“The notion that Hitch was not concerned with his actors is utterly fallacious. I never knew how actors and people could say that. For Lifeboat, we began by sitting around a table for days in long read-throughs, as we would do in the theater. The lifeboat was actually very like a stage.
“Hitch would listen carefully and every once in a while, he would interrupt us with some suggestion like, ‘Speak more slowly,’ or ‘Emphasize that word’—you know, that sort of thing. He very much didn’t try to show us how to play our parts any more than he would have told a mike boom operator how to stay out of the frame. He expected us to know our jobs. That was why he had hired us. I don’t consider that being unconcerned with your actors.
“He had faith in you, and that made you feel good and gave you confidence. There are directors who are backseat actors. They don’t give you a chance to do what you can do.
“I could sense that as we read, Hitch was seeing our words more than he was hearing them. He had such a visual mind, and I feel he was watching the movie unfold in his mind’s eye as all of us spoke the words of the characters. He was working backwards, you might say, from what he saw to what he heard. Other directors work from the dialogue and action to the visual elements of the film. Hitch, I think, had a total concept of the finished movie before we sat down to read, and he was just guiding us all toward what he saw on that screen in his mind.”
Walter Slezak, who played the German U-boat commander, also disagreed with the notion that Hitchcock was unconcerned with his actors. “Far from it,” he told me, “and he knew more about how to help an actor than any director I’ve ever worked with. I remember a young actress who was having trouble with an emotional scene. He told her to lower her voice three tones, take a deep breath, and not breathe again until she’d finished her speech. It worked beautifully.”
John Steinbeck wrote the novella on which Lifeboat was based. Darryl F. Zanuck, who had done Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, was the producer. Jo Swerling and Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay.
In a lifeboat, columnist Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), wearing a fur coat, high heels, and a Cartier diamond bracelet, photographs her own personal tragedy as if it were any other news story. Fellow survivors from the ship torpedoed by a U-boat join her: ship’s engineer Kovac (John Hodiak), radio operator Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), nurse Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson), seaman Gus Smith (William Bendix), steward Joe (Canada Lee), and Mrs. Higgins (Heather Angel), a hysterical Englishwoman holding her dead baby. After the baby is buried at sea, the mother drowns herself. Though the inhabitants of the lifeboat come from vastly different backgrounds, they quickly set aside the social and economic differences that divide them in a united effort to survive.
A German seaman, Willi (Walter Slezak), is picked up. Constance interprets. Willi suggests in German the direction toward Bermuda. During a crisis, he shouts at them in English. He was the U-boat commander.
Gus’s leg must be amputated, and Willi, a surgeon in civilian life, performs the operation. Feverish, Gus becomes a burden, and Willi encourages him to slip overboard. When the group realizes Willi is actually steering them toward a rendezvous with a German supply ship, they push him overboard.
An approaching German ship is sunk, and a young German sailor (William Yetter, Jr.) is pulled from the sea brandishing a pistol. He is quickly disarmed, and they are soon rescued.
When I asked Hitchcock if he thought the characters would keep in touch, he answered, “No, it was a wrap.” When making a film, people become friends, fall in love, vow at the wrap party to always keep in touch, and then return to their lives, forgetting it all.
Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance in a before-and-after reducing ad on the back of a newspaper salvaged from the debris. Conveniently, Hitchcock had just lost more than 100 pounds on a recent diet.
Pat Hitchcock told me that after Lifeboat, her father received many letters from people who had seen the film and, not realizing Reduco was a fictitious product, wanted to know where they could buy it.
“I had wanted to get into the lifeboat,” Hitchcock said, “but Tallulah wouldn’t let me. She was afraid I would sink it. And I would never do anything so undignified as float by, as someone else suggested. What really hurt was they said I would be just as recognizable floating face-down as face-up. I immediately went on an extreme diet, and that was when I thought of using before-and-after photographs of myself on a page in a newspaper.”
NOT LONG AFTER HITCHCOCK moved to Hollywood, Michael Balcon wrote an article about British film people who were deserting England in time of war for Hollywood, singling out a certain “plump” director, whom he didn’t name.
Making light of it, Hitchcock said that what he minded most was being called “plump.” There were attempts at restoring the old relationship between the two men, though it never truly happened. “The words had hurt too much,” Hitchcock said.
Hitchcock, who felt physically cut off from England and World War II, wanted to make a contribution to the war effort. His friend, Sidney Bernstein, director of the British Ministry of Information, offered him the opportunity.
In December 1943, before beginning Spellbound, Hitchcock flew to London. He spent a month there, early in 1944, filming two propaganda shorts to be shown in unoccupied France.
Hitchcock was given a token salary of £10 a week and a suite at London’s Claridge’s Hotel. He had never stayed there before. Thereafter, Hitchcock frequently stayed at Claridge’s when he visited London.
Writing the scripts with Hitchcock was Angus MacPhail, who was at the time also working on Spellbound. The actors were drawn from members of the Molière Players, a French refugee group performing in London. They would remain anonymous to avoid the possibility of reprisals against their families in occupied France. The cinematographer was Günther Krampf, who, before he left Germany in 1932, had photographed Nosferatu, The Student of Prague, and Pandora’s Box. One British actor appeared, John Blythe.
Hitchcock was concerned that occupied France be shown authentically. “We had to be careful not to leave any crusts of bread on the tables, and certainly not any cigarette butts.”
In Bon Voyage, Sergeant John Dougal (John Blythe), a young Scottish airman, has just escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp. In London, a colonel of the Free French Army listens as John describes his “miraculous” escape from occupied France with the help of a fellow escapee, a Polish prisoner of war.
They were taken by members of the resistance to a farm where they stayed with the farmer and his young daughter, Jeanne. John is rescued by a British plane with room for only one passenger. The Polish escapee will leave later.
The French officer tells the Scottish airman that he has been duped, part of a plot to expose the resistance, and that the other man is really a Gestapo agent. This leads to the death of members of the resistance, among them the appealing Jeanne. Members of the resistance take their revenge.
“Bon Voyage shows that the enemy is clever and ruthless, and one must be extra-vigilant,” Hitchcock said.
In Aventure malgache, the Molière Players are rehearsing a play in London during World War II. It is based on the experiences of Paul Clarousse, a Madagascar lawyer, who is playing himself. One of the actors is having trouble understanding his character, who is shown in flashback as Jean Michel, a police chief who was publicly accused of corruption by Clarousse. When the Vichy government takes over Madagascar, Michel joins them, while Clarousse secretly sides with the Allies.
Michel is able to have Clarousse jailed as a traitor when he is caught helping people flee Madagascar to join the Free French. His death sentence is commuted because of his World War I record. Clarousse is offered better prison conditions by Michel if he will reveal the location of a secret Free French radio transmitter, but he refuses. When the British arrive Clarousse is freed, and Michel changes sides again and professes loyalty to the Allies.
When Clarousse tells the actor playing Michel that he greatly resembles his old
enemy, the actor gets angry, and explains he is only rehearsing his part.
The point of Aventure malgache is to show “how the same spirit animated even the furthest colonies,” Bernstein said.
In Bon Voyage, the scene between the French girl and the escaped impostor is cinematically worthy of the best Hitchcock films. With the camera on Jeanne, a shot is fired, and she collapses. Without a cut, a man’s hand comes up into frame holding her address book, and then her delicate lady’s wristwatch. The scene anticipates the murder of Juanita in Topaz.
The two shorts have a visual style similar to that of Hitchcock’s later television series. They are examples of what Hitchcock could achieve at the peak of his creative powers with almost no money, and with unknown actors speaking French.
Bon Voyage and Aventure malgache did not play any part in the British war effort. They were not widely circulated in France. Fifty years afterward, the British Film Institute, which had surviving prints, made them available.
WHEN THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS were liberated by the British, Russian, and American armies in 1945, the full horrors of what they found became known, and Sidney Bernstein went there personally for the British Ministry of Information. He believed it imperative that army photographers document the scene as they found it in each camp; the dead, the dying, and the few survivors, as well as those who ran the camps. The only person Bernstein wanted to have supervise the editing of a film of the horrors was his friend, “the greatest film genius, Alfred Hitchcock.”
Hitchcock agreed immediately. He knew that he was going to be working with unimaginable horrors, if only on film, without his personally having visited the camps. The films proved to be more horrible than Hitchcock anticipated. He told me that even though the tragic images remained in his mind, he never regretted doing it.
Ultimately, the British government decided not to show the film to the Germans, feeling it would work against the morale and rapport of the German citizenry, which was needed to rebuild the country. The relatively unseen film, therefore, remained officially F3080, and unofficially, Memory of the Camps.
Hitchcock had three ideas he considered important in making the film. The first was to film the dead in the extermination camps in wide, slow panning shots, the longest possible with no editing, so that there could be no accusation of trickery.
He wanted to have as many prominent Germans as possible who lived in the vicinity of the camps appear in the film, documenting their presence as the horrors were revealed by the liberating troops. They would then be witnesses who could never deny what they had seen.
He suggested a montage of the possessions of the victims, who, having been told they were going to new homes to be resettled, took with them what they could of their most treasured belongings. These were mostly wedding rings, brooches, handbags, children’s toys, and eyeglasses.
Hitchcock had the idea, which proved very effective, of showing the life of the German countryside in the pastoral areas surrounding the camps, with carefully tended farms. Most startling were the local inhabitants, seemingly not disturbed by their proximity to such unspeakable horror. They ought to be shown, Hitchcock felt, going about their daily lives, involved with their own concerns, even those as close as one mile away, where the overpowering stench made it impossible to ignore what was happening.
The anonymous corpses were stripped of their identities, and from what remained, it often wasn’t possible to tell men from women. The German civilians who lived in the area and who were forced to witness the atrocities appear well dressed and well fed, many of them, indeed, too well fed. Even living as they did, within sight and smell of the camps, they nonetheless claimed they were unaware of what was happening there. Viewing the camps from the inside with a close look at the piles of corpses that had been people and the few pitiful survivors, some of the women wept.
The guards, having become prisoners themselves, remained arrogant, claiming they were only obeying orders. They handled the corpses like store mannequins.
The film wasn’t shown until the late 1980s, on British television, under the title A Painful Reminder, to an audience that tuned in never expecting to see such a disturbing program. Many turned away, unable to bear it.
Hitchcock, like Bernstein, was frustrated because the film he created from work by British, Russian, and American cameramen was not shown. His name on the project did not guarantee its showing, but it did help to preserve it.
WHEN SPELLBOUND BEGAN SHOOTING, David Selznick’s own psychiatrist, Dr. May Romm, was brought in as technical advisor. Norman Lloyd, who played Garmes in the film, recalled that Hitchcock’s melodramatic approach to psychiatry didn’t always coincide with Romm’s conventional approach.
“I was there on the set one day,” Lloyd told me, “when the technical advisor, Dr. Romm, was objecting to something Hitch did in a scene which was a violation of psychoanalytic theory. Hitch said, ‘It’s only a movie, May, and in a movie, we don’t have to stay absolutely faithful to facts.’”
Selznick, who had great faith in psychiatrists, had wanted to do a film with Hitchcock about psychiatry. Hitchcock chose as his subject a book by Francis Beeding called The House of Dr. Edwardes, set in a Swiss asylum. (Edwardes was changed to Edwards for the film.) While he was in London making the French shorts for the British Ministry of Information, he and Angus MacPhail began working on a screen adaptation.
Selznick wasn’t satisfied with MacPhail and replaced him with Ben Hecht, who was more familiar with psychotherapy. Hecht and Hitchcock produced a screenplay quickly after Hecht did some research at mental hospitals around New York City.
Selznick felt no compulsion to follow the novel faithfully, as he had with Rebecca. The original story deals with a madman who takes over an insane asylum. Selznick was most interested in the love story that Hitchcock and Hecht would have to add to the screenplay. “Though David would not have characterized himself that way, he was an extreme romantic,” his first wife, Irene Mayer Selznick, told me. “He was Don Quixote, with a dash of Cyrano and some Parsifal. And he was Faust, who sold his soul.”
Hitchcock saw psychiatry as an interesting element in a suspense film, but he could not imagine telling his own innermost thoughts, feelings, fears, and desires to a stranger, “not even to a friend, to Alma, not even to myself,” he told me. He was, however, fascinated by one aspect of it, the study of the criminal mind.
Dr. Anthony Edwards (Gregory Peck), sent to replace Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) as head of Green Manors mental hospital, is an impostor. When Murchison calls the police, Edwards leaves, followed by Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman), who has fallen in love with him and wants to treat his amnesia. She believes he is a medical doctor whose name is John.
As snow falls outside, John is upset by the parallel lines of sled tracks, and recalls skiing at St. Gabriel Valley with Edwards. Constance accompanies him to the ski resort.
Skiing down a long slope, accompanied by Constance, John relives the memory of his brother being impaled on an iron fence with parallel bars, an accident for which he feels responsible.
He remembers that he is Dr. John Ballantine. After a traumatic military plane accident, he went to Dr. Edwards for treatment. They went skiing together, and Edwards went over the precipice.
Police find the body, but there is a bullet wound. John is accused of murder.
Constance returns to Green Manors, where she confronts Dr. Murchison, accusing him of the murder. When he aims a revolver at her, she calmly rises and leaves. He turns the gun on himself and fires.
It was Dr. Murchison who killed Edwards at the ski slope, and John was a witness. John is cleared, and he and Constance are reunited.
On the original prints of the film, the firing of the gun aimed at the camera, from Dr. Murchison’s point of view, is in color. “Audiences weren’t expecting it,” Hitchcock said, “and I was rather disappointed when people didn’t seem to notice it. I hope they noticed subliminally. That would be best of all.” The red color
has been restored on new prints.
Before the gun is fired, Ingrid Bergman is seen in the background from Murchison’s point of view. Hitchcock asked camera director George Barnes to temporarily abandon his low diffuse lighting on female stars in order to increase the camera’s depth of field. He wanted both the gun and Bergman to be in focus, so the lighting had to be increased. “Ingrid didn’t need any help from the lighting,” Hitchcock said.
For the musical score, Miklos Rozsa won an Oscar. His music featured an electronic instrument known as the theremin. Selznick was furious when he learned that Rozsa had also used it in Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend. That score was also nominated.
“I knew Hitch liked working with me,” Ingrid Bergman told me. “I could feel it, and I felt that way about him. He was a wonderful director, so sensitive. There were actors who said he wasn’t a good actor’s director, but something was wrong with them. He was so sympathetic. He never seemed bored by my concerns, professional or private. He always listened. Hitch was someone I could tell just about anything.
“He had a delicious sense of humor, and he could be a little shocking. It wasn’t so much what he said, but when he said it, always at some inappropriate moment when one wasn’t expecting it. Hitch could talk me out of being nervous and uncertain, which I always was, and he could make me giggle.”
Gregory Peck found a different side of Hitchcock.
“Hitch didn’t seem to like to be personally involved,” Peck told me, “and I got the impression that what he was saying was that he wanted me not to be involved. That was the message I got. Now, maybe it wasn’t the right one, but it was what I understood and what I acted on. I asked him how he wanted me to play a certain scene where I would be in close-up. ‘Blankly,’ he said. I wondered if he was making fun of me. I didn’t know how to do blank.”
While in school, Peck had thought of becoming a doctor, but then he discovered acting. Spellbound gave him an opportunity to live out his early dream. He said it was one of the great advantages of being an actor. “You can live all different sorts of lives. And then, best of all, you can leave them behind on the set and go home to your own life.
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