Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  It is a film about legibility and readability. In one scene a detective is seen looking momentarily at a work of abstract art; but his glance tells you nothing. Does he understand it or does it pass his comprehension? In similar fashion the camera will pause upon Cary Grant’s face. Is he a hapless playboy or a sociopath? It is impossible to tell. All is inscrutable and ambiguous, which is perhaps why the ambivalent ending perfectly suits the tone and manner of the film. Yet the film has the strange power of drawing the spectator forward, in a state of constant anticipation.

  . . .

  Even while filming Suspicion Hitchcock had begun working on his next picture. Saboteur was primarily of his own devising. With the assistance of Alma and Joan Harrison he developed a scenario for a film in which a munitions worker is falsely accused of sabotage. With the help of an attractive young woman the suspect must pursue the real criminal. If this sounds like The 39 Steps transposed to American soil, that is exactly what it is. In some ways he liked to look back. Vague ideas of remaking The Lodger and The Man Who Knew Too Much were considered before being shelved.

  He delivered the treatment of the proposed film to Selznick, who was intrigued but not convinced. Selznick wrote to Hitchcock that he should “try to get something instead of [a] dam being blown up. This is not very new for a picture catastrophe.” He also took the precaution of sending one of his senior colleagues, John Houseman, to supervise the process of turning the treatment into a viable film. Even at this early stage Selznick planned to sell the film and director to another studio, and naturally wanted to protect his investment. He hoped that Houseman, another Englishman, might be able to work more easily with Hitchcock. Houseman had spent previous years working with Orson Welles, and so had perhaps acquired a reputation for dealing with difficult characters.

  Houseman was immediately taken with his compatriot. “I had heard of him as a fat man given to scabrous jokes, a gourmet and an ostentatious connoisseur of fine wines. What I was unprepared for was a man of exaggeratedly delicate sensibilities, marked by a harsh Catholic education and the scars from a social system against which he was in perpetual revolt and which had left him suspicious and vulnerable, alternatively docile and defiant.” This is, perhaps, overstressing the point; whether by Hitchcock or by Houseman is not clear.

  He went on to say that “his passion was for his work, which he approached with an intelligence and almost scientific clarity to which I was unaccustomed.” He worked with Hitchcock by means of long conversations, concerning “anecdotes, situations, characters, revelations and reversals, which he would think up at night and try out on us during the day.” Hitchcock had images and scenes in his head, quite unconnected with one another, but, as Houseman says, “the surviving elements were finally strung together into some sort of story in accordance with carefully calculated and elaborately plotted rhythms.” This was the origin of Saboteur, where certain notable set scenes and conflicts are held together by the slenderest of threads.

  In the course of planning and writing the film, one of the essential members of his team left. Joan Harrison had decided that she wanted to further her career in Hollywood by striking out alone. Hitchcock asked Selznick to increase her salary but, when the producer declined to do so, Hitchcock left the office in a rage. Harrison and Hitchcock managed to remain on friendly terms, however, and eventually they were reunited.

  Her replacement at the time was a young man, Peter Viertel, who had never written a script before. Hitchcock promised that he would teach him how to do so in twenty minutes. When Viertel questioned him about a problematic piece of action Hitchcock replied that “they’ll never ask”—“they” being what he described to Viertel as “the great masses” and “the moron millions.” He needed to sell them tickets, to furnish his own livelihood, but he did not have to admire them. This was the paradox of his position. He needed to consult the tastes of his audience, and to a certain extent pander to them, while at the same time he believed himself to be an artist rather than a mere entertainer; this would encourage odd contortions on his part. It may have been a sign of self-hatred, however, that he was willing to belittle his own achievements.

  The filming of Saboteur was given an additional impetus by the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on the morning of 7 December 1941. American neutrality in the larger war was no longer an option, and it allowed Viertel (and his eventual co-writer, Dorothy Parker) to pepper the script with remarks about those rich American socialites and industrialists who sympathised with the fascist cause.

  Selznick sold the film and its director to an independent producer, Frank Lloyd, who in turn supervised the film for Universal Pictures. Universal was not at that time as formidable as it became, and Hitchcock was given a modest budget. But he also enjoyed the minimum of interference, which compensated for everything. He went to work with a will. The production designer, Robert Boyle, remarked that “everything we did had to be short cuts.” A storage facility became an aircraft factory. Mattes and miniatures formed the backdrops. When anyone questioned him, Hitchcock would say, “Well, I know it can be done.” Out of these sometimes makeshift elements Hitchcock re-created the look and atmosphere of contemporary America—the large ranch of a fascist agent, a ghost town, a Manhattan town house, the Boulder Dam, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Radio City Music Hall and, most astonishing of all, the upper part of the Statue of Liberty from which the real saboteur falls to his death. Some of it was actual footage, some of it was painting, and some of it reconstruction. When a French liner caught fire in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hitchcock sent a camera unit to film the disaster which he then incorporated into the film.

  He proceeded with the filming very quickly, as if the pace of events in the outer world had quickened him; he began in October 1941, and finished in January 1942. The speed showed. It has some remarkable moments, such as the fall from the Statue of Liberty, but it is a little ramshackle in its construction. It is fast, and it is furious. It has the power of raw drama that involves the audience, conveying an extraordinary intensity and excitement. Hitchcock relies upon the sudden surprise, the unlikely connection, the satirical twist in the plot. As one critic pointed out, “this is Hitchcock at his most Hitchcock, which does not necessarily mean at his best.” Hitchcock himself later seemed to agree, citing the script and the actors for being less than perfect. More importantly, however, it is the villain rather than the hero who is in imminent danger of falling to his death. That was an aesthetic mistake. Yet the film was a popular, if not necessarily a critical, success. Hitchcock had at last managed to create a properly American thriller set entirely in the United States, and the audiences responded. This was also the first film in which his name surmounted the credits, with “Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur” across the posters; he never lost that position.

  . . .

  He had now finally decided to settle in his adopted country. The sudden death of Carole Lombard in a plane crash, in the same month he had finished filming, required him to leave the house he rented from her. The Hitchcocks (predominantly Alma) began looking for a home of their own. They found one in the same neighbourhood of Bel Air, at 10957 Bellagio Road, where they remained for the rest of their lives. It was just a few miles from St. Cloud Road but it was newly built in what was called the “colonial style”; Hitchcock was probably the first owner. It was spacious, with seven bedrooms and five bathrooms, comfortable, and entirely hidden by trees. He had homely, if increasingly expensive, tastes. He was across the road from the fifteenth hole of the golf course owned by the Bel Air Country Club, and Alma would pick up the stray balls that landed on their lawns. They also had two terriers who helped in the chase. They were at home.

  He had already put down roots when, in the summer of 1940, he had purchased a weekend retreat among the redwoods of California. “Heart o’ the Mountain” was high up in the Scotts Valley on the slope of the Santa Cruz mountains; it commanded an eighty-five-acre estate, complete with orange groves and grapefruit trees. It was a large
house built in the “California–Spanish” style of the 1930s with red-tiled roofs, white walls, arched doorways and wooden beams. It had the advantage of a panoramic view of Monterey Bay, and the Hitchcocks built an outside dining room of glass with heated floor. The front door was made out of a wine cask. In its walled rose garden Alma grew white roses, her favourite flower, and on a whitewashed stone wall hung a mosaic of Les oiseaux by Georges Braque. In a cupboard Hitchcock kept a gramophone and his collection of classical records.

  It soon became known as “The Ranch” but, with baskets of hanging flowers, it also summoned up memories of Shamley Green and England. Robert Boyle said that “I think northern California always reminded Hitch of England. There was something about the weather, which was very unpredictable. It was fog and rain and then sunshine. It was a moody strange area both forbidding and foreboding and I believe that’s what intrigued him. It had a kind of mystical quality.” It possessed an unmysterious vineyard, too, and Hitchcock’s caretaker made wine from the grapes. Hitchcock served it to a range of guests, among them in later years Ingrid Bergman and James Stewart (not to mention Princess Grace and Prince Rainier) and was known to fly in Dover sole or steak and kidney pie from his favoured suppliers in London for these occasions. One of his actors, Hume Cronyn, once said that he “took a marvellous, malicious delight in seeing his guests fall apart with all those vintage wines and liquor.”

  6

  FAKE IT

  He was already thinking of his next film. He had so much enjoyed the freedom of Universal Pictures that he was more than happy to continue working with the studio. He was happier still when David Selznick increased fees all round as a result of the success of Saboteur. Hitchcock himself received $50,000, which poured a little balm over his resentment of the producer’s exploitation of him. The idea for his next project came over lunch at the beginning of May 1942, when Gordon McDonell, the husband of one of the story editors at the studio, outlined the narrative of a true event. This was the beginning of Shadow of a Doubt. McDonell sent Hitchcock the story as he envisaged it; Hitchcock, taken with the idea, outlined a screenplay and took it to the studio. It was irresistible. Evil comes to a small town. A sociopathic murderer takes refuge from the attentions of the police by being ostensibly reunited with his long-lost family in a provincial town; they welcome him, but his niece soon finds reasons to doubt the intentions and even the sanity of “Uncle Charlie.”

  That was to be the name of the film. Hitchcock wanted Thornton Wilder to write the script, since Wilder had written the play Our Town, a drama of everyday people in the fictional setting of “Grover’s Corners” in New Hampshire. Wilder, perhaps to Hitchcock’s surprise, accepted the assignment. The director was accustomed to eminent writers turning him down with sometimes ill-disguised contempt.

  The two men were intent upon fidelity to American experience, and settled on the town of Santa Rosa in California for its exploration. They found the right public square, they found the right library, they found the right street and they found the right house (partially reconstructed on the studio set). They talked to the residents, looking for certain characteristics or turns of phrase that they might use. When they returned to Hollywood, stimulated by their visit, they began work at once. They talked in the morning about the coming day’s work and Wilder wrote to a friend that “in long story conferences we think up new twists to the plot and gaze at each other in appalled silence, as much to say ‘Do you think an audience can bear it?’ ” Wilder would then spend the afternoon writing the scenes in a notebook, animated by what he described as “that old Wilder poignance about family life.” They both had such a clear idea of the narrative that they did not need to work chronologically; the film already had an organic shape that did not need cultivating.

  Nothing could have been more congenial to Hitchcock than the character of Uncle Charlie, on the surface a humorous and likeable companion but in truth a man who has a manic grudge against conventional society. Hitchcock also took pleasure in setting up an orthodox small-town family into which this all-American Nosferatu insinuates himself. All of Hitchcock’s preoccupations, of the fear and trembling just below the surface of ordinary life, came to the surface. Joseph Cotten, chosen to play Uncle Charlie, professed some anxiety about his role. “Just be yourself,” Hitchcock told him. That accounted for the realistic triumph of the film; everyone was simply “themselves”—the scatter-brained but sympathetic mother, the slow but steady father, the sharp-eyed niece—in what seems to be an authentic environment. After Saboteur, it was Hitchcock’s second attempt at re-creating Americana.

  The proposed title was changed to Shadow of a Doubt, perhaps in deference to the film’s darker shades, but Hitchcock remained remarkably faithful to Thornton Wilder’s original scenario. Teresa Wright, playing the niece who discovers the truth about her uncle, recalled that Hitchcock “saw the film completely in his mind before we began—it’s as if he had a little projection room in his head.” He would sit at his desk, his thumbs emerging above his folded arms, and go through every scene with his principal cameraman and other colleagues. With his cast complete, including Joseph Cotten and Hume Cronyn, he began filming in August 1942.

  Shadow of a Doubt was meant to be realistic, yet Hitchcock always preferred the artifice of the set. His art director explained that “we would take a few shots on location, the minimum amount, and then he always liked to work in the controlled area of a stage…he would sacrifice many things to get that control.” Occasionally, however, he was happy to improvise or extemporise. There is a photograph of him, on location in Shadow of a Doubt, actually looking through the lens of the camera. This was a practice in which he claimed never to indulge, but surely the camera does not lie? It was his custom, however, to position himself in a chair just to the right below the camera.

  Timing was all. Teresa Wright reported that “if an actor was strumming his fingers it wasn’t just an idle strumming, it had a beat, a musical pattern to it—it was like a sound refrain. Whether someone was walking or rustling a paper or tearing an envelope or whistling, whether it was a flutter of birds or an outside sound, it was carefully orchestrated by him. He really scored the sound effects the way a musician writes for instruments.” Some of the effects were not intentional; when Uncle Charlie arrives at the railroad station of Santa Rosa, the sun providentially hides itself behind clouds.

  The musical score was enhanced by his insistent use of a doubling effect—the niece Charlie and Uncle Charlie, two detectives, two children, two dinner scenes, the sequence at the “Till Two” bar where two double brandies are served, the figurines of couples dancing to “The Merry Widow” waltz, and so on. This is always assumed to be deliberately planned, as a way of emphasising the duality of the central character or even the ambiguity between comedy and suspense that suffuses the film. But it may simply be instinctive, a consequence of the musical pattern of the film. Much that has been attested about the director’s use of symbolism, which in private at least he ridiculed, may be simply a forced interpretation of what was initially accidental or coincidental. His own interpretations of his films tended to be bland or hesitant, as if he did not want to scrutinise his intentions too carefully. He was happy enough for the more highbrow critics and scholars to supply their own analyses, since he knew very well that they would give him credit among the intellectuals and the college teachers, but he took it all cum grano salis.

  He celebrated his forty-third birthday while beginning to film Shadow of a Doubt and, with his usual ghoulish sense of humour, picked up a long carving knife and put it to his throat; he was grinning and, of course, everybody laughed. Yet there was bad news on the way. His mother had been ailing for some time with acute renal and intestinal infections, and she died at the house in Shamley Green that autumn. Five months later his older brother, William, died from what seems to have been a self-administered dose of paraldehyde. His suicide might have been prompted by his mother’s death, but it is impossible to say. He was a hea
vy drinker, and the fatal mixture of drugs and alcohol might have killed him in any case. The continuing strain of the war no doubt contributed its part.

  Hitchcock’s reactions to the two deaths are not recorded, but it is known that he began to lose a great deal of weight in the following months. Mortality beckoned. By the end of 1943 he had shed one hundred pounds, which was a cause of concern to David Selznick. He wrote that “I am sincerely and seriously worried about Hitch’s fabulous loss of weight. I do hope he has a physician, as otherwise we are liable to get a shock one morning about a heart attack or something of the sort.” After a medical examination for an insurance policy Hitchcock discovered that he had an enlarged heart, and a hernia. Such was his fear of treatment that he refused the operation on his abdomen, and so was obliged to wear a truss. His insurance was declined.

  The loss of his mother might have affected him in another sense. Ever since he had been planning and filming Shadow of a Doubt, Emma Hitchcock had been declining. The mother in the film is also called Emma, and she is played by Patricia Collinge as an endearing and benign figure; she seems to have shared some of Emma Hitchcock’s characteristics, including the tendency to shout down the telephone as if her voice had to make up the distance. Hitchcock recalled later that “there was the constant danger from the war, as well as her own failing health. She was in my thoughts at the time. I suppose that if we think about a character who is a mother, it is natural to start with one’s own. The character of the mother in Shadow of a Doubt, you might say, is a figment of my memory.” That was perhaps the nearest he ever came to revealing his private thoughts. He did not want anyone to come too close.