Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  Stage Fright does have the air of a wasted opportunity. It has no natural or even pace. As well as being set in the world of London theatre, under Hitchcock’s guidance it becomes theatrical both in tone and execution. The characters wear various disguises and adopt various roles, many of the scenes are melodramatic in intent, the landscape of London resembles a set, and nothing is truly what it seems. The innocence of the accused man, as narrated in the first scenes, turns out to be false. This confuses the audience, and acts as a check upon suspense until the end. A succession of virtuoso performances, from Alastair Sim and Joyce Grenfell among others, does not cohere.

  The dialogue is always drawing attention to its own artificiality. “This is not real, this is a piece of theatre…the curtains, Johnny, draw the curtains…you are an actress, you are playing a part.” Despite the fact that it is a comedy or farce rather than a thriller, it is a little heavy-handed. The reviews were neither hot nor cold, and one critic described it as “rambling.” It was generally considered, however, to be an expression of the “real” Hitchcock after the experiments of Rope and Under Capricorn.

  Although he had been only too eager to return to California, he came back to discover that he had very little to do. Between September 1949 and the spring of 1950 he spent seven months in a state of suspended animation; there were no stories to consider, no treatments to contemplate, and no stars to pursue. This was for him a form of torture.

  Though agonised by this idle period, he was, at any rate, comfortable financially. He was by any standard a wealthy man. He owned two properties, one of them very large. He possessed land and stocks, with an interest in oil and cattle. He checked on his investments almost every day. He had also decided to put his vineyards in Santa Cruz into proper shape with the help of viticulturalists. He travelled between his house in Bel Air and his estate above Monterey Bay; he dined at the most celebrated restaurants in their respective neighbourhoods.

  He held dinner parties for his closest associates, in which drinking seems to have been a large part of the proceedings. He was sometimes persuaded to do his “breast ballet” in a primitive form of striptease, as well as other stunts and pranks that suggest a reserved nature ready to burst out of control. He built a wine cellar for his house in Bellagio Road, as well as a “walk-in” refrigerator for his range of delicacies. A film critic, Penelope Gilliatt, recalled that “I remember that he was once showing me his kitchen in Bel Air. Everything was spick and span. Not a cornflake visible. A desert for cockroaches. He opened a door, and icy air steamed out. The freezer locker: a whole room. I saw hams and sides of beef hanging from hooks like rich women’s fur coats in summer storage. Hitchcock courteously bowed me in first. I hesitated and looked back, imagining the door clanging shut behind me. He knew what I was thinking, and I knew that he knew.”

  He had been a serious, if not professional, collector of art for some years. He preferred early twentieth-century French art, and in Bellagio Road hung the work of Utrillo, Dufy and Modigliani as well as three paintings by the German–Swiss artist Paul Klee. “I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned,” he said. “I’m only self-indulgent about treatment. I’d compare myself to an abstract painter. My favourite painter is Klee.” In the house above Monterey Bay he hung the prints and etchings of Thomas Rowlandson. Rowlandson epitomised a London vision of grotesquerie and farce, of which Hitchcock himself might be described as a prominent twentieth-century exponent. The fact that he hung the eighteenth-century prints in northern California suggests the direction in which some of his deepest loyalties lay.

  There was, at last, the chance of a script. In the spring of 1950 he had read a recently published novel, Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith, and saw its possibilities. He instructed his agents to keep his name out of the negotiations and to bid for the rights in what was, after all, a first novel. They acquired them for $7,500, much to Highsmith’s subsequent chagrin. He had been attracted by the dual charge of the fiction. On the train, there are two men who exchange two murders—and it was this “two” that Hitchcock emphasises, on the understanding that “nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it…there’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.” All Hitchcock’s reading of Poe and Wilkie Collins could have brought him to the point. In his filmic world he was always contemplating the possibilities of doubles, of dualities, of dichotomies.

  He noted that at first “I couldn’t find anyone to work on it. They all felt my first draft was so flat and factual that they couldn’t see one iota of quality in it.” His agents approached Dashiell Hammett, but nothing happened. But then a story editor at Warner Brothers, Finlay McDermid, came up with an equally enticing name. Raymond Chandler was the one to be enticed. The writer was intrigued by the prospect of working with Hitchcock, and no doubt by a salary of $2,500 a week. He met his director briefly and then set off for his home in La Jolla with Highsmith’s novel, Hitchcock’s treatment, a bundle of writing paper and a secretary.

  It was not a happy collaboration. Chandler’s contract had stipulated that he would not travel, so Hitchcock had to come to him. On one occasion, as Hitchcock struggled to emerge from his limousine, Chandler could be heard saying, “Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car.” Chandler resented all the meandering discussions of script meetings, or what he called the “god-awful jabber sessions,” and disliked the suggestions that Hitchcock would throw in his direction. “If you can go it alone,” Chandler told him, “why the hell do you need me?” He also considered Strangers on a Train to be “a silly enough story.”

  The author did complete a second draft, however, but he was now complaining about the director’s invisibility. Chandler wrote to Finlay McDermid that “this screenplay was written without a single consultation with Mr. Hitchcock…not even a phone call. Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence then and since…I find it rather strange. I find it rather ruthless. I find it almost incomparably rude.” He also expressed a complaint that other writers had articulated. “He is always ready to sacrifice dramatic logic (in so far as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect or mood effect.” The disparate shots had then to be shoehorned into the existing narrative. Sometimes it simply could not be done, and the storyline degenerated into a string of actions or scenes into which anything could be added at the last minute.

  By late September 1950, Chandler had left the process of writing altogether. He had realised in the end that, as he put it, “a Hitchcock picture must be all Hitchcock.” But his departure came at the last minute and, just weeks before filming was due to begin, the studio threatened to close down the whole production. Hitchcock enlisted the help of one of Ben Hecht’s co-writers, Czenzi Ormonde, to rewrite. He consigned the Chandler script to a waste-paper basket, and told her that they would begin again “with page one.” She worked quickly and efficiently, even as Hitchcock was in the middle of filming, and produced the ending just one week before the scene was shot.

  When Hitchcock began work at the end of October, he seemed to be full of confidence. He announced on the first day of filming that this was the true start of his American career, and he remained on the set from seven in the morning until nine in the evening. Yet he seemed hardly to direct at all and one of the principal players, Laura Elliot, remarked that he never praised her. It was always “Cut, next shot.” Or it was “Walk here…walk there.”

  The filming was completed by the end of December, and for its speed and efficiency he owed much to the production team that he had assembled. He was indebted in particular to his director of photography, Robert Burks, who worked with him on twelve films over the next fourteen years. A scriptwriter remarked that Burks “gave Hitchcock marvellous ideas” but that he also “had a very tense time…by the end of each picture he was emotionally worn out.” Burks merely stated that “you never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it.
Hitchcock insists on perfection.” By the end of their relationship Hitchcock trusted his cameraman so completely that he did not bother to look at the rushes after each day’s filming.

  Hitchcock once said of Strangers on a Train, “Isn’t it a fascinating design? You could study it forever.” It has been reported that towards the end of his preparation of the script with Czenzi Ormonde he gave her an inspired account of all the “doubles” and “pairs” that could be included in the narrative; he was perhaps prompted by the tennis match that occurs at a crucial moment in the story, but it is more likely that he was moved by the cinematic possibilities of two men exchanging roles. In the opening sequence we see them wearing shoes that distinguish their characters immediately, and the effect of duality works its way through the entire film. For his own characteristic entry in a cameo role, Hitchcock carries a “double” of himself in the bulky shape of a double bass.

  Truffaut once noted that Hitchcock filmed scenes of murder as if they were love scenes, and scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. This is nowhere more evident than in Strangers on a Train when the putative strangler, with his hands around the neck of an old lady, falls back in a romantic swoon. Hitchcock liked the concept of strangulation. Most of his murderers, and victims, are part of the same game. He himself was photographed many times rehearsing the method. It appears so many times in his films, most particularly in Dial M for Murder and Frenzy, that it is plausible to claim that it holds some especial significance for him. He told one screenwriter that “I can kill a man, you know, with a swift press of the thumb.” But women are usually the victims, and in some prolonged scenes of strangulation we can hardly distinguish between love and death.

  Patricia Hitchcock was given a part in Strangers on a Train, and it is indeed her chubby bespectacled face that prompts the strangler’s swoon. Quite by chance a photographic sequence by Philippe Halsman shows the director with his hands around the neck of Jacob Epstein’s sculptured bust of his daughter. It is not by chance, however, that Patricia Hitchcock is wearing spectacles. The woman wearing glasses was also something of a Hitchcock speciality. Madeleine Carroll wears them in the first scene of The 39 Steps, Ingrid Bergman wears them in Spellbound, and Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo. There are many other examples. But Hitchcock’s fascination for them was not limited to film. One of his permanent secretaries in Hollywood, Carol Stevens, recalled that he ordered four or five sets of spectacles for her from the studio optician. “If I came on the set without my glasses on, it irritated the devil out of Hitch. He had a fetish about glasses.” There were times, also, when he asked her to take them off. Alma wore glasses when she was working but, in the fashion of the period, put them away when she was socialising. It might be construed that a woman wearing glasses is somehow more invulnerable, more knowledgeable, more scrutinising; the female gaze may be disruptive and even threatening. When she removes them she reveals a certain vulnerability, even isolation, which of all characteristics Hitchcock is most eager to convey on the screen. To be more vulnerable is, perhaps, to be more attractive.

  So Strangers on a Train has the double charge of Hitchcock’s own preoccupations in a film that is established upon guilt and thwarted desire. The two men are meant to exchange murders, but only the psychotic commits the crime. The other is possessed by the desire to reveal him and to protest his own innocence.

  With the help of Robert Burks, Hitchcock created a shadow world of silhouettes and darkness; he became an artist of chiaroscuro which reflects the pervasive atmosphere of guilt and anxiety. Everyone seems to be guilty of something, partly concealed by an unspeakable pact with the forces of “order” that must in the end be triumphant. In such a dark setting objects are fraught with meaning and menace—a broken pair of spectacles, a cigarette lighter. Hitchcock selected the piece of orange peel, the crumpled paper and the chewing-gum wrapper that were to be seen in a storm drain. Jean-Luc Godard wrote that “perhaps there are ten thousand people who haven’t forgotten Cezanne’s apple, but there must be a billion spectators who will remember the lighter of the stranger on the train.” Godard went on to celebrate Hitchcock as “the greatest creator of forms of the twentieth century.” Careful construction and calculation are the twin accompaniments of obsession and wild fantasy.

  8

  I AM TYPED

  And then he was quiet. He had finished work on Strangers on a Train two days before Christmas 1950, and the Hitchcock family spent the season at Santa Cruz before embarking on a long holiday in the spring and summer which took them through much of Europe. Strangers on a Train was a success when it was released in June, and his reputation as the “master of suspense” was reaffirmed at the box office and in the press. Yet he had no new project. He had often been told that he should take a break, but the long vacation of 1951 proved that he was not built for holidays. When he travelled to a Swiss ski resort he sat on the porch and read. He looked at the scenery but never ventured into it. He could look, but he could not act. Throughout the rest of the year, after the family had returned, he had very little to do except to deal with correspondence and search for ideas wherever he might find them. This inactivity prompted the usual sensations of panic and nervous fear as he sat and pondered in Bellagio Road or at Santa Cruz.

  There was a diversion in January 1952, with the marriage of his daughter to a New England businessman. Hitchcock said later that “Alma and I were relieved, in a way, when our daughter decided that being a mother of sticky-fingered children required all her creative attention.” Alma recalled that “when he gave the bride away, Hitch’s face was so white that a member of the groom’s family remarked that he must have just come out of a Hitchcock movie.” He was “relieved,” perhaps, because his daughter had turned her back on a career as an actress; that was perhaps too close to home.

  He still had no firm project in mind, when it seems that Alma furnished her husband with the solution. He had long ago purchased the rights to a play by Paul Anthelme, Nos deux consciences. At the time it had intrigued him, but he had left it to one side. It concerned a Catholic priest who cannot disclose the true identity of a killer, since the man had revealed his secret in the sacred space of the confessional. The priest himself is then accused of the crime and goes to trial.

  The Hitchcocks had actually written a treatment four years before, and Alma recalled the impression the screenplay had made on them at the time. Once more she sensed the possibilities, and she went over the old materials with an eye for their revival. Hitchcock himself seems to have been reinvigorated by the project and by February they had conjured a new treatment, called I Confess, out of the existing scripts. The drama was to be set in Quebec; it was a largely Catholic city, and the priests still wore cassocks rather than collars as they walked through what seem to be vertiginously steep streets. It was a city where the crucifix was dominant. The Hitchcocks travelled there and within a few days had found the necessary locations, including the most prominent churches; they also found suitable co-writers in two playwrights, William Archibald and George Tabori, who proceeded to fashion a deeper and darker film than that proposed by Hitchcock.

  The leading actor, playing the troubled priest, was obviously the most crucial choice, and Hitchcock may have regretted preferring Montgomery Clift; Clift was in many respects a fine actor but the director admitted later that he had two disadvantages. “There are some actors I’ve felt uncomfortable with,” he said, “and working with Montgomery Clift was difficult because he was a method actor and a neurotic as well.” Clift was also a near-alcoholic and one of the other players, Anne Baxter, recalled that “poor Monty was drinking so heavily, virtually all the time. He was so confused and removed from what was going on around him that his eyes wouldn’t focus…he was so disturbed and unhappy, but Hitchcock never talked to him. He had the assistant director, Don Page, handle everything.”

  Clift brought with him on to the set his acting coach, Mira Rostova, which added to the tension. Another of the actors, Karl Malden, recalle
d that “Monty depended on her, kept a distance from Hitchcock and from the rest of us to go over his lines with her, insisted on her approval before a scene could be shot. Naturally this created a deep division and tension.” The actors were meant to defer to Hitchcock, not to some teacher. Yet the director remained calm and polite with her, knowing that anger or recrimination might jeopardise Clift’s performance. Malden also noticed that Hitchcock was “never ruffled, never gave any sign of being worried, never shouted, was always in control. There was no unnecessary noise or talking or shouting on his set. It was a quiet set because that’s the way he wanted it.” The director himself was also noticeably silent, and Malden added that “I really can’t remember anything he said to me.” At a dinner party, when Malden had a little too much to drink, he complained to Hitchcock that “you never tell us what you want. I know the blocking and the lines, but what I don’t know is what you expect from me.” He replied immediately that “you’re a professional, and I’m a professional. I simply expect you to do your job.” Another actor, Henry Corden, noted that the director never once said a word to him.

  Patricia Hitchcock, visiting the set, recalled that for one shot Clift was required to walk across a large ballroom—“and he just sat there to think and think about it. He was holding everybody up, and Daddy became very impatient.” Hitchcock hated self-indulgence, but he managed to restrain himself from any open criticism of Clift. The walk was in any case important, and Truffaut once noted of I Confess that “Montgomery Clift is always seen walking; it’s a forward motion that shapes the whole film. It also concretises the concept of his integrity.”

  The location filming began in August 1952, and lasted for three weeks. Quebec City, the old quarter of Upper Town surrounded by a high stone wall, turned out to be an inspired choice; on the screen at least, with the gifted cinematography of Robert Burks, it is a city of shadows. As the camera glides over the waters of the Saint Lawrence river the spectator slowly enters Hitchcock’s forbidding world. It is a menacing place, full of arrows and steep streets sloping downward; the inhabitants look down from their windows as if they were in the balcony of a courtroom. The locations once more exude a deep sense of guilt and horror. Taking its cue from Clift’s performance, perhaps, this is a film of people thinking and judging.