It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (17 page)

“She writes a letter. ‘Dear Mother, I’m in such terrible straits. I know he’s going to kill me, but I love him so much I don’t want to live anymore, and I do think society should be protected.’ Then, she seals the letter and leaves it by the bed. Johnnie brings up the milk, and she says, ‘Could you mail this for me?’ She drinks the fatal glass of milk, really committing suicide, and you fade out on her death. Next you have a cheerful, whistling Cary Grant popping the letter into the mailbox. That’s how I wanted to end the picture. Black humor, you know.

“The problem of having the leading man, Cary Grant in this case, be guilty was the same problem we had faced in
The Lodger.
In those days, the audience wouldn’t have put up with Ivor Novello being guilty, especially women, and a lot of the audience would be women anytime he was in a film.

“For the sake of their own careers, important stars won’t be villains. The idols that we put up there must do no wrong. If they do, audiences don’t approve of that sort of thing.

“In Mrs. Belloc Lownde’s book, the Ripper got away with it. Having Cary Grant as the hero meant I had to compromise. The best you could have was a bit of doubt, and not much of that. Once the decision was made to have Grant, it was like Novello, he
had
to be innocent.

“There was a new head of RKO who came up to me one day smiling, and said, ‘I’ve solved all the problems of
Suspicion
. I’ve cut it down to fifty-five minutes.’ What he had done, you see, was to take out every mention, every hint that Cary Grant was a murderer. Well, what do you have left?”

Grant told me, “I’m sure I didn’t do it. My character wasn’t that sort of chap at all. He couldn’t possibly have murdered her. My character was a rogue, not a rat.”

H
ITCHCOCK
’
S DAUGHTER
, Pat, decided shortly after
Suspicion
that she wanted to be an actress, and she told me how that career began.

“John Van Druten, a good friend of Auriol Lee, who was in
Suspicion,
was looking for a thirteen-year-old to do a Broadway play of his called
Solitaire.
He asked my parents if they would let me read for it. They said only if she doesn’t know what she’s reading for, because they didn’t want me to get all excited about it and be hurt if I didn’t get it. I read, and he decided he wanted me to do it. Unfortunately, it opened right after Pearl Harbor, and that was the end of that, but not the end of my wanting to be an actress.”

Alma was anxious to move into a home of their own in California. She felt it was important for their daughter not to live in a temporary house, so Alma and Pat looked at many houses. Finally they found one they both immediately loved.

Hitchcock at first feigned lack of enthusiasm, and they were disappointed. Then he bought the house himself, surprising them. From then on, he and Alma never lived anywhere else except their northern California weekend house, and Pat lived with them until she married.

“He’d learned to drive,” Pat told me, “but he didn’t drive very much. He had a license, but he didn’t like it. My mother loved it and she did all the driving.”

“W
HEN
H
ITCHCOCK BEGAN
a picture, he glowed,” Robert Boyle told me.

“In those days, if Alma didn’t drive Hitch to the studio or wherever they were working, he would arrive in a taxi. At the end of the day, she usually drove by for him. Alma was so small, you could barely see her head over the steering wheel. But he would see her, and his eyes would light up. Whenever there was a discussion of some importance to ponder, Hitchcock would say, ‘I’ll discuss this with the Madame.’

“I became an art director in 1941 on
Saboteur.
He was really retelling
39 Steps,
as he did later with
North by Northwest.

“We would sit on either side of the desk, and he’d make these funny little drawings, and I’d draw, and then we’d compare. After we had made all these roughs, they would be transferred into better sketches. But they never were better, because his originals, these little stick figures and things, always gave you the proper image size. Then, every shot was prepared and outlined, and everything worked out. When all this was finished, he said, ‘Now I will be bored making the picture.’ Actually that wasn’t quite true. He just liked to say it because it was a funny thing for him to say. I think he enjoyed making the picture.

“No one taught me more than Hitchcock about film language. He thought that each shot should relate to all the other shots, with no such thing as a throwaway shot.

“No other director could ask for solutions to such difficult problems, because no other director knew what questions to ask. He knew enough about getting difficult shots and the sort of effect he wanted to create, so that you could somehow get it for him, though it might cause you some sleepless nights trying to figure it out.

“Hitchcock would push the technical aspect of any shot to any length
if
it would satisfy what he felt is that gut feeling of whatever he was trying to do. And sometimes he’d push it so far that it didn’t quite make it. The shot became a little too strange, a little too far beyond the capabilities of the medium. But he never really was worried about that.

“He bent reality to his purpose to get the real truth.”

Of Boyle, Hitchcock said, “I would say to him what I wanted to do, knowing it was not impossible, only close to impossible, and he would do it.”

After
Suspicion,
Selznick loaned-out Hitchcock to Universal to do
Saboteur.
For
Saboteur,
Hitchcock originally had hoped to get Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck for the leads, and veteran western actor Harry Carey, Sr., as villain. John Houseman was assigned by Selznick to supervise the writing of the script, which began a lifelong friendship between Houseman and Hitchcock. The film was shot in fifteen weeks and came in almost within budget.

One of the most memorable images in any of Hitchcock’s films is that of Norman Lloyd dangling from the top of the Statue of Liberty. Lloyd explained to me how that was done.

“Hitch had the hand, torch, and balcony built to scale at Universal. The inside of the crown was also built to scale. When in panic I went over the railing, there was a mattress and a grip below to catch me. For the long shot, stuntmen took over for me and Bob.

“For the next shots, which were close-ups, Hitch had the torch dismantled. The thumb and the forefinger piece of the torch, and the crotch of the thumb and forefinger were arranged on the stage floor. The camera was angled at me lying on my stomach on the set piece, and I did all my close-up reactions in that position. Bob Cummings came down the forefinger, but he could only reach the sleeve of my jacket. Then there were intercuts between my close-up, Bob Cummings’s close-up, and the seam where the sleeve was stitched to the jacket, which began to tear.

“When I fell, it had to be in one continuous shot, of Fry in close-up to Fry falling all the way to the base of the statue. People have wondered to this day how this was done.

“The thumb and forefinger section was taken to another studio and attached to a platform six feet high. This platform was on counterweights and rigged to the top of the stage. A hole was cut in the platform, and a camera was placed so it could shoot down through the hole, towards the set piece fixed beneath it. Underneath the whole thing was a saddlelike thing on which I sat, on a pipe about four and a half feet high, based on a black cloth. On a cue, the camera, on the counterweight system, started from a close-up of me, went up in the air to the grid, together with the set piece of the thumb and forefinger, and left me behind, giving the illusion of my falling.

“This was shot at different speeds, in which I did movements of falling rather slowly, like a ballet dancer. By the time the camera got to the top of its move, it had gone from an extreme close-up of me to a very long shot of my apparently falling figure. The small saddle was not visible; the pipe and black cloth, which still could be seen, were painted out later in a traveling matte. As the camera pulled away from me, I gave my best Shakespearean scream.”

“There is one device I have employed many times in assorted variations—the dangling,” Hitchcock told me. “The so called danglee is sometimes held by the so-called danglor, and may or may not fall.”

Hitchcock was later uncertain about whether having the villain dangling from the Statue of Liberty instead of the hero was a good idea. “It would probably have been more effective if the hero were in danger,” he said. “On the other hand, the hero thinks he has to save the villain in order to clear his name. He’s also a decent fellow who would try to save the life of anyone who was in trouble.
Res est sacra miser,
a person in distress is a sacred thing.

“Well, it was probably best the way it was. No one could have dangled better than Norman.”

“He left an indelible mark on me of what it means to be a director and how to conduct oneself on the set,” Lloyd said. “Hitch always dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. He looked more like a banker than a film director.

“He projected a very special world. He had about him an international aura of the Orient Express, St. Moritz, the best foods, cigars, and vintage wines—all of the fantasies one saw on the screen.”

For Lloyd, the essence of the Hitchcock touch was the blending of humor with real danger, as in the Radio City Music Hall sequence, where real shots are being fired, and the audience is laughing. “It was typical of the balance he could achieve in everything he did. Nobody else could achieve this balance, and then, finally, neither could Hitch.”

Norman Lloyd told me about a lady tourist from Virginia who somehow got mixed up among the extras during location filming. It didn’t bother her that she had to keep getting on and off the boat, before she was allowed to go up in the Statue of Liberty. She had the time of her life, thinking that the coffee and doughnuts and box lunches served to the extras were how everyone was treated in New York. It was discovered too late that she wasn’t an extra, and she couldn’t be located to sign a release, so none of the shots with her could be used.

The scene of Fry looking out at the capsized
Normandie
was inspired by newsreel footage Hitchcock had seen, and incorporated after the script was written. The navy was concerned because there were plans to press the passenger liner into service as a troop carrier, and sabotage was suspected.

Hitchcock fans have long wondered who played Barry Kane’s friend, Ken Mason, in
Saboteur.
He sets the plot in motion by bumping into Fry, and then his death in the sabotage fire puts Barry in the position of being the man on the spot who quickly becomes the man on the run. He is not listed in the credits.

In 2004, Norman Lloyd told me why the actor had been so difficult to identify. “Hitchcock was looking for someone to play Ken, a small but crucial part. Then, one day on the set, he found him.

“‘That’s the one’ he said, indicating a tall, well-built young man, good-looking and sympathetic. He wasn’t an actor at all, but a grip. He eventually became the head grip at Universal. His name was Virgil Summers and that was his only screen appearance.”

U
NIVERSAL NEGOTIATED WITH
Selznick to employ Hitchcock again, and at a considerably higher fee, $150,000 for eighteen weeks. Of this, Hitchcock would receive $50,000, Selznick the rest. Hitchcock was also to get above-the-credits billing for the first time in his career.

For his next subject, Hitchcock chose a short story by Gordon McDonell, “Uncle Charlie,” which was based on a real-life serial killer who murdered twenty-two wealthy widows for their money. To help develop the screenplay, he turned to Thornton Wilder, whose stage play
Our Town
he greatly admired. Since Wilder was about to join the army’s psychological warfare unit, he was only able to supply a treatment and limited material for the story, and to help Hitchcock select locations. They chose Newark, New Jersey, and Santa Rosa, California, as sharply contrasting locales for
Shadow of a Doubt.
Alma finished the script, working with Sally Benson, who wrote
Meet Me in St. Louis.