Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  Yet it was a public success; Selznick reported that, at a preview, “we could not keep the audience quiet from the time his [Gregory Peck’s] name first came on the screen until we had shushed the audience through three or four sequences and stopped all the dames from ‘ohing’ and ‘ahing’ and gurgling.” Spellbound gained one Oscar for its music and was nominated for six others, but Hitchcock professed indifference to such baubles. He may have received more satisfaction from the crowds surrounding him at the film’s premiere at the London Tivoli, on the Strand.

  Hitchcock later said of Spellbound that “it’s just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis.” Some critics did not disagree. Ingrid Bergman was disappointed with the finished product. But any interpretation of the completed film is as fraught with ambiguity as psychoanalysis itself. The image of the locked door, the motif of vertical bars, the theme of watchful eyes (including, of course, those of the audience), and all the complex visual distortions that Hitchcock devises, intimate the world as a prison from which there is no possibility of escape. Again the eyes are everywhere.

  A special effects artist, Clarence Slifer, wrote of the Dalí sequence that “Hitchcock wanted some bloodshot eyeballs moving through the scene. I went down to Skid Row [in Los Angeles] on Christmas Eve to photograph these bleary-eyed fellows who’d been drinking heavily all their lives. We got more varieties of eyes than you can imagine, from bloodshot to weepy and then expressionless eyes.” Yet the presence of Bergman in the film ensures an underlying tenderness and textural softness. The woman is, for the first time in a Hitchcock film, the healing agent. She is the blossom in the dust. Spellbound conveys an intimate and a claustrophobic world. Within these ambiguities, Hitchcock dwells.

  . . .

  Two days after the filming of Spellbound was complete, Hitchcock returned to England to renew his discussions with Sidney Bernstein on a possible collaboration. They wished to form Transatlantic Pictures, employing the best crews, scriptwriters and actors from both countries; but for this purpose they needed investors, who were notoriously nervous about any new ventures. Hitchcock remained in London for some ten weeks, but no startling progress was made in the search for finance. He was ready to return to the security of Hollywood, where he was contracted to make another picture for David Selznick.

  While he was in London he had heard from Selznick’s agent that the producer was ready to start work on one of Hitchcock’s favoured projects. The popular and financial success of Spellbound was such that Selznick had begun preparations for another film with part of the same team: Ben Hecht would once more be scriptwriter, and Ingrid Bergman again the star. Selznick had found the perfect vehicle in a magazine serial, “The Song of the Dragon,” that had been published more than twenty years before. It concerned an actress who is persuaded to seduce a suspected double agent and discover his secrets.

  As soon as he returned to the United States, Hitchcock met Ben Hecht in New York where they discussed the new picture that had already been entitled Notorious. In December 1944, they met for most days of the week, from nine in the morning to six in the evening; when they were not together, Hecht would be at his typewriter. A reporter from the New York Times observed that “Mr. Hecht would stride about or drape himself over a chair or couch, or sprawl artistically on the floor. Mr. Hitchcock, a one-hundred-and-ninety-two-pound Buddha (reduced from two hundred and ninety-five) would sit primly on a straight-back chair, his hands clasped across his midriff, his round button eyes gleaming.”

  A second and third draft duly followed, with comments scribbled by Selznick; in the spring of 1945 Hitchcock and Hecht returned to Los Angeles for the final collaboration. The story had changed. The German double agent had a daughter (Ingrid Bergman) who is persuaded by an American agent (Cary Grant) to seduce and marry another prominent German (Claude Rains) in order to infiltrate his circle of conspirators. Her true identity is discovered by her new husband, and she becomes the victim of secret and stealthy poisoning. At the last minute the American comes to her rescue. At some point in this process Hecht, or Hitchcock, or both, hit upon the idea that the Germans were dealing with uranium, a remarkably prescient idea in the months before Hiroshima. The uranium was concealed in red wine bottles.

  The months of writing and rewriting Notorious had been very costly. Hecht and Hitchcock had been given large weekly salaries, and Selznick was growing anxious over delays. Hitchcock was also hesitating over any new commitment to Selznick, since he was still waiting to sign the agreement with Bernstein for Transatlantic Pictures. As John Houseman pointed out, Hitchcock had “a lifelong and highly neurotic preoccupation with money.”

  Selznick decided to cut his losses, present and possibly future, by selling the entire project to RKO. Hitchcock was happy with the arrangement, since it afforded him independence; he had enjoyed his time at the studio, four years before, where he had made Mr. & Mrs. Smith as well as Suspicion. RKO provided the studio space and the distribution, but left the actual work to the director and producer. On this occasion, however, Hitchcock also managed to exclude Selznick from the process. One clause of the agreement stipulated that the producer would not have “any voice in the production, or the supervision of production, of the PHOTOPLAY.” He was on his own.

  He had one other, less happy, project to complete. He had agreed to Sidney Bernstein’s request to act as consultant on a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. He flew back to London in June 1945, to scrutinise the raw footage shot in Belsen, Dachau and elsewhere. He was so horrified by what he saw that it took him some days to be able to work on the material. In a later interview Bernstein stated that “I wanted somebody to compile it together…but I wanted the imaginative touch that somebody like Hitchcock could give.” The contribution that Hitchcock made is still unclear, but he seems to have insisted that long travelling shots should be included to confirm that the sequences had not been faked. It was important to show as many people as possible in real situations.

  He returned to Hollywood after a month in London, and immediately resumed work on Notorious. The filming was scheduled to begin in October, and the revisions of Hecht’s last script were made by Clifford Odets. Odets was a noted playwright, and might be considered an expert on dialogue; Hecht himself disagreed and wrote “this is really loose crap” on the margin of one page, but Hecht was eventually persuaded to compose one more rewrite before filming began. He began turning out material even as filming continued, and was sometimes only a day ahead of the schedule. This was of no real concern to Hitchcock, despite his usual predilection for careful planning, because he trusted Hecht. It is enough, in any case, to dispel the theory or fantasy—conveyed by Hitchcock himself—that every element of his films was set in place before the first camera rolled.

  The process of filming itself, after a year’s preparation, went smoothly. The three stars of the film—Bergman, Grant and Rains—were perfectly at ease with each other and with the director. Patricia Hitchcock recalled how intimate and yet authoritative her father became on the set. “Now I think it might be…” he would say to one actor, or “Why don’t you try this?”

  Hitchcock’s principal concern was the relationship between Grant and Bergman—Grant’s character is secretly in love with the woman he is about to sacrifice to the Germans, and she in turn is dismayed by his apparent indifference to her plight. Hitchcock focused the camera steadily upon them in close-up and medium close-up. He said, late in his life, that film “begins with the actor’s face. It is to the features of this face that the eye of the spectator will be guided, and it is the organisation of these oval shapes within the rectangle of the screen, for a purpose, that exercises the director.” This is Hitchcock as a master of aesthetics and formal artistry, but he also made the remark in particular relation to Ingrid Bergman whose face is frequently seen in close-up as if it were a form of pure cinema, intimate and pre-verbal.

  With Hitchcock in sole charge of direction and production, Notorious differs markedl
y from its predecessor, Spellbound. For the first time he was able to control every aspect of post-production without the hindrance or interference of a producer. As a result, perhaps, the film has a much more sinister texture with the suspense mounting like a quickened pulse. It was also very much a film for its time; the revelation of the German death camps, and the explosion of the atomic bomb, gave the film a startling relevance beyond that of any thriller. That intensity of interest remains on the screen, like radioactivity, and conveys an atmosphere of menace and foreboding that can still possess a cinema audience. The film was a critical success at the time, with The New Yorker remarking that it was “a happy example of what Alfred Hitchcock can do when he is really bearing down.”

  He was not able to “bear down” on his next film, where he was once more accompanied by Selznick. The Paradine Case was the last film they made together. It was a project favoured by the producer ever since the novel of the same name had been published in 1933. It is essentially the story of a beautiful woman who hires a successful barrister to defend her against the charge of murdering her blind husband; inevitably, perhaps, the barrister (Gregory Peck) falls in love with his client and in a doomed attempt to prove her innocence alienates his wife and falls from his previous eminence.

  Hitchcock was not at first averse to the proposal. He had as a child been fascinated by the Old Bailey and its adversarial duels, and had even nurtured the ambition of being a judge in just such a court. Now he had the opportunity of re-creating his interest, or passion, on a Hollywood set. In May 1946, he returned to London in order to survey the city for suitable backdrops. He and the production manager, Fred Ahern, visited police stations, Holloway Prison and the Old Bailey itself; these were the principal scenes of the drama, to be strengthened by what Hitchcock called “Dickensian backgrounds.”

  Another drama was unfolding elsewhere. In the previous month the partnership of Hitchcock and Bernstein in a new venture, Transatlantic Pictures, was announced with the news that their first film would star Ingrid Bergman. The report came as no surprise to Selznick; he had been monitoring events since the new partnership had first been suggested. He could scarcely complain. With The Paradine Case Hitchcock would have completed his contract with him. But he could not help but feel bruised and anxious, a situation that would only exacerbate his difficulties with the director on their last film.

  Hitchcock had persuaded Selznick to hire James Bridie, a Scottish playwright, to turn The Paradine Case into a film. But at the same time he had also asked Bridie to start work on Under Capricorn, the film to be made by Transatlantic Pictures. This further irritated Selznick. Bridie had completed a script of The Paradine Case by the autumn, but Selznick wanted it shortened and sharpened. The results still did not satisfy the producer, who decided to sit down and write the screenplay himself. Hitchcock was by now thoroughly alarmed and despondent at the prospects for the new project. Selznick had chosen an Italian actress, Alida Valli, to play the mysterious Mrs. Paradine; she was twenty-five and had already earned considerable success in the Italian cinema. Selznick hoped that she might become another Bergman. Gregory Peck was to play the lovelorn barrister but, as had been the case in Spellbound, he received very little instruction or praise from the director. Hitchcock had already told Valli “to do nothing well,” and the same attitude was once more conveyed to Peck.

  But Peck was not trained to do nothing; he had been trained to act, and his discomfiture is evident on the screen. Gregory Peck was an experienced actor whose stage career had begun in 1941; Cary Grant, as has been observed, came from the circus. But the difference endeared Grant to Hitchcock, who had more than a touch of the circus in his own style. He did not warm to Peck in the same manner; he always distrusted pure actors.

  Courtesy of Ralph Crane/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

  Hitchcock with Alida Valli on the set of The Paradine Case, 1947. This was his last film with Selznick.

  In this fraught period Hitchcock himself seemed to fall ill or, at least, he believed that he was ill. Hypochondria had always been one of his many neuroses, and he began to tell the people closest to him that “something is wrong, something is very wrong.” The ills of the body, if such they were, were the consequence of the ills of the mind. Anxiety was the problem. He was anxious about the film. He was anxious about his future after Selznick and Hollywood. He was anxious about Transatlantic Pictures. He was anxious about everything. Gregory Peck remarked that “he was obviously suffering terribly about something during the shooting of The Paradine Case.”

  He had decided to construct a replica of Central Criminal Court Number One at the Old Bailey; it took eighty days to build and was reputedly exact in every detail, including the scratches on the tables left by bored or impatient barristers. To the cost of construction must be added the cost of production; since the scenes in the courtroom are necessarily static, Hitchcock employed four cameras simultaneously during the filming so that he could create a tapestry of looks, gestures and effects.

  Even as filming continued Selznick sent down pages of script he had just completed; these of course had to be incorporated into the shooting schedule at the last minute, causing enormous complications for the director. Peck also recalled that “Selznick was totally disorganised but essentially a lovable man, while Hitchcock, whose manner was not quite so lovable, was totally organised. This created an unavoidable tension, and it clearly affected Hitchcock’s attitude during production.” Sometimes he seemed bored; sometimes he slept, or pretended to sleep, in his chair. He had planned and orchestrated a continuous take of some five minutes for an important episode in the film, but Selznick came down on to the set and countermanded Hitchcock’s direction. Selznick told him that “we’re not doing a theatre piece.” So there was anger, and frustration, throughout the filming. It did not bode well for the finished article.

  Ann Todd, who played the barrister’s increasingly desperate wife, furnished another and more familiar aspect of Hitchcock during the filming. She said that he was “a very complex man—an overgrown schoolboy, really, who never grew up and lived in his own special fantasy world. He had a schoolboy’s obsession with sex that went on and on in a very peculiar way. He had an endless supply of very nasty, vulgar and naughty stories and jokes. These amused him more than they amused anyone else, but I think he was really a very sad person.” She attributed this sadness to his dismay at the shape and size of his body.

  The delays in filming continued, with Selznick complaining to his staff that Hitchcock had “slowed down unaccountably” and that he was “out of hand.” When the director heard of these complaints he replied that the equipment he was obliged to use was twenty years out of date. The filming ground to a finish in the spring of 1947. Hitchcock had scored a record in his own career by filming for ninety-two days, and producing a film that was three hours in length, at a cost of $4.25 million. It was the most expensive he had ever made. He then abandoned it to Selznick who in post-production managed to cut fifty minutes out of the finished film, complete with retakes and redubbing. The producer was concerned about “Hitch’s sloppiness about story points,” and tried every means he could to remedy them.

  The film was not a disaster; it was a disappointment. It did not flow, largely because of the wooden performances from most of the cast. The critic of the New York Times described it as “a slick piece of static entertainment.” It did not succeed at the box office, and lost money. When asked which film he would most readily burn, Gregory Peck replied, without a beat, “The Paradine Case.” Hitchcock never worked with Selznick again.

  Yet in retrospect the film has virtues which were not readily discernible at the time. The fluid and luxuriant camerawork, a sort of golden rhetorical prose written by the camera, is everywhere apparent. Hitchcock has once again explored his fascination for shadows, barred windows, strips of darkness, corridors, staircases and mirrors so that all of the participants seem to be trapped in his artificial world where all the forces of passion
and disorder spread like a stain over the well upholstered surface. This is perhaps what Ann Todd meant by “his own special fantasy world.”

  . . .

  It was time to move on. The first fruit of the collaboration between Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein, at Transatlantic Pictures, came as a surprise to many. It did not star Ingrid Bergman, as had been previously announced, but instead derived its inspiration from a sordid murder that had occurred twenty-three years before. Two wealthy and homosexual law students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, kidnapped and murdered a fourteen-year-old boy in order to demonstrate that they could commit the perfect crime; five years later, in 1929, the notorious episode was dramatised by Patrick Hamilton in his play Rope. In the late months of 1947, and the early months of 1948, it was reconstructed by Hitchcock in his film of the same name.

  The point of the film was indeed reconstruction. The scenario never left the young men’s Manhattan penthouse, as if it were a stage, and was elaborately orchestrated from first shot to last in the Warner Brothers studio at Burbank rented for the occasion. It could be said that, in this instance, the director gained his inspiration from his technique. He had decreed that the entire action would be filmed in segments of uninterrupted ten-minute takes when the camera would roam freely across the set; props and furniture were built on rollers so that they could be moved effortlessly out of the way. Hitchcock wrote later that “every movement of the camera and the actors was worked out first in sessions with a blackboard…even the floor was marked and plotted with numbered circles for the twenty-five to thirty camera moves in each ten-minute reel. Whole walls of the apartment had to slide away to allow the camera to follow the actors through narrow doors, then swing back noiselessly to show a solid room.” Chairs and tables were pulled back by prop-men before being replaced in exactly the same position. Everything was “wild,” which simply means that everything could be moved at a moment’s notice. If an actor had to put down a glass on a table that was no longer there, an unseen member of the crew would take it from them.