Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  In one sequence Scottie and Madeleine venture into a great redwood forest at Big Basin where they wander among the ancient trees. Scottie says to her “Their true name is Sequoia sempervirens: always green, ever living…what are you thinking?”

  “Of all the people who’ve been born and who died while the trees went on living…I don’t like it, knowing I have to die,” replies Madeleine.

  It is an exercise in nostalgia as well as obsession, creating an atmosphere of eternal recurrence in which all of the participants are involved. Hitchcock said that “I made the film in order to present a man’s dreamlike nature.” It is in fact sometimes curiously somnolent, as if suspended in time; the twin agents of Technicolor and VistaVision themselves create a fantastically coloured world which is so vivid that it seems artificial. This is the paradox inherent in Hitchcock’s often quoted remark that “it’s only a movie.” He is a wonderful colourist and there are moments in Vertigo when the image on the screen resembles a canvas by Bonnard or Vuillard. It could almost have been conceived as a silent film, with a sequence of hugely powerful visual images that are both artificial and exquisite.

  Courtesy of Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

  A composite portrait of Kim Novak showing her two roles in Vertigo, 1958.

  The performance of Kim Novak, despite the fact that it was treated with some coolness by Hitchcock himself, is impressive. She had to play the roles of two different women, Madeleine and Judy, intimating their genuine resemblance while expressing their different personalities. She is in a sense the presiding image of the film, wraithlike and insubstantial. Her role might have been based upon the premise, adumbrated by Edgar Allan Poe, that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

  All the poetry of Hitchcock’s vision is poured into what at first glance is morbid and obsessional material, worked over with infinite finesse and susceptible to various interpretations psychic or psychotic. That is why it has endured. It is a reverie and a lament, a threnody and a hymn, with an ending so abrupt, so shocking, that it prolongs the mood of emptiness and anxiety. The last words of the film are spoken by a sepulchral nun. “I heard voices. God have mercy.”

  Vertigo has in recent years been considered to be the most profound and exquisite of all Hitchcock’s films. It did not seem like that to anyone at the time. It was treated as another Hitchcock thriller with suspense and pursuit as its principal elements. Yet it was not a success. It was greeted with bemusement by the reviewers, and with boredom by the public. It was too odd. It was too vague and too remote. It was too long, with music often taking the place of words. Hitchcock professed to believe that its failure was largely due to James Stewart’s ageing appearance. When the rights of the film reverted to him, according to his contract with Paramount, he buried it in the vaults and it was never again released during his lifetime. It did eventually re-emerge and in 2012 was voted in a ten-yearly poll in Sight and Sound as “the greatest film of all time.”

  He was asked once, “What do you think about the prominence that Vertigo has assumed for your European critics?”

  “I think they understood the complexities of the situation.”

  . . .

  As soon as filming was completed, and before the process of post-production had begun, the Hitchcocks flew to Jamaica for a month’s vacation. He already had another project in mind. Even as he was filming Vertigo he was working with Ernest Lehman on a script that was tentatively entitled In a Northwesterly Direction. They had previously worked on The Wreck of the Mary Deare, but Lehman recalled that Hitchcock “went to a meeting and told them that it was taking too long to write Mary Deare, and that we were planning to do another script instead.” The studio managers at MGM were delighted rather than dismayed; they assumed that he would now be working on two films instead of the single one for which he had been contracted.

  Hitchcock and Lehman began to imagine, and to improvise, new stories and new settings. Hitchcock said that “I always wanted to do a chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore.” It was an image, and no more, but it seems to have been enough to create a new mood in both director and writer. As Hitchcock immersed himself in the spiral of Vertigo, Lehman asked himself questions. Who is chasing whom over the famous faces? Why are pursuers and pursued in such a location? How did they get there? If he is on a train, where is he going? Should he meet someone? Perhaps it would be a young woman. And then what? One question followed another as Lehman slowly wrote the pages of the script which would eventually become North by Northwest. Lehman admitted that “in the end, the audience never knows what’s coming next, because I didn’t either.” But Hitchcock approved of the work that Lehman had already done and began to work enthusiastically on the script, going through it page by page as the quixotic plot unfolded.

  At some point the director told Lehman that “I’ve always wanted to do a scene in the middle of nowhere—where there’s absolutely nothing. You’re out in the open, and there’s nothing all around you. The cameras can turn around 360 degrees, and there’s nothing there but this one man standing alone—because the villains, who are out to kill him, have lured him out to this lonely spot. Suddenly a tornado comes along and—”

  “But Hitch, how do the villains create a tornado?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What if a plane comes out of the sky?”

  “Yes, it’s a crop duster. We can plant some crops nearby.”

  This is Ernest Lehman’s recollection of their conversation. Hitchcock had certainly noted the crop dusters working the fields near his ranch.

  But then, suddenly, he became the man alone. In the middle of April 1958, Alma returned to Bellagio Road to tell him that some routine tests had revealed that she had contracted cervical cancer and that she would have to undergo very risky surgery. This was a time when cancer was generally pronounced to be fatal. Although Alma tried to keep up her spirits, no doubt for the sake of her husband rather than for herself, Hitchcock himself was struck with fear and trembling. He continued with his filming schedule, which included an episode for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but according to his authorised biographer John Russell Taylor “he would drive straight to the hospital, weeping and shaking convulsively.” He dined alone in a nearby restaurant, but could not bear to go near the place in later years. Alma herself said later, “He wants it blotted out of his life.” The days of panic, and near hysteria, had to be eliminated from his memories.

  Norman Lloyd, who still worked with him on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, recalled that he once drove home with him to Bellagio Road. It was a hot day, and they were both in their shirtsleeves. Hitchcock talked about Alma and then began to weep incessantly. He reverted to the oldest sentiments in the world. “What’s it all about?” he asked Lloyd. “What would it all mean, without Alma? After all, everything I do in film is secondary to what is really important.” The pioneering surgery was a success, however, and Alma slowly recovered. Yet it had been a close-run thing. Alma said later that “for a man with Hitch’s phobia about suspense, it was like being impaled on a torture rack.” His daughter recalled that “Daddy was totally devastated.” Even while Alma was making a complete recovery “Hitch remained a complete wreck and continued to believe she was going to die.” He told Patricia that he could not live without Alma, and in her memoir Patricia remarks that “had anything happened to her, he probably couldn’t have gone on.”

  Yet he did go on after the weeping had passed and, under the aegis of MGM, he continued work with Lehman on the script for what was still called In a Northwesterly Direction, or sometimes The Man on Lincoln’s Nose. His contract had given him complete control of the picture, and it might be described as an independent Hitchcock production with all the resources of a film studio behind it. Lehman decided to investigate the route that his hero would cover to get all the way from New York to Mount Rushmore; he and Hitchcock had decided that it would be another case of an innocent man on the run. O
n this occasion he has been mistaken for a government agent by a group of unspecified spies, instigating a relentless and sometimes comic pursuit in which the usual complications occur in an auction house, in a hotel lobby, in a field of corn where he is pursued by the famous crop duster, and of course across the heads of the four presidents. Hitchcock had effectively given Lehman a series of startling locales and images, some of which he had conceived previously, and asked him to provide a script that tied them together. He was not at all interested in logic or in the objections of what he called “our friends the plausibilists.” So it became as much a circus ride as a chase. Hitchcock had also wished to include an episode that he had long considered. On a Detroit car assembly line a finished automobile comes off at the end, and a corpse promptly tumbles out of it. But this proved too difficult to accommodate. Other episodes did not.

  Cary Grant was Hitchcock’s first choice as Roger O. Thornhill, the advertising executive who is mistaken for a spy; having once been a trapeze artist, the actor could bring a life of performance to the role. In any case James Stewart was now deemed too old; the film world could be unforgiving. For his first lady Hitchcock chose, against the advice of the studio, Eva Marie Saint who was invited to lunch at Bellagio Road. After the encounter, she believed that “one of his greatest gifts as a director was that he made you feel you were the only perfect person for the role and this gave you incredible confidence.” In the absence of Edith Head on other duties, Marie Saint was allowed to dress herself under Hitchcock’s instructions. He said that “I acted just like a rich man keeping a woman.” And that, in part, was what he was. They visited Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue and together chose a classic black suit, a black silk cocktail dress, and a charcoal brown jersey complementing an orange burlap outfit. All of these colours had meaning for Hitchcock, even if they seemed at the time simply to be charming accessories.

  When filming started Marie Saint was asked to sit on her hands and look directly at Cary Grant. The most important instruction, however, was to lower her voice. Hitchcock developed a repertoire of signals to her so that she remembered. “It’s still low to this day,” she once said. Grant was of a less amenable nature, as he had proved in To Catch a Thief. “All I have to do,” he told a reporter, “is to disregard everything he says. But I guess what’s in his mind, and then I do just the opposite. Works every time, and I find it very pleasant.” But the fact that he always consulted his script right up to the last moment before a scene was shot suggests that his bravado was in part assumed.

  A few difficulties emerged during filming. The film crew was not allowed to use Mount Rushmore, a sacred site, but of course Hitchcock was not at all dismayed; he simply built replicas in the studio which were in any case much more convenient for sound and lighting. No film could be shot in the United Nations building, in which a vital episode takes place, and so Hitchcock built a model of its entrance hall on set. Lehman recalled that “Cary Grant and I had a few fierce battles in the back seat of a limousine on location at Bakersfield during the crop-duster sequence…He would sit there and go over some of his scenes with me. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he’d say. ‘You think you are writing a Cary Grant picture? This is a David Niven picture.’ ” Grant was a professional, however, who had worked in front of the camera for twenty-six years; Hitchcock usually listened to his advice. For one scene in the film Grant told him that “if you’ll get Bob to move the camera over a few inches you’ll catch me going down the corridor through the hinge of the door.” It worked.

  In a break between scenes, Hitchcock once spotted Marie Saint drinking coffee out of a disposable cup. He was horrified. “You are wearing,” he told her, “a $3,000 dress, and I don’t want the extras to see you quaffing from a Styrofoam cup.” He ordered his staff to serve her in a porcelain cup with porcelain saucer. He wanted to maintain the illusion for her, for the crew, and above all for himself.

  Filming began at the end of August 1958, and was completed on 24 December. The final version of North by Northwest, running over two hours, was considered by the studio executives to be too long and they asked him to cut it. He refused. He knew that he had in his contract a cast-iron guarantee that no one else could touch it. His instincts were in any case right. When it was given its premiere at the Radio City Music Hall on 6 August 1959, it was greeted with acclaim. Hitchcock sent a telegram to Lehman with the words “Reception f-blank [fucking] enormous.” The critic of Time magazine described it as “smoothly trowelled and thoroughly entertaining,” and it became one of Hitchcock’s most profitable productions. It was generally believed that, after the morbid experimentalism of Vertigo, he had returned to the entertaining and extravagant suspense thriller of which he was the master.

  In some respects it does furnish a “typical” Hitchcock package in which he reprises some of his favourite moments from earlier films and provides a slick, vivacious and engaging rehearsal of his most popular devices. It comes close to pastiche or parody at certain points, but it is too clever, and too witty, to fall into that easy trap. Like his protagonist in the film, he is always one step ahead.

  There may be a sense in which he is always making the same film. As in many previous works, such as The 39 Steps and Stage Fright, all of the protagonists are literally or figuratively playing a part. Roger O. Thornhill, for example, enacts a different role for every person he meets; he is continually involved in reinvention that gives the film its slightly manic and unreal air. When asked what the “O” stands for he replies, “Nothing.” (This may of course also have been a sly dig at David O. Selznick.) There is no such geographical direction as north by north-west and so the film is racing towards an impossible destination. It is full of chases, of movement, of angular escapes, but they are going nowhere fast. Like the “O” in Roger O. Thornhill it becomes an intriguing improvisation on the themes of emptiness and absence. That is why it seems to leave audiences, after the initial euphoria of a successful entertainment, sometimes uncomfortable and dissatisfied.

  . . .

  The public and the critics may have believed that Hitchcock was about to continue his Technicolor vistas of beautiful people in impossible situations, but they were wrong. He had quite another vision in mind. He always had a keen eye for cinematic fashion and the prospect of profit, and he had noticed the recent emergence of cheap black-and-white films that made a habit of terrifying the public, among them The Fly, The Blob, Dementia, Curse of the Undead and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. What if someone good, perhaps someone as good as Hitchcock, were to make one of these bargain-basement horrors?

  He had been prompted into a new project after the failure of one in which he had already invested some time and much money. No Bail for the Judge, a novel by Henry Cecil, brought together some of Hitchcock’s key preoccupations. A judge is falsely accused of murdering a prostitute, but his daughter tries to discover the real murderer by her own private form of sleuthing in which at one point she must pose as a lady of the night. Audrey Hepburn was chosen to fill the principal role. A script was prepared by Samuel Taylor. But it all came to nothing. It has been suggested that Hepburn was in the early stages of pregnancy. It has also been surmised that she did not care for her role as a prostitute. Or, alternatively, there may have been problems with the censor. Yet the withdrawal of Hepburn seems to have been the reason for his abandonment of the project. “I spent more than $200,000 on No Bail for the Judge,” he said, “and then decided against doing it. They said to me ‘But you can’t just let all that money go.’ And I said, ‘If we go on you will lose $3 million,’ and then they asked no further questions.” Hitchcock always liked his recollections to end on a decisive and formal note.

  He was perhaps more deeply interested now in the prospect of a cheaply made horror film. One literary agent, H. N. Swanson, recalled that “Hitch never casually looked for ‘something different.’ He was relentless.” Any play, any novel, any short story, any piece of news was scrutinised for suitable content. Soon enough he
found a book ripe for picking. Robert Bloch’s Psycho had stirred his interest on the basis of a favourable review. He read the novel during a weekend at Bellagio Road, and realised that it was his kind of story. “I think that the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue. That was about all.” In fact the shower scene plays no very prominent part in the novel. But Hitchcock could already see it.

  The film would be something quite different. It would not be one of his “glossy Technicolor baubles,” as he called them. It would have no stars, and no exotic locations. Much of the action would take place in a cheap motel. In an interview with the New York Times he went so far as to say that “some very ordinary people meet other ordinary people and horror and death ensue.”

  Paramount was not at all happy about the prospect. The story of a demented maniac who dresses up as his dead mother in order to kill his victims did not fill the studio managers with enthusiasm. The title was wrong, no reputable actor would be seen dead, or alive, in it. “Well,” Hitchcock is supposed to have said, “I’ll make do.” He did more than that, however. He effectively subsidised the project, while Paramount arranged its distribution. His agent Lew Wasserman even arranged for the film to be shot in the studios of Universal Pictures where he could work without any interference at all. He waived his salary in exchange for sixty per cent of the ownership of the film, and in fact never worked for Paramount again after Psycho. Under the guidance of Wasserman, he remained with Universal for the rest of his career.