Corruption of the innocent, Michael Balcon calls it. And innocent Hitch certainly was in 1923. He did not smoke; he did not drink; he had never been out with a girl apart from his own sister. He was overweight—always had been—and was painfully self-conscious about his appearance. He looked younger than he was, like a chubby, overgrown baby, and the carefully cultivated moustache fooled no one. He had become a loner as a child, partly no doubt from shyness and timidity, but also because he was conscious of having few interests in common with the rest of his family or schoolfellows. In any area where he was unsure of himself he would walk away from competition; in a strict, repressed family, where everything—even, it seemed, love—had to be ‘deserved’, he got into the habit of avoiding confrontations. If he doubted that he was lovable, or in any way attractive, he avoided situations which would put this to the test. He avoided boring school friends with his cranky interests by having no school friends, following up his interests alone. In his mid-teens, when he was thrown together more with a variety of other people, he quickly developed the protective colouring of the office joker—unfailingly bouncy and cheery, always obliging and ready to lend a hand. Oh, but would they like him if he did not make himself so easy to like? Best not to ask, in case he found out something he would not care to know. So, by the time he joined the Balcon-Saville-Freedman company, he had the act perfected: he almost was what he seemed to be, an uncomplicated, extrovert young man reasonably satisfied with himself and his situation, remarkably unfraid of the dark at the top of the stairs.
And, for all his bravado, remarkably inexperienced in life. As Michael Balcon and Victor Saville rapidly found out. Though they were little older than he was (three and two years respectively) they felt and behaved a lot older. They had both seen service in the First World War; they both came from much less solidly bourgeois homes—struggling Jewish families in the industrial midlands of England, which had perforce protected them much less than Hitch’s family had protected him—and had both been making their own way in the world at an age when Hitch was still at school, still comfortably if not lavishly financed from home. The gap between them and him in worldliness seemed enormous. But they liked him; he amused them and made himself immensely useful to them. They determined to take his education in hand.
First, the smoking and drinking. Here there was an obvious way past his defences: he loved to eat. Already when he was working as a clerk in the City he had taken to dressing up in a city suit and going off by himself to eat in restaurants like Simpson’s in the Strand, the haunt of businessmen who appreciated its fine cuts of meat served from giant joints on trolleys. There, always alone and equipped with the day’s Times, he would eat in solitary splendour, sketching out for himself one of the roles he hoped to play in life. He saw himself, in his fantasies, as a connoisseur of the good things in life, and the good things in life obviously included, according to the traditional image, fine wines with fine food, and brandy and cigars to follow. Not that fine wines and old brandy played much part immediately in the routine at Islington—beer and sandwiches at a local pub were more likely. But at least it was a start, and Balcon and Saville were soon satisfied with the aptness of their new pupil.
Girls were something else again. Neither of his two chief mentors was particularly experienced there either, though they still had a very fair start on the virginal Hitch. Matters were quite different with the other principal figure of the company, their star director Jack Cutts. And he was the one Hitch principally had to do with, since he was working in various capacities on a succession of five films directed by Cutts. Cutts was older than the rest, already pushing forty, and had quite a reputation as a womanizer. He always managed to keep attractive young women around him, playing small parts in his films or hoping to do so, and was famed for such feats as having two sisters in his dressing room in the course of one lunch break. He was generally in the midst of some tempestuous affair, sometimes several at a time, which had to be more or less effectually concealed from his wife (who was not even in fact his wife). He was by all accounts not much of a director (none of his films from this period seems to have survived), but he was a shrewd packager, a fast talker and a good chap to have a good time with. He had energy and stamina, and was perfectly happy to party all night and turn up, more often than not, bright and fresh for work the next morning. Eventually drink would take its toll, and some years later Hitch was embarrassed to be approached on behalf of Cutts, his first boss, with an urgent request for some work, anything, on Hitch’s latest film, The Thirty-Nine Steps (he managed to find Cutts one day’s work shooting a couple of close-ups of Robert Donat and even that, which Hitch felt ashamed to offer him, he accepted with gratitude). But right now Cutts was the most successful director making films in Britain: a colourful figure, somewhat histrionic in manner, thoroughly at home with those important actors Hitch had been up to now worshipping almost entirely from afar, and ready to throw a fit of temperament at the slightest excuse or no excuse at all. Even if Hitch kept his own counsel, and cast a cool, mistrustful eye on Cutts, it was all the same inevitable that Cutts should have some influence on him.
And so, probably, Cutts did: in particular Hitch would seem to have picked up from him some hints on dealing with actors, on and off stage. But in his obvious area of expertise, the wonderful world of girls, Cutts seems to have had no influence at all. Hitch was by no means uninterested, but he had already, secretively, formed a very specific interest of his own, Alma. One result of his recruiting her as continuity girl on Woman to Woman was that, as assistant director, he was on the set every hour of the working day, right next to her. Whatever else he might learn from Balcon, Saville and Cutts, he was not interested in anything they might teach him about seeing girls.
Which was no doubt just as well, considering that the connection with Cutts was to lead him into some rather bizarre situations. For the moment, though, things went on calmly enough. Woman to Woman started production in June 1923 and was finished by August. It was, Hitch thinks, the best of the Cutts films, and it was certainly the most successful. By the standards of the time it was both lavish and sophisticated: the script Hitch and Cutts had devised from a successful play of the previous season concerned an Englishman fighting in France during the First World War. He has an affair with a dancer at the Moulin Rouge who bears his child, then goes back to the trenches, is wounded and becomes amnesiac, and back in England marries another girl, completely unaware of his unfinished business in France. The grand finale has the girl from the Moulin Rouge, now known as ‘the English Dancer’, come to dance at his mansion, in an elaborate routine which begins with her being borne in by four ‘Nubian’ slaves—actually the McLaglen brothers in black-face, this being one of Victor McLaglen’s more unlikely early appearances in films. Hitch confidently elaborated the character of the fallen woman as though he was intimately familiar with the breed, and to his relief no one questioned what he wrote.
The settings too involved unknown territory, since he was required to design several elaborate Parisian scenes, including a complete reconstruction of the Moulin Rouge, without ever having set foot outside England. He dispatched someone to France to do research for the décor, but then decided that he didn’t really trust the researcher, and suddenly told Alma that she would have to keep an eye on things for a couple of days, as he was taking the night ferry to France himself. On this first trip, one might expect he would try acquainting himself with some of the fine food and drink for which the French capital was famed. But no; this was business. And the first thing Hitch did, arriving off the boat train at 7 a.m. was to go to early mass at the Madeleine. Sharp firsthand observation and native intelligence covered for lack of practical experience, and Hitch suddenly found that as ‘art director’ of the film he could just calmly state as a fact that the set had to be shot from this angle, in this way, and people would listen. Though he did not know it at the time, he was taking the first steps towards assuming complete control of a film.
An important part of the film’s success with the public, apart from a story which had been sure-fire in one form or another since Enoch Arden, was the presence in it of a big Hollywood star. Realizing how important it had been to Cutts’s previous films to have Mae Marsh in them as a selling-point for America, Victor Saville had been dispatched to Hollywood to sign up an American star for the company’s first venture, and had the good luck to find Betty Compson momentarily at a loose end, haying just refused to sign a new contact with Famous Players because they would not pay her enough money for the drawing-power she had achieved with them in the previous two years. He offered her £1,000 a week—a very generous amount for British films at that time—and she accepted, on condition that the contract should be for two films made back-to-back. Which proved to be a big mistake for the British company, since they had no property ready to exploit their expensive star and had to rush into production with another film, The White Shadow, advertised hopefully as ‘The same Star, Producer, Author, Hero, Cameraman, Scenic Artist, Staff, Studio, Renting Company as Woman to Woman’. Unfortunately the same formula (or almost the same—this time the script was written by Michael Morton, author of the stage play on which Woman to Woman was based) did not have the same results, and the film was a box-office disaster. But for the moment the Balcon-Saville-Freedman company was riding high on the enormous success of Woman to Woman all over Europe and in the United States too, where Lewis J. Selznick put it into every Paramount theatre and it made a big profit for practically everybody concerned—except its makers, who had had to sign away most of their rights in order to get a foot in the door of their desired markets.
Hitch was known as a good fellow, full of ideas and always good for a laugh. The veteran film-maker George Pearson recalled that while filming at Islington in 1923, he used regularly to adjourn to Hitch’s office to gamble for pennies on a toy race game he had invented. But for Hitch the most enjoyable personal experience of working on the two Cutts films was his meeting with Betty Compson, a jolly, effervescent and yet firmly practical young woman who put on no airs and graces as the visiting star and was very kind and friendly towards the fledgling designer. Hitch never forgot this, and years later, when Betty Compson was no longer a star but a hardworking utility actress in Hollywood, he repaid his debt with a nice little role for her as a ‘good-time girl’ in his screwball comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But something in the long run much more influential on his future was to result from Woman to Woman. Balcon went to the States with the film, to find that the Selznick company, its distributors there, were in a temporary state of financial embarrassment and in the hands of the receivers, and both Lewis J.’s sons, David and Myron, were jobless. When Balcon returned to England, Myron came with him; he married in England, settled down and founded the Joyce-Selznick agency in London. Very rapidly, Hitch and Myron were to become firm friends, this being Hitch’s first connection with the Selznicks and so finally a contributory factor to his coming to Hollywood under contract to David O. Selznick some fifteen years later.
Meanwhile, though, all question of long-term career planning was far from Hitch’s mind. The success of Woman to Woman was good, but it was instantly cancelled out by the abject failure of The White Shadow. C. M. Woolf, the film renter who handled their product, had lost confidence and would not give the company a distribution advance. It looked as though Balcon-Saville-Freedman in its present form would have to be dissolved. But Balcon, as so often in his long career, pulled a surprise out of the hat. One morning he came into Hitch’s office and announced casually that he had decided to set up a new company. It would be called Gainsborough Pictures, and had a capital of £100. Why Gainsborough? Because there was a particular Gainsborough portrait Balcon had always liked, and he thought it would make a good trademark, suggestive of art and gentility and class. He had worked out an arrangement with one of the leading distribution companies, Gaumont, for a new film, made on the same lines as the first two, with the same production team. The Passionate Adventure, ready for showing in August 1924, was a reasonably adroit mixture of glamorous high life and picturesque low life, scripted by Hitch and Michael Morton from a popular novel by Frank Stayton about a frustrated husband-in-name-only who found escape in visits to the East End slums disguised as a derelict. Clive Brook starred in it with another American import, Alice Joyce, and playing a featured role, this time his own colour, was Victor McLaglen. Hitch had to design and build a complete stretch of canal with houses beside it all on a 90-foot stage for this film, but such professional problems were just grist to his mill. The film was a much more modest production than its predecessors, but as such it was a safe beginning for the new company, and the first of a long line of pictures which were going to make Gainsborough and its nodding lady one of the most familiar features of the British cinema for some thirty years.
For the moment, however, it was scratching around for finance and facilities. In the parlous state of British films it was scarcely possible to plan more than one picture at a time. And for his next production for Gainsborough Balcon looked across the Channel to set up a co-production deal: to Germany, where the giant UFA organization had become one of the most powerful and successful production companies in the world. They agreed to try out a new pattern of production with an adaptation (by Hitch, of course) of The Blackguard, a novel by Raymond Paton about a violinist’s tempestuous career. It would be made in Berlin at the Neubabelsberg Studios with a largely German cast and an American female star, Jane Novak; UFA provided the financing, the British side undertook to distribute the film throughout the English-speaking world, and of course brought in the services of Balcon as producer (with Erich Pommer, a figure who was to cross Hitch’s path again in Britain years later, as his associate), Cutts as director, and Hitch as writer, designer, assistant director and general odd-job man.
At first the English contingent in Berlin, strangers in a strange land, had to stick together. Hitch, faced with the problems of communicating with his German draughtsman, found that they had both been title-designers and could make some sense to each other by sketching out their messages. But he soon got fed up with the limitations of this method and began learning German in earnest. He began learning a number of other things in earnest too. Cutts was in the midst of another affair, with an Estonian dancer. When his ‘wife’ arrived in Berlin he found himself in something of a dilemma, and recruited Hitch and Alma as cover. They were asked to stay with the Cuttses in a flat they had taken, Alma having a small bedroom of her own and Hitch sleeping on a sofa in the living room. Cutts then suddenly found himself surprisingly often ‘working late at the studio’—which meant that Hitch and Alma had to meet Cutts and his girl-friend and the cameraman and his girl-friend and go round to a famous café called the Barbarina, where they would sit drinking and eating sandwiches until it was time for them to drive home via Cutts’s girl-friend’s place in the Dorotheenstrasse, behind the Reichstag. There Cutts would disappear upstairs for a while; Hitch and Alma would sit in the car and watch as the light went off and in due course was switched on again. Then Cutts would reappear and carry them off home, very late, to a heavy English meal prepared by Mrs. Cutts (steak-and-kidney pudding and such)—which of course they could not refuse without arousing suspicion, so that Hitch got to the point of regularly excusing himself from table to run out, throw up and return for the rest of the ordeal.
Hitch did not always find himself waiting downstairs in the car. On at least one occasion he discovered that Weimar Germany featured some diversions undreamed of in Leytonstone (as far as he knew, anyway). One evening he and Cutts were invited out by the family of one of their UFA bosses. To their surprise, after dinner they were taken to a night-club where men danced with men and women with women. Eventually, two German girls in the party, one of them still in her teens, the other thirtyish, offered to drive them back to their lodgings. But there was a little diversion: on the way they stopped at a hotel and the two Englishmen and their party were dragged in. In the room the girls made various propositions, which perhaps fortunately the terrified Hitch did not understand too exactly; he thought the safest thing to do was to keep saying ‘Nein, nein’ until they got discouraged. At this point, perhaps suspecting that the Englishmen were united by some special interest of their own, the two girls got into bed together. Hitch was surprised but fairly uncomprehending. Not so the other young girl of the party, a student daughter of the UFA director: she sat down comfortably and put on her glasses to be sure of not missing anything. It seems unlikely that this interesting and exotic experience had any very deep effect on Hitch, though he admits to an abiding interest in abnormal psychology and sees the bedroom scene between the two showgirls in his first independent film, The Pleasure Garden, which has a faint lesbian overtone, as a reflection of this scene. Meanwhile, he tended in off-duty moments to stick even closer to Alma.
Professionally, working at Neubabelsberg was an enormously productive experience for Hitch. Up to then he had worked entirely in the one small British studio, making his own mistakes and finding his own way without much reference to the techniques of other filmmakers. Now suddenly he was dropped in the middle of the most innovative area of film-making at that epoch. On neighbouring sets the great F. W. Murnau was making his most famous movie, The Last Laugh, which was designed to be the last word in visual story-telling, showing audiences every stage in the decline and fall of the grandly uniformed hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) without a single explanatory title. Hitch watched fascinated whenever he had the chance, and was particularly impressed by the art of Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, Murnau’s art directors. There seemed to be no trick in the book that they did not know and exploit: one day Hitch watched Murnau setting up and shooting a short scene on the platform of a railway station where a train has just come in. The carriage nearest the camera was the real thing, with passengers getting on and off. Then the next few carriages were constructed in forced perspective to give the impression of receding into the distance in a very small space. But such was Murnau’s concern for detail that to give life to the background he had placed another full-size railway carriage in the far distance across the lot, with passengers getting in and out of it, in such a way that when photographed the foreshortened fake carriages would neatly join up the two far-separated real carriages. What you can see on the set does not matter, explained Murnau—the only truth that counts is what you see on the screen. It was a lesson Hitch was never to forget.
But his opportunities for visiting other sets were not so extensive. Once they started shooting he had more than enough problems of his own. Cutts’s behaviour was becoming more erratic and unpredictable, and he left more and more decisions up to Hitch while in pursuit of his Estonian dancer and on the run from his wife. Hitch was used to handling little incidental scenes, odd shots with extras and the other details that an assistant director might normally be left to take care of. But now for whole sequences he was left to his own devices. The principal thing Alma recalls of Hitch at this time is how very impressed she was (even though she would rather have died than admit it) at the way nothing seemed to faze him: in the midst of all the frenzy he was a still centre of calm and confidence, acting for all the world as though he had behind him a lifetime’s experience of big studios, foreign parts, and ordering around artists and technicians of considerable seniority and distinction. On at least one occasion he had to use all the authority he could muster. One of the sequences he was to shoot all by himself was a dream in which the violinist sees himself ascending to heaven accompanied by the hosannas of welcoming angel hosts. There was in Neubabelsberg a stage which would be perfect for this, as it was already fitted with a solidly constructed, unevenly sloping floor, as for a hillside forest glade. The trouble was, that was precisely what it had last been used for—the giant trees constructed by Fritz Lang’s set-designers for the forest scenes in his legendary epic Siegfried, recently completed, were still there, the pride and joy of the studio. And now this young Englishman came in and wantonly demanded they be destroyed. The studio begged and pleaded, but he was adamant—this was the stage he needed and he was determined to use it.
He got his way; usually, even then, he got his way. Tearfully, the art department moved in, demolished Lang’s forest, and built in its place fancy tiers of narrow platforms disguised with rather solid cut-out clouds, through which the violinist would wend his way by a winding path, playing away the while, to heaven’s door. But now there was another problem: how to convey the idea of an infinite host of angels in the generous but still limited space of the studio. Hitch decided to use the human equivalent of forced perspective, and sent his minions out to hire the tallest players they could find, and the shortest children and midgets. (The search for enough midgets involved further plunges into the odder kinds of Berlin night life, which Hitch was, with some relief, able to depute to his German assistants.) Having got them all dressed up in suitably angelic white shifts, Hitch then proceeded to arrange them on the tiers in order of size, starting with the giants at the front, then normal-sized extras, children and midgets, so that the scene appeared to be populated by an infinite number of uniformly sized angels stretching away into the far distance. Right at the top, at the back, he carried the process to its logical conclusion with dressed dolls. The only movement all the figures, live and stuffed, had to make, was a raising of their right arms in greeting, and to get the dolls to do this too Hitch devised an ingenious system whereby each doll’s arm was attached at its base to a cord which dangled down through the sloping floor of the set and at the other end was tied to a long timber, which in its turn stood on a set of trestles. The arrangement was repeated for each row of doll-angels. At a given signal the scene-shifters would push the logs off the trestles, they would fall to the ground, and the sudden jerk in the cords would make all the doll arms pop up at the same time. The only remaining difficulty was that the set was so solidly constructed, there seemed to be no way the director on the outside could communicate instantly with the scene-shifters on the inside. Finally, the problem was resolved by cueing to a gun shot, and visitors to the set were somewhat taken aback to see the usually mild, peaceable Hitch running up and down apparently threatening his angels with a pistol and getting them to jump to his orders with a plentiful expenditure of blanks.
Despite the expertise of the UFA studio, all the learning does not seem to have been on the part of the Britishers. Hitch had been familiar, for instance, with the use of certain process shots, such as the Hall process, an ancestor of the Schufftan process, which enabled the cameraman to combine a painted area with an actual set in the camera; it had been brought over to Islington by the Americans he first worked with. On one occasion he used it in The Blackguard for a scene in Milan Cathedral which required tourists to pass through looking around and pointing out features of interest which were present only on the painted section. Hitch had to get a British set-painter to paint it, and UFA was so interested in what he was doing, as they had never seen anything like it, that they wanted to set up another camera to photograph it. Hitch had to explain gently that it would not make the slightest sense visually except from exactly the angle his camera would take—but he did promise to hand on his know-how before he left, enjoying to the full the odd situation of being deferred to by the experts of UFA.
Towards the end of shooting things were getting altogether too complicated for Cutts, and one day he just vanished with his girlfriend, leaving Hitch and Alma to finish the film and make their way home as best they might. The next anyone heard of Cutts he had settled in Calais with the Estonian, gazing eagerly but in vain across the English Channel. It appeared that the girl was a stateless person and could not enter Britain on the papers she had. Cutts was frantic and kept firing off telegrams to Balcon and other persons of influence threatening suicide or, alternatively, that he would go off with his girl-friend to South America and become a professional tango dancer if they did not do something about entry papers and a work permit for his beloved.
Unaware of what was going on back home, Hitch had been reaching a momentous decision of his own. He and Alma were returning from Germany on the overnight boat from Kiel, and a very stormy night it was. Alma was lying down in her cabin, not feeling at all well, when Hitch suddenly appeared and, after making a couple of practical remarks about the job in hand, quite out of the blue asked her to marry him. He says, perhaps with hindsight, that he had chosen the moment because the journey was one of the few chances they had to be alone and also because he felt that Alma’s resistance would be low at this point and she would be least likely to turn him down.
So when Hitch arrived back in Islington he was engaged. It was more doubtful whether he had a job. Cutts was still fuming and fretting at Calais, and nobody knew how the next film planned would be made, if it was to be made. There was a project, though; Gainsborough had acquired the rights to a play by Rudolph Besier, later of Barretts of Wimpole Street fame, called The Prude’s Fall, and Hitch was as usual assigned to shape it into a script. He worked on it alone; it was mailed to Calais, came back with alterations, was revised and sent again to Cutts, until finally, at this distance, it was completed and ready to go. There was some urgency in the matter since Jane Novak had been brought over on a two-picture deal, and the faster The Prude’s Fall followed The Blackguard the better and cheaper for Gainsborough.
As Cutts would not come back to England the rest of the production team had to go to him. Hitch and one of Balcon’s assistants set off to go with Cutts on a location-finding tour, since the film required shooting in various glamorous parts of western Europe. They met Cutts in Calais, but he seemed very happy there and sent them on to Paris. In Paris after a couple of days they were joined by Cutts and his girl-friend. She liked it in Paris, so Cutts decided they would stay on there while Hitch and his associate went on to St. Moritz. After a week Cutts and the girl-friend arrived in St. Moritz. She liked it there too, so Hitch was sent on to Venice to pick further locations and meet the cast and the rest of the crew. Which was all very well, until Cutts arrived with his girl-friend. She didn’t like Venice—all that water was unhealthy and lugubrious. So the whole group upped stakes and went on to Lake Como. The day they arrived, there was a storm on the lake, and she didn’t like it. Well, obviously she’s right, said Cutts, the weather is impossible here. So on they all moved to St. Moritz. Or towards St. Moritz: an hour away by train they discovered that the line had been blocked by an avalanche. Well, that’s it, said Cutts: let’s go back to England. Which they did, having trailed the whole cast and crew around Europe at great expense and shot not a single foot of film.
The script had to be revamped to let all the exotic locations originally envisaged be substituted for in the studio: the result, inevitably, was rather half-hearted and nobody liked it. Moreover, Cutts never did manage to get the Estonian into England, so he was not happy on any score. And by now Hitch had really become conscious of a certain underlying hostility in Cutts’s attitude towards him. There were just too many slighting references to the ‘wonder boy’, and malicious ones in the studio were all too ready to stoke up the fires of Cutts’s resentment by suggesting that Hitch was getting too much credit for the over-all effect of Cutts’s films—after all, his name appeared all over them. In particular the cameraman Hal Young, a tough and cynical character noted for his habit of reading the racing reports while he cranked the camera with his free hand, had taken against Hitch for whatever reason and delighted to poison Cutts’s mind against him.
Of course, Cutts himself was not in such a strong position, with a pretty steady decline in the critical and commercial standing of his films since Woman to Woman. But he was a partner, and could not just be dumped, however eccentric his behaviour. Nor, really, did Gainsborough have anyone in mind to replace him as their star director. Balcon had no ambition to direct, and neither at this point did Saville, though he was later on to become one of Britain’s leading directors. Nor, despite some talk already, and a little experience in that area, did the ‘wonder boy’—incredible as it seems in relation to what came after, Hitch claims that he never thought of becoming a film director, being perfectly happy doing what he was doing. It came as a complete surprise to him when one day Balcon came to tell him that Cutts was set to direct a film version of the very successful stage melodrama, The Rat, featuring its brilliant young author-star Ivor Novello, and did not want Hitch to work on it.
Hitch accepted this with outward stoicism, but could not help worrying what he would do next—especially seeing that the British cinema was going through one of its periodic crises, and work was not so easy to find. But again it was Balcon who came up unexpectedly with the solution. A couple of weeks later he suddenly asked how Hitch would like to direct a film himself. It was a new idea, but he might have been systematically preparing himself for just this moment, learning every detail of the craft through scripting, designing and assisting Cutts on all aspects of his films. He knew he could do it, and had no hesitation in answering with perfect nonchalance, ‘All right. When do we start?’