Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  Hitchcock’s world of fear, however, is not in doubt. By his own account he was afraid of everything; he always imagined the worst, and prepared for it. He still did not like to cross the studio floor in case a stranger came up to him. François Truffaut said of him after a series of exhaustive interviews that he was a “neurotic” and “a fearful person”; he was “deeply vulnerable” but as a result became “an artist of anxiety.” That was the secret. Hitchcock projected his anxiety into his films, in which fear becomes an intrinsic aspect of daily life. He was aware of the innate and uncontrollable terror that can suddenly afflict a human being, and in that instant the outer world becomes unreal. This is also the awareness of his films.

  The business of filming itself, for an essentially timid man, was formidable and frightening. How could he control the restless life of the studio that was insidiously threatening to him? That was why he sought all the time to render himself invulnerable by total control, routine, neatness, quietness. His daughter testifies that he was afflicted by migraines if things did not go to plan. There is an anecdote told by the screenwriter of Psycho, Joseph Stefano, who agreed to drop off Hitchcock at a cab rank in front of a hotel; but the last cab was driving off as Stefano pulled away. He saw Hitchcock standing alone with a look of abject terror upon his face at this abandonment.

  Hitchcock suffered from vertigo and the fear of falling; in many of his films there are sequences of vertiginous falls into the abyss. The hanging man is one of his central motifs with the unspoken assumption from Edgar Allan Poe that “my whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable.” Hitchcock was a superb fantasist of fear. So like a tuning fork he finds the hidden fears and anxieties of his audience; as an artist he had access to the collective unconscious. He had such an intimate connection with his own anxieties that he was able instinctively to stir those of the public.

  . . .

  Hitchcock and Selznick still did not seem to be working as a partnership. It was customary in America for the producer to make all the important decisions; he would expect to be given long stretches of film, “master shots” of the action, as well as close-ups, shots from different angles, which he could mix until he found the version he preferred. But Hitchcock did not work in that way. He had so designed the film in his imagination that he used precisely the camerawork he had envisaged; the completed film would fit like pieces of a puzzle. In his world there was no room for second-guessing or interference from anyone else. His first shock came quickly. After the rehearsal of a scene he had said “Well, let’s go.” The script girl intervened. “Oh, wait a minute—I have to send for Mr. Selznick.”

  Despite the director’s displeasure, the producer persevered. He ordered retakes, and changed the script; he continued to supervise the costumes of the leading players and saw the daily rushes. Fortunately for Hitchcock, perhaps, he was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problems of completing Gone With the Wind, and after a few weeks his interventions in Rebecca became less frequent. It is hard to say, with Rebecca, where the director ends and the producer begins, but it hardly matters.

  The director himself said later that “it’s not a Hitchcock picture,” but he was only half right. The lighting is still conveyed with his expressionistic use of darkness and shadow, while the vast and gloomy house takes on all the characteristics of a Gothic prison where the heroine is alone and vulnerable. The house is a living thing that in the end must be destroyed by fire. Fear is once more the key. Yet Rebecca has a purely cinematic depth that had eluded him in the past; he was learning from Selznick even as he was resisting him. In the last weeks of post-production, for example, Selznick supervised the editing of the film until it reached the tempo and atmosphere which he desired.

  The production went over budget, and over time, but it did what it was meant to do: it made a large profit. It delighted audiences and went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of 1940. It was an undeniable achievement for a foreign director’s first film in the United States, even if Selznick himself picked up the statuette.

  Hitchcock had made an auspicious start, even if in not quite the way he had anticipated, but by the autumn of 1939 Selznick had already decided to “loan out” his British director to an independent producer. Selznick made a profit on the deal, charging $5,000 a week for Hitchcock’s services while still paying the director his stipulated weekly fee of $2,500; Hitchcock, always aware of deals and finances even as he pretended not to understand them, was furious. The producer was making a hundred per cent profit out of him. In the end he could do nothing; yet he was at least free from Selznick’s immediate control. Hitchcock said in an interview that “as soon as I was working for someone I wasn’t under contract to, the supervision was lessened.” The result was Foreign Correspondent, a film much closer to Hitchcock’s British thrillers than to Hollywood melodrama.

  The producer, Walter Wanger, had bought the rights to a memoir of an American foreign correspondent. Vincent Sheean’s Personal History concerned his journalistic adventures in Europe and Asia while working for the Chicago Tribune in the late 1920s and ’30s, but Wanger wanted to employ it to create a film about the war only recently begun. Hitchcock seemed genuinely excited at the opportunity, but his mind was already working in the direction of The 39 Steps; he wanted to mix once more the ingredients of international espionage, assassination and pursuit with the war as a convenient backdrop.

  Hitchcock persuaded Wanger to hire Charles Bennett as the principal scriptwriter; much to his delight his old colleague, now resident in Hollywood, was available. Through the month of February 1940 he and Bennett, together with Alma and Joan Harrison, worked on the screenplay. It was largely to be set in Holland, already under threat from the German forces. “We’ll have the hero see a windmill turning against the wind,” Hitchcock told them. “He’ll know that’s some kind of enemy signal.” That was pure Hitchcock—a visual conceit, remarkable in itself, that would somehow be welded to the plot. An American reporter is sent to London where he promptly falls in love with the heroine; the girl in question, however, is the daughter of a prominent peace campaigner who turns out to be the chief of the enemy spy-ring in England. It was worthy of Buchan himself. Wanger said of Hitchcock that he is “fat, forty and full of fire.” An observer noted of the filming that “Hitchcock’s full lips move with the words of the performer, his round face grimaces with every emotion, he sways with their action. He is each character in turn, enacting each part silently, without rising from his chair. He is like a child participating in a Saturday afternoon thriller.”

  This energy and inventiveness forced the pace of the film, with Hitchcock dreaming of and then devising spectacular set scenes to maintain the momentum of the narrative. A prominent statesman is apparently assassinated in the large public square of Amsterdam, and for that purpose Hitchcock arranged for the building of an elaborate facsimile that covered ten acres; the Colorado river had to be diverted, and a sewer system built, to provide and accommodate endless rain. In another Hitchcock fancy a hundred umbrellas fill the square. The hero, played by Joel McCrea, chases the assassin to a large windmill in the fields outside the city; it is a vaguely Gothic construction of ladders and beams and wooden sails, where Hitchcock can once more indulge his love of shadows, steps and silhouettes. In a later scene a complete aircraft was crashed into a vast water tank to splendidly realistic effect.

  At a total cost of $1.5 million, Foreign Correspondent was the most expensive film Hitchcock had ever made, yet it was also one of his most successful, considered by some to be superior even to Rebecca. The critic of the New Republic considered that it provided “a seminar in how to make a movie travel the lightest and fastest way, in a kind of beauty that is peculiar to movies alone.”

  He shot the film from March to May, even as events in Europe left him more apprehensive by the day. Norway and Denmark had gone by April; Belgium and Holland followed with Paris about to fall. London’s turn could onl
y be days or weeks away. At the last minute he added a codicil to the film, when the foreign correspondent delivers a broadcast speech to America from a BBC studio. “All that noise you hear isn’t static. It’s death, coming to London. Yes, they’re coming here now! You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and homes!”

  As soon as filming was complete, he and Joan Harrison decided to return to England in order to pick up their respective parents. (Alma had already returned to take her mother and her sister to California.) Theirs was not a comfortable journey; they took ship in a convoy under crowded conditions with a shortage of bathrooms. This was not Hitchcock’s idea of travel. It was a fruitless expedition. Emma Hitchcock flatly refused to travel back to the United States with her famous son. She had survived the First World War without a scratch, and had no wish to run for cover now. She was persuaded, however, to remove permanently to “Winter’s Grace” at Shamley Green, the Hitchcocks’ country home, which might be considered safer; she was later joined there by Hitchcock’s older brother William, as well as their sister, Nellie. Hitchcock did not travel back empty-handed, however; he brought for his daughter an empty incendiary bomb case, which she put by her bed.

  In this period, he came under sustained assault from some of his English colleagues who effectively accused him of deserting England at a time of peril. He should not have been swanning around Hollywood, but fighting the war on the home front. This of course did not mean that he should be “called up”; he was too old and too fat and had already been considered unfit for combat during the First World War. Instead it was believed that he should have become involved in the film propaganda in England. Michael Balcon, his former friend and colleague, led the charge with an unmistakeable attack. “I had a plump young junior technician in my studios whom I promoted from department to department. Today he is one of our most famous directors and he is in Hollywood while we who are left behind short-handed are trying to harness the films to our great national effort…I do not give this man’s name, as I have decided not to mention any of the deserters by name.” Yet everyone knew whom he meant. One satirist imagined a film, Gone With the Wind Up, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

  Hitchcock was terribly hurt by the criticism, particularly by the reference to him as a “deserter,” to the extent that he broke the habit of a lifetime and replied very sharply in public to Balcon’s criticism. He attributed it to envy at his success. He wrote that “Balcon’s view is coloured by his own personal experiences with Hollywood, which have invariably wound up unfortunately for Balcon. He’s a permanent Donald Duck…The manner in which I am helping my country is not Mr. Balcon’s business and has nothing to do with patriotic ideals. Mr. Balcon apparently hates Hollywood. I can only put his remarks down as personal jealousy. How else could he be so unintelligent?” He could have added that he had in fact agreed to make films with the Ministry of Information in London, and had already made unpublicised contributions to the war effort. He edited, for example, American versions of two British documentaries concerning the war.

  The episode harmed him in another sense, because it marked a sea change in the attitude of certain English critics and pundits. They decided that Hitchcock’s American films were below his best, and that his departure from London had been at the expense of his cinematic imagination. He was no longer the Hitchcock of The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes; he had become a component of the Hollywood machine, churning out glossy and vulgar artefacts for the sake of profit. This was of course a vindictive and mistaken argument, but it was not until the 1960s and ’70s that it was finally overturned.

  . . .

  On his return he was once more loaned out by David Selznick, on this occasion to RKO for two successive pictures. RKO—or Radio-Keith-Orpheum—had already gained a reputation for musicals and light comedies to which at this point Hitchcock was not necessarily averse. He always ascribed the first of the two pictures, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, to a sense of obligation. Carole Lombard had rented out her house to him, and they had found each other agreeably abrasive company. That was the reason why he agreed with RKO to direct a comic vehicle for the star. It was perhaps not quite so simple. He had in fact expressed a wish to work with her for some time, and he enjoyed the opportunity of directing a comedy in an American landscape with what he called “typical Americans.”

  Lombard herself was hardly typical. When on set he was discussing the rushes with her, she told him that “I don’t give a fuck about that. How did my new tits look?” She knew about Hitchcock’s supposed remark to Michael Redgrave that “actors are cattle,” so on the first day of filming he was surprised to find three stalls on the set. Each one contained a calf, with the names of Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery and Gene Raymond around their necks. These were the three principal actors.

  As a cinematic team they worked well, and Hitchcock completed filming within six weeks. It was, all in all, a success as a Hollywood comedy in the tradition of It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey. Lombard was the queen of screwball, effortlessly able to become the dominant female in comedies of courtship and marriage. It was light, amusing and eminently forgettable. It was also a huge success at the time, confirming Hitchcock’s growing reputation as a director for American themes.

  His second film for RKO was a very different matter. It had its comedic moments but the comedy was black. He began shooting Suspicion in February 1941. It is a psychological thriller in which the heroine comes to believe that her husband is trying to kill her. In the novel from which the film is derived, Before the Fact, the wife willingly drinks the poison she is offered; she is carrying her husband’s baby, and does not wish to give birth to the murderer’s child. It is all somewhat contrived, but the macabre situation appealed to Hitchcock. Joan Fontaine and Cary Grant took the lead roles, although Hitchcock seems to have become obsessed by the amounts they were paid in comparison with his own standard salary.

  By the time shooting began, the script was still in pieces. No one as yet had a title for the film, and endless rewrites on differently coloured pages were ordered. Hitchcock fell sick from the tension and indecision, while his principal actress complained that he was not giving her performance enough attention. Fontaine had been ceaselessly coached in Rebecca, and now believed that the director was losing interest in her. He had in fact become more confident of her abilities. She and Grant also had difficulties, with both complaining of the other’s subtle attempts to steal scenes. This was not an uncommon rivalry, and Hitchcock would have done his best to exacerbate it to increase the necessary tension on the screen.

  Hitchcock admired Grant’s abilities as an actor. The actor eventually performed in four of the director’s films, and would be considered for another six which time and circumstance denied him. It has been said that Grant was the man who Hitchcock in his fantasies wished to be. It is possible but not likely. “Cary Grant” was in any case a fiction, an invention designed for the public. He was actually an English circus performer, Archie Leach, who had by various methods vaulted from the trapeze into stardom. His secret was to do little or nothing; his face was in many respects a blank, on to which the audience could read any and every emotion. There were occasions when his eyes moved very slightly to register that something had happened, even if he himself was not prepared to say what it was. A single phrase, or a single gesture, was enough. That was his style. In the famous scene when he brings up to his ailing wife a glass of milk, in which Hitchcock had placed an electric bulb to increase its luminescence, he might have been carrying a sleeping potion or a dose of poison. The accompanying music is that of a waltz by Strauss entitled “Vienna Blood.” Grant’s posture, and his expression, fulfil Hitchcock’s familiar advice to actors: “Do nothing.” This is not as simple as it sounds.

  One of Grant’s fellow actors in another Hitchcock film, James Mason, recalled that “Cary was a very serious person, not the character he played. He would be there waiting, clutching his script as though his life depended on it until the last possible secon
d. Then he would step into his part, confident, flippant, and casual, appearing to be making it up as he went along.” He managed at the same time to convey intimacy and distance, the sort of strangeness that accompanied his creation of “Cary Grant.”

  Three different conclusions were prepared for the film, a sign of the confusion that bedevilled the entire process of filming. In one of them Grant’s character is in fact the murderer. The studio rejected that ending, on the grounds that the romantic star could not be the villain. The second, in which the wife drinks the milk to no ill effect but saves her husband from poisoning himself, was derided by a preview audience. Hitchcock had to settle for an ambiguous close, in which the ill-starred couple drive away in a show of apparent amity after the wife realises that her own fears had clouded her judgement. This ending, with its hint of menace to come, seemed to satisfy the director.

  Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  A press shot for Suspicion, 1941. Cary Grant, left, was to become a favourite actor of Hitchcock. In 1942, Joan Fontaine won an Oscar for her role in the film.

  To general surprise, however, there was a happy ending in another sense. When the film was released in November 1941, it quickly became a success, with one critic believing that it was “far finer” than Rebecca. The audiences agreed, and Suspicion became the most popular and profitable film of that year for RKO. The president of RKO, George Schaefer, cabled to Hitchcock that “ORCHIDS TO YOU AGAIN REVIEWS EXCELLENT AND PICTURE DOING OUTSTANDING BUSINESS WE ARE ALL VERY HAPPY AND KNOW YOU MUST BE TOO.” The public approval was sealed in February 1942 when Joan Fontaine won the Oscar for Best Actress.

  It is in fact a film that displays some of the director’s characteristic themes; unease bubbles quietly beneath the surface, the darkness hidden from view in familiar and even homely surroundings. Strong horizontal shadows cross the innocent participants, like the mark of Cain. There are shadows everywhere, encouraging perpetual suspense and unjustified suspicion. The tension is almost palpable.