It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (11 page)

In October of 2002, I was at the Savoy Hotel dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the British Film Institute. Seated next to me was Jack Cardiff, the acclaimed cinematographer who had worked on
Under Capricorn
for Hitchcock in 1949. Cardiff, however, had met the director much earlier, and he shared his memories with me.

“I first knew about Hitch towards the end of 1928, when I was fourteen. I was working then at Elstree, in silent films. I remember that he was on a nearby stage making
Blackmail.
I hadn’t met him yet. But then, two years later, he made
The Skin Game.

“I was then a humble numbers boy, the guy who puts the number board in, and with sound, you did the clappers. That’s when you clap two pieces of wood together so the editor can synchronize the sound to the picture.

“Originally, with the first sound films, it was considered so important, the director did the clappers. After a while, Hitch got fed up with it—‘Why am I doing this?’—and it was put onto the poor little numbers boy. So I had to do the numbers and also do the clappers. That was a long time ago.”

“I’
VE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED
in off-center people,” Hitchcock told me. “My picture
Rich and Strange
is about such people. The young couple doesn’t even know they’re off-center until opportunity knocks. Then, it almost knocks them over.”

Only Joan Barry’s voice had appeared in
Blackmail.
In
Rich and Strange,
all of her appeared.

Bryan Langley remembered that despite the low budget, a second unit was sent to Paris to shoot footage at the Folies Bergère, and background scenes were filmed in Alexandria, Egypt.

Rich and Strange
may have been influenced by the Hitchcocks’ own previous shipboard adventures before they married. The film, however, was based on a novel.

Hitchcock especially liked the actress who played the eccentric Miss Imrie, Elsie Randolph. It was her first screen role. He promised her that he would use her again, and Hitchcock did not forget. Forty years later, Elsie Randolph would appear in
Frenzy.

Though
Rich and Strange
was shot before Hitchcock’s next film,
Number 17,
it was released afterward, in December 1931.

F
OLLOWING
T
HE
S
KIN
G
AME
,
Hitchcock, Alma, and Pat had embarked on a world cruise. He returned to England with ideas that would be used in
Rich and Strange.
The film he wanted to do next was John Van Druten’s stage comedy
London Walls.
Instead, British International assigned him
Number 17,
a 1925 stage play by J. Jefferson Farjeon, while another director, Thomas Bentley, was assigned the Van Druten play. Hitchcock had not wanted to do
Number 17,
and Bentley had. “Typical of producers,” Hitchcock said.

Number 17
is a comedy-thriller, a popular genre of the time. A group of seemingly unrelated people meet in an unoccupied house for no apparent reason. Then, as the plot progresses, it turns out they are all there for the same mysterious reason. That reason might be described as a “MacGuffin,” Hitchcock’s later term for something that motivates characters to take dangerous chances for something they
must
have. “MacGuffins are not totally explainable,” he said, “or they wouldn’t be MacGuffins.”

In
The 39 Steps
it’s a secret airplane engine design, in
The Lady Vanishes
and in
Foreign Correspondent
it’s a secret diplomatic message, in
Notorious
it’s uranium ore, and in
North by Northwest
it’s rolls of microfilm. In
Number 17,
the MacGuffin is simply a diamond necklace. “It doesn’t matter what it is,” Hitchcock explained, “just that everyone wants it.” Hitchcock explained how the MacGuffin got its name:

“Two men are traveling on a train to Scotland. One of them is carrying an odd parcel. The other man says, ‘What have you there?’ and he answers, ‘A MacGuffin.’

“‘What’s a MacGuffin?’

“‘It’s a special device designed to trap wild lions in the Scottish Highlands.’

“‘But there
aren’t
any lions in the Scottish Highlands.’

“‘Then, this is no MacGuffin.’

“The MacGuffin, you see, is only important if you
think
it’s important, and that’s my job as a director, to make you
think
it’s important.”

The play was a parody of melodramatic thrillers and was written for the actor who starred in it, Leon M. Lion, who also helped finance the film.

Hitchcock told me that he didn’t care for anything about
Number 17
except the last part with the miniatures. This was his first extensive use of miniatures, a technique that would figure prominently in his later British thrillers. Bryan Langley, who shot this sequence in 1932, remembered well how it was done.

“The last ten minutes was all a model, a model train running through the countryside. Anything with the actors in it is the real train, the close-ups and so forth. But everything else was models. The scale of the models was one inch to one foot. When the train runs into the dockside, the dock was painted on what they call a Schüfftan shot. The little man you saw being run over by the train was reflected in a sheet of glass, which was put on the model track. The man, of course, was a real man, but he had to be a great distance away to be in scale to the rest of the thing. Hitchcock was there directing it, most of the time, in particular that last sequence. The man who did the models was a chap called Bill Warrington.

“The railway line was laid all around the edge of the big studio. I think it was more or less a reenactment of a real line.

“A few years back, we had a festival of Hitchcock in London, and I saw
Number 17,
and to my very great surprise, there was my name. It was put on as a credit, but nobody told me. I was a bit surprised. I’d never seen the film.

“I didn’t see it because I was always working and seldom had time to go looking at films. I should have seen them, but I had my mind on the next film.”

Langley paused for a moment, trying to remember something else from seventy years before.

“In
Number 17
there was a big house built in the studio, and there was a shot of a young lady at the top of the staircase listening to footsteps coming up the stairwell, and she was apprehensive as to what might happen. So, she was wringing her fingers, twisting them.

“This girl was sort of a beginner, and Hitchcock demonstrated how her hands should function. Her fingers should waggle, and he demonstrated with his big, fat fingers. It was like a string of sausages waving around. It was absolutely right, and when this slim girl did it, it was really a marvelous thing.

“From my personal point of view, Hitchcock was a marvelous man. He once said to me, ‘Do you want to be a lighting cameraman?’ and I said, ‘Yes, very much indeed.’ So he gave me two pieces of advice.

“One was to go to a museum, an art gallery, and study two or three paintings, painters like Rembrandt and so on. Get their lighting techniques in my head, the direction of light. And the other piece of advice was to take a candle and a sheet of white paper, and go into a black room, and hold the candle at varying positions to my head, and watch in the mirror the effects of front light, side light, back light, reflections, and no reflections. So, this was practical lighting, which he was kind enough to advise me to do, and it certainly worked.”

Lord Camber’s Ladies,
Hitchcock’s last film for British International Pictures, was only produced by him, and was directed by Benn Levy. The author of the original play, H. A. Vachell, had written the stage adaptation of
The Lodger
that Hitchcock saw in 1915. The cast of this film included Gertrude Lawrence and Gerald du Maurier, as well as Nigel Bruce in the title role. Hitchcock considered this and his next film the low points of his career.

W
HEN
I
MENTIONED
to Hitchcock that I’d never seen
Waltzes from Vienna,
he said, “That’s a good girl. Don’t.”

I hadn’t, because there was no opportunity. Finally I was able to see the film in 2003 when a British Film Institute print was shown at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. As I left the theater, I wished I could tell Alfred Hitchcock that I had enjoyed it.

After some commercial disappointments at British International Pictures,
The Skin Game, Rich and Strange,
and
Number 17,
Hitchcock signed a short-term contract with Alexander Korda. Nothing came of this, so when Ivor Novello’s producing colleague, Tom Arnold, approached him about doing a musical, Hitchcock was initially receptive. Based on a 1933 German film, Ludwig Berger’s
Waltzerkrieg
(“The Battle of the Waltzes”) had recently been adapted by Guy Bolton for the London stage as
Waltzes from Vienna.
When the stage musical was adapted for the screen, however, nearly all of the dance numbers were taken out, prompting Hitchcock to refer to it as “a musical without music.”

For the hero, Johann Strauss, Jr., called “Schani,” Esmond Knight came from the stage production, where he had created the role in English. For the heroine, Rasi Ebenezar, Jessie Matthews, one of Britain’s most popular musical comedy stars, was selected. She had starred in
The Good Companions
and soon would appear in her most famous film,
Evergreen.
Other members of the cast included two Hitchcock favorites from the London stage: Edmund Gwenn as Strauss, Sr. and Fay Compton as Countess Helga von Stahl, the “other woman” in Schani’s life. As well as having just appeared in
The Skin Game,
Gwenn would play in two more Hitchcock films,
Foreign Correspondent
and
The Trouble with Harry.
Compton had played the title role in
Mary Rose,
the James Barrie stage play that had impressed the young Hitchcock so much that it would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Jessie Matthews (1907–1981) was offered the opportunity to dance in Hollywood musicals with Fred Astaire, but she chose to remain in England with her husband, dancing partner, and director, Sonny Hale. Matthews’s career declined as she gained weight, and by the 1960s, she was a radio voice.