Hitch (21 page)

Undeniably what one remembers from the film is bits and pieces rather than the whole. Controlled essays in virtuosity like the stabbing scene, the boy's journey with the bomb and the stroke of genius which counterpointed the wife's anguish over the news of her brother's death with the delighted reactions of a cinema audience to Disney's Silly Symphony
Who Killed Cock Robin
? But also
Sabotage
is the richest and most detailed picture in Hitch's work of the London he grew up in and knew like the back of his hand. Much of the detail is drawn from his own experience: the greengrocer's shop which the detective uses as cover recalls his own childhood home, the little East End cinema the kind where he had his own experiences of the flicks. When the detective takes Mrs. Verloc and her brother out to lunch he takes them to Simpson's in the Strand, Hitch's own favourite restaurant in his City days. The quirkily vivid scenes in the streets markets, the back-street shops, the cheery by-play of the peddlers and the darker sense of crime behind closed doors in mean streets all summon up Hitch's own childhood and his early fascination with the domestic details of the murder cases he loved to read. And even something like the scene in which the cinema audience get nasty when their entertainment is interrupted by a power cut owes a lot to Hitch's experience of an audience turning like that at the Pierre Fresnay/Yvonne Printemps first night, or at another, acutely embarrassing, occasion when a comic with a sense of grievance insisted on making a curtain speech at the Empire castigating
the management and his fellow artists, to a similarly hostile response.

For the most part the film was very modestly budgeted and made. But Hitch insisted on one big splurge. At the cost of
£
3,000, which was then a considerable amount, he had a whole tramline laid from the Lime Grove studios to near-by White City, and operated it complete with functional tram for just one day's shooting. Ivor Montagu, as associate producer, remonstrated with him—this was absurd expenditure for a few seconds of screen time. But no: Hitch knew exactly what he was doing—this was one of the Hitchcock touches deliberately put in to impress American audiences and, particularly, American producers, who would recognize exactly what the production values involved in these few shots were. It was expensive, but it was meant to be, and the impression of extravagance it created was worth it.

As it happened,
Sabotage
marked something like the end of an era in British films. But no one realized it at the time. Hitch was by now in an unchallenged, and virtually unchallengeable, position as the leading British film-maker, with his films recognized and successful on both sides of the Atlantic. He was certainly the biggest fish in a pretty small pond, and it was no doubt not without reason that Michael Balcon feared he might be snatched away by Hollywood. But for the moment life was very comfortable in England. He could move around freely, according to his whim of the moment, and script collaborators recall story conferences on a train to the Riviera, at a bullfight in Barcelona, in a funicular at St. Moritz, going up and down all day, or, less exotic, on the roof of Croydon Airport. At home he went to the theatre several times a week, and now that Pat was nine he and Alma felt she was old enough, when at home on school holidays, to stay up in the evening and go to the theatre if there was anything vaguely suitable. So she found herself seeing a lot of musicals and light comedies; in particular she was taken to
Careless Rapture
and all of Ivor Novello's subsequent spectacular musical shows. Novello was still a personal friend, and Pat recalls that at one of his shows she and Alma and Hitch were sitting in a box, and Hitch went right off to sleep in the first act. During the interval a note was brought round from Ivor observing, ‘Of all the people seeing this show, you seem to be enjoying it the least.' But then he knew better than to take Hitch's sleeping personally: Hitch made a habit of it, even at shows with which he was personally
involved. He was reputed to have slept soundly through the whole première of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, and even slept at the first night of
The Old Ladies
, a play in which he had money invested.

He found other ways of spending his money too. His passion for the painting of Paul Klee resulted in his circling round and round one particular painting in a London exhibition, wondering and wondering whether he could afford it, until finally he took the plunge, to the tune of some
£
600—quite a steep price considering that Klee was little known in Britain at the time and that first-day sales totalling
£
250 at Dali's 1936 London exhibition were considered spectacular enough to be reported in the papers. Hitch used also to seize every occasion for holidays with his family, in his beloved Switzerland or, almost equally beloved, the south of Italy. In 1937 he took Alma, Pat and his mother to stay in Naples, which had the slight drawback that every time she went there Alma was prostrated with a strep throat—a condition Hitch irreverently attributed to having had to kiss the Pope's ring during an audience with him on their way, since after all you never knew who else had been kissing it that day. Be that as it might, she was laid up in their hotel while Hitch took his mother and Pat out to Capri to see the Blue Grotto. The trip went very well until, right outside the Grotto, they were required to transfer from the motorboat in which they had come to a small rowing-boat. Hitch's mother flatly refused, and the director at whose words film stars trembled was left helplessly saying, ‘But you've got to—you've come all this way to see the Blue Grotto and, well, you've just got to.' Mrs. Hitchcock senior remained as formidable as ever, and as stubborn, so it was a long battle before she actually did get to see the pride of Capri.

Oddly enough, given his fascination from childhood with America and things American, his detailed theoretical knowledge of the geography of New York, and his frequent professional contacts with Americans right since the earliest days with Famous Players at Islington, Hitch had never seriously considered visiting America. But the time was approaching fast. First, Gaumont-British, to which he was currently under contract, was summarily closed down in 1937, shortly after shooting on
Sabotage
was completed. One day Isidore Ostrer, who had at last acquired total control of the company, arrived at the Lime Grove studios in Shepherd's Bush and called Victor Peers, one of the vice-presidents, into his office. He gave him a list of names, headed by that of Michael Balcon himself, and said
‘Go and fire all these today.' The man stammered, ‘But I can't fire them; they're my bosses.' ‘Fire them,' said Ostrer, ‘or fire yourself.' Hitch was in the studios that day, and remembers it as ‘like Christmas, but without the booze'. Everyone was in and out of everyone else's offices, comparing notes, as the news spread like wildfire, and by the end of the day Balcon and Ivor Montagu had been fired, the film production company dissolved, and the whole Gaumont-British operation was no more, except as a title for a distributing company. This did not make any immediate difference to Hitch, since he was not fired and his contract was taken over by the associated company, Gainsborough, for which he had been working at the start of his career. But it was the break-up of a successful team. Balcon went almost immediately to take over the direction of a newly set up MGM production programme in Britain, and Ivor Montagu abandoned feature films altogether. Even closer, Charles Bennett had received an offer of a contract from Universal to go to Hollywood as a script-writer, and decided to accept. His work on the new script, called
Young and Innocent
, was confined to the now traditional trip to Switzerland, this time St. Moritz, where he would ski during the day while Hitch stayed in and read, then in the evening they would eat and drink and work out the scenario together. After that he bade Hitch a sad farewell and went off to Hollywood, leaving him to complete the script with other collaborators. His summing-up on Hitch at this period: ‘Biggest bully in the world; one of the kindest men I have ever met in my life.'

Young and Innocent
is sheer delight, a perfect Hitchcockian demonstration that less is more. The featherweight plot, vaguely suggested by the first two chapters of Josephine Tey's novel
A Shilling for Candles
, is a simple chase. The police are after our hero, because they believe, for no sufficient reason, that he murdered a woman, and he is after the man who really did it, in order to clear his name. In the process he takes up with the police chief's daughter, she helps him, a romance develops, and in the end they run the missing man to earth, playing in a blackface band at a
thé dansant
and only revealed, at the end of one of Hitch's most spectacular moving-camera shots, by the twitching of one eye in extreme close-up. And that is really all there is to it. It has no political overtones, no pretensions whatever to significance. It is perfectly crisp and clear and pure and to the point, an almost abstract exercise in film-making saved from aridity by its sheer
joie de vivre
. It looks as if everyone concerned had a good time making it, and though such impressions are often deceptive, on this occasion it is no more nor less than the truth.

Apart from an awkward move from Lime Grove to Pinewood Studios in the middle of shooting, Hitch had no troubles at all with this one. It had no important stars to be dealt with, just two young players in the principal roles, Derrick de Marney and Nova Pilbeam, remarkably matured in the three years since she played the kidnapped child in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and a solid support of reliable character actors. The simple story all fell into action set-pieces which left him plenty of room for his little private jokes and included some of the most shameless model-shots ever seriously shown on the professional screen (the cars in parts of the chase sequence are so evidently children's toys on a table-top that it makes one wonder if these shots were not after all done very much tongue in cheek). The only really irritating thing about the film was the
decision to cut its already spare 80 minutes by another 10 for distribution in America, thereby removing one of Hitch's own favourite scenes, in which a children's tea party becomes menacing to the hero and heroine because of the situation they are in with the police. Still, even that was no doubt better than the total ban imposed on
Sabotage
in Brazil because it was judged liable to foment public unrest—though how or why that might be was never indicated.

Liberated from spies and secret agents for one picture, Hitch could not wait to get back to them for his next,
The Lady Vanishes
. But in other respects this follows the lead of
Young and Innocent
, in that it is the lightest and purest of diversions, with little claim to logic (‘The first thing I throw out is logic,' observed Hitch at the time) and none at all to deeper meaning. He got two young writers, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliatt, to put the screenplay together for him from a novel by Ethel Lina White,
The Wheel Spins
. As usual, the ostensible basis was hardly more than a pretext: what really interested Hitch was the idea of the old story set in Paris about a mother and daughter staying at a hotel when the mother is taken ill, the daughter is sent on a wild-goose chase in search of medicine, and when she gets back everyone pretends not to know her, her mother has vanished, along with all trace of the room they were staying in. The story has been adapted straight on several occasions, including one of the
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
half-hours and the British film
So Long at the Fair
, but here it was twisted slightly so that the old lady vanishes on a transcontinental train and all the passengers except the heroine either have not seen her or pretend they have not for various reasons, understandable or sinister.

Launder and Gilliatt's sense of humour corresponded very closely with Hitchcock's—later on they made on their own one of the very best Hitchcock-type comedy thrillers not made by the master himself,
Green for Danger
—and they turned out what he considered one of the best scripts he had ever had, even though characteristically he added and subtracted before he was completely satisfied. He added the business with the stage illusionist travelling on the train, whose trick props in the luggage van provide some comic and suspenseful details, and the whole conclusion with the gun battle in the woods, and after shooting cut several details, including a love scene and the overpowering of the armed guard who is holding several of the characters prisoner, in order to speed up the action. In the process,
inevitably, he turned it into a Hitchcock picture, and suggests that it was Launder and Gilliatt's irritation at seeing it referred to as such, with no mention of their contribution, that drove them to launch out on their own very successful careers as producer-directors as well as writers.

To cast the film he used a bright young stage actor, Michael Redgrave, as the vague, pipe-smoking, rather whimsical hero; Redgrave had in fact played a small part for Hitch in
The Secret Agent
, but this was his first starring role in films. For his first scene they ran it through once, then Hitch said they were ready to shoot. Redgrave was nonplussed: ‘In the theatre, we'd have three weeks to rehearse this.' ‘I'm sorry,' said Hitch; ‘in this medium we have three minutes.' The heroine was played by Margaret Lockwood, already on her way to being the most popular female star of British films during the war years; here she seems visibly unsure of herself as the spoilt socialite of the opening sequences, but as soon as the drama gets going she is fine. With the lady who vanishes the revered character actress, Dame May Whitty, Hitch tried out his most flagrant shock tactics. In the middle of her very first scene he suddenly shouted, ‘Stop! That's terrible. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?' She was momentarily shattered, and Hitch got exactly the performance he wanted out of her. Later he said to his producer, Edward Black, ‘Break ‘em down right at the start—it's much the best way.' Another of his casting inspirations was to take the pair of silly-ass Englishmen Launder and Gilliatt had written (they are so totally absorbed in the Test Match cricket scores that they see any trouble on the train only as a threat to their punctual arrival in England for the end of the match) and put in the roles two very capable straight actors, Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, who had never played anything like that before. This casting against type actually proved to be a transformation of type, since the two actors were so successful in these roles they then went on to make a career out of playing them, usually as a sort of informal double act.