It's Only a Movie
Page 29
Curtis Harrington, a young director at the Universal Studios during the shooting of Topaz, spent three days watching Hitchcock work.
“I asked if I could visit the set, because Hitchcock had a closed set, and didn’t allow visitors. He said I could, and that’s all I expected, to stand in the corner and be as invisible as possible. But what happened was, he took it upon himself, all the time, to come over and tell me what he was doing and why. He was extraordinarily kind to me.
“I got to watch him do one of those unique Hitchcock shots. Topaz has a scene in which the ostensible heroine is shot in an embrace by this man. This was one of those famous Hitchcock ideas, unique to him. He set up the camera so that as she fell to the ground, out of this man’s arms, the camera up in the rafters looked directly down on the couple. As she fell to the ground, her skirt spread out and away from her, like a growing pool of blood.
“This was a very tricky shot, not something you can accomplish except with tricks. He had many members of the crew with monofilament threads tied to all the edges of her skirt. As she crumpled to the ground, they pulled the skirt away from her, and I think he shot it in slow motion, so it looked like the skirt just spread out magically around her, like a pool. Pure Hitchcock.
“Topaz has no stars. Ordinarily, Hitchcock worked with big stars. Directing these players, he would give them physical moves. He would say, ‘Look up. Look down. Look to the right, then look back.’ Now, he would never do that with Cary Grant or Ingrid Bergman, or any star. I asked him why he was giving those physical instructions.
“I’ll never forget what he said: ‘Well, Curtis, I have to try to bring them a very long way in one picture.’
“I remember at one point he fired an actor, and had the casting office send in five other actors. They all lined up, and he chose another one, and then proceeded shooting with that one. It was a small part, but he could not get what he wanted with the first player.
“He had a vision in his head, and that’s what he had to create. When he had the players he really wanted, it must have been a great deal easier for him, because he didn’t have to bring them anywhere.
“My own feeling about Hitchcock is that he was above all a romantic, and his vision is romantic. It’s an idealized vision, even though he dealt with mystery and mayhem. It’s the creation of the Hitchcockian world, and there isn’t a shot that isn’t thought about and created by Alfred Hitchcock.
“When I was doing Mati Hari with Sylvia Kristel, I gave her those physical instructions. I remembered what Hitchcock did, and I said I’m going to try to make her as good as possible in this, and I would give her beats. ‘Look up, look down, look away, look back.’ What was wonderful was that one of the French reviews said, ‘She has an acting talent we have not seen before.’
“Astrologically, you know, Hitchcock had the same astrological configuration as Mae West. I think that’s very significant, because they both had sex on the mind.”
GERMAN ACTRESS Karin Dor, from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, was cast in Topaz as Juanita de Córdoba. She told me how it happened.
“I was in Germany, and at four o’clock in the morning, my Hollywood agent called and said, ‘Pack your suitcase. Mr. Hitchcock wants to see you.’ So, I packed a little suitcase, not expecting to get the part, because I knew Mr. Hitchcock had already screen-tested over a hundred girls from all over the world.
“So, I arrived at Universal Studios and had lunch with Mr. Hitchcock in his office. He had a dining room there. We were sitting together, talking about everything. After about an hour, he said, ‘Do you know Edith Head?’ I said, ‘Who doesn’t.’ He said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if you go over and have your measurements taken.’ That was his way to tell me I got the part. I said, ‘I got the part?’ He said, ‘Yes!’
“So, I got my fittings with Miss Edith Head, which was, for me, very exciting, too.
“While we were talking in his dining room, he told me about the individual scenes, especially about the death scene, which he already had in his mind so clearly. He said, ‘I want to have you in a purple dress. The dress has to spread out to look like she’s sinking in a pool of blood.’
“But when I fell down the dress wouldn’t spread out. The idea came. Nylon wire.
“They put nylon wire at the seams, and they tried it with a double. She did the fall several times. On every wire there was one person pulling it, about eight workers. Then, the wardrobe ladies came and put a big towel around her, and the girl got out of the dress. I came in a bathrobe, and they put the towel around me, and I slipped into my dress, so we could shoot it.
“We had one day when journalists from all over the world could ask questions. Mr. Hitchcock was there with all the actors. One journalist asked Mr. Hitchcock, ‘Why did you take Miss Dor? She’s dark-haired, and dark eyes, all your leading ladies are blond and blue-eyed.’
“He said ‘Topaz is based on a book by Leon Uris, and Juanita de Córdoba really existed. She was Cuban, so she had to be dark-haired and dark-eyed, but Miss Dor is blond inside.’
“One morning it was so ice-cold, and I was freezing. I said to Mr. Hitchcock, ‘Is it only me who is freezing, or is it cold?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘It is only you! You are a coldhearted woman. You are a frigid woman. You are eating too many ice creams.’ It was totally silent, because everybody wanted to hear what I said.
“I looked at him and I said, ‘With the first two I agree. With the third one not. I hate ice cream.’ And everybody knew how I loved ice cream. He was putting me on. From this moment, we really had a marvelous relationship, because he realized I opened my mouth and said something. He was famous for saying things like that to people and waiting for the reaction.
“Sometimes he spoke to me in German, and his German was quite good. For example, this scene where the police come into my house and search, the scene where I’m coming out of my bedroom and have to come down the stairs. We rehearsed. The first time I came out and I said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, do I go left or right from the camera when I come down the stairs?’
“He looked at me, and he said, ‘You are going to the too-hot-washed sweater.’
“And I thought, ‘My God, what can he mean by that?’
“Then I thought, what does a sweater do when it’s washed with hot water? It shrinks, and the past tense of shrink is shrank. And the German word for armoire or cupboard is Schrank. So, there was an armoire, and I said, ‘Ah, I know. I have to go to the armoire.’ And he said, ‘I knew you would get it.’ This was his way of putting in some German words sometimes, and trying to see if I would get it. But that was a toughie.
“If he was very pleased with me in a scene, he would say, ‘Would you like to have dinner with Mrs. H. and me?’ And we would go to Chasen’s, their favorite, and I was always thrilled.”
John Vernon, who played Rico Parra, felt he was playing someone like Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl. Vernon told me, “though it wasn’t really anyone specific, and Mr. Hitchcock never said anything to me about it.
“I was asked to go to Edith Head’s wardrobe department. ‘Mr. Hitchcock wants to see you in dungarees.’ I put on a pair of overalls or whatever the Cuban army’s overalls were, and Edith Head said, ‘My God, after all the films I’ve done here, all I can offer you is this!’
“He loved to joke a bit. He would say, ‘Are you familiar with Cockney rhymes?’ and I said, ‘Not really.’
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are too many dog’s feet in your scene that you’re doing.’
“‘I don’t know what you mean.’
“‘Pauses, John.’
“And one other time, he’d just finished a scene, and I was still on the stage of the next day’s shooting, pacing the set, and he said, ‘What are you doing?’
“‘I’m working at what I’m going to be confronted with tomorrow.’
“He says, ‘What do you mean?’
“‘I’m not quite sure how I should play this scene tomorrow.’
“So, we sat in his trailer, and he says, ‘Have you seen my film Rear Window?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Do you remember the scene where Jimmy Stewart is staring out his window to the apartment across the courtyard? Well, I had Mr. Stewart stare at a crack in a wall, and that’s all he saw for three minutes. He looked at that crack in the wall, at the paint on the wall, seriously.
“‘The great Russian director Pudovkin filmed a lady looking down at her lap. He said she should be staring at nothing, just staring down. The director then inserted two different things: an empty plate, which signified hunger, and then a dead baby, with the same look, staring at her lap, remorse, horrible remorse.’
“So, what Mr. Hitchcock was telling me was, if you’ve got a strong enough framework around you, the director is doing most of the work, so don’t muck it up.
“There’s a great scene where Rico Parra hears something from a woman holding her dying husband in her arms, and they’re traitors. Rico comes into the room, and he says, ‘What’s going on?’ She sort of mumbles. So he gets closer, and finally his ear goes practically into her mouth, and he gets the bad news that his lady friend is a traitor. Then, of course, he pulls back, and there’s a shot of him taking it in.
“The next day Mr. Hitchcock says, ‘John, we have to do that scene again.’ Just after you hear the bad news. ‘I was a little too far away from you. I shouldn’t have cut you below the knees. I should have cut you at the knees.’ So, talk about a mathematician or something!
“He fell asleep once during a long take, and no one dared wake him up. But we didn’t want him to stay there the whole afternoon. Finally, he started to clear his throat. He quietly opened his eyes. He looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, how was it John?’ I didn’t know what the hell to say. He started to laugh, and that was it.
“When I shoot Juanita, it was a love scene, really, holding her at arm’s length, and looking down at her like that. Meanwhile, the gun is coming out of the holster, which you never see, and she’s shot.
“There was another scene in a big conference room where the camera seemed to skim right along the table. There were stagehands on either side of the table, who pulled the chairs right out of the scene to allow the camera in. That was a ballet off-screen.
“Mr. Hitchcock was never late. Sometimes he’d say, ‘We’ll finish a little early. Come into my study,’ his trailer, ‘and we’ll imbibe and tell stories.’
“When Mr. Hitchcock died, Pat and her husband received a lot of things, and one of them was a $6 million cache of wine, from all over the world. And Pat’s husband, Joe was his name, said, ‘John, you won’t believe it. I got all this wine, and I’ve got twenty-five years AA.’”
IN ITS FRAGMENTED PLOT and documentary style, Topaz harks back to Hitchcock’s 1944 World War II French shorts, Bon Voyage and Aventure malgache. Jeanne’s murder by the Gestapo agent in Bon Voyage is similar to Juanita’s death in Topaz, and in both, the pistols that kill the sympathetic women are not shown. Like Topaz, Aventure malgache is a complex story about politically duplicitous people with no really central characters. Like the French shorts, Topaz is set during a critical international moment, when the Cold War threatened to become a hot war.
Topaz was shot in Copenhagen, Wiesbaden, Paris, Washington, D.C., New York, and at Universal Studios in Hollywood. It was not successful financially or critically.
While in Europe making preparations for the filming of Topaz, Hitchcock visited Ingmar Bergman in Stockholm. Bergman suggested he use two Swedish actors, Per-Axel Arosenius and Sonja Kolthoff, for the Soviet defector and his wife. Then, Hitchcock traveled with Coleman and Taylor to Finland to scout locations for The Short Night, another Cold War novel he hoped to bring to the screen. His next film, however, was to be Frenzy.
The camera operator on Frenzy, Paul Wilson, spoke with me about Hitchcock.
“When I got to know him better, he was always asking after your family. He was a lovely man. He could be hard with people, actors in particular. He used to purposely fall asleep if he was fed up with the performance. I think he’d lay it on. He’d do a bit of pretense. And in pretending, he did fall asleep.
“He drew a lot of pictures, and when you put the camera near to what he wanted, it all fell in line. Uncanny. He’d made the picture in his head. He would tell me what I’d got in the camera, and it was right there on the ground glass exactly as he said.
“If there was a problem, it was always, ‘We’ve got a problem with that shot,’ not ‘You’ve got a problem,’ or ‘I’ve got a problem.’”
Wilson also worked with Charlie Chaplin as the camera operator on The Countess from Hong Kong.
“They were extraordinary people, completely opposite. Charlie Chaplin hated to move the camera. I suggested on one occasion that we track into a wedding cake. And he said, ‘I don’t want any Hitchcock stuff in my picture.’
“Chaplin didn’t just have his dolly marks chalked in, he had them painted in, because that was where the camera was going to stay. It was the same with the actors. During a rehearsal, Marlon Brando, having been standing in the same place for several pages of dialogue, said, ‘Charlie, I feel I ought to move a little during all of this.’
“‘Marlon,’ Chaplin replied, ‘when I want you to move, I’ll tell you.’
“‘Okay, Charlie,’ said Brando, and that was it.
“With Hitchcock, it was totally different. There was nearly always a technically challenging shot in each film. In Frenzy, it was when we follow Barry Foster as he leads Anna Massey from the street up the stairs to his room, and then after they go in, we pull back down the stairs and back into Covent Garden and look up at the window where that room is. It had to appear as if it was shot continuously when it was actually two shots, half studio interior and half location, joined by a useful sack of beetroots. It gave me and my assistant, Gil Taylor, quite a workout.”
Rusty Coppleman, the sound editor for Frenzy, appreciated Hitchcock’s sense of humor.
“In the scene where the hero thinks he’s beating the villain about the head with an automobile crank, Hitch was a bit concerned, censorship-wise, about the noise that we should apply on this. He said, “Go out and buy a couple of melons, and hit those and see what sound you get.’” The melon sounded extremely bloodthirsty, like brains being splattered. A cabbage didn’t work, so I devised a sound.
“Then, I wrapped a bandage around my head, with a few streaks of red on it from a marking pen. We ran this scene with the sound I’d created, and Hitch said, ‘That’s very good.’
“I said, ‘I hope that sounded authentic enough for you.’
“He saw the bandage, with the red on it, and said, ‘Do you want an aspirin?’
Hitchcock chose a playwright rather than the novelist to adapt Frenzy, which was based on the book Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, by Arthur La Bern. The title of the novel was taken from the popular World War I song, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
“I would say the playwright rather than the novelist is generally the better for adapting for the screen,” Hitchcock explained. “You need scenes that can ‘play’ as people from the theater can write them for you. Who was it who once said that drama is life with the dull bits cut out? Compression belongs to the playwright, not the novelist.”
Covent Garden wholesale fruit merchant Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) is an impotent serial killer who strangles women with a necktie. One of his victims is Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), the ex-wife of his best friend, Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), who becomes a prime suspect. Fearing discovery, Rusk kills Blaney’s girlfriend, a barmaid (Anna Massey), and Blaney is arrested.
Escaping from jail, Blaney is followed by the police to Rusk’s flat, where Rusk has strangled another woman. Rusk is arrested, and Blaney cleared.
On New Year’s Eve, j
ust before 1970 became 1971, playwright Anthony Shaffer received what he considered one of the most memorable phone calls of his life. Amidst the banging sounds of cracker party favors, the popping of corks, and the buzz of celebratory conversations, Shaffer heard a strangely familiar voice, announcing himself as Alfred Hitchcock. The voice asked would he, Anthony Shaffer, be interested in writing a screenplay for his next film?
Shaffer assumed it must be a joke, because who, after all, would call anyone at a time like that to ask if he would like to write the screenplay for a Hitchcock film? He listened for a while, trying to detect which of his friends was trying to fool him. As he listened, it dawned on him that the caller might really be Alfred Hitchcock.
Peter Shaffer recalled how his twin brother, Anthony, became the screenplay writer for Frenzy. At the time, Anthony’s play Sleuth was playing on the London stage to great acclaim.
“Hitchcock was interviewing Tony, and they were talking about Hitchcock’s sort of credo, the MacGuffin, and all that, the willing suspension of disbelief, and so on. Hitchcock was saying that although his pictures are very often high melodrama and border on the improbable, there was absolutely nothing in them that was illogical or dependent on pure chance.
“‘I challenge you, dear boy,’ Hitchcock said. ‘You’ll never find anything like that in the plots of my films.’
“Tony said, ‘Oh, really? I wonder if I can take you up on that?’
“They went to the little cinema by Hitchcock’s office, and Tony said, ‘Can we see North by Northwest?’
“There was the scene where Cary Grant is being chased by both the spies and the police in New York, and he ends up desperate and frightened in the concourse of Grand Central. He says to the man behind the grille of the ticket office, ‘Give me a ticket to Chicago.’ When the ticket seller hesitates because he recognizes him as a wanted man, Cary Grant leaves without a ticket and boards the 20th Century Limited. Eva Marie Saint and the villains are already there.