An Interview with J. Danvers Williams
When I saw his latest film, The Lady Vanishes, it struck me that Hitchcock’s famous formula of secret agents, guns, and hold-ups was wearing just a little thin.
True, as an evening’s relaxation, The Lady Vanishes is worth anybody’s shilling. Judged purely as a piece of mechanical entertainment it compares favorably with the majority of American-made pictures.
But what a pity, I couldn’t help thinking, that so talented a director as Hitch should waste his knowledge of the film medium and his sense of the dramatic on such a basically trivial story.
There were sequences in The Lady Vanishes (as, for example, the one halfway through the picture depicting a near-slapstick fight) which seemed to me to have been included for no reason except that there is invariably one such situation in every Hitchcock film.
So many of the situations were mechanical that I began to suspect Hitchcock himself (though, perhaps, only subconsciously) of growing just a little weary of his formula.
It heartened me considerably when I went to see him to hear that this is the last secret agent film which he will make for a very long time.
I asked Hitch why he had stuck to his formula so long—why he had never used his brilliant technique to dramatize real events in our national life.
“Because,” said Hitch, “circumstances have forced me into the realms of fiction. I have always wanted to make films with some sociological importance—but I have never been allowed to do so.
“You must remember,” he continued, “that my chief appeal is an ability to work people up into a state of excitement.
“I do this not by quick cutting or by incessant camera movement, but by packing every sequence with incident and small details of characterization.
“If you study one of my films closely you will find that, compared with a Russian or an American gangster film, it is visually quite slow.
“Situation follows situation at a leisurely pace, and it is only the amount of detail which I pack into each sequence that makes my films appear to move so quickly.
“Working in this way, I can create scenes of great intensity and violence. But if you suppose that I consciously evolved this technique you are quite wrong.
“It emanated naturally from my own personality. It grew up automatically from my innate love of a dramatic situation and from my desire to generate excitement in other people.”
“I have never made a subtle, psychological drama on Blue Angel lines, not because I dislike this type of film, but for the very simple reason that my mind does not work in this way.
“Give me any subject to be turned into a motion picture and I immediately judge it from the number of dynamic situations it contains.
“No matter how good a picture it might become in the hands of another director I toss it aside unless it has the forcefulness and violence which appeals to me personally.
“Now, paradoxically, it is my love of the dynamic that has forced me into the fields of fiction.
“Soon after the General Strike in 1926 I wanted to put the whole thing into a film. I saw in this subject a magnificently dynamic motion picture.
“When I suggested the idea to my production chief he approached the British Board of Film censors, who immediately vetoed it.
“I should, no doubt, have been allowed to make a wishy-washy picture about the general strike, but in this form the subject no longer appealed to me. I wanted to show fistfights between strikers and undergraduates, pickets, and all the authentic drama of the situation.
“Much the same thing happened when I wanted to put the Sydney Street siege on the screen for The Man Who Knew Too Much.
“When the idea was submitted for approval to the Home Office they informed me that I mustn’t show the militia being called out and the house in Sydney Street surrounded by machine guns. All that I was allowed to do was depict the policemen being handed rifles and shown how to use them.”
“Again and again I have been prevented from putting on the screen authentic accounts of incidents in British life.
“Again and again I have suggested authentic ideas to my production chief, only to be told: ‘Sorry, Hitch, but the censor’d never pass it.’
“In order to give utterance to the violent things which I want to express I have been forced into fiction.
“If you imply ‘it can’t happen here’—if you set your story in Central Europe or even make your villain a foreigner—officialdom raises no objections. But if your picture is too obviously a criticism of the social system, Whitehall shakes its head.
“Although circumstances have forced me into fiction I have always sincerely tried to draw my characters and their behavior from genuine observation.
“Given that the basic story is imaginary, the characters, I think, always behave as real people would, in a similar set of circumstances.
“Thus, in The Lady Vanishes, at that point in the picture where the vanished lady turns up unexpectedly in the dining car of the train, I make one of the Englishmen (Naunton Wayne) remark casually: ‘Hello! the old girl’s back again.’
“This, in my opinion, is exactly how the type of Englishman which Wayne was depicting would react to that given situation. The remark told the audience a great deal about the psychology of the character.”
“Again, in The Man Who Knew Too Much (I merely mention this because it was so widely commented on) during the siege sequence I showed a policeman being handed a cup of tea.
“I did this because I have always found that, in a moment of crisis a person invariably does something trivial, like making a cup of tea or lighting up a cigarette. A small detail of this sort adds considerably to the dramatic tension of the situation.
“Experience has taught me that if one detail is inaccurate, one gesture or one line of dialogue illogical, a situation loses its sting.
“To illustrate the importance of credible characterization I will give you an example of a sequence which, I admit, missed the mark in The Lady Vanishes. It was the fight scene halfway through the picture.
“When we were preparing to make this, Michael Redgrave told me that were he doing a similar scene on the stage he would want to rehearse it for a week. There is no opportunity for doing this in a film studio where thousands of pounds are running away every day of production. To aid Redgrave I shot the action first, adding the dialogue after. Even so, the behavior of the characters was just a little bit inaccurate, with the result that you immediately picked out this sequence as being weak.”
“I do not think that a truly exciting sequence of film can be made unless every detail is true to life. Looking back at such of my pictures as Blackmail and The Man Who Knew Too Much, I believe that these made you sweat with excitement (if indeed they did) because of the credibility of the characterizations.
“The Lady Vanishes will be the last secret agent picture that I shall make for a very long time. My next film will be the Laughton vehicle, Jamaica Inn. This is the story of a Cornish squire who, besides being the local magistrate, is the head of a gang of shipwreckers and smugglers.
“Usually I do not like historical subjects (for it is very difficult making characters in costumes behave credibly), but I accepted the invitation to make this film because I felt that it offered plenty of scope for my particular technique.
“I am primarily interested in the Jekyll-Hyde mentality of the squire. I shall also get a great deal of fun out of the shipwrecking sequences, the vessels being lured on to the rocks with false lights.
“When I have finished Jamaica Inn I am going to America to make one or two films. I hope that the first will be based on the disaster of the Titanic.
“This seems to me a marvelously dramatic subject for a motion picture; the greatest liner every built ploughing through the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage; the iceberg floating ominously into her path; the band playing ‘Abide With Me’; the vessel sinking with most of its passengers and crew because the wireless operator of a nearby ship had gone to bed a few minutes before.”
“My idea is to show that over the grave of the Titanic modern shipping can now pass in safety. But the old trouble has cropped up again.
“The shipping companies are trying to prevent me from making the picture. They seem to think that if I recapture all the horror and violence of the situation it will stop people going on cruises.
“The picture which I shall make as well—or instead of—Titanic, will be based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca.
“This is really quite a new departure for me. It concerns the wife of a rich young man who feels that the house in which she lives with her husband is haunted by some malignant influence.
“Subsequently she discovers that her husband nurdered his former wife.
“I shall treat this more or less as a horror film, building up my violent situations from incidents such as one in which the young wife innocently appears at the annual fancy-dress ball given by her husband in a frock identical with the one worn by his first wife a year previously.
“When Rebecca is finished I may stay in Hollywood or come home—I don’t know!
“I would like to come back to Britain and weave a film around a pit disaster or an incident of sabotage in the Glasgow dockyards or around the crooked financiers of the city.
“But I am afraid that such subjects, handled as I must inevitably handle them, would have great difficulty getting past the censor.
“Do not blame me for ignoring such subjects. Blame Whitehall.”
“The Censor Wouldn’t Pass It” was originally published in Film Weekly, November 5,1938, 6–7.