bernstein realized that he simply didn’t want to produce motion pictures. Transatlantic was mired in debt, and Hitchcock’s partner was tired of the risks and pressures of the business. Bernstein was constantly on call to Hollywood, but he felt more at home in London. Anxious to simplify his life, he decided to resign from the company.
There was no Transatlantic without Bernstein. But Hitchcock took the news calmly; he had half expected it, and he accepted the decision as temporary. Yet Bernstein’s retreat led directly to Hitchcock’s. He soberly reevaluated The Bramble Bush, which had begun as a Transatlantic project. Its story opened in Mexico, but most of the film was to be set near San Francisco, making for an expensive and challenging production. And if Bernstein bowed out, The Bramble Bush would have to become a Warner Bros. film, with Hitchcock wondering “whether it will make an important enough picture for these doldrum days.”
Warner Bros. didn’t care much about The Bramble Bush. The studio was in a frenzy over 3-D, the stereoscopic photography that simulated a three-dimensional effect. The studio’s 3-D House of Wax was drawing crowds and setting box-office records across America. Jack Warner wanted Hitchcock to try the new format. Though initially dubious, the director believed Warner’s had short-shrifted I Confess in its advertising and publicity. All the support had gone to the “new toy,” in his words—the studio’s new 3-D pictures. Warner Bros. would take a different attitude toward a 3-D Hitchcock, and The Bramble Bush was too political for 3-D; the Mexican and San Francisco locations would be impossible in 3-D.
Better to hit the soundstage. In early April, Hitchcock asked the studio’s permission to drop The Bramble Bush and switch to the stage play Dial M for Murder, which he thought could be quickly and cleverly filmed in 3-D. Hitchcock told Bernstein he intended to shoot Dial M for Murder as a Warner Bros. film at Elstree in late summer and fall, then direct Rear Window for Paramount, following that with To Catch a Thief for Transatlantic in the spring of 1954. Cary Grant was still attached to To Catch a Thief and Hitchcock left the door open for Bernstein to change his mind and return to producing. Otherwise he would carry on alone.
Dial M for Murder was a story about an English marriage gone stale. The caddish husband, discovering his wife’s affair with a visiting American, decides to stage her perfect murder in order to speed up his inheritance. Everything goes wrong; the wife, lured to the phone where a hired killer awaits her, fights back. She stabs the intruder to death (a famous scissors-stabbing scene in the play, which Hitchcock intended to turn into the best 3-D flourish of the film). The husband must frantically cover his tracks and organize the clues to fool the police and frame his wife. Only the American lover and a dogged police official refuse to believe the evidence, which is enough to convict her.
The play had originally opened in London in June 1952. Hitchcock did not see the show there, but Sidney Bernstein did so right away and gave it a good report. Hi
tchcock attended the Broadway production shortly after completing I Confess, and returned at least once after deciding to make a film version. Producer Alexander Korda, who had snapped up the rights to the play, profited by reselling them to Warner Bros.
Dial M for Murder was a decidedly run-for-cover play, right down to its London setting. Indeed, Hitchcock hoped to shoot as much of the film as possible at Elstree, integrating second-unit footage from around London, but Jack Warner quickly vetoed that idea. Warner claimed he didn’t want to send the studio’s only 3-D cameras overseas, but “I personally think the real reason is that he will create a bad impression by making a picture abroad when the studio is virtually at a standstill,” Hitchcock told Bernstein.
The modest budget and tight schedule dictated Hitchcock’s expeditious filming decisions. Unlike with Rope, the only other play he adapted in Hollywood, Hitchcock had little time to rewrite Dial M for Murder, so the film’s setting would remain London, its characters all British. The script-work for Rope had proven how long Americanization could take.
The film’s script was really “not a great problem,” Hitchcock wrote Bernstein, because the playwright, Frederick Knott (“quite a bright boy”), closely cooperated with Hitchcock. The film “will have to follow the play very closely,” the director explained, “because if any attempt is made to open it up the ‘holes’ will show, so I am treating it in a modified Rope style. After all, its great success as a play has been its speed and ‘tightness.’ ”
Of course one reason Hitchcock had hoped to shoot the film in London was to minimize Warner Bros. intrusions. “One cannot show modern London exteriors on the back lot,” Hitchcock informed Bernstein, yet “the [Warner’s] front office could see no difference between the Brownstone N.Y. street and Randolph Crescent, Maida Vale!” The story’s single, recyclable set was attractive to Warner’s, but even on interiors Hitchcock had to be on faux-English alert. His first fight, he reported to Bernstein, was over the “shocking taste of the set dresser” (adding, he’s “a contract man, so he’s a must”).
Alfred Hitchcock Page 67