Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Hitchcock assembled another sparkling supporting cast—starting with Thelma Ritter as Stella, the comedy-relief nurse. Reliably funny with sharp-tongued characters, Ritter had entered films in 1947 and racked up four Academy Award nominations in six years. Another Paramount contract player, dependable Wendell Corey, was lined up as the detective: pinpointed as a World War II buddy of Jeff’s, he would play a larger role than his character did in the original Cornell Woolrich story.

  Although they have no scripted dialogue and are glimpsed only from afar through their apartment windows, future Chipmunks creator Ross Bagdasarian (the composer), Judith Evelyn (Miss Lonelyhearts), and Georgine Darcy (Miss Torso) made even the film’s minor characters memorable. And Raymond Burr, who was still specializing in heavies at this stage of his career, was picked to play Thorwald. Hitchcock had Burr made up in short curly hair and spectacles, and then costumed in white button-down shirts. His chain-smoking was the last Hitchcockian nuance—all, the director told later interviewers, to evoke David O. Selznick.

  Hurdling the Production Code seemed increasingly easy for Hitchcock. Luck was with him during the Paramount years, and, besides, the rules of censorship were finally changing.

  Production Code administrator Joseph Breen, who had been Hitchcock’s nemesis since Rebecca, criticized the first draft of Rear Window on every imaginable count: for its leering depiction of Miss Torso; for the scene in which Miss Lonelyhearts welcomes to her apartment a young man whose “hand is doing something with the slide fastener at the back of her dress”; for Stella’s toilet humor (“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country has to let go”); for the new-lywed couple caught up in the “sexual aspects of a honeymoon”; for the constant dialogue that suggested a sexual relationship between Jeff and Lisa; and especially for the lines that implied Lisa was going to stay overnight in Jeff’s apartment—a fact that becomes plain as sin in the film when she shows off a sexy negligee.

  Paramount wasn’t as prudish as Warner Bros., though, and allowed its autonomous units to take the lead in fending off the Code. First finding an ally in Luigi Luraschi, the studio’s liaison with censorship authorities, Hitchcock invited Code officials to Paramount to marvel at the set. Treating them like royalty, he smoothly reviewed the objectionable elements. Almost everything they saw as an issue, he explained, would be staged far away from the camera—too far to matter. “Having seen the extraordinary set, and noting that the action in the surrounding apartments would be photographed from the viewpoint of the protagonist’s apartment,” wrote Steven DeRosa in Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, “many of their concerns had been eliminated.”

  Hitchcock then filmed Miss Torso several different ways: once topless from behind, once in white lingerie, and once in black, playing the racy versions off against each other for Code officials. He made minor compromises in scenes, exaggerating their importance, but “in spite of Breen’s objections,” wrote DeRosa, “many of these elements remain, verbatim, in the finished picture.”

  Timing was on his side: after twenty years as the top cop of Hollywood morality, Joseph Breen was nearing retirement by the time Rear Window went before the cameras. No one followed through on many of his objections to the script. And Breen was replaced by the Englishman Geoffrey M. Shurlock, who was more open and liberal in his attitude, more open (and resigned) to the idea that screen values were moving with the times.

  Some directors create their best films out of angst, cheap budgets, impossible schedules, and stars or projects that inspire in them conflict or indifference. But Hitchcock found his greatest inspiration during times of security and contentment, filming stories that took a leisurely amount of time to germinate, and which delved deeper into familiar, favorite themes. He could be marvelous on a shoestring, but he made his greatest films with first-class budgets.

  By the time he began filming Rear Window in October, Hitchcock was an almost svelte Master of Suspense. He had dieted down from his all-time high of some 340 pounds to his all-time low of 189. He had “seldom been happier,” wrote John Russell Taylor. “I was feeling very creative at the time,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut. “The batteries were well-charged.”

  Hitchcock had been credited as producer of the Transatlantic and Warner Bros. films, but Paramount gave him more power and authority, with fewer strings attached. And greater purse strings: after Rear Window—which was planned from the start as a soundstage-bound film, as much for the challenge as anything—Hitchcock was allowed to splurge on travel. It wasn’t simply that he was enamored of location work, which involved a certain amount of risk; but going places, adding dashes of local flavor, was vital to Hitchcockery. And there were more personal considerations: Alma had stopped coming into the studio, but she adored travel, and if Hitchcock was working on a location she would accompany him, and even follow him to the set from time to time. The Paramount films went to places the Hitchcocks wanted to visit together.

  For seven years, Jack Warner had balked at paying what he considered the stratospheric salaries of Cary Grant and James Stewart. Actors under studio contract came cheaper, made no special demands, and didn’t skim off percentages. But Paramount was willing to structure Hitchcock’s budgets so the director could afford Stewart and Grant.

  The two stars were as different in their professionalism as in their onscreen personas. While Grant could be a royal pain, fussy and demanding in his approach to a film, Stewart punched into work like a guy carrying a tin lunch box. Stewart was more of a partner, and the Hitchcock-Stewart films were organized as partnerships, with Stewart’s company sharing a percentage of the gross and profits—and risk. As with Rope, Stewart paid himself a reduced salary, taking the chance of making more money on the back end. The director knew from experience that such an arrangement wouldn’t work with Cary Grant, but after Rope, Stewart would be involved this way in each of his other three films with Hitchcock, from the script stage through to the end of production.

  Hitchcock and Stewart had a peculiar friendship; they were intimate but also proper with each other, close but also businesslike. Stewart wasn’t much of a gossiper, a chuckler at dirty stories, or a practical joker. He attended at least one “blue dye” dinner party at Bellagio Road, where Hitchcock served blue martinis, blue steak, and blue potatoes to the guests, but thereafter he was a rarer visitor to the Hitchcock houses, in Bel Air or up in Santa Cruz. (It worked the other way around; Hitchcock visited Stewart, often at his vacation home in Hawaii.)

  In meetings or on the set they didn’t talk much. They had more of an unspoken communion, sharing amused glances—like Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock.

  Here is Stewart, tongue half in cheek, on the director:

  “I never once saw him look through a camera. Uh, maybe he couldn’t get up. He’d make a little screen with his hands and the poor cameraman, whoever he was, had to get back there and look at it, and Hitch would say, ‘This is what I want.’

  “I don’t think Hitch paid much attention to a ‘star image.’ I never heard Hitch discuss a scene with an actor. He never did with me. I heard him say that he hired actors—you know, the ‘cattle’ as he referred to them—because they were supposed to know what they were doing. When he said ‘Action,’ he expected them to do what he hired them to do.

  “Every once in a while after shooting a scene Hitch would get out of his chair and come up to me. Then he would very quietly say, ‘Jim, the scene is tired.’ He would then go back to his chair and sit down, and you would know exactly what he meant, that the timing and the pace were wrong.”

  For Hitchcock, Stewart had already played mentor to a pair of killers in Rope. In the years ahead the folksy star would play even more dysfunctional roles. In The Man Who Knew Too Much he’d find himself at the mercy of an international conspiracy. In Vertigo he’d suffer a fear of heights, a nervous breakdown, and sexual obsession. Now, in Rear Window, he would be impotent in a plaster cast, with G
race Kelly almost sacrificing her life for him. Indeed, Rear Window could be “interpreted as a picture of impotency,” as Peter Bogdanovich suggested. “It could be, yes,” Hitchcock joked, “the impotency of plaster.”

  But it’s easy to overlook that two of these films boast parts as romantic as any Stewart ever got to play. One of the most magical entrances in cinema is the shadow of Lisa (Grace Kelly) spreading over Jeff, as she silently enters his apartment and bends down to kiss him awake. Hitchcock made the kiss unique: a close-up lingering in seeming slow motion. “These are pulsations that I get by shaking the camera by hand,” Hitchcock explained to Truffaut, “or dolly backward and forward, or sometimes by doing both.”

  Hitchcock finally found his American alter ego in Jimmy Stewart; while in Grace Kelly he discovered the perfect blonde to gaze upon rapturously—never murderously.

  “Too talented, too beautiful, too sophisticated, too perfect,” Jeff complains about Lisa—and that was Grace Kelly. Perfect women were always perfectly dressed in a Hitchcock film, and just as the script started with the actress, the directing started with her look. Kelly probably looked perfect in dungarees, but for Rear Window Hitchcock told Edith Head she ought to evoke “a piece of Dresden china, something slightly untouchable.” Head would garner an Oscar nomination for her costuming of the film, including Kelly’s black-and-white dress, with beaded chiffon skirt, that she wears in her magical entrance; and the sheer peignoir she wore later (which Kelly herself thought made her look like a “peach parfait”).

  Hitchcock even had ideas about the perfect bosom; aware that Kelly was on the flat-chested side, he decided that a pleat in her peignoir was contributing to that impression. “He was very sweet about it,” Kelly recalled. “He didn’t want to upset me, so he spoke quietly to Edith. And then everything had to stop.” Hitchcock thought perhaps she should don falsies, but alone with Head in her dressing room, Kelly cheated. “We quickly took it up here,” Kelly explained, “made some adjustments there, and I just did what I could and stood as straight as possible—without falsies. When I walked out onto the set Hitchcock looked at me and at Edith and said, ‘See what a difference they make?’ ”

  Kelly could get away with almost anything with Hitchcock. His adoration of the actress was another thing he had in common with his leading man, his partner. “We were all so crazy about Grace Kelly,” James Stewart said. “Everybody just sat around and waited for her to come in the morning, so we could just look at her. She was kind to everybody, so considerate, just great, and so beautiful.” Assistant director Herbert Coleman concurred: “Every man who ever was lucky enough to work with Grace Kelly fell in love with her, me included. Even Hitchcock—although he only was in love with two people, and that was Alma and Pat.”

  The affection the director had for his two stars was borne out in a filming experience that was carefree, and reflected in an ending to the actual film that is rare, if not unique, for Hitchcock.

  After the killer Thorwald is caught, he is all but forgotten in Rear Window’s tidy coda, which is almost Capraesque in its feel-good optimism. The struggling composer is seen to have finally finished his pop song; the suicidal Miss Lonelyhearts has found a promising suitor; Miss Torso’s beau shows up (a good joke: he’s a too short nerd in army uniform); and the courtyard community springs back to life … even as Lisa, coyly turning the pages of a ladies’ magazine, watches over a dozing Jeff (with a new broken leg).

  François Truffaut told Hitchcock that when he first watched Rear Window in his days as a critic, he found it “very gloomy, rather pessimistic and quite evil,” but after reseeing the film, in preparation for their talks, he found its vision “rather compassionate.” “What Stewart sees from his window,” said Truffaut, “is not horrible, but simply a display of human weaknesses and people in pursuit of happiness. Is that the way you look at it?”

  “Definitely,” replied Hitchcock.*

  Always cunning, always operating on as many levels as he could plumb in a story, Hitchcock was at his most byzantine with Rear Window. Its obvious voyeurism was wrapped up with sympathetic humanism; its grisly crime story offered sharp-eyed character study and aching romance. Crafted entirely in the studio, claustrophobic in its staging, Rear Window was also Hitchcock’s greatest demonstration of Kuleshov’s theories of how editing affects perception—and by his own lights “my most cinematic” film. One of his simplest, “smallest” films, it is also among his most complex and universal.

  Hitchcock’s rift with John Michael Hayes really began on their second film. To Catch a Thief was a 1952 novel by David Dodge, an American who wrote whimsical humor (20,000 Leagues Behind the 8-Ball, How Lost Was My Weekend), mystery adventure (Plunder of the Sun, The Long Escape), and volumes of travelogue. When Sidney Bernstein officially bowed out of future filmmaking, Transatlantic transferred the story rights—which had cost the company a mere $15,000—to Paramount, for $105,000.

  The author lived part of the year on the Côte d’Azur, which gave the novel its setting. The first attraction for the director was undoubtedly France and the Riviera, among the Hitchcocks’ favorite places in the world, which they couldn’t visit often enough in film or in real life. Dodge’s book also touched on the internecine politics of the French Resistance, which had intrigued the director before, in Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (though treatment of the subject is light in the book—and even lighter in the film).

  To Catch a Thief tells the tale of a notorious cat burglar named John Robie, nicknamed Le Chat (the Cat), who during the war forsakes crime and becomes a Resistance hero, then retires to live comfortably on the French Riviera. A rash of high-society jewel thefts that imitate his honorable methods (“he was never known to employ violence or carry a weapon”) forces the Cat to seek the help of old comrades, stake out likely targets, and set traps in order to catch the copycat and clear himself with police.

  In such a synopsis the novel sounds quite similar to Hitchcock’s film, but in fact the book and film are entirely dissimilar. As the author himself wryly admitted some years after the film was made, “All that survived [of the book] in the end were the title, the names of some of the characters and the copyright, which was mine.”

  Once again Hayes had the luxury of writing for specific stars, and tailoring the characters to their personalities. And when Hitchcock learned that Hayes had never been to the Riviera, he sent the writer and his wife on a quick trip there while postproduction continued on Rear Window. The Hayeses stayed at the Carlton Hotel in Nice, familiarizing themselves with a primary setting of the story. By the time Hayes returned to Hollywood, Hitchcock was ready to “get involved in the script work every day, which had not been true of Rear Window,” as Hayes explained to Donald Spoto. “The work was a pleasure for most of the time. What made us a good team was that he had such brilliant technique and knowledge of the visual, and ego and conviction; and I think I was able to bring him a warmth of characterization.”

  Robie (Cary Grant), the sexy Texas tourist Frances “Francie” Stevens (Grace Kelly), her world-weary mother (Jessie Royce Landis), the enigmatic French girl Danielle (Brigitte Auber), Robie’s ex-Resistance pal Bertani (Charles Vanel), and the insurance agent H. H. Huston (John Williams)—all these characters are present in David Dodge’s novel.* But Hitchcock would fiddle with them all, ratcheting up the romance between Robie and Francie, and injecting the plot with more suspense and comedy than Dodge had brought to the book.

  Hitchcock and Hayes held almost daily script conferences through the late winter and early spring of 1954. Frequently these meetings were at Hitchcock’s house, where the director relaxed in a sweater, or an open shirt with no tie. Their lunch was prepared and served by the director’s German cook. One scene in To Catch a Thief takes place at Robie’s villa, where Robie (Cary Grant) and Huston (John Williams) share lunch and a humorous disquisition on quiche Lorraine, served by Robie’s cook. That scene was inspired by a quiche Lorraine lunch served at Bellagio Road.

  The quic
he scene, though, also spurred friction between the director and writer. Hitchcock was “preoccupied with strangulation,” according to Hayes, and he wanted the scene to end with the insurance man praising the delicate crust of the quiche, and the “exceedingly light touch” of Robie’s cook, who quietly serves it around. Robie concurs, adding, “She strangled a German general once, without a sound.”

  Hayes objected to such morbid comedy, but Hitchcock said too bad; he was the boss, and the line stayed in. The scene was pure Hitchcock—and also served as one of several that expanded on the role of the insurance agent, which he had earmarked for a favorite actor.**

  Hitchcockian flavoring of a different kind was sprinkled over the scene where Robie escorts Francie down a hotel corridor. Though she has previously evinced little interest in him, when she stops at the door to her room she suddenly turns and passionately kisses him. According to Hayes, Hitchcock insisted that one night in New York he was walking Grace Kelly back to her hotel room, when she kissed him in just such a fashion. That’s all—just a perfect kiss, and then the door closed. True, Joan Fontaine does much the same with Cary Grant at the doorstep in Suspicion; but apocryphal or not, the Hitchcock anecdote went into the script.

  Hayes always insisted that Mrs. Hitchcock never sat in on a single one of their conferences, or ventured any suggestion in his presence; that the director never said anything that expressly reflected his wife’s opinion, except once: “Alma liked your script.” It was his highest compliment—though people didn’t always take it well.

  Mrs. Hitchcock was busy these days being a grandmother; Pat Hitchcock had given birth to her first daughter, Mary Alma O’Connell, in 1953, followed by Teresa (called Tere) and Kathleen. Hitchcock’s letters didn’t often agonize about the reviews of his films, but he fretted consistently over Pat’s health during each of her pregnancies, and he doted on his grandchildren.