Hitch

Chapter Thirteen

Exactly why Hitch, who had always made a point of not repeating himself, wanted to remake The Man Who Knew Too Much remains a mystery. Sometimes he shrugs it off by saying that he wanted a new vehicle for James Stewart quickly, and the property was there lying to hand, so he used it. He also said at the time that the original version had never been shown in America, or hardly—which is as it happens quite untrue. We know that he had seriously considered a remake some years previously, so this was not a sudden decision. He has often listed the original version as one of his own favourites among his films, which one might think constituted a good case for not tampering again with the subject; there would be more reason if he had some nagging dissatisfaction with the way he did it first time round. To Truffaut he said simply, ‘Let’s say that the first version was the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.’

At any rate it does not seem to have been a case of ‘running for cover’, since it was quite an expensive and elaborate film to set up, with extensive locations in Morocco and London as well as major shooting in Hollywood. And it was, incidentally if not primarily, a way of being kind to his old friend and colleague Angus McPhail, who had fallen on hard times since they had last worked together on the Ministry of Information films during the war, and who benefited enormously from Hitch’s solicitude in bringing him out to work in Hollywood on two scripts, The Man Who Knew Too Much and his subsequent film, The Wrong Man. The script of The Man Who Knew Too Much, written on this occasion by Angus McPhail and John Michael Hayes, followed the first in general outline, though changing the opening sequence completely, relocating it in Morocco instead of Switzerland, altering the ending to a sequence in which Doris Day sings at an embassy to track down her kidnapped boy (where Edna Best had to practise her marksmanship to get back her kidnapped girl) and substituting a feeble red-herring sequence in a taxidermist’s around the middle of the film for the original terrifying encounter of the hero with a villainous dentist. Over-all the treatment was much more expansive, so that the second version, at 106 minutes, runs twenty-two minutes longer than the first.

This was perhaps in line with a new mellowness in Hitch’s work, a consistent tendency, ever since Strangers on a Train, to move away from the straight thriller such as audiences thought they expected of him. That they could now get on television every week in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, so in his theatrical films he was freed for other things—precisely for ‘stories they wouldn’t let me do on TV.’ The films of the 1950s clearly mirror his own happiness, health and confidence—the confidence to do what he wanted, develop the aspects he found interesting, and to look for more than the mechanical thrills of his early British masterpieces. Those had been the products in their time of a similar happiness and professional confidence (Hitch underestimates his younger self when he calls him ‘a talented amateur’), but now the mature Hitch is more at ease with emotion, more eager to explore atmosphere, psychology and, at times, the darker areas of neurotic and obsessive behaviour which he had skimmed over before. The films are still springes to catch woodcocks, machines to play on the audience’s responses—it was not for nothing that during a tipsy moment on North by Northwest he actually fantasized about a time when it might not even be necessary to make the movies, but simply to wire up the audience with electrodes to produce the desired responses and play on them as on a giant organ console.

The results of this new attitude include some of his finest films—Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie—but only when the material is right for the weight of the treatment it is given. The Man Who Knew Too Much, despite the ingenious working-over it has been given, is not. An enchanting diversion has become weighed down with gloss and the sort of psychological elaboration it cannot really bear. The only occasion when he actually, verbally directed Doris Day, playing the distraught mother, is a case in point. In one of her big scenes she suddenly burst into convulsive sobs, which had not been specified in the script. Hitch stopped and asked her why she was doing that. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘my child has been kidnapped, I don’t know if I’ll ever see him alive again, and I have to go through all this pretence meanwhile. Of course I’m crying.’ Hitch had to admit she was right and give her her head. But this indicates the intrusion of a sort of psychological realism alien to his earlier method and to this material—as soon as it was admitted, the tight plotting of the story as a series of emotional directions to the audience went by the board: they were left watching emotions rather than experiencing them.

Still, the casting of Doris Day proved in general a happy (if for Hitch improbable) inspiration. Back in 1959 Hitch had one evening met her in a corner where they had both taken refuge from some vast and noisy Hollywood party. Impulsively, he had introduced himself, told her how good he thought she was in Storm Warning, up to then her only dramatic role, and promised one day to cast her in a picture of his own. Now he took up that promise, casting her to star with James Stewart. She was frankly terrified of the travel involved, never before having left the United States, but by the time she arrived in Marrakesh after stopovers in London and Paris (for costume fittings) she was sufficiently confident to put her foot down about the treatment of any animals featured in the filming and to get them specially fed. Hitch was not too happy about the heat of Marrakesh, but still chose to vary little from his normal formal attire for filming. James Stewart retains a vivid image of Hitch shooting one of the big scenes in the main square in Marrakesh. They had hired a lot of extras, and a rumour had somehow spread that if they weren’t able to see the camera they wouldn’t get paid. So here were Doris Day and hundreds of extras, all backed up behind the action and staring fixedly at the camera. Things were getting ugly, the police had to be called in, and there was nearly a riot. And there, in the middle of it all, in temperature of well over 100°, sat Hitch, under a big umbrella, dressed in his ritual dark suit, white shirt, tie, calmly waiting for it all to be sorted out as though this was the most normal, restful situation in the world.

For Doris Day he was all too unrufflable. She was rattled by the strange food and lack of hygiene, and even more worried because Hitch never said anything to her. Oh, he was polite and friendly enough, and perfectly charming over the dinners which he often had flown in specially from Paris or London. But never a word about her performance. The same when they moved back to London for further location scenes. She became convinced that he was deeply unhappy with her, and demanded a serious meeting as soon as they returned to Hollywood. Hitch was amazed. He explained gently that the reason he had said nothing was that she had been perfect in everything she had done; if he had wanted her any different he would certainly have told her. He also confided to her that he was quite as nervous as she was—he was nervous every time he walked into the Paramount commissary. She was totally reassured and finished the taxing studio scenes without any problem.

James Stewart, of course, was very used to Hitch’s working methods and by now had complete confidence in him. But even he was taken somewhat by surprise when they were rehearsing and shooting the climactic sequence of the film, in which Doris Day foils an attempted assassination during a concert at the Albert Hall. The plot called for a reunion of husband and wife in the passage running round the outside of the auditorium, and, since they have been functioning separately for some time, a quick exchange of information between them. The shot was intricately set up, with a lot of swirling camera-movement up and down the corridor and a lot of explanatory dialogue for Stewart to speak. They rehearsed it that way, and then Hitch suddenly said, ‘I’m not hearing the London Symphony.’ Stewart said, ‘What?’ And Hitch repeated, ‘I’m not hearing the London Symphony. You’re talking far too much. Why don’t you cut the dialogue and let us hear the music?’ They thought he was crazy, but after all it was his movie. And sure enough the scene was far more effective with the audience left to imagine the dialogue, while all they hear is the music.

Hitch was not long in London—the time he could afford to spend there was strictly limited by the British tax regulations—but he managed to do some research of his own on a nice point of casting. Knowing the British film industry of old, he was not surprised that in the casting of small parts they were lazy and convention-bound. When he asked to see actors for the small but visually important role of the ambassador he was sent dozens of small bearded men, all of whom had made a career out of playing politicians and diplomats. Out of curiosity, Hitch got hold of pictures of all the ambassadors in London at that time from a newspaper office, and found that not one was a small man with a beard. So instead he cast a big, smooth, bald man, a prominent stage actor in Copenhagen. So much for the inspirations of the casting department.

Back in Hollywood Hitch had to catch up with the television series and immediately got involved in a very unlikely theatrical film project—the most unlikely he had undertaken for some years. He had completed the work required of him under his contract with Warners before he moved over to Paramount to make Rear Window, but he was not satisfied that he had given them full value for money. In addition, they, along with other companies in Hollywood, were in something of a crisis in 1957, and so Hitch undertook to make them a movie for no fee. As it happened, they had at that time a property which interested him—a real-life story of wrongful arrest which he had first read in Life some five years before. A musician called Manny Balestrero had been arrested and charged with armed robbery. All the circumstantial evidence was against him, he was imprisoned, brought to trial (or mistrial, as it was declared, since one of the jurors showed himself too convinced of the accused’s guilt before the proceedings were completed), and meanwhile his wife went mad before the real culprit, an astonishing near-double, was accidentally discovered. Hitch decided to make this story as The Wrong Man.

It is easy enough to see what in it would have appealed to him. It reflected his long-standing neurotic fear of the police, and Balestrero’s predicament could be some Kafkaesque nightmare of his own. What was less predictable was the way he chose to film it. He decided—he, the master of fantasy and film-for-film’s-sake—to film it in a semi-documentary fashion, following the real course of events exactly. The script, by Angus McPhail and the distinguished playwright Maxwell Anderson, took an absolute minimum of dramatic licence, and though Hitch did originally shoot one of his usual cameo appearances in it he decided to suppress that in the interests of total credibility, and instead appeared himself on camera in a prologue telling us that everything we are about to see actually happened. Later on he came to see that that is an insufficient defence for dramatic weaknesses. Life, we always say, is stranger than fiction; but how do you convince an audience of that in a dramatized story? The dialogue people utter in life tends to be banal, prolix and stereotyped, a pale reflection often of something they have heard in the movies. Is that any excuse for putting it back into the movies unedited? In life someone may just go mad, as Balestrero’s wife did, suddenly giving way under a strain. But will that be acceptable in a dramatization of these same facts?

Hitch knew the depressing answers to these questions already, but the challenge fascinated him. In the role of Balestrero he cast an actor he had long admired but never worked with, Henry Fonda, whose face and acting style made him perfect for the victim role. In the difficult (indeed, impossible) role of the wife Hitch cast his latest protégée, Vera Miles, whom he had put under personal contract after working with her on his television series. Physically she had the makings of his favourite cool blonde type, and he thought he could manoeuvre her into it. He set to work to mould her career, choose her other roles for her, give her an image by selecting the colours she should wear and the way her hair should be styled. But he came up against a problem he had not anticipated: she was an excellent actress—better, probably, than some of the others he had given the same treatment to—and she looked more or less right, but temperamentally she was all wrong. On screen she came over as strong, practical, earthy. Not ethereal at all, not cool and mysterious. Nor, perhaps, the material really big, big stars are made of. In the end Hitch used her in two theatrical movies, playing the problematic Mrs. Balestrero and the lesser role of Janet Leigh’s sister in Psycho, as well as in his most ambitious television show, the Ford Star Time hour Incident on a Corner. But the real test of his transformative skills, Vertigo, was foiled when Vera Miles got pregnant and had to be replaced by Kim Novak. It is difficult to imagine Vera Miles in the role; but then one should never underestimate Hitch. He did subsequently recognize that he had probably miscalculated with Vera Miles, but, lacking the clinching evidence Vertigo should have provided, it is difficult to know for sure.

In any case, her role in The Wrong Man was really peripheral, and Hitch, hoist on his own petard of documentary veracity, rather resented having to take so much time out from the main story of Balestrero’s imprisonment to show what was happening meanwhile to the wife. What he strongly responded to, and threw himself wholeheartedly into, was the detailed business of the arrest, the booking and the imprisonment of Balestrero, all shown very much from his point of view. Throughout all this part of the film we see only what he sees: when he is handcuffed and too ashamed to look up, we never see who he is handcuffed to, or any more than the legs of the police officers involved. When he is put in prison Hitch documented down to the smallest detail how the prisoners had to fold and carry their bedclothes, what exactly was the routine of their cell life, and then made Henry Fonda reconstruct it exactly in as far as possible the actual locations where the original events took place. For the insanity of the wife he even shot in the same nursing home and used many of the actual doctors and staff who had originally attended her to recreate their roles in the film. He used dramatic licence only at one or two points—most notably that in which we dissolve from Balestrero, in despair and praying for help and guidance, to the face of the real culprit, on his way to rob another store and be caught. Balestrero was apparently a religious man and did pray, but the coincidence here has a Hitchcockian logic and neatness (and maybe even mirrors his own religious convictions) rather than the smack of real life.

The Wrong Man was little more than an interlude, rapidly made in black-and-white, before Hitch could get on to the picture he really wanted to make, both for himself and for Vera Miles. When he had announced three years earlier his intention of filming a novel by the French thriller-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called D’entre les Morts (From Among the Dead), which had been acquired for him by Paramount, he had, curiously enough, been falling in exactly with a deep-laid plan of the writers: they had heard that Hitch had been interested in acquiring rights to their novel Les Diaboliques, very successfully filmed by Clouzot, and inspired by this they had set out to write a novel deliberately designed to attract Hitch’s attention. He did not know this until some time after he had made the film, when Truffaut told him, but clearly Boileau and Narcejac had been right on target with their guess of what would turn Hitchcock on.

The preparation of the film was a lot longer and more complicated than Hitch had envisaged, hence the delay and the intermediate films. For one thing, he had trouble getting a workable screenplay out of the book, which, like Les Diaboliques, relied heavily on tricks which were permissible only because the reader was kept quite in the dark on several crucial issues till the end and therefore was in no position to ask awkward questions. But as Hitch always said, ‘It’s fine to be mysterious, but you cannot mystify the audience.’ He wanted to transform shock into suspense, and make the film more of a meditation on illusion and reality, a portrait of an obsession, than a simple mechanical thriller. The basic theme of the story is a seeming return from the dead, and it is an intense love story. Very early in his preparations Hitch decided to set the story in the San Francisco area; he had many of the sequences clearly visualized, but somehow structurally it would not pull together. He had worked for some time on a script with Alec Coppel, but despaired of structuring it satisfactorily. In 1957 he had contracted James Stewart to play the leading role of the obsessed detective (a strange role for him, but he claims he never considered that—if Hitch asked him to do something, he just did it without question), with Vera Miles as the elusive object of his desires, and had everything ready to go except the script.

So in desperation he called in Sam Taylor. Taylor never read the novel he was supposedly adapting, and never read the previous screenplay. Instead, he just listened to Hitch, let him tell the story the way he saw it over and over again, and took it from there. Hitch saw it, as usual, in a series of powerful visual images. The hero, who has just discovered he suffers from acute vertigo, is set to watch the wife of a client who is supposedly suicidal and obsessed with the story of an ill-fated ancestor of hers. First he follows her without contact, then, saving her from a suicide attempt, falls in love with her, but is unable, because of his vertigo, to save her a second time. Shortly afterwards, he meets a girl who looks just like her, though very different in personality, and sets about trying to make her over into his lost love, dressing her the same way, dyeing her hair and so on. Finally he discovers he has been the dupe in a murder, that the second girl is the same as the first, and then loses her again, this time for keeps. Hitch had all of this clear in his mind—the silent pursuit around San Francisco, the death and resurrection—but how to construct it, telling the audience enough to be mysterious but not mystifying?

In July 1957, in the middle of directing a couple of shows for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitch had to go into hospital for an umbilical hernia and gallstones to be operated on, followed by a bout of colitis. But that did not stop him from bouncing right back into the television work and preparations for Vertigo. When at the last moment it turned out that Vera Miles was pregnant, and would not be able to make the film, Hitch could not delay it any further because of other commitments, and decided, unwillingly, to replace her with Kim Novak. The situation was not of the happiest, since Kim Novak was well aware she was very much second choice, and was not in any case the most secure of actresses. As usual with a Hitchcock script, the clothes and colours the characters wore in each scene were carefully indicated. Kim Novak began on her first meeting with the designer Edith Head (one of Hitch’s most regular collaborators, on eleven films in all) by saying that there were just a couple of things she had to insist on—she never wore tailored suits, never wore grey, and never wore black shoes. Since the whole film hinged on our (and the hero’s) first sight of her in the museum wearing a grey tailored suit and black shoes, this obviously caused something of a problem. Edith Head asked Hitch to talk to her. He invited her to his house, and said to her simply, ‘My dear Miss Novak, you can wear anything you want, anything—provided it is what the script calls for.’ However he said it, it seemed to have the required effect, since in the scene in question she did wear a grey tailored suit and black shoes—hating it all the time.

Hitch’s relations with her during the actual shooting remained cordial but distant. He recognized at least that she had genuine difficulties with the role, and dealt with them in his own way. Once, early in the filming, she raised a question about some aspect of the way her role was written: might it not be better if the character’s inner motivation was brought out by changing this line or extending that? Hitch replied simply, ‘Kim, this is only a movie. Let’s not go too deeply into these things. It’s only a movie.’ It worked like a charm: clearly, all she needed was to feel secure, to have the weight of responsibility taken off her shoulders, and that is what Hitch did. For the rest of the movie there was no more trouble and Kim Novak did an excellent job—so good it is difficult to imagine Vera Miles or anyone else in the role. And ironically after the shooting was over something happened which gave Hitch an amused regard for her he had not had before. Since she then lived at Carmel, not far from their Scots Valley home, Hitch and Alma thought one evening to invite her over to dinner. The time she was supposed to arrive came and went, and about half an hour later there was a phone call: she and her escort were lost, and needed directions. Another half-hour and they arrived, Kim Novak perfectly made up for the occasion—and her story of a broken-down car, a tramp through the woods—with one lock of hair out of place and one small, symbolic smudge of earth on one cheek, just like in a Forties movie. Hitch said when he saw this he had to admit that, whatever reservations he might have had, she was the stuff real stars are made of.

The atmosphere of the film, and of the shooting, was so strange and intense it seemed to affect everyone. The remains of Spanish California, like Mission Dolores where the cemetery scene was shot, and San Juan Batista, the site of the mission in which the climactic scenes take place, have a rather mysterious, dreamlike quality. Everything in the locations was planned and researched down to the last detail. The precisely right lighting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honour, the right layout in the flower shop where James Stewart first sees the second Kim Novak, the exact measurements of the dress salon in Ransohoff’s department store to be duplicated in every detail back at the studio, the diffusion in the graveyard sequence where the ghostlike Madeleine visits the grave of her supposed evil genius, Carlotta Valdes. All these Hitch planned with even more than his usual care and attention. Unmistakably the picture was particularly close to his heart.

Why? Easy to come up with glib formulations such as that he had been fascinated by necrophilia ever since he researched Jack the Ripper for The Lodger. So he may have been, but since Vertigo does not really have anything to do with necrophilia (the hero does not want his love-object dead, but a dead love restored to life) it hardly seems very much to the point. We should look deeper, to that stream of tormented, gloomy romanticism which had flowed clearly through nearly all of his films since he arrived in America, and is often perceptible before. However calm and unruffled his private life, undisturbed by the stormier emotions (he claims he has been completely celibate for more than forty years), and lived in exemplary bourgeois circumstances with the same wife and a small familial group about him, there is no doubt that he does have a deep interest in sex, straight and bent. There are few of the darker recesses of the human heart that he has not explored at one time or another, and in particular he is expert in those sado-masochistic areas where sex and domination are inextricably entangled. It is as though in some way he equates lovers’ manipulation of each other with the filmmaker’s manipulation of his audience—they are different facets of the same power play, different ways of controlling and directing the emotions.

In Rear Window the equation is particularly clear: the hero’s involvement with his girl-friend and his involvement with what he is peeping at run in tandem, and the two of them are turned on by their complicity in wishing the hypothesis of the murder to be proved correct. In Notorious, another film in which Hitch played quite explicitly an important part in creating the theme, the course of the love between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman is interrupted precisely because each of them is too proud to speak the necessary word before the other does. And the emotion in Hitchcock, the degree of sexual excitement even, is always stronger the more dammed up it is, the more diverted and prevented from natural expression. So, in Vertigo, the whole emotional situation is invested with a nightmarish intensity because its true nature is unacknowledged and its natural course diverted. The hero’s passion for the girl in the second half of the film is perverse not because he continues hopelessly to love someone he believes dead—bereavement is not such an unnatural situation—but because he is incapable of reacting to a real, living woman until he has dominated her completely and transformed her, completely against her will, into the image of his lost love. In other words, he has chosen the fantasy over reality, and tried to transform reality into fantasy by the sheer force of his obsession.

And it is difficult not to notice a strange and hardly coincidental similarity between what James Stewart does to the second Kim Novak and what Hitch has done over and over again to his leading ladies. Given that there is this ‘head’ that he finds constantly fascinating—the blond hair falling in a certain way over the ears, the bearing which implies cool, ladylike control and who knows what fires beneath—he has sometimes found stars who fitted naturally into the mould (quintessentially Grace Kelly) and more often, especially in his later career, set about forcing unlikely material into it. Vera Miles was a case in which he did not succeed. Tippi Hedren, later, was a case in which he did. And Kim Novak, who was not really his type at all (despite a surprising similarity in some shots to the Joan Fontaine of Suspicion), comes amazingly close to it in the first half of Vertigo, thanks to his dictating what she should wear and how she should bear herself. It can hardly be insignificant that Madeleine (Kim Novak No. 1) is specifically brunette in the book, and has been transformed for the film into an icy, ethereal blonde—precisely the type that Hitch, alias Svengali/Pygmalion, has so often tried to produce before filming, in just the way that James Stewart does within the latter half of this film. Vertigo in that respect is alarmingly close to allegorized autobiography, a record of Hitch’s obsessive pursuit of an ideal quite as much as a literal tale of love lost and found again.

And is Hitch aware of this element of submerged autobiography in his work, coming more and more nakedly to the surface in the sadistic manipulations of Kim Novak by James Stewart in Vertigo or of Tippi Hedren by Sean Connery in Marnie? Probably not. He always maintains that there is nothing more than an obvious dramatic interest of surprise and discrepancy in his consistent breaking up of his heroine’s soignée exterior to reveal the passionate or whimpering animal within. And yet, even bearing in mind Wordsworth’s enthusiastic judgement of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart’ and Browning’s unceremonious rejoinder, ‘If he did, the less Shakespeare he!’, it is hard to resist some lining-up of the attitudes embodied in Hitch’s work and the attitudes of the man himself. If Buñuel, with his blond heroines who start all prim and frail and virginal and grow into monsters of brutal dominance, figures as the cinema’s leading exponent of male masochism, Hitch seems on the contrary the great exponent of male sadism. As a private person he seems to get on with women better than with men, but as a film-maker he clearly suggests a broad streak of misogyny. Perhaps he feels he can afford not to examine his own hidden motivation in his films too closely because he knows perfectly well that he is in his life a model Catholic husband and father: a less correct and moral man would very likely have more hesitation in letting all his complexes hang out in his work. But then it is the combination of extreme sophistication in some areas and what appears to be extraordinary naïveté in others which goes to form the fascinating ambiguity of what Hitch does on the screen. It does not matter whether he knows exactly what he is putting into his films—all that does matter is that it is there.

If Hitch felt an extraordinary, and to him perhaps not totally explicable, identification with Vertigo, his next film, North by Northwest, is an unmistakable jeu d’esprit, standing in much the same relation to Vertigo as Graham Greene’s ‘entertainments’ do to his novels. Some—mainly those who follow Hitch’s own lead in regarding him as the great master of form without content—regard it as the peak of his achievement; to others it is immensely charming and entertaining, but finally lacks the resonance of his best work. Either way, there is no doubting its singular brilliance, the impression it gives of being all as easy as falling off a log. Naturally, this was far from being the case. It had actually been in the works, the subject of a lot of slow and sometimes agonizing labour, for at least eighteen months before it was ready to shoot. And 1958 had been in other respects a difficult year for Hitch, though few outsiders knew how difficult. He and Alma, for all the care they took, had actually always been in robust health: it was one of their biggest assets in life. But in 1958 Alma began to have some disturbing symptoms. She went into hospital, and the condition was diagnosed as cancer. The doctors decided to operate right away. As it happened, Hitch was that very week scheduled to direct one of the television shows, and a very light, comical one at that. Not wanting to worry Alma unduly, and needing something to keep himself occupied, he went right ahead with it. He went to the studio every day, regular as clockwork (the nearest he has ever come to a statement of his life’s philosophy is ‘The day begins at 9 a.m.’), rehearsing and shooting with his usual humorous impassivity, so that no one there knew anything was wrong. Then he would drive straight to the hospital, weeping and shaking convulsively all the way, and on arrival would put on his cheerful face again and spend the evening talking with Alma as though this were the most usual thing in the world. The operation, as it turned out, was a complete success, and life went back to normal, but not without a severe shake-up to Hitch’s nervous system—for the first time he had had to think seriously about the unthinkable, life without Alma.

Meanwhile, some months before he started shooting Vertigo, he had started work on his next project, which was a Hammond Innes novel called The Wreck of the Mary Deare. The book belonged to MGM, a studio he had never worked for, and they had somehow interested Hitch in making it for them. One day Ernest Lehman, then under contract to MGM, got a mysteriously secretive call telling him that Hitch, whom he had met once before through Bernard Herrmann, had specially requested that he work on the script. He took the book home, read it, and gave a prompt refusal—he could see no way a movie might be extracted from the subject. All it had, he felt, was a powerful opening image of a ship drifting, deserted, in the English Channel; the rest was a boring courtroom drama in which it was painfully established in manifold flashbacks just how this state of affairs came about. MGM and his agent begged him to reconsider, he had lunch with Hitch at the Beverly Hills Hotel and was totally charmed by him, and, thinking to himself that Hitch must after all have some answer to the problem that he could not see, accepted. Thus began a period of daily visits to Hitch’s home, where each morning they would talk about anything and everything but the project in hand. Hitch seemed, in fact, to get more and more leery of talking about it at all, until finally they went three days without even mentioning the Mary Deare. So after three weeks Lehman plucked up the courage to tell Hitch he did not know how to lick the subject into shape, and Hitch had better get himself another writer. Hitch took it very calmly: ‘Don’t be silly. We get on very well. We’ll do something else.’ How about MGM? ‘Oh, we won’t tell them.’

So the meetings continued, kicking around various ideas, including the story of Jack Shepherd, the eighteenth-century English escape artist, which Hitch had announced as a project back in 1948. But Lehman did not want to do a costume drama; if he was going to do a Hitchcock script he wanted it to be ‘the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures’. Still nothing more solid was emerging than a mountain of notes and detached ideas. Hitch seemed happy, but Lehman was getting more and more nervous as everyone at MGM kept asking him how the Mary Deare was going. By now Hitch was into pre-production on Vertigo and their morning meetings had shifted to Paramount. Somewhere in here Hitch remarked that he had always wanted to film a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore. Shortly afterwards he mentioned a notion he had had for a scene in which a delegate speaking at the United Nations gets very annoyed and says he will not continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up. They try to awaken him, and find of course that he has been murdered, and the only clue is a doodle on his pad of a caribou head. Somehow these two notions came together into the idea of a sort of chase film starting at the United Nations in New York, taking in Mount Rushmore and ending (shades of the caribou) in Alaska. Since this was vaguely north-west they started to call the project In a North-Westerly Direction.

Along this frail thread sequences and ideas gradually gathered. At one point they tried to work in a sequence in Detroit using Hitch’s old notion of a car being put together from scratch on an assembly line, and when it rolls off completed there is a dead body in the back. And then how about a Moral Rearmament conference at Lake Louise? But the problem remained, who was this happening to and why? Someone not used to this sort of adventure, James Stewart perhaps, who would somehow, like Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, be caught up in it. Then Hitch mentioned a conversation he had had with a New York newspaperman who had offered him the idea, if he had any use for it, of the CIA inventing a man who did not exist as a decoy in some spy plot. This seemed to be the key they needed: Jimmy Stewart (or whoever) would be mistaken by the other side for this decoy who did not really exist at all. When it became clear that they were going to use this idea they cleared the rights to it with the newspaperman, who was only too delighted actually to have come up with something useful to the great Alfred Hitchcock, and started putting things into shape.

At which point Hitch suddenly observed to Lehman, ‘Well, you’d better tell MGM what we’re doing.’ Lehman had a fit: no way. So Hitch said lugubriously, ‘Oh well, if you want me to do your dirty work, I suppose I must,’ and set up a meeting with the heads of Metro. Here he was brilliant. He told them that it was going to take so long for them to lick the scripting problems on the Mary Deare that he had decided to do another film for them before that—which delighted them because they thought they would get two films instead of one. It would be, he announced, an original thriller, and then with all his skill and charm told them the story up to where he and Lehman had got with it, at which point he suddenly pretended to remember another appointment, leaving them panting for more. So all was arranged, and when Hitch started shooting Vertigo Lehman was due back in his office at MGM to write. The project was still called In a North-Westerly Direction, but at one stage, in tribute to the Mount Rushmore sequence, it was called The Man on Lincoln’s Nose. One day Sammy Cahn came into Lehman’s office and proceeded to sing him a love song he had composed using this as the title, which Lehman thought was going a little far. Eventually it was Kenneth McKenna, head of the MGM script department, who suggested that North by Northwest would be better than In a North-Westerly Direction, and though they kept meaning to change it the title stuck. (Any allusion to Hamlet’s madness was entirely accidental.)

Before starting the script in earnest Lehman did a research trip covering more or less the route the film’s protagonist would travel. He sat around in the United Nations building for a week, got a judge on Long Island to put him through all the stages of arrest for drunken driving, and hired a forest ranger to guide him up Mount Rushmore, until he got so scared he gave the ranger a Polaroid to complete the climb alone and photograph the top for him. (As a result they found the real top of Mount Rushmore was completely unusable—not that that mattered at all to Hitch.) Back in Hollywood he continued writing, and by the time Hitch had finished shooting Vertigo he had the first two-thirds of the story in shape. Hitch was delighted with what he had done. But Lehman had no ‘third act’—he had come to a complete block. After a couple of weeks blocked he went to Hitch and told him he wanted to leave the picture. Hitch was very reassuring: he said he would go to Metro, take all the blame, and they would get in a third mind, one of those best-selling woman thriller writers perhaps. Then suddenly Lehman had an inspiration—that the heroine should have to shoot the protagonist in order to clear her name for the other side of the double game she was playing—and the rest of the story fell into place.

By now Hitch was concentrating completely on North by Northwest, having got Vertigo out of the way. He worked into the script an idea he had toyed with for many years driving north from Los Angeles to the house in Scots Valley through the flat, featureless fields around Bakersfield, with the sinister presence of the crop-dusting planes overhead. What if the hero should be attacked by some faceless enemy in one of these planes, out in the open, in broad daylight? What could leave him more defenceless than that? Together Hitch and Lehman worked out the details, shot by shot—though Hitch sometimes resented Lehman’s attempts to suggest camera placements and on one occasion, when Lehman was suggesting some changes in the Mount Rushmore scene, burst out quite uncharacteristically with ‘Why do you insist on trying to tell me how to direct the picture?’ But by and large they worked together very well, and when the script was completed and a starting date set Hitch wanted Lehman to get on right away with scripting the next project he had in mind, Henry Cecil’s No Bail for the Judge, to be made in Britain with Audrey Hepburn and Laurence Harvey.

The actual shooting of North by Northwest was a complicated mixture of locations and studio work, sometimes within the same scene. There was a rule in force at the time that no fiction film could be shot in the United Nations building, and though they cheated on this a bit by shooting one little scene with Cary Grant (who had been cast as the lead when it became evident the subject was more of a Cary Grant subject than a James Stewart subject) by concealed camera, most of the United Nations stuff had to be reconstructed in the studio. They did do quite a lot of location shooting elsewhere in New York, however, notably in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, where Cary Grant had an apartment. Since there was not much room in the part of the lobby where they were shooting, and nowhere for Grant to sit in peace, he was not called down from his rooms until they were absolutely ready. One morning he came down, walked through the crowd, picked up a telephone and put it down (to match a studio close-up), then walked over to the camera and looked through the viewfinder to see what the outside line for his walk would be. Joe Hyams, who was there, was amazed and said to Hitch, ‘You haven’t even said “Good morning” to Cary. How does he know what to do?’ Hitch answered casually, ‘Oh, he’s been walking across this lobby for years. I don’t need to tell him how.’

And indeed by this time Hitch and Grant had worked together so long there was a great deal of mutual trust and respect between them. Hitch would even take suggestions from Grant with good grace. In one scene in North by Northwest Grant checked a detail and then said to Hitch, ‘If you’ll get Bob to move the camera over a few inches you’ll catch me going down the corridor through the hinge of the door’—a suggestion Hitch immediately accepted. Back in the studio Grant wandered over from the shooting one day to look at the next set they would be using, the Pullman car. He found it had been thrown together very quickly and casually and went back to tell Hitch, ‘This won’t work—you can’t shoot in that set the way it stands.’ Without further question Hitch ordered the set to be revamped and repainted, not even bothering to go and look at it himself, so far did he trust Grant’s professional judgement.

Things did not go altogether smoothly between them on the picture, though. Grant was not happy with the way Hitch had shot the scene with his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) and the two heavies in the elevator. He remarked to someone that he was not sure of Hitch’s touch in light comedy, and the remark got back to Hitch, who was furiously offended. Meanwhile, Ernest Lehman had had second thoughts about No Bail for the Judge and told Hitch he did not want to do it, so Hitch was annoyed with him, and not speaking. All this while they were shooting the crop-duster sequence on location at Bakersfield. But since Hitch avoids and forbids confrontations, Grant and Lehman found themselves quarrelling with one another, with Grant claiming it was really a David Niven script and it was lousy anyway because he didn’t understand what was going on and he doubted if anyone else would. They were both aware, of course, that they were taking out their worries on each other because they could not manage to quarrel directly with Hitch, who was the party most vitally involved. But, as these things do, it all blew over and by the end of shooting they parted the best of friends.

The main problem in casting North by Northwest was the role of the heroine, once it became clear, about halfway through the scripting, that the hero had to be Cary Grant. Other parts were filled with actors like Leo G. Carroll and Jessie Royce Landis with whom Hitch had worked happily before (indeed Leo G. Carroll, with six appearances in Hitchcock films to his credit, qualifies numerically as Hitch’s favourite actor). Hitch overcame the old problem of avoiding melodrama in the villain by splitting his villain into three, the vicious side-kick, the strong-arm man, and the villain-in-chief, who can then be smooth and charming as only James Mason could make him. But who could Hitch get for his cool, elegant, inevitably blond heroine, the woman of mystery who is playing a double game rather like that of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious? MGM wanted Cyd Charisse, but Hitch did not feel she would be quite right. Surprisingly, his choice fell on Eva Marie Saint, who had won an Oscar for her role in On the Waterfront and had not up to then been associated in any way on screen with glamour, sophistication or sexiness. He set immediately about refashioning the outer woman. Before North by Northwest she was due to do a comedy with Bob Hope, That Certain Feeling, and Hitch laid it down that in that she should wear no colours, only black, white and grey. For North by Northwest he had a wardrobe specially designed for her at MGM, but then did not like it, and ended up taking her to Bergdorf Goodman in New York and personally selecting her wardrobe off the peg. Given her Method background he expected some repetition of his problems with Montgomery Clift on I Confess, but in the event found her a warm, humorous, eminently practical person. He felt that the only thing needed to complete her transformation into a Hitchcock woman was to lower her voice register a little, and he found she was very amenable to this. To avoid obviously directing her in front of the cast and crew (something he has always regarded as demeaning for the actor and the director) he worked out a whole repertoire of signs and code words which immediately conveyed to her that she should lower her voice, speak up or whatever, and from then on everything went as smoothly as could be imagined.

When the film was finished it ran a surprising 136 minutes, easily his longest film to date. MGM were nervous, and begged him to cut it. In particular they wanted shortened or removed the scene between Gary Grant and Eva Marie Saint after he has finally discovered what her role in the drama is. For Metro this was a hold-up in the flow of thriller-type action; for Hitch it was essential to the development of the characters in the story. Metro looked like insisting, but Hitch checked on his contract, drawn up for him by MGA, and discovered that without his asking for it they had given him complete rights over the final cut. MGM had no powers in the matter, and for once he could and did say a polite but decided no. And in the long run his judgement was proved right, as the film turned out to be one of his biggest money-makers ever, and one of his biggest successes with critics who had found that in Vertigo he was straying too far for their taste from what they still persisted in expecting of him. This time, thank God, he was back with a classic thriller formula, and all was right with the world.

If they thought he had returned to the straight and narrow, and had no more surprises in store for them, they were quite wrong. He was in fact mulling over his biggest surprise yet—a film the ripples from which have not yet completely died down.

Psycho really began with a professional challenge. Hitch made it his business to be closely aware of what was going on in the industry, what was making money and what was not. And he noticed that a lot of trashy horror films from companies like American-International were being produced for peanuts and making giant profits. Most people who regarded themselves as representatives of serious, responsible Hollywood shook their heads a little at the awfulness of public taste, shrugged, and passed by. But Hitch believed that all evidence on what the public wanted should be heeded. And what, he wondered, if he were to make a cheap horror film but do it superlatively well? Could he do as well or better with a quality product? As it happened, he had a property in mind, a pulp novel by a prolific writer of such called Robert Bloch. The story of a middle-aged, mother-dominated murderer in a motel, it had little to recommend it, but there was the germ of something there, something Hitch thought he could work on.

What he very much needed was the right writer. He saw the film as a ruthless black comedy, and it had to be written by someone who shared his own rather sadistic sense of the humour in the subject. But he was stumped on who it should be. At this time his own agents, MCA, were pressing him at least to meet a writer from New York, an ex-songwriter called Joseph Stefano. He had written one film before, The Black Orchid, a family drama of Italians in America which Hitch did not like at all, and one prize-winning television play. Hitch was loath to see him, because he always hated having to say no: he did not want to risk the embarrassment of having to tell someone they were not right for his purposes. (He often avoids seeing films by people who ask his opinion, just because of this, and one of the actresses he had under personal contract was put there because he could not bear to disappoint her after making all the tests.) But MCA said, Meet him anyway, what have you got to lose? And finally he did just that—a short fifteen- or twenty-minute interview in his office at Paramount.

For a wonder, everything turned out very well. Stefano had been inactive for nine months because he felt he had come too far too fast, and really needed to work with a director who could help him learn his craft from the bottom up. Hitch would be perfect, and so when he heard that Hitch was planning on Psycho he rushed to read the book. He was very disappointed: why should Hitch possibly want to make this film? So that was the first thing he asked Hitch on meeting him. Hitch was amused, and started to tell him. He said two things which immediately made sense to Stefano and fired his enthusiasm: that the murderer should become an attractive, clean-cut young man, say, Anthony Perkins; and that he wanted to start the picture with the girl. Hitch and Stefano had a brief but relaxed conversation, then Stefano’s agent came out and told him Hitch liked him and would try him on the script. The only thing was, Hitch did not want to make a flat deal for him to write the picture; instead he would take him on week-to-week, paying him a weekly salary as long as he was working on the script. Stefano’s agent was not too happy, but Stefano leapt at the chance, and began work right away.

As with Hitch’s other writers, this was a daily process of discussion. Stefano would arrive at the studio at 11.00 each morning (Hitch would have liked it earlier, but Stefano was in analysis at the time and could not manage it), they would talk, have lunch, and talk through the afternoon—about everything on earth, it seemed, except the movie. Usually not more than ten or fifteen minutes would be directly concerned with Psycho. But in that time Stefano or Hitch would make suggestions, notes would be taken, and things moved steadily forward. Stefano’s first suggestion was that we should meet the girl during a lunchtime assignation (the book begins with her arrival at the motel), and he also suggested the opening with a helicopter shot over the city taking us into the cheap hotel window. After a couple of weeks Hitch had to go out of town on a business trip, and he suggested casually that while he was away Stefano should go ahead with writing the first scene. Obviously this was in the nature of an audition, since it was so contrary to Hitch’s usual practice. Many writers might have been insulted at the idea, but Stefano saw no reason to be, and went ahead. He tried to make the girl human and touching, so that the audience would care about and sympathize with her. When Hitch returned he read the scene and was clearly very pleased, though all he would say directly to Stefano was ‘Alma liked the scene very much.’

From then on Stefano did not write another word until they had laid out the whole script verbally, scene by scene. This took about six weeks’ conversation, followed by four or five weeks during which Stefano went off and wrote. It was his first draft that Hitch shot, with only one scene rewritten—that in which a cop talks to the girl on the road, which was originally written with the cop being flirtatious, and changed at Hitch’s suggestion to his being quite neutral, only menacing in her guilty imagination. Hitch asked for one more change: could Stefano use another word than ‘lurid’ of the love letters? Stefano asked why. Hitch said he didn’t care for the word ‘lurid’. Was this, Stefano asked, just a personal feeling? Hitch admitted it was. Oh well, said Stefano, I can’t change a word in a script for no other reason than that you personally don’t like it. And so the word remained. Stefano took the finished script up to Hitch’s house in Bel Air one morning, and they had champagne on the rocks to celebrate, Hitch saying Stefano must tell no one such a terrible solecism had been committed in his home, merely because they had no champagne properly chilled.

This had been one of the smoothest and fastest scripting jobs ever for Hitch. He and Stefano saw eye to eye on practically everything. They discussed, for instance, the possibility of showing the reactions back in the office after Marion has left with the stolen money, but decided that it would be a fatal distraction. Instead Stefano wrote the scenes as though they would be shown, then they were done as voices over while Marion drives, as her imaginings, so that this tells us more about her too. In the book the explanations of Norman’s strange behaviour and impersonation of his dead mother are all speculations on the part of Marion’s boy-friend and her sister. Stefano suggested instead that they have an old-fashioned expository scene, like in the movies of his childhood, where an expert would move in with a set explanation. Hitch liked the idea, though he feared it might be a ‘hat-grabber’, and into the script it went.

Fortunately, for when it came to clearing the script with the Production Code, the first thing they objected to and wanted removed was the word ‘transvestite’. Stefano was able to defend this by pointing out that it was a technical word used by a doctor in the film, and anyway he was not calling Norman a transvestite but saying very clearly that properly speaking he was not. They were worried by the idea of the audience seeing the mummified face of the mother, but accepted it when reassured that the maquette had been passed as accurate by doctors at UCLA. They also raised objections to the scene in which Marion tears up her notes and flushes them down the toilet. The very sight of a toilet, they said, was offensive. Here too Stefano did battle and won—since the very intention Hitch and he had with that scene was to be offensive. They reckoned that, innocent though the idea was, if you actually showed a toilet on screen and a close-up of something being flushed down it, you would already have knocked the underpinnings out from under 90 per cent of an American audience, so deeply did the neuroses of toilet-training go, and you would have them just where you wanted them.

When it came to the shooting, Hitch followed out to the letter his plan of making the film as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Though it was for Paramount he financed it completely himself, and made it in much the same circumstances as his television shows, at Universal with his television crew and cameraman, John L. Russell. The famous ‘Psycho house’ now proudly shown off on Universal tours was a standing set, and only the row of motel rooms in front had to be built—Hitch fought Stefano over a shot from the house showing Marion’s sister approaching because it necessitated building a back wall to the motel proper, but gave in to Stefano’s feeling that the exact geography was important here. As for the casting, Hitch was able to get Anthony Perkins very cheaply because he owed Paramount one film on an old contract—otherwise he would have been much too expensive. Vera Miles was under contract to Hitch anyway, and most of the other roles were small in terms of days of shooting required. He wanted as big a star as he could get for the role of Marion to make the shock of her death in the middle of the film as great as possible, and settled on Janet Leigh as the best possible compromise between the ideal and the affordable. On the principle of keeping things in the family, he recruited Pat to play a character role in the opening scenes.

During the shooting, every possible television short cut was taken to cut costs. Everything was shot on the back lot at Universal apart from some second-unit stuff on the freeway. As in his television shows, Hitch picked out the crucial scenes and shots for special attention, and let the rest fall into place around them. The scene in which the insurance investigator is killed at the top of the stairs, for example, needed some expensive special construction so that the camera could get up high enough to leave us in doubt about the identity of the ‘mother’, but here it was worth it, because the resultant scene is one everyone remembers. The lead-in to this murder, incidentally, was shot twice. Saul Bass, the brilliant graphic artist who did the credits for Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo and other Hitchcock films around this time, had drawn out a story board for the detective’s ascent of the stairs. Hitch was ill one day, so he told his assistant to shoot the scene according to the story board. When he saw the result he realized he had to re-do it completely, because though it was pictorially fine, when cut together it conveyed that the investigator was the menace rather than the menaced.

Joseph Stefano was on set practically every day of the shooting, and sometimes found himself landed with some rather odd jobs. One day Hitch said to him, ‘Mr. Gavin would like some changes in the script of this scene. Will you talk to him about it?’ Stefano could not believe that Hitch was serious, but clearly he was, so Stefano went to find out what the trouble was. After some equivocation it turned out that John Gavin, who plays Marion’s lover, was embarrassed about playing the first scene with his shirt off. Stefano remonstrated with him—he had a great body, after all, and had been bare-chested in Spartacus. Yes, but that was different: here it was just embarrassing to play an intimate contemporary scene that way. Finally Stefano persuaded him by encouraging him to use that very embarrassment as part of the scene, to play it that way, recognizing that the character he was portraying would also feel embarrassed and vulnerable, particularly when having an argument while half undressed. This in fact was the sort of detailed psychological direction of actors Hitch was not interested in: they should do something just because he or the script told them to, and he did not have the patience to fiddle around with psychological niceties—particularly with men, whom he hardly seemed to notice on set, in contrast to the great deal of trouble he would sometimes go to with his ladies.

He went to a considerable amount of trouble with Janet Leigh over the notorious scene of the murder in the shower. She was needed for close-ups, of course, but Hitch would not permit her to do the nude scenes, even such flashes as ended up on the screen—it did not sort with his ideas of what was and was not proper for a star. Instead he got a model, someone whose profession it was to be seen in the nude. Stefano has a vivid memory of Hitch up on the platform above the shower, directing this beautiful naked girl, he in his suit, shirt, tie, a model of correctitude and composure. One sensed that Alfred Hitchcock does not stand in front of naked women, and that he has precisely this feeling about himself, so that for him she was not naked, and that was that.

Hitch also took great care to show no actual details of violence—you never see the knife touch the girl’s flesh, and the main reason Psycho was made in black-and-white was to avoid a wash of Technicolor blood. Despite which the sequence has been traumatic for many. There are those who swear that the film goes into colour at that point, or that you see the knife tearing the flesh, all of which is in their own imaginations. Hitch once got a sad letter from a parent asking advice. After seeing Les Diaboliques his daughter had refused to have a conventional bath. Now, after seeing Psycho, she refused to take a shower either. What should he do? Have her dry-cleaned, replied Hitch cheerfully. The one person clearly not traumatized by the shower scene was Alma. As usual, she was the last person Hitch showed the film to before shipping it out. After seeing it, her first comment was, ‘Hitch, you can’t ship it. Janet Leigh gulps after she is supposed to be dead in the shower.’ And sure enough she did—just in one or two frames, so little that no one else, shaken by the shock of the scene, had noticed.

Before things got to that stage, though, a number of other processes had to be gone through. And Hitch was, for him, amazingly indecisive and lacking in confidence. Perhaps because a major investment of his own money was involved, even though he had brought the whole film in for a mere $800,000, he was hard to satisfy. At one point, having put the rough cut together, he decided he didn’t like it, it wouldn’t work, began to talk about cutting it down to an hour and using it on television. Among those who thought he was crazy was Bernard Herrmann, who was composing the music for it. Hitch had planned on having the whole shower sequence silent except for the actual sounds of the water, the shower curtain and so on. Herrmann begged Hitch to try it with the music he had composed, and Hitch had to admit that he was right—the sequence was transformed and enhanced to an incredible degree, and his fears began to die away.

Even so, neither Hitch nor anyone else could have guessed the fantastic commercial success in store for the film. Hitch and Alma went off to Europe on holiday and were away when Psycho opened. The critical reception was mixed. Many of the critics were alienated by being required to see the film with an ordinary audience, and being refused admission if they arrived late (it was a rule Hitch had insisted on, that the movie had to be seen from beginning to end); others were shocked by the film’s violence and felt it was unworthy of its maker. His old friend Charles Bennett saw a preview in Hollywood and afterwards told Hitch he was a ‘sadistic sonofabitch’. Hitch mildly replied that he thought the film was funny, and feigned surprise when Bennett said that only made matters worse. But the public loved Psycho right from the start. On its first release it made some $15 million in the United States alone, and shortly after Hitch’s return Paramount presented him excitedly with a cheque for $2.5 million, far and away the largest amount they had ever paid an independent producer, as his personal share of the first quarter’s returns. It was a climax in his career. Now in his early sixties he was famous, more famous than ever before, and he was rich. He had made a string of masterpieces, one fast on the heels of another. The only problem was, where did he go from here?