Three weeks of filming in Hollywood completed the process, and the premiere was held on 13 February 1953, in Quebec. It is in some respects an odd and awkward film, possibly reflecting the circumstances of its production, but it also possesses the virtues of dignity and restraint in handling the spiritual imperatives of Hitchcock’s Catholic upbringing. It is not permissible for a priest to break the secret of the confessional, even if it leads to his own false condemnation. Clift’s own restraint, which some described as woodenness, lends an authenticity and even, perhaps, sobriety to the narrative.
There was no post-production celebration, no customary “wrap party,” and Hitchcock rarely spoke about I Confess. He did give a small dinner party at Bellagio Road for the cast, after the film was completed, but it was noticeable only for the fact that the host plied large quantities of drink upon Clift who eventually collapsed on to the carpet. That was not perhaps the best treatment for an alcoholic.
Hitchcock was once asked in an interview whether he actually liked the film. “So so. It lacks humour.” It is indeed one of the few films Hitchcock made that wanted the necessary ingredient of comedy to balance the suspense. He was always aware of the defect but, in I Confess, where could comedy have been found? It was too slow, and austere, for the general public. The American critics were no more enthusiastic, at best respectful about what one of them called “a ponderous, equivocal situation.” The London reception was a little warmer but Hitchcock complained to Sidney Bernstein that “by God I am typed, though, what with the label ‘thriller’ and the search for ‘suspense.’ ”
Yet these were exactly the directions in which he chose to go. After the relative disappointment of I Confess he ran for cover, deciding to film a very successful play which had all the ingredients of the best melodrama. Dial M for Murder had started life as a black-and-white television drama before being transmuted into a cosy West End (and then Broadway) thriller. In Hitchcock’s version an ex–tennis star, played by Ray Milland, blackmails a small-time villain into murdering his wife; it all goes wrong when the wife, played by Grace Kelly, kills the killer in an act of self-defence. How will the original crime be ascribed to the husband? That is the sum of a plot which dealt in suspense rather than mystery.
It was to be filmed on a single stage-bound set that represented a family apartment in Maida Vale, London, but of course Hitchcock was used to the constraints of a small space. He told Sidney Bernstein that he was going to use “a modified Rope style”; as a very successful play it already had all the “speed and ‘tightness’ ” it required. If he broadened the narrative, “the holes might show.”
However he was not accustomed to the technique of filming that Warner Brothers imposed upon him. The early 1950s was a time of cinema gimmicks, none more successful for a time than 3D, which brought such things as scissors and knives into the laps of the audience. Hitchcock did not like the process, because it offended his beliefs in verisimilitude, and he considered it to be a passing fashion. Yet he was obliged to proceed with a camera the size of a small room, and Grace Kelly recalled that “with this camera it was like going into a boxing ring with your hands tied. But he was so extraordinary. I never saw him lose his patience—he never became angry. I would get furious for him, when I saw the frustrations and the things he wanted to do, and the technicians said, ‘Oh no, with the camera we can’t do this and we can’t do that.’ ”
He was perhaps mollified by the presence of Grace Kelly, who represented for him one of his types of ideal blonde beauty. She seemed to be austere and unapproachable, but Hitchcock was well aware of all the sexual gossip that surrounded her. As Gore Vidal said at a later date, “Grace almost always laid the leading man. She was famous for that in this town.” Sure enough she had embarked on an affair with Ray Milland while filming Dial M for Murder that almost cost the actor his marriage. She was also well known for her earthy sense of humour and a fund of dirty jokes that she had amassed while at a Catholic convent school. This was the kind of woman Hitchcock admired. He also appreciated the combination of apparent frigidity and lust. He once explained to a journalist that “she’s sensitive, disciplined and very sexy. People think she’s cold. Rubbish! She’s a volcano covered with snow.”
That is perhaps why he treated her very carefully on the set. He called her “Miss Kelly” and she called him “Mr. Hitchcock.” She reported that “Hitch was always so decorous and dignified with me. He treated me like a porcelain doll.” He liked to consider himself her Svengali, coaxing out of her a performance that she could not otherwise have given. She in turn was competent, controlled, and always on time. It soon became clear that she was his new ideal actress.
Nevertheless it took him five days to film the assault upon her by the small-time gangster hired by her husband; at the end of the experience she was covered with bruises, and at last Hitchcock deemed the sequence to be satisfactory. He had used 3D with care throughout the film, limiting its effect to incidents of high tension such as the moment when the wife grabs a pair of scissors to ward off her attacker. He believed that the sequence had been “nicely done but there wasn’t enough gleam to the scissors, and a murder without gleaming scissors is like asparagus without the hollandaise sauce—tasteless.” He believed that 3D would lose its appeal, and that the film would eventually be released as a “flattie.” It would be a “nine-day wonder” and “I came in on the ninth day.”
Hitchcock had a pronounced interest in Kelly’s clothes and recalled that “I dressed her in very gay and bright colours at the beginning of the picture and, as the plot thickened, her clothes became gradually more sombre.” These are not perhaps details that the audience assimilated on an immediate level, but his attention to them attests to the sensibility of an artist. The same care emerges in his decision to use the noise of London traffic on the soundtrack of the few street scenes. A memorandum was circulated that he “feels that English traffic noises are different from the American ones. He would also like a few English auto horns.”
Hitchcock knew well enough that Warners wanted another Strangers on a Train, with which Dial M for Murder has certain similarities, and required a relatively quick return on their investment. He managed to complete filming in thirty-six days, and was glad to have finished in so short a time. He said later that “I could have phoned that one in,” with an ironic obeisance to its title. He later dismissed the film as a “minor work,” but as an exercise in construction and ingenuity, with an underlying ironic wit, it still repays attention. It was also a success with the public, no doubt because of the presence of Grace Kelly who was rapidly becoming the star of the moment.
He was in any case possessed by another vision even as he was filming Dial M for Murder, and was eager to begin work on an altogether more challenging and significant project. His preparation for the next film was, according to Grace Kelly, “the only way he could remain calm” on the set. She added that “he sat and talked to me about it all the time. He was very enthusiastic as he described all the details of a fabulous set while we were waiting for the camera to be pushed around. He talked to me about the people who would be seen in other apartments opposite the rear window, and their little stories, and how they would emerge as characters and what would be revealed.” She must have known by this stage that she herself would be one of “the people who would be seen,” albeit in a more prolonged and intimate way than the rest of the cast.
. . .
He had not enjoyed the experience of working at Warner studios, not simply because of the cumbersome 3D equipment imposed upon him. He told Sidney Bernstein that “the Warner lot is the deadest that anyone can remember.” It was relinquishing staff and contract players in order to cut costs. Even before filming of Dial M for Murder began, he was making other arrangements. He had signed a contract with Paramount Pictures for nine films, five of which would revert to his ownership after a period of eight years. This arrangement would seal his reputation as well as his finances.
Rear Window was
the first of his films for the company. Paramount had asked that he choose one of Cornell Woolrich’s short stories, Woolrich being then regarded as one of the finest writers of “crime” or “suspense” in the country. Hitchcock finished Dial M for Murder at the end of September, and immediately turned his attention to the preparation of the new film at the new studio. Earlier in the year he had needed a writer and his choice fell upon a young man who had already gained a reputation in radio drama. John Michael Hayes recalled that “Hitchcock had his agents and my agent get together for lunch and they handed me this book which had the story in it of ‘Rear Window.’ They told me ‘You’re to meet Mr. Hitchcock on Friday night at the Beverly Hills Hotel for dinner. Read the story and be prepared to discuss it with him.’ ” The proposed dinner passed in an alcoholic fog, for both parties, but Hitchcock seems to have liked the young writer enough to propose a collaboration that began in spring 1953. It proved to be a notably successful partnership, with Hayes bringing light and shade to characterisation in scripts that were more buoyant and more revealing than those of previous films.
Hayes had prepared a treatment of seventy-six pages which was sent to Paramount at the beginning of September. But the treatment was only part of the process. Hayes recalled that Hitchcock “went to his office in Paramount and sat down with the script. We went over it line by line and page by page. What we did then was try to break it up into shots. Now Hitch wanted to set them up into actual camera angles. He had a large sketch pad on which he sketched out each camera set-up for each scene.” The director did not wait for the set to be built or the script to be finished. He called in assistant directors as well as cameramen and, with the aid of his sketches, told them precisely what he wished them to do. When one assistant director was hired he entered Hitchcock’s office to find “what seemed like cartoon panels covering three walls of the large room.” This was the storyboard that Hitchcock had constructed.
Hitchcock’s office was part of the Paramount Studios on Melrose Road, approximately twenty-five miles from his house on Bellagio Road; it was on the ground floor at the centre of the building, and a short walk from his limousine took him into his sanctum. From here Hitchcock planned and executed some of the finest films of his career, from To Catch a Thief and The Trouble with Harry to the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo. It was here, also, that he assembled the team that instigated what has been described as “the golden age” of Hitchcock. Among them were Edith Head, the doyenne of costume designers, and Robert Burks as cinematographer; George Tomasini, editor, and assistant director Herbert Coleman joined them. Henry Bumstead became Hitchcock’s production designer, Leonard South the camera operator, and Saul Bass the designer of film titles for Vertigo and others. Peggy Robertson had worked as a continuity editor on Under Capricorn but now returned to her old boss, after an absence of nine years, as script supervisor on Vertigo. She remained with him, as his personal assistant, until the last months of his life. And then there was Hitchcock’s favoured composer, Bernard Herrmann, who worked on eight of Hitchcock’s films beginning with The Trouble with Harry.
These men and women were his vital collaborators in the creation of the Hitchcock style. He hardly ever mentioned them, and rarely gave them any credit for their work with him. As far as he was concerned any Hitchcock film was the expression of Hitchcock, and all others were merely extras in the drama of his achievement. This was sometimes the cause of resentment and even of anger, just as his equivocal relationship with actors also provoked dismay.
The preparation of the set for Rear Window began on 12 October on stage eighteen of the Paramount lot. It represented the back of a residential block in Greenwich Village with thirty-one separate apartments, eight of them with fully furnished rooms. It also had to include fire escapes and roof gardens, together with an alley leading to a street that can be fitfully glimpsed as a relic of the outside world. The huge and complex set took a month to construct, by the coordinated efforts of fifty men, and rose forty feet into the air at a length of 185 feet. One hundred arc lights and 2,000 smaller lamps were installed. A large console was created with a series of switches to control the lighting of each apartment. From here Hitchcock used a shortwave radio to communicate with all the actors. It was the biggest project on the Paramount lot since the heroic days of Cecil B. DeMille, and it shared the same theatricality. It was not real. It was bigger than reality.
Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Edith Head, the renowned costume designer who worked on several of Hitchcock’s most iconic films, including Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.
The casting was not difficult. Although James Stewart had vowed never to work with Hitchcock again after the problems with Rope, he relented when he saw the script by Hayes and when told that his leading lady would be Grace Kelly. He plays a photographer, “Jeff” Jefferies, immobilised by a broken leg, who watches the events in the apartments opposite his own and concludes that a murder has taken place; his girlfriend, played by Kelly, is at first inclined to ignore his speculations for the sake of a little romance. But after he brushes off her advances, she herself becomes involved in the amateur investigation. Then the film becomes very tense indeed.
Hitchcock had asked John Michael Hayes to pay particular attention to Grace Kelly’s character. Hayes simply found inspiration in the star herself. He recalled that “Hitchcock said of Grace Kelly, ‘Look at her. She does everything well, but there’s no fire in her.’ So I spent a week with Grace Kelly, and got to know that she was whimsical and funny and humorous and teasing. She was like the girl next door, but she was very sexy and had all these attributes.” This was the character, already almost fully formed, that he re-created. Hitchcock was also involved, and said once to a reporter that “I didn’t discover Grace, but I saved her from a fate worse than death. I prevented her from being eternally cast as a cold woman.” With Edith Head, he dressed her with minute attention to colour and to style. Rear Window was to be filmed in Technicolor in a widescreen format, so that it might provide a powerful entrance into Hitchcock’s dream world.
The production, so carefully arranged from the command centre placed in Jeff’s apartment, proceeded almost without incident. Hitchcock began filming at the end of November 1953, just two months after completing Dial M for Murder, and the production continued rapidly and smoothly until the middle of January. Very few problems were encountered. The telephoto lens had to be changed for heightened definition in certain sequences, and there was one occasion when the heat of the arc lights prompted a minor storm of water from the sensors, leaving everyone drenched; but that was nothing.
Hitchcock himself thoroughly enjoyed the direction, re-experiencing the energy and enthusiasm that he had felt on earlier films. “About this time,” he said, “I felt that my batteries were really fully charged.” James Stewart confirmed this mood of optimism. He recalled that “the set and every part of the film were so well designed, and he felt so comfortable with everyone associated with it, that we all felt confident about its success.” The director was only occasionally discontented. “Every once in a while after shooting a scene,” Stewart recalled, “Hitch would get out of his chair and come up to me. Then he would very quietly say, ‘Jim, the scene is tired.’ He would then go back to his chair and sit down, and you would know exactly what he meant, that the timing and the pace were wrong.”
Hitchcock knew precisely the speed and tempo which he required. He once said that the film “was, structurally, satisfactory because it is the epitome of the subjective treatment. A man looks, he sees, he reacts—thus you construct a mental process. Rear Window is entirely about a mental process, done by use of the visual.” He sees. He reacts. It is also a definition of the technique of montage that Hitchcock had learned many years before in Germany and, as Hitchcock told Truffaut, “Pudovkin dealt with this, as you know.” It is one of the few occasions when Hitchcock betrayed any theoretical knowledge of what might be called cinematic aesthetics; his study of
early European cinema was something he preferred to conceal. Much of Rear Window had also to be silent, in the sense that Jeff cannot hear what is being said in the opposite apartments. He must rely on the gestures and expressions alone, and in the process Hitchcock revived his technique from the silent films of his early career. It has been estimated that thirty-five per cent of the film is silent. He was returning to the era of what he once called “pure cinema.”
Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Hitchcock on the set of Rear Window, 1954.
It was essentially a film about voyeurism, with the prolonged satisfaction of exposing or discovering what is usually secret and hidden. It is easy to recall here Hitchcock’s own love of sexual gossip and innuendo. It could even be said that in fashioning Jeff he had created an image of himself—the man hiding behind the camera who creates a fantasy world out of observable reality, and who engages more fully with the women in front of his lens than with the women in his life. At certain moments Jeff is described as “abnormal” with a “problem” that “he can’t discuss” and “too frightful to utter.” This may be an allusion to repressed homosexuality, as some have suggested, but it may just be a piece of teasing by Hitchcock and Hayes. In the same spirit of teasing, Raymond Burr, who plays the part of the suspected murderer, is made up and coached to resemble David Selznick.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 16
