Without his favorite ghostwriter, Hitchcock cut back on all his speeches. He even dodged an invitation proffered by his old friend, the Catholic priest Father Thomas J. Sullivan, in the second half of 1966. Father Sullivan wanted him to speak for twelve minutes “on any topic” to a San Francisco group. When Hitchcock demurred, Sullivan pleaded with him, reminding him how well received his clever and amusing stump speech had been when he accepted an honorary degree at Santa Clara University in 1963. (Father Sullivan, who had promoted the degree, was in the audience.) “You’ll never know what I went through before the Santa Clara speech,” Hitchcock wrote Father Sullivan. “I was miserable for days and days before it came about. I know the speech got a lot of laughs and that sort of thing, but I personally get no satisfaction from it whatsoever. It’s just the same when I make a picture. I go through hell and get no pleasure at all from the fact that it succeeds. I’m only relieved that it wasn’t a complete failure.” Without the safety net of James Allardice’s wit, Hitchcock no longer enjoyed such public performances, and in the future his few addresses and bylined articles were ghosted by Universal publicists.
June brought the death of David O. Selznick. The career of Hitchcock’s first Hollywood producer had ground to a virtual halt after The Paradine Case—and after Selznick’s marriage to Jennifer Jones. Like his father before him, Selznick had become irrelevant in the film industry. But Hitchcock had kept in touch with him socially, and saw Selznick’s death as symbolic of an era passing. He spoke graciously of Selznick at the time, telling The Moguls author, Norman Zierold, for example, that the producer used his notorious memos “as much to clear his own mind as much as to communicate with others.”
In years to come, Hitchcock would wax nostalgic for the producers of old. “Are we missing some other stimulus that went with those earlier days,” he asked an interviewer in 1969, “the great movie mogul, for example?” The same year, he told another journalist, “It was fun then. Now the industry’s run by accountants and businessmen and agents. Agents are the worst, because they’ve no interest in the film, only in getting work for their artists.” (Never mind that he was employed by Universal, a studio run by his own former agent.)
With a heavy heart, Hitchcock attended Selznick’s funeral, and then left for a long, purely social weekend in Santa Cruz with Brian and Jean Moore. Such weekends used to be reserved for close friends, but now his friends were scattered; the weekends were more like treats or outings for principals who worked on his films. When meeting with each other later, the guests would compare notes like children discussing a schoolmaster.
Besides getting Moore started on a second draft, Hitchcock welcomed Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli back to Hollywood. He met with them regularly until July 9, when he and other key personnel flew to Europe to scout Torn Curtain locations in Copenhagen and Frankfurt.
The European milieu called for changes in the team. Hein Heckroth, who had won an Oscar for Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, supplanted Robert Boyle as production designer. Hitchcock planned another one of his unusual color schemes—if possible, a shadowless monochrome. “We decided,” the director explained later, “that after we leave Copenhagen, which is the last location in the picture before we go to East Germany, to go gray everywhere—gray and beige—so we have a mood, a depressed mood, a sinister mood, in the general tones of all the sets.”
Bud Hoffman moved over from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to edit his first feature. Cameraman John F. Warren’s feature credits included The Country Girl with Grace Kelly, but he had been on Hitchcock’s crew as far back as Rebecca, and also served as a cameraman for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Edith Head (who concentrated on Julie Andrews’s hair and costumes) and Bernard Herrmann were the only key members of Hitchcock’s long-established Paramount unit to carry over to the new film.
In Hollywood as in London, it was common policy to shoot films as much as possible inside the studio or in the near vicinity, to tuck costs into general overhead. The high cost of his two stars forced him into “cutting corners,” as Hitchcock candidly admitted later; the decision to shoot Torn Curtain in its entirety at Universal may have saved a little budget money, but it also dictated, in the words of writer Keith Waterhouse, “the excessive use of (sometimes crude) back projection.”
Any hopes for Eastern European flavor were dashed after the second unit returned from East Germany. For economic as well as surreptitious reasons, Hitchcock had hired a German crew to capture the sights and scenery while pretending to be shooting a travelogue. But their footage proved “inferior,” according to John Russell Taylor, and there wasn’t the time or money to send Americans back. In the end Hitchcock had no choice but to minimize the authenticity.
An airport in the San Fernando Valley stood in for East Berlin’s Schönefeld. The farm on the outskirts of East Berlin was actually near Camarillo. The Swedish docks were faked in Long Beach Harbor, and the University of Southern California stood in for Karl Marx University. When Paul Newman walks through the Museen zu Berlin in Torn Curtain, only the floor is real: the galleries are paintings optically printed into the film. After ten years exploiting all manner of exotic locations, this was the second film in a row with Hitchcock stuck inside soundstages.
It’s hard not to assume that Hitchcock’s decision to stick close to home was also influenced by concerns about his health. But he continued his grueling pace: when he returned to the United States on July 15, Hitchcock went back to juggling two different projects, sometimes working on one script in the morning, then switching to the other in the afternoon.
Brian Moore was just a week away from finishing the second draft of Torn Curtain, and Age and Scarpelli were in and out of Hollywood all during the summer, still developing the “RRRRR” project. Along with the Italian writing team, Hitchcock interviewed a slew of performers, nobodies in Hollywood terms, who might be right to play the family of crooks: actors of different nationalities (one Argentinean), eccentric performers, even circus clowns.
After Moore finished his second draft, Hitchcock asked for rewrites and a third draft, which was delivered to him in the first week of August. The director was sufficiently pleased that he offered Moore a contract for another four Hitchcock films. But Moore was exhausted by the process, and said he’d rather return to novels; then, when Hitchcock summoned him to discuss additional “script fixes” in the third week of August, the increasingly impatient Moore forgot himself and savaged the project. Fed up, he told Hitchcock that the plotting was implausible and the characters cardboard, according to Donald Spoto; polishing the dialogue wouldn’t solve anything. “I told him that if it were a book I were writing, I’d scrap it, or do a complete rewrite,” Spoto quoted Moore as saying.
But a final polish was needed, Hitchcock insisted at the time in a letter to François Truffaut, because Moore had “a tendency to want to avoid all melodrama. This I was quite prepared to do, except that there was a tremendous risk of the story becoming flat and plausible, but unexciting.” Hitchcock said people complained that the dialogue was too literary, that “the people did not talk like human beings.”
After their unpleasant meeting, Moore had second thoughts, and two weeks later he wrote to Hitchcock, offering to accommodate any “rewrites or fixes,” assuring the director that he “vastly enjoyed” working with him, Lucullan meals and all. But Hitchcock couldn’t forget that Moore had disparaged the film on which he was pinning his hopes, and the director left him behind.
Wasting no time, Hitchcock contacted the English writing team of Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, authors of several West End hits including Billy Liar (which was also made into a successful film), and the duo agreed to come to Hollywood. They arrived “within a few days of rolling,” according to Waterhouse, “so that we often found ourselves revising scenes only hours before they were to be shot, while on occasion a messenger would be waiting to rush our latest rewrites across to the Torn Curtain sound stage, where they would be thrust into the hands of the actors ev
en as Hitchcock lit them for the scene.”
The new writers were “treated to a crash course in filmmaking,” hovering “close at hand on the set,” according to Waterhouse, where Hitchcock would “only very occasionally” refer “to the shooting script being meticulously monitored by his longtime assistant Peggy Robertson, for by this stage in the game the whole film existed, frame by frame, as pictures in his head.
“There was a written part of this highly-paid seminar besides the valuable lectures both on and off the sound stage. Willis and I had been assigned a comfortable star dressing-room bungalow, just around the corner from Hitchcock’s suite of offices at Universal City Studios. Every morning when the studio limo decanted us, there would be awaiting us a big buff envelope containing Hitchcock’s notes on the current day’s work, dictated between looking at the rushes the previous evening and going home to Bel Air to read that day’s London Times before his customary dinner of Dover sole, both of them flown to him along with his breakfast kippers. I have kept over twenty close-typed pages of these ruminations. …
“Some of them show Hitchcock’s almost fanatical obsession with accuracy: ‘Scene 88. We should eliminate the Floor Concierge. My information is that they do not have these in East Berlin.’ Others show his sense of meticulous cinematic detail: ‘Scene 127C. I would like to discuss the place where the sausage is carved …’ On Scene 139, where we had someone describing the Julie Andrews character as beautiful, Hitchcock comments: ‘Not that I wish to cast any aspersions on Miss Andrews’ physiognomy, but do you think beautiful is perhaps too much, and cannot we say lovely instead?’
“Above all, there are the notes that reveal the seething mind of Hitchcock at work as he jigsaws the pictures in his head into place. He takes two long paragraphs to detail how he envisages the reaction of refugees on a stolen bus as they witness the approach of the real bus that must give their game away. He wants one character to see the bus in the distance but keep it to himself… then someone else sees it, and someone else, until panic spreads through the bus: ‘It would be rather like the play within a play in Hamlet which starts with the King and then spreads to the rest. Anyway, let’s talk about this little moment.’ There was nothing to talk about. He had already conceived the whole sequence exactly as he was to shoot it.”
Hitchcock’s copious notes included his cameo appearance, by now a treasured tradition of a Hitchcock film, but also a headache to think up and insert early enough in the story to satisfy the audience’s expectations without impeding the momentum of the suspense. The director suggested inserting himself in the brief scene in the lounge of Copenhagen’s five-star Hotel d’Angleterre, where Newman and Andrews stay in the film. Waterhouse was struck by how Hitchcock envisioned his cameo “not simply as an ego trip” but as a shot also supplying “valuable background information.”
Hitchcock explained: “I should be seen sitting in an armchair in the lounge with a nine month old baby on my knee and I’m looking around rather impatiently for the mother to come back. This impatience could be underscored by shifting the baby from one knee to the other, and then with the free hand, surreptitiously wiping the thigh. Having this shot would enable us to show the sign announcing the presence of the convention members in the hotel. We might even show some of the delegates crowding around the elevator which, of course, would then lead us to the corridor scene on page 10.”
Waterhouse found working with Hitchcock “an education and a joy”—an education entertainingly leavened by the director’s reminiscences about his silent film days in London, by the long dinners at Chasen’s and Bellagio Road, and by the surprise awaiting them when they returned to England for a play opening, and were feted at a first-night party in their honor, which Hitchcock had masterminded from Hollywood.
Truth to tell, the two Englishmen didn’t think much of the film—or of Brian Moore’s script, which would have ranked Torn Curtain “even lower in the oeuvre had we not been called in to improve the script and polish the dialogue,” in Waterhouse’s words. But the writing partners were limited in their contribution “apart from the odd scene … restricting ourselves to dialogue rewrites which we were doing on a day-by-day basis as the film was shot.”
But a fair share of the film’s flaws, Waterhouse reflected, should be blamed on Hitchcock. The master provocateur of Psycho and The Birds had begun making mistakes; he first turned old-fashioned, with Marnie; and now he was behaving cautiously, and worse. Hitchcock took out his resentment of the stars on the most vulnerable players; he fixated on irrelevant details; and the man who had always challenged audiences now seemed bent on pandering to the moron millions.
“We could not persuade him,” Waterhouse remembered, “to let us get to work on an immortally bad line uttered by Julie Andrews: ‘East Berlin? But—but—that’s behind the Iron Curtain!’ Mindful of geographically uncoordinated audiences in such centers of insularity as Dubuque, Mr. Hitchcock steadfastly refused to modify the line, not even to the extent of getting rid of the superfluous ‘but’ and its hesitant dash.”
“Additional dialogue by” was a dubious credit that had been abolished by the Writers Guild, so when Hitchcock submitted “Story by Brian Moore, Screenplay by Brian Moore, and Keith Waterhouse & Willis Hall” as the film’s official credits, the matter was automatically sent to arbitration.
Waterhouse reports that Hitchcock “campaigned valiantly” for his name and Hall’s to be included, adding, “I hope it does not seem ungrateful when I reveal that we were campaigning just as vigorously to have our names kept out of it.” Moore, “feeling that the script was not up to his standards and expectations,” according to Jean Moore, tried just as hard to keep his name off. “However,” said his wife, “our lawyer intervened again and strongly advised Brian not to remove his name.” Ironically, Hitchcock’s resistance to changes had limited the Englishmen’s input, and after studying the drafts the Guild struck their names.
In spite of the script’s defects, Hitchcock was still optimistic as the filming began; one might even say he was deluded. Sending a copy of the script to Truffaut for his opinion, he wrote, “In some respects it might have the feeling of Notorious, except that I have given it a little more movement than Notorious had. Anyway, read the script and then you can judge for yourself.”
When Paul Newman and Julie Andrews read the script, however, they saw no resemblance to Notorious. In fact, it seemed substandard—nothing like the story they had agreed to star in. Andrews, whose role had mysteriously shrunk during the successive drafts, secretly despised the script, while Newman admitted later he “never felt comfortable” with it. But the clock was running, and both trusted in Hitchcock.
Apart from Lila Kedrova, most of the ensemble were known only to European filmgoers. Gisela Fischer (as Dr. Koska, the defector’s pro-U.S. contact in East Germany) and Wolfgang Kieling (as Hermann Gromek, the “personal guide” who is actually a menacing undercover agent for the East German state) had both appeared in Frau Cheneys Ende, a 1961 German version of the chic English jewel-thief play The End of Mrs. Cheyney. Kieling’s countercasting as the film’s only true heavy—he was a frequent studio vocalist for hit Broadway shows rerecorded in German—was a joke only for diehard German fans.
Hansjoerg Felmy was cast as the chief of East German security, and Günter Strack as the East German scientist who abets the American scientist’s defection. Tamara Toumanova, whose role as a ballerina wittily bookends the film, had been the supreme Russian ballerina of the 1930s and 1940s in Paris and New York. Ludwig Donath, a veteran of German and U.S. films, played the East German professor who has formulated a sought-after mathematical theory to counteract nuclear weaponry. This, his final role before his death, brought Donath back from a long absence due to the blacklist.
On October 18, photography began on Stage 18 at Universal. From the outset Hitchcock got along politely—too politely—with Julie Andrews, while Paul Newman vexed him with his persistent Method questions, and his equally vexing script sugges
tions (“apparently,” Hitchcock wrote Brian Moore earlier, passing along three pages of his ideas, this “comes from Paul Newman the author, and not Paul Newman the actor”).
“One of our duties,” recalled Keith Waterhouse, “was to keep Paul Newman out of our director’s nonexistent hair, spelling out the thinking behind any scene or piece of dialogue that troubled him, and if necessary inventing far-fetched explanations for the characters’ behavior. This we became quite good at.”
One thoroughly minor scene, where Newman had to furtively meet Andrews and take a package from her, agonized the star; no matter how much the writers reassured him, Newman insisted on discussing it with Hitchcock at some length during the camera rehearsal. The star hemmed and hawed, finally asking how he should be relating to Andrews in the scene.
“Well, Mr. Newman,” Hitchcock explained in his plummy accent. “I’ll tell you exactly what I have in mind here. Miss Andrews will come down the stairs with the package, d’you see, when you, if you’ll be so good, will glance just a little to the right of camera to take in her arrival; whereupon my audience will say, ‘Hulloh! What’s this fellow looking at?’ And then I’ll cut away, d’you see, and show them what you’re looking at.”*
But there was an unmistakable pall over the project, symbolized neatly by Hitchcock’s gray-on-gray color scheme. Even the atmosphere on the set was “everywhere gray”—the color of indefiniteness, irresolution, and gloom. Regardless of his customary black or blue suits, the director himself now virtually embodied that color. “Hitchcock in action,” reported one journalist to the set, “is mostly Hitchcockian inaction.”
Alfred Hitchcock Page 96