Hitch (37 page)

Hitch knew the depressing answers to these questions already, but the challenge fascinated him. In the role of Balestrero he cast an
actor he had long admired but never worked with, Henry Fonda, whose face and acting style made him perfect for the victim role. In the difficult (indeed, impossible) role of the wife Hitch cast his latest protégée, Vera Miles, whom he had put under personal contract after working with her on his television series. Physically she had the makings of his favourite cool blonde type, and he thought he could manoeuvre her into it. He set to work to mould her career, choose her other roles for her, give her an image by selecting the colours she should wear and the way her hair should be styled. But he came up against a problem he had not anticipated: she was an excellent actress—better, probably, than some of the others he had given the same treatment to—and she looked more or less right, but temperamentally she was all wrong. On screen she came over as strong, practical, earthy. Not ethereal at all, not cool and mysterious. Nor, perhaps, the material really big, big stars are made of. In the end Hitch used her in two theatrical movies, playing the problematic Mrs. Balestrero and the lesser role of Janet Leigh's sister in
Psycho
, as well as in his most ambitious television show, the Ford Star Time hour
Incident on a Corner
. But the real test of his transformative skills,
Vertigo
, was foiled when Vera Miles got pregnant and had to be replaced by Kim Novak. It is difficult to imagine Vera Miles in the role; but then one should never underestimate Hitch. He did subsequently recognize that he had probably miscalculated with Vera Miles, but, lacking the clinching evidence
Vertigo
should have provided, it is difficult to know for sure.

In any case, her role in
The Wrong Man
was really peripheral, and Hitch, hoist on his own petard of documentary veracity, rather resented having to take so much time out from the main story of Balestrero's imprisonment to show what was happening meanwhile to the wife. What he strongly responded to, and threw himself wholeheartedly into, was the detailed business of the arrest, the booking and the imprisonment of Balestrero, all shown very much from his point of view. Throughout all this part of the film we see only what he sees: when he is handcuffed and too ashamed to look up, we never see who he is handcuffed to, or any more than the legs of the police officers involved. When he is put in prison Hitch documented down to the smallest detail how the prisoners had to fold and carry their bedclothes, what exactly was the routine of their cell life, and then made Henry Fonda reconstruct it exactly in as far as possible the actual locations where the original events took place. For
the insanity of the wife he even shot in the same nursing home and used many of the actual doctors and staff who had originally attended her to recreate their roles in the film. He used dramatic licence only at one or two points—most notably that in which we dissolve from Balestrero, in despair and praying for help and guidance, to the face of the real culprit, on his way to rob another store and be caught. Balestrero was apparently a religious man and did pray, but the coincidence here has a Hitchcockian logic and neatness (and maybe even mirrors his own religious convictions) rather than the smack of real life.

The Wrong Man
was little more than an interlude, rapidly made in black-and-white, before Hitch could get on to the picture he really wanted to make, both for himself and for Vera Miles. When he had announced three years earlier his intention of filming a novel by the French thriller-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called
D'entre les Morts (From Among the Dead
), which had been acquired for him by Paramount, he had, curiously enough, been falling in exactly with a deep-laid plan of the writers: they had heard that Hitch had been interested in acquiring rights to their novel
Les Diaboliques
, very successfully filmed by Clouzot, and inspired by this they had set out to write a novel deliberately designed to attract Hitch's attention. He did not know this until some time after he had made the film, when Truffaut told him, but clearly Boileau and Narcejac had been right on target with their guess of what would turn Hitchcock on.

The preparation of the film was a lot longer and more complicated than Hitch had envisaged, hence the delay and the intermediate films. For one thing, he had trouble getting a workable screenplay out of the book, which, like
Les Diaboliques
, relied heavily on tricks which were permissible only because the reader was kept quite in the dark on several crucial issues till the end and therefore was in no position to ask awkward questions. But as Hitch always said, ‘It's fine to be mysterious, but you cannot mystify the audience.' He wanted to transform shock into suspense, and make the film more of a meditation on illusion and reality, a portrait of an obsession, than a simple mechanical thriller. The basic theme of the story is a seeming return from the dead, and it is an intense love story. Very early in his preparations Hitch decided to set the story in the San Francisco area; he had many of the sequences clearly visualized, but somehow structurally it would not pull together. He had worked for
some time on a script with Alec Coppel, but despaired of structuring it satisfactorily. In 1957 he had contracted James Stewart to play the leading role of the obsessed detective (a strange role for him, but he claims he never considered that—if Hitch asked him to do something, he just did it without question), with Vera Miles as the elusive object of his desires, and had everything ready to go except the script.

So in desperation he called in Sam Taylor. Taylor never read the novel he was supposedly adapting, and never read the previous screenplay. Instead, he just listened to Hitch, let him tell the story the way he saw it over and over again, and took it from there. Hitch saw it, as usual, in a series of powerful visual images. The hero, who has just discovered he suffers from acute vertigo, is set to watch the wife of a client who is supposedly suicidal and obsessed with the story of an ill-fated ancestor of hers. First he follows her without contact, then, saving her from a suicide attempt, falls in love with her, but is unable, because of his vertigo, to save her a second time. Shortly afterwards, he meets a girl who looks just like her, though very different in personality, and sets about trying to make her over into his lost love, dressing her the same way, dyeing her hair and so on. Finally he discovers he has been the dupe in a murder, that the second girl is the same as the first, and then loses her again, this time for keeps. Hitch had all of this clear in his mind—the silent pursuit around San Francisco, the death and resurrection—but how to construct it, telling the audience enough to be mysterious but not mystifying?

Taylor suggested adding a character, a placid, understanding girl-friend for Stewart who would act as a sounding-board. Hitch told Taylor that he planned to reveal to the audience almost as soon as the heroine reappeared in her second incarnation that she was in fact the same person as the first, and had simply reverted to normal after doing her job in disguise. Taylor was amazed: wasn't this giving away the point of the story much too early? (A number of critics thought the same when the film came out.) Hitch explained carefully to him the concept of suspense versus shock: if the audience knew this well in advance of the hero, then their minds would be clear to sympathize, to anticipate her reactions and his—they would know exactly what was going on in the minds of the two characters, and that was where the real drama lay. Hitch and Taylor worked smoothly together, fleshing out and humanizing the characters, particularly
the James Stewart character, and made a number of location-scouting trips together in the Bay area. Taylor contributed one or two suggestions, like the drive under Fort Point, but most of the visualization of the story was already there in Hitch's mind.

In July 1957, in the middle of directing a couple of shows for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, Hitch had to go into hospital for an umbilical hernia and gallstones to be operated on, followed by a bout of colitis. But that did not stop him from bouncing right back into the television work and preparations for
Vertigo
. When at the last moment it turned out that Vera Miles was pregnant, and would not be able to make the film, Hitch could not delay it any further because of other commitments, and decided, unwillingly, to replace her with Kim Novak. The situation was not of the happiest, since Kim Novak was well aware she was very much second choice, and was not in any case the most secure of actresses. As usual with a Hitchcock script, the clothes and colours the characters wore in each scene were carefully indicated. Kim Novak began on her first meeting with the designer Edith Head (one of Hitch's most regular collaborators, on eleven films in all) by saying that there were just a couple of things she had to insist on—she never wore tailored suits, never wore grey, and never wore black shoes. Since the whole film hinged on our (and the hero's) first sight of her in the museum wearing a grey tailored suit and black shoes, this obviously caused something of a problem. Edith Head asked Hitch to talk to her. He invited her to his house, and said to her simply, ‘My dear Miss Novak, you can wear anything you want, anything—provided it is what the script calls for.' However he said it, it seemed to have the required effect, since in the scene in question she did wear a grey tailored suit and black shoes—hating it all the time.

Hitch's relations with her during the actual shooting remained cordial but distant. He recognized at least that she had genuine difficulties with the role, and dealt with them in his own way. Once, early in the filming, she raised a question about some aspect of the way her role was written: might it not be better if the character's inner motivation was brought out by changing this line or extending that? Hitch replied simply, ‘Kim, this is only a movie. Let's not go too deeply into these things. It's only a movie.' It worked like a charm: clearly, all she needed was to feel secure, to have the weight of responsibility taken off her shoulders, and that is what Hitch did. For the rest of the movie there was no more trouble and Kim Novak
did an excellent job—so good it is difficult to imagine Vera Miles or anyone else in the role. And ironically after the shooting was over something happened which gave Hitch an amused regard for her he had not had before. Since she then lived at Carmel, not far from their Scots Valley home, Hitch and Alma thought one evening to invite her over to dinner. The time she was supposed to arrive came and went, and about half an hour later there was a phone call: she and her escort were lost, and needed directions. Another half-hour and they arrived, Kim Novak perfectly made up for the occasion—and her story of a broken-down car, a tramp through the woods—with one lock of hair out of place and one small, symbolic smudge of earth on one cheek, just like in a Forties movie. Hitch said when he saw this he had to admit that, whatever reservations he might have had, she was the stuff real stars are made of.

The atmosphere of the film, and of the shooting, was so strange and intense it seemed to affect everyone. The remains of Spanish California, like Mission Dolores where the cemetery scene was shot, and San Juan Batista, the site of the mission in which the climactic scenes take place, have a rather mysterious, dreamlike quality. Everything in the locations was planned and researched down to the last detail. The precisely right lighting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honour, the right layout in the flower shop where James Stewart first sees the second Kim Novak, the exact measurements of the dress salon in Ransohoff's department store to be duplicated in every detail back at the studio, the diffusion in the graveyard sequence where the ghostlike Madeleine visits the grave of her supposed evil genius, Carlotta Valdes. All these Hitch planned with even more than his usual care and attention. Unmistakably the picture was particularly close to his heart.

Why? Easy to come up with glib formulations such as that he had been fascinated by necrophilia ever since he researched Jack the Ripper for
The Lodger
. So he may have been, but since
Vertigo
does not really have anything to do with necrophilia (the hero does not want his love-object dead, but a dead love restored to life) it hardly seems very much to the point. We should look deeper, to that stream of tormented, gloomy romanticism which had flowed clearly through nearly all of his films since he arrived in America, and is often perceptible before. However calm and unruffled his private life, undisturbed by the stormier emotions (he claims he has been completely celibate for more than forty years), and lived in exemplary
bourgeois circumstances with the same wife and a small familial group about him, there is no doubt that he does have a deep interest in sex, straight and bent. There are few of the darker recesses of the human heart that he has not explored at one time or another, and in particular he is expert in those sado-masochistic areas where sex and domination are inextricably entangled. It is as though in some way he equates lovers' manipulation of each other with the filmmaker's manipulation of his audience—they are different facets of the same power play, different ways of controlling and directing the emotions.

In
Rear Window
the equation is particularly clear: the hero's involvement with his girl-friend and his involvement with what he is peeping at run in tandem, and the two of them are turned on by their complicity in wishing the hypothesis of the murder to be proved correct. In
Notorious
, another film in which Hitch played quite explicitly an important part in creating the theme, the course of the love between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman is interrupted precisely because each of them is too proud to speak the necessary word before the other does. And the emotion in Hitchcock, the degree of sexual excitement even, is always stronger the more dammed up it is, the more diverted and prevented from natural expression. So, in
Vertigo
, the whole emotional situation is invested with a nightmarish intensity because its true nature is unacknowledged and its natural course diverted. The hero's passion for the girl in the second half of the film is perverse not because he continues hopelessly to love someone he believes dead—bereavement is not such an unnatural situation—but because he is incapable of reacting to a real, living woman until he has dominated her completely and transformed her, completely against her will, into the image of his lost love. In other words, he has chosen the fantasy over reality, and tried to transform reality into fantasy by the sheer force of his obsession.