It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  He planned his words and pondered scenarios. The end of the voyage, however, drew close, with Alma’s seasickness, which she believed was terminal, showing no sign of abating.

  As Alma, “looking green,” lay in agony on her bunk, Hitchcock remembered paying her a visit and blurting out his proposal. It didn’t come out as he had rehearsed it, but she didn’t say no. She only burped, which Hitchcock took as yes.

  Alma told me, “I was too weak to say yes, or I would have said it.”

  WHEN THE ISLINGTON STUDIOS were offered for sale, and Balcon bought them for Gainsborough Pictures, it was for a fraction of the asking price, to be paid out over a period of seven years. Balcon was on his way to becoming one of Britain’s most important producers.

  The next Cutts-directed Gainsborough picture to be shot in Germany was The Blackguard, for which Hitchcock was able to incorporate into his set designs some of the ideas of forced perspective he had been observing at UFA. He was also able to save a great deal of money by using suggestion rather than showing everything.

  “One of the important things I learned at UFA was that you are only responsible for what is in the frame. If you want to give the impression of a great European cathedral, all you have to do is show an important detail. The audience will see the whole cathedral in its mind.”

  When Cutts said that he did not want to work with Hitchcock again, Balcon decided it was time to give the younger man a chance to prove himself. In 1925, Hitchcock was assigned to direct another Anglo-German production, The Pleasure Garden, to be shot in Munich and Italy. Alma would be his assistant director.

  “Someone told me,” Hitchcock recalled, “that Cutts said to Balcon, ‘I don’t want to work anymore with that know-it-all son-of-a-bitch, Hitchcock.’

  “Well, Cutts not wanting me could have ruined my career, but instead, it was the making of it. It gave me the opportunity I didn’t even know yet I wanted. I was to be a director.”

  II.

  The British

  Films

  Cub Director

  The Pleasure Garden to The Lodger

  WHEN I WAS STARTING OUT in films,” Hitchcock told me, “I was a cub director. But I didn’t want anyone to know it.

  “Nita Naldi was my first murder. I’d never killed anyone before—in a picture I directed, that is. In The Pleasure Garden, she’s drowned by the villain, though it was actually her stand-in who was murdered, since Miss Naldi hadn’t arrived in Italy yet.

  “Someone said that I didn’t personally direct that murder, but I am guilty of every one of my screen murders. It’s how I’ve earned my blood money.”

  Balcon preferred that Hitchcock prove himself as a director away from England, so he was sent to Munich, where he and Alma would work with a German company. For the American market, Balcon had contracted Nita Naldi, Virginia Valli, and Carmelita Geraghty, well-known Hollywood actors, as the stars. Naldi had just starred with Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand. The actual filming would be done at the Emelka Studios in Munich, as well as on location in Italy.

  After preparations in Munich, Alma went to Cherbourg to meet Valli and Geraghty, while Hitchcock went to Genoa to shoot the departure of a ship. Accompanying him were actor Miles Mander, who was also to be in the film, and the cameraman, the Baron Gaetano di Ventimiglia.

  At the Italian border, their film stock was confiscated. In Genoa, after Hitchcock had sent for more film, the confiscated film arrived with an unexpected duty imposed. As other unexpected expenses accrued, Hitchcock’s money was stolen from his hotel room, and he had to borrow from Mander and Ventimiglia in order to shoot the scene.

  When he returned to Munich already over-budget, Hitchcock found that the Hollywood stars had demanded first-class accommodations from Cherbourg to Munich. At the end of shooting, in late summer of 1925, they were left “virtually pfennig-less,” said Hitchcock. “Until a check arrived from London, we were dependent on the hospitality of our German friends, who saw to it that we lost no weight, unfortunately. Looking back at some snaps Alma took of me at the time, a bit of hunger might have done me some good.”

  Alma told me that during the years of World War II, she and Hitch thought many times about these people who had been so kind to them, and the Hitchcocks worried about their fate.

  Titles and credits share the screen with a 1920s chorus girl who appears on one side, looking almost like a dancing doll. Then, other chorus girls scamper down the backstage spiral staircase of the Paradise Garden Theatre.

  Jill Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty), applying for a job as a dancer, is befriended by chorus girl Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli), who invites her to stay with her. Patsy persuades the theater manager (Georg Schnell) to give Jill a chance, and the audacious young woman dances so well, he hires her instantly.

  Jill is soon star of the show. Though engaged, she becomes the girlfriend of an older Russian prince (Karl Falkenberg).

  Jill’s fiancé, Hugh Fielding (John Stuart), arrives with his friend, Levett (Miles Mander). Hugh then leaves for the Far East to seek his fortune.

  Patsy, charmed by Levett, marries him. Levett tires of Patsy and leaves to join Hugh. Though heartbroken, when she learns he is sick, Patsy goes to nurse Levett.

  Arriving at the island, she finds him living with a native girl (Nita Naldi). Feverish and drunk, he throws the girl out and demands that Patsy stay, but she leaves. An English doctor asks Patsy if she will help nurse another “sick white man.”

  Levett drowns the native girl in the sea.

  The “sick white man” is Hugh. He imagines Patsy is Jill. Levett returns, making threats. To protect Hugh, Patsy goes with Levett to his bungalow.

  Imagining he sees the ghost of the native girl, Levett attacks Patsy with a sword. The doctor arrives and shoots Levett.

  Patsy and Hugh return to London—together.

  Balcon was so pleased with The Pleasure Garden, he assigned Hitchcock to his second Anglo-German film at Emelka, The Mountain Eagle, also starring Nita Naldi. The Pleasure Garden would, however, have to wait for two years to be released because a powerful backer of Gainsborough, the financier and distributor C. M. Woolf, did not think it was suitable for English audiences.

  The Mountain Eagle was shot in the Tyrolean Alps in late 1925.

  Beatrice (Nita Naldi), the schoolteacher in a Kentucky town, angers Pettigrew (Bernard Goetzke), the justice of the peace and owner of the town’s general store. He believes she has encouraged the attentions of his crippled son, Edward (John Hamilton), who is taking evening classes with her. When she rebuffs the elder Pettigrew’s own attentions, he proclaims her as wanton, and she is driven out of town.

  A hermit, John “Fear o’ God” Fulton (Malcolm Keen), takes her in. He offers marriage with the promise she can divorce him whenever she wants. Pettigrew, still angry, performs the ceremony.

  Beatrice is happy with Fear o’ God. They have a child.

  When Edward disappears, Pettigrew blames Fear o’ God, and has him arrested for murder. He is tried, found guilty, and imprisoned. He escapes from jail and hides with his wife and child in the hills.

  The child falls ill, and Fear o’ God goes into town for a doctor. He and Pettigrew have a fight, but Edward returns safe.

  The child recovers, Fear o’ God is exonerated, and Beatrice’s respectability is restored.

  After being distributed in England, Germany, and America, all prints and the negative of the film disappeared. Much of the script has also disappeared, leaving only a few production photos. The synopsis is based on Peter Noble’s reconstruction for the British Film Institute.

  Woolf again disapproved of Hitchcock’s finished film, so The Mountain Eagle was held and released only after the huge success of his third film, The Lodger.

  Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote The Lodger first in 1911 as a magazine short story, and then as a novel in 1913. It was based on the 1888 serial killings of young women in London’s East End slums, the notorious Jack the Ripper murders. In the novel, the landlady
never finds out if her lodger is indeed the infamous killer.

  Hitchcock, with writer Eliot Stannard, emphasized that part of the novel which dealt with the fear and uncertainty the family feels about their lodger.

  A new boarder (Ivor Novello) arouses the suspicion of his landlady (Marie Ault), and her husband (Arthur Chesney), but their fashion model daughter, Daisy Bunting (June Tripp), is attracted to him. Daisy’s boyfriend, police detective Joe Betts (Malcolm Keen), becomes jealous.

  When Mrs. Bunting hears the lodger leaving late at night, she fears he may be the notorious murderer of young women, the Avenger. She tells Betts, who obtains a warrant to search his rooms.

  Police find a pistol, a map indicating past murders, and a picture of the first victim. Though the lodger claims the girl in the picture is his sister, and says that he is looking for her killer, he is arrested.

  He escapes, and Daisy helps him. His handcuffs are noticed at a pub, and he is pursued by an angry mob and finally cornered. At the last moment, he is saved by news that the real killer has just been arrested.

  The lodger is really a wealthy gentleman. He marries Daisy, and the Buntings adjust to their new station in life.

  Hitchcock said that the ending he would have preferred was to have the lodger really turn out to be Jack the Ripper, who goes free at the end, thought to be innocent, “while the audience knows he’s going to go on about his dirty business. At the very least, there might have been some doubt left as to whether he had done the nefarious deeds or not. But it would have been unacceptable to cast a leading man like Ivor Novello as a villain. I had the same problem later with Cary Grant in Suspicion.”

  A memorable image in The Lodger is an overhead shot of a stairwell, with the lodger slowly descending the stairs, shown only by his gloved hand on the guard railing as the hand slides down.

  “This was a substitute for sound,” Hitchcock said. “Nowadays, we wouldn’t do that.

  “Later on, I show how he paces up and down in his room. I have the faces of the people below, looking up to the ceiling. So I dissolved the ceiling away to show this agitated man. I had a one-inch-thick plate glass floor made so his feet showed through. This was instead of sound.”

  The Lodger was the first film in which Hitchcock had a cameo appearance. He is in the newsroom at the beginning and in the crowd pursuing Novello near the end. “Two actors didn’t show up. In those days you used to be able to hop in and do a bit if necessary,” he recalled.

  Balcon brought in a young editor, Ivor Montagu, to work with Hitchcock. They recognized each other as fellow members of the London Film Society, and they were immediately compatible.

  “When The Lodger was ready,” Hitchcock said, “the distributors screened the film and said it was dreadful. C. M. Woolf particularly objected to the transparent ceiling. He wanted to give the story to another director to reshoot.

  “I was at a pretty low ebb in my career. The Lodger was shelved for several months, and then they decided to show it after all. They had an investment, and wanted their money back. It was shown, and acclaimed as the greatest British picture ever made. So, there, you see, is that thin line between failure and success.

  “If I’d made the story again as a talker,” Hitchcock told me, “I would have wanted to do something different. Perhaps Jacqueline the Ripper.”

  “My father always referred to The Lodger as the first true Hitchcock picture,” Pat Hitchcock told me. With this film, Hitchcock led the emergence of the British cinema.

  Great British Hope

  Downhill to Waltzes from Vienna

  ON DECEMBER 2, 1926, Hitch and Alma were married in a small Roman Catholic ceremony. Alma converted to Catholicism.

  They spent their honeymoon in Paris and at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The Palace perfectly suited the young Hitchcocks’ dreams and their reality. Afterward, they celebrated their anniversary there whenever they could.

  Back in London, they moved into their new flat, decorated with fabrics and furniture from Liberty’s Department Store. It was a top-story flat, something that never bothered them, although Pat Hitchcock told me that she remembered in 1936, at the age of eight, counting ninety-six steps from the ground floor to their flat. It was where they were to live until they left for America.

  When the Hitchcocks married, their future seemed far from secure. During 1927, however, all three of the films he had directed were finally released. Four more were finished that year, and Hitchcock was becoming the most famous British director.

  Downhill, Hitchcock’s next film, was based on a play by Ivor Novello and Constance Collier, writing under the pseudonym Robert LeStrange.

  School sports captain Roddy Berwick (Ivor Novello), accused of fathering a waitress’s child, doesn’t expose the true seducer, his best friend, Tim Wakely (Robin Irvine). Roddy is expelled from school, and when even his own father, Lord Berwick (Norman McKinnel), doubts his innocence, Roddy leaves home.

  Joining the chorus of a stage musical, he falls in love with the star, Julia (Isabel Jeans), but cannot afford her extravagant lifestyle.

  Then, Roddy inherits £30,000. The sum appears very large in an intertitle:

  £30,000

  He buys an expensive flat, and Julia moves in with him. She is having an affair with the musical’s leading man, Archie (Ian Hunter), and they squander Roddy’s inheritance, living lavishly. The intertitle is now very small:

  £30,000

  Roddy loses both Julia and the flat.

  He becomes a taxi dancer in Paris, ending up in a Marseilles flophouse, where the operators hope to collect a reward for returning him to his rich family.

  Roddy finds himself on a freighter. Hallucinating, taunted by the memory of those who victimized him, he relives his downhill descent.

  Awakening in an English port, he makes his way through a nightmare-like montage of familiar London scenes and arrives at his family mansion.

  His father, having learned the truth of the waitress’s seduction, welcomes him back, as does his alma mater.

  An important scene shows Ivor Novello riding down a long escalator in the London subway. “We couldn’t film in the Underground until after midnight,” Hitchcock said, “so it was perfect for going to the theater. There was an opening night, and if you were in the good seats, you wore white tie and top hat.

  “When the performance finished, I wore my formal attire to direct Novello going down the escalator into the Underground.”

  At one point in the film, Isabel Jeans leans back and looks at Ivor Novello, who has just entered her dressing room. The next shot shows what she sees, an upside-down Novello. For Hitchcock, this became a favorite moment in his films. He repeated the effect in Notorious with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant.

  Another favorite moment occurs in his next film, Easy Virtue. Hitchcock described the scene as “actually a monologue without words.”

  “It lasts about one minute and is in one small set, where a hotel switchboard operator [Benita Hume] sits. She is wearing earphones, reading a romantic novel.

  “She plugs into a conversation between a young woman and a young man who is proposing marriage. Neither the young woman nor the young man is shown. The audience is in suspense, along with the operator. Will the girl on the phone say yes? The switchboard operator, living vicariously, is ecstatic, showing the audience that the proposal has been accepted.”

  Work on Easy Virtue started even before Downhill was completed. Because Ivor Novello had not been available for his final close-ups in Downhill, Hitchcock arranged to shoot them while he was filming Easy Virtue in the south of France.

  The film was adapted from a play by Noël Coward, famed for his witty dialogue, but it has few intertitles. “The only thing wrong with the silent picture was that mouths opened, and nothing came out,” Hitchcock said. “The talking picture only partially solved that problem.”

  Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) flees England for the French Riviera after enduring a sensational divorce tr
ial. In the south of France, she falls in love with John Whitaker (Robin Irvine), who knows nothing about her past. He proposes, and the couple returns to England where she is introduced to his family at their mansion.

  John’s dominating mother (Violet Farebrother) grudgingly accepts her, but Larita seems vaguely familiar.

  Fearful her past will be discovered, Larita pleads with John to take her back to the south of France, where they were happy.

  John’s mother recognizes Larita from a newspaper photo. While other members of the family are willing to accept Larita, Mrs. Whitaker is resolute, insisting her son divorce the infamous woman.

  Larita returns to divorce court and the headlines. Touching her heart, she tells photographers on the courthouse steps, “Go ahead and shoot—there’s nothing left to kill.”

  These last words from Larita, spoken in an intertitle, represented for Hitchcock his least favorite line written by him in any of his films. Today, the line seems more perceptive and appropriate.

  The power of the media to ruin private lives, finding an individual guilty, not by conviction, but by implication, is a theme that has become even more timely. Apparently the news photographers of 1927 really were not different from the paparazzi who pursue celebrities today.

  In Easy Virtue, Larita meets her mother-in-law in the same way Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, would meet hers years later in Notorious. A menacing figure of an older woman comes down a staircase, “descending and condescending,” as Hitchcock put it, toward her new daughter-in-law.