At least Alma liked the weather. Hitch was not so sure, but it did not make that much difference to him, since he had never been much of a one for the outdoors anyway. And he did not have much time for appreciating or deprecating the hot summer in still smog-free Los Angeles, since virtually from the moment he arrived he was deep in the project to hand, Rebecca. They moved into the first reasonably comfortable apartment that was readily available, in the Wilshire Palms on Wilshire Boulevard, right above Franchot Tone and one of the Ritz Brothers. It had palms and a pool, and was conveniently placed so that Pat could wander out by herself and take a bus up to Hollywood to see a movie or just explore. In Los Angeles, much to her relief, she was going to a day school, Marymount, a smart Catholic girls’ school on the edge of Bel Air. Though Hitch pretends to have given up driving altogether when he arrived in America, from total paranoid fear of the police, in fact this is not quite so. He did own a car in Los Angeles, and though Alma, intrepid to a fault, did most of the driving, he would regularly and without fail drive Pat to church every Sunday for mass—indeed, church soon became the only place he would drive to, perhaps with some faint notion that since he was, after all, doing God’s work He would not let anything too bad happen.
Such speculations were strictly incidental to the serious business of getting his first Hollywood film under way. Selznick, as was his habit, had been bombarding Hitch with letters, cables and memoranda across the Atlantic ever since he had seriously considered him for the property. In September 1938 he was planning to hold the picture for Hitch, and later in the month was casting around for writers, suggesting to Hitch Ben Hecht, Clemence Dane and John Balderston. Hitch was not happy with Clemence Dane because her first script on Jamaica Inn had had to be completely rewritten, but was otherwise open to suggestion, though he inclined towards an English writer and proposed Sidney Gilliatt. In January 1939 Selznick was pressing Hitch for some decision on the matter of who should play the important role of Maxim de Winter, suggesting that if Ronald Colman remained hesitant they should definitely sign Leslie Howard. By June 1939 Hitch was ready to submit a first treatment, written by Joan Harrison and Philip MacDonald; in a lengthy memo dated 12 June Selznick proceeds politely but firmly to take apart everything they have done and castigate them, with some reason, for needless and vulgarizing departures from the book.
This was a new experience for Hitch. He had dealt with obstructive, philistine producers like C. M. Woolf and John Maxwell, who were really businessmen interested only in the money. And he had worked with Michael Balcon, who was in general a good person to work with, not uncomprehending and genuinely interested in films as such, but hampered by being at this stage in his career a man in the middle, between the ‘intellectuals’ on the one hand and the C. M. Woolfs on the other; Balcon believed in letting his film-makers have as much freedom as possible to do their own things in their own way, and did not often interfere, though he could not be counted on in a crunch to prevent interference from others. But this kind of detailed, closely concerned supervision by a producer was very different. Hitch could see the advantages of it, since Selznick was undoubtedly bright and many of his contributions were good ones. But it was also a trial, since it seemed to mean that Hitch had to defend his position and prove himself all over again. Still, that, he supposed, was the Hollywood system, and he would just have to accept it for what it was.
As much as anything, it was a challenge to his ingenuity. How far could he appear to play the producer’s game and yet end up doing exactly what he wanted? In this battle of wits, he and Selznick were pretty evenly matched, and each fascinated and somewhat mystified the other. When he got to know Hitch a little better Selznick wrote to his wife that he had spent a social evening with Hitch after a preview of The Wizard of Oz, and had decided that he was ‘not a bad guy, shorn of affectations, although not exactly a man to go camping with.…’ Professionally, he treated Hitch very much as an equal, reserving the right to criticize what he was doing as one pro to another, but at the same time ready to be resisted and, if necessary, proved wrong. Hitch tended to resist him by sheer inertia: if he said yes, or maybe, let’s consider it some more, then went about things in his own way, there was little Selznick could do except fire him, and that, obviously, he was not about to do.
Fortunately, during the preparation and shooting of Rebecca, Selznick just did not have the time to interfere much, beyond the usual barrage of memos. At the forefront of his mind and in the centre of his activities was the completion of his biggest production yet, and most famous production ever, Gone With the Wind. It was still shooting principal photography till the end of June 1939, and thereafter there were a thousand jobs in which Selznick himself was deeply involved, what with the cutting, the scoring, the previewing, and all the little last-minute revisions right up to the day of the film’s premiere on 15 December 1939 in Atlanta. If he had been concentrating exclusively, or even mainly, on Rebecca Hitch would have had a much harder time. As it was, inspired by the tremendous amount of publicity garnered by the search for the screen’s Scarlett O’Hara, Selznick first interested himself principally in trying to make equal publicity mileage on the search for the nameless heroine of Rebecca. Hitch was convinced that he had determined from the start on his first choice, Joan Fontaine, who did by fairly general consent seem ideal for the role. But a big air of mystery was built up, negotiations were begun with other, more prominent actresses as well as with unknowns, and tests were shot by Hitch of at least six actresses, Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, Margaret Sullavan, Anita Louise, Loretta Young and the sixteen-year-old Anne Baxter. Vivien Leigh was involved at all only because she was desperately eager to star with her husband-to-be, Laurence Olivier, who had already been signed to play Max de Winter, but Hitch and Selznick thought from the outset she was totally unsuitable. The three serious candidates were Joan Fontaine, Margaret Sullavan and Anne Baxter, and when Joan Fontaine was finally contracted it came as a surprise to no one closely connected with the production.
Once a script had been completed more or less to Selznick’s specifications, adhering as closely to the book as the Production Code permitted (Max could not be allowed to have killed his first wife and got away with the crime, so the shooting had to become accidental death), Hitch began filming in his own way, at his own pace, hurried occasionally by messages from Selznick that the rushes seemed too slow, or that the budget was building up because he was taking such a long time to shoot. Selznick was particularly disturbed by Hitch’s method of shooting just what was in the script and no more—no master shot of a whole scene, no variations of middle-shot and close-ups which could be cut together in different ways and allow the film to be remade at the producer’s whim in the cutting room. Hitch’s material was a jigsaw which permitted of only one solution: his. There was a strict limit to what Selznick could do afterwards, without getting the stars back and rebuilding the sets for expensive reshooting.
Selznick hazily realized this during the course of shooting, and tried to argue Hitch into a more Hollywood method of proceeding, on the grounds that it was quicker and cheaper. But Hitch stuck to his guns, and such was Selznick’s degree of preoccupation with Gone With the Wind (on 2 December he complained that he had been so busy he had not been able to look at a foot of Rebecca for a week) that he let him. It was a gamble on Hitch’s part that Rebecca would turn out all right and thus all such irritations would be forgotten. And so it proved—the first preview, even very roughly assembled, was sensational, audiences loved the film, it won the Oscar for the ‘Best film of the year’, and it presented Selznick with an important new star in Joan Fontaine. Hitch was vindicated, and in after years Selznick would say that Hitch was the only director, absolutely the only director, whom he would trust completely with a picture.
For the time being Hitch was slowly acclimatizing himself to Hollywood studios and Hollywood ways. He and Alma lived very quietly, and he soon made it clear that they were not about to join any Beverly Hills party set. In a curious way, this helped his assimilation into Hollywood: producers and stars might not understand him, but at least they knew where they stood, they could pigeon-hole him. He was a bit weird, obviously foreign, but serious and dedicated—not the man to go camping with, but he did not screw around, he was totally honest and reliable; he was, as one big producer said, ‘the kind of a guy who restores your faith in this whole lousy business.’ If Hollywood did not feel totally at home with him, at least it could respect him. And anyway Hitch rapidly got to feel totally at home with Hollywood. He could keep Hollywood guessing, which was just the way he liked it.
Soon his day-to-day life settled into ritual. He made a rapid investigation of Los Angeles’s gastronomic delights, and decided that of all the restaurants he liked Chasens’ the best. The location, near the West Hollywood decorator belt, was unprepossessing, and the interior, standard pseudo-French plush-and-gold, was undistinguished. But Dave Chasen and his wife Maude were totally devoted to the production of unpretentiously fine food, and they and the Hitchcocks soon became firm friends. So every Thursday, come rain or come shine, Hitch and Alma would dine at Chasens’, always in the same booth, which through the years came to be decorated with little personal memorabilia like a portrait of Pat. Hitch’s favourite meal consisted of a double steak (at $5.50) and a champagne punch made up to his own specifications.
That outing, and the Sunday drive to church with Pat, were the fixed points of his life. When he was filming he would turn up punctiliously at the studio every day disguised as an English businessman in the invariable dark suit, white shirt and restrained dark tie. In the 1930s the fact of wearing a suit and tie, even in the suffocating heat of a Los Angeles summer, was not so bizarre as it has since become, but in a world where many of the film-makers affected fancy dress—De Mille’s riding breeches, Von Sternberg’s tropical tea-planter outfit—Hitch’s was the fanciest of them all by being the least suitable and probable. He would work regular office hours, come home, read the daily papers, relax with his daughter and his dogs, snooze for an hour or so on the sofa in their living room, eat a quiet family dinner prepared as a rule by Alma herself, then go early to bed. His physical surroundings were from the first determinedly English: chintzes and polished brass and dark wood. He imported English bacon and Dover sole himself, and stored them at the Los Angeles Smoking and Curing Company, until the war put a stop to this indulgence. And his way of life carried over entire the pattern he had established in England: he was a straightforward middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an artistic genius.
At work, too, he soon settled into a routine. Though his methods of making a film in advance on paper were peculiar by Hollywood standards, they could be quite readily accommodated to the Hollywood system. The secret was that they evidently worked, and anyone in Hollywood would go along with that. He, for his part, was immensely impressed by the sheer efficiency of the Hollywood studio machine. There was virtually nothing you could not do, no supplies which were too esoteric, no skills which could not be bought somewhere in the city. And there was the money to buy them. Rebecca was originally budgeted at around $950,000, and eventually hit the million mark. It was far and away the most expensive movie Hitch had ever made, and the effect was tonic after the limitations of his tiny budgets in England. Of course, it was possible that this situation could also be stultifying, since the responsibilities were heavier, and there was not the outside stimulus to invention that severely limited money and resources willy-nilly provided.
Undeniably Rebecca, successful though it was at the box office, is a lot less personal than the films Hitch had recently been making in England. Hitch himself regards it as ‘not a Hitchcock picture: a novelette really.’ He does not have any special dedication to the writings of Daphne du Maurier, such as might seem to be implied by his having made three films based on her work, Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds, when he has never otherwise adapted the same author more than once. But Rebecca was certainly a subject that appealed to him from the moment of the book’s appearance, and The Birds had at least that necessary nugget of a telling situation from which a Hitchcock film could come. He wonders how Rebecca would have turned out if he had made it in England, since after all the subject, the director and most of the cast were English, and only the producer and the final script-writer, Robert E. Sherwood, were American. Probably it would have been more realistic, less obsessive—the house at Manderley would have had more of a context, the details been more vivid, the whole thing less dreamlike and gothic, which might not, he admits, have been an advantage.
He did not have any major problems with Selznick over his treatment of the story, apart from their battle over the introduction of humour into it (which Selznick won, to Hitch’s regret), and a determined tussle over the very last shot, when Manderley is finally burnt. Selznick came up with what he felt was a great idea: that there should be an elaborate process shot showing the smoke from the house curling up to form a gigantic ‘R’ (for Rebecca) in the sky. Hitch thought that was really vulgar and silly, and anyway gave the opposite effect to what was needed, suggesting as it did that the malign presence of Rebecca continued to brood over everything instead of being at last dispelled. In place of this he quickly thought up and shot the sequence in which the flames consume Rebecca’s room, ending with the detail of this same ‘R’ embroidered on the pillowcase being reduced to ashes. Selznick accepted that, none too happily, but with the comforting thought that at least it was less expensive, so here for once his costly foreign director was showing himself willing actually to cut costs.
Selznick considered that he had been (if involuntarily) a model of patience and non-intervention during Rebecca. Hitch felt otherwise. He had enormous respect for Selznick, and even personal liking, but he was disturbed and irritated at the idea of a producer constantly breathing down his neck, and coming on to the set even as relatively infrequently, by his own normal standards, as Selznick had. He wondered, nervously, if this was the way things were usually done in Hollywood, because if it was, he certainly did not like it. He was soon to find out.
Obviously, with the tremendous success of Rebecca, Selznick’s expensive contract with Hitch was paying off. But at this point he did not have another property ready for Hitch; in fact, the Selznick International organization itself was in a state of flux, largely because of its enormous profits on Gone With the Wind and Rebecca, which forced Selznick to liquidate in an elaborate capital-gains transaction, with the result that he took three years out of active film production and did not return until 1944, with Since You Went Away. Meanwhile, he still had Hitch and several stars under contract, and a lot of literary properties; he remained in the business of selling and trading, and Hitch was to be sold off to a wide variety of other producers before he made a film for Selznick himself again. In June 1940 the possibilities were being discussed simultaneously that he should direct The Constant Nymph with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh at Warners, Back Street with Margaret Sullavan at Universal, or A Woman’s Face with Joan Crawford at Metro.
Long before this, however, events on a larger stage than that of the Selznick Studios in Culver City intervened. On 3 September 1939, Britain’s ultimatum to Hitler over Poland had taken no effect, and so, unwillingly, Britain found herself in a state of war with Germany. Hitch had just started shooting Rebecca, and there was no way he could return to Britain even if it had seemed politic or sensible for him to do so. When he heard that war had been declared he tried immediately to telephone his mother, and was told that all communication had been cut off for the moment. He felt totally desolate, and to a degree panicked, since everyone had been taught to suppose that when and if the war came, there would be an instant bombardment and the lives of those left in London would be worth very little. Finally, after three days, he did manage to get through to his mother, and found her, to his mingled irritation and relief, as stubborn and unemotional as ever. They were not bombing London yet, and did not seem likely to do so, and in any case she had been through the Zeppelin raids in the First World War and saw no essential difference this time. She brushed aside Hitch’s suggestion that perhaps she might consider coming to America until the present emergency was over. She did not like to travel and did not care to be uprooted at her time of life. She did go so far as to admit the possibility she might move out of London, down to Shamley Green if things got worse, but she was promising nothing.
Well, at least this was cheering, by and large. And since the Government’s first action in Britain on the outbreak of war had been to close all the theatres and cinemas, and all the film studios, most of which they intended to requisition for warlike uses, there would be little or nothing Hitch could do in England anyway. Only one film was still in production in the whole of England, Gabriel Pascal’s expensive adaptation of Shaw’s Major Barbara, and that only because Michael Balcon, who was now in charge of the tiny Ealing Studios in West London, where the film was being made, had pulled strings and begged and argued and pleaded that Britain needed its cultural ambassadors more than ever now and it would be wanton to scrap something of such importance altogether out of sheer panic. And as it happened Hitch was currently at work, on the other side of the world, on what was to all intents and purposes a British picture. To complete it to the best of his ability was the only thing he could do, and also the most telling. He decided to stay on.
This decision, perhaps never at one moment consciously taken, was not be be received all that favourably in certain quarters at home. Hitch was above the age to be called up for war service, but one other vitally concerned with the production was not: Laurence Olivier, as soon as he had completed his role, had to return immediately to England. Other Englishmen in America at the time also headed homeward, though there were many who stayed on for the moment, tied as they were by contracts or feeling that, the instant emotion apart, there was little point in their rushing back until it became clearer how things stood. Over at RKO, for example, Hitch’s near-contemporary in the early days of British movies, Herbert Wilcox, was making a series of films with his wife Anna Neagle; they were in much the same position as Hitch, tied down by contractual obligations and compelled for the time being to sit tight and do all they could to assist the British cause from across the Atlantic.
And soon there were new arrivals in a two-way traffic. Gracie Fields had the misfortune to be married to an Italian, Monty Banks, who was in immediate danger of being interned in Britain as an enemy alien. So naturally they moved rapidly to America, pursued by overexcited accusations that Gracie was a coward and a traitor, deserting her country in its hour of need. Elisabeth Bergner, domiciled in Britain since Hitler had come to power, was shooting Forty-Ninth Parallel for Michael Powell on location in Canada and deserted the production to slip over the border into the neutral United States. She too was denounced. Then in February 1940 Alexander Korda, still the most powerful and extravagant producer in Britain, arrived in Hollywood to join his brother Zoltan, the director, who was already in the desert for his health, and his wife, Merle Oberon, then under contract to Warners, bringing with him a major film which had been interrupted by the outbreak of war, The Thief of Bagdad, to complete in California. For many in Britain that was the last straw. That Korda, a ‘guest in our country’ (as they loved to say of foreigners, implying that somehow they never paid their way), should cheerfully desert Britain in her darkest hour just to make a buck, was treachery of the worst sort, and terrible were the denunciations in the British press.
Now as it happens Korda, a crazed anglophile from way back, had come over, some say at the personal request of Churchill, and certainly with Churchill’s active support, to continue making British films, films which would project British values and the British way of life for American audiences, at a time when they could not be made in Britain. The fact could not be made public at the time, and his actions were wildly misconstrued—even when he continued in Hollywood to make defiantly patriotic British films such as Lady Hamilton (or That Hamilton Woman as it was known in the States) with Vivien Leigh, and with Laurence Olivier specially relieved of his wartime duties for the sake of the good propaganda embodied in his magnetic portrayal of Nelson.
Naturally, in all this flurry of accusation Hitch came in for his share. The most hurtful was from his old friend and associate Michael Balcon, who made an ill-considered statement to the press naming Hitch as one of those who had deserted Britain when she needed them most. Hitch and Alma were deeply upset that he of all people, who should have known better, had taken this line; and he himself soon regretted it, since he was unofficially informed that Hitch, like Korda, was continuing film-making in America at the express request of the British Government. But the harm had been done. Alma especially found it hard to forgive a number of the things which had been said about Hitch in Britain during the early days of the war, and it all hardened her resolve to stay permanently in their new home. As soon as she possibly could she went over to Britain to collect her mother and sister and bring them back to America, and she embraced the country and its ways wholeheartedly. Almost as soon as she was legally qualified to do so she took out naturalization papers, five years before Hitch resolved to do so.
Meanwhile, Hitch looked around for what he could most usefully do to help the British war effort in America. This was not such a simple matter. Though there were few direct Nazi sympathizers in Hollywood, and many with good reason to be hostile, the official policy was to retain strict neutrality. More and more films were creeping into production in which the bad guys had German accents and audiences could get the general idea that they were Nazis, even if they were not specifically identified as such. But any producer undertaking an explicitly anti-Nazi film still ran the risk of State Department displeasure, and so they were few and far between. Providentially, at this moment one of the bolder producers came to Hitch with just such a proposition. It was Walter Wanger, and he had, it transpired, recently purchased the rights to Vincent Sheean’s autobiographical Personal History, for $10,000. The background to the book, that of a politically conscious correspondent in disastrously unsettled Europe, with a major war looming, was appealing and dramatic. Unfortunately there was no foreground in sharp focus—no coherent narrative, no telling characters, no specific incidents that lent themselves to filming. What, Wanger wanted to know, could Hitch do with this if he were given a free hand?
Hitch did not know offhand, but he was sure he could do something—for Wanger and for Britain. So calling in his old script collaborator Charles Bennett, who had been settled in Hollywood since 1937, he and Joan Harrison began laboriously to construct a workable plot line. Almost the only thing they took from Sheean’s book was the opening location, Holland. And true to his old principle, the first thing Hitch asked was, what do they have in Holland? Answer: windmills and tulips. Consequently, two images: one, of a windmill with the sails revolving in the wrong direction, as a signal of some kind; two, of a murder in a field of tulips, concluding with a shot in which blood spattered on a pure, pristine white tulip. The second image he decided was impractical, as it needed colour for its full realization, and anyway he could not see quite how to work it in. But the first provided the starting-point for the film as it was to be, a complicated story of an innocent bystander’s gradual unwilling involvement in the toils of war. The hero, an American correspondent in Europe on assignment, with no political parti pris, could in this way stand in place of the average uncommitted American. He first of all gets involved on a personal level, with a nice old Dutchman and an attractive English girl, and through them with a complicated spy intrigue concerning a kidnapped Dutch diplomat and stolen papers, and finally finds himself wholly committed to the fight against Nazism, broadcasting to America at the fade-out:
JONES: Hello America. I’ve been watching a part of the world being blown to pieces. A part of the world as nice as Vermont, Ohio, Virginia, California and Illinois lies ripped up bleeding like a steer in a slaughterhouse. And I’ve seen things that make the history of the savages read like Pollyanna legend.
ANNOUNCER: We’re going to have to postpone the broadcast.
(At this point sirens begin to wail and lights flash as bombs begin to burst outside the studio.)
JONES: Don’t postpone nothing, let’s go on as long as we can.
ANNOUNCER (to Carol): Ma’am, we’ve got a shelter downstairs.
JONES: How about it, Carol?
CAROL: They’re listening in America, Johnny.
JONES: O.K. We’ll tell them. I can’t read the rest of this speech I have because the lights have gone out. So I’ll just have to talk off the cuff. All that noise you hear isn’t static, it’s death coming to London. Yes, they’re coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and homes. Don’t tune me out—hang on—this is a big story—and you’re part of it. It’s too late now to do anything except stand in the dark and let them come as if the lights are all out everywhere except in America. (Music—‘America’—begins to play softly in background of speech and continues through end credits.)
JONES: Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they’re the only lights in the world.
The script turned out to be one of those on which Hitch had most trouble: in the course of preparation he went through fourteen writers, only four of whose names finally appear on the film—Joan Harrison and Charles Bennett, who are credited with the original scenario, and James Hilton and Robert Benchley, who are credited with the dialogue. Benchley’s inclusion is a special case anyway. Hitch had seen several of the shorts the woebegone, disenchanted comic had made, illustrated lectures by himself on such subjects as How to Sleep, A Night at the Movies and The Sex Life of the Polyp, and had appreciated a dry, grotesque sense of humour not unlike his own. Years later he was to remember the tone and format when devising his own famous introductory monologues for Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television. He had the notion that Benchley, who was more of a writer than an actor at that point and had been hired just to write dialogue, would be good casting as the semi-alcoholic reporter the hero is sent to replace at the beginning of the film. His main scene is largely exposition, and so to give it character the obvious solution was to get Benchley to write the role as Benchley, and play it himself. During the shooting Hitch constantly admonished Benchley just to be himself, and everything would be fine—the camera would simply ‘eavesdrop’. The most radical piece of direction Hitch was heard to offer Benchley in the whole course of the movie, in fact, was on one occasion when he said to the heavy-lidded actor, ‘Come, now, Bob, let’s open those naughty little eyes.’
For the principal role he wanted a big star like Gary Cooper. Cooper was approached, but feeling that the script was, after all, ‘only a thriller’, and therefore beneath his dignity, refused. (Later he told Hitch he thought he had made quite a bad mistake in doing so.) Instead Hitch got Joel McCrea, with Laraine Day as his leading lady, supported by an excellent cast of character players, among them Herbert Marshall, another of Hollywood’s English colony, as the sauve English undercover-agent for the Nazis, George Sanders, with whom Hitch had just been working in Rebecca, as the hero’s spruce English sidekick, the distinguished German refugee actor Albert Bassermann as the Dutch diplomat, and Edmund Gwenn, whom Hitch had worked with in England back in the days of The Skin Game and Waltzes from Vienna, as a vicious but not too efficient killer. He even managed to find a small place in the film for the star of The Blackguard, Jane Novak, now, fifteen years later, a busy Hollywood bit player, like Betty Compson, of Woman to Woman, whom he was similarly to work into his next film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Hitch’s memory in such matters was proverbial—and proverbially generous. He even knew when not to remember: while looking for suitable locations for Notorious, he found himself humbly being offered something by an assistant of an assistant in the location department, whom he recognized as the man in Famous Players who had looked at his sketches and given him his first job back in 1919. Then he thought it kinder to give no sign, but when there was anything practical he could do unobtrusively to help old friends (or even old enemies like Jack Cutts) who had fallen on hard times, he invariably did it.
In his book on Hitchcock, François Truffaut refers to Foreign Correspondent as something of a come-down for Hitch after Rebecca, ‘definitely in the “B” category.’ Hitch politely does not contradict him, but in fact this is far from the truth. Despite its lack of big star names, it was an ambitious and expensive picture, and finally cost over $1.5 million, as against Rebecca’s $1 million. The reason for this is evident if one looks closely at the film. In addition to costly second-unit shooting in London and Amsterdam, which had to be done again because the first time the ship in which the cameraman went over was torpedoed and all his stock and equipment lost, the sets that had to be built in Hollywood were numerous and in some cases enormous. The square in Amsterdam in which the feigned murder takes place took a month to build, with three crews working round the clock, sported an elaborate drainage system because the whole sequence, with its hundreds of umbrellas, takes place in torrential rain, and covered some ten acres. There were also a strip of Dutch countryside, with windmills, several parts of London, and a large plane, interior and exterior, the latter also requiring the use of a giant studio tank for the spectacular air-crash sequence. To achieve vividness, authenticity and artistic quality in all of these Hitch was pleased to be working with William Cameron Menzies, who had just completed a mammoth job as production designer for Selznick on Gone With the Wind and was the man primarily responsible for its visual consistency and sumptuous appearance through all the chopping and changing that chequered production underwent.
After the enclosed psychological drama of Rebecca, Hitch was back with Foreign Correspondent in his own chosen territory, the action-packed thriller. And having his largest budget ever to play with (though little of it came his way: he was maddened to discover he was getting $2,500 a week from Selznick, while Wanger was paying Selznick $7,500 for his services), he was able to have a ball with the virtuoso passages like the murder in Amsterdam, the attempted murder in London (by precipitation from the top of the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral tower, an incidental detail with which religiously minded commentators have had a field day) and the crashing of the transatlantic airliner into the sea. For this latter sequence he devised some of his most mystifying effects. The crash itself is done in one continuous shot over the pilot and copilot’s shoulders, showing the water getting nearer and nearer and finally, on impact, pouring through the windscreen and drowning them and the camera. The procedure, actually, is relatively simple once you know how. Hitch shot a back-projection from a plane zooming towards the water. He then had it projected on to a tissue-paper screen the other side of the cockpit from the camera. And beyond the screen he had a body of water which was released at the moment the plane appeared to hit the sea, breaking through the screen and surging into the cockpit so fast that it was impossible to see the paper tearing under its impact. For the following scene, with the survivors struggling in the water, he wanted to show a wing breaking from the body of the plane and veering away, and to do this he had an elaborate pattern of rails and branch lines built under the surface of the water in the studio tank, so that the pieces of the plane could be manoeuvred exactly on the hidden equivalent of a giant child’s toy train set.
He was a lot happier with Foreign Correspondent than he had been with Rebecca. This, at least, was an unmistakable ‘Hitchcock picture’ and was greeted as such. It also did something he very much wanted to do: as the Herald Tribune said, it ‘blends escapist entertainment with challenging propaganda in film terms.’ When it opened on 16 August 1940 the United States was still eighteen months away from resigning its neutrality and entering the war, but Hitch’s anti-Nazi, pro-Britain message came over loud and clear. When asked about the conclusion now he is liable to back away from it, saying that it was all the doing of Walter Wanger and Ben Hecht, but it is hard to believe that, in those very emotional days, he did not endorse it and find in it something very close to his own sentiments, even if left to himself he would have hesitated to wear his heart so flagrantly on his sleeve.
After completing the picture, he got involved in a minor, incidental way in two other films which were then in the works. First, as a favour to Walter Wanger, whom he had enjoyed working with (he at least, unlike Selznick, would leave well enough alone) he shot some additional scenes for the Archie Mayo film The House Across the Bay, sequences involving Walter Pidgeon, Lloyd Nolan and Joan Bennett in a plane, a setting he was felt to be expert at following Foreign Correspondent. Then he was roped into a more wholehearted, single- (or simple-) minded piece of British flag-waving than Foreign Correspondent, an episodic tribute to the English spirit called Forever and a Day, to which most of the British colony in Hollywood, along with many sympathetic Americans, donated their services. Among the others concerned were Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle, Jessie Matthews, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Laughton and Ida Lupino. Hitch prepared and was about to direct the sequence in which Ida Lupino, a little cockney maid, runs up and down behind a crowd trying to see over. But then his schedule did not permit him to make it, so René Clair, a recently arrived refugee from the German invasion of France, took over and directed it instead, from Hitch’s script.
On the domestic front, the Hitchcocks were rapidly settling in. After a few months of apartment living at the Wilshire Palms, they found themselves hankering for a house, and rented a suitable one, an English-style cottage, once Carol Lombard’s, in St. Cloud Road, Bel Air. Socially, Hitch was extending and amplifying his reputation as a harmless eccentric. There was his habit of sleeping in public. Once at a social evening he was deep in conversation with Thomas Mann and Louis Bromfield one minute; the next he was fast asleep, while they continued to talk fascinatingly over him. On another occasion he took Loretta Young and Carol Lombard to Chasens’ and in the middle of dinner fell sound asleep between two of the most glamorous women in Hollywood. Once he went to sleep at a dinner party and continued to sleep until all the other guests had tiptoed away. At last Alma ventured to wake him and suggest that they might perhaps think of going. ‘Wouldn’t it be rude to leave so soon?’ asked Hitch hazily.
No one was ever quite sure how far these naps were genuine and how far he staged them impishly to test other people’s reactions. Certainly he continued with his practical jokes. One of the most famous took place at Chasens’ one evening. He arranged a dinner party to celebrate Alma’s birthday, in the back garden, or yard as they called it, where there were two or three table-tennis tables, a small semi-circular bar, and one table for about fourteen people. And at the head of the table he sat a very grand-looking old lady, beautifully dressed and groomed, grey-haired and evidently very distinguished (actually a dress extra he had hired for the occasion). When guests started to arrive and gathered for drinks at the bar they all began asking sotto voce, ‘Who’s the old lady?’ And Hitch, with extreme embarrassment, muttered that he didn’t know, she must be at the wrong table, but he didn’t like to say anything. Dave Chasen, who was in on the joke, was nowhere in evidence until the dinner was about to begin, then he went over at Hitch’s instructions to the table and bent down to exchange a few words with the old lady, then came back and reported, ‘She says she’s with Mr. Hitchcock’s party.’
Well, there seemed to be nothing much to be done, and so everyone sat down with the old lady and had a good if slightly surrealistic dinner, people occasionally trying to engage her in conversation and subtly place her, but all being foiled by her well-bred vagueness and apparent deafness from making any sense of the situation. Among the guests was the producer Collier Young, then in the Myron Selznick story department, and his very attractive wife. At the last moment they had called to ask if they could bring along their house guest, and though Hitch did not like having a stranger introduced in this way to what was ostensibly a family occasion, he agreed. At dinner he was intrigued to notice that the house guest was very evidently making a play for Young’s wife, just to add to the drama of the situation. And one invited guest, Harry Hand, from Myron Selznick’s London office, was late, so everyone concluded that the old lady must be with him. But when he arrived and went round the table shaking hands with everyone, including the old lady, he of course denied all knowledge too. At last, when the meal was nearly over, Charles Bennett, who knew Hitch’s ways of old, suddenly slapped his hand on the table and cried, ‘I’ve got it—it’s a gag. I know it’s a gag.’ Then he gazed round the table, his eyes lighted on the other stranger, the Collier Youngs’ house guest, and pointing an accusing finger at him he added, ‘And you’re a gag too!’
After completing Foreign Correspondent and his other bits and pieces, Hitch was able at last to make his first trip home to England since he had settled in Los Angeles in a world still precariously at peace. It was not all that simple a matter to get to Britain from America at that time. Hitch had to go to the East Coast and wait around through various delays and disappointments until finally he was able to get on a ship travelling in convoy across the Atlantic. Even then, conditions were no picnic: passengers had to sleep in great dormitories, thirty to a room, and there was a shortage of bathrooms, so that all one’s most intimate functions had to be carried out virtually in public. This was sheer torture for Hitch, always reticent and puritanical about his own body, painfully shy, and quite compulsive when it came to cleanliness and tidiness. But there was no help for it, and he put up with everything cheerfully enough, so that none but those who knew him really well could guess what he was going through on this and other similar voyages during the war. In England Hitch resettled his mother at Shamley Green—where she was shortly to be joined by his brother William, bombed out of his South London fish shop in the blitz—and visited Joan Harrison’s mother, who toasted his arrival, to his rather mixed feelings, with warm champagne. He also acquired a rather bizarre gift for Pat—an empty incendiary bomb case, which for years she kept by her bed as a memento.
Back in Los Angeles, he did not have any new production immediately in view, though he was discussing making the Francis Iles novel Before the Fact for RKO. A happy chance, thought Carole Lombard, with whom Hitch and Alma had become very friendly, and she asked him to direct also her new movie at RKO, a belated screwball comedy called Mr. and Mrs. Smith. This was quite unlike anything he had done before, or was to do subsequently, and if Rebecca could not be regarded in his terms as a ‘Hitchcock picture’, this certainly could not. But as a favour to Carole Lombard he was willing to undertake it; in any case, the challenge amused him, and it was approaching the problem of his first completely American movie from a very unexpected direction. Rapidly it was agreed by RKO that they should borrow Hitch’s services from Selznick for the two films to be made one immediately after the other, at a payment to Selznick of a little over $100,000 apiece. Originally it was envisioned that each would take 16 weeks, making 32 consecutive weeks in all, but in the event they took more than a year, until the end of June 1941.
In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the first to be made, Lombard’s sense of humour and Hitch’s meshed perfectly. Things began the way they were going to go on the very first day of shooting. Hitch, of course, had once given an interview in which he made the notorious statement that actors are cattle (curiously enough, since this is Hitch’s most quoted quote of all, no one, not even he, knows when and where he first said it), and Lombard picked up on this. There on the set, the first day, was a small corral with three stalls, each containing a calf. All of them had tags round their necks, tied with ribbon: they read ‘Carole Lombard’, ‘Robert Montgomery’ and ‘Gene Raymond’, the three stars of the film.
Hitch, naturally, gave as good as he got. One day, on the pretext that Carole Lombard, the most professional of screen actresses, had fluffed a line a couple of times, he insisted on having all her lines chalked up on an ‘idiot board’ out of camera range for her to read while she acted the scene—a procedure which threw her completely, so that she forgot all her lines. She got her own back, though, when it came time for Hitch to shoot his traditional walk-on in the film, a little scene in which he appears as a panhandler trying unsuccessfully to hustle Robert Montgomery for the price of a drink. Lombard insisted on directing this herself, and then did take after take after take, instructing the make-up man meanwhile to ‘Powder Alfie’s nose’, until she was finally satisfied enough to say, ‘Cut. Print it.’
As for the film itself, Hitch says that he did very little, not knowing the background or the characters at all, but follow the finished script by Norman Krasna, expert deviser of dozens of such agreeable diversions (Bachelor Mother, It Started with Eve, Dear Ruth). All the same, it does seem that the film shows in certain areas the mark of Hitch’s personality and preoccupations. In particular, the story (of a couple who find that they are not married as they supposed and play a very intricate game of jockeying for position before they get together again) is given a particularly ruthless tone. The retort to that might be that it is all in the script, but one need only think of many similar subjects in 1930s Hollywood comedy and how they came across on screen. Something like The Awful Truth, for example, has the heroine behaving just as monstrously in a comparable situation, but Irene Dunne’s performance and Leo McCarey’s directorial angle of vision seem to take it for granted and project to the audience that she is quite charming, the ladies are like that, God bless ‘em, and that’s why we love them. Hitch, aided and abetted by an unsparing, hard-edged performance from Carole Lombard (no sentimentalist ever in her films), makes it quite clear that the woman is a monster, and the film leaves a sharp, bitter after-taste in the mouth.
Also, there is one little scene in which the heroine and her substitute boy-friend get trapped on a broken-down Ferris wheel at the New York World’s Fair which is developed in such a way, beyond anything the script seems to call for, that one does wonder if Hitch himself suffers from the horrors of vertigo. He says not particularly, but then there is always Vertigo itself as further indirect evidence on the subject, not to mention many a literal or near-literal cliff-hanging sequence as in North by Northwest or Saboteur. And what is one more fear for Hitch to admit to among so many?