Spellbound, as The House of Doctor Edwardes came to be called, was in the event the first of Hitch’s post-war films, and the one that marked in some mysterious way his definitive absorption into the American cinema. It is hard to put one’s finger on the difference. But up to this point Hitch had either been making English films in America, or films in which he was consciously a propagandist trying to sell the American public on something which might not seem natural to them. Even in Shadow of a Doubt a lot of the film’s extraordinary perceptiveness about small-town America seems to come, as in other films by foreigners such as Renoir’s Swamp Water or Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy or Forman’s Taking Off, from the very fact that there is a different angle of vision, that many things which would be taken for granted by an American are seen as exciting and exotic. From Spellbound on that all changes—Hitch has become, quite simply, an American film-maker.
Not that Spellbound is, in anyone’s opinion as far as I know, one of Hitchcock’s better films. Disarmingly, he calls it ‘just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis’. In the process of scripting, with Hitch, Ben Hecht and the inevitable Selznick working over the original idea, almost nothing of the novel is left except, remotely, the idea of the villain turning out to be the asylum director, who is of course mad. The new story line sorts itself out as a straightforward vehicle for Selznick’s two biggest new stars at that time, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Ingrid Bergman, playing a psychiatrist who falls in love with her new boss before discovering that he is an amnesiac who is substituting for and has possibly murdered the real Doctor Edwardes, fits in very well with the Hitchcock world. Gregory Peck, who plays the amnesiac in question, does not. Hitch and Bergman took to one another right away, and she obviously conforms to his developing stereotype of the cool blonde with fire underneath, going through very much the classic Hitchcock development in Spellbound as she melts, under the influence of love, from a brisk, businesslike doctor into a soft, passionate woman. Between Hitch and Peck there seems to have been little communication—Peck speaks rather cooly of Hitch’s tremendous technical skill; Hitch makes it clear that Peck was cast in a second of his films, The Paradine Case, against his wishes, simply because he was under contract to Selznick at the time.
The most significant thing about Spellbound in general was that in it Hitch, with his usual flair for catching ideas in the wind at the time, had happened to hit on what was to become a major preoccupation of American cinema in the next few years—the subject of psychoanalysis as popularly, over-simply understood. Glamorous psychiatrists (or villainous psychiatrists, successors of many generations of crazed scientists) became staple characters in American films, somewhat to Hitch’s amusement. He himself did not take it all too seriously, seeing it mainly as a new twist on an old theme. In Spellbound he benefited to the maximum from the superior production values Selznick could bring to the film (benefited too much, some might say, since the film is after all rather ponderous and tends to get bogged down in its own gloss), and mercifully, once shooting had begun, was very little interfered with by Selznick’s active on-set supervision.
Though Hitch did not noticeably suffer from it on Spellbound, Selznick had changed quite a lot in his attitudes since Rebecca. Many around him felt it was the success of Gone With the Wind; suddenly he saw himself tagged for the rest of his life as the producer of Gone With the Wind, and became obsessed with the necessity of equalling or surpassing it. Also, his business activities had not gone so well since, and he seemed to be seeking new satisfaction in taking over every aspect of his own productions—especially, of course, if they included Jennifer Jones’s interests to be lovingly cared for. His own taste tended to the rather over-literary and dialogue-bound, and Hitch found himself having to fight on their later films together to keep the dialogue within limits, and the action flowing. However, Selznick undoubtedly respected him, even if he did not always understand exactly what he was up to.
In Spellbound, specifically, he was mystified as to why Hitch wanted to bring in Salvador Dali to work on the dream sequences. But just as a newsworthy gimmick he could approve of the idea, and acted as go-between for the arrangement. Hitch had never met the eccentric Spanish painter, but had a certain guarded admiration for his work, along with that of another Surrealist, now ex-Surrealist, Chirico. What he liked in both men’s painting was the precision and literalness with which they rendered a dream world. This was how Hitch himself saw dreams—no vagueness, no ‘atmosphere’, completely hard-edged. And he wanted Dali to bring this sort of architectural sharpness to the rendering of the amnesiac’s dreams in the film. He wanted to emphasize this even further by shooting all the dream material in the open air, in real sunshine, but Selznick baulked at the expense, and finally it was all shot in the studio. Evidently, from production stills that survive, considerably more was staged and shot than ever reached the finished picture, and Hitch himself vetoed some of Dali’s wilder ideas, like the shot which would show a statue breaking apart to reveal Ingrid Bergman inside, covered with ants. He wanted the tone of the film to be perfectly matter-of-fact, to balance the fantasy elements in the story. In exchange for this, he got to carry out one of the one-shot ideas he had had at the back of his mind for years: at the climax the villainous Doctor Murchison has a gun trained on Ingrid Bergman and then slowly turns it on himself (the camera, that is, the audience) and it discharges with one flash of flame, red in this otherwise all black-and-white film.
Dali apparently enjoyed his stay in Hollywood, which was certainly more productive than his abortive attempt to design a whole animated feature for Disney, to be called Destiny. And he enjoyed Hitch, sensing in him a showman-eccentric very readily comparable to himself. Hitch still today has on his walls a Dali drawing inscribed to him as ‘Le chevalier de la mort’ And he still today retains the warm friendship of Ingrid Bergman, who shares with Grace Kelly alone the distinction of having played the heroine in no fewer than three of his American films, including the one immediately following, Notorious.
If Selznick had forborne to interfere with the shooting of Spellbound, he moved in with a vengeance at the editing stage, seeing it through the regular series of previews, noting with appreciation the enthusiastic audience reactions to Gregory Peck, and, between first preview and opening, cutting some two reels (about twenty minutes) out of the print. Hitch was inured to this, but the experience was still galling, and the irritation was not significantly lessened by the commercial triumph which awaited the film—it cost around $1.5 million, and made $7 million. Or by the fact that Selznick voluntarily gave him special billing above the title: the film was called ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound’. It was some comfort that he had recently made a new agreement with Selznick by which he was paid $150,000 a picture, making supposedly two a year, non-exclusive. But it was still with a certain trepidation that he went straight into another film with almost exactly the same team—Selznick producing, Ben Hecht scripting, and Ingrid Bergman starring with Cary Grant instead of Gregory Peck.
Meanwhile, Pat’s career as an actress was getting unpredictably under way again. She was now seventeen, and another role had come up for her, just as she was about to leave school. A series of stories by Whitfield Cook had been appearing in Red Book, about a little-Miss-Fixit called Violet who pulls together a large family made up of children from several different marriages. Cook decided to turn the stories into a play called Violet, and offered Pat the title role. She took it, though somewhat dismayed to discover that Cook was going to direct it himself, despite the fact that he had no previous directing experience. As it turned out, the result, which should have been light and charming, was heavy-footed and got a drubbing from the critics. The play had been optioned by MGM, so they were guaranteed three weeks, playing rather sinisterly to empty houses. Then, at the end of her second three-weeks’ run on Broadway—with Hitch again not having been able to see the play, as he was tied up with Spellbound—she returned to Los Angeles and began to give some serious thought to how she was going to pursue her career.
She had achieved respectable but not spectacular marks in school, so college did not seem a very good idea unless she had some specific purpose. Her only specific purpose in fact was to become an actress, and that had been accepted almost without question. But what should she now do about it? There were not so many respected drama schools in the US at that time, but one of them happened to be near by, at UCLA, where they already had drama courses as part of the academic curriculum. Pat went down to register, found that the registration fee was $12, and as she had only $9 on her she ran home to get the rest of the money. At which point Hitch suddenly said, out of the blue, ‘How would you like to go to RADA?’
Wouldn’t she just? She had heard Hitch talk about the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and knew that he had enormous respect for it as a repository of English acting traditions and technique. He could hardly have shown his confidence in her ability to learn her craft in a more practical, serious way. And evidently he had been secretly thinking it over for some time: he had already, before broaching the subject of RADA with Pat, made arrangements that she should, at least to begin with, live with his two elderly spinster cousins, Mary and Teresa, in Golders Green while she went to school. It was the most spectacular present he could possibly have given her at that point, and like the house for Alma it was given somewhat shamefacedly, spiced with a little teasing which made it a game for Hitch, with the other party only at the last moment, almost grudgingly, let into the secret. Pat, yet again, marvelled at his complexity even as she rejoiced at his kindness.
While all this was happening at home, preparations for Notorious were proceeding, not without problems. Selznick had been preoccupied during the making of Spellbound with his other major production of the time, Duel in the Sun, meant to be his Gone With the Wind of the post-war years and plagued with similar problems of escalating budgets, changing directors and so on. (It was probably more because of this than of any noble self-denial that he was not seen more often on the set of Spellbound.) While Notorious was on the stocks he was busy whipping up a storm of publicity for Duel in the Sun—Pat recalls being drummed at school into a ‘protest of Hollywood children’ against the alleged immorality of the film, and wondering vaguely whether she should say her father worked for the same fellow—but found time to interfere quite extensively with the scripting.
It was Selznick who had first turned Hitch’s mind in the direction of Notorious by showing him a Saturday Evening Post story called ‘The Song of the Flame’, about an actress who has to go to bed with a spy in the course of her counter-espionage duties and later fears this guilty secret may ruin her prospects of marriage. The story had nothing to offer in itself, but it set Hitch thinking around the idea of a woman who has to become sexually involved with a spy to get secret information, and the effect this has on her private life, especially her real love life. From that point (story idea actually credited to Hitch on the screen, which is rare) Hitch and Ben Hecht evolved the story line of the film as it was finally made, with Ingrid Bergman as the counter-spy turned unwilling sex object and Cary Grant as her jealous director of operations, just waiting for her to use her love for him as a reason to back out of her role in the plot.
All well and good, except for the vexed question of what the plot was. For Hitch it was the love story. But there had to be some MacGuffin as a motive force—the ‘secret’ everyone in the action is intent on keeping or revealing, even though it does not mean anything to us, the spectators. At first he and Hecht toyed with the idea of a secret Nazi army being formed in Brazil, but then, as with the secret air force in The Thirty-Nine Steps, he was faced with the problem of what it was for and how to dispose of it, having once introduced it. So instead it had to be some vital but simple object—industrial material, maybe. And how about uranium—the material they might, some day, use to make an atomic bomb? Why not—this was still early in 1945, before Hiroshima, and it seemed like the most remote science fiction. Hitch and Hecht even went to see Dr. Millikan, one of the foremost scientists in America, at Cal Tech to check out the feasibility of the notion, and he talked to them for a couple of hours about the possibility (remote) of scientists’ being able to split the hydrogen atom, but pooh-poohed the idea of uranium. (Even so, Hitch afterwards discovered he had been under surveillance for three months by the FBI as a result of that conversation.)
Well, maybe it was a bit fantastic, but a MacGuffin is a MacGuffin, and into the script the uranium went. A much more serious objection came from Selznick, however. What, he wanted to know, was this uranium stuff concealed in the wine bottles? Hitch carefully explained to him that though it did not matter a damn, it was this stuff they might make an atomic bomb out of. Selznick was not satisfied: how could they make something so remote and fantastic the basis for the whole story? Hitch patiently went over the principle of the MacGuffin again: that the film was ‘about’ the love story, and the uranium was only incidental. He even offered to change it to industrial diamonds if that would make Selznick any happier. But Selznick could not be convinced, and shortly afterwards he sold the whole package, script, stars and Hitchcock, to RKO for $800,000 and 50 per cent of the profits. As Hitch, who then took over as producer as well, remarked, this was very silly of him, for if he had had confidence in the picture and stuck with it he could have had all the profits, over $8 million.
The argument over this bit of MacGuffin has curiously followed Hitch through the years, providing him with a perfect instance of how the MacGuffin works and how even very sophisticated film men often fail to understand it. In 1950 Hitch found himself crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth with Joseph Hazan, a business partner of Hal Wallis, who asked him how he had managed to find out about uranium so early and admitted that he and Wallis had turned down the film when Selznick offered it to them because they thought the fundamental idea of the script (i.e. the uranium) was preposterous. A few years later still, Notorious was being belatedly released in Germany, and the German distributor proudly explained to Hitch how they had saved his bacon for him in the dubbing by changing the uranium to diamonds, because uranium was now so dated no one would accept it as the basis for a plot. More recently still, there was talk of remaking Notorious (perish the thought!), but the producers got stumped on the MacGuffin. After all, who was interested in uranium now? If only it could be changed into drugs of some kind, then possibly …
With Hitch as his own producer and no outside interference at all, Notorious went smoothly through the production process and turned out one of Hitch’s best films. He was happy with his stars, and they with him. As usual, he got the best results by patience and sweet reasonableness. One morning they had to start with Cary Grant’s reply to something Ingrid Bergman had said in the last shot taken the previous evening. She was still not altogether secure in the English language, and for some reason she just could not read the line right again for him to answer in the right way. At nine o’clock Hitch was patient. After a few attempts he talked quietly to Bergman: ‘Ingrid, do you know what this scene is all about?’ ‘Oh yes, Hitch.’ ‘Well then, let’s try it again.’ By eleven o’clock she still had not got it right, and then suddenly, in the middle of her speech, light dawned in her eyes and she read it perfectly. Hitch said ‘Cut,’ then calmly, matter-of-factly said, ‘Good morning, Ingrid’; she replied in the same tone, ‘Good morning, Hitch,’ and they went straight on without further comment.
Hitch was as ever quite imperturbable. One day Grant had difficulty opening a door as he was supposed to do, and complained to Hitch that he couldn’t do it with his right hand as it had his hat in it. Hitch pondered a moment, then asked sweetly, ‘Have you considered the possibility of transferring the hat to the other hand?’ On another occasion a fire broke out at the back of the stage. In the middle of explaining something to the cameraman Hitch simply said, ‘Would someone please put that fire out?’ and kept right on talking. For the famous kissing scene, allegedly the longest kiss on film, Bergman and Grant had to do take after take until they got it absolutely right, and as they embraced they took to murmuring sweet nothings in each other’s ears, different each take, mostly concerned with such unromantic matters as who would do the dishes. Hitch, of course, had his own idea, which he did not at the time confide to anyone else. He had an image in his mind of amorous obsession, derived from a scene he had once witnessed when his train stopped for a few moments at Étaples, just outside Boulogne. He saw a couple standing near a great brick wall embracing while the boy was urinating against the wall. The girl occasionally looked down to see how he was progressing, then looked round, then down again, but never let go of his arm the whole time. Nothing could interrupt romance, even the need for a pee. And that, unknown to his glamour stars and the public at large, was the kind of image Hitch was determined to create in these very different circumstances.
Notorious is one of Hitch’s most romantic, most simple, most secret films. It has bravura pieces of technique like the famous crane shot which begins at the top of a flight of stairs, taking in a whole crowded party scene, and closes in gradually to an enormous close-up of the one significant detail in the scene, the key held tightly in Ingrid Bergman’s hand at the bottom of the stairs, right at the other end of the set. But more importantly it is a model of plotting, and creates its own rather nightmarish, doom-laden atmosphere with such intense conviction it leaves one wondering whether those critics who insist on the importance of Hitch’s Catholic education may not have a point. Certainly the story does seem to turn so significantly on the avowal, the clear verbal admission of love between the two principal characters, that it is hard to find this entirely coincidental. Also it is quite deliberately an exercise in moral ambiguity: ultimately the villain (Claude Rains) is a much more likeable and sympathetic character then the hero (Cary Grant), and the audience is in a strange way pushed into rooting for him, even though they know him to be a Nazi and a cold-blooded killer, because his love for the Bergman character, ruthlessly exploitive as it is, is in many ways deeper and more genuine than the hero’s.
From here Hitch would have liked to go on to make more films which would combine this very personal exploration of the dark sides of human personality and passion with the wide popular appeal Notorious achieved. But instead, much to his resentment, he had to go back to Selznick and make for him the final film under his contract, The Paradine Case. He was very unhappy. He did not care for the subject, a novel by Robert Hichens turning on the trial of a mysterious femme fatale for the murder of her husband. It had been kicking around Hollywood for years and no writer had managed to lick it into satisfactory dramatic shape. (Selznick himself had tried unsuccessfully to sell Garbo on the idea back at MGM in the early 1930s.) Now Selznick, who was paying Hitch $5,000 a week for doing nothing, remembered the property, bought it from MGM, and decreed that it had to be done immediately. To make matters worse, he insisted on writing the script himself. Hitch and Alma had done the first adaptation, which Selznick needed for budgeting, and then had wanted James Bridie to work on the script with them. Bridie was brought over by Selznick, but when he was not met off the plane in New York took the first flight back, and tried to write the script in Britain—a not very satisfactory arrangement. Old faithful Ben Hecht was then called in, but left for another job with the script still very incomplete; and Selznick, with some show of reluctance (though this was what he had wanted all along), took over. And even though he confided to one of his aides a couple of weeks before the film was to go into production, in December 1946, that he did not have the time and feared that the film would ‘not be what it should be, and may even be dangerous at its present cost’, economic necessity forced him and Hitch on with it, all unprepared as they were.
Also, Selznick was compelled, and therefore compelled Hitch, to cast the film as far as possible from his own contract players. Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier, or possibly Ronald Colman, as the very straight English lawyer hopelessly in love with the woman he has to defend; instead he got Gregory Peck, who was then big box-office but whom he thought totally wrong. As the woman herself, the mysterious Mrs. Paradine, he wanted Garbo, but Garbo was still dead set against the subject and instead he got Alida Valli, a new European discovery of Selznick’s whom he hoped to make into a second Bergman now that his contract with the original was terminating. That was not so bad—she had the right mixture of passion and frigidity, and Hitch liked her personally, to such an extent that when, years later, he visited Italy again she was the only person there he specifically requested to see. But the third piece of imposed casting was the real disaster. As the story turns out, Mrs. Paradine did actually murder her husband, because she is hopelessly in the sexual power of her husband’s groom, a rough brute of a man smelling of manure who satisfyingly degrades her and enlivens her overcivilized senses. To make sense, Hitch thought, the role should be played by someone like Robert Newton—thus, at least, the relationship would be powerfully perverse, something which would interest him dramatically. But instead he was forced to use another Selznick contract artist, the sleek continental charmer Louis Jourdan, who could hardly have been further from what the part required.
Hitch therefore went into the film in a very contrary mood, hopeless from the outset, for one of the very few times in his professional life, of being able to make anything of the project he had been assigned. Oddly enough, almost like a bird of ill-omen, there in the cast, in the supporting role of the lecherous judge, was Charles Laughton, who had been in the last film he had felt this way about, Jamaica Inn. Actually on this occasion Laughton and Hitch got along very well—they were able to inject into the role of the hanging judge, mercilessly mistreating his own wife (Ethel Barrymore) and drooling over the lawyer’s beautiful young wife (Ann Todd), a lot of the strangeness and perversity which was so signally lacking from the main intrigue. Right from the start, though, Hitch and Selznick were constantly at loggerheads. Selznick was endlessly writing and rewriting against the clock, sending down new scenes on the very morning they were due to be shot. Hitch complained to an old friend, ‘What am I to do? I can’t take it any more—he comes down every day, he rewrites the scene, I can’t shoot it, it’s so bad.’ He also berated Selznick for the absurdity of going into such a picture with technical equipment, he claimed, twenty years behind the times. Selznick for his part accused Hitch of deliberately going slow and disregarding spiralling costs, out of some obscure kind of revenge. ‘This I can assure you,’ he told his aides; ‘you will see an entirely different result when he starts on his own picture; and you can also be sure that he will attribute this to efficiency in his own operation, against the gross inefficiency with which he charges us.’
Probably both parties were right to an extent in sensing ill will on the other’s part. Hitch, certainly, had come to the end of that period in his career when he could cheerfully and philosophically brook the constant interference of a creative producer, however well-intentioned, and he was surely correct in feeling that Selznick’s natural tendency to dominate his productions had taken a neurotically authoritarian turn. It is quite possible, on the other hand, that Selznick, who was no fool, was also on to something when he found Hitch’s slowing-down ‘unaccountable’. The later 1940s, though externally a period of advance for Hitch, in which he would become his own master, his own producer and as near as might be the complete creator of his own films, were also a strange period of dissatisfaction and lack of direction for him. He would not, of course, be the first man who has undergone some kind of change of life in his later forties, and it does seem that at this period, though generally in remarkable health, as he has always been, he was subject to all kinds of minor ailments, probably of nervous or psychosomatic origin, and that the hypochondria he has remarked on as an hereditary trait in his family had him for the moment particularly in its power.
This may explain the curious aridity many sense in his films of this time—The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, Stage Fright. Again and again the most vivid interest he can seem to summon up in them is that of playing games with himself, setting himself purely technical challenges which he then sets out with the utmost ingenuity to solve. In The Paradine Case he found distraction from his woes with Selznick by shooting the courtroom scenes in an entirely new way for him: instead of set-up by set-up, he placed four cameras, each with its own crew, in different parts of his expensive Hollywood reproduction of the Old Bailey, each trained on a different character or group of characters, then let them run, recording the continuous scenes from all these angles, to edit together the most telling parts in the cutting room. In his next two films he approached the problem of the continuous scene from the opposite direction, by cutting down the role of editing dramatically and introducing the controversial ‘ten-minute take’.
Once The Paradine Case finally went into release in December 1947 he felt an exhilarating sense of freedom. It was the end of an era, for him, for Selznick and for Hollywood. For Selznick, The Paradine Case meant the drastic winding-down of his independent releasing organization, his last challenge to the major Hollywood studios. The picture had cost an astronomical $4 million, and did not come anywhere near repaying the investment. And the organization proved uneconomical: he could not keep up a sufficient flow of product to occupy his employees all the year round, and from now on he had to admit defeat and retreated more and more into the dependent position of a producer or co-producer releasing his films through the major distributing organizations. The end was also in sight, though no one then fully appreciated it, for the old Hollywood studio system of factory-style production, contract artists and technicians, and tycoon heads of production ultimately in charge of it all. Though Hitch, ever cautious, felt a certain trepidation in launching out on his own as a complete independent, without a contract to fall back on or a producer to blame if things went wrong, he had certainly chosen the psychological moment to make the change.
But now he had the freedom, where should he go and what should he do with it? Ironically, the most attractive offer came from Britain. During his wartime visit to London in 1944 Hitch and his producer Sidney Bernstein had discussed a long-standing project of Bernstein’s, the very sober, simple filming of stage plays. At that point Bernstein had been particularly interested in it as part of the war effort, a way of recording an important part of British culture and selling it to other nations. Hitch had not seemed too interested—this sort of canned theatre, rather like what was subsequently done by the American Film Theatre, was far indeed from his own preoccupations in the cinema. But now Hitch was free and eager to work, Bernstein offered him a production set-up of his own, something to be called Transatlantic Pictures which would enable him to make films in Britain or America, co-produce them with Bernstein, and have complete control of subjects, casting and budgets. Hitch was delighted: he said, ‘The only thing that matters is who I work with day-to-day.’ By this time he was fairly well settled into the American manner of film-making, was respected and encouraged in the States, while in the frivolous and, curiously, more cynical atmosphere of Britain his fanaticism for films was a problem. But obviously on his own terms he could work anywhere.
And at this point, to Bernstein’s surprise, Hitch reverted to the subject of the filmed stage play. How if, for their first production, they were to return to his old project Rope, which by now dated back at least ten years in his mind? He said he would like to make a play on film, ‘but not Shakespeare’, and thought Patrick Hamilton’s thriller, loosely based on the Leopold-Loeb case in which two young Chicagoans murdered a third boy for kicks and to prove that they had super-intelligences, would do perfectly. He saw it as being a very inexpensive film, with a very short shooting schedule, and planned to put into operation this old idea of doing it as nearly as possible in one take—actually in takes of ten minutes’ (one reel’s) duration which would run imperceptibly into each other on screen.
This sounded like a slightly odd idea to Bernstein, but if that was what Hitch wanted to do, that was what he wanted to do, and his enthusiasm for the whole project was a good sign. Hitch wanted to make the film in America, planned on shifting the locale of the story back to America, and wanted James Stewart, recently returned from the war, in the lead role of the professor who taught the two murderers philosophy and now unmasks their crime. During his absence from the screen on war service Stewart had dropped a bit from public view, and was now not considered a big enough name for the financiers, but he was tentatively offered $100,000 to play the role. He replied that he would play it free for a percentage of the profits, if any, but finally they settled on a fee of $300,000, a significant slice of the $1.5 million the film eventually cost. Hitch worked on the adaptation with his actor friend Hume Cronyn, who had appeared in Lifeboat for him, and the final screenplay was written by the American dramatist Arthur Laurents. In May 1948 Hitch assembled his cast around him on a stage in the Warner Brothers Studios, Burbank, and embarked on this new adventure.
Here, for ten days, they rehearsed very much as they would a play on stage. They were all word-perfect for the whole script, as they would be in the theatre, and Hitch occupied himself mainly with working out the intricate camera moves that would be necessary to shoot the whole thing continuously in actual time. By design, all the actors were very competent, with some stage experience, so that they could be more or less left to look after themselves, evolving a collective reading under Hitch’s watchful eye. Even so, the most seasoned professional of them all, Constance Collier, was absolutely terrified to go to the studio when they were actually shooting—the long takes not only required theatrical feats of memory, but also imposed the added tension of worrying, if you made some slip, about the tremendous expense of reshooting, and the whole idea that this performance was about to be recorded, once for all, definitively on film even as you were giving it, with no possibility of manipulation and correction in the cutting room. James Stewart took the whole thing with his usual calm—though he did once inquire of Hitch why he was bothering to film it at all: why not just put up bleachers in the studio and sell tickets to live audiences?
During the shooting, Hitch encountered more problems than he had anticipated. For one thing, this was his first film in colour, and he insisted that he must have rushes in colour, which at that time was unheard-of from Technicolor: usually the rushes were in black-and-white, and the film-maker saw how his work looked in colour only weeks later. It was just as well Hitch made this stipulation, however, for when he saw the rushes he was horrified to discover that his dusk and sunset effects, carefully graded on the cyclorama outside the set’s apartment window, had turned out a bilious orange, so that he had to reshoot five of the film’s eight reels to obtain a quieter, more realistic effect. This nearly doubled his shooting time in the studio, though the work was still accomplished in a brisk eighteen days, despite the untimely illness of the cameraman after the first four or five days, so that the photography had to be completed by the Technicolor consultant with the aid of the chief electrician.
Maybe it was Hitch’s curious denying himself of cutting, the very resource which had always meant most to him in the cinema. Maybe it was the deadening effect of the limitations of sound this kind of shooting involved—it was so meticulously disciplined, with all the furniture, props and camera carefully muffled so that the sound track could all be recorded directly with virtually no need for looping dialogue. Or maybe it was just that the project so long planned had finally gone cold on him (the best advice for any filmmaker who finally gets the chance to realize his lifetime’s dream seems to be, Don’t). For whatever reason, Rope, despite its gimmick value and some effective moments, which earned its money back with a modest profit, seems strangely flat and ponderous, all played at a uniform pace which kills most of the excitement and suspense built into the subject-matter. At least Hitch had got it finally out of his system, which was all to the good, but it was saddening that his first independent production was such a disappointment, and left critics and public making excuses and hoping for better things.
Unfortunately, his next film, Under Capricorn, offered little for their comfort. It was the second (and last) of the Transatlantic Pictures productions, made in England, a period piece (a genre for which Hitch feels he has no talent, since he does not know how much the characters earn, how they go to the lavatory), and cost $2.5 million, much more than Hitch or anyone else thought it should. It was also a complete financial failure which brought about the liquidation of the company, and was repossessed by the bank which had financed it, so that it was unseeable for a number of years. During that time it developed a healthy underground reputation in France, where it was often regarded as one of Hitch’s masterpieces—a view in which he clearly does not concur. His recollections of the filming are nearly all unhappy, and he tends to talk of the film itself as a total miscalculation.
The trouble? Hitch says casting and his own vanity, closely interlinked. The casting because he sacrificed everything to the idea of grabbing Ingrid Bergman from all other Hollywood producers, without bearing in mind that she would cost so much as to make the whole project, given what it was, uneconomic, and also that she was at this time very nervous and preoccupied because of her new liaison with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Vanity because, having successfully laid his snare with an English novel he was not specially keen on but thought might appeal to Bergman, he was so delighted with his producer’s coup and his triumphal return to Britain to make the picture that he began to play the star himself and paid insufficient attention to getting the film itself right. He was inattentive to scripting: he had Hume Cronyn adapt the story again, though he was not an experienced enough writer, and finally achieved his earlier desire of getting James Bridie to write a screenplay for him without considering that Bridie was, after all, famed for his brilliantly paradoxical dialogue and notorious for his lackadaisical construction and the weakness of his last acts, both faults well in evidence in this screenplay. Finally, he did not pay enough attention to the casting of the lesser roles: in particular the role of the groom for whom the heroine sacrifices all (a variation on the theme of The Paradine Case), which he assigned to one of his pet actors, Joseph Cotten, though he was much too intelligent and refined for the part, which might ideally have been played by someone like Burt Lancaster.
Hitch calls his own behaviour at this point in his career ‘stupid and juvenile’, but he also admits to a lot of enthusiasm invested in the picture, and he seems to undervalue now his own enterprise in trying, however unsuccessfully, to do something different, something to break the thriller mould at this stage in his career. For the subject is not in any way a thriller—it hardly contains more than one or two momentary shocks, like the shrunken head placed in the heroine’s bed by the sinister housekeeper (a close relation of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca) to keep her dubious of her own sanity. It is a slowly developing psychological drama set in a strange place and period (nineteenth-century Australia) and Hitch does not even try to make it look like a thriller. His style is as leisurely and smooth-flowing as the story itself, with considerable use of the long takes (seven to ten minutes) which he had perfected in Rope. These were much commented on at the time, mostly unfavourably, as reducing the thriller potential of the story, but are now totally unnoticeable, so far have they become part of the normal language of the cinema since 1949.
On the other hand, it is true that the film is not very good; it does seem heavy and uncomfortable, as though nobody on it was communicating very well with anyone else. Certainly Hitch had a number of quarrels with Ingrid Bergman, with whom up to then he had got on perfectly. Once she was complaining so violently about the method of working, the long takes and the disappearing scenery, that Hitch, refusing to argue, just walked out of the room while her back was turned and went home, only to discover afterwards that she had been so wound up she had continued her monologue without even noticing his absence for another twenty minutes. On another occasion they were shooting a drunk scene on the stairs and Bergman could not, or would not, keep to her marks. Why should she anyway? she asked. She was supposed to be drunk. Couldn’t they just let her act the scene the way she felt it, and follow her? This time Hitch decided on a little demonstration, so he agreed to shoot the scene her way if she would play it his, and leave the decision of which version to use up to her. Once she saw the rushes of their respective versions she was in no doubt that Hitch’s was better, and generously admitted as much. But in general the film, odd and in a way compulsive as it is (particularly on television), does reek of compromise and discomfort, and Hitch was glad to forget it, if he could be allowed to. In fact, the only long-term advantage he gained from the Under Capricorn adventure was that through it he first met Peggy Robertson, the young Englishwoman taken on as continuity girl, who impressed him so much that the next time a chance came up he teasingly informed her that no, he did not this time need a continuity girl but—after a suitable pause for suspense—he did, if she might possibly be interested, need a personal assistant. And so another permanent member was added to the Hitchcock ‘family’.
With the débâcle of Under Capricorn behind him, he decided to follow his old principle and ‘run for cover’—when you are out of ideas, and rattled because of it, take refuge in something tried and true, just exercising your craft, until the phase passes. Not that Stage Fright, his next film, worked out quite that way, but it was an attempt in the right direction. After the weightier works of his latest Hollywood period, he determined on a light-weight, black-and-white thriller with a British locale and very much in the style of his pre-war British films. A suitable subject was to hand in the shape of a story with a theatrical background from a book by the English journalist Selwyn Jepson, just published, which reviewers had instantly cited as ideal material for Hitchcock—a suggestion which he thinks he may have accepted a little too uncritically. Certainly he put aside, yet again, I Confess, the other subject (besides Rope) that he had wanted to make since the mid-1930s, as well as Jack Shepherd and Dark Duty, the story of a British prison governor, all three of which he had definitely announced as in the works within the previous year. Instead he set right to work with Alma on a treatment based on two of Jepson’s stories, which was then turned into a screenplay by James Bridie and Whitfield Cook, author of Pat’s second Broadway play.
Pat was of course at this time still in London, at RADA, though she had now moved out of the cousins’ place in Golders Green and taken a flat with a couple of fellow students. Alma and Hitch were consequently able to see a lot of her, and Hitch put her into his new film in a small role as well as using her as a double for the star, Jane Wyman, in some scenes. The film, after the pervasive humourlessness of his last few films, is primarily cheerful. The central characters, played by Jane Wyman and Richard Todd, are rather too dull for us to be very interested in their problems, or who did what to whom, but there is a lot of fun around the edges with a gallery of British character actors such as Alastair Sim (suggested by Bridie, whose greatest interpreter he was), Sybil Thorndike, Kay Walsh, Miles Malleson and Joyce Grenfell, not to mention Marlene Dietrich magisterially intoning Cole Porter’s song ‘The Laziest Girl in Town’ and flashing her famous legs.
Hitch had trouble keeping Jane Wyman, who was supposed to be playing a very plain girl, from surreptitiously glamorizing herself to rival Dietrich. But then he really had fun with the extravagant theatrical-benefit garden party, and in parts of the film the sense of enjoyment is infectious. Towards the cast in general he was as usual impassive. Marlene Dietrich recalls: ‘He frightened the daylights out of me. He knew exactly what he wanted, a fact that I adore, but I was never quite sure if I did right. After work he would take us to the Caprice restaurant, and feed us with steaks he had flown in from New York, because he thought they were better than the British meat, and I always thought he did that to show that he was not really disgusted with our work.’ And in the case of Hitch and Dietrich a sterling regard for each other’s supreme professionalism ripened into a warm affection. The problems of the plot were never quite solved—the audience is kept in the dark for too long about who the real villain is, no one is in real danger during the film, and everyone, even the ostensible villains, is scared. These considerations finally seem more important than the curious objections raised at the time that the film is ‘dishonest’ because it begins with a flashback told by Richard Todd which finally proves to be a lie. The camera, it is asserted, should not lie, even if a character in a film can lie verbally. But who says? After the narrative ambiguities of Last Year in Marienbad it is hard to feel so confident of anything in the cinema.
Hitch’s return to Britain had not exactly proved the unmitigated triumph he had hoped and fantasized it to be. But it had not been a total disaster either, and he could return to Hollywood with his reputation only slightly tarnished. He and Pat and Alma all went back together, home after an unusually long break. In Hollywood he now felt more comfortable, and apart from some brief location work on the second Man Who Knew Too Much he would not film in Britain again for some twenty-two years, until Frenzy in 1972. He was by no means down and out. He had been well paid for his producer-director work on the last two films, and he was still news, still very much a name to conjure with. But there was no doubt that at this point in his career he was sorely in need of a hit. Fortunately, one of his biggest was just around the corner, to inaugurate the greatest period in his Hollywood career.