“My Sean was so overjoyed, he set about writing a new play that would be right for a Hitchcock film. He wrote the screenplay. It was called Within the Gate, and it became a stage play. Hitchcock liked it, but it didn’t happen as a movie with him. I know Sean would have liked to have done another film with Hitchcock, but he wasn’t interested in doing one with any other director.
“With the film Juno and the Paycock, Hitchcock’s name joined my Sean’s, two of the great names of this century. Now I myself think how wonderful it is that it exists, Juno and the Paycock, an Alfred Hitchcock film, and, like Sean said, with all the great actors of that moment.”
Eileen O’Casey was welcomed as a great celebrity at the Savoy, and she enjoyed it when the hotel, happy to have Mrs. Sean O’Casey as a guest, didn’t present us with a check.
In Dublin during the 1920s, a Republican Army soldier has been killed after being betrayed by an informer. Angry mobs roam the streets and machine gun fire is heard.
Juno Boyle (Sarah Allgood) supports her lazy husband, “Captain” Jack Boyle (Edward Chapman) with the help of their daughter, Mary (Kathleen O’Regan). Lurking in the background is their morose son, John (John Laurie), who has lost an arm in a Republican Army skirmish.
A lawyer, Charles Bentham (John Longden), informs the Boyles that they have inherited £2,000 from a distant relative. Mary believes she and Bentham will soon be married.
The Boyles go on a spending spree, and then learn that Bentham has left for London with their inheritance. Mary is pregnant. John is losing his mind. Two men in trench coats arrive to take John away.
A neighbor tells Juno that John has just been machine-gunned as an informer. Juno and Mary make plans to leave a worthless husband and father, the Captain, who has gone to get drunk.
After Mary has left, questioning the truth of religion, Juno stands alone, still firm in her faith.
The greatest problem for early sound was post-production. There wasn’t any. Everything heard in Juno had to be produced while it was being shot, and it couldn’t be changed afterward. In one scene, Hitchcock had to direct an orchestra, a singer, a crowd, and the sound of machine gun fire, all offstage, while his camera, encased in a soundproof booth, was being dollied. “All of this at once,” Hitchcock said, “and it couldn’t be changed, only reshot. The amazing thing was it worked the first time.”
Barry Fitzgerald, who created the part of the Captain in the first Abbey Players production of Juno and the Paycock in 1924, made his screen debut as the Orator. The Orator’s speech at the beginning of the film was not in the play, but written specially for Hitchcock by O’Casey.
Sara Allgood, who had played Anny Ondra’s mother in Blackmail, re-created her role from the original production and two London runs of Juno. Her younger sister, Maire O’Neill, reprised the role she created, and Sidney Morgan also came from the Abbey Players productions.
IN 1930, HITCHCOCK directed a short, An Elastic Affair, and segments of two revue films, Elstree Calling and Harmony Heaven. The revue film was an early example of sound, giving the studio the opportunity to display its stars while exploiting the novelty of synchronized sound.
The next feature Hitchcock would direct was “a talker,” as the British called the new sound film, in two languages. Murder! and Mary were shot simultaneously in 1930, based on the same play, using the same sets and technical crew, but with German actors replacing the English actors for Mary. Herbert Marshall and Norah Baring starred in the English version, and Alfred Abel and Olga Tschechowa in the German. Murder! and Mary were based on Enter Sir John, a play and novel by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, who wrote Under Capricorn.
Actress Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is accused of murdering fellow actress Edna Bruce, though she claims she has no memory of the crime. She is found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.
One of the jurors, playwright-director Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), comes to doubt Diana’s guilt. He writes a play recreating the crime, hoping that the real murderer will reveal himself when confronted with a reenactment of the murder.
Diana appears to be protecting one of the members of the troupe, someone she identifies as a “half-caste.” Sir John locates the man, Handel Fane (Esme Percy). He was a member of the repertory company at the time of the murder and left to become a trapeze artist.
Reading for the part, Fane realizes he has been found out, and hangs himself dramatically in midair during one of his high-wire performances. Afterward, Sir John receives a note of confession by Fane.
Diana, released from prison, stars with Sir John in his next play, which is about the case. It’s evident that she will also be starring with him in private life.
“What people most remember about Murder!,” Hitchcock told me, “was Herbert Marshall’s soliloquy in front of the shaving mirror.” His lips don’t move while he’s looking into the mirror, but we hear him speaking his thoughts about the unfairness of the verdict in which he played a role. At the same time, a radio broadcast of the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde is heard.
“This was 1930, and we didn’t know much about sound mixing yet. The only way to do it then was to record Marshall beforehand, and then play his voice back while we shot the scene, with a thirty-piece orchestra in the background.
“We had a chance to hear the results before we shot the German version. The orchestra had been playing too loudly, and sometimes Wagner drowned out Marshall. When we shot Abel, we had them play more softly; consequently, it’s the more successful in this respect.”
Hitchcock drew on his own memory for some of the comic business in Mary. In the opening, the wife has to dress in a hurry without taking off her nightgown because, as Hitchcock told me, “In the Victorian England I was born into, a woman would never think of exposing herself, even under dire circumstances. Because she’s in such a panic to get dressed while preserving her modesty, it takes her much longer.” He based this on a moment when he had glimpsed his own mother trying to get into her bloomers, putting both of her legs into the same bloomer leg.
The jury room scene comes closest to Hitchcock’s early ideas of how sound film would continue the poetic tradition of the silent picture. Sir John is coerced into a guilty verdict by all of the jurors converging upon him like a Greek chorus, chanting in unison, “Guilty! Guilty!” This type of sound picture, which Hitchcock hoped to make the standard, quickly gave way to the literal, naturalistic cinema that audiences preferred.
Bryan Langley, an assistant camera operator on both Murder! and Mary, talked with me in 2003 about making those films in 1930.
“Hitchcock had been at the Babelsberg Studio in UFA, so he had a good smattering of German. On many occasions, he and the actors and everybody would be talking in German, and I was the camera assistant trying to understand what they were saying. My grip assistant, who pushed the dolly, was a Jewish man who spoke Yiddish, and he could understand German. So my instructions came from the German-speaking actors and whoever via the Yiddish-speaking grip assistant.”
Langley remembered that Hitchcock said, “‘Achtung!’ for action, and in German, he’d say, ‘Lick your lips.’ This was for the girls, you see. Before the take, they had to lick their lips to make them shine.”
“A great deal of the humor,” Hitchcock said in discussing the two films, “is based on the difficulties of the lower class trying to adjust to the upper class and the upper class trying to adjust to the lower class. This kind of British humor doesn’t travel well. In Murder! Sir John is an actor who becomes a gentleman, while in Mary, he is a gentleman who becomes an actor.”
Markham’s inability to speak at the opening without his false teeth is left out of Mary. The difficulty his modest wife has in getting into her bloomers in front of her husband without taking off her nightgown is simplified to putting on her stockings. Most of the comic exaggeration in Murder!, such as Markham’s feet sinking ankle-deep into Sir John’s rug, is not repeated in Mary.
At the German actor’s insistence, the sc
ene with Sir John in bed with the children and a kitten climbing all over him was modified. Only one child, a little girl, climbs onto Abel’s bed and hugs him, while one little boy stands politely beside the bed holding the kitten, thus preserving Abel’s dignity.
When Sir John visits Diana (Mary in the German version) in prison, the women guards are menacing. In Murder!, there are several ominous close-ups of them, while in Mary, they remain mere background figures. A scene with Diana in a cell watching the shadow of the gallows growing larger is not included in Mary.
At the end of Murder!, Sir John and Diana greet each other in a drawing room that turns out to be a stage set. This scene is omitted in Mary, which ends with the next-to-last scene in Murder!, Sir John and Mary in the back seat of his limousine, obviously in love.
The character, Sir John Menier, Hitchcock said, was lightly based on Gerald du Maurier, a famous actor-writer-producer, who was also the father of writer Daphne du Maurier and a prank-pal of Hitchcock’s.
Once, Hitchcock invited Sir Gerald to a dinner party at the Café Royale in Regent Street, along with two hundred other guests. He told him that the evening was a fancy dress party, and he should wear a costume. Du Maurier arrived in an elaborate Shakespearean costume. Everyone else was in formal attire. During dessert, a naked girl entered the restaurant, crossed the room, and sat down on Sir Gerald’s lap, all arranged by Hitchcock.
In Murder!, Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance with a woman, walking past the murder victim’s house. He does not appear in Mary.
Alma and Hitchcock worked on both the English and German versions of the screenplay adaptation. Hitchcock’s directing experience in Germany gave him enough confidence to direct the actors, but “Languages are a great deal more than words,” he told me. “They’re full of idiomatic expressions with subtle shades of meaning that take years of living in the language to understand and, even more important, to feel.”
The Hitchcocks learned enough German to put it to use as their “secret language” at home when they didn’t want their daughter, Pat, to understand what they were saying. Pat told me she wished they had used the language more often, so she could have learned it.
“THE SKIN GAME had a baronial hall,” Langley told me. “There were two big Great Dane dogs who had to parade through this thing. And their feet made—their toenails, shall we say—made an awful noise on the sound recording, ‘Clunk, Clunk, Clunk.’ So they had to make little booties to put on their feet, and then paint their toenails on these little booties for these Great Danes to walk around in silence.”
The Skin Game was based on the play of the same name by John Galsworthy, produced on the London stage in 1921. To protect their unspoiled land from outside developers, the gentry of Long Meadows resort to blackmail, but in doing so, they compromise their own integrity, and the changes are not prevented.
Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn), a self-made industrialist who feels snubbed by the local gentry, breaks his word not to develop the rural property he bought from Hillcrist (C. V. France). He intends to develop the land the Hillcrists cherish most, the Cintry. To block him, Hillcrist persuades the owner of the Cintry to agree to an auction. In the bidding, Hornblower gets the property.
Finding out something damaging about the past of Hornblower’s daughter-in-law (Phyllis Konstam), Mrs. Hillcrist (Helen Haye) resorts to blackmail to save the Cintry.
At the prospect of being exposed, the pregnant daughter-in-law attempts suicide. Fearing he may have lost his grandchild, Hornblower loses all interest in being socially accepted, and vows to leave.
Hillcrist has beaten Hornblower in “a skin game,” a swindle, but victory is not sweet. “When we began this fight, our hands were clean,” he tells his wife. “Are they clean now? What’s gentility worth if it can’t stand fire?”
Most of the film’s auction scene is shot in one camera setup, following the bidding from the auctioneer’s point of view in a series of rapid pans. Then, at the climax of the bidding, it changes unexpectedly to rapid cutting as the auction takes a surprising turn.
In October of 2002, I was at the Savoy Hotel dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the British Film Institute. Seated next to me was Jack Cardiff, the acclaimed cinematographer who had worked on Under Capricorn for Hitchcock in 1949. Cardiff, however, had met the director much earlier, and he shared his memories with me.
“I first knew about Hitch towards the end of 1928, when I was fourteen. I was working then at Elstree, in silent films. I remember that he was on a nearby stage making Blackmail. I hadn’t met him yet. But then, two years later, he made The Skin Game.
“I was then a humble numbers boy, the guy who puts the number board in, and with sound, you did the clappers. That’s when you clap two pieces of wood together so the editor can synchronize the sound to the picture.
“Originally, with the first sound films, it was considered so important, the director did the clappers. After a while, Hitch got fed up with it—‘Why am I doing this?’—and it was put onto the poor little numbers boy. So I had to do the numbers and also do the clappers. That was a long time ago.”
“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED in off-center people,” Hitchcock told me. “My picture Rich and Strange is about such people. The young couple doesn’t even know they’re off-center until opportunity knocks. Then, it almost knocks them over.”
Fred Hill (Henry Kendall), tired of his middle-class existence, yearns for excitement. He is granted this wish when a rich relative gives him a small fortune. Fred quits his secure but boring job, and he and wife, Emily (Joan Barry), embark on a world tour.
After the shock of seminude revues in Paris, they board a luxury liner. Fred’s first taste of the grand tour is seasickness. Emily, unaffected, enjoys shipboard social life. She is attracted to Commander Gordon (Percy Marmont), an older man.
Fred recovers and retaliates by fixing his attentions on an exotic woman who claims to be a princess (Betty Amann). Fred and Emily find themselves spending more time with their new interests than with each other.
In Singapore, Emily learns that the Princess is really a German actress who intends to steal Fred’s money. Emily warns him, but it’s too late. The Princess has left with his money. They book passage on a cargo ship.
One morning, they awaken to find the ship abandoned and sinking. A Chinese junk rescues them. On the junk, life is unbelievably hard, but enduring the ordeal reunites them.
Back home, they resume their dull, ordinary life, not seeming changed by their experience.
Only Joan Barry’s voice had appeared in Blackmail. In Rich and Strange, all of her appeared.
Bryan Langley remembered that despite the low budget, a second unit was sent to Paris to shoot footage at the Folies Bergère, and background scenes were filmed in Alexandria, Egypt.
Rich and Strange may have been influenced by the Hitchcocks’ own previous shipboard adventures before they married. The film, however, was based on a novel.
Hitchcock especially liked the actress who played the eccentric Miss Imrie, Elsie Randolph. It was her first screen role. He promised her that he would use her again, and Hitchcock did not forget. Forty years later, Elsie Randolph would appear in Frenzy.
Though Rich and Strange was shot before Hitchcock’s next film, Number 17, it was released afterward, in December 1931.
FOLLOWING THE SKIN GAME, Hitchcock, Alma, and Pat had embarked on a world cruise. He returned to England with ideas that would be used in Rich and Strange. The film he wanted to do next was John Van Druten’s stage comedy London Walls. Instead, British International assigned him Number 17, a 1925 stage play by J. Jefferson Farjeon, while another director, Thomas Bentley, was assigned the Van Druten play. Hitchcock had not wanted to do Number 17, and Bentley had. “Typical of producers,” Hitchcock said.
Number 17 is a comedy-thriller, a popular genre of the time. A group of seemingly unrelated people meet in an unoccupied house for no apparent reason. Then, as the plot progresses, it turns out they are a
ll there for the same mysterious reason. That reason might be described as a “MacGuffin,” Hitchcock’s later term for something that motivates characters to take dangerous chances for something they must have. “MacGuffins are not totally explainable,” he said, “or they wouldn’t be MacGuffins.”
In The 39 Steps it’s a secret airplane engine design, in The Lady Vanishes and in Foreign Correspondent it’s a secret diplomatic message, in Notorious it’s uranium ore, and in North by Northwest it’s rolls of microfilm. In Number 17, the MacGuffin is simply a diamond necklace. “It doesn’t matter what it is,” Hitchcock explained, “just that everyone wants it.” Hitchcock explained how the MacGuffin got its name:
“Two men are traveling on a train to Scotland. One of them is carrying an odd parcel. The other man says, ‘What have you there?’ and he answers, ‘A MacGuffin.’
“‘What’s a MacGuffin?’
“‘It’s a special device designed to trap wild lions in the Scottish Highlands.’
“‘But there aren’t any lions in the Scottish Highlands.’
“‘Then, this is no MacGuffin.’
“The MacGuffin, you see, is only important if you think it’s important, and that’s my job as a director, to make you think it’s important.”
The play was a parody of melodramatic thrillers and was written for the actor who starred in it, Leon M. Lion, who also helped finance the film.
A vacant mansion is the meeting place for a gang of jewel thieves. It is also shelter for Ben (Leon M. Lion), a homeless seaman.
Gilbert Allardyce (John Stuart), a private detective, investigates. There he finds Ben, a body, and Rose, a neighbor (Ann Casson), along with members of the gang. Gang leader Sheldrake (Garry Marsh) arrives with a stolen diamond necklace.
After tying up Allardyce and Rose, the gang escapes through a basement door leading to a railway spur. Before leaving, Nora (Anne Grey), a sympathetic gang member, unties them.
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