Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  The film was completed by the end of August. It bears the marks of Hitchcock’s characteristic style. In the opening shots a line of chorus girls spin down a spiral staircase and then display themselves on stage to the admiring and lascivious gaze of elderly males in the front row. The rest of the narrative, concerning the conflicting fates of two chorus girls, is played out with what would become Hitchcock’s signature amalgam of comedy and suspense.

  Another aspect of Hitchcock’s films also makes its first appearance here, as male indifference and brutality towards women are exemplified by betrayal and attempted murder. Voyeurism and violence towards women were to become Hitchcock’s twin motifs. But comedy was to keep on breaking through. In The Pleasure Garden, a cockney couple bring with them the cockney drollery which he knew very well. Comic allusions to homosexuality, male and female, can be found in an extravagantly effeminate costume designer and a female secretary (complete with the Hitchcock device of spectacles) who ogles the chorus girls.

  It was, for the time, clever and inventive, with camera angles and techniques of cutting that were still considered by some in England to be too experimental or innovative. Balcon flew over to Germany to see the finished film, and loved it. He said that it had an “American look,” by which he meant that it was more sophisticated and more fast-paced than its English counterparts. The press reaction, on its eventual release, was equally satisfying with Hitchcock himself described as “the young man with the master mind.” He had proved himself, on his first film, to be an expert director.

  But he could not have done it on his own. Alma was of course always there, ready to lend support and give advice. She was his second pair of eyes. He had also gained the inestimable help of a seasoned scriptwriter, Eliot Stannard, to whom Alma had introduced him. Stannard was well known and well respected in the trade, and had already written essays on the formal art of film-making; this would have been enough to endear him to Hitchcock. Stannard in fact went on to write, or adapt, the scripts for eight of the nine films that Hitchcock completed between 1925 and 1929; he already had a firm grasp on the techniques of montage, and on the creation of suspense, so that he could be said to provide the scaffold on which Hitchcock built. In any case the director wished to create a familiar “team” with which he could work. The cameraman on The Pleasure Garden, Gaetano di Ventimiglia, worked on the next two films. Throughout his career Hitchcock preferred to surround himself with recognisable faces. This may have been an aspect of his general nervousness.

  With The Pleasure Garden a public success, the “team” returned in November 1925 to the studios of Emelka to make The Mountain Eagle. All that remains of this venture are a few stills of a melodramatic kind and some striking photographs of Hitchcock and Alma making the best of their situation in the thick snow of the Ôtztal Alps which they had chosen for their location filming. While there, Hitchcock was attacked by a violent fit of nausea which was later diagnosed as a form of “mountain madness”; he had been afflicted by a sudden and uncontrollable desire to shout out to the mountains “Let me speak English to someone!” That at least is the story. The film itself was not considered to be a success, and the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly noted that it was “rather wandering and not too convincing.” It was wandering so much that it was quickly lost, with no surviving copy to confirm the impression of the stills that Hitchcock was continuing to experiment with German filmic techniques.

  The journey had one successful outcome, however. On their way back to England by ship, on Christmas Eve, during a violent storm, Hitchcock proposed to Alma. She was in her cabin, prone with seasickness, when he knocked on the door and asked her simply if she would marry him. Their daughter, who no doubt heard the story first-hand, wrote that “Alma was too sick to lift her head from the pillow. She groaned, nodded her head, and burped.” And that was that. The burp said it all. He would later state that “I married her because she asked me to,” but that was just another way of sloughing off any hint of sexual desire on his part.

  While Hitchcock was in Germany a new film under his direction had been announced. It was to be entitled The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, and was directly influenced by the criminal career of Jack the Ripper in the streets of Whitechapel some thirty-seven years before. It was based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes and in fact Hitchcock, at the age of sixteen, had seen it played in a London theatre. He was naturally drawn to such material, with murder in the dark streets of the East End as irresistible to him as the image of the stranger with the scarf over his mouth, stalking vulnerable females with a little black bag in his hand.

  Eliot Stannard had already started work on the script in the early months of 1926, and Hitchcock began to break down the narrative into hundreds of small drawings which were designed to specify, in his words, “the exact grouping and action of the characters and the placing of the camera.” This was the technique, known familiarly as “storyboarding,” that he used intermittently for the rest of his life; he conceived his films in purely visual terms. He told aspiring cameramen that they should go to art galleries to learn the effects of the great masters; they should study Rembrandt or Vermeer in order to learn the use of shadow and reflection. In his visual meditation upon characters and objects he became the camera, or an extension of the camera: the camera was for him the pivot of any film. This was not filmed theatre, or a filmed story; it was simply film. The use of light was its music, rising in intensity from piano to forte, and in the process creating a unique rhythm of meaning.

  . . .

  In February 1926 Gainsborough Pictures announced that the star of The Lodger was to be Ivor Novello, a matinee idol whose previous career both as a composer of musical comedies and romantic lead of silent films did not necessarily prepare him for the role of a suspected killer of women. By the end of the story, of course, he would have to be vindicated, but Hitchcock was good at compromise.

  In March he began what he called variously “the first real Hitchcock film” or “my first picture,” with its combination of Victorian melodrama and expressionistic techniques. He and his cameraman were at one in preferring shafts of light and intense shadows, sudden close-ups and vertiginous staircases. The story was a simple one: at the time of a series of killings, a mysterious stranger arrives at the Bunting household in search of lodgings. The camera roams through the Bunting house as if it were intent upon laying a ghost, but the atmosphere of suspense and suspicion has already been very carefully established. The film opens with the face of a screaming woman, a device Hitchcock would use again as an emblem of female hysteria and sexuality, and then the night sky of London is punctured by a neon sign announcing “To-Night Golden Curls.”

  Enter Novello from the London fog like a wraith; the gas lamps of the house flicker and dim as he crosses the threshold into the Bunting world of cosy domesticity. The lower part of his face is covered. The eyes do all the work. To today’s audiences it might look like overacting, but at the time it was simply intensity. He is led up to his rooms on the second floor, and at once the staircase becomes one of the themes of The Lodger; it might be seen as an image of spiritual mystery, mounting ever higher, but it also prompts the fear of falling. In one of the most technically expert scenes, lasting no more than ten seconds, Hitchcock turns a ceiling into glass so that the Buntings can actually see the pacing footsteps of their lodger; this effect would have come as a shock to contemporary audiences. At the end of the film the lodger, known as “The Avenger,” is pursued by a ferocious London mob and is suspended by handcuffs from a set of railings. Hitchcock always liked handcuffs.

  The filming took six weeks, but Hitchcock sensed trouble even before the first screening. There were still whispers of resentment against him at Gainsborough Pictures, orchestrated in part by Graham Cutts who could not forgive his erstwhile assistant’s rise in the company. Cutts had as an ally the chairman of the distribution company attached to Gainsborough, C. M. Woolf. Both men believed that Hitchcock’s experimental techniques wou
ld alienate an English audience. “I don’t know what he’s shooting,” Cutts told someone at the studio. “I can’t make head or tail of it.” He prophesied disaster.

  Neither Hitchcock nor Alma attended the formal screening in front of Woolf and others. Instead they trudged the stones of London together for an hour and a half. Both of them were praying, since Alma had just been on a Catholic induction course in preparation for her marriage. They were eventually greeted, on their return, to devastating news. The Lodger was declared to be a fiasco, too “arty” and too “highbrow.” It would have to be shelved. Hitchcock’s career looked as if it might be over just after it had begun.

  © National Portrait Gallery, London

  Hitchcock in 1926, the year before The Lodger came out.

  Michael Balcon, desperate to see a return on his investment in Novello, came to Hitchcock’s rescue. He called in Ivor Montagu, who earned a precarious living by re-editing foreign films and translating foreign titles. It was Montagu’s task to rework the film into a more acceptable form. He was actually delighted by the quality of The Lodger; he wished only to shorten some scenes and to reduce the number of title cards so that the narrative flowed more naturally. Hitchcock was, as always, highly practical. The title cards were cut from 300 to eighty, but it was still the original film in all of its important elements, and Hitchcock’s vision was sustained.

  The repairs were completed by July and the press and trade screening took place in the middle of September, when it became clear that Hitchcock’s original confidence in The Lodger had been well placed. The critic of the Daily Mail called it “brilliant” and The Bioscope believed it to be “the finest British production ever made.” Cutts and Woolf were confounded, Balcon vindicated, and Hitchcock celebrated as the radiant boy. Picturegoer had already called him “Alfred the Great.”

  On its release at the beginning of 1927, The Lodger proved to be a popular success; the scenes of the city in shadow, the doubt and suspense hovering over the suspected killer, the lighter touches of London domesticity, would all become Hitchcock’s hallmarks; but here for the first time they were conveyed to an English audience without the black mark of being a “foreign” film. The sexual suggestiveness, already one of the weapons in Hitchcock’s arsenal of cinematic themes, was also appreciated.

  . . .

  Hitchcock, however, did not immediately follow a predictable path. He decided that he wished to create films associated with current events. This was the period when Robert Flaherty and John Grierson were beginning to experiment with projects, in Grierson’s phrase, “of documentary value.” Hitchcock was alert to any development in the new art of film, and began to consider the possibility of making a film about the General Strike of the previous year; he was not concerned with a simple news story but wanted, as he explained later, to create a “magnificently dynamic motion picture” with “fistfights between strikers and undergraduates, pickets and all the authentic drama of the situation.” The proposal was immediately turned down by the British Board of Film Censors who disliked any reminder of a recent social crisis.

  Throughout his career he aspired to a different form of cinema—a picture about sabotage in a dockyard, about a pit disaster, about a City scandal, featuring the lives of real people. But this was not a direction which the studios or censors wished to follow. In these early years, however, he never ceased to think about his art. In an open letter to the Evening News in November 1927, he made it clear that “when moving pictures are really artistic they will be created entirely by one man,” just as a symphony is conceived by one composer. His ambitions were growing with every success.

  It is of some relevance, then, that in The Lodger he made his first appearance in a “cameo” role; he played the part of a news editor, with his back turned to the camera, in a sequence that lasts two or three seconds. He said at the time that he was obliged to do so because of the shortage of actors, but his subsequent delight in such walk-on performances suggests otherwise. He was making his presence known and, subliminally, alerting the audience to the fact that he was in charge of what they saw. They could not have known who he was in The Lodger, of course. It was still a private pleasure.

  He and Alma married on 2 December 1926, in a formal Roman Catholic ceremony at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington. For their honeymoon they travelled to the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, to which resort they returned on their wedding anniversary as often as they could. The marriage endured until his death, with Alma following him into the dark two years later. He once said of her in a magazine article that “she has a consistency of presence, a lively personality, a never-clouded expression and she keeps her mouth shut except in magnanimously helpful ways.” Her liveliness did much to dispel his nervous fear, of which she was well aware, and it is doubtful whether he would have been able to make his way in the world without her support. She had what she called “peppery” opinions about films, filming and of course film people, but they were for his ears only. She could spot charlatans and amateurs from a great distance, and he immediately bowed to her opinions. She was in the sound suites, the editing rooms and on the studio floors; she was the first one to see the finished picture, and the last one to deliver her opinions. She was in truth, according to contemporaries, a little “bossy”; but, as she said, she was never terribly ambitious and channelled all her hopes and aspirations into the work of her husband. They were like working partners rather than husband and wife; and that is how both of them wished it to be.

  Courtesy of Evening Standard/Stringer

  Hitchcock and Alma on their wedding day, 1926.

  They were in some respects an odd couple. Alma was an almost boyish figure, and tended to wear “pant-suits” in a period they were not considered to be entirely proper. Their daughter, Patricia, recalled that her father arranged to have his wife’s trouser suits tailored by Austin Reed, the gentlemen’s outfitters, in London. Hitchcock called her “Madame,” and on occasions “the Duchess,” which is a cockney endearment for wife or mother. With the one exception of the conception of Patricia, he always claimed that theirs was a sexless marriage, and there is no reason to doubt him. He told Truffaut that he was celibate, and “that’s why they call me the celibated director.”

  One intimate family friend, Dorothy Wegman, came to admire what she called “this odd, weird, little faggish man and this sweet little boyish woman.” “Faggish” suggests an inclination towards camp or effeminacy. He was graceful to the point of gentility in his gestures and attitudes; he was nimble and dainty on his feet, not at all like the ponderous and serene figure of his public appearances. One of his colleagues and close collaborators, the American producer David O. Selznick, told his wife that “he’s not a bad guy, shorn of affectations, although not exactly a man to go camping with.”

  Hitchcock once said that if he had not met Alma, he might have become a “poof.” We may take his word for this, amplified once in a letter to Joan Crawford where he remarked that “in my very rare homosexual moments” he began to leaf through Vogue. He said that an actor had to possess a masculine and feminine side to enter the life of any character; the same undoubtedly would apply to an artist such as Hitchcock. He worked easily and naturally with homosexual actors (Ivor Novello was one such). And of course he showed a keen interest in homosexuality in most of his films; it is almost a leitmotif, and it would be an interesting parlour game to name any of his principal characters who were not intimated to be bisexual.

  Before he married, he had still been living with his widowed mother in East London while Alma had been with her parents at Twickenham; but now they made a decisive change by setting up home together at 153 Cromwell Road, one of those great anonymous avenues of West London. They lived on the two top storeys of an early Victorian house, unfussy and unremarkable; they climbed ninety-six steps to their door, which may have helped Hitchcock’s general fitness. The flat was furnished in contemporary commercial style by Liberty’s of Regent Street. It was comfortable, and even
cosy. At the back, down below, lay the tracks of the Underground coming up for air from the bowels of South Kensington so that, according to the film director Michael Powell, “the thunder of the passing trains was distant like the waves on the pebbles of Sandgate beach.” They ate, and worked, on the dining-room table.

  It was here they planned the last stages of Downhill, the film that directly followed The Lodger and was designed to reap the rewards of the previous film’s popularity. Once more it starred Ivor Novello, as fresh and youthful as ever. It is a highly melodramatic narrative of a public schoolboy wrongly accused of seducing a female employee. Novello was of course the lead. The transition from suspected serial killer to wronged public schoolboy may seem a large one, but for an audience in love with its matinee idol it was not a leap too far.

  Yet Downhill has its moments. Theatrical as it may have been in execution, it is a successful study in deceit, cruelty and perversion. The interiors are like prison scenes illuminated by shafts of sunlight and, as Novello begins his ineluctable journey downwards, Hitchcock conveys his characteristic sense of the world as perilous and unstable. The protagonist is once more “the wrong man,” as he had been in The Lodger, and some of his travels take him through scenes of London at night wonderfully striated by neon lighting. It becomes a Hitchcock landscape. The images of the young man’s fevered delirium are startlingly clear since, as Hitchcock said, “I tried to embody the dream in the reality, in solid unblurred images” at a time when dreams were generally presented as dissolves. It was an aspect of his instinctive cinematic intelligence.