Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  One of the film’s wittiest scenes occurs on a ridgetop where, after eluding police pursuers, Robie is dragooned into a picnic with Francie. Dipping into her picnic basket, Francie asks, “Do you want a leg or a breast?” With an indescribable Cary Grant-look, Robie replies, “You make the choice.” The stars spontaneously added such bits, “in a cheerful, silly mood,” according to John Russell Taylor, carrying on the fun even after Hitchcock called cut.

  Spontaneous and as hardworking as anyone, Grant brought craft and dedication to every role—along with the marquee value Hitchcock prized. Toward the end, once they were back in Hollywood, Ericksen reminded Hitchcock of his vow to tell off the star. “Well, I don’t know,” the director hedged, rubbing his chin. “I might want him for another picture.”

  They wrapped up location work on June 25, and then resumed interiors in Hollywood after July 4. Herbert Coleman stayed behind in France to supervise the second unit, collecting the road and aerial footage for the Grand Corniche sequence, from precise storyboards. The footage was then rushed to Hollywood, where Hitchcock watched rushes and wired back remarkably detailed notes for retakes. “In present shot,” the director pointed out in a typical memo, “only half the bus appears on the screen. This I realize arises out of fact that you are veering out of its way. … This latter fault could be corrected by keeping camera panned well over to left so that as camera car swerves the camera pans over at same time from left to right.”

  With all the script jiggling, the location hitches, the outright refilming, To Catch a Thief eventually fell almost a month behind schedule. August 13, 1954, Hitchcock’s fifty-fifth birthday, was celebrated as birthdays often are on film sets, by champagne and cake. “Ladies and gentleman,” the director’s very English secretary announced, “would you all come into the other room, please, and have a piece of Mr. Hitchcake’s cock?”

  The general camaraderie on location didn’t improve tensions between Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, however. On location, the director and writer skirmished several times over scenes, with you-know-who always emerging the winner. Hayes tried showing his preferred version of pages to the two stars behind Hitchcock’s back. The director ordered Hayes to cease and desist.

  The film’s coda was a particular sticking point. The ending kept changing from draft to draft, and the final version was Hitchcock’s, over Hayes’s protest. A cute coda: Francie chases Robie back to the villa, throws her arms around him on the terrace, and then, after Robie surrenders to her kiss, looks over her shoulder at the beautiful view and exclaims, “Mother is going to love it here.” (Leaving just enough film in the reel for one of Grant’s patented looks.)

  Never entirely plausible, the script became even less so on location, and during postproduction. That bothered Hayes; not so Hitchcock. Who has set up Danielle’s father, pushing him over the cliff to his death? It’s a mystery never clarified in the film. The actress playing Danielle demanded to know. But Hitchcock told Brigitte Auber, “It doesn’t matter.”

  The sex-drenched scenes were one element of the script that survived remarkably intact, however. Francie, in particular, always speaks while flashing bedroom eyes.

  “Tell me,” Robie asks her at one point, “what do you get a thrill out of most?”

  “I’m still looking for that one,” she replies.

  Hayes’s dialogue was so slippery (his marvelous double entendre was almost entirely an invention of the script), and Hitchcock guided things so cleverly, with the two stars all but winking at the camera, that the Production Code found it hard to pinpoint their complaints.

  The sexiest scenes had been red-flagged at every stage. From the first draft, code officials targeted the fireworks erupting in the sky as Robie and Francie embrace—urging that “the love scene between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, in Miss Kelly’s hotel room … be terminated by a dissolve before the couple lean back toward the corner of the sofa.” To the Code—and Hitchcock—the fireworks signified “pure orgasm,” as he later told Peter Bogdanovich, “just as the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest is a sexual symbol.”

  Focusing on the fireworks, the censors overlooked the very next scene, which takes place later that same night. After the fade-out, Francie is seen bursting into Robie’s room, accusing him of stealing her mother’s jewels. She goes off to phone the police; her mother is left briefly alone with Robie, and takes his side—she likes him and finds him attractive. Undaunted, Francie returns to advise Robie that she has spoken to the police and told them exactly what he was doing all night. “Everything?” Robie asks, with a raised eyebrow. “Oh, the boys must have enjoyed that down at headquarters.”

  Hitchcock stacked up the violations, then traded cunningly—with Paramount and the censorship authorities. Studio head Don Hartman objected to one running gag, in which the two French plainclothesmen, during surveillance breaks, scrutinize nudie postcards. After first making a show of resistance, the director then made an equal show of surrender—cutting the nudies. “Why would you take that out? It’s charming,” the film’s composer, Lynn Murray, complained to Hitchcock. “The picture doesn’t stand or fall on one little shot,” the director explained. “Besides, if I take that out they won’t complain so much about the fireworks scene.”

  Murray initially wrote “very sensuous” music for the fireworks scene—a smoky tenor saxophone to accent the romantic mood—but the director suggested he try again with music “in a more conventional way, like with strings.” Murray did so, and the result tempered the “orgasm” effect, just enough to win the day with the censors. Another Hitchcockian trick, another hard-won victory.

  Postproduction was in general a nightmare. On location, the sky had changed moods swiftly and dramatically, making it difficult to maintain a visual continuity. Hitchcock had tried various experiments, including using filters for night shooting, but the night images disappointed everyone. Robert Burks would miraculously win the Oscar that year for ravishing camera work that was partly a marvel of special effects.

  Gusty winds and constant background racket also forced heavy dialogue rerecording. Music was sometimes the solution. “For example, in a scene on the beach at Cannes with Grant the wind is whipping the umbrellas and the canvas on the cabanas,” remembered Murray. “He said there would be absolutely no sound track in this scene—just music.”

  Dubbing also helped smooth things over for the French actors who spoke broken English. For the part of Danielle, Brigitte Auber’s pidgin English proved charming. But for the others it often sounded plain wrong. “In the interest of schedule and budget [on location],” recalled George Tomasini’s assistant, John M. Woodcock, “Hitch okayed many imperfect takes, knowing that the French cast was due to travel to the U.S. for additional shooting. He figured that, with coaching and looping, their performances could be improved.”

  Dubbing and redubbing: in January 1955, months after calling the last take at Paramount, Hitchcock returned to Nice for what he hoped was a final bout of studio rerecording for To Catch a Thief. Ultimately, the sound editors had to insert 250 “loops” of corrected sound—something of a record for the time, according to Woodcock.

  Ironically, Charles Vanel came off the worst. Hayes trimmed his dialogue, “shortening speeches and, in the process, sacrificing characterization,” in the words of Steven DeRosa. Elsie Foulstone coached him from the sidelines; his lines were even phonetically chalked on a blackboard. But, as a last resort, Hitchcock began to shoot him with his back to the camera and his hand over his mouth. Vanel’s English was so incomprehensible that ultimately he had to be redubbed almost entirely by another Frenchman. In the end, the grand old man of the French cinema would be seen in To Catch a Thief, but not heard—and the plausibility of his character naturally suffered.

  But plausibility, holes in the plot, bodies without voices—none of it mattered. To Catch a Thief proved nearly as popular as Rear Window when it was finally unveiled almost a year after its filming, in August 1955. While Rear Window continues to insp
ire serious analysis and to support Hitchcock’s artistic reputation, To Catch a Thief remains unabashedly escapist. The fabulous scenery, the deceptive humor, the romantic alchemy—the director somehow pulled it all off, conjuring a film that begs comparison to the work of Ernst Lubitsch.

  In London for the premiere, he gave an interview explaining that To Catch a Thief was merely “a woman’s picture.” “It’s important that filmmakers should have a sense of responsibility for the stability and continuity of their industry,” Hitchcock said. “And, if sometimes you have to make corn, try at least to do it well.”

  The Hitchcock property that thrilled Paramount the least was the offbeat black comedy: The Trouble with Harry, which the director was determined to do “just for fun and for relief from what he was doing regularly,” according to John Michael Hayes. But the studio stuck to its bargain.

  Published in 1949, Jack Trevor Story’s first novel was slight, just over a hundred pages. Its whimsical plot revolves around a little boy’s discovery of a dead body in rural woods, and the reactions of several local townspeople who all believe they have killed the man accidentally. Little is known about the stranger, except for his name: Harry. “A nice little pastorale,” Hitchcock called the story.

  While on location for To Catch a Thief, Hayes started developing the script, meeting with Hitchcock between setups and on weekends. Hitchcock had been visualizing The Trouble with Harry ever since reading it in galleys; Hayes tried to convince him to add some action or suspense, but the director showed little inclination to deviate from a book he had read over and over. “In truth,” conceded Steven DeRosa, “Story’s short novel reads rather like a detailed film treatment,” with “pithy dialogue and aural descriptions” that betrayed Story’s background (like Hayes’s) in radio.

  Hitchcock always said he was attracted by the subversive sense of humor that pervades The Trouble with Harry. But the story also has the undertow of romance that balanced his best films. In fact, it boasts a double love story: a sweet courtship between an older couple, a shy spinster and a retired gentleman, which is paralleled by the spicier attraction between a perky, husbandless mother and a tortured artist.

  From book to the screen, characters and subplots had to be eliminated, but little was added: the single new character is Mrs. Wiggs’s son Calvin, a deputy sheriff whose investigation into the killing provides a modicum of suspense, as well as the police thickheadedness expected in a Hitchcock film. And little was added in the way of dialogue, which remained “almost religiously faithful” to the book, according to DeRosa.

  The major change was in making the film transatlantic—transplanting the story from the English countryside setting to Vermont. The Americanization was easier to do than with Rope because all of the novel’s local references were superficial. Hayes had lived in Vermont as a boy, and his background came in handy, although in the end the film claimed only the merest whiff of Yankee authenticity.

  The Hitchcocks had enjoyed their trip through New England in 1951, and now the director wanted to shoot in Vermont during the peak of fall (“to counterpoint its macabre elements with beautifully colored scenery,” he told Charles Higham). With the efficiency and organization that marked the Paramount years, he worked until 5:30 P.M. on Saturday, September 4, on To Catch a Thief, before leaving for the train east.

  Paramount was gulled along by Hitchcock’s shell game of casting. Although The Trouble with Harry was decidedly more of an ensemble piece than his recent pictures, the director talked up Grace Kelly for the part of Jennifer, the young mother—who turns out to be Harry’s estranged wife—until Kelly became embroiled in a contract dispute with MGM.

  When Kelly proved unavailable, Hitchcock considered carrying over a different actress from To Catch a Thief—Brigitte Auber, who was a relative unknown in America. “She had a casual way of wearing a blouse,” John Michael Hayes noticed in France, “which exposed her bosom frequently. And Hitch, of course was delighted.” Hitchcock had struck up a friendship with Auber; now that Pat was married and busy with her own family, he behaved with the French actress as though she were his daughter. (Indeed, Auber’s father had recently died, and she came to look upon Hitchcock as a surrogate father.)

  But all the headaches with French accents during To Catch a Thief helped put Hitchcock off the idea of Auber, and even en route to New England Hitchcock still didn’t have his leading lady. Producer Hal Wallis had rhapsodized about a twenty-year-old dancer who stepped in for the lead one night in the Broadway musical The Pajama Game. The dancer had made a screen test for Wallis, which Hitchcock watched appreciatively. Coleman then visited the understudy backstage in New York on the director’s behalf, noting her lithe tomboy looks (quite like those of Auber). Coleman told the understudy Hitchcock was looking for a “suitably fey creature” to play the lead of his next picture.

  Meeting with Shirley MacLaine (no blonde) for the first time at the St. Regis, the director had a few questions: What movies had she done? Could he see any television film on her? What Broadway roles had she acted? None, nothing; she was only a chorus girl, an understudy. “Suddenly,” MacLaine recalled, “his leg shot up, his foot came down heavily on the seat of a chair, and his elbow came to rest on his knee, all in one lightning motion.”

  “That makes you about the color of a shamrock, doesn’t it?” said Hitchcock.

  “Yes, sir, I suppose so,” she replied, standing up. “Should I go now?”

  “Of course not. Sit down. All this simply means that I shall have fewer bad knots to untie. You’re hired.”

  She fell back into her chair.

  “I shall need you on location—in Vermont—in three days. Can you make it?”

  It was okay to have a nobody as the perky, young mother—if Hitchcock could boast a marquee attraction as the tortured artist. Early on, he had teased the front office with the idea of Cary Grant, but Grant’s salary and percentage demands were escalating out of sight, and Hitchcock was determined to keep The Trouble with Harry a “little” picture. Moreover, Grant could be a nuisance: rewriting the part to please him would be a headache, and might change the flavor of the story beyond recognition.

  William Holden was Hitchcock’s real preference, and once again the director hotly pursued the actor. But whether for budget or loan-out reasons, or because of the accelerated schedule, Holden vanished from the horizon even as Hitchcock was passing through New York. The director had a reasonable average with Cary Grant, but his repeated attempts to coax Holden into a Hitchcock film were unsuccessful.

  In New York, Hitchcock met with John Forsythe, who agreed to a ten-week leave from playing Captain Fisby in Teahouse of the August Moon to appear in The Trouble with Harry. A debonair actor with a reserve of quirkiness, Forsythe had appeared in several undistinguished films, but his Broadway credits were prestigious and his radio work extensive (including multiple appearances on Hitchcock’s beloved Suspense).

  That’s how reflexive his instincts were, how fast Hitchcock was moving. As late as September 14, when his arrival in Vermont was splashed across the Barre Daily Times—shaking hands with Governor Lee Emerson at the airport—official publicity was still insisting that Hitchcock’s star for The Trouble with Harry was William Holden.

  Not only did Hitchcock cast a former understudy and a no-name as his two leads, but the true star of The Trouble with Harry was an octogenarian friend of the director’s. The central character of Jack Trevor Story’s novel is the aged, retired captain of a Thames barge, who believes he may have shot the stranger accidentally while hunting. (In the film he is the retired commander of an East River tugboat.) All along, Hitchcock had envisioned this role for the English actor Edmund Gwenn, whom he had previously directed in The Skin Game, Waltzes from Vienna, and Foreign Correspondent.

  The winking humor of To Catch a Thief spilled over to The Trouble with Harry, and some of John Michael Hayes’s sexiest double entendres ever came from the mouth of the octogenarian. “Do you realize you’ll be the first ma
n to cross her threshold?” Sam (John Forsythe) teases the Captain (Edmund Gwenn) in their first scene together, referring to his courtship of the spinster, Miss Gravelly. “It’s not too late, you know. She’s a well-preserved woman,” replies the Captain defensively. “I envy you,” Sam says. “Very well-preserved,” the Captain muses, “and preserves have to be opened some day.”

  From the first draft, Paramount and code officials noticed this exchange; Hitchcock promised to do something about the lines—but, once again, found a way to keep them in the film.

  The other members of the cast weren’t going to help the box office much either. Mildred Natwick, an accomplished interpreter of Shakespeare, Shaw, O’Neill, and Ibsen and a semiregular in John Ford films, was cast as Miss Gravelly. Mildred Dunnock, who had been poignant as the wife in Death of a Salesman on Broadway and then on film, would play Mrs. Wiggs, the country-store proprietor, village postmistress, and agent for Sam’s unsalable art. Tall, craggy-faced Royal Dano, Elijah in John Huston’s film of Moby-Dick, became the deputy sheriff, while seven-year-old Jerry Mathers—later the star of TV’s Leave It to Beaver—had a rascally part, enhanced from the book, as the little boy who first discovers the body.

  Herbert Coleman and Doc Ericksen had scouted ahead to find a quaint Vermont village with plenty of atmosphere and mountain scenery, settling on the vicinity around St. Johnsbury, a place where sidewalk repairs were reported on the front page of the newspaper. Unfortunately Hurricane Carol blew through on September 1, spending itself out in Canada and New England, including parts of northeastern Vermont and St. Johns-bury—followed a week later by heavy electrical storms that washed out local roads.

  Hitchcock had been looking forward to filming the brilliant autumn leaves of New England. Instead the trees were down everywhere, the streets were littered with storm wreckage, and tree branches were naked. John Michael Hayes probably didn’t mind; he was still polishing the script, on location. Coleman and Ericksen, on the other hand, had to scramble to relocate. Initial photography was delayed until the end of the third week of September, but the bad luck never abated. It was colder and wetter than average that year in Vermont.