“I felt she had great appeal for women,” Hitchcock said. “I believed she had a brilliant future, and I was planning to use her for the part Margaret Lockwood eventually played in The Lady Vanishes.
“She was fresh and natural-looking. Hollywood makeup people would have put a mask on her, but she didn’t care a bit about Hollywood. I didn’t, at the time, know why. The reason was love.”
In 1939, she married Penrose Tennyson, whom she had known since 1934 when he was an assistant director on The Man Who Knew Too Much. Tennyson became a director for Michael Balcon after Young and Innocent and made three films for Ealing before he joined the navy at the outbreak of World War II. He was killed in a plane crash in 1941, at the age of twenty-nine.
Pilbeam returned to films after his death, acting in twelve pictures until she retired from the screen in 1948.
Young and Innocent is best remembered for the wide overhead traveling shot in the hotel ballroom which finishes on a close-up of the twitching eye of the blackfaced drummer. Hitchcock used this shot memorably in Notorious, and again in Marnie, each time to point up something small in a large setting that is really the most important element of the scene.
To accomplish this in one take, Hitchcock asked the studio’s camera workshop to design and construct a variable focal-length, zoom-type lens that, when used with a specially built elevator dolly, would allow the camera to move from a high overhead view of the ballroom to a close-up of the drummer’s twitching eye.
Bryan Langley recalled Hitchcock’s expert knowledge of camera lenses: “He could draw a setup with background, larger or smaller, according to the focal length of the lens, which no one else I’ve ever seen was able to do or even understood that it’s necessary.”
Young and Innocent was based on a novel by Josephine Tey, with the screenplay by Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood, Anthony Armstrong and Alma Reville, who was uncredited.
After a violent argument with her husband, a famous star is discovered by her ex-lover, Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney), drowned on a beach. Police arrive and arrest Tisdall on the testimony of witnesses who saw him with the body. He is accused of the murder.
As he is about to go on trial for murder, he escapes from the courthouse with the help of Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the resourceful daughter of the police constable (Percy Marmont). At first, Erica doesn’t really believe Tisdall is innocent, but she’s so attracted to the young man, she continues to help him elude capture while searching for the real killer, risking her life and her father’s reputation.
Their only lead is provided by Old Will (Edward Rigby), a china mender, who can identify the murderer, a man with a noticeably twitching eye. They track him to a grand hotel, where the murderer is revealed to be the blackfaced drummer in the ballroom’s dance band. Robert’s innocence is established.
Although Erica’s father is not thrilled with Tisdall as a future son-in-law, her expression in the final close-up indicates she will have her way.
Hitchcock appears onscreen in a scene outside the courthouse, wearing a cap and holding a small camera, annoyed because people are blocking his view, and he can’t get his picture. “My cameo appearances,” Hitchcock told me, “were a deliberate move away from realism, reminding the audience, ‘It’s only a movie.’”
IN AUGUST OF 1937, the Hitchcocks made a trip to America on the Queen Mary. Hitchcock and Alma had talked about a possible move to Hollywood, and they were anxious to explore the possibilities firsthand.
Very privately, he had employed an American publicist to be certain the press knew of his arrival. He already was represented by the brother of David O. Selznick, agent Myron Selznick, who lived and worked in England.
The trip did not produce anything in the way of offers, but a personal relationship was established with David Selznick’s representative in New York. The Hitchcocks returned to England in September 1938, where he completed the editing of Young and Innocent. They had made no American commitment, nor did they have in mind their next British film. The Wheel Spins, a 1936 novel by Ethel Lina White, who specialized in mysteries about young women on journeys, was considered. It developed into The Lady Vanishes.
A screenplay had been prepared at Gainsborough for the Hollywood director Roy William Neill, later known for his Universal Sherlock Holmes films. Neill, however, dropped out of the project, so it was given to Hitchcock. He was struck by the resemblance of the story to one he had wanted to do, one that had inspired a German film of 1938 (Veit Harlan’s Verwehte Spuren) and later So Long at the Fair, a 1950 British film with Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde directed by Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough. It is based on the true story of a woman who disappears without a trace at the Paris Exposition of 1890 because she has contracted the plague.
“Our vanishing lady disappears because of a different plague coming on the scene—World War II,” Hitchcock said. “The heroine is supposed to be imagining things because of a bit of a bump on the head she has had.”
I met Sir Michael Redgrave at his last birthday party, in New York. We had the opportunity to speak about what it was like working with Hitchcock during the director’s late British period.
Redgrave remembered it as “life-changing, my first film,” though he had appeared briefly in Secret Agent. At the time, he thought of himself as “of the theater, one of the theater folk” who scoffed at acting in films.
“I was appearing on the stage,” Redgrave said, “but I didn’t have a next part coming up that I really liked, so I decided to try a film. My fellow actors were discouraging, but that only made me feel more determined to do it.” John Gielgud advised him to give it a try for the experience, but Peggy Ashcroft, who had worked in The 39 Steps, advised him to “stick to the stage.”
“I loved to go to the cinema, but I approached it with trepidation as an actor.” Redgrave took the screen test and was offered the lead in The Lady Vanishes.
“I was more or less the right type for the part. I was sufficiently trained to be able to memorize and rattle off my lines, and though I was more of a Redgrave than a Redford, I was not especially self-conscious in front of a camera.
“I wasn’t vain because I really didn’t have anything to be vain about. I didn’t think about camera angles or which was my best side. I didn’t think I had a best profile, or if I did, I couldn’t find it.
“The first thing I did after signing was to regret it. It was like so many decisions we all make, where one immediately has second thoughts. But I was curious to see what picture making was all about, and I assumed I’d learn something.”
The first words of wisdom he heard from the most famous of British film directors were: “Learn your lines, hit your marks, and don’t worry too much.”
“I don’t think Hitchcock thought much of me as an actor. But he didn’t seem worried because I believe he thought he would get a performance from me in the cutting room through his skill. I thought I’d been chosen because I photographed well.
“I can say definitely that Hitchcock said, quote, ‘Actors are cattle,’ unquote, because he said it in my presence. I never knew if it was aimed specifically at me or if he had already had the thought.”
Hitchcock told me, “You don’t have time to massage actors’ egos. If you do, it has been my experience that the appetite grows with the eating. It can be a full-time job for an octopus, holding all those hands.”
In the theater, Redgrave had never enjoyed “hitting chalk marks.”
“I was a stage actor accustomed to being expansive. I believed that there must be a great deal of improvisation in acting, and that the part should be developing continuously.”
Redgrave had some ideas he thought quite clever business, and he thought Hitchcock would be pleased by what he had brought to the character. Quite the contrary. He was allowed to finish his small addition. Then, an extremely serious Hitchcock said, “You can’t do that. It won’t match the other shots.”
Redgrave felt mortified by the rebuke in front
of the cast and crew. “I did not like Hitchcock. I particularly didn’t like his sense of humor.
“I was bored. I’d never been bored in the theater. Not for one minute. I was certain I would never agree to make another film, even if anyone wanted me to, which I was certain they never would after this. I expected to writhe in shame when the picture was released.
“Being in the theater at night and getting up early for the film, I was always tired. I had a terrible time waking up in the morning and I was sleepwalking all day. We had a lot of time to talk since most screen acting is waiting around.
“One day, that fine actor, Paul Lukas, who was in the film, told me he had seen me the night before in The Three Sisters. ‘You’re a real actor,’ he said. ‘But here, you hardly seem to be trying at all.’
“I agreed with him. I not only found it boring, but I was really exhausted, putting all my energy into my nightly performances in the theater.
“‘But, my dear boy,’ he told me, ‘it’s all going into the can, forever. After the director has called, ‘Print!’ it’s too late for you to do it better next time. There is no next time. It’s all there in the can.’
“There is a scene in The Lady Vanishes in which a foreign agent mentions that his perfect command of English is due to his having been educated at Oxford. My character picks up a chair and hits the agent over the head.
“‘Why did you do that?’ I’m asked.
“I say, ‘I was at Cambridge.’ I found this an utterly terrible line to say. Embarrassing. I considered asking Hitchcock to cut it, but to do so might have been disruptive to our relationship.
“When the film opened and as long as it played, everywhere my line, the one I would have wished to have taken out, got the biggest laugh of the film.
“Well, here we are, so long afterwards. The audiences that watched me as a young man are as old as I am and some of them are gone, taking their memories with them. The film screen has a much longer memory. I understand now that when I am gone, I shall probably be remembered best for The Lady Vanishes, about which I was at the time flippant and nonchalant. I had occasion to see the film not long ago, and I felt gratitude to Paul Lukas for helping me gain perspective. I felt gratitude to Mr. Hitchcock for casting me. I came to admire Mr. Hitchcock very much, but never his sense of humor.
“At the time I made the film, I had so little confidence in the way my face would look blown up big on a screen. Seeing the film just a little while ago, I noticed how young I look, and that is forever.”
A group of British tourists, snowbound in an Alpine lodge, finally catch a train out of a Balkan country. One passenger, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), is unenthusiastically returning to London to get married. She meets an older lady, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who disappears after a bandaged patient is brought aboard. When Iris calls attention to Miss Froy’s disappearance, no one will admit that a Miss Froy ever existed, with the exception of an eccentric young musician, Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave). They tell their story to Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), who is really a member of the conspiracy to kidnap Miss Froy and take her off the train as the bandaged patient.
Iris and Gilbert find Miss Froy and free her. She is an English spy on her way to London with an important message encoded in a melody. Before escaping, she teaches Gilbert the melody, in case she doesn’t make it.
The train is diverted and the passengers are attacked by troops, until they manage to commandeer the engine and drive out of the country.
In London, Iris chooses Gilbert instead of her fiancé. They go together to the War Office where Gilbert finds he cannot remember the tune. Then they hear Miss Froy playing it in the next room, and they are reunited.
“I’ll tell you the kind of image I’m proud of,” Hitchcock said. “In The Lady Vanishes, there is a lady disguised as a nun. The audience believes she is a nun, and then I cut to the hem of her robe. When you see her high-heeled shoes, that picture tells the story. No nun, this one.
“This kind of image may come out of my early days in silent films, or it may be just the way my mind works.”
Hitchcock was reunited with cinematographer Jack Cox on this film; it was their twelfth picture together. Director Roy Ward Baker, who was an assistant director on the film, told me, “Cox was very tall, a man of very few words, with a complete lack of pretense, and a sardonic wit. He didn’t chatter, you know. He just got on with his lighting.
“If we had to put the camera up on a rostrum, what you call a parallel lift, Hitch wouldn’t climb up, because he always was fat, even in those days. What he did was to make a sort of thumbnail sketch of what he wanted and give it to Jack Cox. And that was it.
“He always claimed that he could see the film in his mind’s eye, complete, as it would be when it was finished. It was a kind of boast, ‘Only a leg-pull, really,’ as he would say.
“At the same time, that was his principle, that you don’t build a great set and call a lot of actors and a crew and everything, and then sit down and wonder what you’re going to do next. The most vital ingredient for the success of any film is that the people who are making it know what they want and know what they’re doing.”
Baker described Hitchcock as “not particularly friendly, but he wasn’t unfriendly. He was professional, you know. He didn’t waste time on pleasantries. He got on with the work, and so did I.
“I think everyone enjoyed working with Hitchcock. He was an eye-opener, a plucky chap. There was no larking about, wasting time, and stupidities. He was quite a disciplinarian, but he didn’t emphasize it at all; he just was it. The whole crew’s behavior will derive from the behavior of the director, in any case.
“Hitch called on the art director to build one of the sets for The Lady Vanishes in false perspective. It was the platform of a small country railway station, which was made to look much longer than it was by foreshortening each end of the platform to a false vanishing point. Hitchcock had the idea to have some small children dressed as grown-ups and to have them at the rapidly diminishing ends of the platform where there would be normal-sized adult people and buildings in the foreground.
“If it had been anyone but Hitchcock, I would have been dubious about the effect, but he could imagine everything and work it out that way in advance, and when you did it, his technical conception was infallible. And it was always that the technical was only there to carry the story forward in the best possible way, and frequently in the most money-saving way. Hitchcock was able to work within limitations, and when he did, they were no longer limitations.
“I was Hitchcock’s second assistant director, that’s all. But it was a privilege to have worked with him, and it taught me a great deal about the inside, the nuts and bolts, of how you make a film.
“I saw him later when I came to Hollywood to make pictures myself. I visited him at Universal, and he was very genial and amusing, you know, as he always was, at least to me. He gave me tea.
“He was quite a connoisseur of good food, and he fancied the food hampers of Fortnum & Mason. I always remember the image of Hitchcock with his little daughter, of whom he was so proud, having lunch in the train’s make-believe wagon restaurant. We were shooting that day in the dining car. There, in the make-believe restaurant, they had a little make-believe champagne, which had the bubbles, but no alcohol. With a few working lights, the two of them were dining.
“The Lady Vanishes showed the varying moods of people towards what everybody knew was an oncoming war. It was shown in late 1938 in London, and of course it was a tremendous success because he got it bang to rights.”
On the subject of Hitchcock’s legendary love of practical jokes, Baker said, “People warned me to beware of his practical joke side, which apparently amused him, jokes which he found hilarious and no one else did, especially the victim. I must say that during the course of the film, I, personally, never saw any instance of any practical jokery on the part of Hitchcock, only serious determination and focus on planning. The methodical planning
of everything in advance was what I learned from him, and, I repeat, on a Hitchcock set there was no larking about.
“The nearest I ever got to a firsthand account of a joke was from a production manager who worked for Hitchcock. His name was Dicky Bevill.
“Hitch invited Bevill to drive down to his country house at Shamley Green in Surrey for a Sunday lunch. ‘But, Hitch, my car is being repaired.’
“‘No trouble,’ Hitch said. ‘Come by Green Line bus. It passes by your door.’ Hitch was a student of public transportation and could tell you how to get anywhere by bus or train.
“Still, Bevill was skeptical. ‘Are you sure? I’ve never seen a bus running on Elgin Avenue.’
“‘Take the 11:10 a.m. bus and you’ll be there in good time.’
“‘But, Hitch…’
“‘Don’t argue. Just do as I say.’
“So, on Sunday morning, just as Hitch had said, a Green Line bus appeared at 11:10 going to Shamley Green. Of course, Hitch had hired the bus, complete with driver and conductor.”
Bryan Langley offered an explanation for Hitchcock’s often criticized fondness for practical jokes. “He was a great joke maker, but he wasn’t the only one. In those days, soon after the First World War, people were full of practical jokes. This was the fashion at the time in the studios, and I do believe really it was a reaction from the events of the First World War. Many of these people were either in the war or had grown up as children with it.”
Practical jokes in England came into their own even earlier, at the end of the Victorian period, and were especially popular during the Edwardian era, which lasted from 1901 until 1910. In its heyday, people would spend fortunes and great effort and ingenuity to devise elaborate pranks. Hitchcock’s reputation for practical jokes was exaggerated, but he did grow up during this period and admitted he had a liking for them.
As The Lady Vanishes was being completed, Myron Selznick negotiated a seven-year contract with his brother, David, for his client, Alfred Hitchcock. Though other studios had shown interest, the Selznick offer was the only firm one. Seven years seemed a rather long commitment to Hitchcock, but at the same time, it held the promise of security for his family and justified the move to California. Though the Hitchcocks had high hopes for their future in Hollywood, they kept their home in Shamley Green, and paid an exploratory visit to America.
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