Hitch (32 page)

During the shooting, Hitch encountered more problems than he had anticipated. For one thing, this was his first film in colour, and
he insisted that he must have rushes
in colour
, which at that time was unheard-of from Technicolor: usually the rushes were in black-and-white, and the film-maker saw how his work looked in colour only weeks later. It was just as well Hitch made this stipulation, however, for when he saw the rushes he was horrified to discover that his dusk and sunset effects, carefully graded on the cyclorama outside the set's apartment window, had turned out a bilious orange, so that he had to reshoot five of the film's eight reels to obtain a quieter, more realistic effect. This nearly doubled his shooting time in the studio, though the work was still accomplished in a brisk eighteen days, despite the untimely illness of the cameraman after the first four or five days, so that the photography had to be completed by the Technicolor consultant with the aid of the chief electrician.

Maybe it was Hitch's curious denying himself of cutting, the very resource which had always meant most to him in the cinema. Maybe it was the deadening effect of the limitations of sound this kind of shooting involved—it was so meticulously disciplined, with all the furniture, props and camera carefully muffled so that the sound track could all be recorded directly with virtually no need for looping dialogue. Or maybe it was just that the project so long planned had finally gone cold on him (the best advice for any filmmaker who finally gets the chance to realize his lifetime's dream seems to be, Don't). For whatever reason,
Rope
, despite its gimmick value and some effective moments, which earned its money back with a modest profit, seems strangely flat and ponderous, all played at a uniform pace which kills most of the excitement and suspense built into the subject-matter. At least Hitch had got it finally out of his system, which was all to the good, but it was saddening that his first independent production was such a disappointment, and left critics and public making excuses and hoping for better things.

Unfortunately, his next film,
Under Capricorn
, offered little for their comfort. It was the second (and last) of the Transatlantic Pictures productions, made in England, a period piece (a genre for which Hitch feels he has no talent, since he does not know how much the characters earn, how they go to the lavatory), and cost $2.5 million, much more than Hitch or anyone else thought it should. It was also a complete financial failure which brought about the liquidation of the company, and was repossessed by the bank which had financed it, so that it was unseeable for a number of years. During that time
it developed a healthy underground reputation in France, where it was often regarded as one of Hitch's masterpieces—a view in which he clearly does not concur. His recollections of the filming are nearly all unhappy, and he tends to talk of the film itself as a total miscalculation.

The trouble? Hitch says casting and his own vanity, closely interlinked. The casting because he sacrificed everything to the idea of grabbing Ingrid Bergman from all other Hollywood producers, without bearing in mind that she would cost so much as to make the whole project, given what it was, uneconomic, and also that she was at this time very nervous and preoccupied because of her new liaison with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Vanity because, having successfully laid his snare with an English novel he was not specially keen on but thought might appeal to Bergman, he was so delighted with his producer's
coup
and his triumphal return to Britain to make the picture that he began to play the star himself and paid insufficient attention to getting the film itself right. He was inattentive to scripting: he had Hume Cronyn adapt the story again, though he was not an experienced enough writer, and finally achieved his earlier desire of getting James Bridie to write a screenplay for him without considering that Bridie was, after all, famed for his brilliantly paradoxical dialogue and notorious for his lackadaisical construction and the weakness of his last acts, both faults well in evidence in this screenplay. Finally, he did not pay enough attention to the casting of the lesser roles: in particular the role of the groom for whom the heroine sacrifices all (a variation on the theme of
The Paradine Case
), which he assigned to one of his pet actors, Joseph Cotten, though he was much too intelligent and refined for the part, which might ideally have been played by someone like Burt Lancaster.

Hitch calls his own behaviour at this point in his career ‘stupid and juvenile', but he also admits to a lot of enthusiasm invested in the picture, and he seems to undervalue now his own enterprise in trying, however unsuccessfully, to do something different, something to break the thriller mould at this stage in his career. For the subject is not in any way a thriller—it hardly contains more than one or two momentary shocks, like the shrunken head placed in the heroine's bed by the sinister housekeeper (a close relation of Mrs. Danvers in
Rebecca
) to keep her dubious of her own sanity. It is a slowly developing psychological drama set in a strange place and
period (nineteenth-century Australia) and Hitch does not even try to make it look like a thriller. His style is as leisurely and smooth-flowing as the story itself, with considerable use of the long takes (seven to ten minutes) which he had perfected in
Rope
. These were much commented on at the time, mostly unfavourably, as reducing the thriller potential of the story, but are now totally unnoticeable, so far have they become part of the normal language of the cinema since 1949.

On the other hand, it is true that the film is not very good; it does seem heavy and uncomfortable, as though nobody on it was communicating very well with anyone else. Certainly Hitch had a number of quarrels with Ingrid Bergman, with whom up to then he had got on perfectly. Once she was complaining so violently about the method of working, the long takes and the disappearing scenery, that Hitch, refusing to argue, just walked out of the room while her back was turned and went home, only to discover afterwards that she had been so wound up she had continued her monologue without even noticing his absence for another twenty minutes. On another occasion they were shooting a drunk scene on the stairs and Bergman could not, or would not, keep to her marks. Why should she anyway? she asked. She was supposed to be drunk. Couldn't they just let her act the scene the way she felt it, and follow her? This time Hitch decided on a little demonstration, so he agreed to shoot the scene her way if she would play it his, and leave the decision of which version to use up to her. Once she saw the rushes of their respective versions she was in no doubt that Hitch's was better, and generously admitted as much. But in general the film, odd and in a way compulsive as it is (particularly on television), does reek of compromise and discomfort, and Hitch was glad to forget it, if he could be allowed to. In fact, the only long-term advantage he gained from the
Under Capricorn
adventure was that through it he first met Peggy Robertson, the young Englishwoman taken on as continuity girl, who impressed him so much that the next time a chance came up he teasingly informed her that no, he did not this time need a continuity girl but—after a suitable pause for suspense—he did, if she might possibly be interested, need a personal assistant. And so another permanent member was added to the Hitchcock ‘family'.

With the débâcle of
Under Capricorn
behind him, he decided to follow his old principle and ‘run for cover'—when you are out of
ideas, and rattled because of it, take refuge in something tried and true, just exercising your craft, until the phase passes. Not that
Stage Fright
, his next film, worked out quite that way, but it was an attempt in the right direction. After the weightier works of his latest Hollywood period, he determined on a light-weight, black-and-white thriller with a British locale and very much in the style of his pre-war British films. A suitable subject was to hand in the shape of a story with a theatrical background from a book by the English journalist Selwyn Jepson, just published, which reviewers had instantly cited as ideal material for Hitchcock—a suggestion which he thinks he may have accepted a little too uncritically. Certainly he put aside, yet again,
I Confess
, the other subject (besides
Rope
) that he had wanted to make since the mid-1930s, as well as
Jack Shepherd
and
Dark Duty
, the story of a British prison governor, all three of which he had definitely announced as in the works within the previous year. Instead he set right to work with Alma on a treatment based on two of Jepson's stories, which was then turned into a screenplay by James Bridie and Whitfield Cook, author of Pat's second Broadway play.

Pat was of course at this time still in London, at RADA, though she had now moved out of the cousins' place in Golders Green and taken a flat with a couple of fellow students. Alma and Hitch were consequently able to see a lot of her, and Hitch put her into his new film in a small role as well as using her as a double for the star, Jane Wyman, in some scenes. The film, after the pervasive humourlessness of his last few films, is primarily cheerful. The central characters, played by Jane Wyman and Richard Todd, are rather too dull for us to be very interested in their problems, or who did what to whom, but there is a lot of fun around the edges with a gallery of British character actors such as Alastair Sim (suggested by Bridie, whose greatest interpreter he was), Sybil Thorndike, Kay Walsh, Miles Malleson and Joyce Grenfell, not to mention Marlene Dietrich magisterially intoning Cole Porter's song ‘The Laziest Girl in Town' and flashing her famous legs.

Hitch had trouble keeping Jane Wyman, who was supposed to be playing a very plain girl, from surreptitiously glamorizing herself to rival Dietrich. But then he really had fun with the extravagant theatrical-benefit garden party, and in parts of the film the sense of enjoyment is infectious. Towards the cast in general he was as usual impassive. Marlene Dietrich recalls: ‘He frightened the daylights
out of me. He knew exactly what he wanted, a fact that I adore, but I was never quite sure if I did right. After work he would take us to the Caprice restaurant, and feed us with steaks he had flown in from New York, because he thought they were better than the British meat, and I always thought he did that to show that he was not really disgusted with our work.' And in the case of Hitch and Dietrich a sterling regard for each other's supreme professionalism ripened into a warm affection. The problems of the plot were never quite solved—the audience is kept in the dark for too long about who the real villain is, no one is in real danger during the film, and everyone, even the ostensible villains, is scared. These considerations finally seem more important than the curious objections raised at the time that the film is ‘dishonest' because it begins with a flashback told by Richard Todd which finally proves to be a lie. The camera, it is asserted, should not lie, even if a character in a film can lie verbally. But who says? After the narrative ambiguities of
Last Year in Marienbad
it is hard to feel so confident of anything in the cinema.

Hitch's return to Britain had not exactly proved the unmitigated triumph he had hoped and fantasized it to be. But it had not been a total disaster either, and he could return to Hollywood with his reputation only slightly tarnished. He and Pat and Alma all went back together, home after an unusually long break. In Hollywood he now felt more comfortable, and apart from some brief location work on the second
Man Who Knew Too Much
he would not film in Britain again for some twenty-two years, until
Frenzy
in 1972. He was by no means down and out. He had been well paid for his producer-director work on the last two films, and he was still news, still very much a name to conjure with. But there was no doubt that at this point in his career he was sorely in need of a hit. Fortunately, one of his biggest was just around the corner, to inaugurate the greatest period in his Hollywood career.

When
Strangers on a Train
was published in 1950, Patricia Highsmith was an unknown thriller writer, far from the literary eminence she was later to attain, and this was her first novel. It was flattering when her agent was approached by Alfred Hitchcock's office with an offer to buy the film rights of the book. It was a pity the offer was not larger (only $2,000), but as Hitch said when she met him, really she should pay him to make the film, it would mean so much to her in terms of later reputation and sales. Ruefully she has to admit that he was right, though at the time it was a blow to her vanity as well as her pocket. But the agent said take it, you're not likely to get a better offer, and she did.

So began the slow process of Hitch's Hollywood come-back. He prepared a first treatment with Whitfield Cook. To begin with he could find no writer who seemed to see what he saw in the subject—nearly a dozen turned down his treatment because they couldn't visualize or make sense of it, though to Hitch it seemed clarity itself: it is about an exchange of crimes, and therefore an exchange of guilt, between two men, one of whom happens to be crazy and tries to force the other into doing his murder once he has carried out the other's murder for him. Despairing of making sense of himself to a Hollywood professional, Hitch decided to turn instead to someone who certainly knew a thing or to about guilt and lunacy: the distinguished thriller-writer Raymond Chandler. Chandler had worked on a couple of scripts before, but was refreshingly unintimidated by Hollywood conventions of what would work and what should and should not be done. On the other hand, he had some fixed ideas of his own, which were to give Hitch a few headaches. Improbably, for someone so careless of detail in his own books (it is recorded that when the makers of the film
The Big Sleep
consulted him to settle the question of who did commit one of the murders in
his original novel he was quite unable to provide a satisfactory answer), he developed a conscience about believable characterization, and so made all kinds of difficulties for Hitch. Hitch would say, in effect, Here we have certain characters at point A, and in five minutes' screen time they have to be at point B; now it is up to you to get them there. And Chandler would answer, with elaborate scruples, But how do we know, given the characters at point A, that they would ever reach point B? To Hitch it was quite clear: the characters were invented in terms of the actions they had to go through, so you simply ironed out or went back and corrected any inconsistencies; for Chandler they had some mysterious life of their own, which he did not feel qualified to interfere with.