Blackmail, of course, is something else again. In the history of the cinema, it is the first real British talkie. In Hitchcock’s own history it is a return to the thriller, which he had not tackled since The Lodger, a reaffirmation of his mastery, and a triumphant vindication for the critics of their first enthusiastic assessment of his talents. It marked an epoch, and provided an object-lesson in how this still dangerous new medium, the sound film, might be used. Though Hitch was to have his reverses and thin periods during the next few years, there was never again after Blackmail any danger of his being ignored or discounted.
The film did not quite start out that way. Its origin was a play of the same name by Charles Bennett, a young writer of, mainly, thrillers. Bennett was to figure importantly in Hitch’s subsequent life and work, but for the moment their contact was rather remote: the credits of the film say that he collaborated on the screenplay, but he denies that he did. The play had been a moderate success in February 1928 at the Globe Theatre, with Tallulah Bankhead in the lead, directed by Raymond Massey. Shortly afterwards, Bennett had a tremendous success with another play of his, The Last Hour, at the Comedy Theatre, and mainly on the strength of this rather than its own merits Blackmail was dusted off early in 1929 and sent out with three touring companies simultaneously. It was at this stage that the proposal to make the play into a silent movie came up, and Bennett, grandly enjoying his current affluence, was not particularly interested. He met Hitch at that time, and maybe contributed a few ideas verbally, though he doubts it. As usual, Hitch was responsible for the adaptation and continuity, with the aid of the playwright Benn Levy for the dialogue.
Dialogue? What was dialogue doing in a silent movie? Well, initially there was no dialogue beyond what was included in the titles, and a completely silent version of the film does exist, made for showing in those backward cinemas, of which there were still quite a few in 1929, that had not yet made the investment of conversion to sound. It was an investment that John Maxwell also was reluctant to make, despite Hitch’s urging. Hitch was longing to get into the new medium, and let his mind play freely around the question of how he would make Blackmail if it were a talkie. But there seemed no way that it could be, and he started shooting it as a silent film. History was catching up with the British film, however, and while Blackmail was in production Maxwell made the decision to jump on the sound bandwagon by putting some dialogue in the last reel, so that the film could be advertised as ‘part talking’. As far as they knew in the front office this was all Hitch was doing—making an alternative version of the last reel with some spoken dialogue.
But Hitch had more confidence—and more guile—than that. The film as he had made it was structured along very similar lines to The Lodger, with an elaborate opening sequence of purely visual exposition, this time showing the whole process of an arrest: the man with a gun in a dingy upstairs room disarmed by detectives who take him in, book him, fingerprint him, question him, photograph him and finally put him in a cell, then wash and make their ways homeward just like anyone else who has done an ordinary day’s work. The heroine of the film has a policeman boy-friend, as in The Lodger, and the film climaxes, like The Lodger, in an elaborately staged chase sequence. Hitch felt there was more than enough very visual material in the film for him to experiment with sound effects and snatches of dialogue elsewhere than in the last reel, so that is what he did—to such effect that when he presented his producers with the part-talkie version he was able to impress them with the sensational possibilities of the new medium in his hands. From there it was a short step to getting them to allow him to reshoot certain key scenes as a fully fledged talking picture.
Nowadays Hitch tends to be critical of the way he used the dialogue: it does not flow; it sounds like spoken titles rather than having an independent life of its own. (Actors in early talkies used actually to refer to the process as ‘speaking their titles’.) To an extent this is true. But the film, made before the talkie medium had hardened into convention, also enjoys the freedom of the early sound film to use dialogue only as and when it seems positively useful. Soon afterwards, the idea of the 100-per-cent talkie became just that, and film-makers had to fight in order to retain the basics of visual storytelling in their films. But despite some inevitable technical crudities in the recording, Blackmail is for most of its length remarkably assured. And this even despite the awkward necessity of using someone else’s voice for Anny Ondra, whose heavily accented English would sound rather strange coming from the mouth of a London shop-keeper’s daughter. At this time, naturally, such refinements as dubbing and post-synchronization in a recording studio were unheard of: all the speech had to be recorded directly at the time of shooting. So Hitch devised for himself a method whereby another actress, Joan Barry, stood off-camera speaking Anny Ondra’s lines while she mouthed them as closely synchronized as she could manage—to highly convincing effect, be it said.
Since Hitch already had shot for the silent version the strongly visual opening montage, the killing when the heroine knifes her would-be seducer in his studio apartment, and the final chase through the British Museum, he felt he could afford to experiment a bit elsewhere with the conspicuous use of sound, instead of just adding dialogue. And at this point he invented the scene which figures in every textbook and impressed critics and public alike as much as the glass ceiling with Ivor Novello’s feet pacing had in The Lodger, This occurs just after the killing. The heroine has managed to sneak home unobserved, and is trying to pretend that everything is as usual. Her mother rouses her from the bed she has just got into, fully clothed, and she comes down to breakfast. There the conversation is all about this mysterious stabbing the night before, and gradually we hear what is being said as though through her hypersensitive ears: ‘What a terrible way to kill a man,’ says the chattering neighbour. ‘With a knife in his back. Now I would have used a brick maybe, but I’d never use a knife. A knife is a terrible thing. A knife is so messy and dreadful …,’ and so on, as the words become an almost indistinguishable litany with just the word ‘knife’ stabbing out with full volume and clarity. This kind of subjective distortion was a complete novelty at the time, and if today it seems perhaps a little too obtrusive and self-conscious (like the ceiling shot in The Lodger), it was a sensation in 1929.
The film has another point of similarity with The Lodger: in it Hitch was not allowed to use the ending he had originally intended, but was forced to settle for a more conventional happy ending. What he originally intended was to bring back at the end the same sequence of events in the arrest and imprisonment of a suspect as he had used at the beginning, only this time the suspect would be the heroine. Again the arresting officer would be her boy-friend, but there would be no sign between them—he would just mechanically do his job, and at the end, after she has been led away, the other policeman would ask him, as before, ‘Well, what are you doing tonight, going out with your girl?’ He would answer without apparent emotion, ‘No, not tonight,’ and walk out. Obviously this would be an ironically effective conclusion; equally obviously it would be distressingly downbeat for an audience which has been suffering along with the heroine and empathizing with her attempts to get away with it. In the process, of course, the audience has been persuaded to lay aside or suspend judgement on the question of her guilt, which, when you look at it dispassionately, is more than a little problematic. After all, the victim had only taken her up to his apartment (willingly enough on her part) and made a fairly violent pass at her—it would be difficult even to maintain that she killed him while resisting rape. So she would seem to be guilty of at least an unpremeditated panic killing, worse than manslaughter. The script obligingly switches our attention from this to the red herring of the blackmailer, both to gain sympathy for the heroine as the victim of such a low, sneaky criminal and to convince us, by dramatic sleight-of-hand, that his detection and pursuit are a parallel to the discovery of the real murderer in The Lodger which let the unjustly suspected hero off the hook. Some commentators eager to find the deep-laid Christian morality they argue is present in all of Hitchcock, read into the end of the film as it stands a strong suggestion that though the heroine does escape prosecution she and her policeman fiancé will be unable to escape the agony of a shared secret guilt for the rest of their lives. It is hardly likely, however, that Hitch intended anything so deep (or so trite, depending which way you look at it): for him the ending was and remains a ‘happy ending’ forced on him as a compromise, and amusing mainly because it was a successful early exercise in wilfully warping an audience’s moral perceptions to such a point that they would cheerfully applaud the spectacle of a murderer getting away scot-free.
The film has a number of other incidental whimsical touches which show Hitch privately enjoying himself. There is, for example, the characterization of the would-be seducer, who is not really in any important sense a villain, and is in fact played by Cyril Ritchard, later famous in America as the king of light comedy and musicals. His talents in the musical direction are even employed in Blackmail by having him do a musical number at the piano before he is knifed. But he is, after all, out to lead the girl astray, which whimsically suggested to Hitch the moustachioed villain of melodrama. Actually he is clean-shaven, but in one shot Hitch arranged the lighting so that a shadow from a wrought-iron chandelier fell across his face in precisely the shape of a twirlable moustache. ‘My farewell to silent pictures,’ he calls it.
A lot of the technique Hitch used in Blackmail was far more sophisticated than that, though—in particular the near-final chase through the British Museum, none of which could actually be shot in the British Museum, on account mainly of the poor light there. But Hitch, with his developing penchant for locating his action sequences in curious and visually striking places, had set his heart on the British Museum. So it all had to be done in the studio—with the aid of some quite complicated examples of the Schufftan process. Hitch had long-exposure photographs taken from the nine viewpoints from which he would have chosen to shoot in the Museum, made transparencies of them so that they could be back-lit to give the desired clarity and luminosity, then had the parts of the slides corresponding to the places where he wanted to put the live actors scraped away. The slide was then placed close to the camera and only the parts of the original setting immediately surrounding the actors built full-size so that when photographed the slide and the set fused together. All one might see, therefore, on the stage was a man by a door frame looking intently at nothing: the rooms on either side of the door frame and the cases of exhibits into which he appeared to be gazing were all on the slide.
All this had to be done in great secrecy, because Maxwell was worried about how long the film was taking to shoot and no one in the studio management knew much about the Schufftan process except that they mistrusted it as a new-fangled contraption which might well go wrong. As a cover, Hitch set up a second camera on the sidelines apparently photographing a letter for an insert. A lookout was posted, and if anybody from the front office was sighted approaching they would all drop what they were doing and suddenly be very intent on the letter until the danger was past. So successful was the stratagem that when the rough cut of the film was shown to Maxwell and his staff everybody wanted to know exactly when and how Hitch had found time to shoot this whole elaborate chase sequence on location in the British Museum. Indeed, even today it is hard to tell what was shot in the studio and what, if any, on the spot—even the shot of the blackmailer being chased across the roof of the Reading Room was done in the studio with a miniature combined in the camera with a skeleton ramp.
Blackmail is also a first in another respect—inessential, perhaps, but immediately noticeable: it is the first film in which Hitch makes one of his cameo appearances. Admittedly he is visible, just, in The Lodger, but in Blackmail he makes a characteristic gag appearance which more or less requires him to be recognized. There he sits on the London Underground, a portly figure in a pork-pie hat, quietly reading a book, while a horrible little boy leans over the back of the next seat to torment him and receives a sharp but ineffectual jab for his pains. It is the precursor of and model for many other such moments, and it somehow symbolizes Hitch’s emergence as a public figure—a position unique among British film-makers and ultimately to make him one of the most familiar faces and figures in the world.
The immediate effect of the film was very gratifying too. It was a considerable commercial success, and moreover was received with universal delight by the critics. The Lodger had encouraged the notion that perhaps, just possibly, there might be such a thing as a British film which could seriously be held up to comparison with the best that foreign film-makers could produce. Since then, British critics had been hopefully looking for something more to support this idea. True, Hitch’s films—or some of them—had been pretty good, good enough to make the critics feel that their confidence was not misplaced. At the same time there were a lot of excuses and back-handed praise, a lot of head-shaking about the quality of the story material he had to work with. But now, with a communal sigh of relief, the film press could discover a worthy successor—and a film, moreover, which seemed to advance the medium itself, to put Hitchcock and the British cinema in the forefront of world development in the tricky new medium of the talkie. Even the usually superior Close-Up, though it deprecated the way the ‘knife … knife … knife’ sequence had been ‘glorified in the English press’, did still admit that it gave one ‘a clear idea of the potentialities of the medium’ and concluded that in consequence ‘some of us are already beginning to say that talkies are an art.’
Among such might well have been Alfred Hitchcock, though, then and since, he was chary of striking any too pretentious a public pose on the subject of his private convictions: he would make the movies, and let the art take care of itself. And indeed his next assignment had precious little to do with art of any kind. Nearly all the major Hollywood companies had greeted the arrival of sound with some kind of spectacular revue film which would show off the talking (and singing) abilities of as many as possible of their stars in the most economical and easy-to-take form. Warners had The Show of Shows, with everyone from John Barrymore and Loretta Young to Bea Lillie and Rin Tin Tin; MGM offered The Hollywood Revue of 1929, with Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Jack Benny and many more; from Paramount there was Glorifying the American Girl, put together by Florenz Ziegfeld, and from Universal there was The King of Jazz, glorifying Paul Whiteman among others. So what more natural than that Elstree Studios should come out quickly with their own home-made counterpart, Elstree Calling?
Alas, there is many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, or the script and the screen. Elstree Calling is a truly dreadful compendium of terrible stage variety acts, mostly shot in as near theatrical conditions as possible by an array of cinematically inexperienced directors, including Jack Hulbert and André Chariot, under the general supervision of Adrian Brunel. Some of the songs were by Hitch’s old collaborator Ivor Novello, and among the performers unhappily involved were Anna May Wong and the hero-to-be of British wartime radio, Tommy Handley. Hitch would seem to have had nothing at all to do with most of this: his contribution was the framing device which has a working-class family, not totally unlike those in The Lodger and Blackmail, trying frantically to tune in to the show on their new television set (which in early 1930 was more science fiction than science fact) and being constantly frustrated by the incompetence and irascibility of the father and the gleeful descriptions of what their more fortunate next-door neighbours have seen. The only point of interest now (and quite possibly to Hitch at the time) is that the father is played by the English comic Gordon Harker, who had already played substantial roles for Hitch in The Ring, The Farmer’s Wife and Champagne. But otherwise Hitch’s sequences (which cannot have taken more than a day or two to shoot), though they are the only bearable parts of the film, can hardly be said to occupy a meaningful place in the canon or in his life.
Indeed, Elstree Calling was only a strange interlude while he was preparing his next film, a far more imposing project and his first to be conceived from the start as a fully fledged talkie. Altogether too much of a talkie from Hitch’s point of view, in fact, for nowadays he tends to dismiss Juno and the Paycock as just a photograph of the stage play. This is not actually fair—it is, if anything, rather less so than Dial M for Murder or Rope, but one can see what he means and he seems to have little love for either of those later movies either. And Juno and the Paycock (like Rope, unlike Dial M for Murder) was something which he specifically wanted to do. He had seen Sean O’Casey’s original play set during the Irish Troubles several times, and been immensely impressed by it and by the acting of the Abbey Theatre company from Dublin. He particularly liked their simplicity and directness of effect, as opposed to the elaboration of C. B. Cochran’s then recent production of O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, which he felt was too ‘gussied up’, and was very struck by the last scene, which pushed humour to the point where it became deliberately sickening. He had mentioned this enthusiasm to Ivor Montagu, still a friend although they had gone separate ways professionally, and one day Montagu engineered a meeting between Hitch and the playwright on the set of Blackmail. O’Casey, who had never set foot in a film studio before, arrived exotically dressed in a tweed knickerbocker suit, and after looking around uncomprehendingly for a few moments, delivered himself of the rather surprising observation: ‘There’s no education like the education of life’—a curious reaction, Hitch thought, to this world of illusion. His only comment on the idea of filming Juno was ‘Why do you want to do the bloody thing?’ However, Hitch and O’Casey immediately hit it off, and the deal to bring Juno and the Paycock to the screen with some of the original Abbey Theatre cast, notably Sara Allgood as Juno, was soon finalized.
So here was the very English Hitch set to direct a very Irish subject—and one, moreover, which as an outstanding stage success had its own coherence and consistency and would brook very little modification, even if he had thought this a good thing to do. In fashioning the screenplay Hitch and Alma stuck very close to the original: he kept thinking desperately ‘How can I get out of the room?’ but the only important point at which he felt the text could stand some expansion was at the opening. He wanted anyway to show the pub where they drank, a very important part of their lives, so he persuaded O’Casey to write a new scene in the pub leading up to an energetically staged riot and shooting. The rest of the film follows the play so exactly that it has, Hitch says, nothing to do with cinema, as he could see no way of narrating the story in cinematic form. He did, though, photograph the stage play with a lot of imagination and sometimes considerable technical ingenuity. The imagination is still of course apparent, but it frequently needs an exercise in historical reconstruction to be fully aware of the technical ingenuity. There is a scene, for instance, in which the family is talking in the living room, gathered excitedly round the new phonograph, oblivious of the fact that the son is crouched in anguish by the fireplace. Their conversation is interrupted by a funeral passing in the street outside, and then by gunfire, and meanwhile the camera moves in from a general view of the room and the family, past them to a close-up of the guilty boy by the fire and his reactions.
Easy enough, one would say, in terms of modern film-making. But what one forgets is that at the time the film was made all the sound had to be produced and recorded on the spot. So there had to be a phonograph playing ‘If You’re Irish, Come into the Parlour’, and the sound of the Marian hymn being sung by the funeral procession as it passes, and the gunfire, and the conversation all created on one tiny stage. Unfortunately, to complicate matters, they could not find a suitable recording of the required song, so that too had to be done on the stage. Consequently, as well as the actors and the camera crew, there were present a small orchestra without basses to simulate the right tinny, distant sound, a prop man singing the song while holding his nose to sound as though it was coming from a phonograph, an effects man at the ready with the machinegun effect, and a choir of about twenty people to represent the funeral. All to be synchronized with the dialogue and fluctuating in relative volume and intensity as the window is opened and closed. It is a tribute to the success of the result that one would never guess at the problems involved.
Despite Hitch’s anxieties about making the text cinematic, the film turned out very successfully, and was praised by the critics of the time to such an extent that it seriously embarrassed him. James Agate, famously difficult to please, wrote in the Tatler, ‘Juno and the Paycock appears to me to be very nearly a masterpiece. Bravo Mr. Hitchcock! Bravo the Irish Players and bravo Edward Chapman! This is a magnificent British picture.’ Others did not lag far behind. Hitch was flattered, but felt rather guilty, as though he was stealing the praise which should really have gone elsewhere, since the qualities of the film, in his view, had little to do with cinema. At least, it would seem, O’Casey did not share this view: he was so happy with the result that he and Hitch began almost immediately working together on an original screenplay to be called The Park, which would use the comings and goings in a small public park during one day as a sort of microcosm of city life. Some minor failure of communication—as simple as a misunderstanding about who should call whom—caused the project to fall by the wayside, but O’Casey subsequently went on to reshape the script into his play Within the Gate. Hitch, though he saw little or nothing of O’Casey in later years, retained an affectionate memory of him, not untinged with malice, and confesses that some of both went into the character of the old bum prophesying the imminent end of the world in The Birds.
Much more to Hitch’s taste, and in the perspective of his later films much closer to ‘typical Hitchcock’, was his next film, Murder. Not that, in one important respect, it is ‘typical Hitchcock’; it is a whodunit, a genre which Hitch in general disapproves of, or at least finds relatively uninteresting, as it falls foul of his oft-stated belief in suspense as opposed to surprise—too much attention is concentrated on the purely mechanical matter of the conclusion and working out which of the various possible characters did actually do whatever it was that was done. The story of Murder is derived from a detective thriller by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson called Enter Sir John; a theatrical knight turns amateur sleuth when he becomes uncertain that a jury he has been on was right to convict a young woman of murder. In the tradition of many a gentleman detective he sets out to solve the case himself, quite disinterestedly, to set his own mind at rest, and finally comes up with the odd but reasonably convincing conclusion that the real culprit is a transvestite half-caste acrobat.
Even if the whodunit structure was not particularly appealing to Hitch, he obviously found a lot to enjoy in the film itself, which gave him many opportunities to explore odd by-ways of human behaviour and is packed full of invention and recollection. The rather grand theatrical knight (an excellent performance by Herbert Marshall) is at once approved of and lightly mocked—he can be a proper gentleman, as when he considerately eats his soup with the same spoon as his ineradicably ‘common’ guest has chosen and gives subtle pointers as to what to do with the cherry in a cocktail, but also he comes in for his share of sly humour, as when he is beset with his landlady’s many terrible children in bed at the crummy lodgings he has taken to inspect the scene and milieu of the crime. Hitch’s memories of the grandeur of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre came in handy when Sir John is receiving the humble theatricals from the provinces: the vast expanse of very thick-pile carpet the trembling visitor had to traverse to reach Tree’s desk in the office is exaggerated, in the film, by putting a mattress under the carpet to give the subjective impression that the visitor is actually sinking in knee deep. And the vision of his mother struggling to get both legs into one knicker leg during an air raid is recreated in the opening sequence when screams signalling that a murder has taken place awaken a whole neighbourhood, causing various kinds of response as the camera tracks along outside a row of windows.
Since so much in the story turns, or seems to turn, on nice class distinctions, a lot of attempts have been made to pin down Hitch’s attitudes in the matter, snob or anti-snob, rebellious or grovelling towards the Establishment. In fact, as we might expect, he is too cagey, or naturally given to paradox, or just bound up in the dramatic values of the story from scene to scene, to commit himself unambiguously. There is no doubt that the workings of the jury in the early scenes (and consequently the conviction of the innocent young actress) turn on the most obvious kind of social one-upmanship and the class prejudice of the shakily genteel against the evidently common. And there are certainly points at which the loftiness of Sir John is humorously deflated. On the other hand one might detect a certain patronizing of people who don’t know which is a soup spoon and are allowed to make fools of themselves in social games which are not worth playing anyway. No doubt a lot of this can be accounted for by the conventions of the period, such as the source of the trouble involving the real murderer being located in the secret information that he is a half-caste (it is a threat to reveal this which causes the murder)—in those days obviously, no position, liberal or otherwise, had to be taken on race prejudice and no serious question was raised over the use of terms like ‘half-caste’ in an evidently derogatory sense. Whether this should be pushed further, to assume (given the character’s habit of performing in drag) that half-caste is a sort of code word for homosexual, is more arguable: despite the rather affected, effeminate presence of Esmé Percy in the role, there does not seem to be any real evidence of this intention in the film, and Hitch was even then too sophisticated in his knowledge of sexual peculiarities to make the naïve equation of transvestism (especially merely theatrical transvestism) with homosexuality.
In the course of shooting the film Hitch decided to experiment with improvised dialogue in order to get a feeling of spontaneity. He would discuss with the actors what the scene was about and, in general terms, what they should be saying, then set them to invent their own dialogue as they went along. Unfortunately the results were none too happy—the actors seemed embarrassed and self-conscious, and Hitch decided that whatever good effects others might get that way, improvisation was not for him. Other innovations in the film were more fruitful. In accord, perhaps, with the frequent references to Hamlet in the script (a trap is laid for a suspect with a play within a play, for instance), the hero is given a soliloquy, an interior monologue delivered on the sound track while we see Herbert Marshall’s face unmoving in camera. This has the advantage of revealing his inner thoughts and providing a very direct, natural-seeming piece of exposition, and though the studio thought audiences would find it obscure (where was the voice coming from?) in practice it seems to have presented no problem. There was also a scene in which Herbert Marshall is shown shaving in his bathroom with the sound of the radio playing the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde—another problem, in the primitive recording conditions then prevailing, which could be solved only by tucking a thirty-piece orchestra somewhere behind the wash-basin.
Whatever problems Hitch may have had in shooting Murder, they were more than doubled by his having undertaken to shoot at the same time a German-language version, Mary. This making of versions in two or three different languages, often with widely varying casts, was a habit of early talkies, intended to counteract the sudden sharp limitation of potential audiences for any given film in Europe with the coming of dialogue. It had even been done in the silent cinema occasionally—Hitch’s Champagne, for example, also exists in a German version directed by Géza von Bolvary. With Hitch’s hard-won grasp of German he seemed to be a good person to direct both versions of this talkie, but he found it was a lot more difficult than he thought. He did go to Berlin in advance to discuss the script, and was sufficiently confident to turn down most of the suggestions the German producers made for modifications—mistakenly, he came to feel. In English he knew the audience, he knew what would be funny and what would not, he was in complete control of the pacing and tone. But in German he was not, and constantly found his attempts to keep the German version as close as possible to the English (for budget reasons if nothing else) being thwarted by the discomfort of the German actors and sometimes their flat refusal to do things which seemed very simple and acceptable to their English counter-parts.
Alfred Abel, who played the role taken in the English version by Herbert Marshall, would not play the scene in which the actor has to be tormented by his landlady’s children while taking his morning cup of tea in bed: this was not suitable treatment for such a distinguished man, he insisted. When the character goes to visit the convicted (but innocent) supposed murderess in prison, Herbert Marshall wore a raincoat and tweeds, having shed his slightly ridiculous actor-manager garb of black jacket and striped trousers for clothes more suitable for the role of detective. Abel insisted on wearing formal clothes, since he was going (whatever the circumstances) to meet a young lady, and anything less grand would have been to German audiences not rather funny but merely unseemly. Needless to say, Hitch did not get on too well with Abel (though he enjoyed working with Olga Tchekowa, later a favourite actress of Hitler’s, who played opposite Abel in the German version), but he had to admit that maybe Abel was correct, in that he had for once bitten off rather more than he could chew.
Still, Murder, the English version anyway, did maintain his reputation with critics and public, and his next film, if a photographed stage play on much the same pattern as Juno and the Paycock, was a safe and intellectually respectable venture from which he extracted himself as usual with credit. John Galsworthy’s play The Skin Game had been produced in London back in 1920, and concerned a fight to the death between two families, one country gentry, the other nouveaux riches industrialists, over a piece of land near the country town where they both live. It is talky, serious and meticulously constructed, offering little opportunity for opening out or unmistakably cinematic effects. In the circumstances Hitch decided to make a virtue of necessity by tackling it head on: the virtues and the faults are much more of Galsworthy than of Hitchcock. Hitch, indeed, hardly obtrudes himself apart from some big subjective close-ups to dramatize a faint, and the whole style of the film is cool and simple, very different from the almost expressionist feeling of Murder. In the preparation of the film Hitch, still an avid playgoer, did get to meet the aging playwright and was invited down to a week-end at Galsworthy’s country house. He found Galsworthy living in some style (the success of The Forsyte Saga in particular had made him rich as well as famous) surrounded by a large household. Hitch put his foot in it immediately. Mrs. Galsworthy asked him what kind of music he liked. ‘Wagner,’ replied Hitch; ‘he’s so melodramatic’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs. Galsworthy conclusively; ‘we like Bach.’ Then over dinner Hitch discovered that Galsworthy prescribed the subjects of conversation. ‘We shall talk about …’ he began, and everyone tried manfully to do as he said. Then when he was tired of the subject he would begin another with ‘And now we shall discuss …’ Hitch recalls, as through a haze, a rather surrealistic part of the conversation in which Galsworthy announced they would discuss the relations of objects and then said, ‘Now suppose I have one grain of sago on this side, and one on that. Neither is aware of the other. Yet there must be some connection.…’ Why sago, wondered Hitch, as his attention mercifully drifted away. Hitch was amused as much as impressed by Galsworthy’s assumption of the grand manner, and some of his own ambiguous feelings surely filtered into the film, where things seem ultimately to be weighted against the gentry rather more heavily than in the play.
After making these rather enclosed, theatrical pictures which did not permit him to wander very far from the studios, Hitch was beginning to feel the need for a change of pace. Also, he and Alma had not had much of a holiday for some time, so the idea of a film subject which would involve foreign travel, documenting and shooting in strange places, was immediately attractive. Rich and Strange (eventually called in America East of Shanghai) was therefore a project close to Hitch’s heart, and the first of his films since The Ring to be based on a story originally conceived for the screen, by Hitch himself developing a ‘theme’ by Dale Collins. The basic notion is that an ordinary surburban couple win a lot of money which changes their life, mostly for the worse, as they set off, two innocents abroad, to go round the world on a cruise.
As it happened, Hitch and Alma had themselves recently been on a cruise, with Pat, now four. They decided it would make an agreeable winter holiday to head for the sun, on a cruise ship which went down the coast of West Africa, then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and back. Things went along quite smoothly and restfully until they got to Bathhurst, in Gambia. There, each member of the party was given a car and a driver for the day, mostly friendly volunteers happy to see new people. By chance Hitch and Alma were assigned the local priest, who took them out to his mission church in the jungle. As they arrived they saw a native family with a small son stark naked sitting outside. The father motioned to the boy to go inside and put something on; after a moment he reappeared wearing a shirt down to the navel and nothing else, which seemed to satisfy everyone that the proprieties were being observed. On the way back the priest suddenly said as they approached a crowd, ‘I can’t come any further with you—this is a demonstration for tourists.’ What it turned out to be was a very decorous dance, presumably originating in some fertility cult, involving two sheaves of corn from which a smaller sheaf eventually emerged—scarcely more exciting or indecorous than a harvest festival in the average English village church. The cruise probably had little specific effect on the conception of Rich and Strange, except, Hitch says darkly, that it gave him and Alma a vivid sense of how rapidly cruise members, decent people all, get to hate one another after being cooped up for a while on board ship.
Before starting work in earnest on Rich and Strange, Hitch and Alma (who was writing the screenplay with Val Valentine) went to Paris to do some research on the background. They were planning a scene in which the central couple of the film, Fred and Em, go to the Folies Bergère and are taken in the interval to see some genuine belly-dancing. So Hitch and Alma went along to the Folies Bergère and in the interval asked a young man in a dinner jacket where they could see belly-dancing. He took them into the street and called a taxi: when they seemed surprised he told them the dancing was in an annexe. This was obviously odd, so Hitch guessed there must be some mistake, and when they stopped in front of a shady, anonymous-looking house he said to Alma, ‘I bet this is a brothel.’ In his innocent youth he had never been to such a place, and neither of course had she, so, greatly daring, they decided to go in anyway. The girls all came down and paraded in front of them, they carried off the situation as best they could by offering champagne for all, and then the madam matter-of-factly inquired which of the girls best suited Hitch’s tastes and how they might accommodate the lady. Taking refuge in an exaggeratedly shaky grasp of French, the two of them beat a hasty retreat and headed straight back to the theatre, only to discover that they had not been at the Folies Bergère at all, but at the Casino de Paris, and were obviously behaving about as naively in foreign parts as the principal characters in their story.
Back in England they completed the script, cast it, and Hitch sent a second unit off to shoot the location scenes with a small group of actors and a skeleton crew, all of whom went on an actual cruise from Marseilles through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean out to Colombo. Because of the unusual length of the shooting schedule enforced by all this location work, he could not afford important stars, but recruited capable character actors from the West End stage: the central couple were played by Henry Kendall and Joan Barry (finally showing her face in a Hitchcock film after lending her voice to Anny Ondra in Blackmail), while Betty Amann played the phoney princess who attracts the husband’s attention on board ship, Percy Marmont the young man who courts her, and Elsie Randolph, a charming musical-comedy star on stage, was grotesquely dressed and made up to play the rather cruelly caricatured role of the inevitable old maid and cruise bore.
The little background scenes for an Arab market, riding around in a rickshaw in the Orient and so on, were all shot without mishap, and the unit came back to the studio, where sets had been constructed with miraculous fidelity to match the location material, for most of the film. The story they were shooting is curious, to say the least—oddly bitter and gloomy, an adventure story in which all the adventures turn out badly. One thing everyone would agree: it could not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as ‘typical Hitchcock’, whatever that phrase might mean. It has been rediscovered and enthusiastically praised in recent years, probably because of all his English films it is the closest in its density and ambiguity to the great films of his Hollywood years. Despite this, and despite the fact that it is, as Hitch himself says, ‘full of ideas’, it does not finally seem very satisfactory. As so often in such cases, Hitch blames himself for casting wrongly—in particular, for putting Henry Kendall, a sophisticated West End comic actor and fairly obvious homosexual, in the role of Fred, the quintessential ordinary suburban husband.
But even though not ideally cast, and endowed with a curiously primitive quality in parts because most of the location scenes had to be shot silent and pieced together with titles of almost silent-movie profusion, Rich and Strange does have an oddly haunting quality. The opening scene sets the tone, with Fred melodramatically demanding LIFE, and maintaining that as they are, the best thing for them is the gas oven—it is at once farcical and curiously convincing in its bitterness, and should prepare us for a black comedy. The comedy which ensues is not quite black, but it is certainly very grotesque. The misadventures of the innocents abroad begin harmlessly enough with a drunken evening in Paris, and the odd little gag in which each thinks the other is praying as they stagger incapably to bed. But soon they are not so innocent—snobbery rampant leads both of them into trying to appear much grander than they are, particularly Fred, who becomes enamoured of the obviously bogus princess. Much of the comedy on shipboard turns on social humiliation of various kinds, and it should not come as a complete surprise when things take a nasty turn.
Still, it does—probably because the turn they take is quite as nasty as it is. What has begun as romantic dalliance comes seriously to threaten the couple’s marriage and ends in total humiliation for him after a very unpleasant scene of confrontation between the two of them. Then they are shipwrecked, and as they prepare themselves for death they come to a sort of reconciliation: ‘Do you mind very much?’ ‘Not now—I did at first. I’m scared, Em.’ Still the comedy persists here and there—on the deserted, waterlogged ship Em still worries with surburban refinement about whether it would be all right for her to use the Gents. But the turn towards harrowing drama has been made. Being rescued by Chinese on a junk brings further trials: they see sudden death accompanied by a total unconcern for human life, they see a cat tortured and later, when its skin is pinned up, realize that they have eaten it, and finally they observe a woman giving birth in the most primitive, animal conditions imaginable. Perhaps they have learned their lesson; at least they return with relief to a nice steak-and-kidney pudding, the daily papers, and a wireless with new batteries—all the once-despised paraphernalia of suburban existence. And end where they began, with a minor marital squabble.
Have they been ennobled by suffering? Is the whole thing a simple morality demonstrating that one should know one’s place and stick to it? What, finally, is Hitch’s attitude to these silly but not totally despicable characters? These are not the sort of question which can usually be profitably asked about a Hitchcock movie, though the temptation remains strong, allied to the feeling that if Hitch is a dramatic thinker his dramas must contain something which can be isolated and defined as thought. As a rule his films, those perfectly tooled cinematic machines, contrive to fend off the speculations of those who seek a corpus of philosophy which can be independently articulated. But occasionally there are films which trail enough loose ends or set off resonances so intense and rationally unjustified—Vertigo is one, Marnie another, and in its own crude way Rich and Strange is another—as to set one wondering what they mean, or meant, to him. Today he is evasive, or forgetful: it was an eccentric adventure story, it had nice things in it, but it didn’t come off. And that is that. Or is it? We are still left with an obscure sense that here Hitch is somehow wearing his heart on his sleeve, or at least showing his hand more than he intends. Misanthropy might be an explanation; rejection of a particular class, the class from which he comes, might be another. Something lies beyond the scene, but what?
If we can come to no certain conclusion now, in the light of our knowledge of his subsequent career, it is hardly surprising that no one seemed able to understand Rich and Strange at the time. Certainly no one seemed to like it, or to understand why Hitch had wanted to make it. It had little critical and no commercial success, and Hitch was again in some difficulty. To make matters worse, his relations with John Maxwell and the front office at British International Pictures in general were deteriorating. He was unpredictable, unreliable (he might insist on making something as odd and uncommercial as Rich and Strange) and he did have this nasty, sneaky habit of ingratiating himself with the film press, so that he had some real independent standing denied everyone else who worked for the company. Also, the fortunes of the company were on the decline, and they were trying to make pictures ever more cheaply, getting at times right down into the ‘quota quickie’ category. Hitch felt that his days with the company were numbered, but he was under contract, and did his best to be obliging. He even undertook to produce, though not direct, two real quickies for them, though in the event he only got round to making the first, Lord Camber’s Ladies, a rather silly story about a poisoning directed by its script-writer, Benn W. Levy, and starring Hitch’s old friend Gerald du Maurier in one of his few film roles, along with Gertrude Lawrence (improbably muted and suffering as the poisoned wife) and Hitch’s one-time discovery Benita Hume. The film was the cause of a break in the friendship between Hitch and Benn Levy, when Hitch one day on set began to instruct the prop man and Levy interrupted with ‘Don’t take any notice of him!’ After that they hardly spoke for thirty years.
This was actually the last film Hitch made for British International, but before it he did direct one more, Number Seventeen, itself little better than a quota quickie based on a stage play by Jefferson Farjeon which the company had bought cheap. As it happened, there was a property in the studio at the time in which Hitch was really interested: John Van Druten’s recently successful stage play London Wall. To help him in the scripting he took on a young recruit to the scenario department at Elstree, Rodney Ackland, whom he had encountered on the set of The Skin Game and co-opted as an extra. Ackland was already a playwright of modest note, but for the time being he was a beginner in films, trying to find a niche for himself, rather mistrusted by the studio because he possessed, horror of horrors, a higher education. Hitch and he got on well from the outset, and they worked together on an adaptation of London Wall until with characteristic divide-and-conquer perversity Maxwell assigned it to one of the studio’s other directors, Thomas Bentley, and gave Hitch instead this wretched play Number Seventeen—which, for some unaccountable reason, Bentley actually hankered after.
Hitch accepted with bad grace—he did not have much choice in the matter—but he and Ackland, fortified by a plentiful supply of Hitch’s drink speciality at the time, a particularly potent White Lady, decided to get their own back by tearing the play apart and piling nonsense on nonsense until no one could take it seriously. Most of the film takes place in one set, a deserted house into which all the characters wander, either by accident or in answer to a mysterious summons; then for the climax there is a wild race between a hijacked Green Line bus and a boat train to the coast, ending in a spectacular crash of the train into the waiting cross-Channel ferry (all done with models, but impressive not withstanding). The talky, stagy bit of the film, which accounts for most of its skimpy 64 minutes, is actually shot with some enterprise and imagination—long moving-camera shots, a lot of chiaroscuro, dark shadows and flashing lights. Which all serves to high-light the general ludicrousness of the plot, where everybody is in the dark all the time, no one knows who are the good guys and who are the bad, and people keep saying things like ‘Just like the pictures, isn’t it?’ as one melodramatic absurdity is piled on another. Gleefully elaborating, Hitch and Ackland decided that since the heroine in such stories is always pretty dumb anyway, they would go one stage further and make this heroine completely, literally dumb. And when at the end she suddenly proves able to speak, obviously no explanation is necessary other than the hero’s crisp dismissal of it as ‘some crook’s trick’. Despite which, nobody it seemed noticed what Hitch was up to: the front office accepted the film as a routine thriller, no better or worse than most such, and no one else tumbled to the parodistic intent—a Hitchcock private joke which really remained private.
Hitch was not after all too unhappy about his plunge into quota quickies, because he was working the while on a subject which really pleased him. He liked the character of Bulldog Drummond, as featured in a series of novels by ‘Sapper’ (Hector McNeil)—a gentleman agent involved, in a rather jolly, sporting spirit, in basic detection and international intrigue. Among the writers under contract to British International Pictures was Charles Bennett, author of the original play on which Blackmail was based. Hitch got together with him and proposed an original story using the Bulldog Drummond character as the father of a child who is kidnapped. Together they developed Bulldog Drummond’s Baby, sold the idea to British International, and prepared to start work on the film. But obviously it was not going to be a very cheap film, certainly no quota quickie, and Hitch’s personal situation with Maxwell got more and more difficult as he was baulked in one project after another. He wanted to produce a film to be written and directed by John Van Druten, who would have a small crew and two principal actors at his disposal for a whole year to shoot entirely on locations around London; but Van Druten had doubts, and Maxwell was not too happy about financing such an unconventional project. Then Hitch was considering a story by Countess Russell about a runaway princess—very much what eventually became Roman Holiday—but that came to nothing also. It became clear that Bulldog Drummond’s Baby was not going to be made—not at British International anyway—when Maxwell wrote to Hitch saying, ‘It’s a masterpiece of cinematics, old boy, but I’d rather have the £10,000’ (which, incredibly, was all the film would cost). Hitch suspected that Walter Mycroft, the film critic whom he had brought in as story editor at British International, was plotting against him and poisioning relations between him and Maxwell. But whether or not that was so, poisoned they were, and Hitch felt it was time to get out.
The question, of course, was where to go. For some years—since the end of the silent era, in fact—there had been two major film companies in England: British International, headed by John Maxwell, and Gaumont-British, a combine which took something like definitive shape in 1927 under the control of Maurice and Isidore Ostrer, City financiers. The Ostrers had acquired an important holding in Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough production company in 1928, and by 1929 had combined with C. M. Woolf’s W. and F. renting company, acquiring in the process Woolf himself (who had crossed Hitch’s path before) as managing director. Besides the two major film production/distribution/exhibition combines, the most interesting and exciting of the other possibilities was Alexander Korda’s London Films, soon to become the big maker of prestige movies in England. For the moment Korda was building on the modest success of two inexpensive films with a relatively big production, The Private Life of Henry VIII, which, when it was completed and shown towards the end of 1932 created a sensation. Finding Hitch at a loose end when he left British International, Korda rapidly put him under contract, but to Hitch’s puzzlement no job or property to work on materialized. Eventually one day he went to beard Korda in his Wimpole Street office, to be greeted with the spectacle of Korda pacing the floor saying, ‘Heetch, Heetch, where can I get some money?’ Since Hitch was under the impression that it was the producer’s job to get the money, and the director’s to be paid it, he bowed out of this arrangement also, and never did get to work for Korda. Nor, for that matter, was he ever to work directly with the other major figure to emerge on the British film scene in 1933, J. Arthur Rank, eventually the great tycoon but for the moment merely a dabbler in religious movies.
So the only realistic alternative to British International remained Gaumont-British, and that was where Hitch found himself, more or less—working for independent producer Tom Arnold and directing, of all things in the world, a rather cheap version of the stage musical based on the music of the Strausses, The Great Waltz. Called in Britain Waltzes from Vienna and in America Strauss’ Great Waltz, the production had been reworked as a vehicle for Jessie Matthews, since Victor Saville’s The Good Companions one of the most popular of British stars. Hitch seems to have had no grudge against her, but he certainly had a grudge against the production: ‘My lowest ebb,’ he has called it, and made no secret to the cast and crew of how much he despised the whole thing. The film itself is actually rather charming, with what seem to be a few characteristic Hitchcock touches—the anti-romantic idea of ‘The Blue Danube’ being conceived in terms of the various foods in a bakery; the shot indicating a servant’s humbling by showing just the count’s two feet at the top of the stairs which occupy most of the shot and the top of the servant’s head at the foot—but Hitch will have none of it. He claims now not to have been consciously aware that he was in severe difficulties, even though his commercial and critical standing were low following Rich and Strange and Number Seventeen and he had never been forced to make a film he disliked more than Waltzes from Vienna. Probably he was more desperate then than he will admit, even to himself; certainly he felt immense relief when one day his old friend Michael Balcon came to visit him on set. Balcon came with an American cinematographer who was fascinated by the way Hitch drew out the whole film frame by frame, and said he had never seen anything like it. ‘Show him,’ said Hitch, pointing to Balcon. And sure enough, after a few minutes Balcon came over and asked him casually what he had on his schedule next. ‘Nothing, yet,’ replied Hitch significantly.