It was deliberately a very quiet morning wedding, in a side chapel at Brompton Oratory, with only the immediate family of the bride and groom and one or two friends present. After the ceremony they adjourned to the apartment not far away which Hitch had been preparing for them, cut the cake, drank a toast or two, then packed the guests off in hired cars to a lunch in the West End while they made their escape to the boat train for France. Still punchy on their arrival in Paris, whom should they first run into but the redoubtable Nita Naldi, now living there with ‘Daddy’, the distinguished older gentleman who had accompanied her everywhere on The Mountain Eagle. Brooking no refusal, she bore them home to lunch in her elegant town house, and proceeded to press so much drink on them that they reeled back to their hotel in mid-afternoon with the carpet in the lobby lurching and heaving beneath them—it was the first and last time in her life, says Alma, that she has been conscious of being really, hopelessly drunk.
From Paris, Hitch and Alma headed on to spend most of their honeymoon at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz. It was, and is, Hitch’s favourite hotel in the world. Still in the hands of the family who owned and ran it when he and Alma first went there, it remains one of the very few luxury hotels unaffected in its appearance or its service by the passage of time and changing standards. Or so Hitch says—and he should know, since he and Alma have returned sentimentally to the scene of their honeymoon over the Christmas-New Year season every year they possibly could since 1926. Such a romantic gesture seems curiously at odds with the conventional image of Hitchcock the cynical joker and ruthless specialist in the macabre. Of course, Hitch does profess himself mystified by the way the people he meets persist in identifying him with the materials of his trade (’If they did but realize it, I’m more scared than they are by things in real life’), but if this is really the case, like most scared people he goes to considerable lengths to disguise his own vulnerability. The fact remains that his marriage with Alma was unmistakably a love match from the start, and has been an exclusive dedication and devotion ever since, a personal and professional union on all possible levels.
Immediately on their return there were practical matters to be resolved. They were both due to go straight back to work on Hitch’s next film, Downhill. But before that they had the job of moving into their new married home, a top-floor flat at 153 Cromwell Road, in West London. The flat was a maisonette, up ninety-odd stairs (no lift, needless to say). Since Hitch had himself been an art director, and now had many contacts in the studio art department, he designed the interior himself with furniture and fabrics from Liberty’s and had technicians from the studio carry out his designs. It was the first time either he or Alma had lived away from their respective family homes—as unmarried children they had been expected to stay on at home, so all the time they had been working at Islington and courting Hitch and Alma had had to travel halfway across London, he from Leytonstone in the east, she from Twickenham in the west, to meet more or less in the middle. Now they had set up a comfortable, modest home in a conservative English style—solid, traditionally designed furniture, chintzes, polished wood and brass. It was from the first a charming, happy, lived-in home, cosy rather than imposing. The Hitchcocks entertained a lot, and remained happy in their first London home until they moved to America in 1939. By the mid-1930s Hitch was making a lot more money, and much in his life-style had changed. But though he had by then acquired an (also fairly modest) country home as well, he staunchly resisted all suggestions from Michael Balcon and others that he should move to fashionable Mayfair: ‘I never felt any desire to move out of my own class.’
As well as a new home, Hitch now had a reputation to keep up: that created by the phenomenal success of The Lodger, which had really confirmed his standing with the critics as the leading British film-maker. This, and the value of it, was something he understood very quickly: understood, indeed, better and more effectively than anyone else. At the time of The Lodger Hitch joined an informal club called the Hate Club, along with Ivor Montagu, Adrian Brunel, and various other people connected one way or another with films. The idea was that they should get together from time to time to blow off steam, discuss (often in the most inflammatory terms) people and situations which displeased them. On one occasion the question at issue was, who did they make films for? Some said that it had to be for the public; others said the distributors or the exhibitors, for unless you pleased them first how could you hope ever to reach the public? Hitch alone held out in silence. Finally, someone asked him what he thought. Oh, he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, for the press, of course. The critics were the only ones who could give one freedom—direct the public what to see, hold a gun at the heads of the distributors and exhibitors. If you could keep in well with them, keep your name and work in the papers, and so the public eye, the rest was easy.
Apparently everyone present thought Hitch was crazy—or, worse, cynical, admitting openly his own opportunism. Of course, it is easy to say now that the years have proved him right, but the question is not so clear-cut as all that. Hitch’s uniqueness resides not so much in his recognition thus early of the power and value of publicity, not even in his skill in exploiting it, but in his combination of this insight with the consistent power to deliver. There have been others who guessed the power of personal publicity and self-advertisement—Cecil B. de Mille and Orson Welles have been no sluggards in that regard—and there have been many highly talented artists who have never evinced any ability to sell themselves in the market-place. But no one apart from Hitch has been so consummate a master in these two complementary but not necessarily coexistent spheres of activity. The pattern was already beginning to form in the 1920s. But it could not yet be said that a clear image of Hitch, or the ‘typical’ Hitchcock movie, had emerged. The Lodger was a distinctive achievement, and looking back at it now one can see all kinds of touches which seem to point the way towards things to come, beyond the thriller element—the suggestions of sexual perversity in the relations of the lodger and the girl, for example, in which Hitchcock first explores a sado-masochistic pattern which recurs often in films as light as To Catch a Thief and as intense as Marnie: the girl is drawn to the lodger, he suggests, partially because she half suspects he may be the crazed killer, rather than in spite of this. All of which seems surprisingly sophisticated, or at least knowing, in one who had not yet gone, virgin as he says, to his own marriage bed. And already Hitch was conscious of the sexual overtones also in the situation of being handcuffed, the pleasures as well as the pains of bondage and humiliation, in the climactic scenes of the lodger’s arrest, escape and pursuit. For the first time in his films, but by no means the last, he found a way of channelling, exploiting and maybe temporarily exorcising his own anxieties and terrors faced with authority in any shape or form.
More noticeable, naturally, to spectators at the time was the purely technical adventurousness of the film. The elaborate montage of the opening scenes in particular was an immediate attention-grabber, and the famous individual effects later in the film, like the glass ceiling and the mysterious, menacing descent of the lodger represented by just a gloved hand seen gliding closer and closer down the banister rail of the curving staircase, were all instantly seized on. If they were a little too showy in their context, at least Hitch knew what he was doing. When a shot was really just too farfetched, like the one he laboured long but in vain to perfect in The Lodger, where a police van with two small round windows in its rear doors would take on the appearance of a face with rolling eyes as a result of the swaying of its occupants seen through the windows, then he generally let it go—there was always method in his madness.
One other thing little remarked at the time—as how should it be?—which later became an important gimmick in his films was Hitch’s own personal appearance. In a scene in a newspaper office he is to be glimpsed sitting with his back to the camera, but reasonably recognizable—he claims it was just because they needed another extra there and no one was to hand. It has also been said that he is part of the crowd by the railings at the end of the final chase, but having examined the sequence carefully I suspect that it is someone who, in the darkness, from certain angles, looks like him. The point is immaterial: this was the first of the famous personal appearances Hitch has made through the years as his trademark—another instance of his remarkable gift for publicity and catching the public’s attention as a personality, a recognizable person, at a time when film directors were generally mysterious beings who stayed behind the camera and hardly impinged in any way on the awareness of the moviegoing public.
For the moment, though, Hitch was set to work on a much more routine project which did not particularly appeal to him but had certain practical advantages. It was Downhill, starring Ivor Novello, and based like The Rat on a play Novello had written for himself in collaboration with the actress Constance Collier under the collective pseudonym of David Lestrange. It is not, one would gather, among the films Hitch feels particularly proud of nowadays—he is the first to make fun of titles such as (when the hero is about to be expelled from public school for supposedly getting a local shop-girl in trouble) ‘Does this mean I won’t be able to play in the Old Boys’ match, sir?’ And the film undeniably does have its moments of absurdity (though the example cited is surely not as absurd as all that—not anyway if one takes the hero as the age he is supposed to be rather than the age Ivor Novello appears), as well as its naïve illustrative touches, like the literal setting out of the hero on the downward path after his father has turned him out by going down a ‘Down’ escalator in the London Underground. (The shot in question was made late at night in Maida Vale station, Hitch coming straight on from the theatre to do it, incongruously dressed in white tie and tails.)
But seen today Downhill comes over as one of his liveliest and most joyously inventive silent films—possibly a lack of any great sympathy with the material (‘A poor play’, Hitch says) made it easier to regard the film as an exercise in technique. His attitude to the public school in which the drama starts (a little grander than but not so different from Hitch’s own boarding school of St. Ignatius) is, seemingly, not over-romantic—this is no starry-eyed Goodbye Mr. Chips view of upper-class youth at school from the viewpoint of the deprived petit-bourgeois. But, as so often, the real pleasures are all out of school: some hint of what Hitchcock can do comes right away in the scene at Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe where the hero, Roddy, and his best chum toy with the willing shop-girl’s affections to a battery of Germanic lighting effects and a lot of play with the motion of a bead curtain (not to mention a little comic distraction of the kind Hitchcock was to use over and over again in suspense contexts, when a little boy comes into the shop with a penny and is served by one of the visitors).
Perhaps the most astonishing moment of all comes later on, in a shot which prefaces Roddy’s sojourn in the ‘world of make-believe’. He has just been turned out of his own home by an irate father. Now we see him in close-up, looking reasonably cheerful, in evening dress. Then the camera pulls back and we realize that he is in fact a waiter. The couple he is waiting on then get up from the table and move on to the dance floor, where they seem to be performing with slightly surprising abandon for a thé-dansant. And suddenly, while the camera continues to move out and round, the ‘waiter’ joins in the dance also, and we are able now to see that this is all taking place on a stage, before an audience as part of a musical comedy—it is a sort of Chinese box of illusion within illusion. The first time it works by surprise and suddenly making us conscious that the filmmaker’s art and ingenuity are being applied; on further viewing it continues to work, but with the added interest of our being able simultaneously to see exactly how it does work. And at the time Downhill was made absolutely no one else in the British cinema was working with this kind of cinematic imagination, telling a film story with this mind-grabbing command of the medium’s possibilities—which, one senses, Hitch was incapable of not doing, even with a subject not at all to his taste.
The shooting of the film did not go off entirely without incident. For one thing, Hitch had a quarrel over a rather strange matter of principle with Ivor Montagu, who had helped him change the apparent disaster of The Lodger into a triumph and was now working on the scripting and editing of Downhill. Montagu, as befitted a young intellectual invader of the cinema, had all sorts of principles about what could and couldn’t, or should and shouldn’t, be done in films. He objected particularly to shots which seemed to contain a built-in impossibility, or to be cheating in some way. He himself admits to a measure of inconsistency: he introduced into The Lodger a shot of a hand switching off an electric light a split second before the light actually goes out—a practical impossibility which nevertheless had to be put up with if the gesture was going to be read on screen. But a shot Hitch was determined to include in Downhill stuck in Montagu’s gullet. It was a scene in a taxi with the knees of the hero, his new love and her older protector all touching in a rather equivocal manner, photographed from directly above. Montagu complained that the shot was from an impossible viewpoint—not even a fly on the ceiling of the taxi could see things that way, unless the taxi was ten feet tall. Hitch, characteristically, didn’t care: the shot showed what he wanted it to show, and that was that. Montagu was irritated at his inability to put over his point, and though he remained quite friendly with Hitch he departed after preliminary work on Easy Virtue, and he and Hitch did not work together again until seven years later, when fate and Michael Balcon reunited them on the first Man Who Knew Too Much.
Ivor Novello was very different to work with. Six years older than Hitch, he had become known first as a song-writer, then as an actor and dramatist, and with the original stage production of The Rat in 1924 had got well on the way to being the great matinée idol of his generation. He was a romantic star in the classic manner, eventually to be associated mainly with a long series of sentimental operattas in which he himself usually starred, beautiful and lovelorn, dutiful and sad. His private personality was very different—funny and charming, homosexual in a somewhat swishy way, and a toughly practical businessman. Different as they were, he and Hitch became quite friendly during the two films they made together, and Downhill is really the only film Novello appeared in which suggests something of his sense of mischief and fun. Originally it suggested even more of this. Hitch shot a scene in which Novello and Ian Hunter, rivals for the affections of the same woman, have a knockdown fight which starts quite seriously with them formally dressed, Hunter in morning coat and striped trousers. Then they start throwing things which get bigger and bigger until they are each wrestling with pedestals almost as large as themselves which end by knocking them both down. But the studio took a dim view of this farcical turn of events—it was, they said, no way to present a romantic idol, and out the scene had to come.
Hitch was intrigued to note Novello’s skill in managing publicity. When the rest of Downhill was completed they still had a couple of necessary close-up shots left to do of Novello staggering through the East End of London on his return to England. Hitch had already begun work on his next film, Easy Virtue, and was on location on the Riviera. Novello came down very grandly, checked into the Hotel de Paris in Nice for one night, gave a lot of interviews there in his suite, and then, having got that out of the way, vanished to a very humble pension for the rest of his time on location. The shots were done on the flat roof of the pension, with a couple of men holding a painted backdrop of the London docks while Novello walked on the spot in front of it in the bright Mediterranean sunlight and the natives looked on incredulously, speculating as to what on earth these crazy Englishmen could be doing.
The second of the straight assignments Hitch found himself working on in 1927 (started, as will be gathered, so hot on the heels of Downhill he had not even finished the one before he was well into the other) was on an even more unlikely subject. At least the play of Downhill was episodic and featured a variety of locales. But Noël Coward’s play Easy Virtue was almost completely dialogue-bound, a deliberate evocation of the kind of problem drama about women with pasts and families with principles which had been enormously popular some thirty years earlier. A perverse subject to make into a silent movie, evidently, but Hitch was not to be easily beaten by it. The story is spread out to include locations in the South of France and the English countryside, and framed by two sessions in court to establish the hapless Larita’s shady background and unfortunate fate. (As she leaves the court for the second time she says to the photographers outside, in what Hitch calls the worst title he ever wrote, ‘Shoot—there’s nothing left to kill’). Everything which is explained in the play about Larita’s guilty secret and her wooing by an idealistic young man who knows nothing of it is shown in the film—in fact the play as written by Coward does not begin till about halfway through the film.
Hitch never actually worked directly with Noël Coward on the film—he scripted it himself with Eliot Stannard and, to start with, Ivor Montagu. It is curious to speculate on how Coward and Hitchcock would have got on at this stage in their respective careers: they were almost exact contemporaries and came from very similar backgrounds, but had gone in very different directions right from their professional beginnings. Coward was already Novello’s chief rival as a theatrical idol, though while Novello’s was the traditional romantic image, Coward’s was that of the sophisticated, cynical, bright-young-thing generation, whose most publicized representative he had become with the phenomenal success of his play The Vortex in 1924. Coincidentally, The Vortex had been filmed almost at the same time as Easy Virtue by Adrian Brunel, fellow member of the Hate Club, and starring none other than Ivor Novello—not too successfully, since that film just plodded along in the wake of the play, loaded with dialogue titles, where Hitch’s film took off gleefully on its own.
Easy Virtue contains some great Hitchcock ideas and a few out-and-out Hitchcock tricks—the kind of thing he took pleasure in doing as much as anything because no one could guess how he did it. There is a classic instance of this near the beginning of the film when he makes the judge in the divorce court look at the attorney through a spyglass. He wanted to match this gesture with a close-up of the attorney from the judge’s point of view, but for technical reasons it was impossible to change the focus quickly enough to achieve the effect directly. So instead Hitch had a giant plaster hand and a huge spyglass made, to look, when photographed, like the judge’s hand and glass close to the camera. He then used a double of the actor playing the attorney in the long shot which is instantly obscured by the raising of the spyglass, put the real actor behind camera in the same pose reversed, and had the giant pseudo-spyglass fitted with a mirror, so that when it was raised into shot the apparently magnified image through the spyglass was actually a natural-sized image reflected in the mirror.
Such intricate exercises in mechanical ingenuity do not make up the whole of the film’s inventiveness, though. One of its most charming scenes turns on a very functional story-telling idea, and a little personal discovery. Larita (played by Isabel Jeans) is being courted by a respectable, idealistic young man who does not know about her past. Finally he asks her to marry him, and she, torn between fear and desire, tells him to telephone her that evening for her answer. He does so, and the whole of the ensuing scene is played not on either of the principals, but on the switchboard operator. She hooks them up, pays little attention to their conversation for a moment, then starts to listen in, and we see the to-and-fro of their discussion on her face, concluding with a triumphant smile as Larita finally says yes. By doing it this way Hitch saved the cost of two sets, found a witty visual way of getting over what would otherwise be a boring exchange of dialogue—and gave a first chance to a new girl he had noticed on stage, who went on to be an important star and a lifelong friend, Benita Hume.
By the time Easy Virtue was completed and released there was already a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, on the horizon of world cinema. On 6 October 1927 The Jazz Singer, the first part-talkie feature had its New York première and the days of the silent movie, whether many people then realized it or not, were numbered. For the moment, though, the news had relatively little effect in Britain. No British film producers could afford to invest in all the new equipment required for a still-experimental process, which might well prove to be just a flash in the pan. And anyway at this time they were having their work cut out for them, as usual, just to keep functioning even on the much more modest level normal in Britain. So much so that the generally apathetic Government was persuaded late in 1927 to pass the Cinematograph Films Act, which set up a quota of British films required to be booked into British cinemas. Though there was some violent opposition to the act from those who saw in it a danger that the cinemas would be flooded with poor-quality British films taking advantage of their protected situation, at least it was a shot in the arm for the industry—even while the bill was passing slowly through Parliament (May-December 1927) finance became a lot easier.
One incidental result of this period of optimism and expansion was the setting up of a new company called British International Pictures, headed by John Maxwell, a solicitor from Glasgow who had been involved in film exhibition and distribution since 1912. The company rapidly gathered assets—a couple of distributing companies, cinemas, subsidiary production companies, and Elstree film studios. It also signed up as much talent as it could to back up its claims to eminence in the newly secure-seeming British film industry. Most importantly, it acquired Alfred Hitchcock, who was prized away from Michael Balcon and Gainsborough with promises of new freedom, bigger and better budgets—a considerable inducement since Gainsborough’s finances were painfully modest and Hitch had not been too happy with either of his assignments since The Lodger.
At least the first film he made for BIP was a subject of his own choice, an original script by himself and Eliot Stannard (whom he had brought with him from Gainsborough) set in the world of boxing and entitled The Ring. Hitch had never felt any great interest in boxing, any more than any other sport, but he used to go quite often to the Albert Hall for the big fights, as much as anything to observe the curious rituals: the smart audience all dressed up in black tie to sit around the ring; the habit of pouring a whole bottle of champagne over a fighter to revive him at the thirteenth round. All of which contributed to the later stages of the film. The tawdry side-shows among which the early scenes are set represented another aspect of that seamy underside of show business which had always fascinated Hitch, and did give him the chance to show with vivid location reality a whole spectrum of lower-class English life which at that time had rarely if ever been seen on the screen. Since meticulous realism is seldom an end in itself in Hitchcock films (even in The Wrong Man, which makes a big point of telling a real-life story just as it happened) it has not been too much noticed as one of the effects he has at his disposal. But many of the most memorable parts of The Ring are these incidental scenes of almost documentary material in the fairground and later in the fight crowds. And some of the details Hitch was most proud of at the time were the little realistic notations which few if any in his audience would consciously notice—like the contrast between the very battered, worn card indicating the first round in the fights of ‘One Round Jack’ against all challengers and the brand-new, unused card they have to get out when one challenger unexpectedly manages to hold out till round two.
The story of The Ring is none too subtle: a side-show fighter (played by the Danish actor Carl Brisson) is discovered and taken up by a professional promoter and the reigning champion (Ian Hunter). His discovery enables him to marry his girl-friend from the fun-fair, even though she is undecided which she is more interested in, him or the champion, and after her marriage she continues to wear the snake bracelet the champion gave her and to go out with him in spite of her husband’s understandable jealousy. The title refers to the boxing ring, the wedding ring and possibly also the bracelet, and there are some strong visual effects (of the kind Hitch was later to label naïve) emphasizing these symbolic identifications, such as the shot of the heroine’s hand as the wedding ring is put on her finger and simultaneously the bracelet falls down over her wrist from where it has been concealed under her sleeve. And there is a lot of rather Germanic play with mirrors, usually returning deceptive images, as when it looks as though the heroine and the champion are flirting at a party because of the angle from which the husband is observing their reflection. Compared with the intricacy of some of these effects, there are moments which at the time do indeed seem naïve, like the passage of time being indicated by the champagne at the boxer’s celebration party going flat as they all wait for his wife to come home, or his professional progress marked by his name moving further and further up a billboard while round about the seasons change (snow is succeeded by blossom and so on).
Still, noticed such effects were. The critic of the Bioscope announced enthusiastically that it was ‘the most magnificent British film ever made’, and most of the other critics were inclined to agree that it was pretty good. Admittedly Hugh Castle, in the highbrow magazine Close-Up, said that ‘Hitchcock just missed great things in The Ring’, but then he rarely praised British films anyway. The film did not do very well commercially, but it helped to forward Hitch’s career, gave him the satisfaction of receiving a round of applause at the première for an elaborate montage in which the hero fantasizes a kiss between his wife and his rival to a welter of distortions, with a piano keyboard twisted into abstract patterns, and constituted in his estimation the second real Hitchcock film. He certainly felt, and feels, much happier about it than about any of the next three films he made for British International. His assessment of these films is arguable, and probably influenced by various adverse circumstances associated with their production at the time. Also, maybe, by their failure to make much mark either critically or commercially. Two of them, The Farmer’s Wife and The Manxman, were derived from works in other media which had already had considerable success in their own right, with the consequent limitations on what a film-maker could hope to do with them. The third, Champagne, which came in between, was at least based on an original story in which Hitch had some hand, but he was absolutely prevented from shooting the story he wanted, so that was not too pleasing an experience either.
There were compensations. While Hitch was preparing and shooting The Farmer’s Wife, Alma was working on a script for someone else: Adrian Brunel’s version of Margaret Kennedy’s romantic best-seller The Constant Nymph, featuring two familiar figures in the Hitchcocks’ lives, Ivor Novello and Benita Hume. Alma was among friends, and she did not have to go on location with The Farmer’s Wife—a relief for the best of all possible reasons: she was pregnant. On 7 July 1928 she gave birth to a daughter, christened Patricia, the Hitchcocks’ first and as it turned out their only child.
While Alma was pregnant the Hitchcocks had acquired, for the then fairly substantial sum of £2,500, another home, a small Tudor cottage in Shamley Green, a village just outside Guildford, about thirty miles south-west of London. It was a modest enough farmworker’s house in its own large garden and with its own private strip of woodland right behind. In the middle of the woodland was a concrete septic tank, from which the agent drew a glass of water and held it up in front of a newspaper to show it was so clear you could read through it; the demonstration would have been more convincing if he had drunk the water, Hitch reflected. Almost at once he set about expanding and remodelling the house. He found a derelict Tudor barn up the road and suggested they should buy and re-use the timbers. But his architect, Woodward, was outraged: everything had to be done in the original fashion, with new oak cut with an adze, naturally seasoned and secured with wooden pegs. All of which seemed to take an age, with the architect occasionally looking in to point out ecstatically how he had carefully used irregular timbers for the ridge of the roof, to give it a picturesque built-in sag. He also tried to insist that the interior heating be kept down to 60° in the rooms, 50° in the halls, so as to avoid shrinkage of the wood. But here Hitch was adamant: at any cost he and his new family were going to be comfortable, so up went the temperature to 70° and 60°, even though he noted that this had the effect of aging the new wing a hundred years in just one winter. At this time some restorations were being carried out to the exterior of Pugin’s Victorian Gothic Houses of Parliament, and Hitch acquired some carved stones from among those being replaced which bore the letters A and H: the signature was proudly incorporated in the façade of the new building as a finishing flourish.
Meanwhile, the shooting of The Farmer’s Wife had gone reasonably smoothly, though in the course of it Hitch had been forced to add another string to his bow when the cameraman, Jack Cox, fell ill and Hitch had to handle the camera himself for much of the picture. Though he had observed the cameraman’s work, he had never done it himself. He decided that most of the process had to be common sense, and with his art director’s training he should at least be able to light a set without too much difficulty to produce a satisfactory pictorial composition. But he was not too sure of the technicalities, so to be on the safe side he would send the film over to the lab as he shot it, for a rush processing job, and rehearse the actors on subsequent scenes until he got it back to check that he had achieved the effect he wanted. Not that the actors ever knew this—to outward view he was confident and imperturbable, as though he always shot films this way.
The subject in this case did not give him much leeway for any kind of a personal statement: the film is based on a light comedy by Eden Philpotts which had just had enormous success on the London stage, concerning the wooing of three unlikely ladies by a widower-farmer before he comes to appreciate that his own unnoticed house-keeper is the right one for him. Like Easy Virtue it was a very dialogue-bound piece, but this in itself was a challenge to Hitch, stimulating him to an especially active interest in the problem of telling his story in visual terms. And the result, if not very characteristic of Hitchcock as we have come to know him, is a lot more charming and lively than he gives it credit for. One senses in his treatment of the details of rustic life more of the town child’s mistrust than of urban romanticism about the country, but he obviously warms to his task in depicting the gallery of grotesques who populate the story. Already in The Ring he had shown a pawky sense of humour in the bizarre details of the wedding, with the Siamese twins from the fairground arguing over which side of the church they should sit on and the assembled freaks and show people responding to the verger’s clap for silence with a hearty round of applause. Here the three principal objects of the farmer’s frustrated wife-hunt—a horsey widow, a prim, hypochondriac old maid and a simpering overweight baby-doll—are pilloried with a relish which may have lent some colour to Hitch’s cinematic reputation as a misogynist; and the sustained scene of the refined tea party given by the old maid, which is gradually, inexorably reduced to a shambles by the unfortunate interaction of the mismatched guests and by rebellion and hysteria below stairs, shows talents for immaculately timed knockabout comedy which one would not otherwise have suspected in Hitchcock.
Champagne is if anything even slighter than The Farmer’s Wife. Hitch’s producer had the title, and a star, Betty Balfour, a charming comedienne who was at that time the leading feminine attraction in the British cinema. The thought appealed to Hitch since he was by this time more than casually interested in champagne, its production and consumption. So he elaborated a plot which would turn on the experiences of a girl making a humble living nailing down the lids of champagne crates in Reims, who goes to Paris, gets to live for a while the high life associated with the champagne she has never actually tasted before, is ‘ruined’ and becomes a sort of high-class whore, and finally, disillusioned with night-clubs, parties and men, returns to her old job in Reims, hating the stuff. The story was a bit moralistic, and the studio wanted something much lighter and more comic as a vehicle for their effervescent star Betty Balfour. So instead we get a not too sensible story (by Walter Mycroft, a friend of Hitch’s, soon to become an enemy) of a headstrong heiress who is taught a lesson when her father pretends to be bankrupt and she has to cope with love-in-a-hut and the necessity of making her own living as best she can with no training in the practical things of life. Details remain vivid, like the rousing opening in which the voyage of a transatlantic liner is disrupted when the heroine arrives in a seaplane, to general excitement and confusion, or the ruthless fun Hitch has with the rolling ship and sickening food and the quarrel played for laughs (taking up the idea he had had to cut from Downhill) by using the pitching of the liner in a storm to break up the dignity of those involved. The rest of the film seems rather perfunctory, though, and Hitch himself complains that it has no story—even if it does yield one memorable image of degradation, fixed in a very famous still, when the heroine applies for a job at a model agency and one of the agents, standing behind her, coolly lifts her skirt with his toe to look at her legs.
This film had the comforts of being a fairly staid, studio-bound venture. But The Manxman took Hitch out to the wilds of location shooting again. Though Hall Caine’s novel specified the Isle of Man as the seat of the action, Hitch did not fancy that—it was altogether too far afield—and settled instead for Polperro and near-by stretches of the Cornish coast. By this time, in the autumn of 1928, the coming of sound was clearly inevitable. The Jazz Singer finally opened in London on 27 September, and suddenly there was a rush to be the first on the market with a British-made talkie. Various shorts were being made, mostly in the cumbersome home-grown Phonofilm system, and Hitch naturally wanted to experiment. There was, however, no way that The Manxman could be made as a sound film, and even as he made it Hitch chafed at the delay—he later dismissed the film with the curt statement that its only point of interest is that it was his last silent picture. The judgement is unfair. Even if The Manxman is not the film Hitch would have chosen to make at this time, and is not made in the way he might have chosen to make it, it still has qualities—and qualities which set it apart from most other Hitchcock films, then or since.
Above all, it is directly sexual in a way surprising in the brisk, masculine world of Hitchcock’s British films. This seems to have something to do with the extraordinary quality of Anny Ondra, perhaps the first clear example of a classic Hitchcock blonde. One has only to compare the scenes of the romantic triangle in which she is involved with those in The Ring featuring the charming but anodyne Lillian Hall-Davies: suddenly there is a living, sensuous woman in front of us, one who seems conceivable as the object of such passionate conflict between the two childhood friends—and as a participant, herself torn by passion, rather than merely a light-minded flirt. Partly this must have something to do with the actress’s training and background in the German cinema. In the early sequences she has a playful, winsome quality a little reminiscent of Elisabeth Bergner. When passion strikes—while the fisherman fiancé is away, presumed lost at sea, his best friend and his girl discover they are in love with each other—she throws herself into her lover’s arms with the rush and abandonment of a figure from Expressionist drama, with no preliminary, no transition. And when the fiancé comes back she is held like a bird in a cage, looking wildly round for escape, palpitating, instinctive, a creature of the senses rather than a product of society.
It is difficult to say whether this side of the film is the personal contribution of the actors concerned, or something which Hitchcock, consciously or unconsciously, put into it, or a bit of both. Mostly, it must have been a happy mutual response. Personally, Hitch and Alma enjoyed Anny Ondra, a very lively, open-natured girl who remained a friend through the years. During the shooting of The Manxman they introduced her to their doctor, who promptly fell madly in love with her. Unfortunately, he was a devout Catholic who absolutely would not consider any kind of sexual connection without marriage, and she was by no means prepared for marriage. So nothing came of that and shortly after she returned to Germany Anny Ondra married the boxer Max Schmeling. When Hitch read of this marriage he sent Anny a cod telegram asking her what terrible thing was this—she had married a boxer? To his amusement he received back a three-page letter of impassioned defence of her new husband, his gentleness, his charm, his lovability.
The nature of Hitch’s relationship with Anny Ondra is perhaps best captured in a tiny fragment of film which has by chance survived in the British National Film Archive. It is a voice test in which Hitch is seen directing Anny, in one improvised shot, and the exchange between them goes like this:
HITCH: Now, Miss Ondra, we are going to do a sound test. Isn’t that what you wanted? Now come right over here.
ANNY ONDRA: I don’t know what to say. I’m so nervous.
HITCH: Have you been a good girl?
ANNY ONDRA (laughing): Oh, no.
HITCH: NO? Have you slept with men?
ANNY ONDRA: No!
HITCH: NO?!
ANNY ONDRA: Oh, Hitch, you make me embarrassed! (She giggles helplessly.)
HITCH: Now come over here, and stand still in your place, or it won’t come out right, as the girl said to the soldier. (Anny Ondra cracks up completely.)
HITCH: (grinning): Cut!
The combination of jollity and edginess is very characteristic of Hitch’s relations with his leading ladies: a mixture of humour and authority, the ability to put them at their ease and at the same time keep them sufficiently off balance to give light and shade to their performances. It is a sort of seduction—he seduces them into producing something extraordinary on screen, with a kind of ruthless, even brutal charm. Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint … these are the ones who fit naturally into the pattern. Others, like Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren, have required a little forcing. But always the same meshing of senses of humour, always the same physical and psychological profile: that of Hitch’s famous ‘cool’ blonde. Something about the cast of feature, something about the colour of hair and the way it falls about the ears, a tantalizing glimmer of sensuality almost hidden beneath the controlled, ladylike surface. Least hidden, though, in Anny Ondra—it is as though she has the makings of the image, but it is not yet completely formed, partly because Hitch does not yet have it clear in his own mind, partly because the roles she has to play in the two films he starred her in required the character she plays to act in a violently impassioned way at odds with the studied cool of the later Hitchcock heroine.