It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (19 page)

Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance in a before-and-after reducing ad on the back of a newspaper salvaged from the debris. Conveniently, Hitchcock had just lost more than 100 pounds on a recent diet.

Pat Hitchcock told me that after
Lifeboat,
her father received many letters from people who had seen the film and, not realizing Reduco was a fictitious product, wanted to know where they could buy it.

“I had wanted to get into the lifeboat,” Hitchcock said, “but Tallulah wouldn’t let me. She was afraid I would sink it. And I would never do anything so undignified as float by, as someone else suggested. What really hurt was they said I would be just as recognizable floating face-down as face-up. I immediately went on an extreme diet, and that was when I thought of using before-and-after photographs of myself on a page in a newspaper.”

N
OT LONG AFTER
H
ITCHCOCK
moved to Hollywood, Michael Balcon wrote an article about British film people who were deserting England in time of war for Hollywood, singling out a certain “plump” director, whom he didn’t name.

Making light of it, Hitchcock said that what he minded most was being called “plump.” There were attempts at restoring the old relationship between the two men, though it never truly happened. “The words had hurt too much,” Hitchcock said.

Hitchcock, who felt physically cut off from England and World War II, wanted to make a contribution to the war effort. His friend, Sidney Bernstein, director of the British Ministry of Information, offered him the opportunity.

In December 1943, before beginning
Spellbound,
Hitchcock flew to London. He spent a month there, early in 1944, filming two propaganda shorts to be shown in unoccupied France.

Hitchcock was given a token salary of £10 a week and a suite at London’s Claridge’s Hotel. He had never stayed there before. Thereafter, Hitchcock frequently stayed at Claridge’s when he visited London.

Writing the scripts with Hitchcock was Angus MacPhail, who was at the time also working on
Spellbound.
The actors were drawn from members of the Molière Players, a French refugee group performing in London. They would remain anonymous to avoid the possibility of reprisals against their families in occupied France. The cinematographer was Günther Krampf, who, before he left Germany in 1932, had photographed
Nosferatu, The Student of Prague,
and
Pandora’s Box.
One British actor appeared, John Blythe.

Hitchcock was concerned that occupied France be shown authentically. “We had to be careful not to leave any crusts of bread on the tables, and certainly not any cigarette butts.”

“
Bon Voyage
shows that the enemy is clever and ruthless, and one must be extra-vigilant,” Hitchcock said.

The point of
Aventure malgache
is to show “how the same spirit animated even the furthest colonies,” Bernstein said.

In
Bon Voyage,
the scene between the French girl and the escaped impostor is cinematically worthy of the best Hitchcock films. With the camera on Jeanne, a shot is fired, and she collapses. Without a cut, a man’s hand comes up into frame holding her address book, and then her delicate lady’s wristwatch. The scene anticipates the murder of Juanita in
Topaz.

The two shorts have a visual style similar to that of Hitchcock’s later television series. They are examples of what Hitchcock could achieve at the peak of his creative powers with almost no money, and with unknown actors speaking French.

Bon Voyage
and
Aventure malgache
did not play any part in the British war effort. They were not widely circulated in France. Fifty years afterward, the British Film Institute, which had surviving prints, made them available.

W
HEN THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS
were liberated by the British, Russian, and American armies in 1945, the full horrors of what they found became known, and Sidney Bernstein went there personally for the British Ministry of Information. He believed it imperative that army photographers document the scene as they found it in each camp; the dead, the dying, and the few survivors, as well as those who ran the camps. The only person Bernstein wanted to have supervise the editing of a film of the horrors was his friend, “the greatest film genius, Alfred Hitchcock.”

Hitchcock agreed immediately. He knew that he was going to be working with unimaginable horrors, if only on film, without his personally having visited the camps. The films proved to be more horrible than Hitchcock anticipated. He told me that even though the tragic images remained in his mind, he never regretted doing it.

Ultimately, the British government decided not to show the film to the Germans, feeling it would work against the morale and rapport of the German citizenry, which was needed to rebuild the country. The relatively unseen film, therefore, remained officially F3080, and unofficially,
Memory of the Camps.

Hitchcock had three ideas he considered important in making the film. The first was to film the dead in the extermination camps in wide, slow panning shots, the longest possible with no editing, so that there could be no accusation of trickery.

He wanted to have as many prominent Germans as possible who lived in the vicinity of the camps appear in the film, documenting their presence as the horrors were revealed by the liberating troops. They would then be witnesses who could never deny what they had seen.

He suggested a montage of the possessions of the victims, who, having been told they were going to new homes to be resettled, took with them what they could of their most treasured belongings. These were mostly wedding rings, brooches, handbags, children’s toys, and eyeglasses.

Hitchcock had the idea, which proved very effective, of showing the life of the German countryside in the pastoral areas surrounding the camps, with carefully tended farms. Most startling were the local inhabitants, seemingly not disturbed by their proximity to such unspeakable horror. They ought to be shown, Hitchcock felt, going about their daily lives, involved with their own concerns, even those as close as one mile away, where the overpowering stench made it impossible to ignore what was happening.

The anonymous corpses were stripped of their identities, and from what remained, it often wasn’t possible to tell men from women. The German civilians who lived in the area and who were forced to witness the atrocities appear well dressed and well fed, many of them, indeed,
too
well fed. Even living as they did, within sight and smell of the camps, they nonetheless claimed they were unaware of what was happening there. Viewing the camps from the inside with a close look at the piles of corpses that had been people and the few pitiful survivors, some of the women wept.

The guards, having become prisoners themselves, remained arrogant, claiming they were only obeying orders. They handled the corpses like store mannequins.

The film wasn’t shown until the late 1980s, on British television, under the title
A Painful Reminder,
to an audience that tuned in never expecting to see such a disturbing program. Many turned away, unable to bear it.

Hitchcock, like Bernstein, was frustrated because the film he created from work by British, Russian, and American cameramen was not shown. His name on the project did not guarantee its showing, but it did help to preserve it.

W
HEN
S
PELLBOUND
BEGAN SHOOTING
, David Selznick’s own psychiatrist, Dr. May Romm, was brought in as technical advisor. Norman Lloyd, who played Garmes in the film, recalled that Hitchcock’s melodramatic approach to psychiatry didn’t always coincide with Romm’s conventional approach.

“I was there on the set one day,” Lloyd told me, “when the technical advisor, Dr. Romm, was objecting to something Hitch did in a scene which was a violation of psychoanalytic theory. Hitch said, ‘It’s only a movie, May, and in a movie, we don’t have to stay absolutely faithful to facts.’”

Selznick, who had great faith in psychiatrists, had wanted to do a film with Hitchcock about psychiatry. Hitchcock chose as his subject a book by Francis Beeding called
The House of Dr. Edwardes,
set in a Swiss asylum. (Edwardes was changed to Edwards for the film.) While he was in London making the French shorts for the British Ministry of Information, he and Angus MacPhail began working on a screen adaptation.

Selznick wasn’t satisfied with MacPhail and replaced him with Ben Hecht, who was more familiar with psychotherapy. Hecht and Hitchcock produced a screenplay quickly after Hecht did some research at mental hospitals around New York City.

Selznick felt no compulsion to follow the novel faithfully, as he had with
Rebecca.
The original story deals with a madman who takes over an insane asylum. Selznick was most interested in the love story that Hitchcock and Hecht would have to add to the screenplay. “Though David would not have characterized himself that way, he was an extreme romantic,” his first wife, Irene Mayer Selznick, told me. “He was Don Quixote, with a dash of Cyrano and some Parsifal. And he was Faust, who sold his soul.”

Hitchcock saw psychiatry as an interesting element in a suspense film, but he could not imagine telling his own innermost thoughts, feelings, fears, and desires to a stranger, “not even to a friend, to Alma, not even to myself,” he told me. He was, however, fascinated by one aspect of it, the study of the criminal mind.