“EVER SINCE I READ John Buchan’s The 39 Steps,” Hitchcock told me, “I thought it would make a great movie. But I didn’t do anything about it until years later when I reread it.
“Then, I was surprised to find that, despite being full of action, it wasn’t a natural screenplay. Many things didn’t carry over to the screen.
“In the novel, the hero is running from a gang of assassins. We changed that to the police chasing him while he’s chasing the spies to prove his innocence. I also added comedy. There isn’t a great deal of humor in Buchan, and there is no romantic interest. That wouldn’t do for the screen since it’s so often the women who decide which movie the men are going to see. They weren’t going to choose one without a heroine, but Buchan wrote his ‘shockers’ for men.”
Buchan said, in fact, that he wrote The 39 Steps for himself when he found himself with no “shocker” to read. The novel’s hero, Richard Hannay, resembles Buchan.
“Hitch and I both admired Buchan,” Charles Bennett told me, “with this sudden eruption of terror in the life of an ordinary man. But I didn’t like the novel. I thought it was horrible, but with possibilities. Hitch and I liked the double chase.
“Alma’s credit on 39 Steps’s continuity was a way Hitchcock got more money. What is continuity? Alma was an adorable person, but I don’t remember her making much of a writing contribution to that film. But one advantage of working with Hitchcock was the wonderful food when Alma cooked.”
Again, C. W. Woolf tried to stop The 39 Steps from being made, instead assigning Hitchcock and co-producer Ivor Montagu to a biography of Leslie Stuart, the composer of Floradora, a turn-of-the-century musical. They placated Woolf until Balcon came back from America and rescued The 39 Steps.
Shots are fired, and a music hall audience panics. An attractive foreign woman (Lucie Mannheim) asks Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) if she can stay the night at his flat.
Early the next morning, she is stabbed. Before she dies, she tells Hannay he must stop “the 39 Steps” from smuggling a state secret out of England. Clutched in her hand is a map of Scotland, with a town marked. Hannay, now a fugitive, leaves for Scotland to prove his innocence.
On the train, he seeks help from a beautiful young blonde, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), but she informs the police. He escapes and makes his way to Scotland.
He locates Professor Jordan (Godfrey Tearle), the 39 Steps leader, but Hannay is arrested. He escapes, and then is again arrested by two plainclothesmen, after being identified by Pamela.
The men, not really policemen, handcuff Hannay and Pamela together, but in handcuffs they escape and register at an inn. Finally, Pamela believes Hannay’s story and agrees to help him. They go back to London.
Returning to the music hall, Hannay sees an act he remembers from his previous visit, Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson), who can answer any question of fact. Hannay asks, “What are the 39 Steps?” As Memory compulsively recites the answer, Jordan shoots him, and the police shoot Jordan.
Dying, Memory tells Hannay and Pamela his proudest achievement—memorizing the complex secret formula that was to be smuggled out of England.
“Mr. Memory is one of my favorite characters,” Hitchcock told me. “I have many favorites among those who people my films, but none of whom I’m fonder than Mr. Memory. The character is based on a real person named Datas, who had an act in London when I was young. I found Memory’s compulsion to answer quite fascinating.
“He was neither a magician nor a genius, you see. Memory had this one special talent. Otherwise, he would have been ordinary, but his pride in it made him a victim. He couldn’t help showing it off, even at the cost of his life.”
Madeleine Carroll had not been Hitchcock’s first choice to be Pamela, but Alma had persuaded her husband to cast her. For Carroll, the part was expanded.
“She would have played the smaller role if I’d asked her,” Hitchcock said. “But she understood what a good part it was for her, and I wanted to get more of her real personality on the screen.
“She was extremely likable. Before The 39 Steps, she’d played rather cold, humorless types, but she was a good comedy actress. She was a wonderful sport about Robert Donat dragging her over the Scottish moors during a rainstorm. The weather was our regular problem.
“I am often accused of perpetrating inconsiderate practical jokes, but I never purposely left Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed together for a whole day, as rumor had it. The key being misplaced was accidental, and certainly not for long. We did, after all, have other scenes to shoot with them. I would never risk time or money, placing my film in jeopardy.
“It is true, however, that I played a bit of a joke on Robert Donat. When he complained that his suit had been ruined in the waterfall scene, I went out and bought him another one from a nearby thrift shop—a child’s sailor suit. Then, I told him I’d had a fine tailor make it especially for him.”
When the picture came out, Hitchcock took Pat to see it. “She was only seven and frightened when the woman was stabbed, so I told her, ‘It’s only a movie.’”
Pat said, “It was just a very normal life at our house. My father was a wonderful father, so dear and funny. He liked it when I was mischievous. He was. Sometimes when I was very young, I would wake up and look in the mirror, and he had drawn a clown’s face on me. This happened a lot. He never woke me, and I never knew who I would be.”
“THERE IS A NO-MAN’S-LAND between good and evil. It is this gray area which interests me,” Hitchcock told me. That was the theme of Secret Agent.
The film was drawn from two Somerset Maugham short stories, “The Traitor” and “The Hairless Mexican,” which were included in the Ashenden collection. Balcon had become interested in the subject when he saw a play by Campbell Dixon based on “The Hairless Mexican.” The project was given to Hitchcock and Montagu. A key difference between Dixon’s play and the Maugham story was the addition of a female spy who provides the love interest, an essential of the Hitchcock touch. Hitchcock also chose glamorous settings, such as the Alps, grand hotels, and international trains, his own preferences.
Maugham had based his Ashenden spy stories on his own experiences as a British spy during World War I. Driving an ambulance in France, Maugham volunteered for espionage duty and was posted to Switzerland. The character of Robert Ashenden became Maugham’s alter ego in a series of short stories based on his real career as a spy.
Novelist Edgar Brodie assumes a new identity as a secret agent. As Richard Ashenden (John Gielgud), he is assigned to kill a German agent going to a meeting with Arab leaders sympathetic to Germany.
In Switzerland, Ashenden is joined by a professional assassin, the General (Peter Lorre), and, as cover, a beautiful wife, Elsa (Madeleine Carroll). Courting Elsa is an American playboy, Robert Marvin (Robert Young).
They mistakenly kill the wrong man (Percy Marmont), a sympathetic Englishman traveling with his devoted German wife and their beloved long-haired dachshund. When the elderly Englishman is killed and his wife left alone, the General finds the mistake funny and laughs, but Ashenden and Elsa decide to resign.
Ashenden and the General discover that the German spy is Marvin. Not knowing this, Elsa departs for Greece with Marvin. At the station, Ashenden and the General find Elsa waiting for him. Seeing Marvin board the Constantinople train without her, they follow.
On the train, Marvin finds Elsa alone and confronts her. Ashenden and the General arrive as planes bomb the train. Marvin, dying in the wreckage, shoots the General.
After a montage of successful Allied advances in Turkey, a postcard to London announces: “Home safely, never again, Mr. and Mrs. Ashenden.”
John Gielgud was selected for the film because Hitchcock saw a resemblance between Ashenden and Hamlet, and he was fond of using stage actors because “they weren’t afraid of speaking.” He found Gielgud “arrogant,” however, and the actor felt that he received no help from his director. Gielgud was well into his eighties when I spok
e with him in New York City.
“My performance was taken for granted, and I was unaccustomed to being taken for granted. Hitchcock was, I learned later from others who worked with him, rather stingy with praise. In the theater I was used to the nourishment, after a performance, of audience applause. In film work, one looks primarily to the director, or possibly a co-star. Not only was little forthcoming from Hitchcock, but I didn’t establish a warm relationship with Madeleine Carroll. She was very good, but when our scenes ended, she seemed to be inhabiting another world. I might say the same for Peter Lorre, except that he really was in another world, drugs, you know.
“He was also an accomplished film actor who knew how to steal a scene by inserting business into the take that he hadn’t used in rehearsal. At the time, I was annoyed. I think now it was my own inexperience with the film medium which was responsible for my insecurity and subsequent stiffness. Then, too, I didn’t feel I was good-looking enough to be a screen leading man, especially with someone as beautiful as Madeleine Carroll. But when I saw the film rather recently, I was struck by how well we all played together.
“I have always been a passionate film fan, being an early member of the London Film Society, along with Hitchcock, whom I would see there. But in those days, it was considered beneath one’s dignity, as a stage actor, to accept employment in films. So, when I did take a few parts in the silents, I didn’t tell anyone and hoped my friends wouldn’t notice.
“I avoided making films. It was terribly exhausting to have to get up early in the morning after you’d been working in the theater the night before. And then, you’d always be thinking about the performance that evening. I must admit that I really did Secret Agent for the money.
“Your faults are hidden on the stage, and you seem grander than you are. In the films, every defect is magnified. And it’s forever.
“For many years, I stopped making films entirely, and I blamed Hitchcock for this, but it wasn’t his fault. Looking back, I realize I didn’t have much confidence in my talent as a film actor and, when I first saw the film, I thought my performance was rather poor. When I saw it decades later, I was stunned—by how young I looked.
“Actually, I rather enjoyed working with Hitchcock. He was a great joker. Now, I love the film and treasure my appearance in it.”
Making her English-language film debut in Secret Agent was Lilli Palmer, who plays Peter Lorre’s girlfriend, Lilli. Tom Helmore is the colonel in the steam bath. Michael Redgrave makes a brief appearance as an army officer. The coachman is the legendary French actor Michel Saint-Denis, who was a friend of Gielgud’s. Robert Young, already an established star in Hollywood, assumed the role of the villain, a part that was tempered with comedy.
The murder of the sympathetic British man mistaken for a German spy changed the tone of the film from spy thriller to tragedy. He is an outstanding example of another Hitchcock wrong man, although Hitchcock preferred to think of that character as “a man on the spot.”
“ ‘DESMOND TESTICLE. Where are you Desmond Testicle?’
“My most vivid memory of Sabotage was Alfred Hitchcock calling out to Desmond Tester,” Sylvia Sidney told me. “Desmond was the boy who played my little brother. Tester was his last name, and I could never forget it, because whenever Hitchcock would call upon him, he would call out in that incredible voice of his, every syllable clearly enunciated, ‘Is Des-mond Tes-ti-cle here?’”
It was in 1998 at New York City’s legendary Players Club that Sidney talked with me about her memories of 1936, more than sixty years earlier, when she was the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage.
“The boy was terribly embarrassed, but Hitchcock seemed to get a great deal of pleasure out of that. I didn’t think the joke was funny in the first place. I certainly didn’t think it was funny in the second place. And it didn’t get funnier with repetition for anyone except Hitchcock, who seemed to enjoy it so much. I personally thought it was a cruel thing to do to a child who couldn’t do anything about it except be red-faced. Fortunately, it never seemed to affect the boy’s performance, which was very good. I often wondered what became of him.
“Then, some years later, I met someone who had been working on the Sabotage set, and he said he happened to run into Desmond, somewhere like Australia, I think. The person told me that they were reminiscing about the picture, and he expressed his sympathy to Desmond about how Hitchcock had made fun of him. And you know what? Desmond said he thought it was very funny!”
Sidney and I were standing in front of a painting of the celebrated nineteenth-century actor Edwin Booth. Indicating Booth, she said, “His fame as a great actor was eclipsed by his brother, John Wilkes Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln. The negative always gets more attention than the positive.
“If I’d known how famous Alfred Hitchcock was going to be, I would have paid more attention to what he was doing. And if I’d known how long people were always going to be asking me how it was to work with Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, I would have taken notes.
“I guess I preferred Hitchcock to Fritz, who could be cruel. Hitchcock wasn’t unpleasant, but he was strange. He seemed to be more interested in things than in people. He treated props like actors. When we did the murder scene at the end, where I kill Oscar Homolka, Hitchcock was more interested in the knife than in either of us. He would just tell us, ‘Look to the right. Not so much. Less. Look away.’ He never said, ‘You’re doing it right.’ When he stopped giving you any directions, you knew you were doing it right.”
Charles Bennett remembered Sylvia Sidney as being extremely unhappy during the shooting of Sabotage. “She just hated Hitchcock! He called her and courted her for the picture, and then paid no attention to her. I thought she was very good. Hitch was a very tubby, brilliant man. He was tough to love and easy to hate.”
Sabotage is loosely based on the Joseph Conrad novel The Secret Agent.
Disguised as a greengrocer’s assistant, police sergeant Ted Spencer (John Loder) investigates a suspected saboteur, Mr. Verloc (Oscar Homolka), a cinema owner. He makes friends with Verloc’s young wife (Sylvia Sidney) and her younger brother, Stevie (Desmond Tester).
Desperate for money, Verloc agrees to blow up the Piccadilly tube station during a parade. Before the parade, he receives a bomb set to go off at 1:45 p.m. Hiding it in a film can, he gives the can to Stevie to deliver to the Piccadilly underground station, admonishing him to do so before 1:30. As Stevie passes Spencer and Mrs. Verloc, they notice the film can.
Stevie, distracted along the way, is late. The bomb goes off on a London bus, killing him and the other passengers, including a small, friendly dog.
Spencer, finding pieces of the film can in the wreckage, understands what has happened. Mrs. Verloc confronts her husband, who admits his guilt, but blames her “Scotland Yard friend” for Stevie’s death. As he moves toward her threateningly, she kills him with a carving knife.
The bomb maker returns to remove any evidence of his complicity, and accidentally blows up the theater along with Verloc’s body.
Mrs. Verloc and Spencer are free to find what happiness they can.
Robert Donat was originally scheduled to play the part of Verloc, but he suffered from very bad asthma and was incapacitated by it just before shooting started. Sylvia Sidney remembered Oscar Homolka as “very old school, very old-fashioned in his approach to acting. I wasn’t used to this.”
Sidney had looked forward to working with Hitchcock, the most famous British director of that moment. She was enjoying a fine Hollywood career, which included playing the lead in Fritz Lang’s Fury. During a visit to England, she had been signed by Michael Balcon for Sabotage. She was, in fact, the reason the picture could be made.
The actress had expected to learn something from Hitchcock, but when he wanted to shoot the end of a scene before the beginning, even before they had rehearsed it, she began to wonder. His methods were so unorthodox she decided that “maybe he was going to have the rehearsal after the wrap, but h
e seemed to know what he was doing.” When she saw the film and her performance in it, she decided that while he was a bit aloof, he was a great director.
Sidney loved dogs, so she was particularly offended by what she considered “the unnecessary death of the darling dog.” She told Hitchcock so and was unsatisfied then and through the years by his reply: “It’s only a movie, Sylvia.”
“I think Hitchcock made a terrible mistake when he had the people in the bus, my young brother, and that adorable little dog blown up,” Sidney continued.
When Sidney died, she left her white bulldog to New York City’s Players Club, a favorite place of hers, where he became their mascot.
Hitchcock, however, was well aware that he had broken a prime rule of his own by killing Stevie. “Once you have established the heroes and heroines, you must rescue them at the last second,” he told me. “That’s because you have transferred the feelings of danger facing your characters to the audience. The only way they can enjoy the sensation of the hero and heroine facing death is knowing they will be saved. If you don’t do this, you have betrayed this unspoken agreement with your audience.”
Sabotage was not shot on location. An entire city block was built for it on a field near Harrow in order to avoid the pitfalls and inconveniences imposed by shooting on the streets of London. “But there was one I couldn’t avoid, the English weather. We were held up for the same reason we would have been held up in the West End. Rain.”
WHEN YOUNG AND INNOCENT was released in early 1938, it was widely anticipated not only as a new Hitchcock thriller, but also as Nova Pilbeam’s first adult role. She was fourteen when she played the girl who is kidnapped in The Man Who Knew Too Much, and eighteen for Young and Innocent.
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