Hitch (28 page)

The Hitchcocks were indeed becoming more and more a part of American life, as Hitch's next film,
Shadow of a Doubt
, very clearly demonstrates. By this time he was easing up into a routine of about one film a year, and after the experience of being rushed into
Saboteur
before he was ready, he determined that this time he was going to start shooting only when he was good and ready. The subject came to him absolutely by chance—a chance of the kind which nowadays no major figure in Hollywood could afford to indulge, with litigious writers pressing so hard that no unsolicited matter can be accepted unless it comes through a recognized agent. But in those more innocent days things could occasionally happen otherwise. One day Margaret MacDonell, the head of Selznick's story department, mentioned that her husband Gordon, a novelist, had an idea for a story which he had not yet written down. Hitch liked what he heard, arranged to have lunch at the Brown Derby with the MacDonells, listened to the story as they had it and elaborated it with them while they ate. Gordon MacDonell then went home, typed up what they had discussed as a nine-page outline; Hitch bought it, and the film was under way.

To write the screenplay Hitch decided to go back to his old idea of playing hunches by getting distinguished literary figures to work
with him. He had just seen and been very impressed by
Our Town
, and so his first choice was Thornton Wilder, who had never written a screenplay before. To Hitch's surprise and delight, Wilder liked the idea and did not in any way look down, as so many American intellectuals did at that time, on the film medium. He came out to Hollywood right away, and Hitch began one of the most harmonious collaborations of his working life. Wilder and he would talk in the morning, then Wilder would go off by himself in the afternoon and write bits and pieces in longhand in a high-school notebook. He had such a clear idea of the milieu and the characters that he never wrote consecutively, but just scenes here and there, as the mood took him, until the outline screenplay was completed. He had already enlisted in the Psychological Warfare Division of the US Army, and in fact wrote the last pages of the script on the train to his military service, with Hitch accompanying him across-country to Florida to complete the collaboration
en route
.

Hitch would have liked Wilder to make the last revisions to the screenplay himself, but obviously that was not possible, and anyway Hitch wanted a different quality injected into it, a few touches of humour to balance the darkness of the main story—that of the relationship between an attractive, villainous uncle, a murderer of widows, and his idealistic young niece, who penetrates his secret. Wilder suggested the playwright Robert Ardrey, author of an effective ghost play,
Thunder Rock
, who was then under contract to MGM, but Hitch felt he was a little sober-sided, and instead picked Sally Benson, author of
Meet Me in St. Louis
, who had a particularly attractive light touch in handling the domestic scenes and those involving the children. The finishing touches were put to the script in the course of shooting, by Patricia Collinge, who plays the mother in the film and wrote the scene between the girl Charlie and the detective when they speak of love and marriage.

Right from its original conception
Shadow of a Doubt
was built on a principle new to Hitch's American films, and indeed new to his sound films altogether—that of detailed location realism. He had aimed towards this, tentatively, in the New York scenes of
Saboteur
, but amid so much studio reconstruction and the manifold extravagances of the thriller plot this was scarcely appreciable.
Shadow of a Doubt
, on the other hand, was a story of life in a small American town, by the author of a classic piece of Americana, and Hitch wanted it to be as precise and accurate as possible: particularly in
his two recent ‘British' films,
Rebecca
and
Suspicion
, Hitch had become conscious of the weaknesses inherent in placing such stories in a studio limbo, without the vivid details of local colour he could have provided, even in a studio, in England. So he was determined not to make the same mistake again when it was not necessary, in his first fully ‘American' film.

Consequently, even before he and Wilder started detailed work on the screenplay, they picked a specific town for their setting, the northern California town of Santa Rosa, and went there to explore on the spot and drink in the atmosphere and look of the town. They even selected in advance the exact house they would use for the home of the family in the film. Wilder thought Hitch's suggestion was too big and grand for a bank clerk, but when they investigated they found that the occupant was exactly in the bank clerk income bracket. (Unfortunately, he was so delighted at the idea of having a film made round his house that when they came back to shoot they found he had had it completely repainted and smartened up, so they had to dilapidate it a bit and then put it back to spanking newness when the shooting was over.) And though the interiors were shot at Universal City, all the exteriors were made in Santa Rosa, the cast and crew living in close communion with the locals. Some of the performers, notably Edna May Wonacott, who plays the younger sister, were recruited locally (Edna May was the daughter of a Santa Rosa grocer), and even when small roles were played by professionals the natives were more than ready to advise. For example, the policeman on traffic duty who admonishes Teresa Wright (playing Charlie) for running across the street with insufficient care was an actor, but constantly directed by the real traffic cop as to how he should deal with traffic at the intersection—‘Now let some traffic through. Now let some pedestrians cross'—and was so convincing that a woman went up to him to ask directions, as from a real policeman, and was quite surprised when he denied all knowledge with ‘I'm sorry, I'm a stranger here myself.' The funeral of Uncle Charlie at the end was staged right in the main square, with a few professional extras, but most of the people we see on the street as the funeral cortège passes are ordinary Santa Rosans, as a matter of course stopping and taking off their hats, even to an empty coffin.

Hitch particularly relished this return to giving the violence and menace in his films a local habitation and a name. Much of the
effectiveness of his British thrillers had come from setting their extraordinary happenings against very humdrum, everyday surroundings. And, too, he was fascinated by the omnipresence of evil, the fact that there was no refuge from it. He had first had some glimpses of this in his childhood: he became really interested in the idea of poisoning, for instance, when he was seventeen and a blonde was found dead a few blocks from his family home in Leytonstone, killed with a home-made poison. His social contacts with Edith Thompson's father at the same time made a deep retrospective impression on him—murder, evidently, was or might be a family affair, something happening to friends or relatives, just down the street, behind the most respectable façade. Which was, of course, very much what the good fathers were always warning him of, in school and at church: the Devil was always active, evil was everywhere and must constantly be guarded against. Every little town has its share of evil, and a sleepy backwater like Santa Rosa in the 1940s is not exempt, even if it seems like a paradise of innocence. There is, after all, nowhere to hide, and it is Hitch's fearful appreciation of this which most vividly dramatizes
Shadow of a Doubt
, a film which has always been very close to his heart.

It was in connection with
Shadow of a Doubt
, incidentally, that the Hitchcocks finally moved into their second American home. Exploring northern California in 1940, they had found and fallen in love with a then peaceful, hilly area between Santa Cruz and the southern end of the peninsula on which San Francisco stands. Scots Valley was remote-seeming, yet accessible to Santa Cruz and San Francisco—an ideal equivalent to their English country refuge at Shamley Green. They soon found a house in its own grounds, with a spectacular view out over the hillside, and bought it, but then they were so tied up in Hollywood they never got round to moving in until 1942, when
Shadow of a Doubt
brought them much more to the north in the line of work. By early 1943 they had fallen comfortably into a new routine of weeks in Bel Air, week-ends near Santa Cruz, interrupted only when Hitch was actually shooting a film. Or, of course, was out of the country, back in England, as he was to be for several months the following year.

Before his return to England he did make one more film, however—his third obvious contribution to the war effort,
Lifeboat
. He was, of course, still under contract to the currently quiescent Selznick, who remained in general control of his career. The only thing he
did directly for Selznick at this time was to direct one of the tiny Buy-War-Bonds appeal films which happened to feature Jennifer Jones, now the apple of Selznick's eye and centre of his personal and professional preoccupations, though they were not free to get married until 1949. To Hitch all the effort seemed rather disproportionate: himself in the director's chair, a top cameraman, top make-up artist and the whole of a large studio sound-stage (though they were using only a tiny corner of it) occupied for a day just to capture on film one shot of Jennifer Jones delivering a stereotyped patriotic appeal straight to the camera. However, he was rather amused and touched by Selznick's evident vulnerability and anxiety that everything possible and impossible should be done to show off his new love's talent and beauty in the best imaginable light, so he submitted with good grace.

Meanwhile, Selznick was constantly wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, buying and selling properties and people, and at the beginning of 1943, when still officially out of pictures, he took time to rap Samuel Goldwyn firmly over the knuckles for trying to lure Hitch away from him:

You recently have sent direct for one of my people, Alfred Hitchcock, and talked with him without so much as either asking us, or even letting us know after the fact. I wonder just how you would behave if I reciprocated in kind—or if any of the big companies did it with your people. Hitch has a minimum of two years to go with me, and longer if it takes him more time to finish four pictures, two of which I have sold to Twentieth Century-Fox. And not alone did you try to seduce him, but you tried something which I have never experienced before with any company or individual—you sought to make him unhappy with my management of him. When you told Hitch that he shouldn't be wasting his talents on stories like
Shadow of a Doubt
, and that this wouldn't be the case if he were working for you, what you didn't know was that Hitchcock personally chose the story and created the script—and moreover that he is very happy about the picture, which I think he has every right to be. Further, that in the years since I brought Hitchcock over here from England (at a time when nobody in the industry, including yourself, was willing to give him the same opportunity …) and established him as one of the most important directors in the world with the production and exploitation of
Rebecca
, he has never once had to do a story that he
was not enthusiastic about. This has always been my attitude about directors, and I happen to know that it has not always been your attitude toward directors under contract to you …

Clearly Selznick could still be possessive and jealous over his prerogatives and what he regarded as his property. When Joseph Cotten, who had just been making
Shadow of a Doubt
with Hitch, heard that Selznick had sold Hitch to Twentieth Century-Fox for two projected features,
Lifeboat
to be the first of them, he observed ‘I see they're selling
directors
like cattle now.' And Selznick for all his passionate involvement in the film-making process, was also a tough businessman, ever ready to make a buck when he could see how. Hitch was caught between two fires. On the one hand while he was working for Selznick he was inevitably subject to day-to-day interference; on the other he never knew when he might not be sold off, ‘like cattle', as part of some deal Selznick was cooking up. But at least Selznick came to place unique confidence in Hitch: as he wrote later on

Increasingly, I learned to have great respect for Hitchcock. Thus, while I worked very closely with him on preparation, and while he left the editing to me, I left him entirely alone on set. During
Spellbound
, I don't think I was on the set twice during the entire film.

However, Hitch had nothing to complain of in his new situation at 20th (where, in the event, he made only one film). He got something very like red-carpet treatment, Kenneth Macgowan, the intellectual of the outfit, to produce the film for him, and a completely free hand in his choice of subject, writers and cast. Hitch considered. He was still nagged by a feeling that he wanted to do more, through the medium he knew best, to help with the war effort and make some kind of significant statement. On the other hand, he deeply doubted the efficacy of the straight message picture in any circumstances, and was convinced that he could not make one. What he knew about was making thrillers—hence
Foreign Correspondent
and
Saboteur
. But there might perhaps be another way of combining the elements …

At which point he bethought himself of an idea which had attracted him, as a sheer technical challenge, for many years: the idea, as he summed it up, of making a whole film in a telephone booth. The possibility of denying oneself the scope and mobility normal in the cinema and yet making a film that was purely cinematic appealed
enormously to him. Later the notion, or something akin to it, was to produce one of his greatest triumphs in
Rear Window. Lifeboat
, though the subject of some controversy, is certainly less than that. But its basic idea is sound enough: the whole thing is shot in and around a lifeboat, the occupants of which present a microcosm of the war-torn world, and their story a sort of thriller in which a disguised Nazi tries to steer the boat towards a German supply ship and is finally unmasked and thwarted.