Hitch (24 page)

Selznick considered that he had been (if involuntarily) a model of patience and non-intervention during
Rebecca
. Hitch felt otherwise. He had enormous respect for Selznick, and even personal liking, but he was disturbed and irritated at the idea of a producer constantly breathing down his neck, and coming on to the set even as relatively infrequently, by his own normal standards, as Selznick had. He wondered, nervously, if this was the way things were usually done in Hollywood, because if it was, he certainly did not like it. He was soon to find out.

Obviously, with the tremendous success of
Rebecca
, Selznick's expensive contract with Hitch was paying off. But at this point he did not have another property ready for Hitch; in fact, the Selznick International organization itself was in a state of flux, largely because of its enormous profits on
Gone With the Wind
and
Rebecca
, which forced Selznick to liquidate in an elaborate capital-gains transaction, with the result that he took three years out of active film production and did not return until 1944, with
Since You Went Away
. Meanwhile, he still had Hitch and several stars under contract, and a lot of literary properties; he remained in the business of selling and trading, and Hitch was to be sold off to a wide variety of other producers before he made a film for Selznick himself again. In June 1940 the possibilities were being discussed simultaneously that he should direct
The Constant Nymph
with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh at Warners,
Back Street
with Margaret Sullavan at Universal, or
A Woman's Face
with Joan Crawford at Metro.

Long before this, however, events on a larger stage than that of the Selznick Studios in Culver City intervened. On 3 September 1939, Britain's ultimatum to Hitler over Poland had taken no effect, and so, unwillingly, Britain found herself in a state of war with Germany. Hitch had just started shooting
Rebecca
, and there was no way he could return to Britain even if it had seemed politic or sensible for him to do so. When he heard that war had been declared he tried immediately to telephone his mother, and was told that all communication had been cut off for the moment. He felt totally desolate, and to a degree panicked, since everyone had been taught to suppose that when and if the war came, there would be an instant bombardment and the lives of those left in London would be worth very little. Finally, after three days, he did manage to get through to his mother, and found her, to his mingled irritation and relief, as stubborn and unemotional as ever. They were not bombing London
yet, and did not seem likely to do so, and in any case she had been through the Zeppelin raids in the First World War and saw no essential difference this time. She brushed aside Hitch's suggestion that perhaps she might consider coming to America until the present emergency was over. She did not like to travel and did not care to be uprooted at her time of life. She did go so far as to admit the possibility she might move out of London, down to Shamley Green if things got worse, but she was promising nothing.

Well, at least this was cheering, by and large. And since the Government's first action in Britain on the outbreak of war had been to close all the theatres and cinemas, and all the film studios, most of which they intended to requisition for warlike uses, there would be little or nothing Hitch could do in England anyway. Only one film was still in production in the whole of England, Gabriel Pascal's expensive adaptation of Shaw's
Major Barbara
, and that only because Michael Balcon, who was now in charge of the tiny Ealing Studios in West London, where the film was being made, had pulled strings and begged and argued and pleaded that Britain needed its cultural ambassadors more than ever now and it would be wanton to scrap something of such importance altogether out of sheer panic. And as it happened Hitch was currently at work, on the other side of the world, on what was to all intents and purposes a British picture. To complete it to the best of his ability was the only thing he could do, and also the most telling. He decided to stay on.

This decision, perhaps never at one moment consciously taken, was not be be received all that favourably in certain quarters at home. Hitch was above the age to be called up for war service, but one other vitally concerned with the production was not: Laurence Olivier, as soon as he had completed his role, had to return immediately to England. Other Englishmen in America at the time also headed homeward, though there were many who stayed on for the moment, tied as they were by contracts or feeling that, the instant emotion apart, there was little point in their rushing back until it became clearer how things stood. Over at RKO, for example, Hitch's near-contemporary in the early days of British movies, Herbert Wilcox, was making a series of films with his wife Anna Neagle; they were in much the same position as Hitch, tied down by contractual obligations and compelled for the time being to sit tight and do all they could to assist the British cause from across the Atlantic.

And soon there were new arrivals in a two-way traffic. Gracie Fields had the misfortune to be married to an Italian, Monty Banks, who was in immediate danger of being interned in Britain as an enemy alien. So naturally they moved rapidly to America, pursued by overexcited accusations that Gracie was a coward and a traitor, deserting her country in its hour of need. Elisabeth Bergner, domiciled in Britain since Hitler had come to power, was shooting
Forty-Ninth Parallel
for Michael Powell on location in Canada and deserted the production to slip over the border into the neutral United States. She too was denounced. Then in February 1940 Alexander Korda, still the most powerful and extravagant producer in Britain, arrived in Hollywood to join his brother Zoltan, the director, who was already in the desert for his health, and his wife, Merle Oberon, then under contract to Warners, bringing with him a major film which had been interrupted by the outbreak of war,
The Thief of Bagdad
, to complete in California. For many in Britain that was the last straw. That Korda, a ‘guest in our country' (as they loved to say of foreigners, implying that somehow they never paid their way), should cheerfully desert Britain in her darkest hour just to make a buck, was treachery of the worst sort, and terrible were the denunciations in the British press.

Now as it happens Korda, a crazed anglophile from way back, had come over, some say at the personal request of Churchill, and certainly with Churchill's active support, to continue making British films, films which would project British values and the British way of life for American audiences, at a time when they could not be made in Britain. The fact could not be made public at the time, and his actions were wildly misconstrued—even when he continued in Hollywood to make defiantly patriotic British films such as
Lady Hamilton
(or
That Hamilton Woman
as it was known in the States) with Vivien Leigh, and with Laurence Olivier specially relieved of his wartime duties for the sake of the good propaganda embodied in his magnetic portrayal of Nelson.

Naturally, in all this flurry of accusation Hitch came in for his share. The most hurtful was from his old friend and associate Michael Balcon, who made an ill-considered statement to the press naming Hitch as one of those who had deserted Britain when she needed them most. Hitch and Alma were deeply upset that he of all people, who should have known better, had taken this line; and he himself soon regretted it, since he was unofficially informed that
Hitch, like Korda, was continuing film-making in America at the express request of the British Government. But the harm had been done. Alma especially found it hard to forgive a number of the things which had been said about Hitch in Britain during the early days of the war, and it all hardened her resolve to stay permanently in their new home. As soon as she possibly could she went over to Britain to collect her mother and sister and bring them back to America, and she embraced the country and its ways wholeheartedly. Almost as soon as she was legally qualified to do so she took out naturalization papers, five years before Hitch resolved to do so.

Meanwhile, Hitch looked around for what he could most usefully do to help the British war effort in America. This was not such a simple matter. Though there were few direct Nazi sympathizers in Hollywood, and many with good reason to be hostile, the official policy was to retain strict neutrality. More and more films were creeping into production in which the bad guys had German accents and audiences could get the general idea that they were Nazis, even if they were not specifically identified as such. But any producer undertaking an explicitly anti-Nazi film still ran the risk of State Department displeasure, and so they were few and far between. Providentially, at this moment one of the bolder producers came to Hitch with just such a proposition. It was Walter Wanger, and he had, it transpired, recently purchased the rights to Vincent Sheean's autobiographical
Personal History
, for $10,000. The background to the book, that of a politically conscious correspondent in disastrously unsettled Europe, with a major war looming, was appealing and dramatic. Unfortunately there was no foreground in sharp focus—no coherent narrative, no telling characters, no specific incidents that lent themselves to filming. What, Wanger wanted to know, could Hitch do with this if he were given a free hand?

Hitch did not know offhand, but he was sure he could do something—for Wanger and for Britain. So calling in his old script collaborator Charles Bennett, who had been settled in Hollywood since 1937, he and Joan Harrison began laboriously to construct a workable plot line. Almost the only thing they took from Sheean's book was the opening location, Holland. And true to his old principle, the first thing Hitch asked was, what do they have in Holland? Answer: windmills and tulips. Consequently, two images: one, of a windmill with the sails revolving in the wrong direction, as a signal of some kind; two, of a murder in a field of tulips, concluding with a
shot in which blood spattered on a pure, pristine white tulip. The second image he decided was impractical, as it needed colour for its full realization, and anyway he could not see quite how to work it in. But the first provided the starting-point for the film as it was to be, a complicated story of an innocent bystander's gradual unwilling involvement in the toils of war. The hero, an American correspondent in Europe on assignment, with no political
parti pris
, could in this way stand in place of the average uncommitted American. He first of all gets involved on a personal level, with a nice old Dutchman and an attractive English girl, and through them with a complicated spy intrigue concerning a kidnapped Dutch diplomat and stolen papers, and finally finds himself wholly committed to the fight against Nazism, broadcasting to America at the fade-out:

JONES: Hello America. I've been watching a part of the world being blown to pieces. A part of the world as nice as Vermont, Ohio, Virginia, California and Illinois lies ripped up bleeding like a steer in a slaughterhouse. And I've seen things that make the history of the savages read like Pollyanna legend.

ANNOUNCER: We're going to have to postpone the broadcast.

(
At this point sirens begin to wail and lights flash as bombs begin to burst outside the studio
.)

JONES: Don't postpone nothing, let's go on as long as we can.

ANNOUNCER (
to Carol
): Ma'am, we've got a shelter downstairs.

JONES: How about it, Carol?

CAROL: They're listening in America, Johnny.

JONES: O.K. We'll tell them. I can't read the rest of this speech I have because the lights have gone out. So I'll just have to talk off the cuff. All that noise you hear isn't static, it's death coming to London. Yes, they're coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and homes. Don't tune me out—hang on—this is a big story—and you're part of it. It's too late now to do anything except stand in the dark and let them come as if the lights are all out everywhere except in America. (
Music
—‘
America
'—
begins to play softly in background of speech and continues through end credits
.)

JONES: Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they're the only lights in the world.

The script turned out to be one of those on which Hitch had most trouble: in the course of preparation he went through fourteen writers, only four of whose names finally appear on the film—Joan Harrison and Charles Bennett, who are credited with the original scenario, and James Hilton and Robert Benchley, who are credited with the dialogue. Benchley's inclusion is a special case anyway. Hitch had seen several of the shorts the woebegone, disenchanted comic had made, illustrated lectures by himself on such subjects as
How to Sleep, A Night at the Movies
and
The Sex Life of the Polyp
, and had appreciated a dry, grotesque sense of humour not unlike his own. Years later he was to remember the tone and format when devising his own famous introductory monologues for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
on television. He had the notion that Benchley, who was more of a writer than an actor at that point and had been hired just to write dialogue, would be good casting as the semi-alcoholic reporter the hero is sent to replace at the beginning of the film. His main scene is largely exposition, and so to give it character the obvious solution was to get Benchley to write the role as Benchley, and play it himself. During the shooting Hitch constantly admonished Benchley just to be himself, and everything would be fine—the camera would simply ‘eavesdrop'. The most radical piece of direction Hitch was heard to offer Benchley in the whole course of the movie, in fact, was on one occasion when he said to the heavy-lidded actor, ‘Come, now, Bob, let's open those
naughty
little eyes.'