Alfred Hitchcock (107 page)
Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Cancer, which had touched their lives, would become foremost among their charities; the director gave generously of money but also of his time. One of his first contributions was appearing on
TACTIC
, an educational program produced by NBC, the American Cancer Society, and public television, that aired early in 1959. Introduced on the show as a “fear” expert, Hitchcock “directed” an impromptu skit with William Shatner as a doctor who reassures a young model diagnosed with breast cancer (Diana van der Vlis), that her fears of permanent disfigurement after an operation are irrational.
The third crisis involved
Vertigo
, which was in postproduction during the first months of 1957.
Scottie’s (Jimmy Stewart) “vertigo” was Hitchcockery—the sort of hallucinatory special effect the director had been trying to perfect in films for years. “I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “when I got terribly drunk, and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from
me. I tried to get that into
Rebecca
[in Joan Fontaine’s fainting scene], but they couldn’t do it.”
The studio warned him that it would cost $50,000 to construct a special set with a crane apparatus to suggest the dizzying perspective of “vertigo.” As it was the character’s point of view, and Jimmy Stewart wasn’t really in the shot, Hitchcock proposed using a miniature of the stairway, laying it on its side, and then achieving the shot by dollying away from the stairs while zooming the focus forward. “That’s the way we did it,” he said proudly, “and it only cost us $19,000.”
Artist John Ferren had created the sketches and paintings supposedly drawn by John Forsythe’s character in
The Trouble with Harry
; now he helped with the expressive nightmares suffered by Scottie after Madeleine’s “suicide.” And for the first time, Saul Bass, who had created imaginatively animated credits for Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger, put his unique stamp on the title sequence of a Hitchcock film, with a distinctive prologue that juxtaposed images of eyes with dizzying Lissajous spirals (invented by a nineteenth-century Frenchman to express mathematical formulas).
When pondering the musical score for
Vertigo
, Hitchcock was again reminded of
Mary Rose
, and sent to London for a copy of the original sheet music and an archival recording of the stage production, passing them along to Bernard Herrmann for inspiration. Although he trusted Herrmann enough that he preconstructed certain sequences to accommodate the composer’s musical backing, Hitchcock also gave him meticulous notes clarifying the mood he wanted for each scene.
For the revolving kiss—the scene where Scottie embraces Judy after she is transformed into Madeleine—Hitchcock told Herrmann, “We’ll just have the camera and you.” Only minimal dialogue was scripted. Herrmann’s cathartic theme—later compared by some critics to another favorite Hitchcock piece of music, Wagner’s “Liebestod” (“Love Death”) from
Tristan und Isolde
—would carry the scene.
*
At least twice, Mrs. Hitchcock was involved in crucial editing decisions. The first time was very early on, when the Hitchcocks saw the initial cut upon returning from Jamaica. George Tomasini met them in New York and ran the picture for them. Alma told her husband afterward she thought it was going to be a marvelous film—but he had to get rid of that awful shot of Kim Novak running across the square where you could see her fat legs.
“I don’t know which shot you mean, Alma.”
“The one where her legs looks awful.”
“Well, I’m sorry you hate the film, Alma.”
“I didn’t hate it, I loved it. I thought it was wonderful. Just that shot.”
Alma had an appointment at Elizabeth Arden’s, so Hitchcock joined Tomasini and Peggy Robertson for lunch. Hitchcock was disconsolate, in the “depths of despair,” recalled Robertson. Alma hated the film. How could he get rid of that shot?
He stewed about it all during lunch. Afterward, they dropped Tomasini off at the cutting room. Getting out of the cab at his hotel, Hitchcock leaned back into the open window and said, “By the way, Peggy. Tell George to take that shot of Kim out.”
“Take it out! How can he do that?”
“Oh, it’s perfectly all right. She will just leap from one side of the square to the other, but nobody will notice it because we will cut from big head to big head.”
There was always more vacillation during the editing of a Hitchcock film than the director cared to admit, and there was more on
Vertigo
than usual. The shooting script contained a fair amount of exposition that was shot but ultimately abandoned during cutting. Originally, for example, the silent sequences of Scottie following Madeleine in his car had voice-over narration; Hitchcock even shot an explanatory coda, in Midge’s apartment, with Scottie listening to a radio, announcing a police manhunt for Elster, who is wanted for murder.
“Sc: 276: Int: Midge’s Apartment. 50 mm [lens size]. Variable diffusion. Midge listening to giant radio CRANE FORWARD & JIB DOWN as Scottie enters & goes to window. She gives him drink and sits. Tag end.”
This too was discarded during editing, so that the last image of the film would be Scottie, his arms spread in a despairing, Christlike pose, standing atop the bell tower. Judy has been startled by a nun and backed off the ledge, re-creating Madeleine’s fate by toppling to her own death. No further explanation necessary; any further police investigation is forgotten, and as far as the audience knows the original murderer has escaped.
Paramount even commissioned a “Vertigo” pop song by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, the team behind “Que Serà, Serà,” thinking that lyrics explaining the meaning of the abstruse title might be helpful to moviegoers. A “demo” version was recorded, and the studio even plugged the song in advertisements—but Hitchcock ultimately decided against using it.
Throughout postproduction, Hitchcock made many such choices, refining his vision of a film as he never had before, reediting, stripping away the elements that made the story explicit, allowing for longer stretches for Herrmann’s music, and in the process completing the transformation of
Vertigo
from an everyday murder mystery into a haunting emotional allegory.
Was he uncertain, indecisive? Or was
Vertigo
simply deeper business
than usual? More than once Hitchcock asked Jimmy Stewart for
his
opinion of cuts and changes in the film’s evolving form. Stewart did have opinions—which, unlike Cary Grant’s, had to be honored—but unlike Grant, Stewart usually chose to soft-pedal his views, to encourage Hitchcock to do whatever felt right.
The postproduction ultimately got hung up on Hitchcock’s radical structural innovation: the flashback that finds Judy in her hotel room writing a good-bye letter to Scottie, which reveals her “secret” to the audience. Judy is seen rushing up the ladder of the church tower ahead of Scottie, emerging from the trapdoor just as Elster hurls the real Madeleine off the ledge.
When the first preview was held in San Francisco on May 9, that scene was still in the film—but Hitchcock was uncertain whether it should remain. He told Herbert Coleman he was thinking of taking it out, and then he did just that; he removed the scene and held another screening for close confidants, including Joan Harrison. She jumped up afterward. “Hitchy! How could anyone want your picture to be seen any different from this!”
Coleman was furious. He disagreed, and resented having to counter the influence of the television staff, which was supposed to keep its distance from the films. Coleman told Hitchcock he was making a huge mistake. “We began to argue,” recalled the associate producer, “face to face, our voices rising. Finally, he’d had enough and gave me the first direct order he ever gave me in all the years we had worked together: ‘Release it just like that.’ ”
James Stewart was there for the argument, calm and tactful as usual. “Herbie,” Stewart whispered, “you shouldn’t get so upset with Hitch. The picture’s not that important.”
Coleman went ahead and stipulated the necessary recutting and rescoring, with “less than perfect results,” and ordered five hundred prints of the new reel to be shipped to exchanges for distribution. Stewart may have whispered in Hitchcock’s ear too. But overruling them all was the New York head of Paramount, Barney Balaban, who had been present at the San Francisco preview—and who practically shouted his opinion. After hearing about the last-minute changes from Coleman, Balaban phoned Hitchcock and argued with him to restore the scene.
Even then, Hitchcock might have refused, and everyone would have deferred to him. Was it loyalty and professionalism that made him yield, or was he finally won over by their arguments? For that matter, aren’t doubt and despair among the powerful qualities of the film?
One final vote was likely cast. “The decision [to restore the sequence] was made during the week of April 24th,” Auiler wrote in his book; “Alma returned home [from the hospital] on the 25th. It is no secret that,
in story crises like this, Hitchcock would often turn to his wife for guidance. Did Alma argue to keep the scene? As happened so frequently in their working relationship, it may well have been her judgment that Hitchcock followed.”
Shortly after Alma returned home, Hitchcock phoned Balaban. He came out of his office afterward, staring through his secretary’s cubicle at Coleman, who was sitting in his office. “Put the picture back the way it was,” he barked, before going back in and shutting the door.
When
Vertigo
was released at the end of May 1958, the reaction from audiences and critics was underwhelming. There were some positive reviews, but the negative ones came from prominent venues. “Farfetched nonsense,” declared John McCarten in the
New Yorker
(while the
New York Times
thought it “devilishly farfetched”).
Newsweek
said the director had “overdone his deviousness, overreached the limits of credibility, and, in his plot-twists, passed beyond the point of no return.”
Time
found
Vertigo
just “another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares.”
The latest Hitchcock film was hardly acclaimed as the searching masterpiece that, almost universally, critics have since come to acknowledge. “In its complexity and subtlety, in emotional depth, in its power to disturb, in the centrality of its concerns,
Vertigo
can, as well as any film, be taken to represent the cinema’s claims to be treated with the respect accorded to the longer-established art forms,” wrote Robin Wood.
Hitchcock never lost a few reservations about the final product—especially about Kim Novak. “She doesn’t ruin the story,” he deadpanned to
Time.
After having screened the film during the preproduction of
Psycho
, writer Joseph Stefano told Hitchcock that Vera Miles was a greater actress but Novak was better casting. Hitchcock’s reply was that he would always feel a disappointment with the film, as Novak wasn’t the Madeleine he had imagined.
Still, he recognized
Vertigo
as one of his greatest films. Years later, when Charles Thomas Samuels asked him, “What do you think about the prominence that
Vertigo
has assumed for your European critics?” Hitchcock replied unhesitatingly, “I think they understood the complexities of the situation.”
*
In the film, it’s “Let me go! I’ve got kids!”
**
In fact he had filmed himself in a scene with Henry Fonda, but Hitchcock ultimately cut this cameo from
The Wrong Man
, deferring to the realism he was striving for. Instead, a striking soundstage long shot opens the film, with the director in shadowy silhouette addressing the camera soberly: “This is Alfred Hitchcock speaking. In the past I have given you many kinds of suspense pictures, but this time I would like you to see a different one. The difference lies in the fact that this is a true story, every word of it, and yet it contains elements that are stranger than all of the fiction that has gone into many of the thrillers that I’ve made before.”
*
A crawl at the end of
The Wrong Man
reassures audiences that the actual Rose had made a complete recovery and left the mental institution, though Hitchcock pointedly told Truffaut, “She’s probably still there.”
*
A three-part version of
I Killed the Count
was later aired on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
—the only instance of a “serial” in the show’s history—over successive weeks in March 1957. Anthony Dawson and John Williams were in the cast, while Francis Cockrell wrote the teleplay.
*
In the end, MGM got only the one Hitchcock film.
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
was passed to author Eric Ambler (husband of Joan Harrison), who wrote the script. Michael Anderson directed Ambler’s script, and Gary Cooper was ultimately the star.
*
Alas, “Four O’Clock” is the rarest of all Hitchcock-directed television episodes nowadays;
Suspicion
lasted only a year on the air, and the series was rerun only once, in the summer of 1959.
*
When, in their first interview sessions, François Truffaut complimented Novak’s “animal-like sensuality” in the film, Hitchcock gave her credit for that, at least—linking Truffaut’s comment with her refusal to wear undergarments. “As a matter of fact, she’s particularly proud of that,” he said.
*
Shayne was married to Leopoldine Konstantin, the actress who played Claude Rains’s dragon-mother in
Notorious.
*
Starting with
Strangers on a Train
, Hitchcock had sneaked digs at the Red Scare into several of his films. In
To Catch a Thief
, Jessie Royce Landis tells Cary Grant she suspects him of merely
pretending
to be an American. “You never mention business or baseball or wage freezes or Senate probes,” she says accusingly. “All the things I left America to forget,” Grant mutters. In
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, the Marrakech police chief, interrogating an uncooperative James Stewart, reminds him snidely of HUAC—“you Americans sometimes find it desirable to betray confidences.”
*
Herrmann’s score for
Vertigo
is considered the apogee of his film career—before
Psycho
—but curiously, it is the only Herrmann score for a Hitchcock film that was actually conducted by someone else. A U.S. musicians’ strike forced the music to be recorded in Vienna, under the baton of Muir Mathieson.