Hitch (9 page)

Getting the, film completed was one thing; getting it shown was quite another. Exhibitors back home were still dubious, and though the success of
The Rat
did raise Gainsborough's stock in their eyes,
The Pleasure Garden
was not trade shown until six months later. Its reception was gratifying, if not sensational: the
Daily Express
hailed Hitch as a ‘young man with a master mind', and the picture was shown around a bit, though not very extensively until after Hitch's third film,
The Lodger
, had really made his name. Meanwhile, there was more work to do, another film contracted with Emelka to be made in Munich. That film,
The Mountain Eagle
(called in America
Fear
o'
God
), is the only one of Hitch's works which does not seem to survive anywhere, though it is difficult to believe it will not turn up somewhere, sometime, mislabelled in a private collection or an East European archive. Anyway, Hitch stoutly maintains that it can be no great loss, as the film was terrible.

Its oddities started with the locale of the story versus the locations for the film. It was based on a plot outline by one Charles Lapworth, one of Balcon's lieutenants who had formerly worked for Goldwyn in London, and concerned a virginal schoolteacher in old Kentucky who escapes the clutches of an evil shopkeeper and hides out with a mysterious recluse whom she eventually marries. Since there was the co-production deal with Germany, said Balcon, why shouldn't the Tyrol stand in quite adequately for Kentucky—who had ever been to Kentucky anyway …? Hitch went out to Munich to scout locations, but had no idea where to start. One day he saw in a shop window a painting of just the sort of village they needed—an anonymous huddle of roofs, a church spire—and pointed this out as a model to his German associates. With typical simple-mindedness the Germans traced the painter, asked him where the village was and came proudly back to Hitch with the information that it was Obergurgl, in the Urz valley, and that they had arranged for him to go there. What they did not tell him was that it was a two-hour train journey followed by five hours on a road which at best was too poor for motor traffic and at worst, the last stretch from the neighbouring village (called Zweizimmern and just about that big), required them to go on foot. Finally, they arrived in Obergurgl,
decided that it seemed fine, checked on the weather calendar to be told categorically that the first snows always came at the beginning of November, and started back on foot. About a mile from Zweizimmern Hitch was suddenly attacked by a violent fit of nausea, which he could not understand at all. Later it was diagnosed as a specialized form of claustrophobia; just before, he had been aware of wanting to scream wildly to the mountains, ‘Let me speak English to someone', finding the strain of having to speak German to people who spoke no word of English suddenly unbearable.

Back in Munich they set up production and returned to Obergurgl with the unit to start shooting, still without a leading lady. They had scenes with snow and scenes without, and were counting on shooting those without first. So of course during the first night an unprecedented foot of snow fell, a month early. A quick reshuffle of the schedule took care of that, but the problem of the leading lady remained. From London Balcon kept bombarding Hitch with telegrams (rather slow-motion telegrams, of course, by the time they had been carried on foot up the mountain tracks) suggesting all kinds of Hollywood stars—mostly, like Agnes Ayres, rather
démodée
by this time. Eventually came the curt announcement that he was being sent Nita Naldi, best known for her vamp roles in De Mille's first
Ten Commandments
and opposite Valentino in
Blood and Sand
. Not very likely casting, Hitch thought despondently, and he was not much comforted when she arrived with a big-star wardrobe, a distinguished-looking (and rich) white-haired escort who accompanied her to the set every day, and scarlet fingernails over an inch long. The fingernails were the biggest problem, but finally Hitch persuaded her to shed them for the role. And at least he found her a very amusing woman, with a tough, somewhat bawdy sense of humour and a broad Brooklyn accent bizarrely at odds with her statuesque screen presence.

Relieved to be back in England early in 1926 after their German experiences, Hitch and Alma (who had again been his assistant on
The Mountain Eagle
) plunged with enthusiasm into preparing a third film, this time to be made close to home, at Islington. At least they were busy, but things did not seem all that rosy.
The Pleasure Garden
had finally been trade shown, but had not exactly set the Thames on fire.
The Mountain Eagle
was finished and shelved—it was not trade shown till a month after the opening of
The Lodger
in September 1926. The company had again been reorganized, and
was now to distribute through something called Piccadilly Pictures, which had the none-too-cooperative C. M. Woolf as chairman, Balcon as managing director on the commercial side, and the actor Carlyle Blackwell as joint managing director in charge of production. Cutts was the star director, under a long-term contract. And though it seemed Cutts did not harbour any malice towards Hitch—at the moment he was riding high on the success of
The Rat
and preparing a sequel,
The Triumph of the Rat
—it was not the most comfortable situation for Hitch to be working side by side with the man who just a few months before had been trying determinedly to get him fired.

But for the time being all these troubles were to fade into the background, since Hitch, for the first time, had found a subject which really turned him on. It had all come about because he had gone to see a play called
Who Is He
?, which was based on a bestselling novel by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes called
The Lodger
. The idea of the novel, and the play, was suggested by the Jack the Ripper murders, which had happened in 1888 in Whitechapel, not very far from London Wall, where Hitch had worked for Henleys. At the time, the idea of the ghoulish killer, apparently a man with some medical training, going undetected about the streets killing and dissecting prostitutes had caused something close to panic throughout London, and the resultant outcry had been an important force in a campaign to improve conditions in the East End slums. But as time passed and there were no more murders of this kind interest inevitably slackened; when Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's novel first appeared in
McClure's Magazine
in 1911 it excited very little attention. But gradually sales built up, and by 1923 the cheap sixpenny edition had sold over half a million copies.

The young Hitch, living as he did not very far from the scene of these crimes when they were still fresh in the popular imagination, must have known something about the Ripper. But what caught his imagination in this fictionalized treatment of the story was its focus on the everyday surroundings of the killer, the sudden, unpredictable incursion of terror into an unimpeachably safe, sober, respectable home not so different from his own. Mrs. Belloc Lowndes had got the inspiration for her story from a snatch of conversation at a dinner party in which one of the guests told another that his mother's butler and cook, who let rooms, thought they had had Jack the Ripper as one of their lodgers. In the book and the play ‘the Stranger'
is just such a person, in just such a setting, and the whole thing is seen from the point of view of the family he stays with, their dawning suspicions and fears. There seemed to be the makings here of a great film subject, and one to which Hitch particularly responded: a combination of crime, about which he had a timid, painfully law-abiding person's slightly voyeuristic curiosity, and the bourgeois world of his own childhood, set in the London he knew so well instead of the Far East or Kentucky.

The big advantage the project had was unfortunately also its biggest problem. The star assigned to play the leading role of the Stranger was none other than Gainsborough's biggest current asset, Ivor Novello, who had shot to fame on the screen in
The Rat
and was now working on the sequel which Jack Cutts was directing. Novello was more of a personality (and a profile) than an actor, but it was early in his career and his image had not yet been set. In
The Rat
he had played a picturesquely
louche
character, an apache who uses women in the way apaches were supposed to do, and that was all right—millions of women secretly wanted to be slapped around by him. But a pathological killer—that was something else again. Clearly, if he was to play the role he had to be exonerated. Well, Hitch reasoned, that was not too bad after all. The real subject of the story was fear and its effects, not the psychology of the central character, who even in the original remains a mystery. So, going straight back to the book, Hitch began to fashion a free adaptation in collaboration with Eliot Stannard, who had scripted his two previous films. There were rumbles at the studio: Jack Cutts was not at all happy to see ‘his' star assigned to the upstart assistant, and made his feelings quite plain. But under Balcon's protection the film was ready to shoot in early May.

It was essentially the team as before: including again Alma as assistant director and Ventimiglia behind the camera. But this time, in keeping with the subject, the style was very different. If the two films Hitch had directed in Germany were very American in style,
The Lodger
, ‘A Story of the London Fog', was very German: dark shadows, strange angles and disconcerting compositions in order to convey an atmosphere of neurosis and ambiguity. The German cinema at this time had a special corner in atmosphere, and had built up a repertory of visual language—mirrors and reflections, for example, are usually deceiving; stairs are inescapable, the movement of characters on them creating a feeling of elation or dejection,
their spiralling up into the shadows strangely unsettling the spectator, he cannot quite say why. All these elements had cropped up in connection with the character of Jack the Ripper two years before in the third episode of Paul Leni's
Waxworks
, a picture which Hitch had certainly seen, either in Germany or at the showings of the new Film Society, which Hitch had joined shortly after its foundation in London in 1925. They crop up again in
The Lodger
, but in almost all respects Hitch's treatment is otherwise very different: Leni's account of Jack the Ripper is all hallucinatory expressionist fantasy, while Hitch's is clearly rooted, like all his later work, in everyday reality.

Of course Hitch's own everyday reality was constantly expanding. He was moving more and more in theatrical circles, and making friends elsewhere. During the making of
Woman to Woman
, for instance, he met another young man just starting out in the business, Sidney Bernstein (ultimately Lord Bernstein) who was to become one of his few close lifelong friends. Bernstein was in the exhibition side of cinema, his family controlling what was to become the very extensive and important Granada chain of cinemas. But whereas most exhibitors at this time (and since) were strictly businessmen, part of the material for their business being films, though it might just as well be soap or used cars, for all the specific interest they took, Sidney Bernstein was seriously interested in the film itself, its making, its artistic possibilities and its impact on audiences—he was one of the first people in Britain not only to observe the numbers of people who went to the cinema, but to want to know why they went and to do something practical about finding out, by organizing the first systematic national surveys of picturegoing habits. He and Hitch immediately hit if off, as Bernstein was the first person Hitch had met who looked at films in much the same way he did. In other respects they agreed to differ—Bernstein had strong left-wing political convictions, Hitch was always resolutely non-political—but when Bernstein became a founder-member of the Film Society in 1925 and a member of its first council, Hitch naturally knew all about it and attended such meetings as he could when he was not out of the country working on his own films. And he made a number of other friends and acquaintances through that connection, among them the writers Angus McPhail and Ivor Montagu, the film director Adrian Brunel, and Iris Barry, a film critic later to be a leading force in the creation of the New York Museum of Modern Art's film collections and programmes. For the first time Hitch was
moving in circles which would seriously discuss the potential of the film as an art form, and with people who cared about the cinema as passionately as he did.

Back at Islington these new connections were looked on rather dubiously. Hitch seemed a practical enough sort of fellow, but was he perhaps, horror of horrors, going to go arty? He was not, for the time being, interfered with, but the shooting of
The Lodger
was quite closely observed, and did not, from the tales filtering back, do much to put such doubts to rest. One day, for instance, word came that he had had a floor built of one-inch-thick plate glass, about six feet square, had put the camera underneath it, and was photographing only the soles of Ivor Novello's feet as he paced back and forth across it. On another occasion he spent a day setting up a shot which, once it was printed, no one could work out the mechanics of: what was seen on the screen was a moving-camera shot without a cut which made it appear that the camera had moved away from a couple dancing in a ballroom, across a table between a couple sitting facing each other, out through a window which then proved to be set in a solid wall, then back right across a courtyard. The secret was that everything possible was placed on a movable dolly, not just the camera; and then at the strategic moment first the table with its occupants, then the window frame, was dropped, the walls which framed the window being brought in at the same time, so that all these elements appeared to be stationary while only the camera moved in a way which common sense told one was impossible. To add to the studio's doubts, after expending all this ingenuity on the solution of a purely technical problem Hitch decided not to include the shot in the final montage of the film.