Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  The only memorable aspect of Secret Agent lies in its sound—of a dead man’s head pressing against an organ and sending forth a prolonged and eerie note, and of a dog howling at the precise moment when his master is pushed over a cliff. These episodes demonstrate Hitchcock’s extraordinarily intuitive use of sound, but the film itself is awkward and uneasy. It is impossible to like Ashenden, the supposed hero, and impossible not to marvel, albeit from a distance, at Lorre. The only convincing character is the true villain of the piece, played by Robert Young as a handsome all-American college boy who turns out to be the real German agent.

  It is all too contrived and overburdened, compared with the light symmetries of The 39 Steps. The characters perform as if they are on an invisible stage; they are a bundle of striking attributes or a repertoire of effects. They do not cohere. The reviewers, and the public, were disappointed after the triumph of the previous film; Hitchcock himself admitted that “I’m sorry it wasn’t a success.”

  . . .

  By the summer of 1936 he decided, after this relative failure, to follow his natural grain. He would leave Switzerland and the Alps behind to return to the lower-class streets of London. He said in the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly that English film-makers “ignore the people who jump on to moving buses, the women squeezed together in the Underground, travelling salesmen…the typist and her boyfriend. Queues outside cinemas, music-hall girls, doctors, car salesmen, traffic cops and schoolmasters. It is in them that the spirit of England lies.” This represented in part his documentary ambitions, but it also harboured memories of his own earlier life.

  Sabotage was a reworking of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the story of a clandestine bombing by an enemy agent called Adolf Verloc. In the film he is a proprietor of a small cinema, living in a flat with his wife, Winnie, and her younger brother, Stevie. In Conrad’s novel Verloc owned a shop but Hitchcock wanted to bring life to the London he had known as a young boy haunting “the flicks.” The cinema is also located next to a greengrocery, which would convey the atmosphere of London streets at a crucial time of his life. Hitchcock himself confessed that “I have a penchant for including scenes of London in my films.” And why not? It is the landscape of his imagination. Michael Balcon had announced in advance that the film would “feature more of the real London than any film yet made.” That may in fact be an accurate account of its power. It depicts the movements of crowds and of the great waves of fear or enthusiasm that animate them; it portrays the shadows cast by money and power which agents like Verloc are determined to exploit. The fear of war that pervaded the late 1930s also adds its own shadow to a narrative concerned with the impending devastation of London.

  All the nostalgia and fantasy of Hitchcock’s nature go into his remaking of the urban landscape, from the open-air markets to the crowd lining up in front of the box office, from the pageantry of a lord mayor’s procession to the fusty interior of a bird shop in Islington. It is an alembic of London’s raucous mystery, with its own attendant darkness and shadows. When in a note to the novel Conrad describes London as “a cruel devourer of the world’s light,” Hitchcock knew precisely what he meant. One of the scenes shows an audience reacting with delight to Walt Disney’s short animated film, Who Killed Cock Robin?; but the point is that the young Hitchcock might also have been among them.

  He bears some similarity to another great London visionary, Charles Dickens. Although the outward circumstances of their lives differed very greatly, they shared a similar imagination. They were both fantasists who insisted upon meticulous detail in the unravelling of their plots; they were both poised between art and commerce, with a keen taste for the making of money. They were also great showmen in front of their respective audiences. Neither of them liked to discuss their work in detail. Hitchcock said to one interviewer that “I am not a realist at all. I am drawn to the fantastic. I see things ‘larger than life.’ ”

  “Metaphysically?”

  “Thank you. That’s why I love melodrama.”

  That is as close as Hitchcock ever came to delivering an artistic credo. He and Dickens were both poets and visionaries who posed as practical men of the world.

  He seems therefore to have envisaged Sabotage as an efficient thriller, and to that end he disembowelled Conrad’s novel for the sake of suspense and entertainment. He professed to have discarded all of his previous experimental techniques, with cuts and dissolves and wipes fighting for pre-eminence on the screen. “I have stopped all that today,” he wrote. “I have not the film time to throw away on fancy stuff.” He added in another interview that “I have become more commercially minded; afraid that anything at all subtle may be missed.” But we must trust the tale and not the teller. There is enough “fancy stuff” in Sabotage to fill an experimental art cinema, not least with the subtext of the cinema itself as a cover for deceit and illusion.

  Hitchcock set the scene for filming. “Out in a field near Harrow ‘London’ stands,” he wrote in the New York Times. “It is a complete replica of a London street scene, built for my new Gaumont British thriller, Sabotage. Fully equipped shops, trams, buses, traffic lights, beacons, overhead railway, and hundreds of pedestrians are there, but nothing is happening. The cameras are covered up, the microphone is shrouded, the crowds stand huddled against the shops.” There had in fact been three nights of cold and intense rain.

  The weather was not the only problem. There were disputes over money, at which point Ivor Montagu left the production on the grounds of excessive expenditure. There were arguments with the leading lady, Sylvia Sidney playing Winnie, about the exact nature of her part. In a climactic scene, when Winnie murders her husband, Sylvia wished to say some words to motivate her act; but Hitchcock intervened. She must kill him in silence. He just told her to “look to the right. Not so much. Less. Look away.” This reduced her to tears but, viewing the scene later, she confessed that it represented an act of genius. “Hollywood must hear of this,” she is supposed to have said.

  The fate of the younger brother Stevie, played by Desmond Tester—always called “Testicles” by Hitchcock, much to the young actor’s embarrassment—was tendentious. Tester was part of the biggest mistake that Hitchcock ever made with his audience. Towards the close of the film Verloc persuades Stevie to take some film canisters packed with explosives into the heart of London. The boy agrees, believing that he is going on a simple errand, but the clock has already begun ticking. It will not be long before the fatal explosion. He dallies and is diverted on the streets of London. The clock is still ticking. Eventually he jumps on to a tram, and begins petting a puppy, but the moment has come. The bomb explodes, along with child, puppy and all.

  One critic, with a small child of her own, belaboured Hitchcock and asked him how he could allow such a thing. She had a point. Hitchcock had miscalculated the nature of the suspense. He had written in that year that “I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups. Civilisation has become so screening and sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills at first hand.” But in this instance he may have miscalculated. The blowing to bits of a small boy hardly counts as a thrill, as the events of coming years would testify.

  That is perhaps why the English critics and English audiences were not greatly impressed by the film. Nevertheless Sabotage was risky enough, or adventurous enough, to find an appreciative audience in the United States; a critic of the American periodical The Nation was perceptive enough to note that “a live wire seems to run backward from any of his films to all the best films one can remember.” It was enough to say that Hitchcock had assimilated all the virtues of the cinematic art. As T. S. Eliot said of the work of Wilkie Collins, a great influence upon Hitchcock, “it has no merit beyond melodrama, and it has every merit that melodrama can have.”

  The relative failure of Sabotage only enhanced the financial difficulties of Gaumont British, and shortly after the shooting of the film its studio at Lime Grove was closed down. Hitchcock’s once cl
ose associates, Michael Balcon and Ivor Montagu, moved elsewhere, while the director himself returned to Gainsborough Pictures where he had once worked with Balcon. Hitchcock’s producer at Gainsborough, Ted Black, was experienced in the business of entertainment and soon proved himself to be thoroughly capable.

  . . .

  Meanwhile Hitchcock’s next contracted film, Young and Innocent, was waiting to be born. It was once more an adaptation, based upon Josephine Tey’s novel A Shilling for Candles, concerning a fugitive pursued by police for a murder he did not commit; with the help of a young woman, who happens to be the daughter of the local chief constable, he must track down the real killer. This may all sound vaguely familiar. It is. Charles Bennett was the natural writer for the script, and Hitchcock recalled that “we went into a huddle, and slowly from discussions, arguments, random suggestions, casual, desultory talk, and furious intellectual quarrels as to what such and such a character in such and such a situation would or would not do, the scenario began to take shape.” But the huddle was cut short; even while Bennett was preparing his treatment he received a telegram from Hollywood requesting his presence for The Adventures of Marco Polo. His name and skill had gone before him. There seemed to be no earthly reason to refuse, given the precarious state of the film industry at home, and Bennett crossed the ocean.

  This made Hitchcock pause. The moment might now have come to follow his scriptwriter across the water, in order to redeploy his considerable reputation in the United States. He had become perhaps too large for the English film industry alone; he felt technically constrained and undervalued. Yet he had also constructed for himself a comfortable and agreeable life in London; he appreciated the restaurants and the theatres; he had his immediate family still close to him, having moved his mother to a flat in Kensington. He had even started collecting art. He was also a highly anxious and fearful man terrified of novelty and of change. These were the arguments for staying.

  Yet he was also extremely ambitious, driven, as it were, by the cinematic Fates. The opportunities in America were vast, and the rewards much higher. He would be nearer the sun in every sense. He once told a colleague that in England “the sky was always grey, the rain was grey, the mud was grey, and I was grey.” Soon enough he would be obliged to come to a decision.

  Young and Innocent was a popular film both in England and in the United States, even though Film Weekly described it as a “typically English picture.” It did have one remarkable innovation. Hitchcock devised a “travelling shot” or “crane shot” during which in one unbroken movement the camera crosses a large dance floor and closes on the face of a drummer with trembling eyes; the eyes give him away as the real murderer. The camera moved 145 feet and stopped four inches in front of the eyes; the filming lasted two days. It was the high point of Young and Innocent and emphasised Hitchcock’s gifts as a virtuoso of the camera. But what else might he achieve with the resources of Hollywood behind him?

  Hitchcock was growing ever more restless. In the summer of 1937, just before editing the picture, he paid a visit to New York with his family on the understanding that it was merely a brief holiday. But he was in fact spying out the new territory. His presence was noted at the time, even though it was partly because of his portliness and apparently endless appetite. He is reported to have ordered in one restaurant three courses of steak and ice cream. But work also beckoned. The American producer David O. Selznick, the head of the newly established Selznick International Pictures, sent a telegram to his New York agent stating that “I am definitely interested in meeting Hitchcock as director, and think it might be wise for you to meet and chat with him.” She duly achieved this mission and, by the time the Hitchcocks left, connections had been made with Selznick and with other studios. Eight months after Young and Innocent was released in England, and five months after it was first shown in America, Hitchcock returned to New York in search of a definite contract. In the spring of 1938 he had said that “the matter is still in the air but, if I do go to Hollywood, I’d only work for Selznick.”

  The wish was father to the deed. He had already taken the precaution of hiring Selznick’s brother, Myron, as his agent. He sailed with his family at the beginning of June, on the Queen Mary, and soon enough arrived in Hollywood for the final negotiations. Hitchcock and Selznick seem to have got the measure of each other in the most cordial manner. They were both professionals, passionately devoted to the art of film. But they could both be stubborn and intent upon getting their own way; Hitchcock himself would find it impossible to avert Selznick’s dominant will. There were differences between them: Selznick was extrovert, even explosive, with a propensity for sending long memoranda with complicated instructions to members of the production team; Hitchcock was subdued and secretive, preferring to get what he wanted by devious rather than open means.

  Courtesy of J.T. Vintage/Bridgeman Images

  The American producer David O. Selznick, Hitchcock’s longtime collaborator.

  And how did he now appear to Selznick and to the world? His girth was the first impression he made upon strangers. He told one interviewer that he was of an “adrenal type,” which apparently meant that “I’m all body and only vestigial legs.” He may have been mistaken in his diagnosis, but he did look decidedly different; he once lamented “my odd, misshapen corporeal presence.” He felt his fatness keenly, more so in Hollywood than in England. In the city of dreams portliness was perhaps out of place. He had no illusions about the matter. He once told an art director, Robert Boyle, that “I have all the feelings of everyone encased in an armour of fat.” It is as well that he professed to be celibate all of his life, and that his attraction to his leading ladies did not go further than the adjustment of camera lighting. Or so he claimed. He had a large head and, at a height of five feet and seven inches, must have reminded some acquaintances of Humpty Dumpty. He was in fact very agile on his feet, with the daintiness sometimes associated with fat men; “Fatty” Arbuckle was another example.

  He explained the matter further to a biographer, Charlotte Chandler. “I have always been uncommonly unattractive. Worse yet, I have always known it. The feeling has been with me so long, I cannot imagine what it would be like not to feel that way.” This points the path towards a life filled with anger, sorrow, dismay, despair, anxiety and loneliness; these emotions must have been most acutely felt in his younger years, but their shadow would have followed him everywhere. That is why he came to require the “armour” of fat to protect himself against life’s depredations. He also wore a uniform with almost military precision. He had a wardrobe of six dark suits, all of the same cut but subtly different in size to mark his changing form. They were all numbered, so that trousers and jackets could be matched. It is commonly claimed that they were black, but both Hitchcock and his wife confirmed that they were dark blue in colour. He also possessed six identical pairs of shoes, ten identical ties, and fifteen identical pairs of socks and underwear. They gave him a formal, and calculated, appearance. He appreciated the restraint, the external order and discipline that they imposed. Photographs reveal, however, that he often allowed one of the shirt collars to curl up, perhaps as a sign of a yearning to be free.

  For a man filled with fears the uniform represented the triumph of artificiality and disguise, draping in stern cloth the “poor bare forked animal.” He was capable of seeming motionless on the set, with a preternatural calm and silence. In an interview in 1938 he declared that “if someone came into this room now, and said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, there’s a policeman waiting for you outside,’ my expression would change very slightly and become almost dead for a second.” It was as if he were playing dead to divert a predator.

  He hated conflict and disagreement. He would suppress his anger or resentment and walk away. A harsh or unkind word would leave him anxious and depressed all day. There are references in his early life to the fact that he sometimes berated actors for bad performances, but those references soon stop. In conversation he was calm and even,
almost softly spoken, with the firm but controlled voice that hypnotists use. He was courteous and gentlemanly, relying upon elaborate diction and perfectly enunciated words. Sometimes he affected a slight drawl, and would stick out his lower lip to register disappointment or disapproval; he had very expressive hands to tell a story or make an argument. “Precisely,” he might say. “Exactly.” He had a fondness for understatement which, in his films, became an aesthetic device. “Nothing amuses me so much,” he once said, “as understatement.” He had a fund of anecdotes and aphorisms that he would bring out for almost any occasion. In televised interviews he would repeat the same lines and stories endlessly; it was part of his carapace. He would never say anything out of turn, or surprising, or revelatory. The secret was that he could, or would, never reveal himself. He was often sly or subtle in his dealings with other people. He was a great calculator, ever watchful of himself and of others.

  5

  AT HOME

  The Hitchcocks returned to England at the beginning of September 1937, and were at once faced with unfinished business. Another film was needed to fulfil the contract with Gainsborough Pictures before they could consider moving to the United States. Ted Black, the producer, offered him a once abandoned project, The Lost Lady, which had the prior advantage of being almost completely scripted by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. Hitchcock saw its possibilities. It was his kind of film. A young and attractive English woman adopts as her travelling companion, on a train through central Europe, a rather dowdy middle-aged spinster. The journey has hardly begun when the older woman vanishes. None of the other travellers seem to have noticed her; some of them claim that she never existed. It is time for the romantic lead to take up the cause of the young lady and find the missing party.