It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (21 page)

A memorable image in
The Paradine Case
occurs when Maddalena is taken from her life of luxury and confined to a bare jail cell. The slamming of the iron door behind her as she enters the cell recalls one of Hitchcock’s own memories, that of the six-year-old Alfred being locked up in the Leytonstone jail.

Ben Hecht and James Bridie wrote a screenplay based on Alma’s adaptation of the story, but Selznick wasn’t pleased. He rewrote their script and took credit as a screenplay writer, along with Alma. He also edited the trial sequence after Hitchcock had been prevailed upon to shoot the long and difficult scene with four cameras running simultaneously.

The ninety-two-day shoot was Hitchcock’s longest and the picture his most costly up to that time. Opening on the last day of 1947 in order to qualify for the Oscars,
The Paradine Case
was a critical disaster and box office loser.

Hitchcock said, “Many times, people have told me how much they enjoyed
Witness for the Prosecution.
They thought it was my film instead of Billy Wilder’s. And Wilder told me people asked him about
The Paradine Case,
thinking he had done it. Well, I would be happy to make an exchange.”

After Claude Rains turned down the part of the judge, Hitchcock went against his customary preference for “negative acting,” in other words, low-key, and chose Charles Laughton, never low-key.

“I have been asked what I mean by ‘negative acting,’” Hitchcock said, “a term I have used many times with actors. It seems obvious. Clearly it doesn’t mean
not
acting or
non
-acting, or I wouldn’t need professional actors.

“I used Leo G. Carroll so many times because he was the perfect screen actor. He brought nothing to his part except himself, exactly what I wanted. Negative acting is actually a layer below what I call ‘obvious’ acting, and it requires great subtlety.

“After
Jamaica Inn,
I swore I would never again use Laughton, who was the most ‘obvious’ of actors. This, however, was the perfect vehicle for him.”

Peck thought he looked too young for the part, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t age himself as much as he wanted. He also worried about his speech, not certain about how far he should go toward British diction. His model was Anthony Eden, although he didn’t feel he sounded much like Eden in the finished film.

Selznick saw in Alida Valli the possibility for creating another Ingrid Bergman. Valli told me that she had the impression that Hitchcock particularly wanted her for
The Paradine Case,
but after she began making the film, she had the feeling that “he wanted my look and not me. I had the feeling he was disappointed, but perhaps not in me, but in the film. Now, with Gregory Peck, it was all different. He was always helpful, and
so
attractive.”

It was Hitchcock who selected Ann Todd. Selznick found her “too British,” but he accepted her because for him everything depended on the key role played by Valli.

“David was a remarkable man,” Irene Mayer Selznick told me, “but he wanted to be even more remarkable. Nothing was ever enough.
Gone With the Wind
wasn’t enough. From then on, he had to surpass it. Like for Orson [Welles], Rosebud was elusive. David was a man of passion, a romantic, intense, desperate. When I was his wife, he wanted me to be the best-dressed woman in Hollywood, not something I aspired to be. He was the husband who wanted me to buy more clothes, and more expensive clothes.

“His real death was the death of his confidence.”

“When our contract was finished, I knew I wouldn’t miss those memos,” Hitchcock told me. “Those memos were the essence of the man. Selznick wore his mind on his sleeve.”

R
OPE
WASN
’
T MY FAVORITE PICTURE
,” James Stewart told me. “I think I was miscast, though not terribly so. So many people could have played that part, probably better. But it was a very important part for me because it started my relationship going with Hitch, and it led to
Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much,
and
Vertigo.
”

“When I adapted
Rope
to the screen,” Arthur Laurents told me, “homosexuality was an unmentionable word in Hollywood, referred to as ‘it.’ Now, here was a play about three homosexuals in which ‘it’ had to be self-evident to everybody except the Hays Office or the Legion of Decency. Without ‘it,’ nothing makes sense. There isn’t a scene between Brandon and Phillip, the two murderers, that doesn’t imply ‘it.’

“Casting was of the utmost importance. Hitchcock and I wanted Cary Grant to be Rupert, the college professor, and Montgomery Clift to be Brandon, the dominant one in the relationship between him and Phillip. This would have been dream casting. Instead, we got James Stewart and John Dall.

“I think the casting of Jimmy Stewart was absolutely destructive. He’s not sexual as an actor, and the implication in the British play was that Rupert and Brandon had been some kind of lovers. Cary Grant was not a homosexual, but he was the finest screen actor of his time, and he was always sexual.”

Pat Hitchcock articulated her father’s feeling for Stewart. “He believed an American audience would identify more with James Stewart than any other actor,” she told me. “I think Jimmy personified Everyman for my father.”

Clift told Hitchcock that he couldn’t do the part of Brandon because he didn’t want to do a role that would “raise eyebrows.” John Dall who had been nominated for an Oscar in 1946 for his work in
The Corn Is Green,
replaced him.

“The problems started with the adaptation from English to American English,” Laurents continued. “What was accepted as ordinary everyday speech in London was perceived as ‘homosexual dialogue’ in Hollywood. I drew from some silver and china queens.

“But when I started to Americanize the dialogue, Sidney Bernstein, Hitch’s associate producer, kept returning English expressions to the original play because what I was writing didn’t sound ‘literary’ enough to him. He especially liked the phrase, ‘My dear boy,’ commonly used in England with no homosexual connotations. When he put it back, it never failed to elicit a blue-penciled HOMOSEXUAL DIALOGUE condemnation from the Hays Office. Since Sidney began or ended every sentence he spoke with ‘My dear boy,’ this really mystified him.

“Hitchcock never referred to the homosexual relationships in
Rope,
though he understood it very well. ‘It’ was just implied and taken for granted. And the play’s relationship to the Loeb-Leopold murder case, that was never discussed either.

“I thought the showing of the murder itself was a big mistake. That wasn’t done in the original stage play. The suspense was,
was
there or was there
not
something in the chest? Well, the suspense is over at the beginning. But that’s what he wanted, and Hitchcock did what he wanted. On that film, at any rate. You have to remember that he had formed a special company. The whole purpose was to do what he wanted, and Sidney Bernstein, who was his partner, just adored him and thought everything he did was wonderful. He thought he was a great artist. He was. But Hitch didn’t listen to people. Not that I know of, except for Alma. She kept him on track. She was his core. He had a very good marriage.”

For those who have seen the film’s trailer, the murder takes on an added dimension. Instead of the usual short excerpts from the film being previewed,
Rope
’s trailer shows David Kentley (Dick Hogan) meeting his fiancée, Janet (Joan Chandler), on a park bench. They discuss their future together, and then David gets up and leaves her—forever. This trailer could have been the opening for the film, though it wasn’t in Laurents’s script. Hitchcock said, “It was just an idea that wouldn’t have worked, because if the public had established sympathy for the young couple, it would have been impossible to watch the murderers.”

U
NDER
C
APRICORN
WAS TO BE
the first Transatlantic Pictures production, but its star, Ingrid Bergman, was unavailable. While Hitchcock and Bernstein waited, they chose to make what seemed to be a simple one-set picture. Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 one-set play,
Rope’s End,
seemed an ideal vehicle to test Hitchcock’s experimental ideas. Instead of shooting in conventional camera setups, he would shoot the entire play straight through, interrupted only by the need to change the nine-and-a-half-minute film reels. He envisioned a continuous filmed drama that is shown exactly as it happens in eighty minutes.

To achieve this feat, a special set had to be built, with everything, including the walls, silently mobile so that the six-thousand-pound motorized dolly with its massive motorized Technicolor camera could move anywhere at any time.

“Our roving Technicolor camera had to poke its lens into every nook and cranny of the collapsible Sutton Place apartment of the killers,” Hitchcock told me. “Prop men were crouching everywhere, set to pounce on furniture and pull it out of the way of the camera, and then replace it after it had passed. Everyone was signaling everyone else to move something that had to be moved. Even the actors were moving chairs, or catching people who had to fall out of the way of the camera. Then, if someone fluffed a line, even in the last few seconds of the nine-minute take, we had to shoot it again, from three to six times. This was especially trying for Mr. [Dick] Hogan, whose performance after being garroted consisted of lying in the dark of an antique chest for almost ten minutes, listening to the mayhem.”

This “mayhem,” the rolling of walls on Vaseline-lubricated rollers, the scraping of furniture being shuffled back and forth, the rustling of actors trying to avoid getting in the picture or being run over by the camera, the breathing of prop men, all of this was caught along with the dialogue by the four microphones placed above the set at various locations. It became evident that some post-synchronization of sound would be necessary.

Since the action of the play takes place during the early hours of an evening, the view of New York City from the Sutton Place apartment must change, from daylight, to twilight, to night. To achieve this effect, a complicated cyclorama was built, showing a thirty-five-mile panorama of the city. Model buildings were built to scale in front of the cyclorama to give the effect of depth. This was lit by thousands of incandescent bulbs of various sizes, and numerous neon signs controlled by a complex lighting console.

This was Hitchcock’s first color film, and he had definite ideas about what colors he wanted. “The set and the costumes had been carefully muted down,” Laurents recalled, “and the first prints that came out, it was like fiesta time in Mexico. Hitchcock was furious, and it took a long time before it suited him.”

All of the action takes place in the living room of the fashionable apartment.

Farley Granger described some of his
Rope
experiences: “The studio had been yelling for me to get back from New York. It was to do
Rope.
Of course, as soon as I knew it was a Hitchcock film, I could have flown back without a plane.

“Those tricky long takes caused so many problems. The camera, for instance, was an enormous monster. As the camera moved, they would break away the walls and there’d be people moving the lights at the same time to keep you in the light. Then, for instance, you have to sit down just out of camera range, and there was always a stage-hand there with a seat to slip under you at just the last minute. I saved Constance Collier once because I saw she was ready to sit down and there was no chair.

“She and Sir Cedric Hardwicke were the jolliest of the group. All the young people were taking it very seriously, and they were having a ball.

“Hitch would say, ‘What next?’ And he’d go over and look at the book. Then, he’d say, ‘Oh, yes, okay.’

“Hitch was very definite in what he wanted, you know, because it had all been planned and done with the drawings, so he had to be sure that everything was right. In this film, he had to be more certain of everything because of the way he was shooting it.

“The crews were crazy about him. They respected his knowledge of everything. He really understood lenses, and he was jolly with them.”

Hume Cronyn told me, “When Hitch asked me if I would like to work on Patrick Hamilton’s play
Rope
for the screen, well, I was very complimented, to say the least. But why would he choose a relatively inexperienced writer like me when he could get anyone he wanted?

“He had two reasons. First of all, we got along smashingly. He may have felt more at ease with Canadians than with Americans. I think Hitch liked people intuitively, the way a child does. When he liked you, he
really
liked you.

“Second, since he planned to do
Rope
exactly as it appeared on the stage, with no editing and in reel-long takes, he wanted someone who had a lot of stage experience as well as film knowledge. Then, he brought in Arthur Laurents, but Hitch and I got along well enough for him to ask me to do the same for his next film,
Under Capricorn.
”

Arthur Laurents wondered about the Cronyn connection. “When I saw Hume Cronyn’s name next to mine for the writing credit, I was, to put it mildly, astonished. I had never been given one word of his ‘adaptation,’ nor did I even know he was writing one. I was always under the impression that we were doing the play pretty much as it was onstage, and that I was supposed to ‘Americanize’ and bring it up to date.”

Gary Stevens, the publicist for
Rope,
described his first meeting with Hitchcock. Hitchcock played a practical joke I recognized from my own experiences with him.

“It was in a sixteenth-floor suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York,” Stevens said. “We got into the elevator, and on the fifteenth floor, two elderly ladies got on. As the elevator went down, he said to me, out of nowhere, ‘Gary, did you clean the blood off the knife?’ I looked at him, but I didn’t say anything. The two women stared at us, and when the elevator stopped at the eleventh floor, they were so frightened, they rushed out, not waiting to go down to the lobby. That was how my first meeting with him went.

“I took him to a very popular morning program. They started to talk about his picture, and he went into his own monologue. It was breakfast time, and Hitchcock went into a tirade about eggs. He said, ‘Oh, what a horrible dirty thing an egg is. You open it up and it’s slimy and runs out.’ People all over the city must have had their breakfasts ruined, and it was a hell of a time before they got him out of it. By that time, he knew I was on to him, and he gave me a sly wink.”

“When I worked on
Rope,
” Arthur Laurents told me, “I was included as a member of Hitchcock’s extended family, and it was a laughing and loving family. I was invited frequently to have a family dinner at their home in upper-strata Bel Air or at the country house in northern California. I was a regular at Alfred Hitchcock’s table at Romanoff’s. Romanoff’s was
the
Hollywood restaurant. He always ordered steak with some potatoes, wine, and some black coffee. I understood that eating there with Hitchcock at his table was special, and that eating there without him would never quite be the same. I was soon to find out.

“After the completion of
Rope,
I was invited to one of those family dinners at the Hitchcocks, and Sidney Bernstein was there. After dinner, I was given a novel to take home and read,
Under Capricorn.
I knew what it meant. I was quite flattered. It meant he really liked what I did. And I was prepared to like
Under Capricorn
—
better
than like it.

“I was lightly admonished, as if I needed to be, not to waste any time in getting it read, and then, as if I needed any extra incentive, I was told, ‘Ingrid will be doing it.’

“As soon as I got home, I began reading. I thought I would try to get through it that night. I didn’t make it. The next day, I was still limping along.

“What Hitchcock and Ingrid saw in
Under Capricorn
was a mystery to me. I felt it was wrong for
all
of us.

“Hitch and I were friends, but I was hesitant about saying, ‘Why did you buy this?’ Instead I simply said I would very much like to work for him again, but I was the wrong writer for
Under Capricorn.
It just wasn’t my cup of tea.