It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (22 page)

“He changed the subject. I realized I had been excommunicated.

“Later, Sidney [Bernstein] tried to get me to recant. I had hurt Hitch with my ‘disloyalty,’ loyalty for him being an unquestioning ‘yes,’ disloyalty, a ‘no.’ But if I said ‘yes,’ it would make me
really
disloyal. I never again sat at his table at Romanoff’s.”

H
ITCHCOCK HAD RECEIVED
an unpublished treatment of Helen Simpson’s 1937 novel from Selznick’s office in 1944. He saw enough promise in the story to buy the screen rights for a token price, and then he put it aside for later consideration. He and Sidney Bernstein were already making plans for their Transatlantic Pictures venture, and they would need properties to develop. It appealed to Ingrid Bergman, who agreed to make the picture for Transatlantic, and who encouraged Hitchcock to make the film. Before James Bridie was brought in to write the screenplay, Hume Cronyn worked on a treatment, to which Alma made contributions.

“I did
Under Capricorn
because Ingrid liked it,” Hitchcock told me. “From that, I learned that it was better to look at Ingrid than to listen to her.”

Jack Cardiff, the film’s cinematographer, described for me what he called “the daunting challenge” of shooting
Under Capricorn.

“They built a huge composite set of the entire mansion. It filled the largest stage at Elstree’s M-G-M Studios. I wondered how on earth I could possibly light so many sets at once! Since the camera was going to have to track on a crane noiselessly all over the place, I worked more closely with the director than usual.

“Each long take had to be covered in one shot with one camera. For example: Michael Wilding enters through the front door of the mansion, into a large circular hall with a winding stairway. He turns to his right and walks along a narrow corridor into the servants’ quarters. After saying something, he returns to the hall, along another passage into a large drawing room. More dialogue and more camera movement, and then the camera follows him back to the hall. Now he goes up the stairs and walks down a hallway to a door. He opens the door and enters a bedroom, approaching a large bed where Ingrid Bergman is sleeping. As he and the camera near her, the bed itself tilts towards the camera to avoid the camera having to crane up for an overhead shot.

“We rehearsed the whole day and shot the next day. I had to light all of the sets we’d be using in one go. The noise was indescribable. As the electric crane rolled through the sets, whole walls opened up, furniture was whisked out of the way by frantic prop men, and then just as frantically put back as the crane made a return trip.

“The most incredible take was when the camera ends up in a dining room with eight people sitting at a long Georgian table. Hitch wanted a shot of the guests, looking down the table, then to track in to a close-up of Ingrid Bergman at the far end.

“The Technicolor camera, inside its enormous blimp, was more than four feet high. To crane above the table, over the candlesticks, the wine, and the food, it would have been necessary for the camera to be very high up, looking down on the heads of the actors. The problem was solved by cutting the table into sections, and then fastening everything down very firmly—food, plates, silverware, glasses, napkins, salt shakers, everything.

“Each actor had a section of the table. The camera is now positioned at table level instead of six feet above it. At the beginning of the scene, the guests are all sitting in their places enjoying a leisurely banquet. The camera moves forward, bearing down on each guest, but at the last moment, each of them falls back on a mattress while holding on to his section of the table with all the props stuck to it.

“I don’t know how Ingrid kept a straight face while watching her fellow actors fall back like dominoes. It was hilarious, but it worked. I think a film of
Capricorn
being made would have been far more successful than
Capricorn
itself.”

Cardiff recalled that Joseph Cotten hated the new technique especially the electric crane-dolly. “He was a complete professional and never complained. But he told me that he could always feel the monster sneaking up behind him and was terrified it would run him over.

“Practically all of Hitchcock’s energies were spent on pre-production. Everything was worked out in detail, every page timed. If a page was just a few seconds off, everything would have been off. No wonder Hitch sometimes found the actual shooting of the film something of a bore.

“During a ten-minute take, he would have his back to the set, aimlessly looking down at the floor. Then, at the end, after he had said ‘Cut,’ he would ask my camera operator, ‘How was that for you, Paul?’ If Paul nodded yes, he would accept the whole reel. He hardly ever watched the rushes of the day’s work. From the moment he had drawn pictures of the camera setups, he had the picture all firmly in his mind.

“On his other films, using normal techniques, he used his camera in a way no one else ever had, cutting from shot to shot to obtain rhythmic emphasis. I think that’s where
Under Capricorn
failed. Despite Hitch’s brilliant ideas on how to keep the camera moving, he couldn’t overcome the inevitable loss of tempo. Having to shoot the whole reel without any cuts, the camera had to move cumbersomely all over the place in order to obtain the same angles the editor would have used in cutting.”

Sound director Peter Handford told me that there was absolutely no post-synchronization at all. It was all done at the time on the set.

“We had a very, very good editor. Without him, it would have been difficult. Most editors would have said, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous. Post-sync is just as good.’ But Hitchcock wanted it done properly on the set.

“He was a wonderful man, Hitchcock. Years later when he did
Frenzy,
he sent for me. After all that time!

“He had the largest studio in M-G-M, and the whole floor of the stage, covered in carpet. All that carpet came from Sidney Bernstein’s cinemas. Carpeting was rationed, you see, because of the war.

“He would do a scene, and then, as soon as he’d done the take where there was a problem, he would ask me to tell him what the problem was. He would then clear the stage as soon as he had the take he considered to be best, and he’d get the actors to do the whole scene over again with all the movement, but without the camera.

“And it worked, because they were good actors, and problems of synchronization, of course, had to be put together by the editor. There was no problem then, because their timing was exactly the same as it was when they had the camera. They had the timing from the rehearsals. He was very strict about timing in the rehearsals. This does work with real actors who knew exactly what was wanted.

“It’s true. We didn’t do any post-sync at all. I want to repeat that, because it was so amazing. It was all done with the actors as if it was a proper take of the camera. That’s why it worked. If you had a man a long way from the table and another close, the sound perspective was exactly right.

“Some big scenes were rehearsed for two or three days, mainly because of the complicated camera movement. Even with the rehearsal, things could go wrong, and sometimes did. Ingrid Bergman said it was not exactly fun, but interesting.

“I worked with her again much later, on
Murder on the Orient Express.
I didn’t realize at the time she did
Under Capricorn
what a terrible stress she was under, because she was leaving her husband. You would never know she was under such a strain as that.

“Hitchcock had a wonderful sense of humor, and he loved playing jokes on people. For instance, if we were doing a take, he would suddenly come up to me, and he’d lift my headphones and tell me some awful joke and try to get me to laugh.

“He was very fond of steam trains, railway trains. And he found out it was one of my major loves, steam railways, and we would talk about that for a long time. On steam trains, the wagon behind the engine was called the tender, the one full of coal. Hitchcock came up to me once and said, ‘Do you know why the locomotive was so unhappy?’ and I said, ‘No, not at all.’

“And he said, ‘Because it had a tender behind.’”

H
ITCHCOCK WAS UNHAPPY
, disappointed, when Ingrid Bergman left Hollywood to be with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Divorcing her husband, Peter Lindstrom, she starred in several films of Rossellini, whom she married and with whom she had three children. It was quite a while before she was welcomed back in Hollywood, “forgiven” for the “scandal,” and bankable again. Bergman told me that Hitchcock had never said anything to her about “Roberto,” though she knew he wanted her to be in
his
movies, not Italian films.

“Finally, after several years,” she said, “when I was visiting Los Angeles, Hitchcock said to me, ‘It’s a shame. He ruined your career.’

“I laughed. ‘Oh, no, dear Hitch, Roberto didn’t ruin
my
career. I ruined
his.
’ I didn’t belong in those pictures of his.”

She didn’t remember why she had chosen
Under Capricorn.
She told me, “You would have to ask the person I was.”

Under Capricorn
was Hitchcock’s second and last Transatlantic picture. Though their company had not been successful, Hitchcock’s friendship with Sidney Bernstein continued. Hitchcock always regretted that he hadn’t produced a big success for Bernstein, who never ceased to describe his friend as “a unique genius.” Bernstein told me that he felt honored to have known and worked with him. “No regrets. I’d like to have had a success because I would have liked to be able to go on. It’s a friendship of a lifetime that I treasure.”

“With Transatlantic,” Hitchcock told me, “I had complete freedom, but that of itself is in a way a handicap, because one enters into the field of financial ethics. No doubt one can do whatever one wants, but you become restrained by a kind of responsibility. I did not understand at the time that I was being self-indulgent. I called it artistic freedom. My next picture,
Stage Fright,
was my attempt to return to more responsible filmmaking, but I was too late for Transatlantic.”

Hitchcock didn’t see Jack Cardiff again until 1960, when Cardiff was in Hollywood after having directed
Sons and Lovers.

“Hitch was pleased to see me, of course, but he had this strange look on his face when we shook hands. He seemed kind of stunned, a bit puzzled.

“‘I saw
Sons and Lovers,
’ he said. Then he added softly, ‘It was bloody good.’ It was obvious he couldn’t believe that a mere cameraman could have directed such a good movie. Of all the critical praise I received for
Sons and Lovers,
Hitchcock’s ‘It was bloody good’ were the words I treasured most.”

“T
HEY WERE LIKE
a couple of kids. They really were just like a couple of kids talking about their movie and their plans, and the script, and what everything meant.”

That was how Richard Todd characterized his first meeting with the Hitchcocks to discuss his role in
Stage Fright,
a lunch filled with energy and enthusiasm. More than half a century later, Todd recalled for me that day and his subsequent
Stage Fright
experience.