Alfred Hitchcock (59 page)

Working without Joan Harrison for the first time in nearly a decade, and needing to flesh out McDonell’s brief story, Hitchcock wanted a writer with more experience than Peter Viertel. Just as he sprinkled his films with American landmarks, Hitchcock liked to add a dash of literary prominence to their credits—and now he went looking for “the best available example of a writer of Americana,” as he later put it. Miriam Howell, producer Sam Goldwyn’s literary agent in New York, made a suggestion: Thornton Wilder.

Fond of casting against type, Hitchcock sometimes tried it with writers too. Wilder was best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama
Our Town
, a panorama of life in a small, bucolic New England town, as viewed by the dead in the local graveyard. Hitchcock, who had seen and admired the play, fired off a one-thousand-word telegram synopsizing “Uncle Charlie,” and asking Wilder if he would be interested in writing a Hitchcock film that would be the dark underbelly of
Our Town.

Despite the apparent folksiness of his work, Wilder was a sophisticated writer with a sure technique rooted in Greek and Roman drama. He had
won his first Pulitzer with the novel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, which was later adapted into a film; when
Our Town
was adapted in 1940, Wilder collaborated on the screenplay. When Hitchcock wired him, Wilder had just completed
The Skin of Our Teeth
, destined to become another stage classic.

Wilder had one free month before he was due to join army intelligence. Though he was intrigued by the prospect of writing a Hitchcock film, he complained to his friend, the famous journalist Alexander Woollcott, that the story idea sounded “corny.” Yet Wilder also wanted to make some quick money to tide over his mother and sister while he was in the army. His agent requested fifteen thousand dollars for the script, payable in increments for five weeks of work. It was a princely sum, but Wilder was a princely name, and Jack Skirball immediately authorized the contract. On May 18 Wilder boarded a train; three days later he was meeting with Hitchcock, staying at Hollywood’s Villa Carlotta and commuting to Universal.

The director and his bard of Americana seemed to find the same wavelength at once. Openings were as important as endings to Hitchcock, and he wasn’t sure yet how he wanted to open the film. In McDonell’s sketchy version of the story Uncle Charlie isn’t introduced until he materializes in the small California town. Hitchcock wanted some kind of prelude that would show Uncle Charlie before his arrival, already frantic and on the run.

Most comfortable with East Coast settings, Wilder proposed an opening sequence showing Uncle Charlie holed up in a New Jersey boarding-house. The police are shadowing him, and he is pondering his next move. “There’s this short story by [Ernest] Hemingway,” suggested Wilder, “where a man is lying in bed in the dark, waiting to be killed. That would make a good opening.” Hitchcock was taken aback. The great Wilder was a practical craftsman, it turned out—just like him—not above a little pilfering to get the job done. The New Jersey opening would give the film a more national scope. And that is just how
Shadow of a Doubt
would begin, with a tacit nod to Hemingway’s well-known story “The Killers.”

Hitchcock knew that his style and methods weren’t familiar to everyone, so just as he had with Samson Raphaelson, the director screened his earlier work for the writer, showing
Suspicion
and other Hitchcock films to Wilder, “whispering technical procedures in Thornton’s ear,” according to biographer Gilbert A. Harrison. Mornings were for discussion; in the afternoon Wilder wrote, usually by longhand on notepaper. “He never worked consecutively,” said Hitchcock, “but jumped about from one scene to another, according to his fancy.”

Sparking off each other, the two made galloping progress. “In long story conferences,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott, “we think up new twists
to the plot and gaze at each other in appalled silence: as much to say, ‘Do you think an audience can bear it?’ ”

“Work, work, work,” Wilder wrote to his sister on May 26. “But it’s really good. For hours Hitchcock and I, with glowing eyes and excited laughter, plot out how the information—the dreadful information—is gradually revealed to the audience and the characters. And I will say I’ve written some scenes. And that old Wilder poignance about family life [is] going on behind it. There’s no satisfaction like giving satisfaction to your employer.”

They began by tinkering with young Charlie’s family. Gordon McDonell had presented the mother as a “semi-invalid social climber,” according to film scholar Bill Krohn in
Hitchcock at Work
, while Uncle Charlie was posited as a kind of “fairy godfather” who brings momentary hope and change to the family’s drab existence. Gradually, under Wilder (and later, Sally Benson), the family characters became more positive, more engaging.

Ultimately, the teenage brother would disappear entirely from the script. Instead, young Charlie got a kid sister and an even younger brother—the better for comedy. Hitchcock also decided to eliminate young Charlie’s scapegrace boyfriend, “a John Garfield type,” according to McDonell. Instead, a police detective would nurse a crush on young Charlie. (“A commercial concession, really,” Hitchcock later told Charles Thomas Samuels.)

The Hitchcocks’ notes had hinted at an incestuous relationship between the niece and uncle—“her being attracted to him”—creating tension between the mother and daughter. Now, in Hitchcock’s work with Wilder, safer “twinship” motifs emerged—like the doppelgängers of German expressionism. Wilder wrote the relationship (“We’re like twins,” Uncle Charlie tells his niece, “you said so yourself”), while Hitchcock’s camera visually linked the two Charlies: introducing Uncle Charlie, lying on his bed, before he flees police and leaves for California; then showing young Charlie posed similarly on her bed, her mood suddenly lifted by the premonition that Uncle Charlie is about to reenter her life.

The script gradually took on the feeling of a dark parable—darker even than
Saboteur.
Uncle Charlie became an American Satan—and another Hitchcock villain who uncharacteristically spoke “on the nose,” in his unsettling showdown with young Charlie in a Main Street tavern:

“There’s so much you don’t know. So much. What do you know, really? You’re just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town. You wake up every morning of your life, and you know perfectly well that there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares … or did I? Or was it a silly, inexpert little lie? You’re a sleepwalker blind! How
do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses, you’d find swine? The world’s a hell! What does it matter what happens in it?”

This was Wilder at his best, strengthening a persistent Hitchcock theme: evil might dwell next door in Hitchcock’s world, or in one’s own household; there really is no sanctuary. Yet the director always stubbornly refused to philosophize, and whenever he was queried about the deeper meaning of
Shadow of a Doubt
(or any of his films), his replies were maddening. “There is moral judgment in the film,” Hitchcock said. “He’s [Uncle Charlie] destroyed at the end, isn’t he? The niece accidentally kills her uncle. What it boils down to is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white; there are grays everywhere.”

On one occasion, interviewed for the
New York Times
in 1951, Hitchcock explained that most of his films, even
Shadow of a Doubt
, were basically chases. “The chase makes up about 60 per cent of the construction of all movie plots,” he mused. He added that
Hamlet
could probably be considered a chase, “because Hamlet is a detective.”

“Wouldn’t
Macbeth
be a chase,” the interviewer asked, “Macbeth being the evildoer who is pursued by fate?”

“Well, yes,” Hitchcock said, retreating, “but the moment you make fate the pursuer you’re getting a little abstract.”

By the end of May, Hitchcock and Wilder had thirty promising pages. “Each step is complicated plotting and of course that gets denser and more complex as it goes on,” Wilder wrote his sister. “But I like it.” They interrupted work, flying north to scout out the town of Santa Rosa. Gordon McDonell had originally situated “Uncle Charlie” in the San Joaquin Valley, but Hitchcock had settled on this place in Sonoma County, about fifty miles north of San Francisco.
Shadow of a Doubt
would become the first of several Hitchcock films set near his northern California home.

Santa Rosa was then a sleepy hamlet, population 13,000, built around a central square. Working at Universal had already afforded Hitchcock a new measure of freedom, and now the war created an unexpected advantage: the U.S. government had placed a ceiling of five thousand dollars on new set-building costs. Making a virtue of necessity, Hitchcock convinced his amiable producer that they could shoot much of
Shadow of a Doubt
on location in Santa Rosa, saving on sets while displaying a picturesque town straight out of Norman Rockwell. Hitchcock was excited, looking forward to “reverting to the ‘location shooting’ of early movie days,” according to Universal publicity.

“Beautiful countryside,” he told Hume Cronyn later on. “Miles and miles of vineyards. After the day’s work we can romp among the vines, pluck bunches of grapes and squeeze the juice down our throats.”

Hitchcock, Wilder, Jack Skirball, and art director Robert Boyle toured Santa Rosa, meeting with city officials and roaming city streets. The local library, the train station, the telegraph office, the American Trust Company bank—all were postcard perfect. Hitchcock stopped in front of a private residence on McDonald Avenue, hailing it as the kind of house where young Charlie and her family would live. (Wilder disagreed, insisting that the large house suggested an income bracket above the station of young Charlie’s father, a bank clerk. They checked, and Wilder was right: the house belonged to a physician. But the reality didn’t matter to the director, and Hitchcock used the house.)

Researching reality always invigorated Hitchcock. Once back in Hollywood, he and Wilder plotted the remainder of the script with renewed zest.

“My god, I’m not only getting money, but I’m getting pleasure,” Wilder wrote at the end of a long day of work, at midnight in mid-June. “Seventy pages of the script went to the typist’s today—20 more tomorrow. It only has to be 130. Today and yesterday Hitch and I devised the ending. Honest, I think it’ll be an awfully absorbing picture.”

But the script wasn’t quite finished by the end of Wilder’s fifth week in Hollywood, when he had to head back east for army duty. When Wilder left by train on June 24, he was accompanied by Hitchcock and Skirball—the better to squeeze out the final pages. Somewhere between Los Angeles and New York the script was completed—and then Hitchcock did the unimaginable. He told the American dramatist he wasn’t completely satisfied with the script, that he wanted another writer to take a pass at it.

The structure of the suspense story was solid, Hitchcock explained, but the characters needed shoring up; they were too quaint. “I feel the script needs a polish,” the director told Wilder. “The only way I can describe it is that the Santa Rosa in our story is like a town without neon signs. Its history, its warmth, its people and characters—they’re all there. But I would like a tinge of the modern in it, just a little sharper here and there.”

Surprisingly, Wilder agreed with Hitchcock. He suggested Robert Ardrey, who had been his playwriting student at the University of Chicago; Ardrey’s first screen credit was 1939’s
They Knew What They Wanted
, a Carole Lombard-Charles Laughton picture set in the same wine-growing region as
Shadow of a Doubt.
But Hitchcock felt that Ardrey—who later switched to anthropology, writing the groundbreaking books
African Genesis
and
The Territorial Imperative
—was too solemn for the task.

Besides, eager to add humor to the script, the director already had a replacement in mind. After he and Wilder parted ways, he met in New York with Sally Benson, then in the midst of an annus mirabilis.
Junior Miss
, her collection of stories about the foibles of a twelve-year-old girl—and the Broadway play based on her book, which delighted Hitchcock when he saw it—were huge hits in 1941. Her short fiction was highly regarded for
its skilled depiction of youth and its knowing satire; besides adding comedy and modern tinges to
Shadow of a Doubt
, Hitchcock wanted her to add freshness to his family portrait. Benson became the fourth writer from the
New Yorker
(where she also reviewed mysteries and occasional films) to be recruited by Hitchcock.
^*

At first Benson worked from New York, her pages integrated into the continuity by Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock. Then, just before the late-summer start of production, she came to California and spent two weeks writing on the set. “The rewrite greatly improved Wilder’s very rough draft,” according to film scholar Bill Krohn.

Counting Gordon McDonell and both Hitchcocks, five writers worked on
Shadow of a Doubt.
Make that six: up on location, actress Patricia Collinge, who played young Charlie’s mother, contributed to her own characterization—removing all traces of the “rather silly woman” of the shooting script, according to Krohn. She also touched up the romantic interlude in the garage between young Charlie and the police detective, which takes place after Uncle Charlie seems to have been cleared.

In the end, only four writers were credited on the screen: McDonell, Benson, Wilder, and Alma Reville. Being rewritten by Sally Benson—or a supporting actress, for that matter—didn’t alter Wilder’s favorable view of the experience; nor did it detract from Hitchcock’s opinion of Wilder. Indeed, the director gave Wilder an unusual citation, which ran in the credits just before Hitchcock’s own name: “We wish to acknowledge the contribution of Mr. Thornton Wilder to the preparation of this production.”