Further technical problems had to be solved. Through the windows of the apartment could be seen, according to Hitchcock, “an exact miniature reproduction of nearly thirty-five miles of New York skyline lighted by eight thousand incandescent bulbs and two hundred neon signs requiring one hundred and fifty transformers.” He insisted that the light should fade from that of day to night quite naturally and fluently. This of course required a degree of subtlety not usually required of lighting men.
This was the first film that Hitchcock made in colour or, as it was known, “the Technicolor process.” He was not particularly interested in colour for its own sake; he wanted it to play a role in the unfolding drama as a kind of background music. It was a device rather than an effect. After the natural glow of sunset the apartment captures the variously coloured lights of neon signs and street lights, reflecting and helping to create the increasingly dramatic nature of the action.
Hitchcock himself handed the task of adaptation of the play to Hume Cronyn, the actor with whom he had worked before; he sensed in him literary ability. Cronyn later revealed that the director seemed as interested in the innovative technique of filming as in the drama itself. It was a unique technical challenge that might, at the same time, take some of the emphasis away from the controversial sexual material. Their conversations would become intense, and even heated, but then Hitchcock would change the tempo by telling a story or a dirty joke. “We’re pressing too hard,” he would say, and would wait until the moment when the words or themes presented themselves naturally.
Casting had been completed by the autumn of 1947; many actors were named but few were chosen. Some of the stalwarts of Hollywood, such as Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift, declined on the grounds that they did not wish to play the parts of homosexuals. So the roles of the two young men went to relatively unknown actors, John Dall and Farley Granger, who were in life homosexual or at least bisexual. The subject was never formally mentioned, of course, and nor was the homosexuality of the story itself; but it was always in the air. One of the other writers brought in by Hitchcock, Arthur Laurents, recalled that “homosexuality was the unmentionable, known only as ‘it.’ ”
His most surprising choice of player was, perhaps, James Stewart as the presumably homosexual teacher whose principles of the Nietzschean übermensch or “superman” the two men had imbibed as students. It was a very difficult part, and one not entirely suited to Stewart’s screen persona. He had already created the character of the “average guy,” dry and folksy at the same time, which was not necessarily consistent with that of a repressed homosexual. Yet Hitchcock saw the possibilities. “Stewart is a perfect Hitchcock hero,” the director once said, “because he is Everyman in bizarre situations.” In Rope Stewart does manage to convey the nervousness and harshness of a man perpetually on the edge; his voice sometimes trembles under the strain, and the terrified panic he displays in a later film, Vertigo, is already on the screen in Rope. The director admired his style of acting; Stewart seemed to make thought visible, in a barely perceptible movement or change of tone.
Stewart vowed never to work with Hitchcock again, after his frustrating and demanding performance in Rope; he said that the real presence on the set was the camera. But in fact the actor and director remained occasional dinner companions and went on to work together on Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much as well as Vertigo. Stewart once confessed that “Rope wasn’t my favourite picture. I think I was miscast, though not terribly so. So many people could have played that part, probably better.” It may have been Hitchcock, however, more than any other director, who rescued Stewart’s screen image from ordinariness.
The rehearsals were lengthy and difficult. Stewart complained that he could not sleep at night. He said that “if the rest of the cast is perfect and I fluff a line at, say, 895 feet [of film], it becomes the most colossal fluff in screen history.” The entire and uninterrupted ten-minute sequence would have to begin again. Constance Collier, another player, was terrified of going on to the set. Towards the end of each long take the actors became visibly more tense. Hitchcock said that “I was so scared that something would go wrong that I couldn’t even look during the first take.” All this of course contributed to the atmosphere of tension and anxiety that was an integral part of the story itself.
Courtesy of Movie Poster Art/Getty Images
Film poster for Rope, Hitchcock’s first film in Technicolor and his first with Sidney Bernstein. Hitchcock later dismissed the film, which was adapted from the Patrick Hamilton play of the same name, as a “stunt.”
The story was in essence simple. The two young men have strangled their victim and then placed his body in a cassone or wooden chest in their apartment. They then invite guests, including the victim’s father, to a party for the murdered young man, where the food is served off the wooden chest itself. Their psychotic drollery is gradually realised, and then unmasked, by the teacher.
The filming took place over the first two months of 1948 and was completed in eighteen days. Hitchcock once declared it to be “my most exciting picture,” and the excitement is visible in a photograph of him half rising from his director’s chair at the moment when the two young men begin to strangle their victim. He would later change his mind and dismiss Rope as a “stunt,” claiming that “I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it.” This was often his reaction to films that had been less than successful.
The ten-minute takes, which in fact varied slightly in length, really contribute nothing to the picture except an example of Hitchcock’s virtuosity. But far from creating the illusion of a seamless reality, they only add to the formality and theatricality of the narrative. It was an example of the genre he always said that he hated most—people simply talking. Rope was altogether a very self-conscious exercise which did not prove a success with the critics or the public. It made a triflingly small profit, thus undoing much of the previous enthusiasm for the prospects of Transatlantic Pictures.
Hitchcock told Truffaut that “when I look back, I realise that it was quite nonsensical because I was breaking with my own theories on the importance of cutting and montage for the visual narration of a story.” He had even written, twelve years before, that “if I have to shoot a long scene continuously I always feel I am losing grip on it, from a cinematic point of view.” But the combination of technical experiment and artistic self-assertion proved more powerful at the time.
It is safe to assume that David Selznick would not have countenanced such an approach to filming, and leads to the question whether Hitchcock owed as much to his producer as he owed to his writers. It is impossible to answer. It is clear enough, however, that more than Hitchcock was needed to create a “Hitchcock film.”
7
OH DEAR
“Ah yes,” one of the characters in Rope exclaims, “Ingrid Bergman! She’s the Virgo type—I think she’s just lovely!” This may also have been Hitchcock’s reaction, since he had already determined to make the actress the central figure of his second film for Transatlantic. Under Capricorn could not have been more different from Rope. It was a historical melodrama set in Australia in 1831. He had always said that he hated costume dramas because he could never visualise how the characters went to the lavatory or earned their money, but he swallowed his objections on this occasion for the greater glory of Bergman. She would play the drunken wife of a man (played by Joseph Cotten) who had climbed his way up from convict to landowner. It transpires, of course, that their relationship is more complex. And, in the old tradition of Rebecca, a malevolent housekeeper is at work.
Even while finishing Rope Hitchcock, characteristically, began work on the first treatment of the new film in February 1948, in California; he had completed it by the end of March, and then travelled to England where he had arranged filming at Elstree Studios. His chosen scriptwriter, Hume Cronyn, recalled how they met for story conferences at Sidney Bernstein’s offices in Golden Square in Soho. Yet problems were already emerging. Hitch
cock had announced that he wished to use the techniques of long continuous takes that he had employed in Rope; Cronyn believed this to be a mistake, but did not wish or dare to challenge him on the matter. Cronyn also echoed others in recalling that Hitchcock often planned the narrative image by image, without considering the line that would connect them; he was interested in the arresting detail or scene rather than the completed story.
Yet Hitchcock had his own doubts about the script. He said later that he had asked Cronyn to work with him “because he’s a very articulate man who knows how to voice his ideas. But as a scriptwriter he hadn’t really sufficient experience.” On one morning, according to Cronyn, Hitchcock “suddenly reared back in his chair, scowling like an angry baby, and announced ‘This film is going to be a flop. I’m going to lunch.’ And he stalked out of the room, pouting.” His apparently imperturbable exterior had cracks and flaws; in the preparatory work for a film, in particular, his mood could veer wildly from one extreme to another.
Ingrid Bergman was still the principal element, however, and at a later date he insisted that he had made the film on her behalf. “I was looking for a subject that suited her,” he said, “rather than myself.” He even claimed that she had persuaded him to embark upon the project. “From that,” he said, “I learned that it was better to look at Ingrid than to listen to her.” But this may have been just a convenient excuse; he had a habit of blaming others for his own mistakes. Certainly he had been thrilled by the prospect of stealing her from the Hollywood studios and bringing her to England as his star; he visualised them coming down the steps of the aeroplane together to meet the flashbulbs of the waiting cameramen. He later characterised his behaviour as “stupid and juvenile”; he had not properly assessed the cost of hiring Bergman, with a salary that completely unbalanced the budget, and had in general concentrated upon her rather than the other players.
The reality was in any case less appealing than his vision. From the beginning the actress had reservations about the technique of long takes; she had seen Rope, and did not like it. The fatigue and anxiety that had affected the players in Rope now began to beset her. Moments of strain were inevitable. Hitchcock and Bergman argued for half an hour over a particular scene. “Very well, Hitch,” she said, “we’ll do it your way.” “It’s not my way, Ingrid,” he replied, “it’s the right way.” On one occasion she broke into tears for the first and only time in her career. Director and actor also had another long and apparently bitter dispute on the set, which Hitchcock ended by simply walking away. Bergman had her back towards him at this moment and, not realising that he had gone, continued the argument.
Bergman had her own version of the incident. She wrote to a friend that “the camera was supposed to follow me around for eleven whole minutes, which meant that we had to rehearse a whole day with the walls or furniture falling backwards as the camera went through, and of course that couldn’t be done fast enough. So I told Hitch off. How I hate this new technique of his. How I suffer and loathe every moment on the set…Little Hitch just left. Never said a word. Just went home…oh dear.” At other moments of exasperation he would say to her “Ingrid, it’s only a movie!” It was not so much an expression of his opinion as an attempt to calm her down. Patricia Hitchcock, recalling the period of dispute, remarked that “frankly, with Daddy, there was no room for discussion.”
Other problems beset the production. The Elstree crew went on strike just as filming was about to begin and, although the dispute was settled, it left a difficult atmosphere. A speeding camera made a large dent in one of the stage walls of the set. The director of photography, Jack Cardiff, recalled that “we would rehearse one whole day and shoot the next. Good recorded sound was impossible; the noise was indescribable. The electric crane lumbered through the set like a tank at Sebastopol.” So the dialogue had to be added by the cast without cameras being present. On another occasion the camera rolled over Hitchcock’s foot and broke his big toe. Cotten wrote home that the most favoured expression on the set was “Now what?” The actor himself had a moment worthy of Mrs. Malaprop when he once called the film, in the presence of Hitchcock, “Under Cornycrap.”
Hitchcock told Truffaut in an interview that the completed film “didn’t amount to anything.” But he was wrong. It is a beautifully executed picture with the tracking shots of Ingrid Bergman, in particular, giving the narrative an additional power and resonance. She herself admitted, in retrospect, that the technique had served her performance very well. Hitchcock was right to have faith in her, even if that faith drained away when she began a love affair with Roberto Rossellini. His later disparaging comments about her are likely to have been prompted by hurt and anger.
Under Capricorn was released in September 1949, to general dismay. The reviews were tepid, and the box-office receipts were dire. The Guardian, in England, complained of “intolerable dullness on the screen” while the Hollywood Reporter described Hitchcock’s direction as “crude, obvious, and frequently silly.” It was remarked that, without David Selznick to guide him, the director often lost his way. The effect of the reviews on Alma, who had played some part in writing the script, was devastating. It is reported that she wept uncontrollably.
The failure of the film effectively bankrupted Transatlantic Pictures, which soon went into receivership. Hitchcock, sensing danger, ran for cover. He had already come to an agreement with Jack Warner and, at the beginning of 1949, had signed a contract for four films over a period of six and a half years; his total salary was likely to be $1 million. Warner was apparently a hard man to like but he left his new acquisition to do his job, and Hitchcock responded favourably.
. . .
Hitchcock decided, for his next picture, to play safe. There were to be no long takes, and no colour. That particular period of experimentation had come to an end. Stage Fright was, as its name suggests, an ironic thriller; it was to be set in London. It also had the incalculable advantage of a cast that included Joyce Grenfell, Alastair Sim, Miles Malleson and Sybil Thorndike in what seems to have been a deliberate echo of the then popular Ealing Comedies. The “stars” of the film, Richard Todd, Michael Wilding and Jane Wyman, have not survived so well in popular film mythology; but Marlene Dietrich, in her characteristic role of femme fatale, made an enduring impression upon Hitchcock and his audience.
The film was based upon Selwyn Jepson’s story Man Running, which had been published two years before and had been justly or unjustly nominated as ideal “Hitchcock material.” A young actress is enlisted to help a male friend who has been accused of murdering the husband of a glamorous entertainer with whom he has been having an affair. So far, so good. An accused man on the run was always grist to the Hitchcock mill.
The Hitchcocks, returning to Bellagio Road in Bel Air suitably chastened after their experience at Elstree Studios, worked together on the preliminary treatment of Stage Fright. They also enlisted the help of a short-story writer and dramatist, Whitfield Cook, whose drama Violet had starred Patricia Hitchcock on the Broadway stage for a run of twenty-three days. Pat would also play a small part in Stage Fright itself. There have been rumours and reports of a clandestine romance between Cook and Alma but, if so, it has been well concealed. They were good companions and collaborators, but perhaps nothing more.
In the spring of 1949 the Hitchcocks and Cook sailed to London in order to work, as it were, at the coal face. They had already finished a treatment of 113 pages, together with dialogue and accompanying camera angles. Richard Todd recalled being invited to the Savoy hotel, where the Hitchcocks were staying, and he was struck by the enthusiasm of the couple. Hitchcock had said to him, “You see, we do this, and then we do that and this happens, and then that happens,” while Alma “kept piping up as well.”
On the set, however, Hitchcock was his usual disciplined and determined self. He asked the first assistant director to set the actors in position for their moves; he would then disappear into his office, and only return to the set when the cameras w
ere about to roll. “Hitchcock,” Todd said, “was a very distant man—cold and professional.” Dietrich said of him that “he frightened the daylights out of me. He knew exactly what he wanted, a fact that I adore, but I was never quite sure if I did it right.” She need not have worried. She was a woman with whom he immediately felt at ease—outspoken and sometimes foul-mouthed, unafraid of her sexuality to the point of sporting with it. She insisted on having her astrologer with her at all times, and conducted an amorous relationship with the leading man—Michael Wilding—off and on the set. The noise from the dressing rooms was sometimes unignorable. “Marlene was a professional star,” Hitchcock remarked. “She was also a professional cameraman, art director, editor, costume designer, hair dresser, make-up woman, composer, producer and director.” In a less guarded moment Dietrich described the director to her daughter as “a strange little man. I don’t like him. Why they all think he is so great, I don’t know. The film is bad—maybe in the cutting he does all his famous ‘suspense’ but he certainly didn’t do it in the shooting.”
Hitchcock was in any case feeling ill at ease at Elstree Studios. He wrote to Jack Warner, ensconced at Burbank, that “they have some pretty crude people…I don’t want to bother you with the sordid details…They are my affair, really, and all I have to do is deliver you a picture…Well, Jack, that’s about all…As soon as I’m finished shooting and I have the picture rough cut I’m going to pack all the dubbing tracks into tins and get the hell out of here.”
Alfred Hitchcock Page 14
