Exactly why a major American company would want to set up film-making in Britain in 1919 is something of a mystery. The British film industry was already accident-prone: since Lumière first showed his films publicly in London in 1896 films had been made pretty consistently in Britain, and already the industry had undergone at least two major crises, the first in 1909 and the second as recently as 1918. The reason in both cases was much the same—the all too effectual competition of foreign, and particularly American, films. Given the choice, British filmgoers simply preferred the American product. In answer to this, American stars, directors and technicians were already being regularly imported before the 1914-18 War: in 1913 the original London Film Company was set up with largely American staff to make feature films, and the same year Florence Turner, then an important American star, came to London with her own company to produce films, while other American companies scouted for studio sites. The coming of the war to Britain in 1914, however, produced a rapid cooling of interest, and for the duration British film-makers were left to fight on as best they could. But even with the imposition of government taxes on imported film in 1915, American films continued to dominate the market, and it was somewhat ironic that in 1917 the War Office, desirous of making telling films about the war and British national identity, should have brought in big names from Hollywood, D. W. Griffith and Herbert Brenon, to do it.
In 1918 film-making in Britain had come to an almost complete halt. British film-makers got together to discuss what should be done about the situation, and mainly reminisced about the good old days. One of the problems, then as since, was that few British films were able to get adequate distribution outside their own country. Another was that for the most part they looked pretty amateurish next to their foreign competition. It was no doubt the idea that things might get better if both these problems could be remedied which bought Famous Players-Lasky to Britain in the first months of the new peace. They could bring American know-how to bear on British film production, and, potentially even more useful, they could guarantee American distribution for the British films they made.
‘British’, of course, was only a relative term. Though to ease touchy national sensibilities much was made in the trade of the Britishness of the newly formed company, Famous Players-Lasky British Producers Ltd., its control by British capital and a British board, the fact remained that its equipment, its management and most of its regular staff were American, and even those, such as director Donald Crisp and cameraman Hal Young, who were British by origin had been trained and made a name for themselves in Hollywood. Which was no doubt fair enough, in that whatever the supposed advantages of making films in Britain in terms of a specifically British atmosphere (not borne out in the event), there was little argument that what British film-making most needed right then was an infusion of superior American technique in all departments.
That was exactly what Famous Players-Lasky British brought, and what attracted the young Alfred Hitchcock to them in the first place. If one wanted to get into films, and to learn the métier, there was no doubt that in 1919 this company was the best place in Britain to do it. When Hitch found out that the company had among their properties set for filming Marie Corelli’s novel The Sorrows of Satan, he rushed out and bought the book, read it and made some sketches for the designs which might go on the title-cards: suffering devils, hell flames licking, and things of that sort. Then, equipped with these, he boldly went round to the studio in Islington, not very far away from Henleys’ office in the City, and showed the company his work. They said that no, unfortunately they had changed plans, and were now going to film The Great Day. Nothing daunted, he went away, did a lot of drawings of great days, and was back with them the following day. The company were sufficiently impressed, by his persistence if not by his art, to give him some work, which he did moonlighting from Henleys—an arrangement his immediate superior agreed to on condition that they split the profits 50/50. Very shortly, though, Famous Players offered him a full-time job. And so, at the age of twenty, Alfred Hitchcock decisively bid farewell to the manufacture and marketing of electric cable and entered what had become his dream situation, the movie industry.
Not that his induction was glamorous. He began work very humbly doing exactly what he had shown himself able to do: designing title-cards for the films the company then had in production. At this time the title-cards were quite elaborate, and also tended to be numerous, since the new idea of various of the more intellectual film-makers, particularly in Germany, that film stories should be told as far as possible in images, with the absolute minimum of intervention by written titles, had not yet really caught on in Hollywood, let alone Britain. Hence, every stage of the story was signalled with printed dialogue and explanatory captions identifying the characters and commenting, novel-wise, on the situations to be seen on the screen. Each one of these title-cards had at least a decorative border; the title itself was generally hand-lettered; and in all probability there would be some kind of graphic flourish, of a rather naïve kind—if the title stated that the hero was leading a fast life, there might be a little drawing accompanying it of a candle burning at both ends, and such. So Hitchcock’s was actually quite a sizeable job, and during the next three years he designed the titles for all eleven films made in Britain by Famous Players-Lasky, plus one made independently by one of the directors the company had brought over from Hollywood, Donald Crisp. But very early on, he hired someone to work under him, an older sign-painter with a shop down near Blackfriars Bridge—a demonstration, he says, that he always had enough common sense to realize that just because he had an idea that did not mean he was necessarily the best one to carry it out.
In the company there was a small, closely knit organization. The title department, where the titles were actually written, consisted of Tom Geraghty, who had written for Fairbanks, and Mordaunt Hall, later film critic for The New York Times. It was associated with the editorial department, where the subjects for filming were scrutinized and the scripts written. The editorial department consisted primarily of three women writers brought over from America—Eve Unsell, Margaret Turnbull and Ouida Bergere. It was the convention early in the 1920s that scenario-writing was importantly the province of women, like editing, and many of the leading writers in Hollywood, among them June Mathis and Frances Marion, were women. Seasoned professionals, they ran a little factory whipping the material into shape, mostly from pre-existent plays or novels, though the first Famous Players-Lasky film to go into production in Britain, The Call of Youth, was actually based on an original story by one of the more successful senior playwrights in London, Henry Arthur Jones. Sometimes the job of adaptation was quite straightforward, but Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush (1921), for instance, was put together by Margaret Turnbull from one novel and two separate plays. There was little these ladies did not know about the technique of screen writing, and in Alfred Hitchcock they found an eager and attentive pupil.
He also learned a lot, even at this very early stage, about the possibilities the film medium offered for manipulating material. The story in silent films was of course told in pictures and words—the words of the titles. And what the young Hitchcock soon had brought home to him was the degree to which one could lie with pictures, or rearrange and reinterpret them to make them signify almost anything you wanted them to. A scene shot as drama could, if it did not come off, be re-cut and re-titled to come out as comedy: the filmmaker was sovereign in his own little world, the world he created first by shooting the film and then, even more decisively, by fiddling about with the pieces, laying them end to end first this way and then that. Their significance, he learned, was only relative: you could direct the audience into doing the work, seeing and understanding things just the way you wanted them to, could fix things so that they noticed this and disregarded that. And actors were merely counters in this game of chess—they might be more or less well designed for their purpose, but finally they were only counters, taking on significance from the way they were moved around in the course of the game. And this practical lesson came, be it noted, some three years before Kuleshov carried out his famous experiments with audience-manipulation by juxtaposing shots of various apparent stimuli with the same neutral shot of an actor registering as nearly as possible nothing.
All the same, it is unlikely that the films made by Famous Players-Lasky in Britain at Islington during the years 1920-2 were very lofty works of cinematic art. There is no way of knowing for certain, since they have all disappeared. But George Fitzmaurice was considered one of the better directors in Hollywood at the time, and Donald Crisp had a certain aura as the erstwhile assistant of the great D. W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation and Intolerance were foremost among the films which had seized the teenage Hitchcock’s imagination. And it was a time, we should remember, when despite the inroads that these two Griffith films in particular had made on the prejudice of cultivated people against this upstart fairground side-show the cinema, few filmgoers and perhaps even fewer film-makers gave much thought to the possibility that this might be an art they were dealing with.
In 1919, the year Famous Players-Lasky British was set up, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari was being made in Germany, the first film to dramatize the incursion of the intellectual avant-garde into cinema there. In Hollywood Erich von Stroheim was directing his first film, Blind Husbands; Chaplin had just made A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms, and was in the process of founding United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith. In France Abel Gance was making his first real film epic, J’ Accuse, and Louis Delluc, first intellectual theorist of the cinema, had published his first book, Cinéma et Cie. In Italy the cinema was actually in decline, following its ‘golden age’ which climaxed in the super-spectacle Cabiria (1914), while in Sweden a national cinema was securely based on the first major works of Sjóstrom and Stiller, and in Russia the first films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko were still five or six years in the future. It was a time, in other words, when much of the potential of the film medium was about to be realized, the beginning of the great period of silent movies, the first suspicions of intellectual respectability and the advent of the self-conscious artist-figure in the ranks of film-makers.
Alfred Hitchcock was to be by no means unaware of all this, but it should be emphasized that his own formation as a film-maker and first experiences were of a severely practical nature. Artistic pretensions were hardly thought of, much less encouraged, and the relation of the film to its audience—a large popular audience, since at this time in Britain films were still generally considered a diversion for the servants rather than the masters—was paramount. Hitchcock entered an industry, and an entertainment industry at that: he has often said that one of the great misfortunes was when someone had the bright idea of calling the place that films were made a ‘studio’, with all its artistic overtones, rather than a factory. And the attitudes inculcated then have been important in his life ever since. It should perhaps not need saying, since it is a commonplace of practically every other kind of art criticism, that no necessary relationship exists between the declared artistic aspirations of a film-maker and his artistic performance. Whether or not, for instance, the classic Hollywood directors regarded themselves as artists—and several, such as John Ford and Howard Hawks, were vocally scornful of any such idea—had little or nothing to do with the aesthetic judgements one might pass on their work, and equally the films of various directors much touted by themselves and others as artists look very faded or quite dead now. It seems unlikely that Hitchcock, even in the secret places of his heart, regarded himself as an artist, or anything other than a practical movie-maker, yet his life has been one of total, obsessive dedication to the one activity, movie-making, which many professed artists might do well to emulate. That being so, the conflict between conscious intentions and a talent which could not be stifled began early—probably right back in the days of Famous Players-Lasky in a back-street converted power station in grimy Islington.
Here, anyway, it was that he got his first opportunity to direct a film. It came about in the curiously casual way that so much happened in the early years of the cinema. The youthful Hitchcock had from the outset of his film career been working primarily with women—first and foremost the Hollywood ladies of the Famous Players-Lasky script department. It is, indeed, a curious thing for one who has so often been supposed, on the strength of his films, to be a misogynist, to observe how frequently and long throughout his career he has worked very happily and successfully surrounded by women. So it should probably not surprise us to discover him, at the age of twenty-three, getting the notice of a then somewhat powerful lady and through that, with nothing solid to show as a guarantee of talent and not even, according to his own account, any burning desire to become a film director, the opportunity to direct a film.
The exact circumstances of how this film was made, and how far it was made (it was certainly never completed or released), remain obscure. Even its title presents something of a mystery. In the records of Islington Studios it is called Mrs. Peabody; Hitchcock refers to it as Number Thirteen—presumably no final title was ever decided upon. The lady who came up with the idea was Anita Ross, at this time a publicity woman for Famous Players-Lasky. She carried a certain weight because back in Hollywood she had worked with Chaplin, and this impressed everyone enormously. It must have been evident by early 1922 that the writing was on the wall for Famous Players-Lasky British. The company had made eleven films, most of them disappointing critically and commercially. Moreover, defeated for the most part by British weather, they had not been making the most, as promised, of that distinctive British local colour, and the later films had been largely studio-bound—as contemporary critics smartly pointed out. Donald Crisp’s Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush, nominally set in Scotland, was shot mainly in Devon and might just as well have been made in Hollywood. Consequently, the company was cutting back its own productions and increasingly hiring out its studio facilities elsewhere. Donald Crisp, brought over by Famous Players-Lasky, made one independent production under his own banner, Tell Your Children, based on Islington and with Hitchcock still designing the titles. And among the other productions in the works at Islington was the modest two-reeler variously called Mrs. Peabody and Number Thirteen, written by Anita Ross, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
It seems to have been a comedy; it featured the American star Clare Greet, and the English stage actor Ernest Thesiger, later known to film audiences as the creator of humunculi in Bride of Frankenstein and one of the grotesque inhabitants of The Old Dark House, as well as, more generally, an acidulous and witty gossip and an expert at needlepoint in the days when embroidery was not at all a usual occupation for a male. Why was the young title-designer recruited to direct it? Obviously because there was something about this chubby, poker-faced young man, even then, that inspired confidence in others. Also, it must be remembered, it did not really need that much confidence to be placed in him. It was only a short, and moreover, though film direction was just becoming the prerogative of the specialist in Hollywood, the days were not so far behind when just about anyone could and did try his (or her) hand at directing films. Most of the early stars had directed their own movies from time to time, and it seemed just as likely that this young man could do it as that anyone else around the place could. In any case, even modest as it was, the film was never finished and seems not to exist today (thank heavens, says Hitchcock); it had the misfortune to be in production at just the time Famous Players-Lasky was winding up operations, and the studio was left deserted but for a skeleton staff, including Hitchcock.
During the interregnum which followed, he was given another very limited chance to direct. One of the independent productions at Islington early in 1923 was Always Tell Your Wife, a one-reel comedy starring the distinguished stage actor Seymour Hicks and his wife Ellaline Terriss. It was, it seems, a pet vehicle of Hicks, who had already filmed it once before. The director of this film, Hugh Croise, had fallen ill, or, according to another account, had not seen eye-to-eye with Hicks about how it should be handled. Either way, it had to be finished without him, and Hicks, at this time in his early fifties and at the height of his theatrical fame, recruited Hitchcock to help him do it. Since the young man, unlike most of the people around the studio at the time, was an enthusiastic theatregoer, he had enough knowledge of Hicks’s background and experience to make himself specially helpful and sympathetic; Hicks himself, on the other hand, belonged to the generation of actor-managers who were Hitchcock’s first idols in show business, being almost exactly of an age with another theatrical knight, Gerald du Maurier, who was to become Hitchcock’s closest friend in the theatre and his friendly competitor in many famous practical jokes.
Despite these very modest and rather inconclusive first essays in film direction, Hitchcock must have wondered towards the end of 1922 whether he had made an altogether wise move, leaving a pretty safe, solid job with prospects at Henleys for the ever-uncertain world of film-making. Famous Players-Lasky, after all the bright promises, had ceased production and withdrawn to Hollywood. Nothing much seemed to be happening in British film-making, where all the talk was of crisis: it had been at a ‘crisis’ meeting the previous year in the Connaught Rooms that William Friese-Greene, principal British claimant to the invention of cinematography, died, and everything pointed towards the complete cessation of film-making activities in Britain which was to constitute, in November 1924, the third major crisis of the British cinema. But for Hitchcock at least, and a few other continuing employees at Islington, help was at hand.
Curiously enough, an important element of that help had been nearby for a year or two: a film-maker called Graham Cutts. Among the other companies which had hired space at Islington during Famous Players-Lasky’s incumbency was a newly formed group called Graham-Wilcox, which consisted principally of the producer and director-to-be Herbert Wilcox and the director Graham Cutts, generally known as Jack. Wilcox came from the English provinces and was experienced primarily in distribution and showmanship; Cutts had also been in distribution in the North, and had made a film called Cocaine as his first venture into film production. This was retitled While London Sleeps and put into distribution by Graham-Wilcox, which followed it with The Wonderful Story, the first film made specifically for Graham-Wilcox at Islington (1922). Flames of Passion and Paddy the Next Best Thing followed, both starring the American Mae Marsh, and both successfully shown in America. It did seem, indeed, that Wilcox and Cutts had developed, almost alone of contemporary British film-makers, some real know-how in the film business. Wilcox went on to direct his own films. Cutts looked elsewhere, and very soon joined up with another new group of film producers, also from distribution in the provinces, also eager to get into film-making.
This was the company known as Balcon-Saville-Freedman, after its three principals. Two of them were to become, along with Hitchcock, the best-known and longest-lasting names in British cinema. Michael Balcon (born 1896) was at the beginning of a uniquely distinguished career as a producer and production head of various companies, most famously Gaumont-British in the 1930s and Ealing Films in the 1940s and 1950s. Victor Saville (born 1897) was soon to become a notable director in his own right (of, among other things, the best Jessie Matthews musicals of the 1930s) and to go on to be, like Hitchcock, a leading figure in Hollywood in the 1940s, mainly as a producer. At this time they were both ambitious young men, hardly older than Hitchcock himself but already quite a bit more experienced in the rough-and-tumble of the film business. And Graham Cutts (born in 1885) had not only chronological seniority, but enough successful films to his credit to rate an important role in their production plans, as the star director. Once these three people had combined forces and acquired a property, a hit play by Michael Morton called Woman to Woman, all they needed was somewhere to make it.
And so, early in 1923, they came to look around Islington Studios. It was on that day that they first set eyes on Alfred Hitchcock. It seems to have been a memorable experience. They came to look over the premises one Sunday while Always Tell Your Wife was shooting, and very rapidly noticed a plump, self-possessed young man, younger-looking anyway than his twenty-three years, despite a Charlie Chaplin moustache he was briefly sporting to make himself look mature. Though some have said, and continue to say, that he is shy, neither Balcon nor Saville then noticed much sign of it. On the contrary, he appeared quietly self-confident, silent and watchful when he had nothing to say but able to express himself with much ease and good humour when he wished. He seemed to be everywhere at once, volunteering for any odd jobs that came up, but matter-of-factly, and without seeming pushy. Victor Saville says that for all his willingness he never jumped into anything: if something came up, he would think it over, decide whether he was able to handle it, and if he thought so then propose himself with such total nonchalance that somehow he made other people believe he could do it. Already, apparently, he was learning the trick of putting others at ease by seeming to be at ease himself, relaxing other people’s anxieties by taking on worrying responsibilities.
When Balcon-Saville-Freeman moved into Islington as tenants they were a small concern, making one picture at a time. And in any case none of the films being made in Britain at that time was on a very large scale: the average crew on a film was about eight or nine, with a lot of doubling-up of jobs, no union problems of demarcation, and everyone lending a hand with everything. So there were a lot of things someone ready and willing to mix himself in all the activities of a film studio could do. And Alfred Hitchcock very rapidly started to do them. To begin with he was still in charge of the title department. But inevitably working on titles all the time gave one ideas about their contents, and Hitchcock had already spent a lot of time around the script department. Moreover, in a spirit of self-improvement and in order to have something to show, he had already tried his hand at script-writing: again, as with his first essay at title-designing, he had found out that a particular novel he had read in a magazine had been acquired by a film company, and written a script outline from it—not in any hope or expectation of selling it as it stood, but just as an exercise.
He was first of all hired by the new company as an assistant director, on the strength of his work on Always Tell Your Wife. Then, when they needed someone to write a script for Woman to Woman based on the play they had bought, he volunteered to do that too. They asked what evidence he could produce that he was capable of doing such a job, he brought out the practice script, they were impressed and he got that job too, working in collaboration with the director, Graham Cutts. But that was not all. During his earlier time at Islington he had become friendly with an art director who had originally been slated to work on Woman to Woman and who had recommended him to the company. But then it turned out that the art director could not design the film after all, and so Hitchcock, with his background in design and draughtsmanship, volunteered to do that too. All he needed, he said, was a draughtsman, some carpenters and a bit of other practical help. And so, to his great pleasure, he was able to hire back nearly all the people he knew who had been thrown out of work with the closing down of Famous Players-Lasky.
Among them, joining the team that Balcon-Saville-Freedman brought into the studio to work as a closely-knit unit, was one other person who was to have an important bearing on Hitchcock’s future. This was a tiny, vibrant, Titian-haired girl just one day younger than himself, called Alma Reville. She was the film’s editor, combining the job as was the way then with that of continuity girl on set. It was a natural combination, before the days when the continuity girl was likely to be swamped with bookkeeping and paperwork: on set she would keep careful note of what was shot with what intention, and then afterwards she would have a clearer idea than anyone else (except hopefully the director) of how it all fitted together. Alma had gone into the film industry early, at the age of sixteen, first of all in the very humble capacity of a rewind girl in the editing room at Twickenham Studio—her father already worked at the studio, and it was just round the corner from where she was born—but had already progressed to the point of having herself edited several major British pictures, among them the first version of that old stand-by The Prisoner of Zenda. She had even, impressively, been on set with the great D. W. Griffith when he was shooting studio scenes for Hearts of the World at Twickenham. She had come to Islington Studios to work as a cutter when she was twenty, and had been aware of Hitchcock, and he, evidently, of her, for some time before the shooting of Woman to Woman. She first became conscious of him as a bustling young man in, invariably, a long, dowdy grey coat, carrying large packages of, presumably, title-cards. He appeared very cool and kept his distance until, as assistant director on Woman to Woman, he was able to telephone her and ask her if she would edit it. ‘Since it is unthinkable for a British male to admit that a woman has a job more important than his, Hitch had waited to speak to me until he had a higher position.’
Whether or not Hitchcock was behaving at this point like a male chauvinist, he has given very little evidence of such an attitude in the rest of his life: on the contrary, he has always seemed to have a high regard for the abilities of women as workmates. But undoubtedly the most important of them all, the most profound and long-lasting influence on his life and work that anyone has wielded through the years, is Alma Reville, eventually to become, after a prolonged engagement less unusual in those days than it would be now, Alma Hitchcock.