“He bent reality to his purpose to get the real truth.”
Of Boyle, Hitchcock said, “I would say to him what I wanted to do, knowing it was not impossible, only close to impossible, and he would do it.”
After Suspicion, Selznick loaned-out Hitchcock to Universal to do Saboteur. For Saboteur, Hitchcock originally had hoped to get Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck for the leads, and veteran western actor Harry Carey, Sr., as villain. John Houseman was assigned by Selznick to supervise the writing of the script, which began a lifelong friendship between Houseman and Hitchcock. The film was shot in fifteen weeks and came in almost within budget.
Los Angeles aircraft worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) evades arrest after he is unjustly accused of sabotage. Following leads, he travels across the country to New York trying to clear his name by exposing a gang of saboteurs led by apparently respectable Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger). Along the way, he involves Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane), eventually preventing a major act of sabotage. They finally catch up with Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd), the man who actually committed the act of sabotage at the aircraft factory. Pursuing him to Bedloe’s Island, Barry is unable to save Fry from falling to his death from the Statue of Liberty.
One of the most memorable images in any of Hitchcock’s films is that of Norman Lloyd dangling from the top of the Statue of Liberty. Lloyd explained to me how that was done.
“Hitch had the hand, torch, and balcony built to scale at Universal. The inside of the crown was also built to scale. When in panic I went over the railing, there was a mattress and a grip below to catch me. For the long shot, stuntmen took over for me and Bob.
“For the next shots, which were close-ups, Hitch had the torch dismantled. The thumb and the forefinger piece of the torch, and the crotch of the thumb and forefinger were arranged on the stage floor. The camera was angled at me lying on my stomach on the set piece, and I did all my close-up reactions in that position. Bob Cummings came down the forefinger, but he could only reach the sleeve of my jacket. Then there were intercuts between my close-up, Bob Cummings’s close-up, and the seam where the sleeve was stitched to the jacket, which began to tear.
“When I fell, it had to be in one continuous shot, of Fry in close-up to Fry falling all the way to the base of the statue. People have wondered to this day how this was done.
“The thumb and forefinger section was taken to another studio and attached to a platform six feet high. This platform was on counterweights and rigged to the top of the stage. A hole was cut in the platform, and a camera was placed so it could shoot down through the hole, towards the set piece fixed beneath it. Underneath the whole thing was a saddlelike thing on which I sat, on a pipe about four and a half feet high, based on a black cloth. On a cue, the camera, on the counterweight system, started from a close-up of me, went up in the air to the grid, together with the set piece of the thumb and forefinger, and left me behind, giving the illusion of my falling.
“This was shot at different speeds, in which I did movements of falling rather slowly, like a ballet dancer. By the time the camera got to the top of its move, it had gone from an extreme close-up of me to a very long shot of my apparently falling figure. The small saddle was not visible; the pipe and black cloth, which still could be seen, were painted out later in a traveling matte. As the camera pulled away from me, I gave my best Shakespearean scream.”
“There is one device I have employed many times in assorted variations—the dangling,” Hitchcock told me. “The so called danglee is sometimes held by the so-called danglor, and may or may not fall.”
Hitchcock was later uncertain about whether having the villain dangling from the Statue of Liberty instead of the hero was a good idea. “It would probably have been more effective if the hero were in danger,” he said. “On the other hand, the hero thinks he has to save the villain in order to clear his name. He’s also a decent fellow who would try to save the life of anyone who was in trouble. Res est sacra miser, a person in distress is a sacred thing.
“Well, it was probably best the way it was. No one could have dangled better than Norman.”
“He left an indelible mark on me of what it means to be a director and how to conduct oneself on the set,” Lloyd said. “Hitch always dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. He looked more like a banker than a film director.
“He projected a very special world. He had about him an international aura of the Orient Express, St. Moritz, the best foods, cigars, and vintage wines—all of the fantasies one saw on the screen.”
For Lloyd, the essence of the Hitchcock touch was the blending of humor with real danger, as in the Radio City Music Hall sequence, where real shots are being fired, and the audience is laughing. “It was typical of the balance he could achieve in everything he did. Nobody else could achieve this balance, and then, finally, neither could Hitch.”
Norman Lloyd told me about a lady tourist from Virginia who somehow got mixed up among the extras during location filming. It didn’t bother her that she had to keep getting on and off the boat, before she was allowed to go up in the Statue of Liberty. She had the time of her life, thinking that the coffee and doughnuts and box lunches served to the extras were how everyone was treated in New York. It was discovered too late that she wasn’t an extra, and she couldn’t be located to sign a release, so none of the shots with her could be used.
The scene of Fry looking out at the capsized Normandie was inspired by newsreel footage Hitchcock had seen, and incorporated after the script was written. The navy was concerned because there were plans to press the passenger liner into service as a troop carrier, and sabotage was suspected.
Hitchcock fans have long wondered who played Barry Kane’s friend, Ken Mason, in Saboteur. He sets the plot in motion by bumping into Fry, and then his death in the sabotage fire puts Barry in the position of being the man on the spot who quickly becomes the man on the run. He is not listed in the credits.
In 2004, Norman Lloyd told me why the actor had been so difficult to identify. “Hitchcock was looking for someone to play Ken, a small but crucial part. Then, one day on the set, he found him.
“‘That’s the one’ he said, indicating a tall, well-built young man, good-looking and sympathetic. He wasn’t an actor at all, but a grip. He eventually became the head grip at Universal. His name was Virgil Summers and that was his only screen appearance.”
UNIVERSAL NEGOTIATED WITH Selznick to employ Hitchcock again, and at a considerably higher fee, $150,000 for eighteen weeks. Of this, Hitchcock would receive $50,000, Selznick the rest. Hitchcock was also to get above-the-credits billing for the first time in his career.
For his next subject, Hitchcock chose a short story by Gordon McDonell, “Uncle Charlie,” which was based on a real-life serial killer who murdered twenty-two wealthy widows for their money. To help develop the screenplay, he turned to Thornton Wilder, whose stage play Our Town he greatly admired. Since Wilder was about to join the army’s psychological warfare unit, he was only able to supply a treatment and limited material for the story, and to help Hitchcock select locations. They chose Newark, New Jersey, and Santa Rosa, California, as sharply contrasting locales for Shadow of a Doubt. Alma finished the script, working with Sally Benson, who wrote Meet Me in St. Louis.
The film opens with turn-of-the-century couples dancing to the “Merry Widow Waltz.”
Serial killer Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten) finds a safe hiding place with his sister’s family in Santa Rosa. They believe he is a successful businessman. Uncle Charlie has brought his namesake niece, Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright), a ring, which has an inscription, but not to her.
Uncle Charlie won’t let his picture be taken for the local newspaper, and he avoids two men who want to interview him. One of the interviewers, Jack Graham (Macdonald Carey), confides to young Charlie that they are really detectives. Uncle Charlie is a murder suspect.
Young Charlie reads about the “Merry Widow murderer,” who kills wealthy widows for th
eir money. Her ring has the last victim’s initials on it.
Uncle Charlie pleads with her not to say anything. He will be leaving soon. Afterward, she suspects Uncle Charlie of trying to kill her.
Another suspect is captured, and Uncle Charlie, feeling safe, decides to stay. Charlie demands that he leave in exchange for her silence.
As the train pulls out of the station, he tries to push her into the path of another train. Instead, he is killed.
As Santa Rosa mourns the death of Charles Oakley, Charlie is consoled by Jack Graham, who is in love with her.
“It has been said,” Hitchcock told me, “that I based the character of the mother in Shadow of a Doubt on my own mother. I can tell you that I did not deliberately do so, nor did I deliberately avoid doing so. My characters have their own identities, and for a time, at least, I share my life with them, more perhaps than I do with any except the closest members of my family.
“In this particular case, however, I have to admit that it was a time when I was thinking about my mother, who was in London. There was the constant danger from the war, as well as her own failing health. She was in my thoughts at the time. I suppose that if we think about a character who is a mother, it is natural to start with one’s own. The character of the mother in Shadow of a Doubt, you might say, is a figment of my memory.”
Hitchcock was terribly troubled by the bombing of London and what it meant to his mother, to members of his family, to friends of his and Alma’s. While Alma had gone back to London to fetch her mother and sister, he had been unable to persuade his own mother to come to California. Instead, he had convinced her that she should leave her London home for his Shamley Green country house. Still, he worried, Pat Hitchcock recalled.
Alma Hitchcock remembered their family having a wonderful time filming Shadow of a Doubt. Their daughter, Pat, was there helping in the coaching of the young sister of Charlie, and it was a happy set.
“Everyone knows about how my father said he saw the whole picture in his head before he made the film,” Pat Hitchcock told me. “Well, at home he said that he was happy if he got 75 percent of what he’d seen in his head. Sometimes he got more, and then he was very, very happy.”
“When I met him to talk about being in the film,” Teresa Wright told me, “he described it as if he were seeing it in his mind. The way I think of him is that he had a little projection booth up there in his head.
“On the set, he never raised his voice. I never felt any tension. He would tell you what he wanted without too much instruction, and you would know exactly what to do. You couldn’t make a mistake. If you did, you knew he would be there for you. At the same time, you felt a sense of freedom.
“I remember the actress who played my little sister was from Santa Rosa, and her father owned a grocery store. Hitchcock asked to see it, and he said it reminded him of his own childhood and his father’s greengrocery.
“Shadow of a Doubt is the picture I have taken with me all my life. I wasn’t Charlie. I was an actress. But I think maybe in some ways after that, Charlie journeyed with me all my life. More people ask me about that film than about all the others put together.”
Joseph Cotten told me that Hitchcock was not only a great director, but “really wonderfully easy to work with, one of the best directors I’ve worked with, including Orson [Welles], when we did Citizen Kane, and one of the easiest to get on with.”
Hitchcock said, “Shadow of a Doubt was the rare occasion when suspense and melodrama combined well with character. You know, the family can be so frightening. I do not give my first priority to character, but when good characters come through, it makes me very happy. No ice box chatter there.” This was how he described discussions in the kitchen after the film, when the audience arrives home and “starts taking apart plot discrepancies and character deficiencies.”
“Some of it was shot in the original town,” Hitchcock said, “and at that time, they were shooting an awful lot on the back lot, so it had a freshness.
“The selection of the right house for the family was essential. I had it shopped for very carefully. I wanted to know what it would cost to buy or rent the house. It was very important that the family didn’t live beyond its means. They weren’t that sort. It was also important that they didn’t live below their means. This was a family that knew its place. They didn’t talk about money, or feel the need to think about it.
“We located the perfect place, and the people who owned it were very happy to have their house play in a movie. In fact, they were so happy, they painted it and fixed it up, so it wasn’t right anymore. Fortunately, we were able to undo it all.”
In May 1964, Alfred Hitchcock was invited to speak at the university in Belgrade. It was a great occasion for those fortunate film students who were to have the opportunity to hear Hitchcock speak, to see one of his films, which he was bringing with him, and even to ask questions of the great filmmaker. The film Hitchcock had chosen was Shadow of a Doubt.
Everyone looked forward especially to the question-and-answer part of the program, and began to think of his or her question. At that time, film studies were taken more seriously in Eastern Europe than in the West, and cinema was regarded as something more than art or entertainment.
During the years after World War II, American films were rarely shown in Yugoslavia. Most of the pictures seen there came from Russia, with an occasional politically correct Italian or French film, not intended purely for entertainment and usually with a message. In spite of this, film students in Belgrade were familiar with the name and reputation of Alfred Hitchcock, though few had ever seen one of his films. There was great excitement about his upcoming visit.
Vlada Petric, who was to become a world-acclaimed film professor and the director of the Harvard Film Archive, was at the time a film student in Belgrade and one of those invited to the Hitchcock event. He remembered that everyone liked Shadow of a Doubt, “which he told us was his own personal favorite.”
Petric had given serious thought to what question he might ask, a worthy question that would produce an interesting answer.
When the moment came, he asked Hitchcock his question: “You are fascinated by mystery and suspense, you treat fear. How did you become so interested in these themes?”
Hitchcock said, “That’s a very interesting question. I’ve never told this to anyone before, but I do know exactly. It happened when I was in my cradle.
“I was lying there, too small to move, and over me was the huge face of one of my father’s sisters. My aunt was bent over the cradle, and her big face was moving closer and closer, getting bigger and bigger as it came towards me. Suddenly, this huge face was making horrible sounds, ‘B-bibble, b-bibble, b-bibble,’ as she ran her fingers over her lips.”
Petric always remembered Hitchcock’s answer. Through the years, he noted that while Hitchcock didn’t use the close-up often, he did use it to great effect to create a feeling of horror. Some of the most memorable images in Hitchcock films are in close-up to create intense emotion. Whenever Petric saw one of the horror close-ups, he remembered that evening in Belgrade and thought of the image of that huge face peering into baby Alfred’s cradle.
“THERE WERE ACTUALLY three lifeboats,” Hitchcock told me discussing his next film. “It was like Citizen Kane’s sled, Rosebud. We needed to have a stand-in for the lifeboat and then a stand-in for the stand-in. The difference between the lifeboats and the sleds was when the film wrapped, everyone wanted to take home Rosebud, and no one wanted our lifeboat.”
Starring in Lifeboat was Tallulah Bankhead, a celebrated nonconformist. Among her eccentricities was a disdain for undergarments. George Cukor told me about “Tallulah’s panties” or lack of them. He’d had his own somewhat embarrassing experiences with Tallulah after she asked if she could swim in his pool. “Of course, my dear,” he said. He hadn’t realized she meant without a bathing suit. Not that it bothered him, but his gardener and cook and guests were sometimes surprised, sometimes shock
ed. “George, there’s a naked woman in your swimming pool,” British actor John Mills mentioned to him. “Do you know her?”
Cukor did. “You knew her well, or you didn’t know her at all.” Then he told me the “Tallulah’s panties” story from the days of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.
“The dear girl never wore any panties. In fact, she was way ahead of her time, ahead of Marilyn in not liking to wear any underwear. She was especially against panties.
“Well, she told me that she spent the entire film in the lifeboat. Having the part involved a great deal of climbing in and out of the lifeboat. Every time she got into it, those already sitting there got a pretty good view of her at that rather unusual angle, and it was quickly no secret that she didn’t consider panties part of her costume.
“Someone complained, and the word got back to Hitch, who was told by the powers-that-be that he was supposed to say something about it to her, or delegate that responsibility to someone.
“No one ever said a word to her, and for the entire filming, she never had to don panties.
“I imagine that Hitch saw for himself and thought it funny. He would have been much too staid to say anything to her, but not too staid to have a look.
“Hitch, you know, was full of beans.”
Elizabeth Japp Fowler believed she was the model for the Tallulah Bankhead character. An American living in Ghana, she persuaded the captain of a freighter to allow her to travel on his ship in 1942. The ship was torpedoed on its way to New York, and she spent ten days in a lifeboat with thirty-four men, surviving thirst, hunger, cold, freezing rain, and circling sharks. The press reported that she mourned the Burberry coat she had lost, as the journalist in Lifeboat misses her fur coat, camera, typewriter, and her Cartier bracelet.
Hume Cronyn, who played the sunken ship’s radio operator in the film, talked with me about Hitchcock in general and Lifeboat in particular.
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