Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  The producer called together his team and conferred while still photographs were taken of the most dramatic moments. Burke noted that there were “No Smoking” signs everywhere but that everybody smoked. When the cast and crew went upstairs to the canteen for lunch, he also observed that a great equality prevailed—the junior electrician sat next to the star, and the commissionaire sat beside the producer. He felt that all were “intensely interested” in the novel process of making a film.

  This was the beginning of the world in which Alfred Hitchcock would remain for the rest of his life.

  . . .

  Famous Players-Lasky was in essence an American studio with a largely American staff; there were in fact two large studios, one on the ground floor and one on the first floor, filled with what The Times called “the most up-to-date devices from the United States.” The London fog, always a threat, was expelled through the roof. Alfred Hitchcock was first employed to design the title cards for the films then in production. His was a practical discipline with the purpose of signalling the action and characters for the audience. From the beginning he learned how to cooperate with the studio’s scenarists, essentially scriptwriters, who were usually American women; he once said he was steeped in the cinematic learning of “the middle-aged American women” who worked in Poole Street. It was under their guidance that he also learned to write scripts. He learned also that it was possible to change the tone or meaning of a film by inserting very different title cards from the ones intended; in this manner, a poor film might be saved. He composed titles for such films as The Mystery Road, a romantic adventure, and Dangerous Lies, now lost to the world.

  In this setting he also met the woman with whom he would share all the stages of his life and career. Alma Reville, born just the day after him in the same year, was already a professional of film production. At the age of sixteen she joined the cutting department of the London Film Company at Twickenham Studios; her parental home was just a short distance away. She became the girl on the cutting-room floor, quick and skilful. In an article written in early 1923 for the Motion Picture News she remarked that “the art of cutting is Art indeed, with a capital ‘A,’ ” and she emphasised the importance of smooth continuity and the subtle use of close-up. Her expertise was such that one of the directors at Twickenham Studios promoted her to be studio floor director and then second assistant director. It was a young profession. If she had been a man, she might have moved ahead of Hitchcock very rapidly. In the same year as Hitchcock, 1921, she joined Famous Players-Lasky in Islington where she continued her roles as doyenne of the cutting room and second assistant director.

  For the first two years he barely seemed to recognise her; already ambitious and determined, he had little or no interest in the opposite sex. She herself recalled a plump young man, swathed in a large overcoat, who walked unhurried across the studio floor with title cards under his arm. If he had looked properly he would have seen a short girl, four feet and eleven inches in height; she was a redhead, pretty, quick and efficient with a total dedication to the exciting industry of film-making.

  Famous Players-Lasky did not last long at Islington. Anglo-American cooperation was not working. Films like Three Live Ghosts and Love’s Boomerang were not popular with English audiences, especially in contrast with the genuine American product coming from studios such as Goldwyn Pictures and Universal Pictures in Hollywood. Alma was obliged to leave Islington, and a paragraph in the Motion Picture News announced that “Alma Reville, the continuity writer, late of Famous Lasky…is now at liberty to accept engagements.” Islington Studios continued life as a rental studio and Hitchcock remained there as general factotum, but aspiring to greater things.

  Eventually, in 1923, she received a telephone call. “Is that Miss Reville? This is Alfred Hitchcock. I have been appointed assistant director for a new film. I wonder if you would accept a position as a cutter on the picture?”

  He later confessed to her that he was very shy with women, but there had been a further cause for his reticence. Alma said that “since it is unthinkable for a British male to admit that a woman has a job more important than his, Hitch had waited to speak to me until he had a higher position.”

  He had not been idle at Islington. He wrote the treatment of a film comedy, Good Night Nurse!, which was never filmed; all that survive are eight pages of perfectly handwritten notes. In late 1922 he also seems to have borrowed some money from his uncle, Joseph, to finance an independent film of his own entitled Mrs. Peabody or Number Thirteen; it was to be a drama set in lower-middle-class London, which Hitchcock knew well, concerned with one of the low-income housing estates known collectively as Peabody Buildings. Production closed down after a couple of reels had been completed, for lack of further finance. This first failure must have seemed at the time to be catastrophic, but he said only that it had been a “somewhat chastening experience” which taught him always to watch the money trail of any production.

  At the beginning of 1923 a famous actor-manager, Seymour Hicks, joined forces with an independent director to remake an old film comedy, Always Tell Your Wife. When the director fell ill Hicks looked around for someone in the studio to complete the work; his gaze fell upon the portly young employee who was, according to Hicks, “tremendously enthusiastic and anxious to try his hand at producing.” One reel survives, of no great quality. Yet in the summer Hitchcock began work on a film that was received with much greater enthusiasm.

  A group of independent film-makers descended upon Islington Studios as their ideal space. Michael Balcon was an aspiring producer; Graham Cutts had already directed three films and in those early days of the cinema could be described as experienced; Victor Saville came in as co-producer with Michael Balcon. Balcon was by far the most influential of the three, becoming in time the head of Ealing Studios and the éminence grise of the British film industry. In later days Hitchcock explained to an interviewer, “I have been allowed to experiment. This I owe to one man, Michael Balcon…It is he who has allowed me to follow my celluloid whims.”

  Their association began with Woman to Woman. Hitchcock was as enthusiastic and anxious as ever. It soon became clear that the three men needed a scriptwriter; Hitchcock volunteered and showed them examples of a script he had already finished. They needed an art director. Yes, this was also something Hitchcock could do. Even as he was writing the script and designing the title cards, he was also creating the sets and supervising the costumes. His phrase was “I’ll do it.” It was this energy and adaptability that Balcon, ever the professional, admired. But Hitchcock could be dogmatic; he would build a set and then call out to the director “Here’s where it’s shot from.” He also knew an expert cutter. This was the occasion for the unexpected telephone call to Alma Reville.

  Woman to Woman, directed by Graham Cutts, concerns a dancer with the Moulin Rouge who has an affair with an English soldier; the baby is born, the soldier suffers amnesia and marries again. All the complications that ensue leave plenty of room for sensation and melodrama. When the film was released in the spring of 1923 it was a great success with audiences in Germany, England and the United States. The Daily Express remarked that it was “the best American picture made in England” which, at the time, must have seemed to be a compliment. Alfred Hitchcock, although uncredited as assistant director, had proved his worth. In that year the Motion Picture News printed a caricature of him, now known as A. J. Hitchcock.

  In the following year Balcon and his associates took the further step of purchasing the Islington Studios from Paramount, the managers of which seemed only too eager to rid themselves of what had been for them a failed enterprise. With Hitchcock still as an assistant director they completed two films within three months. The White Shadow and The Passionate Adventure are now forgotten but they were all part of Hitchcock’s cinematic education. In The Passionate Adventure, for example, he had to construct a stretch of derelict canal with the houses beside it. Later in his career, he always preferred to work
on a set, rather than on location.

  The film-makers had now taken the title of Gainsborough Pictures, and were eager to acquire more capital. Germany was at that time one of the great centres of European cinema, and it was natural for Balcon to arrange a co-production agreement with one of its more significant companies. In the early autumn of 1924 Hitchcock was sent, with Alma and Graham Cutts, to the new glass studios of Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) at Neubabelsberg, near Berlin, where they would eventually complete work on two Anglo-German productions. The Prude’s Fall and The Blackguard both starred the expensive American actress Jane Novak, in a number of exotic European locations.

  Neither Hitchcock nor Alma could speak a word of German and were at first reduced to sign language and a sort of technical patois, but they persevered. They learned more than a language. They learned an art form. On an adjoining set the German director F. W. Murnau was working on The Last Laugh, a silent film with no subtitles and only one title card at the end. It was a triumph of expressive film-making. Murnau took the young Englishman into his confidence and, as Hitchcock said later, “from Murnau I learned how to tell a story without words.” From Murnau he also learned the technique of the fluid camera which can rove like any character. He learned another device. If you need to show a mansion or a cathedral you do not need to create a version of the mansion or cathedral. You need only show a marble pillar, or a great wooden door, or just part of a door. The imagination of the audience will do the rest. “What you see on the set does not matter,” Murnau told him. “All that matters is what you see on the screen.”

  Murnau created the chiaroscuro of dark puddles shimmering with opalescent light, of the sad mistiness of street lamps in the rain, of the sheen of wet pavements in the glare of shop windows. There was no light without darkness, and no substance without shadow. And then might come the close-up of a face, bewildered or fearful. The unchained melody of the “mobile” camera could follow a figure wandering, or stumbling, through an indifferent or hostile setting. This was a place of endless corridors, perilous staircases and wild fairgrounds.

  In that sense the German cinema unlocked the door of Hitchcock’s imagination. This world is hazardous and uncertain; it is tremulous and frightening; it is deadly and unpredictable. It elicits anxiety and disorientation. It is always precarious. Hitchcock may have learned the techniques of German expressionism as a filmic exercise, but it is more likely that the works of Murnau and others touched something that lay deep within his personality.

  It also became clear to him that in the German system of film-making the director was always the most important element—not the actor, not the scriptwriter, not the cameraman, but the man sitting or standing beside the camera who gave the orders. Murnau treated his actors as puppets who had only to obey his instructions. It was Murnau who was responsible for the budget and, more importantly, for the editing. Hitchcock took these lessons to heart. When asked whom he considered to be his true mentors, Hitchcock replied, “The Germans! The Germans!”

  Other German episodes were less agreeable. He and Cutts were taken by the managers of the studio to a nightclub in Berlin where men danced with men, and women with women. This was not a situation with which Hitchcock, at least, was familiar. The two Englishmen were later propositioned by German prostitutes as Hitchcock quietly reiterated, “Nein, nein.” In sexual matters he seems not only to have been naïve but also unknowing. Even though he was patiently and quietly courting Alma, their relationship was almost entirely professional. They talked about films, and of course analysed the ones they were then making. In some respects Alma still had a better technical sense than Hitchcock himself, and throughout his life he would defer to her judgement. If she thought that something was not effective, he lost interest in it. As for sex, that was not nearly so important. Companionship and shared enthusiasm were the reasons for their long association.

  Their working relationship also involved protecting Graham Cutts, a married man who was pursuing an affair with his difficult Estonian mistress; Hitchcock and Alma were forced to find alibis, to cover his movements and generally to waste valuable time on the director’s unpredictable behaviour. Their mood was not helped by their joint realisation that Cutts was not even a very good director. Hitchcock tried to be as discreet as he could about the matter, but would sometimes whisper advice on the set. Eventually Cutts left the studio with his lover and did not return, leaving the last remaining scenes of The Blackguard to be directed by Hitchcock himself. Alma once admitted that Cutts “wasn’t really a pleasant man; he knew very little, so we literally carried him.” Cutts himself was jealous of Hitchcock’s talent and expertise; he no doubt sensed a rival in the making, and wasted no time in trying to belittle him. Hitchcock, a man normally consumed with anxiety, seems to have remained unperturbed.

  Neither The Blackguard nor The Prude’s Fall was a success. In New York the latter was jeered by the audience, and Variety described it as “film junk.” Cutts tended to blame everyone except himself, and now stated that he could no longer work with that “know-it-all son of a bitch.” Balcon duly noted his opinion, and then asked Hitchcock if he might consider directing on his own account. Hitchcock, obviously surprised by the offer, cheerfully accepted it. “All right,” he is supposed to have said, “when do we start?” They started in Munich. He and Alma, now his indispensable assistant, were sent back to Germany for another co-production.

  . . .

  He did not learn the lessons of German cinema simply in the film studios. On their return to England he and Alma became involved with the newly established London Film Society that was dedicated to the showing of foreign films that would otherwise have gone largely unnoticed. The society had been set up under the aegis of Ivor Montagu, a supporter of Soviet Russia whose enthusiasm encompassed the works of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. From watching films such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and Pudovkin’s Mother, Hitchcock was formally introduced to the art of montage which became a key element in his cinematic technique. “Pure cinema,” as he put it, amounted to “complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody.” The director in the editing room could establish patterns of tone and of movement, of mood and of imagery, that could dominate the experience of the film. The actor was no longer the principal agent of meaning; his feelings, his expressions, his thoughts, could now be manipulated by cutting and splicing. The actor smiles; there is a baby; he is a nice man. The actor smiles; there is a nude woman; he is a lecher. These early lessons were invaluable to Hitchcock’s art.

  Among those who came to the earliest viewings of the London Film Society, held at the New Gallery in Regent Street on Sunday afternoons, were Augustus John, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes and the American graphic artist E. McKnight Kauffer; a more technical participant was Sidney Bernstein, who would later collaborate with Hitchcock on projects such as Rope and Under Capricorn. Montagu said in an interview that “we thought there are such a lot of films that we are interested in that are being made abroad that we would like to fertilise British film ideas by seeing some of them…In this way we could draw into film artists, sculptors, writers who up to then disdained films.”

  Russian and German films at the time excelled their English counterparts, much to the chagrin of Hitchcock and his associates. Who would not prefer The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Destiny to Flames of Passion and Too Many Crooks? It could plainly be seen that the English cinema was in a dreadful state, dwarfed by that of America and Europe, and considered so rudimentary that actors and writers were inclined to shun it as a low populist sideshow. In turn the established film industry tended to despise the efforts of the London Film Society to expand critical awareness.

  So Hitchcock and others were moved to set up the smaller Hate Club, which organised Hate Parties in which the latest English releases were analysed and as often as not condemned. Ivor Montagu recalled that, at one of the meetings of this club, Hitchcock made a general statement of intent. Hitchcock t
old them that a film was not made for the public “because by the time the public sees it, it doesn’t really matter what happens to it.” The director was making the film for the press and for the critics, because only through them would his name become known. Publicity was the key. Once he was known and recognised, he was more free to do what he wished. Montagu added that Hitchcock said this in his usual manner, “drily, sarcastically, cynically, teasingly,” so that no one could take offence. Hitchcock was not proclaiming a divide between film as art and film as commerce, although most of his colleagues in the London Film Society would prefer the former course, but suggesting as a practical man that art and commerce were not necessarily to be distinguished. He followed this creed for the rest of his career.

  He was keenly aware of all the cinematic developments that were taking place around him, from the spectacle of Cecil B. DeMille to the melodrama of D. W. Griffith. In true English fashion he absorbed everything and changed it in translation. His career as one of the most distinguished directors in the world was just beginning.

  3

  SOUND, PLEASE

  In the spring of 1925 Hitchcock and Alma set out for Munich to embark on their new German co-production arranged by Michael Balcon. The Pleasure Garden marked Hitchcock’s debut as a director. It was financed by Emelka, the studios of which were close to the city; this was a more frankly commercial establishment than Hitchcock’s previous employer, UFA, but there is no reason to believe that he balked at the association. This was his chance.

  The enterprise was beset by problems from the beginning, largely as a result of inadequate finance. The two female stars from Hollywood, Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty, were not exactly thrifty in their arrangements; misunderstandings with Customs were compounded by problems with bulky luggage, all of which exacerbated Hitchcock’s bouts of anxious fear. He was also nervous with the direction of his leading lady, Valli (“I was terrified of giving her instructions,” he confessed), and made sure that Alma was always by his side. “Was that all right?” he asked Alma after every take. He and Valli must have struck up some kind of rapport, however, because there were times when he was obliged to borrow money from her. He was often down to his last pfennig.