It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  Art director Robert Boyle talked with me about some of the difficulties.

  “Hitch asked me whether it would be technically possible to make the film. I read the short story, and it didn’t give me too many clues except that there were going to be birds all over the place, pecking at the walls, coming down the chimneys, doing whatever they had to do to destroy the human race. That already seemed difficult enough, but I knew we would be involved in some technical procedures which were not new, but putting them all together would be new. It seemed rather chancy.

  “The most difficult shot was the seagulls’ point-of-view of the gas station explosion in The Birds. The overall design I had for the film from the very beginning was inspired by Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, the sense of bleakness and madness in a kind of wilderness expressing an inner state. It was just what Hitchcock wanted. He insisted on a subjective approach, so that the audience would emotionally share in the characters’ feelings as well as their fears of physical danger. The actors worked almost six months, but the artists and special effects people and those in the optical department worked more than a year.

  “Hitchcock would push the technical aspect of any shot to any length if it satisfied that gut feeling of whatever he’s trying to do—suspense, terror, whatever. He bonded reality to his purpose to get the real truth.”

  San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is fond of elaborate practical jokes. She plays one on lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), delivering lovebirds to his house in Bodega Bay, where he spends weekends with his mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy), and his young sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Melanie lies, telling Mitch that she is in town to see an old friend, Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette). She has dinner with Mitch, and then stays with Annie, whom she has only just met.

  At Cathy’s birthday party, a flock of gulls attacks the group. A neighbor is found pecked to death. The next afternoon, birds attack the school children.

  Birds cause an explosion in which people are killed, and this incident is followed by massive bird attacks. Some of the locals blame Melanie’s presence for the birds’ bizarre behavior.

  Annie is killed and Melanie injured. As Melanie, Mitch, his mother, and sister flee, the birds watch…

  For The Birds, Hitchcock decided to dispense entirely with music, replacing it with the sound of birds. German inventor-musician Remi Gassmann, who had designed a keyboard synthesizer capable of reproducing the sound of hordes of birds, “composed” the score. Bernard Herrmann was a consultant.

  Hedren had to endure days of having live birds thrown at her. She had never anticipated this, and the ordeal took its toll on her, and on her relationship with Hitchcock.

  “Hitchcock was more careful about how the birds were treated than he was about me,” Hedren said. “I was just there to be pecked.”

  Ethel Griffies, the actress who played an ornithologist in the film, began her stage career in 1881 when she was three years old. Hitchcock had seen her on the London stage when he was a young man.

  Some of the birds seen in the film were trained, some were mechanical, some were animated. Ub Iwerks, an animation pioneer, assisted Robert Boyle on the animated birds. One of the live bird actors, a talented crow, was so enthusiastic about his part that if there was more than one take, he would anticipate his cues.

  “I was overwhelmed by birds who would not move to the right or close their beaks,” Hitchcock said. “Much has been made of my comment, ‘Actors should be treated like cattle.’ Now I would say, ‘They should be treated like birds.’

  “Alma had never liked the original idea of doing The Birds. She didn’t think there was enough story there. Well, she was right. Not enough story, too many birds.” Initially, The Birds received mixed reviews and was disappointing at the box office, but later it came to be held in much higher esteem.

  Hitchcock sent a gift to Hedren’s six-year-old daughter, Melanie. It was a small doll dressed in a miniature of the green suit worn by her mother in The Birds, with her sleek blond hair coiffed in exactly the same manner as Hedren’s had been. There could be no confusion about whom the doll represented, but the problem was that the box that contained the doll was not a routine cardboard doll box. Made of wood, Hedren perceived it as a coffin, and both she and her daughter have continued into the twenty-first century to be perfectly convinced of that.

  Asked by a friend how she felt about Hitchcock, the adult Melanie Griffith said, “He was a motherfucker. And you can quote me.”

  “THERE WAS THIS continuous struggle on the set with regard to him holding it together, and there were people worrying about him,” actress Diane Baker told me. “On Marnie, I think there was a sense of ‘Hitch is disturbed’ or ‘He is not happy.’ I felt he was a man troubled. They had people down from the Black Tower [Universal’s executive office building] watching, to keep Hitchcock happy. There was a lot of worry about Tippi. I think Sean Connery had a very good time. He didn’t let any of it bother him. He just did his part.” Connery had been cast as Hedren’s co-star.

  Hitchcock liked Connery personally and found him good company. He was most impressed by his “professionalism.” Hitchcock defined that term simply as “He came early, knew his lines, and hit his marks. I was pleasantly surprised. He directed himself and you could always find him.” Connery was frequently there even when it wasn’t necessary. “I was interested in seeing Hitch work, as well as in doing everything I could to make it easy for him,” he told me.

  Connery remembered having “a bloody good time” making Marnie. “Hitchcock and his wife were very generous to us, inviting us to their home, showing us southern California. He had his way of directing, as with every director. I saw he didn’t wish to over-discuss things, and any discussion was ‘over-discussing.’”

  Since Hitchcock was comfortable with Evan Hunter, professionally and personally, while working on The Birds, he asked the novelist to adapt Marnie from the Winston Graham novel. “Marnie was The Taming of the Shrew,” Hitchcock told me, “but the public didn’t notice. No one could tell a story like Shakespeare.”

  There was one scene in the novel that disturbed Hunter. As it turned out, the scene in question was the one to which Hitchcock was firmly attached.

  After his marriage to Marnie, Mark, played by Connery, expects to enjoy a husband’s conjugal rights, but he has underestimated the extent of his wife’s psychological trauma. Patient with her rebuff on the first night of their honeymoon, later he is carried away by his passion.

  In the opinion of Hunter, this “rape,” as Hitchcock described it, would destroy all sympathy for and identification with the lead male character. Hitchcock described the scene he wanted in detail to Hunter and art director Robert Boyle, but Hunter was not persuaded. He offered two versions of the script, one version written as Hitchcock wanted, the other without the rape scene. Hunter believed that Marnie truly loved Mark, even though she couldn’t really admit it to herself, and that Mark would be patient with her.

  Hunter described Hitchcock’s reaction to this suggestion: “He framed me up with his hands the way directors do, and said, ‘Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want the camera right on her face!’ And then he moved into a close-up of my face.”

  Years later, talking with writer Jay Presson Allen, Hunter was told, “That scene was his reason for making the movie. You just wrote your own ticket back to New York.” Hunter was dismissed and given no writing credit.

  Alfred Hitchcock had read the script of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie before it was produced on the stage and thought the playwright, Jay Presson Allen, might be the right one to replace Hunter on Marnie. Allen, who lived in New York, went out to Los Angeles and met Hitchcock.

  “We got along very, very well,” Allen remembered. “The first day, instantaneously, we began to have a good time. I took the job. It was my first Hollywood job, and the Hitchcock family just kind of took me in.” She had passed “The Alma Test,” as Pat Hitchcock called it.

  “M
ostly we had dinner in their kitchen,” Allen continued. “Alma cooked, and afterwards Hitch put on an apron and washed the dishes. When I offered to replace him at that job, he was insulted. He said that’s what he did, and he did it better than anyone in the world. And I said, ‘Well, I’m very good, too.’ So he said, ‘I’ll give you a shot.’ I did a little bit, and he said, ‘Well, we can work together.’

  “Alma was a superb cook. Very simple food. Hitch didn’t eat anything fancy.

  “Hitch and Alma, they were a pair. They practically read each other’s minds.

  “Alma was very, very, very bright. She kept everything going for him. Everything just moved according to what was good for what he wanted. She had a wonderful sense of humor. She was very unpre-possessing-looking with reddish hair, very small.

  “She was a great housekeeper. If you ordered up a perfect wife, she was it. Hitch was a perfectionist, and she’s what he ordered up. She was a pro about everything.

  “The house was very, very simple, not like a Hollywood house in any way.

  “She wasn’t around on the set, because that wasn’t her style. She never, never, never spoke directly with me about what I was writing, although I’m sure she read every word.

  “Marnie didn’t turn out the way I hoped. I think Tippi was not up to it, and probably my script wasn’t up to it. Marnie was written for her. It’s not a terribly accomplished script. It was just the best he could do with the time he had with a first-time writer. I was never told there was another script.

  “The film followed my script, but I never thought it was as good a movie as I could have done later. I’d never have gone out there for anybody but Hitch.” In 1972, Allen’s Cabaret screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

  “I’m a very swift writer. I don’t think I could have worked on the script itself more than six weeks. I worked hard when I worked, but not long hours. And then, some of the time we played and called it work.

  “He storyboarded everything. The storyboard was right up there in the office for anyone to see.”

  The scene that caused the breakup between Evan Hunter and Hitchcock, the honeymoon “rape,” wasn’t a problem for Allen. “I found out much later that it had been a problem, but not for me. I remember the rape scene now because it’s what everybody wants to know about.

  “The casting of Sean was amusing. We didn’t know who to get for the part, an upper-class Southern man. I had changed the setting in the novel. One day he said, ‘They’re making one of those Bond books, and I hear the guy who’s doing Bond is worth looking at. Let’s get some footage.’ So we got all this footage of this incredibly handsome young man with that thick Scottish accent. We looked at each other and just burst into laughter. ‘Let’s take him anyway.’ We had no regrets about that. He was darling.

  “On the set, Hitchcock was always absolutely, totally, completely in control. No upsets of any description.”

  Toward the end of Marnie, Hitchcock and Hedren were rumored not to be speaking directly to each other.

  “I was there throughout all that time,” Allen continued, “and the problem that ‘Tippi people’ have talked about over the years was not that overt. Not at all. Hitch was only trying to make a star of her. He may have had something like a crush on her, a crise de coeur, but there was nothing overt. Nothing. Nothing. He would never in one million years do anything to embarrass himself. He was a very Edwardian fellow. Hitch loved his family. I would say that he was possibly a little carried away by Tippi, how attractive she was, but that was all there was to it.

  “Hitch was a fantasist. I think he might have had fantasy romances with his leading ladies, and, if so, Alma accepted this. It’s kind of normal for a man, and they were, after all, fantasies.

  “Hitchcock and I thought we would do a lot of scripts. We wanted to do Mary Rose, but Lew Wasserman just absolutely would not do it.”

  Margaret “Marnie” Edgar (Tippi Hedren) works as a secretary so she can steal money and move on. Her only ties are to her mother in Baltimore and to a beloved horse she boards.

  Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) recognizes her from her previous position, but, even knowing that she is a thief, he hires her. He becomes so obsessed by Marnie that he insists she marry him even after he finds her stealing from his company. Mark’s hobby is taming wild animals.

  On their honeymoon, Mark forces Marnie to have sex, and she attempts suicide. He accepts a marriage in name only.

  When Marnie is recognized by a former employer, Mark persuades him not to press charges.

  Marnie’s horse is injured and has to be shot, and Marnie leaves Mark; but she is unable to take money from the safe, even when Mark appears and offers it to her.

  Mark discovers that her mother [Louise Latham] supported her illegitimate child by working as a prostitute. When a sailor (Bruce Dern) threatened her mother, it was young Marnie who killed him. Her mother, who had been crippled in the fight, accepted the blame, and was acquitted at the trial. This suppressed memory led to Marnie’s hatred of men.

  Marnie is able to start a new life with Mark.

  “Connery, like Mark,” Hitchcock told me, “was the kind of man who had always been handsome and had never seen anything but a look of adoration in the eyes of women. They said ‘Yes’ before he asked them, even if he didn’t. If Mark found a woman who didn’t want him, it was a challenge, a red flag for a bull.”

  When Hedren had asked Hitchcock, “How could any woman be frigid with a man like Sean Connery?” Hitchcock gave her his stock answer:

  “Fake it, Tippi.”

  Goldfinger, with Sean Connery as James Bond, was released at the same time, and it out-drew and out-grossed Hitchcock’s film. At the Film Society of Lincoln Center gala tribute to Sean Connery, he told me: “James Bond was a bigger draw than I ever was. I tried, but I couldn’t compete with him. Well, tonight they’re honoring me here—not Bond. At least I hope so.”

  In Marnie, Hitchcock once again uses a long, slow combination dolly-crane shot that moves from a wide overhead view of a social event to one small detail, the really important element in the whole scene, as with the twitching eye of the drummer and the key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand. In Marnie, it is the face of Strutt, the man from whom Marnie has stolen money.

  The scene opens wide and high above the chandelier in the entrance hall of the Rutland mansion. Guests are milling around as others arrive. From a distance a butler can be seen opening and closing the front door each time new guests arrive. Near him, watching with interest, is Lil. Diane Baker, who played that character, described the scene for me.

  “He moved the entire staircase. It just lifted up in the air, and the camera zoomed down to the front door. He had to do that many, many times, and that camera zoomed carefully right through the whole room, from high up, all the way from the second floor, through the second landing and then the stairs lifted up and everything parted, like the Red Sea, for him to move with his camera to the front door in a close-up of the Strutts. To watch this happen was fascinating, and many, many takes later, they got it. Sounds were creaking and things were moving. It was thrilling to be part of.”

  Baker described Hitchcock’s directions to her for that complex scene in which she was a key player with no words.

  “He said to me, ‘Diane, you are to be sitting here talking, as the Strutts come in to the party, and you are just talking seriously. We’re not going to be on you. We have no dialogue for you, just background chatter. But the camera will pan, and I want you to be smiling and having fun meeting these people, or chattering at the party. Then, the minute the door opens, and the Strutts walk through the door, and the camera’s pulling back, I want you to be in a state. You see them, and it’s a shock, even though you are the one that invited them to come.

  “‘You have to show the shock, the surprise. So, I want you to start off laughing, and I want you to end up with the smile draining from your face. You’re dumbfounded.’ He demonstrated for me how it should look, and he demonstrated th
e wrong way to do it, too. His face wasn’t like mine, but he did it very well, and I got the idea perfectly.

  “Then he said, ‘There it is, and you don’t have to do any faking. Otherwise, it would border on phony, false. You would overact and you would look like you were doing a horror movie, and we don’t want that.’ So, he was able to talk me through scenes.

  “He said not to show too much, not to act. He once said to an actor who was overacting, ‘There’s so much writing on the face, I can’t see your expression.’

  “I was terribly nervous for the tea-pouring scene. I was afraid my hand would shake and the tea cup would rattle in the saucer or that I would spill the tea pouring it. I knew I’d been very nervous in rehearsal because I was being directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitch was especially kind to me.

  “Then once, after a very difficult scene, I looked to Hitch for a sign of encouragement. He turned away as if he wasn’t paying attention to me. I was hurt. Later, I realized he did it to draw the right performance out of me. I was supposed to be a strong-willed young woman who was jealous and hurt.

  “When I was listening at the window to what Marnie and Mark were saying, he would move my hair where he wanted it and put the curtain at a certain point in my face, where it covered my face just slightly so it gave a sense of the ominous or sinister. Then he would place the curtain exactly where he wanted it to hang, next to my face, so that it made me seem like someone listening secretly.

  “He told me to think absolutely nothing. My face must register zero. It’s very difficult to have absolutely no expression. I suppose it was for a close-up, but he knew frame by frame how he wanted to see it.

  “He knew exactly what he was going to do, but he was prepared to make a change that suited the scene or if something happened.

  “I liked him when I first met him. I’d been under contract to Fox for almost five years when Hitchcock asked for me. He had seen me on television. I was invited to his home, and I met with him and his wife.