It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  “It was rather unfair to Henley because I was pretty tired on the job, but I did all of my work. I was utterly conscientious. When I completed all the main titles, I called Famous Players-Lasky for an appointment. Another thing I didn’t think about, due to my youth, lack of experience, and perhaps stupidity, was that I didn’t know the script or the scenes, and what I was offering would only be useful if they let it shape their film. It was presumptuous of me, but I didn’t even know it.

  “‘You can have these free,’ I said. My enthusiasm was taken in the best spirit. My drawings, which I knew were good, were praised, and the confirmation of what they said was they offered me a part-time job. So, my first job in the film world was as a writer and designer of titles for silent films.”

  The movies, then being silent, required full-screen titles, called intertitles, whenever there was dialogue, and Hitchcock’s job was to adorn the titles with artwork as well as to select the type. Hitchcock was so fascinated by the film studio, he volunteered to do other jobs as well, becoming what he described as “a kind of third assistant at a time when they didn’t have third assistants.”

  He was spending so much time there, they thought he was a full-time employee. When they realized he wasn’t, they asked him if he would consider leaving his job and coming to work for them full-time. It didn’t take much persuasion. He quit his job at Henley and went to work at Famous Players-Lasky. Later, Hitchcock always said proudly, “I was American-trained in film, you know,” because he had worked first for an American company in England. “I got a pittance, but I didn’t know it, so I was very happy.”

  From 1920 until 1922, he designed intertitles for films, as well as doing other tasks. “I was the first to pick up a piece of paper from the floor and deposit it in a wastebasket, even though officially I was employed in the editorial department. I did whatever odd job had to be done around the office, while spending as much time as I could in the studio watching the films being shot, sometimes even doing the work of an assistant director without benefit of title. I was very happy in my work.

  “At that time, the American scriptwriters were all women, and I learned screenplay writing from them. There were many opportunities at that time for women to work in films. This kind of sedentary work was considered appropriate for women, like sewing. When films became more important, these positions were no longer readily available to women.”

  By 1922, the American company had become discouraged with their British venture, and decided to phase it out, renting the Islington Studios to independent producers. One of them, Seymour Hicks, a well-known actor-playwright, rented the studio to film his own successful stage play, Always Tell Your Wife. In the middle of shooting, Hicks had an argument with his director, Hugh Croise, and fired him, intending to direct the rest of the picture himself. As his assistant, he hired Hitchcock.

  During this period, Hitchcock directed part of his first film, which was never finished.

  “Paramount’s head of publicity liked me and asked if I would want to direct a two-reel comedy called Number 13, which she had written and for which she had some backing. She had worked with Chaplin, so everybody took her quite seriously. We started, but the film was never finished.

  “The money ran out, and it may have been just as well. We were saved from disgrace and from having that piece of film floating around forever.”

  In 1922, the Islington Studios were leased and eventually sold to a new British company, Gainsborough Pictures, which had been created by Michael Balcon, with Victor Saville. Balcon had been a salesman and Saville a film distributor. They were soon joined by Graham Cutts, an exhibitor who wanted to direct.

  Hitchcock applied for a job on their first picture, Woman to Woman, and was hired.

  “On my own time,” Hitchcock said, “I practiced my hand at writing a script from a novel. When the job at Gainsborough came up, they hired me as the assistant director. Then, they said in a panic, ‘Who’s going to write our script?’ I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ They read it, and liked it. I was twenty-three.

  “I had a friend who was going to be the art director on the picture, and he found he couldn’t work on it. Woman to Woman was a big, important picture. It featured a Hollywood star, Betty Compson. I said, ‘I’ll do the art direction, I’ll design the sets,’ and so forth. They believed me, and I did some drawings to show them. So, I became art director as well.”

  Hitchcock chose as his assistant on Woman to Woman an attractive young film editor who had begun working at Islington in 1916. Her name was Alma Reville.

  Hitch and Alma

  HELLO, MISS REVILLE. My name is Alfred Hitchcock and I have just been appointed assistant director on a new film. I wonder if you would consider the position of cutter on this film?”

  Thus Hitch and Alma began their relationship. Hitchcock had noticed the petite young redhead from the moment he started work at Famous Players-Lasky, but had been too shy and too conscious of his own lower professional status to make an approach until he at least felt equal in rank.

  “I was surprised to hear from him,” Alma told me, “and very grateful. I’d been out of a job ever since Paramount left Islington.”

  She became Hitchcock’s assistant. The job involved editing film and being the script girl, which was an important position on the silents. “I began by admiring her from afar,” Hitchcock told me. “I much preferred admiring her from a-near.”

  Fifty-seven years later, nobody expressed better the relationship between Hitch and Alma than Hitchcock himself in his acceptance speech at the American Film Institute’s 1979 Lifetime Achievement Award Tribute to him:

  “Among those many people who have contributed to my life, I ask permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration.

  “The first of the four is a film editor.

  “The second is a scriptwriter.

  “The third is the mother of my daughter, Pat.

  “And the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen.

  “And their names are Alma Reville.

  “Had the beautiful young Miss Reville not accepted a lifetime contract without options as Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock some fifty-three years ago, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock might be in this room tonight, not at this table, but as one of the slower waiters on the floor. I share my award, as I have my life, with her.”

  There has been much discussion of the glamorous, mysterious blondes who were predominantly the heroines of Hitchcock’s films, though there were brunettes, too. The most important woman for Hitchcock, however, was the heroine of his private life, a mysterious redhead. She was Alma Reville, who became Alma Hitchcock.

  Hitchcock had always acknowledged privately Alma’s contribution to his films, and for some of them she had been credited onscreen, but her full contribution to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock was never declared so publicly until the American Film Institute dinner, during the last year of their life together. That was the way Alma had wanted it. As Hitchcock was the public person, his wife was a totally private person. While Hitchcock was nourished by recognition and praise, it made Alma blush.

  “Alma, you know,” he told me, “was the only person I could lose my dignity with, and dignity was a heavy burden to always carry.”

  A satisfied Alma told me, “He gave me a life I never imagined.”

  Norman Lloyd, actor, producer, and long-time friend of the Hitchcocks, said, “He was the eye, she was the ear.”

  ALMA LUCY REVILLE was born on August 14, 1899, in Nottingham, a lace-making center 120 miles north of London. Alma’s father, Matthew Reville, was the London representative of a Nottingham lace firm. Shortly afterward, her family moved to Twickenham, west of London.

  She was educated at a private girls school where she was a good student until forced to drop out for two years when she contracted chorea, commonly called Saint Vitus’ dance. Being a semi-invalid for so long changed her aspi
rations and the direction of her life. An advanced education had become even less a possibility, and Alma began looking for a vocation.

  Since her mother loved to attend the cinema, she took her young daughter with her over the objections of an aunt who, according to Hitchcock, warned Alma’s mother, “‘You mustn’t take young Alma to the cinema, because she will only pick up fleas.’ Well, she did get involved in the cinema, and after a while, she picked me up. But I’m certainly no flea.”

  With lace going out of style, especially during the economic and social changes of the Great War, Alma’s father had gone to work at the London Film Company in the costume department. It was housed in a converted power station in Islington, only a few blocks from the Reville home, and Alma often rode her bicycle there to see her father and to watch the actors. Noticing his daughter’s interest, and preferring that she work close to home, he arranged for her to be employed there, making Alma a second-generation film person. “I was hired as a tea girl, the only job possible for an untrained sixteen-year-old,” Alma remembered.

  She made the tea for the morning break and then again for afternoon tea, as well as all during the day for anyone who wanted it. Even in that task, Alma immediately wanted to excel. She not only learned all of the refinements of tea making, rinsing the cups with scalding water so they would retain the heat longer, allowing the leaves to steep the right amount of time, but she learned all of the preferences of each of the tea drinkers, such as pouring the cold milk in first before the bath of hot tea. Such enterprise and good spirit did not go unnoticed. Despite her extreme youth, even for that time, she was quickly in line for rapid promotion.

  Her employers noticed how bright and energetic she was, and being in need of a cutter at the lowest possible salary, they promoted her. She was thrilled. She wanted to learn everything about the business she already loved. At that time, a cutter assisted the director, who was expected to edit his own movies. She was also a script girl and secretarial assistant to the director. On occasion, she appeared in a film, briefly inspiring in her some ambition to become an actress. Director Maurice Elvey asked her to step in to play young Megan Lloyd George in the 1918 film, The Life Story of David Lloyd George. This film, considered lost for eighty years, was recently found by Kevin Brownlow, noted British filmmaker and historian.

  Alma understood the filmmaking process from the development of the screenplay to the development of the film stock. There wasn’t anything she hadn’t done except star in a film. She had all but one of the qualifications to be a director at a time when women had some opportunity in this field. “I’m too small,” Alma told me. “Not just short, but small. I could never project the image of authority a director has to project. A director has to be able to play the role of a director.”

  “Would you have liked to have become a director if you hadn’t met Alfred Hitchcock?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The people I worked for said I might become an assistant director at the time. I never really thought about it. I loved my work, and I would have just wanted to go on with it. I liked writing, and I liked best working with a small group of people, like a stock company. As everything got so big, you were no longer part of a team, but part of an organization. Later, sometimes I thought I might like to write a novel because you can do that alone.”

  In 1919, when the London Film Company closed down, and the studio at Islington was sold to Famous Players-Lasky, Alma was invited to stay on as a continuity girl.

  “It sounded very nice,” she told me. “In truth, I hadn’t the faintest idea what a continuity girl did. I think it’s because I hadn’t a clue to what it involved and didn’t know any better that I said yes. I didn’t hesitate. I figured I always had time later to say no, and then I never wanted to.”

  At that time, Alma was rare because she worked both as a cutter and a script girl. For her first job in both capacities, she was assigned a costume film. “When I saw the picture I had put together, I was horrified. I had made so many mistakes! All these years later, it makes me blush to remember it. A girl comes into a hallway with mittens on and goes into another room where she doesn’t have them on, and then she leaves with the mittens back on. It’s a wonder I wasn’t made redundant immediately. Everybody laughed. Well, it was better than losing my job, but I didn’t enjoy being laughed at, either.”

  It was while Alma was working on Donald Crisp’s Appearances that she met the young man who had come to work for Famous Players-Lasky in 1919 as an intertitles artist, Alfred Hitchcock. At that moment in time, Alma was far ahead of him in her knowledge of filmmaking.

  She noticed him immediately, but as she remembered, he didn’t seem to be aware of her, being completely absorbed by his work. This surprised her, since she was accustomed to being noticed by young men, who liked her perky style.

  “I regarded myself as a very attractive girl, prettier perhaps than I really was, but I was outgoing and social. You might say I had good self-esteem. I enjoyed pretty clothes. I loved movies and I loved what I was doing. I was an optimistic type, and I saw a rosy future.”

  Like her future husband, Alma always believed in the importance of first impressions.

  “I remember a young man coming in with a large package under his arm, wearing a dingy gray topcoat.” She giggled at the memory, seeming to relive it in her mind. Hitchcock told me that Alma’s giggle was the first thing he had noticed about her.

  Although immediately attracted to her, Hitchcock didn’t feel he could properly court her yet because he and Alma inhabited a world not far into the twentieth century, and each lived within a nineteenth-century family. The prevalent values were still those of a Victorian world. Only when Hitchcock graduated to assistant director did he feel he could pursue his courtship. Being shy, he approached Alma by telephone, offering her a job. “It wasn’t very romantic,” Hitchcock remembered.

  Alma was different from any girl he had ever met. “Until then,” he told me, “I never understood what women wanted. I only knew it wasn’t me.”

  When Famous Players-Lasky gave up on the English market and leased the Islington Studios to independent producers, Alma went to work for one of those independents, Gainsborough. Hitchcock, who had been kept on as the property master by the American company, soon joined Gainsborough, too.

  Working together for Gainsborough provided the opportunity for them to know each other better. They spent most of their courtship talking about movies, according to Alma. “Still do,” she added. “We wrote letters to each other, but they weren’t love letters. They were letters about filmmaking.” They enjoyed meetings of the London Film Society. A young actor named John Gielgud was also a member and film enthusiast. Many years later, he told me, “It was where we went to see the highbrow movies.” One of the founders was Sidney Bernstein, a distributor who immediately noticed and liked Alfred Hitchcock. This was the best opportunity to see what was going on throughout the world in film. The Russian cinema was important to Hitchcock, who particularly noted its use of montage.

  Hitchcock was an enthusiastic, committed theatergoer. Many of the actors he saw on the stage at that time would later appear, sometimes more than once, in his films. Among them were Tallulah Bankhead, Edmund Gwenn, Leo G. Carroll, Gladys Cooper, Sara Allgood, Isabel Jeans, Ian Hunter, Miles Mander, John Williams, and Ivor Novello.

  Woman to Woman was the first of five films on which Hitchcock and Alma worked together. It was a joyful time for them, although, as Alma added, “It was somewhat marred because director Graham Cutts was not our cup of tea. He didn’t appreciate Hitch, he knew very little, and actually we carried him. Then, he resented it. He was jealous of Hitch, who was intuitive and perfectly understood everything technical. Cutts was ready to depend on others, but not to share credit.”

  The film was a great success, encouraging Gainsborough to follow it with The Passionate Adventure and The White Shadow, again with Hitchcock as assistant director, though uncredited, and art director of The White Shadow. Hitchcock al
so adapted the stage play and, with Alma, wrote the screenplay, again uncredited. The film was unsuccessful, and Cutts complained to producer Michael Balcon that Hitchcock was undermining his authority on the set. Balcon, however, was impressed by the young man, who seemed to be saving him money by doing so many jobs so well.

  After the success of Woman to Woman, Balcon made a low offer in a bid to purchase the Islington facilities, not expecting Paramount to accept, but they did. Balcon had the idea that the only way to run a successful film company in England was to own the studio facilities.

  In 1924, Hitchcock was sent by Balcon to Berlin as assistant director on The Prude’s Fall, an Anglo-German production again directed by Cutts. Alma was sent as Hitchcock’s assistant.

  At UFA (Universum-Film Aktien Gesellschaft), the great German studio founded by Universal in Neubabelsberg, they were able to watch F. W. Murnau directing The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann), as well as Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, and other important German directors. Hitchcock learned from the German technicians as they worked.

  At that time, UFA was more artistically and technically advanced in filmmaking than England, and was challenging Hollywood. Murnau was generous to Hitchcock, answering whatever questions he asked, explaining what he was doing, inviting him to watch the filming, and encouraging him in his career. Murnau’s influence on Hitchcock would last a lifetime, according to Hitchcock: “From Murnau, I learned how to tell a story without words.”

  Aboard the ship returning from Germany where they had been scouting locations for The Prude’s Fall, Hitchcock had determined he would ask Alma to marry him “before our feet touched English soil.” He hoped that she would still feel somewhat carried away by their odyssey. His plan was complicated by her bout of seasickness. It was almost continuous from the moment they boarded the ship, which made Hitchcock hesitate. Even if the situation was not as romantic as he might have wished, he wondered if her weakened condition might help his cause, lowering her resistance. He could not imagine his future life without Alma. He had never before felt so comfortable with a woman. He realized that she was socially graceful, as he believed he could never be, and he felt that she could have anyone in the world she wanted. It was a daunting prospect, but Hitchcock was never one to say no to himself.