“Ingrid was warm and wonderful. She was very young, and she had a fresh quality, but she had more confidence than I did. No wonder. She was beautiful, more beautiful in person than on the screen.
“She was always very encouraging to me, if I felt neglected. Hitch gave Ingrid much more attention than he did anyone else, including me. Especially me. Well, I don’t blame him. The most important thing she understood right away, I didn’t understand. She told me, ‘Hitch will tell you if you aren’t doing it right. It’s a great compliment if he doesn’t speak to you.’ I wanted to believe her. Now, I know it was true. I wish I could say, ‘Thank you, Hitch,’ but I don’t have the number up there.
“He was a very reserved man on the outside. Perhaps on the inside, too. I wouldn’t know about that. Personally, I always felt he was having a very good time working, and that he had great warmth.
“The Hitchcock movies seem so new. It’s hard to believe he isn’t making them now.”
At Hitchcock’s suggestion, surrealist painter Salvador Dali was brought in to help design the dream sequence, which was to be directed by the legendary production designer, William Cameron Menzies. Very little of what Hitchcock and Dali planned was used in the film, and Menzies declined credit for his work on the sequence. Peck remembered parts of the dream sequence that were cut.
“Selznick agreed to make my nightmare an unforgettable visual, as Hitchcock wanted. He went to Dali with the commission. As I would be lying there, the audience would share my nightmare.
“There were four hundred human eyes which looked down at me from the heavy black drapes. Meanwhile a giant pair of pliers, many times my size, would appear and then I was supposed to chase him or it, the pliers, up the side of a pyramid where I would find a plaster cast of Ingrid. Her plaster head would crack and streams of ants would pour out of her face. Ugh. Well, the ants ended up on the cutting room floor.
“I asked Hitch about why I was having a greatly curtailed nightmare. He said, ‘The ants’ contract was canceled. We couldn’t get enough trained ants, and Central Casting said all of their fleas were already gainfully employed. Aside from that,’ he added, ‘David [Selznick] decided it would make audiences laugh.’”
I WAS SITTING BETWEEN Kim Hunter and Elia Kazan at the Players Club in New York during the memorial tribute for playwright Sidney Kingsley, as Hunter told us about her experience with Hitchcock.
“I was under contract to Selznick at the time and not working, so I was put to work as a stand-in for Ingrid while Hitchcock auditioned a group of actors trying out for the part John Emery finally got [Dr. Fleurot]. He’s the psychiatrist who’s trying to seduce Ingrid.
“Anyway, Hitch gave an expansive, articulate description of the character, who he was, what he wanted, and then the story of the whole film in wonderful detail. I didn’t need to see it anymore.
“After he’d done this, he turned to me and quietly said, ‘Have I left anything out, Miss Hunter?’ I blushed and stammered something inane, but I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to put the other actors at ease at my expense. I was kind of embarrassed, like suddenly being called on in school when you aren’t prepared. But what he did didn’t work. They were all even more nervous. They thought he would do it to them.”
Spellbound was nominated by the Motion Picture Academy for best picture, best director, best supporting actor, best cinematography, best special effects, and best musical score. Only music won. The picture was an enormous critical and popular success.
AFTER SPELLBOUND, Selznick once again became enthusiastic about making movies with Hitchcock. Hitchcock had in mind a story somewhat like Vertigo. A woman is coached to participate in a confidence scheme in which she might marry the victim. From Selznick’s story department came a 1921 magazine short story called “The Song of the Dragon,” and Notorious was begun.
Writer Ben Hecht and Hitchcock took so long developing the story and writing drafts, Selznick grew impatient. He was especially unhappy with the MacGuffin they finally decided on, uranium ore, which he considered implausible, so he sold the property to RKO—a few months before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
FBI agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) recruits Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman). Because her father was a German spy, it is believed she will make a convincing undercover agent. She is trying to repay her father’s debt as if it were a bankruptcy. It is a moral debt to America, the country she loves and feels her father has betrayed. Alicia and Devlin have an affair.
Her assignment in Rio de Janeiro involves resuming an acquaintance with a wealthy German businessman, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), who had been attracted to her. She is to infiltrate his circle of German scientists.
Against the wishes of his mother (Leopoldine Konstantin), Sebastian asks Alicia to marry him. She accepts, and they marry, though she is disappointed when Devlin raises no objections. Alicia explores the mansion, but finds the wine cellar is locked.
Devlin tells Alicia to invite him to a party at Sebastian’s mansion. She is to take the key to the wine cellar from Sebastian’s key ring without his knowing it.
At the party, Devlin and Alicia investigate the wine cellar, where they find some bottles of sand. When Sebastian finds them together in the wine cellar, they convince him they are having a tryst.
Noticing that the key was missing and then replaced, Sebastian suspects Alicia of being a U.S. spy. His mother plots to poison her slowly, with arsenic, because she has become a woman who knows too much.
Devlin visits Alicia at the mansion, finds her in bed, desperately ill, and realizes what is happening. He helps her down the stairs and out of the house. Sebastian and his mother, fearing exposure, are forced to aid him as the Nazi guests watch.
Sebastian begs Devlin to take him with them, but he is left to his fate, certain death.
The sand proves to be uranium ore.
Bergman’s dresses were designed by Edith Head. Notorious was the first of many Edith Head credits on Hitchcock films.
Pat Hitchcock told me that Notorious was her favorite of her father’s films. “What a perfect film! The more I see Notorious, the more I like it. It has a wonderful cast, too. My mother’s favorite was Shadow of a Doubt, and Notorious, too. My second favorite is Rebecca.”
A celebrated scene in Notorious is the long kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Hitchcock defeated the Production Code limitation on the time a kiss could last—only a few seconds—by breaking up their long kiss into many short ones, as they discuss dinner. “My father rather enjoyed getting away with something,” Pat Hitchcock told me.
The actor who played the genial Dr. Anderson, Reinhold Schünzel, was the writer-director of Viktor und Viktoria, one of the most popular German films ever made, which has been remade several times, the most famous version being with Julie Andrews playing Victor and Victoria. Schünzel is said to have been Hitler’s favorite director until it was discovered he was one-quarter Jewish. Afterward, he went to Hollywood, where he was chiefly an actor.
Although Leopoldine Konstantin entered films in 1913, she made only this one Hollywood film. She was primarily a star of the German stage, appearing in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater from 1908 until 1937. Her husband was Constantine Shayne, who played Pop Leibel, the loquacious bookstore owner in Vertigo. She was recommended for the part of Mrs. Sebastian by Schünzel after Ethel Barrymore turned it down. Madame Konstantin, as she is listed in the credits, played a part similar to that of the disapproving mother in Easy Virtue who also descends an imposing staircase to meet her son’s choice of a wife. Another memorable shot from Hitchcock’s silent era recurs in Notorious when, from her position in bed, Ingrid Bergman sees Cary Grant upside-down.
HITCHCOCK HAD one year left on his Selznick contract, and one more film, but he was already making plans for the pictures he would be filming with Sidney Bernstein at Transatlantic Pictures, the new production company they were starting. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant had told Hitchcock they wo
uld love to make a film for him at Transatlantic. There was even some talk of a Cary Grant Hamlet in modern dress.
Hitchcock told me that if he hadn’t been a director, the career he would have liked was that of a criminal lawyer. “I have always been interested in the law as well as in food, you might say, torts and tortes.” With a hint of mirth, he added, “I would like to have been a hangin’ judge.”
The Paradine Case was the last picture Hitchcock made on his seven-year Selznick contract, though Selznick did not want him to leave. Selznick had already offered him a new seven-year, nonexclusive contract, with more generous financial terms. Hitchcock would receive $100,000 for one picture each year of the contract with a percentage of the gross receipts, and he would be free to make films with other producers. Hitchcock’s heart, however, was in his project with his friend Sidney Bernstein, Transatlantic Pictures, so he turned Selznick down and started work on the final film of his contract.
The Paradine Case was adapted from a 1932 novel by Robert Hichens, based on a real court case that Selznick had long wanted to make into a film.
Anthony Keane (Gregory Peck), a famous lawyer, is engaged to defend Maddalena Paradine (Alida Valli), a European woman who has been charged with poisoning her wealthy, blind British husband, Colonel Paradine. Although Keane is happily married, he becomes obsessed with his client, and he is convinced of her innocence.
He becomes so involved with the case that his wife, Gay (Ann Todd), understands she is losing him to Maddalena. She feels that if he wins the case, she will lose him to a living woman, and if he loses, she will lose him to an ideal woman he can never possess. She prefers competing with a real woman, and wants her husband to win his case.
The trial turns against Keane and his client. He tries to incriminate the valet, André Latour (Louis Jourdan), who admits to having had an affair with Maddalena. When Latour commits suicide, a distraught Maddalena, who until that time had appeared coolly unemotional, turns against her lawyer. On the witness stand, she admits to killing her husband because she doesn’t care about living now that the man she loves, Latour, is dead.
Keane returns to his loving wife.
A memorable image in The Paradine Case occurs when Maddalena is taken from her life of luxury and confined to a bare jail cell. The slamming of the iron door behind her as she enters the cell recalls one of Hitchcock’s own memories, that of the six-year-old Alfred being locked up in the Leytonstone jail.
Ben Hecht and James Bridie wrote a screenplay based on Alma’s adaptation of the story, but Selznick wasn’t pleased. He rewrote their script and took credit as a screenplay writer, along with Alma. He also edited the trial sequence after Hitchcock had been prevailed upon to shoot the long and difficult scene with four cameras running simultaneously.
The ninety-two-day shoot was Hitchcock’s longest and the picture his most costly up to that time. Opening on the last day of 1947 in order to qualify for the Oscars, The Paradine Case was a critical disaster and box office loser.
Hitchcock said, “Many times, people have told me how much they enjoyed Witness for the Prosecution. They thought it was my film instead of Billy Wilder’s. And Wilder told me people asked him about The Paradine Case, thinking he had done it. Well, I would be happy to make an exchange.”
After Claude Rains turned down the part of the judge, Hitchcock went against his customary preference for “negative acting,” in other words, low-key, and chose Charles Laughton, never low-key.
“I have been asked what I mean by ‘negative acting,’” Hitchcock said, “a term I have used many times with actors. It seems obvious. Clearly it doesn’t mean not acting or non-acting, or I wouldn’t need professional actors.
“I used Leo G. Carroll so many times because he was the perfect screen actor. He brought nothing to his part except himself, exactly what I wanted. Negative acting is actually a layer below what I call ‘obvious’ acting, and it requires great subtlety.
“After Jamaica Inn, I swore I would never again use Laughton, who was the most ‘obvious’ of actors. This, however, was the perfect vehicle for him.”
Peck thought he looked too young for the part, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t age himself as much as he wanted. He also worried about his speech, not certain about how far he should go toward British diction. His model was Anthony Eden, although he didn’t feel he sounded much like Eden in the finished film.
Selznick saw in Alida Valli the possibility for creating another Ingrid Bergman. Valli told me that she had the impression that Hitchcock particularly wanted her for The Paradine Case, but after she began making the film, she had the feeling that “he wanted my look and not me. I had the feeling he was disappointed, but perhaps not in me, but in the film. Now, with Gregory Peck, it was all different. He was always helpful, and so attractive.”
It was Hitchcock who selected Ann Todd. Selznick found her “too British,” but he accepted her because for him everything depended on the key role played by Valli.
“David was a remarkable man,” Irene Mayer Selznick told me, “but he wanted to be even more remarkable. Nothing was ever enough. Gone With the Wind wasn’t enough. From then on, he had to surpass it. Like for Orson [Welles], Rosebud was elusive. David was a man of passion, a romantic, intense, desperate. When I was his wife, he wanted me to be the best-dressed woman in Hollywood, not something I aspired to be. He was the husband who wanted me to buy more clothes, and more expensive clothes.
“His real death was the death of his confidence.”
“When our contract was finished, I knew I wouldn’t miss those memos,” Hitchcock told me. “Those memos were the essence of the man. Selznick wore his mind on his sleeve.”
Transatlantic Interlude
Rope to Stage Fright
ROPEWASN’T MY FAVORITE PICTURE,” James Stewart told me. “I think I was miscast, though not terribly so. So many people could have played that part, probably better. But it was a very important part for me because it started my relationship going with Hitch, and it led to Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo.”
“When I adapted Rope to the screen,” Arthur Laurents told me, “homosexuality was an unmentionable word in Hollywood, referred to as ‘it.’ Now, here was a play about three homosexuals in which ‘it’ had to be self-evident to everybody except the Hays Office or the Legion of Decency. Without ‘it,’ nothing makes sense. There isn’t a scene between Brandon and Phillip, the two murderers, that doesn’t imply ‘it.’
“Casting was of the utmost importance. Hitchcock and I wanted Cary Grant to be Rupert, the college professor, and Montgomery Clift to be Brandon, the dominant one in the relationship between him and Phillip. This would have been dream casting. Instead, we got James Stewart and John Dall.
“I think the casting of Jimmy Stewart was absolutely destructive. He’s not sexual as an actor, and the implication in the British play was that Rupert and Brandon had been some kind of lovers. Cary Grant was not a homosexual, but he was the finest screen actor of his time, and he was always sexual.”
Pat Hitchcock articulated her father’s feeling for Stewart. “He believed an American audience would identify more with James Stewart than any other actor,” she told me. “I think Jimmy personified Everyman for my father.”
Clift told Hitchcock that he couldn’t do the part of Brandon because he didn’t want to do a role that would “raise eyebrows.” John Dall who had been nominated for an Oscar in 1946 for his work in The Corn Is Green, replaced him.
“The problems started with the adaptation from English to American English,” Laurents continued. “What was accepted as ordinary everyday speech in London was perceived as ‘homosexual dialogue’ in Hollywood. I drew from some silver and china queens.
“But when I started to Americanize the dialogue, Sidney Bernstein, Hitch’s associate producer, kept returning English expressions to the original play because what I was writing didn’t sound ‘literary’ enough to him. He especially liked the phrase, ‘My dear
boy,’ commonly used in England with no homosexual connotations. When he put it back, it never failed to elicit a blue-penciled HOMOSEXUAL DIALOGUE condemnation from the Hays Office. Since Sidney began or ended every sentence he spoke with ‘My dear boy,’ this really mystified him.
“Hitchcock never referred to the homosexual relationships in Rope, though he understood it very well. ‘It’ was just implied and taken for granted. And the play’s relationship to the Loeb-Leopold murder case, that was never discussed either.
“I thought the showing of the murder itself was a big mistake. That wasn’t done in the original stage play. The suspense was, was there or was there not something in the chest? Well, the suspense is over at the beginning. But that’s what he wanted, and Hitchcock did what he wanted. On that film, at any rate. You have to remember that he had formed a special company. The whole purpose was to do what he wanted, and Sidney Bernstein, who was his partner, just adored him and thought everything he did was wonderful. He thought he was a great artist. He was. But Hitch didn’t listen to people. Not that I know of, except for Alma. She kept him on track. She was his core. He had a very good marriage.”
For those who have seen the film’s trailer, the murder takes on an added dimension. Instead of the usual short excerpts from the film being previewed, Rope’s trailer shows David Kentley (Dick Hogan) meeting his fiancée, Janet (Joan Chandler), on a park bench. They discuss their future together, and then David gets up and leaves her—forever. This trailer could have been the opening for the film, though it wasn’t in Laurents’s script. Hitchcock said, “It was just an idea that wouldn’t have worked, because if the public had established sympathy for the young couple, it would have been impossible to watch the murderers.”
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