Alfred Hitchcock (10 page)

The first scripts Hitchcock read and helped produce, then, were written by Hollywood women versed in Hollywood ways. More so than in England, American films were centered on a glamorous star system, with stories that plunged beautiful heroines into crises or emergencies. Distaff
scenarists were often employed to help flesh out the characterizations of the leading ladies, to lend scripts the emotional nuances that were thought to appeal particularly to the female sector. From the beginning of his career Hitchcock learned to focus on actresses, emphasize the female characters, accent their performances, highlight their appearances. And he learned early to have women surrounding him to help toward that goal.

Although it’s hard to confirm the credits, Hitchcock is believed to be responsible for the lettering and title illustrating for at least eight pictures in his first two years. These include
The Great Day
(directed by Hugh Ford, 1920),
The Call of Youth
(Ford, 1920),
Appearances
(Donald Crisp, 1920),
The Princess of New York
(Crisp, 1921),
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush
(Crisp, 1921),
The Mystery Road
(Paul Powell, 1921),
Dangerous Lies
(Powell, 1921), and
Perpetua
(John S. Robertson, 1921).

At Henley’s the advertising staff had been expected to write as well as draw, and that was precisely the job of the “captioneer,” a combination writer and sketch artist. At Islington, Hitchcock’s title cards featured “birds flying, hearts breaking, candles guttering,” as he recalled in one interview. One that read “John’s wife was worried about the kind of life he was leading” was accompanied by the drawing of a horizontal candle burning at both ends.

Hitchcock took his assignments from Norman Gregory Arnold, Islington’s supervising art director and the man who hired him. Arnold’s younger brother, Charles Wilfred Arnold, was another art director who became a Hitchcock friend. The head of the camera department was Claude McDonnell, whose frazzled air masked his competence. From these three men Hitchcock would learn all the ground rules of filmmaking. He was a fast learner. All three—both Arnold brothers and McDonnell—would end up taking orders from Hitchcock a few short years later, when he became a full-fledged director.

Sketching title cards was good training for an art director, whose job it is to sketch decor and sets. There is some controversy over just how accomplished a sketch artist Hitchcock was. “If I wanted to,” he told film historian Charles Thomas Samuels, “I could draw every frame of the finished picture.” It was especially true, early in his career, that Hitchcock drew shots for cameramen, and that his drawings could be expressive. But eventually he hired his own small army of artists, and by the 1960s his matte specialist, Albert Whitlock, who rarely saw this side of him, insisted that “Hitch was no real draughtsman and rarely attempted sketching.”

In mid-1921, Hitchcock moved up the ladder. His first picture as art director was probably
Three Live Ghosts
, a comedy directed by George Fitzmaurice in late 1921, starring Clare Greet and Cyril Chadwick. Fitzmaurice was married to the scenarist Ouida Bergere, a former theatrical
agent and actress who had been in film since the days of one-reelers. Bergere was more than a writer; she was Fitzmaurice’s muse. She slaved on all stages of her husband’s films, even sitting beside him in the cutting room.

Fitzmaurice’s favored cameraman, an American named Arthur C. Miller, recalled meeting Hitchcock when he was an enterprising young art director at Islington. “I went along with him to a rather shabby residence where he spent some time bargaining with the woman of the house for all her old furniture to be replaced entirely by new,” said Miller. “He used her old furniture to dress the set he had designed at the studio.”

“Success to our researches!” Sir John (Herbert Marshall) exclaims as he plays detective in
Murder!
Research was Hitchcock’s detective work, and already a key component of his methodology. He relished the process of “putting himself through it” in preproduction, scouting out real-life settings and real-life counterparts for the characters. He compiled notes and sketches and photographs partly for authenticity (“I’m very concerned with the authenticity of settings and furnishings,” Hitchcock told Truffaut), but also as a springboard for his imagination. He always tinkered with the reality.

After
Three Live Ghosts
Hitchcock art-directed
The Man from Home
(another film by Fitzmaurice and Bergere) and
The Spanish Jade
(directed by Robertson), both shot in late 1921. For
The Spanish Jade
, cast and crew traveled to Spain. For
The Man from Home
Hitchcock visited France and Italy. He might have explored those countries earlier, on vacation from Henley’s, but overseas travel became routine in the Islington years.

While art-directing his first films, Hitchcock also tried his hand at writing his first script, adapting on a speculative basis a novella owned by the story department. He also performed spot directing on what were called “crowd days” at Islington, capturing faces among the extras, and he was occasionally “given odd jobs of going out to shoot odd little entrances and exits on interiors.”

Though still an art director, Hitchcock later observed, he was already acting like a director, designing not only the sets but the camera angles. “I was quite dogmatic,” Hitchcock said. “I mean, I would build a set and say to the director, ‘Here’s where it’s shot from.’”

In all of film history only a small percentage of directors have come from the ranks of production design. This foothold gave Hitchcock a distinct edge when thinking in pictures. From the start, the “right look”—for people and places—was integral to his vision.

At Islington, Hitchcock also found his soulmate, an Englishwoman among all those Americans, a woman who made a greater contribution to his films than any other person.

Alma Reville was born one day after Hitchcock, on August 14, 1899,
in Nottingham in central England. Nottingham was known for its lace, and Alma’s father served as the London representative of a local lace firm; the family was comfortably middle-class, and Alma was educated at a private school for girls.

As a young teenager Alma took ill with chorea, or St. Vitus’s dance, a nervous disorder that often follows as a complication of rheumatic fever.
^*
She was forced to miss roughly two years of schooling, which she forever regretted. Regaining her strength and reacting against her childhood illness, Alma developed into a tomboy; she would always be more athletic than her husband, more drawn to exercise and physical activity.

As often as possible, but especially on weekends and holidays, Alma’s mother took her recuperating daughter to picture shows. By the time she recovered her health, the Revilles had moved to Twickenham, west of London. There she cycled over to the Twickenham Studio, a former skating rink converted by the London Film Company, and watched the filming.

In 1915 sixteen-year-old Alma entered the screen trade, five years ahead of her future husband. The producer Harold Shaw, an acquaintance of her father’s, secured a job for her in the cutting room of the London Film Company “because it was the only place where it would be possible to work without any experience,” she once explained.

Editors in those days were called “film joiners.” “Director” and “producer” were still interchangeable titles, and directors often did their own editing, called “cutting.” Cutting-room assistants learned “continuity” by helping the director sequence the footage. An “assistant continuity girl” like Alma Reville was expected to type, file, and know shorthand; besides serving in the cutting room, she held the script during filming, ready to prompt the actors, while recording the shots and script changes. In a pinch, she was looked to for minor writing tasks, and as she gained experience she wrote more, and more often. Effectively, the standard “continuity” credit Alma received on her earliest films indicated that she was working as a combination cutter and script editor—a common career path for women in the silent era.

Twickenham was a busy studio in those years, and Alma worked on numerous pictures. She served as editor of a lavish
Prisoner of Zenda
(1915), directed by the American George Loane Tucker. Another picture she toiled on, at least according to her daughter, Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, was D. W. Griffith’s
Hearts of the World
(1918), parts of which were shot in the vicinity using Twickenham personnel.

By 1920 Alma had established herself as “floor secretary,” or first assistant director, to Maurice Elvey, one of England’s silent film pioneers.
Proving her pluck and resourcefulness, she also stepped in front of the camera for what amounted to the first “Hitchcock cameo,” appearing in Elvey’s
The Life Story of David Lloyd George
(1918), in which she portrayed the wartime prime minister’s daughter.

Alma spent several years closely partnered with Elvey before moving over to Islington in early 1921. She then became the floor secretary to actor-director Donald Crisp. When she first laid eyes on her future husband, sometime in mid-1921, Hitchcock was but a lowly “editorial errand boy,” in his words; Alma was an established cutter, continuity writer, and production manager.

Their first encounter was decidedly anticlimactic. “Newcomers who came into our world inevitably reacted with awe and bewilderment, but this one was different,” Alma said. “He strolled across the set with a deadpan expression, stopped to ask me where the production office was, and when I pointed to the building, he nonchalantly disappeared into it without saying another word.”

She noted his placid face and confident air, but their subsequent encounters went nowhere. “All I can remember about first seeing him,” Alma said, “was that he was always walking round the studios with a large packet of drawings under his arm” and wearing “a rather draggy gray topcoat.”

For Hitchcock, silence was often strategic: what seemed like caution was cunning. With his tranquil expression, the editorial errand boy watched and waited. Hitchcock said later that at first Alma seemed “a trifle snooty to me. I couldn’t notice Alma without resenting her, and I couldn’t help noticing her.”

He couldn’t help noticing that she was just five feet, petite, with bobbed reddish blond hair and hazel eyes. Pretty and vivacious—but for the hair color, almost the ideal woman he described in “Fedora.” Yet she was his superior, and he would let three or four years go by before speaking to her again.

Alas, British Famous Players-Lasky did not last long. By the summer of 1922 the experiment was suspended, and rumors began flying that the American parent company had abandoned the idea of producing pictures in England. Although Paramount was proud of its handful of completed films, the Islington product was regarded as a hybrid, neither English nor American enough to succeed. Moreover, Famous Players had overextended itself by building a new studio on Long Island almost simultaneously with Islington. The company was backing away from grandiose plans for an additional plant in Bombay. On a visit to London, company founder Jesse L. Lasky claimed that the Islington shutdown was temporary, but issued a call for fewer, better pictures.

Months passed, and work was catch-as-catch-can at Islington. The payroll was trimmed, and Alma Reville was one of the people let go. Hitchcock must have worried over his own future, but he managed to stay on as part of the skeleton crew—and, characteristically, he perceived an opportunity in the unstable situation, and made himself indispensable. Working longer hours for less money, he thrived.

It was while the studio was in limbo that Alfred Hitchcock took his first turn at directing.
Always Tell Your Wife
was a two-reeler based on a theatrical sketch by the venerable actor-manager Seymour Hicks. A comedy about a philandering husband, his suspicious wife, and a blackmailing mistress, the story had been filmed before, in a 1914 production with Hicks in the lead; now, in January 1923, director Hugh Croise leased space at Islington to launch a new version, again starring Hicks. When Croise fell ill, Hicks looked around in desperation. His gaze fell on “a fat youth who was in charge of the property room,” according to Hicks, a young fellow “tremendously enthusiastic and anxious to try his hand at producing.”

Today, only one reel of
Always Tell Your Wife
survives at the British Film Institute in London. Its footage bears the dominant imprint of Hicks, its star, writer, and producer. The camerawork is static, the comedy broad. Yet one detail is surely of interest to Hitchcockians: this first “quasi Hitchcock” has pointed shots of a fluttering caged bird. Whether the picture was even completed or released is unclear; probably not.

Or perhaps the obscure
Number Thirteen
, shot during this same period, was the young aspirant’s true debut. Hitchcock directed
Number Thirteen
, a.k.a. “Mrs. Peabody,” sometime in late 1922 or early 1923. The story was about low-income residents of a building financed by the Peabody Trust, founded by American banker-philanthropist George Peabody to offer affordable housing to needy Londoners.

Number Thirteen
was written by a woman employed at Islington, her precise identity unknown, whose background included a vague prior affiliation with Charles Chaplin. Hitchcock took on the directing and producing. The star was Clare Greet, the daughter of famed actor-manager John Greet and his wife, Fanny.
^*
Greet knew Hitchcock from
Three Live Ghosts;
a popular older character actress, she had first appeared onstage before Hitchcock was born.

The most notable thing about
Number Thirteen
is that Hitchcock’s uncle John invested in the picture; when the funds ran out, Greet also pitched in money. Still, filming was ultimately shut down with only two
reels completed. All that is known to survive of
Number Thirteen
are a few stills; it would rank high on anyone’s list of important “lost” films.

The failure of
Number Thirteen
—and the loss of his uncle’s investment—was “a somewhat chastening experience” that Hitchcock took deeply to heart. In the years that followed, preparation and preproduction would become all the more crucial to his methodology. Storyboarding—sketching all the scenes in advance of filming—became standard policy. He felt keenly responsible for making films efficiently, according to budget. He was proud to be a “commercial” director, one who would turn a reliable profit for his producers.