In 1933, at his ‘lowest ebb’, Hitch seemed a strange figure to be a candidate for artistic greatness. Even to people who knew him well there was little real evidence that if he had not chanced to drift into movies he might not have been equally happy and fulfilled helping to run Mac Fisheries. He was, if not deliberately secretive (though he could be that too), at least rather shy about boring people or seeming pretentious about his artistic interests. Even where films were concerned, a lot of his friends and colleagues were left free to suppose that his interests were entirely business and technical—one old friend has told me that he doubted whether Hitch ever saw a film for other than a severely practical reason (to check on the work of an actor or technician in it, for example), and ever saw a film by anyone but himself right through. That is certainly far from the truth, particularly in these early days, but it was an impression he gave. And others, confronted with evidence of his collecting activities in art or his interest in and knowledge of music (which is in certain areas encyclopedic), or his omnivorous reading habits, have been frankly incredulous. He just never seemed to be that kind of a person.
The reason for this comes down, surely, to a species of shyness which afflicts many Englishmen brought up and functioning largely in a philistine environment. Hitch had never had much encouragement at home for his artistic interests (though, to be fair, he had no active discouragement either) and the film business he entered was for the most part in the hands of small businessmen who regarded the films they dealt in much as they would so much soap or used cars. (Hitch remembers the days when the senior Woolfs would stand outside their offices on the corner of Wardour and Old Compton Streets touting their wares—‘’Ere, ’ere, I want to talk to you’—and doing business on their doorstep like a Whitechapel tailor’s shop.) Fear of being laughed at for his eccentric artistic interests, fear of seeming pretentious or boring, fear of being mistrusted in his line of business if he ran the risk of being taken for one of those unreliable arty impractical types—all of this must have contributed to a raising of defences that it was hard to drop even when among people, like the early members of the Film Society, who he could be fairly sure shared his interests and would not scoff or draw back. All really shy, timid people have to choose at some time in their lives between total withdrawal and constructing a façade for themselves behind which they can live and function. Obviously Hitch chose the second possibility, and did it very successfully—so much so that many took the façade for the man.
And all this, of course, was just as Hitch would wish it to be. Behind the barrier might lurk the sensitive plant, his father’s ‘little lamb without a spot’, who was painfully physically shy, with an absolute horror from childhood of undressing in front of anyone, a puritan discomfort with his own body, and a compulsive need to clean up after himself, to the point of always mopping up and drying a wash-basin and polishing the taps after washing his hands. That was not perhaps the real Alfred Hitchcock; it was certainly a real Alfred Hitchcock. But he was also, quite genuinely, the good fellow, the cheery extrovert he seemed to be. And this was certainly where the practical jokes came in. Practical jokes have been defined by psychologists as the desperate attempts of the intensely introverted to establish communication. Certainly, there seems to be something to that in Hitch’s case, though the corollary, that they are the means whereby those who feel the world has them permanently at a disadvantage throw others off balance and so establish their own domination of their environment, seems, in so far as it implies an element of real nastiness or cruelty, to be further from the point. Even those who cared least for practical joking all admit that hardly any of Hitch’s essays were actually cruel or demeaning to their victims. Rather, they showed the workings of an active fantasy and an almost surrealistic sense of the incongruous and bizarre.
Hitch had already acquired a taste for practical joking early in his twenties—a taste shared by some of his older friends, such as Gerald du Maurier. Du Maurier was the butt of a classic Hitchcock joke, which involved getting a full-grown workhorse into his dressing room at the St. James’s Theatre during a performance, leaving the mystery of who and to an even greater extent how. On other occasions Hitch used his maximum ingenuity to get gigantic pieces of furniture installed in friends’ tiny flats while they were away, or would come up with weird birthday gifts like 400 smoked herrings, or on one occasion returned a £3 loan in the form of 2,880 farthings. He alarmed the playwright Frederick Lonsdale on their first meeting at Claridges, by complimenting him very extravagantly on his nonsensical book for the musical The Maid of the Mountains and ignoring entirely his enormous current successes with sophisticated comedies like The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and On Approval. Lonsdale regarded him suspiciously: ‘I’ve heard about you from Gerald [du Maurier]. Now if you don’t pull any gags on me, I won’t pull any on you.’ A year or two later they met in an elevator at the Hotel Carlton in Cannes. Hitch observed, ‘Nice day outside.’ Lonsdale recoiled. ‘What’s the gag?’ he wanted to know. (‘No sense of humour, I suppose,’ notes Hitch wryly.) One of his other extravaganzas in Gerald du Maurier days was to set up a dinner party at which, without explanation, everything eaten or drunk was blue, ranging from blue soup through blue trout and blue chicken to blue ice cream (‘It seemed such a pretty colour, I couldn’t understand why hardly anything we eat is blue’). Then there were the suspense and anticipation jokes: Hitch’s elevator habits included a repertoire of cliff-hanging stories which would be cut off at the crucial point by his exit, or lines like the one he once tried in the St. Regis: ‘I didn’t think one shot would cause so much blood.…’
Other jokes turned on a more ad hominem sense of incongruity. On one occasion he invited an assistant director, Dicky Beville, down to his house in the country, and told him to take such-and-such a bus from Hyde Park Corner. Beville bet him that no such bus existed, but Hitch insisted and told him to catch it at a particular hour. Sure enough, the bus arrived, picked up Beville and conveyed him in solitary splendour to Shamley Green—for the excellent reason that Hitch had hired it specially. He could also retaliate very ingeniously, and would carry on competitions in practical joking with like-minded friends. Once he offered a friend a lift home from work, and took him all the way down to Shamley Green, forcing him to stay the night. In thanks for the hospitality the friend sent him a suitably doctored bottle of fine old brandy. A few days later Hitch thanked him effusively for the gift, which should brighten the last hours of his poor old mother, who had been unaccountably very ill these last few days. The friend was so contrite he sent masses of flowers to the fortunately very hale and hearty Mrs. Hitchcock senior. And if Hitch felt he had gone a little too far, as on the occasion when he paid a studio prop man a pound to let himself be handcuffed overnight, then immediately before gave him a drink liberally spiked with a strong laxative, he always made generous amends—in this case with a 100 per cent bonus the next morning.
These jokes were very much part of Hitchcock’s way of life, professional as well as personal. Among other things, they kept his units cheery and ready for anything. He also had his little cultivated eccentricities. For example, he indulged extravagantly in the English studio habit of constantly drinking tea—something which was unusually hard on crockery, since he always threw the cup over his shoulder after drinking from it, letting it smash wherever it would. He also cultivated a reputation for extravagance and vagueness about money—one which would scarcely seem to be justified by the facts. Of course his circumstances had changed since the 1920s. Even at his ‘lowest ebb’ he was financially very successful, and could well afford a week-end house in the country, especially since in London he continued to live in the Cromwell Road flat instead of moving to a smarter and more expensive part of town. Anyway, the air of grandeur suggested by the term ‘country house’ does not correspond very closely to the actuality of Shamley Green, a quite unpretentious cottage in a semi-suburban setting where, for all the world like a successful stock-broker, he pottered around the garden and supervised the planting—provided, of course, he himself never had to get his hands dirty. And in other respects he and Alma continued to live in the sober middle-class fashion in which they had been brought up: they entertained a lot at home, with Alma doing the cooking, and brought Pat up as a good Catholic child. Rodney Ackland recalls being taken in to say good night to her while he was working with Hitch on Number Seventeen, and Alma proudly asking her to explain the framed print of the Assumption of the Virgin above her bed—at which Pat blandly identified the lady in the clouds as Amy Johnson.
Hitch did, it is true, have certain indulgences. He loved to travel in hired cars, though he owned several himself of which he was very proud. On one of his script-writing trips to Switzerland he discovered a very cheap kind of local cider, and developed a real taste for it. Back home in Britain he telephoned all the shops he could think of, only to find that none of them stocked it. So he arranged to have several cases flown in by Imperial Airways, refusing to do any further work on the movie till the cider came—despite the fact that, personally imported in this way, it cost him nearly £1 a bottle. He also loved phoning people from the high seas, and when on shipboard would ring Charles Bennett or some other friend, often talking for an hour at a time. But these, after all, were more in the line of pardonable or picturesque eccentricities. And the stories of Hitch’s extreme impracticality with money seem somewhat exaggerated, or at least a game that Hitch chose to play with himself rather than a serious necessity. The story goes that he decided he had to get someone to control his extravagance, so he arranged that his accountant, a fellow called Jack Saunders, would allow him only £10 a week spending money, and then devised all sorts of ways to cheat—he would get restaurants where he had accounts to charge double the bill and give him the difference in cash, or borrow money all over the place and return it only under duress. If this did ever happen, it must have been a short-lived (and well publicized) fantasy on Hitch’s part, for in general he has always seemed practical to the point of frugality, sharing to the full the fears of his middle-class background about being in debt or not having something saved for a rainy day.
If such worries beset him at this crucial point in his career, he did not let on. It was certainly worrying for a young man with a wife and child and two homes to support, to find himself as he did in 1933 with no definite prospects of a job. But Michael Balcon had bitten at the proffered bait, and a few days after their meeting on the set of Waltzes from Vienna Hitch received another message. If there was by any chance a property he was interested in, there was room at Gaumont-British proper, as recently reorganized under Balcon’s supervision. Well, said Hitch, there was this thriller story, all ready to go, at British International, and he thought he could get hold of it. How much, asked Balcon. Oh, perhaps £500, said Hitch, morally certain he could get it for £250. And so in fact he did, buying it back from Maxwell for £250 and then selling it to Gaumont-British for £500. But then, being Hitch, he felt so guilty about this bit of shameless profiteering that he commissioned Epstein to do a head of Balcon for the other £250 and gave it to Balcon as a gift.
So it was that Hitchcock’s great British period began, after years of being promising and a lot of false starts. No one had seriously doubted his talent, but it had taken some time for it to show itself clearly and consistently. From The Man Who Knew Too Much onwards, the pattern was finally set, and the association of Hitchcock with the thriller was confirmed for ever in the public mind. The Man Who Knew Too Much, of course, was the final form of Bulldog Drummond’s Baby, reworked so that all reference to the Sapper character was removed; the hero, though basically the same gentlemanly type, was even more of an amateur at this kind of intrigue. Hitch was ready to start shooting with, at last, a script that really excited him, all shot in his head, as was his habit.
He did, however, take the opportunity to make a few modifications. At Gaumont-British he found himself reunited with his old associate from silent days Ivor Montagu, who had been brought in to cut the budget on a Jan Kiepura musical and was now to be Balcon’s right-hand man on a string of productions and so associate producer on The Man Who Knew Too Much. With Montagu and Charles Bennett, whom he had brought over with him from British International, Hitch set about reworking certain parts of the screenplay. Originally the idea had been to make the kidnapped girl’s mother, who is established in the opening scenes to be a crack shot, the tool of the bad guys by having her carry out or attempt to carry out (under hypnosis, of course) the climactic assassination. But Hitch finally decided that this was a little far-fetched, even by the generous standards of this kind of thriller, and had her be the witness and foiler of the attempt instead. More immediately, he had a scene of menace laid out in a barber’s shop, with all those present masked by hot towels. But just before shooting commenced he happened to see I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, which contained a very similar sequence, and so he placed his sequence instead in what are for most people circumstances of maximum menace and horror, a dentist’s surgery, and came up with a classic.
Thus slightly reworked, the film went into production at the tiny Lime Grove Studios, and was shot very rapidly without any major problems. At one point Emlyn Williams, then a promising young playwright, was called in to rewrite some of the dialogue, giving it extra zing, and looked forward to meeting the fabled Hitchcock—but accomplished his task entirely at home and never did. Early in the shooting Hitch found, for one of the very few times in his career, that he had to look through the camera and check what the German cameraman, Curt Courant, was doing, because he did not seem to be following instructions. This made Hitch very unhappy, as it was more than anything else a failure in trust. Courant got told off in ‘light but halting German’, and was sufficiently intimidated to do as he was told for the remainder of the film. Meanwhile, Hitch was doing gentlemanly battle with the film censors of those days over his projected reconstruction, for the closing sequence, of the notorious siege of Sidney Street, an East End incident of his childhood when the unarmed Metropolitan Police ran a group of anarchists to ground and the Army had to be called in to match their guns. This, in fact, proved to be the problem—the censors held that the whole affair was a blot on the record of the police, and should not be referred to: Hitch could not have the Army brought in, and could not have the police armed and shooting. Eventually they reached a compromise. The police might be equipped with guns provided they were seen to be commandeered on the spot from a local gunsmith. Hitch smoothly agreed, then went right ahead and showed a lorry arriving with a load of guns for the police: apparently nobody noticed.
Considering that the film was made on a very restricted budget, it looks surprisingly elaborate, particularly in the Albert Hall sequence in which assassination is attempted during a crowded concert. Here Hitch’s detailed pre-planning helped enormously. He decided in advance exactly how he was going to shoot the sequence, from eight distinct viewpoints, had photographs taken from these viewpoints of the empty hall, blew up the photographs and got the painter Matania to paint the audience into each still. He then had these composites made into transparencies for the Schufftan process, varying it on the spot by scraping off different parts—the orchestra, a box or two—which would be filled with live movement to catch the spectator’s attention and distract them from noticing the immobility of most of the audience in the film.
The casting of the film was an adept mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Leslie Banks was playing a variation on his usual ironic, stiff-upper-lip English gentleman role, and as the wife and mother Hitch cast Edna Best, a popular stage actress. One of the villains was played, at Hitch’s special insistence, by Peter Lorre, then a recent refugee from Nazi Germany, whom he had seen and immensely admired as the child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, and found to be an eccentric after his own heart, wild and weird and fascinating to work with. The small role of the marksman killed in the opening sequence was played by Pierre Fresnay, the distinguished French actor then readily to hand as he was appearing with his wife Yvonne Printemps in a play at the St. James’s Theatre. (The first night of this production Hitch recalls, incidentally, as one of the most uncomfortable he has spent in the theatre, since one of the actors forgot his lines, panicked and staggered round the stage beating his brow until the audience became hysterical and a real lynch-mob feeling ran through the house, as though the crowd felt collectively, ‘The dog is dying, put him out of his misery.’) The kidnapped daughter was played by Nova Pilbeam, a child with whom Hitch, despite his often reiterated mistrust of children, obviously got along very well and whom he was to give her first adult role three years later in Young and Innocent. Interestingly enough, the film has been criticized as heartless, especially by enthusiasts for Hitch’s own American remake of 1956, because the parents do not show more overt emotion over the kidnapping of their child; but the little scene in which mother and ‘uncle’ look at her abandoned toys has a quality of emotion so strong one cannot forget that Hitch himself had a daughter, an only child, not much younger than the child in the film at the time he was making it, and must to an extent have identified with the situation.
With at last a film shot and completed which was exactly what he wanted to do, made exactly as he wanted and destined for enormous success, Hitch would seem to be sitting pretty at Gaumont-British, definitely restored from his ‘lowest ebb’. He set to work confidently with Bennett on scripting his next project, an adaptation of John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, thereby realizing a long-standing ambition, since Buchan was one of his favourite writers and he had already toyed with the idea of filming an even more elaborate Buchan subject, Greenmantle. Every day Bennett would call Hitch, drive round from his home in Belgrave Square, find Hitch waiting on the doorstep in the Cromwell Road, and take him to the Shepherd’s Bush studios, where they would talk about the script, lunching in great comfort at the Mayfair Hotel or the Kensington Palace Hotel, then returning grandly to the studio for an afternoon session. But when they had almost completed the first draft there was a rude awakening. Michael Balcon went off on a business trip to America, partly to bring back for The Thirty-Nine Steps a Hollywood star, Madeleine Carroll, whom in fact he had originally sent out to Hollywood a few years before. While he was gone, C. M. Woolf was left in charge of the studio. And Woolf, of course, had been an old enemy of Hitch’s back in the days when he shelved The Lodger as incomprehensible and dismissed Hitch as one of those dangerous young intellectuals who would ruin the industry given half a chance.
There was sure to be trouble, and there was. Woolf screened the completed Man Who Knew Too Much, and gave as his considered opinion that it was appalling, ridiculous, absurd, and they could not possibly put it out as it was. He announced that it would have to be reshot by Maurice Elvey, now also under contract at Gaumont-British and cheerfully characterized by a colleague of that time as ‘the worst director in the world’. Hitch was practically suicidal, and begged Woolf on his knees to let the film be shown as it was shot. However much he might dislike Hitch, Woolf did recognize the great practical advantage he had for the company—he was a valuable property because investors had heard of him, and so his presence under contract made it easier to raise money. He kept Hitch in suspense for a while, made him wriggle on the hook, then finally, grudgingly agreed. The film opened at the Academy Cinema and had the tremendous success everyone but Woolf had expected, getting wildly enthusiastic reviews and running for ages. But Woolf never learned his lesson: determined to prove he was right, in spite of this evidence to the contrary, he deliberately put the film into release as the bottom half of a double bill, second features being generally booked at a flat £5 fee, so that though the programme it was part of broke attendance records because everyone wanted to see it, the film itself actually lost money.
Woolf had fixed things to prove himself right on paper, but there was no doubt in anyone else’s mind that The Man Who Knew Too Much was a triumph, and that Hitch had really come into his own. His troubles with Woolf were not yet over, but at least he was in a far better position to deal with them. He was ready to go to work on his new picture The Thirty-Nine Steps in the full confidence of a larger budget, stars, and a very respectable subject of his own choosing. And his own shaping, for though he admired and respected Buchan very much as a writer, he was never tempted to make the mistake of supposing that literary story-telling and film story-telling are the same thing. The basic outline of the book is very thoroughly worked over in the film, with a lot added and a lot dropped. Several of the film’s most memorable sequences, like that in which the runaway Hannay is first protected then betrayed by a jealous Highland crofter, have no counterpart in the book at all.
In the film Hitch deliberately aimed for a brisk, disjointed effect, in which no time would be wasted on transitions: the film would simply move as quickly as possible from one thing to the next, with each episode dealt with almost as a self-sufficient short story. Drama, Hitch has said, is life with the dull bits left out And here the dull bits would be plodding explanations of just how Hannay escapes from the police with one hand in a handcuff—we accept that he does it, in the convention of the comic-strip hero, impossibly beleaguered, who suddenly, with one mighty effort, breaks free And anyway we do not have time for any questions before he is whipped through a Salvation Army band and into a hall where he is instantly mistaken for a belated speaker and rushed on stage. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: speed, says Hitch, is preoccupation, and here the rapidity of the transitions keeps the audience so preoccupied that they are always cheerfully, breathlessly, one step behind and feel that the whole film is flashing past.
In this respect The Thirty-Nine Steps is most like the much later, American North by Northwest, and usually those who see North by Northwest as Hitch’s best American film also see The Thirty-Nine Steps as his best British film. And both of them certainly are brilliant, beguiling entertainments, with an extraordinary wealth of invention, idea following idea in unbroken succession. But both of them also seem to pay a price in shallowness for what they gain in surface glitter and busyness. In neither do we ever get any clear idea of what the MacGuffin is, even as a MacGuffin—it is just the vaguest us-versus-them plot to be somehow foiled. But what, one might ask, is a MacGuffin anyway? The mysterious term, which has been bandied about a lot by Hitch and by commentators on him, seems to have entered his vocabulary with The Thirty-Nine Steps, and his British films of this time contain the classic examples. The word is derived from a shaggy dog story Hitch liked to tell which, briefly summarized, concerns an inquisitive chap in a Scottish train and a taciturn fellow traveller. There is a large, mysteriously shaped parcel on the rack, and the inquisitive passenger asks the other what it is. ‘A MacGuffin’ is the reply. ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘It’s for trapping lions in the Highlands.’ ‘But there are no lions in the Highlands.’ ‘Well then, there’s no MacGuffin.’ So a MacGuffin is something totally irrelevant and non-existent which is the subject of conversation and action and which everyone within the drama believes to be very important. In The Man Who Knew Too Much the assassination attempt is the MacGuffin, the kidnapping the real subject of the story—i.e. the spies’ plot is what concerns everybody in the film, but the kidnapping is what concerns us, the watchers on the outside. In The Thirty-Nine Steps the MacGuffin is again the uncovering and foiling of a spy ring, but we are never told enough about them to know or care who they are and what they want. In an early draft of the script Hitch considered inserting a sequence showing giant underground aircraft hangers in the Highlands, built by the spies in their dastardly plotting against us. But then what would happen? It would all be much too complicated and unproductive to go into, since all we really care about on the outside is our hero on the run, not where he is running from and what, if anything, he is running to. As in North by Northwest, the chase itself is the point.
While actually making the film Hitch had an amusing time. It became common gossip (whether true or not) that Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll were having a torrid romance, so no sign of possible wear-and-tear in either was allowed to pass without ribald comment, giving full scope for Hitch’s schoolboy-joker side. He was also up to his teacup-throwing best, putting it all down to ‘temperament’ and the enervating effect of a strict diet. Even the episode with Hannay, the crofter and his wife (one of the few screen performances by Peggy Ashcroft, whom Hitch had seen and much admired on stage), though it is played in the film for suspense and some emotion, derived in Hitch’s mind quite consciously from a joke: a slightly risqué story about a lustful wife, a watchful husband, a traveller and a chicken pie. He took a gleeful delight in devising indignities for Madeleine Carroll to undergo, getting her drenched and dragged about and generally off her super-soignée high Hollywood horse. This was nothing personal, since they actually got on very well together, but he found the Hollywood poise she had acquired in her years away from Britain amusing and longed to break it down a bit. Today it seems like the first obvious instance of his normal treatment of cool blondes, into which all sorts of sadistic sexual motives can be read. Ivor Montagu says, though, that involved as they all were at the time in a rather naïve Freudian search for sexual symbolism in everything, it never then occurred to any of them that this was anything more than straightforward knockabout fun, the comic deflation of phoney dignity. And perhaps it was not, but it is difficult not to wonder.
Many different experiences contributed to the final version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitch’s fascination with music hall and the scrubbier kind of English theatre comes out vividly in the framing sequences involving ‘Mr. Memory’, the stage memory man who is used as the means of communicating whatever it is that the spies want communicated. This character was based on an actual music-hall performer called Datas, whom Hitch had seen many times: his speciality was being able to answer almost any question thrown at him about statistics and records. Hitch’s own addition is the touch of obsession, the strong sense of professional duty which drives him to answer a question, any question, if he knows the answer, even if doing so may have fatal consequences for him. And the look and feel of the music hall, the chorines’ legs impassively stepping in the background as the memory man dies, the audience’s reactions, impressed or dismissive, are rendered with an instant sharpness which must come from loving, unsentimental observation.
When the filming was completed everyone, including Hitch and Michael Balcon, was very pleased with the result—indeed Hitch still says he puts The Thirty-Nine Steps among his own favourites. At the last moment Hitch decided to pare the film down even more, by eliminating the final sequence he had shot—one between Donat and Madeleine Carroll in a cab after they leave the theatre, in which he whimsically explains to her that they are in fact married, since by Scottish law you can be married by declaration, stating yourselves, as they had at the inn, to be man and wife in front of witnesses. This idea tickled Hitch, but he felt it muddled the clear lines of the film’s end. That removed, the film was ready for showing, and Balcon left for America with a print to finalize American distribution.
At which point, unbelievably, C. M. Woolf struck again. This time he informed Hitch and Ivor Montagu that their contracts were to be terminated after the next film—or before, if they refused the assignment he offered them. And what he offered was, of all things, a musical life of Leslie Stuart, the composer of Florodora. By this time Hitch was unable to take the whole matter seriously: if he could not continue at Gaumont-British he could virtually write his own ticket anywhere else, and he was for leaving right away. But Montagu suggested they make a slight show of working on the Florodora story until Balcon got back, and sure enough as soon as he returned he quashed the whole thing and matters returned to normal; Woolf did not like Hitch or his films, but given that they were the biggest box office the company had, he just had to lump them. In any case, once The Thirty-Nine Steps was released in 1936, the question was really out of his hands. The film had a sensational success in the States as well as in Britain, and Hitch was truly an international figure. Offers began to come in from Hollywood for Hitch, some which he never even heard of, as they were suppressed or rejected out of hand by Gaumont-British, while others were skilfully parried by Balcon, who felt understandably possessive about his protégé and liked to give the impression that he was in fact Hitchcock’s agent as well as producer and friend, all to keep him in Britain.
Not that Hitch was as yet seriously considering uprooting. Professionally, things were going ever better for him in Britain, where he could enjoy the situation of being a big fish in a little pond. And personally he had arranged a very comfortable, agreeable life for himself. He had gathered round him a group of regular collaborators who were also friends. Living in London he could indulge one of his great passions, theatregoing, to his heart’s content, while for the other, fine food and drink, the Continent was close at hand. His family also was in easy reach. He had resettled his mother in a flat near his own, in Kensington, and would send his chauffeur-driven car over with fruit and flowers for her. He remained in close touch also with his brother, and Pat used to love going and staying the night over his fish shop in South London, while they continued to see a lot of his two favourite cousins, Mary and Teresa, the artistic ones, in Golders Green. During the week he stayed in London, and at week-ends went down regularly to Shamley Green; at Christmas time he and Alma, and now Pat, made whenever possible the sentimental journey to the Palace Hotel at St. Moritz, and he contrived ingeniously to do most of the serious work of scripting films either amid home comforts, sitting round the table in Cromwell Road with Alma and his writers, or on vacation-like working trips abroad. Pat was now eight, and made the transition from a private school run by nuns in Cavendish Square to Mayfield, a leading Catholic boarding school for girls (there was some talk of sending her to Roedean, but a friend talked Hitch out of that). Curious that he, who had so hated being at boarding school himself, should have sent his only child to one, but in those days it was just what one did, and so he did it, though he and Alma continued to spend as much time with Pat as they possibly could, even in term time. And though she hated many things about the school, at least she took immediately to the dramatics, playing leading roles in two fairy plays, Rumpelstiltskin and The Little King Who Never Grew Up, in her first year. From then on Pat never had much doubt on at least one matter: when she grew up, she wanted to be an actress.
In many respects Hitch’s life was carefully insulated during these years. Family apart, he hardly knew anybody who was not somehow involved in show business, film or theatre. He carefully avoided getting involved in anything connected with politics—he even refused, much to the left-wing Ivor Montagu’s disappointment, to become president of the screen technicians’ union, the A.C.T.T., when in 1936 they decided to put their house in order and become a force to reckon with in the industry, and wanted someone of Hitch’s eminence to lend his support in a prominent way. Maybe Hitch was afraid to be identified with a faction which was widely regarded as trouble-making; but more likely he simply felt that this was outside his field of interest and a waste of his time and energies, which could more profitably, for him and everyone else, be turned to the business of actually making films.
By now Hitch had worked out a perfect routine for scripting his films. After selecting a property, he and Charles Bennett and Alma would reduce it to a bald half-page outline. Then they would start to ask the necessary questions: what are these people; what is their station in life; what do they work at; how do they act at home? From there they would progress to a 60- or 70-page outline which plotted the action scene by scene, but in terms of visual story-telling, with no dialogue. Then, when that was perfected, one or more other writers would be called in to write the dialogue. So when he was ready to start shooting Hitch would have a complete, detailed script, broken down shot by shot and all drawn out in composition sketches, story-board style, by Hitch himself. After which, further modifications during and after shooting were negligible—sometimes removal of a scene, like the final cut in The Thirty-Nine Steps, sometimes the addition of some happy last-minute inspiration. The regular writing associates at this time were Charles Bennett, Alma and Ivor Montagu (Montagu figures in the credits only as co-producer, but did by general consent play an important part at the scenario stage); dialogue writers included novelists like Ian Hay and Helen Simpson and dramatists like Gerald Savory, but they tended to be transients, in accord with Hitch’s feeling that the dialogue was relatively unimportant.
There was also, during the preparation of The Thirty-Nine Steps, a new addition to the team, who was to become one of Hitch’s closest and longest-lasting associates. He advertised for a secretary, and among the applicants came a trim, blondly beautiful Cambridge graduate called Joan Harrison. She was wearing a hat because her mother had told her she should, to be interviewed by an important personage. But after a few moments Hitch asked her very politely if she would mind taking her hat off. She did, they talked, and in half an hour the job was hers. For the time being, her job was mainly to sit in on the script sessions and take notes, as well as take care of Hitch’s day-to-day correspondence. But she rapidly got some insight into what working with Hitch could be like when one day he suggested that to clear the cobwebs away they take a boat trip, and she and Charles Bennett turned up to discover that Hitch had hired for the day a 250-place Thames steamer, in which they grandly steamed out to sea and back, just the three of them, while they worked on the script of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Being, obviously, a bright girl, she rapidly began to take a more active part in things, encouraged by Hitch to contribute suggestions to the scripts and capably taking over responsibility for making his professional life run smoothly. She and Alma also became close friends, and she was soon very much one of the family, at home, in the studio, and frequently on their holidays abroad. With Young and Innocent in 1937 she was promoted to script collaborator, and in 1939 she went along with them to Hollywood, to begin a spectacular career of her own, sometimes with, sometimes without Hitch. Today she is married to the novelist Eric Ambler and they remain among the Hitchcocks’ closest friends in the world.
But now it was time to get on with the next assignment and build on the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitch was looking round for a property, when one was wished on him by Michael Balcon. He was not exactly forced to do it, but from every point of view it would be politic, and Hitch, nothing if not realistic, saw definite possibilities in the subject, so he agreed. The thing was, critics then as now have to be propitiated from time to time—not exactly paid off, but made to feel good. Hitch himself had early tumbled to this: when he was by no means highly paid he had devoted a large part of his salary to keeping up his cordial relations with critics and film journalists, feeding them and looking after them and talking over his projects with them, so that they could become excited and feel a part of the film long before they ever saw it. One or two of the critics he became personally friendly with, notably Caroline Lejeune of the Observer, who was an occasional guest in Cromwell Road and was made comfortably aware that her views on his films made no difference to their relationship—on one occasion she rather shamefacedly remarked, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t very kind to you last Sunday,’ to which Hitch cheerfully replied, ‘Well, I do my job and you do yours—that’s what we’re both paid for.’ Though he would never have dreamed of paying for a good review—it was not impossible, with some of the less reputable of the critical fraternity, and certainly not unknown—Hitch did believe in keeping on the right side of the press.
In the case of The Secret Agent, as the new project came to be called, what had happened was that Campbell Dixon, the film critic of the Daily Telegraph, had written a play based on ‘The Hairless Mexican’, one of Somerset Maugham’s stories about a secret agent called Ashenden (which, in turn, were inspired by Maugham’s own experiences in the secret service during the First World War). Balcon had thought it sensible, and not too suspect, to buy the rights of the play and commission Dixon to write a brief film scenario derived from it. And this was what he now wanted Hitch and Ivor Montagu to use in their next film. Montagu was very uncomfortable about this—it reminded him of his unfortunate experiences working with Eisenstein in Hollywood, when they had been shunted by studio politics from one property to another and never managed to bring any of them to fruition. But this time Hitch talked sense to him: once they got started elaborating the script, they could throw Dixon’s outline out of the window and no one would notice or care—and at least Dixon could play, if he so wished, the one-upmanship game of telling people, ‘Oh, I’m working on the new Hitchcock film, you know.’
What Montagu specifically did not like was the basic idea of the script—that an agent has to kill the wrong man and then go right on to kill the right man next. He felt the audience’s sympathies would not stand the strain of this, and therefore that the second killing had to be accidental and even the first killing should not be done by the agent’s own hand, even if he had some over-all responsibility for it. Also, Montagu thought he saw in the story a chance to convey some kind of political message disguised as entertainment—something about the folly of power politics, and the responsibilities of the individual. He now admits that he was wrong here, in that he was trying to go against the grain of Hitch’s totally apolitical temperament, and that these undertones do confuse what should be the clear thriller outline of the plot. Hitch, more practically, looked from the outset for ideas that would keep the film lively from scene to scene, those famous Hitchcock touches. The first questions he asked were ‘Where does it take place? Switzerland. Right. What do they have in Switzerland?’ The answer was mountains, lakes, chocolate and village dances, so each of these should be worked into the screen-play and made to play a positive role.
With these notions in mind Hitch and Charles Bennett began to hammer out a scenario. They went back to the original Maugham story and another in the Ashenden series, ‘The Traitor’, for their central intrigue, and added the love interest which Campbell Dixon had devised for his play. Hitch decreed that the Alps were there in order that someone should fall into a crevasse, and the chocolate factories were there so that one could be used as an innocent-seeming cover for the crooks’ headquarters. But despite many work sessions round the table in Cromwell Road, somehow the whole thing just would not jell. Finally in desperation Bennett was sent off to sketch out the entire treatment overnight, and the following morning he and Hitch flew out to Switzerland. There they went first to pick up Ivor Montagu at Kandersteh, where he was holidaying, then the three of them drove on into the Lauterbrunnen valley and stayed there, talking the story over day and night, until somehow they worked out what they should do with it. From here Bennett went home and Hitch took a quick trip into the Balkans, mainly to research himself the background for the final train journey in the draft script. He was mistrustful of the over-characterful costuming usual in those days for films set in exotic locations, remembering a classic Punch cartoon which compared different nationalities as we expect them to be (all in picturesque local costumes) and how they really are (all indistinguishable in standard modern clothes). And sure enough, he found in the Balkans that everyone dressed either completely conventionally or half-and-half, partly native, partly pure chain-store.
Back in England he set about the serious business of finalizing the script, casting and shooting the film. To keep up the American interest established with The Thirty-Nine Steps, he used two Hollywood stars, Madeleine Carroll again and Robert Young, who normally played romantic and light comedy roles, as the villain of the piece. For the picturesque Mexican ‘general’ who rather unreliably helps the hero in his task, Hitch again called on Peter Lorre. And for the hero, Ashenden, he looked, as so often in his British period, towards the London theatre and hit on John Gielgud. Gielgud at this time had been having enormous success in Shakespeare, particularly with his Hamlet and in a famous production of Romeo and Juliet in which he and Laurence Olivier alternated Romeo and Mercutio to Peggy Ashcroft’s Juliet. He had made one or two films before, including a silent film, Daniel, in which he could not resist the bizarre proposition of playing a role written for Sarah Bernhardt, and Victor Saville’s version of The Good Companions, which had made Jessie Matthews into a star but had not done so much for him. Consequently, he was not too keen on The Secret Agent, but Hitch seduced him into it by persuading him it was a sort of modern-day Hamlet about a man who could not make up his mind to carry out what he believed to be his duty.
If those possibilities were in the story as Hitch told it to him, Gielgud felt disappointedly that the script did not live up to them—it was just another thriller. However, even just another thriller, if it happened to be a Hitchcock thriller, could not be that bad, and he set to with a will. He persuaded Hitch to cast Lady Tree, the widow of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and a couple of other actors he had just been working with on stage in small roles, and he found old familiar faces at the studio in the shape of Ivor Montagu and the writer Angus McPhail, with both of whom he had been at school. But in general he became increasingly uncomfortable. Hitch was amiable but distant with him, and he felt that Hitch could have little confidence in him as a leading man if he had to fill out the cast with other stars like Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young and Peter Lorre—worries which Hitch did little or nothing to dispel.
Gielgud was also disturbed that his character, whose motivation seemed in principle the most interesting and complex, had been reduced to little more than a cipher; he was frightened of Madeleine Carroll, whom Hitch obviously adored and tended, he felt, to favour in the shooting; he was unnerved by Peter Lorre’s cunning scene-stealing, not to mention his unpredictable absences hiding somewhere in the studio rafters to inject himself with the morphine to which he had become addicted. In short, the shooting was a nightmare for him, and he was glad to escape back to the relative calm and sanity of the theatre. All the same, he ended with a grudging respect, and even affection, for Hitch, recognizing that he was an artist with an obsession—he was going to make his films in his own way, to his own standards, and even though he was always open to suggestion and positively welcomed improvisation, finally he used everything for his own purposes and did not leave much room for anyone else’s creative satisfaction. Which was no doubt right for him and right for the films—they were, after all, first, last and always Hitchcock films—but could be dismaying for others involved.
Hitch himself was reasonably happy about the film. He liked what they had finally done with the given subject, and he had enjoyed a lot of the more fanciful details. But he still felt that something was wrong, though he could not quite put his finger on what it was. At the first preview the film aroused some incomprehension and hostility, mainly it seemed on account of a fancy device Hitch and Ivor Montagu had thought up to dramatize the train wreck at the end. To give a feeling of the complete, rending break this represented in the characters’ lives, they had commissioned the abstract film-maker Len Lye to make a brief insert of coloured film which would look just as though the film itself had caught fire in the projector, shrivelled up and broken. The first audience thought this had actually happened, even though the film went on again as normal almost immediately, and the front office felt there was a danger of panic in the cinemas, so out it had to come. Montagu was for making a stand, but Hitch cut the offending passage without demur—he had liked the idea, but it did anyway look a little self-conscious and distracting, he thought, and he was willing to bow to pressure.
When it opened, the film got slightly more mixed reviews than its two predecessors in what Hitch already recognized as his ‘spy trilogy’, and was not quite so popular, though popular enough still to pay its way. On reflection Hitch decided this was because of a problem inherent in the subject: audiences want to identify with a hero who wants to do something and eventually succeeds in doing it (whether they would morally endorse his actions or not), and The Secret Agent was instead about a hero who does not want to do something (kill a man for political reasons), muffs it the first time, and has fate take the matter out of his hands at the second chance. Consequently audiences just did not care about the hero—certainly not in a thriller context, anyway—while the possibility of capturing their attention in another way by going into his moral dilemma (the whole Hamlet side of it) had been carefully ignored as inimical to the thriller form. To that extent Gielgud was right, and so in another way was Ivor Montagu—there was either not enough of the Hamlet or too much, depending which way you looked at it.
But at least Hitch had managed in it to try out some of his more provocative ideas and had got away with them, in particular the idea he had long been toying with that villains did not need necessarily to look like villains. Indeed, the more charming and presentable and reassuring their appearance and manner were, the more chilling their villainy would be, once revealed. In The Secret Agent Hitch deliberately made the villain, Robert Young, more charming and amusing and attractive than the rather moody, indecisive hero, and audiences loved it; he became, like so many subsequent Hitchcock heavies, the man you hate to love, but find irresistibly attractive anyway—a pattern repeated, with variations, right up to Frenzy. For the French critics this tends to signify moral ambiguity and complexity, deriving in part from Hitch’s Catholic upbringing. But maybe it is no more than the born tease’s instinctive grasp of how to string an audience along, or the timid man’s joyful realization that people can be manipulated to accept almost anything you want them to accept.
In his next film, Sabotage, Hitch was to string his audiences along even further, and in one sequence to pull a bluff-and-counter-bluff trick so outrageous that its reputation still haunts him; he is even inclined nowadays to suggest that it was a mistake. This is the notorious sequence in which the back-room anarchist sends his wife’s young brother to deliver a time-bomb; the boy is distracted and delayed for so long that the hour of detonation comes and goes and then, just when the audience is breathing a sigh of relief that the worst is not after all going to happen (of course, we always knew it wouldn’t), the bomb does go off and the boy is killed. At the press show this episode upset one of the senior members of the British press so much that she had to be restrained from attacking Hitch bodily for his cruelty. Which would seem, actually, to be a measure of his success in involving his audience and motivating his heroine so satisfactorily that she can kill her husband with a carving knife and not in any way lose audience sympathy. The sequence is also, incidentally, a textbook example of Hitch’s famous definition of suspense versus shock. If you show a group of people playing cards round a table and then suddenly there is an explosion, you achieve merely a very dull scene terminated by a shock. If, on the other hand, you show exactly the same scene but preface it by showing a time-bomb sitting under the table before ever the card game starts, then you have suspense and an involved audience. Hitch claims to believe today that after setting up such a scene you should never let the bomb actually go off, because then the audience feels cheated and angry. But his practice in several spectacular instances (Psycho for one) contradicts this, and it would be hard to agree with him that his decision in Sabotage was all that wrong. Of course, he may have been wrong to twist the knife by showing a cute little dog on the bus as well as the boy, and also presumably blown up—that, for the animal-loving British, could just be the last straw.…
In any case, the matter does not seem to have given him any sleepless nights at the time. He himself selected the Conrad novel entitled The Secret Agent (confusingly enough, so the title had to be changed for the film), and scripted it in his usual fashion by starting round the dining-room table in Cromwell Road, then flying with Charles Bennett to Basel, and motoring from there to the Jungfrau, where he acquired his aforementioned taste for cheap Swiss cider. Oddly, given his frequently expressed qualms about adapting any literary classic to the screen, Hitch felt no hesitation about working from a near-classic novel in this case and freely reshaping its story to his own thriller requirements. Partly this was because Conrad had not yet been canonized by the academic critics as a great novelist; Hitch felt reasonably enough that one of Conrad’s important talents was as a spellbinding teller of tales, not so different from John Buchan, and there at least his work was not sacrosanct.
All the same, Hitch did feel that the whole subject was a bit messy and confused, lacking the clear lines of his favourite films. And he ran into some problems in the shooting. To begin with, he had cast Robert Donat in the important role of the plain-clothes policeman who is set to watch the anarchist Verloc (Oscar Homolka) while pretending to work at the near-by greengrocers. Donat had the kind of easy charm and humanity which would round out the rather sketchy outlines of the character and make audiences warm to him. But then at the last moment Korda, who had Donat under contract, refused to release him, and Hitch had to make do with the rather stolid John Loder. This entailed a lot of rewriting during the actual shooting—something which never makes the orderly Hitch happy—and left the character still rather unattractive and negative. Then Hitch had trouble with one of the two Hollywood stars, Sylvia Sidney. She had had stage training, had never appeared in silent films, and found it very difficult to act without the support of words. Also, she was used to the Hollywood style of shooting, in which scenes would be played right through, photographed continuously from first one angle, then another, and cut together afterwards. She found Hitch’s manner of shooting in tiny little sections according to the editing scheme in his mind unnerving, as she felt deprived of all control over what she was doing. She finally got quite hysterical over Oscar Homolka’s death scene, in which, half accidentally, she had to stab him with a carving knife and say virtually nothing: she was certain it was terrible and she was terrible. Hitch had to calm her by asking her please to wait and see how it would look when cut together. When she finally saw it she was delighted and amazed, and left the screening room grandly observing, ‘Hollywood must hear of this!’
Undeniably what one remembers from the film is bits and pieces rather than the whole. Controlled essays in virtuosity like the stabbing scene, the boy’s journey with the bomb and the stroke of genius which counterpointed the wife’s anguish over the news of her brother’s death with the delighted reactions of a cinema audience to Disney’s Silly Symphony Who Killed Cock Robin? But also Sabotage is the richest and most detailed picture in Hitch’s work of the London he grew up in and knew like the back of his hand. Much of the detail is drawn from his own experience: the greengrocer’s shop which the detective uses as cover recalls his own childhood home, the little East End cinema the kind where he had his own experiences of the flicks. When the detective takes Mrs. Verloc and her brother out to lunch he takes them to Simpson’s in the Strand, Hitch’s own favourite restaurant in his City days. The quirkily vivid scenes in the streets markets, the back-street shops, the cheery by-play of the peddlers and the darker sense of crime behind closed doors in mean streets all summon up Hitch’s own childhood and his early fascination with the domestic details of the murder cases he loved to read. And even something like the scene in which the cinema audience get nasty when their entertainment is interrupted by a power cut owes a lot to Hitch’s experience of an audience turning like that at the Pierre Fresnay/Yvonne Printemps first night, or at another, acutely embarrassing, occasion when a comic with a sense of grievance insisted on making a curtain speech at the Empire castigating the management and his fellow artists, to a similarly hostile response.
For the most part the film was very modestly budgeted and made. But Hitch insisted on one big splurge. At the cost of £3,000, which was then a considerable amount, he had a whole tramline laid from the Lime Grove studios to near-by White City, and operated it complete with functional tram for just one day’s shooting. Ivor Montagu, as associate producer, remonstrated with him—this was absurd expenditure for a few seconds of screen time. But no: Hitch knew exactly what he was doing—this was one of the Hitchcock touches deliberately put in to impress American audiences and, particularly, American producers, who would recognize exactly what the production values involved in these few shots were. It was expensive, but it was meant to be, and the impression of extravagance it created was worth it.
As it happened, Sabotage marked something like the end of an era in British films. But no one realized it at the time. Hitch was by now in an unchallenged, and virtually unchallengeable, position as the leading British film-maker, with his films recognized and successful on both sides of the Atlantic. He was certainly the biggest fish in a pretty small pond, and it was no doubt not without reason that Michael Balcon feared he might be snatched away by Hollywood. But for the moment life was very comfortable in England. He could move around freely, according to his whim of the moment, and script collaborators recall story conferences on a train to the Riviera, at a bullfight in Barcelona, in a funicular at St. Moritz, going up and down all day, or, less exotic, on the roof of Croydon Airport. At home he went to the theatre several times a week, and now that Pat was nine he and Alma felt she was old enough, when at home on school holidays, to stay up in the evening and go to the theatre if there was anything vaguely suitable. So she found herself seeing a lot of musicals and light comedies; in particular she was taken to Careless Rapture and all of Ivor Novello’s subsequent spectacular musical shows. Novello was still a personal friend, and Pat recalls that at one of his shows she and Alma and Hitch were sitting in a box, and Hitch went right off to sleep in the first act. During the interval a note was brought round from Ivor observing, ‘Of all the people seeing this show, you seem to be enjoying it the least.’ But then he knew better than to take Hitch’s sleeping personally: Hitch made a habit of it, even at shows with which he was personally involved. He was reputed to have slept soundly through the whole première of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and even slept at the first night of The Old Ladies, a play in which he had money invested.
He found other ways of spending his money too. His passion for the painting of Paul Klee resulted in his circling round and round one particular painting in a London exhibition, wondering and wondering whether he could afford it, until finally he took the plunge, to the tune of some £600—quite a steep price considering that Klee was little known in Britain at the time and that first-day sales totalling £250 at Dali’s 1936 London exhibition were considered spectacular enough to be reported in the papers. Hitch used also to seize every occasion for holidays with his family, in his beloved Switzerland or, almost equally beloved, the south of Italy. In 1937 he took Alma, Pat and his mother to stay in Naples, which had the slight drawback that every time she went there Alma was prostrated with a strep throat—a condition Hitch irreverently attributed to having had to kiss the Pope’s ring during an audience with him on their way, since after all you never knew who else had been kissing it that day. Be that as it might, she was laid up in their hotel while Hitch took his mother and Pat out to Capri to see the Blue Grotto. The trip went very well until, right outside the Grotto, they were required to transfer from the motorboat in which they had come to a small rowing-boat. Hitch’s mother flatly refused, and the director at whose words film stars trembled was left helplessly saying, ‘But you’ve got to—you’ve come all this way to see the Blue Grotto and, well, you’ve just got to.’ Mrs. Hitchcock senior remained as formidable as ever, and as stubborn, so it was a long battle before she actually did get to see the pride of Capri.
Oddly enough, given his fascination from childhood with America and things American, his detailed theoretical knowledge of the geography of New York, and his frequent professional contacts with Americans right since the earliest days with Famous Players at Islington, Hitch had never seriously considered visiting America. But the time was approaching fast. First, Gaumont-British, to which he was currently under contract, was summarily closed down in 1937, shortly after shooting on Sabotage was completed. One day Isidore Ostrer, who had at last acquired total control of the company, arrived at the Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush and called Victor Peers, one of the vice-presidents, into his office. He gave him a list of names, headed by that of Michael Balcon himself, and said ‘Go and fire all these today.’ The man stammered, ‘But I can’t fire them; they’re my bosses.’ ‘Fire them,’ said Ostrer, ‘or fire yourself.’ Hitch was in the studios that day, and remembers it as ‘like Christmas, but without the booze’. Everyone was in and out of everyone else’s offices, comparing notes, as the news spread like wildfire, and by the end of the day Balcon and Ivor Montagu had been fired, the film production company dissolved, and the whole Gaumont-British operation was no more, except as a title for a distributing company. This did not make any immediate difference to Hitch, since he was not fired and his contract was taken over by the associated company, Gainsborough, for which he had been working at the start of his career. But it was the break-up of a successful team. Balcon went almost immediately to take over the direction of a newly set up MGM production programme in Britain, and Ivor Montagu abandoned feature films altogether. Even closer, Charles Bennett had received an offer of a contract from Universal to go to Hollywood as a script-writer, and decided to accept. His work on the new script, called Young and Innocent, was confined to the now traditional trip to Switzerland, this time St. Moritz, where he would ski during the day while Hitch stayed in and read, then in the evening they would eat and drink and work out the scenario together. After that he bade Hitch a sad farewell and went off to Hollywood, leaving him to complete the script with other collaborators. His summing-up on Hitch at this period: ‘Biggest bully in the world; one of the kindest men I have ever met in my life.’