Alfred Hitchcock (106 page)

Early in the schedule, according to John Russell Taylor, the actress raised a question about a certain line of dialogue. “Might it not be better,” Novak wondered, “if the character’s inner motivation was brought out by changing this line or extending that?” Hitchcock replied with a stone face. “Kim,” he said, “this is only a movie. Let’s not go too deeply into these things.”

“It’s only a movie,” Hitchcock’s standard reassurance, paralyzed some actors, while freeing others. “I don’t say that he [Hitchcock] has not gone more deeply into things beforehand, in his preparation,” once mused Stewart. “But he takes the responsibility for all that off the actor’s shoulders.”

Novak wasn’t liberated. She felt imprisoned. Her character even had to walk in a certain way, trapped and cinched into clothing she had disdained. Novak couldn’t be sure if Hitchcock “ever liked me,” the actress reflected years later. “I never sat down with him for dinner or tea or anything, except one cast dinner, and I was late to that. It wasn’t my fault, but I think he thought I had delayed to make a star entrance, and he held that against me. During the shooting, he never really told me what he was thinking.”

Hitchcock molded the look and behavior of Novak, the way Scottie molds Judy—he trapped her with his attitude. Madeleine/Judy also feels trapped, and most critics believe that the director drew out Novak’s greatest performance for
Vertigo
, helping her transcend her limitations.

After two weeks of filming in the San Francisco vicinity, cast and crew returned to Hollywood, where the ensuing two months of soundstage work at Paramount would push
Vertigo
over its allotted schedule by nearly three weeks and over its planned budget (already bloated by the protracted pre-production) by a quarter of a million dollars.

Hitchcock kept up a remarkably crowded schedule, hosting an
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
party at the Coconut Grove on November 4 for TV-page editors, and then a chuck-wagon dinner at Republic Studios on November 6 for one hundred columnists. Some of
Vertigo’s
soundstage delays and overages can be chalked up to Barbara Bel Geddes, who struggled with her part. Her “scenes seemed to be the hardest to get right,” Auiler wrote. Multiple retakes were required for the scene where Scottie rebuffs
Midge’s awkward attempt at comedy (“It’s not funny, Midge”), followed by Scottie’s leaving in a pique, and Midge bitterly chiding herself for poking fun at his obsession (“Stupid, stupid, stupid …”). A dissatisfied Hitchcock made the actress try it again and again.

On November 14, shortly before Bel Geddes was done (Midge vanishes from the last section of the film), the director invited the actress to lunch and offered her a starring role in an
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
episode he’d been talking about ever since inaugurating the series. “Lamb to the Slaughter,” based on a short story by Roald Dahl (who also wrote the teleplay), was about a devoted wife, spurned by her louse of a husband, who clubs him to death with a frozen leg of lamb. As detectives scour her house for clues to the crime, the lamb cooks delectably, ultimately becoming their supper.

Although Bel Geddes had a thankless role in
Vertigo
, the director rewarded her with the lead in his best-remembered television show. Her wounded innocence, affecting in the film, was deployed to comedic perfection in “Lamb to the Slaughter,” which Hitchcock directed early in 1957.

The studio scenes focused on the two stars of
Vertigo:
James Stewart and Kim Novak.

The October and November filming included what Dan Auiler calls “the notorious Scene 151”—Scottie and Madeleine’s first conversation, in Scottie’s apartment, after Madeleine’s suicidal jump into the bay. The eleven script pages began with a gradual pan from Scottie, seated on the sofa, to his bedroom across the apartment, where Madeleine is glimpsed, stirring naked under bedcovers. “In passing we see Madeleine’s clothes drying in the kitchen,” wrote Auiler. “The camera stops on his bedroom; through the open door, we see Madeleine sleeping, and we hear her murmuring something.”

The staging warranted subtle adjustments in the camera work, and the dialogue was lengthy. Hitchcock watched the rushes, then reshot the scene again and again. The blocking, the acting, the lighting, the camera moves—everything had to be better. “Almost all of the [filming] delay can be ascribed to this one stubborn scene,” according to Auiler.

The film’s famous “revolving kiss” wasn’t on the schedule until December 16. This is the scene near the end that follows the moment when Judy emerges from her bedroom, wearing Madeleine’s exact clothing and hairdo, as Scottie has insisted. In the cemetery, wearing the gray suit, Madeleine had been bathed in a green light; now, as the transformed Judy stepped into view, she too was bathed in green, emanating from the hotel’s neon sign outside the window—the same “ghostlike quality” that Hitchcock remembered from theatergoing as a boy.

Seeing her finally changed into Madeleine, Scottie sweeps Judy up into an embrace, kissing her fervently, releasing his memories. The “big head” close-ups (in Hitchcock parlance) fill the screen as the camera appears to whirl around them (though it was actually the scenery rotating). Scottie is transported into the past, back to the stable where he kissed Madeleine before she dashed from his arms and (apparently) leaped to her death. When the camera (and revolving stage) completes its circle, he is back in Judy’s room.

It was difficult to photograph because the actors had to embrace at an extreme angle as the camera circled very close to them; they had to lean together in such a way that they eventually could slide down out of sight. On the second take Stewart slipped and fell, and filming had to be interrupted for an hour while he visited the studio doctor. When he returned, this exquisitely romantic, despairingly beautiful shot—one of the most beautiful of Hitchcock’s canon—was finally captured by the end of the day.

Very often on a Hitchcock film pivotal scenes waited for the end of the schedule, when the creative juices were flowing and actors were primed. Hitchcock waited until December 18 before shooting the opening: Scottie dangling by his fingertips from a rooftop. The following day was the last, with a few pickup shots assigned to the second unit. Finally, around lunchtime, Hitchcock’s cameo was staged near the Paramount paint shop.

“Sc. 21. Ext.: Shipyard. Mr. Hitchcock walks camera left to right & out passing Scottie entering. Scottie pauses to speak to Gateman who gestures & Scottie walks on & out.”

Only one take required.

As was often the case, Hitchcock had worked right up to Christmas. The years of missing out on an annual break were over, however, and after the last takes on
Vertigo
the Hitchcocks left for Miami and Montego Bay, with a gambling side trip to Cuba, joined by the Lew Wassermans.

Ernest Lehman stayed behind to work on “In a Northwesterly Direction.” With all the instructions Hitchcock had given him, Lehman felt he’d been given a treasure map with a whole array of Xs to explore. He took a two-week tour of New York, Chicago, and Mount Rushmore to get a feeling for the locales Hitchcock had specified. He visited the United Nations, underwent a mock arrest in Long Island (where the master villain of the story occupies a grand mansion), and toured Mount Rushmore with a forest ranger. Lehman sent the first sixty-five pages of script to Hitchcock in Jamaica, and on the very day the director returned to Hollywood, February 3, they met for the first time in weeks.

Rubbing his hands gleefully, Hitchcock said he liked what he had read—so far. In interviews Lehman sometimes sounded defensive when claiming credit for
North by Northwest
; the director had been dreaming
up the story for years, after all; and there would be another six months of talks and writing with Hitchcock before the script was done.

Curiously, Lehman remembered that one of the things Hitchcock liked to talk about endlessly was the
logic
of the plot and characterizations—even in the case of the exuberantly illogical
North by Northwest.
It was partly a defensive maneuver, for Hitchcock was always being pilloried by his nemeses, “the plausibles.” But it also gave the director an excuse to explore the boundaries of a film’s logic and decide just how far he could stretch things.

For a while they considered having the film’s protagonist, Roger Thornhill, pass through Detroit just so Hitchcock could shoot a scene he had always wanted to put in a film: Thornhill would visit an automobile plant, where he and a factory foreman have a long, whispered conversation as they stroll alongside an assembly line. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Just as they finish their talk, the car is done, ready to be driven. The two men glance at the shiny new car and exclaim, “Isn’t it wonderful!” They open the front door, and out slumps a corpse. But the idea had to be squelched because “we couldn’t integrate it into the story,” said Hitchcock. So Thornhill bypassed Detroit.

Hitchcock shut the filming down for “a whole day” at a later point, according to Lehman, because he couldn’t figure out how to explain a plot detail that was crucial to how he visualized a scene in the Chicago train station. Eve, Vandamm’s sexy henchwoman (and Thornhill’s love interest), is glimpsed inside a phone booth talking with her coconspirator Leonard, who, as revealed by a beautiful camera glide, is on the phone to her from a nearby booth. But how did Eve know what booth Leonard would be in, and how did they know each other’s phone numbers? Hitchcock and Lehman were both stumped. Work was halted “until somehow or other he came up with an answer that satisfied him,” said Lehman. Then and only then, after arriving at some internal explanation (never, incidentally, elucidated in the film), did filming resume.

Hitchcock said later that with
North by Northwest
, he had gone beyond explanations. Even the Macguffin was finally irrelevant. What is the master villain, Vandamm (James Mason), up to? It’s even murkier than usual. He’s an “importer and exporter of government secrets,” the Professor (Leo G. Carroll) explains, though when he elaborates on this to Thornhill, Hitchcock drowns out the conversation with the noise of an airplane propeller. (“My best Macguffin,” the director told François Truffaut, referring to
North by Northwest
, “and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd.”)

The Macguffin is maddeningly elusive until the film’s final moments, when it is revealed as a spool of microfilm tucked inside a pre-Columbian
figurine. In one of the film’s throwaway laughs, Thornhill wryly dubs it “the Pumpkin,” a mocking allusion to the Alger Hiss case.
^*

In the winter of 1957, as the script took shape, Lehman thought he was writing for James Stewart—and the more Stewart heard about the next Hitchcock film, the more he wanted to play the man inside Lincoln’s nose. The three friends—Hitchcock, Stewart, and Lew Wasserman—got together for lunch at least once a week, but the director kept hedging about the start date; the script still needed work, he said.
North by Northwest
might also have been rushed into production—and James Stewart might have played Thornhill—if, in the spring, three crises hadn’t slowed Hitchcock’s progress again.

The first was the sudden passing, on March 26, of Paramount’s Don Hartman, whose death at age fifty-seven from a sudden heart attack was a shock for Hollywood. Hartman had recently switched over to being an independent producer at Paramount, but he still maintained an office and presence on the lot. Hartman and Y. Frank Freeman had been the leadership team that gave Hitchcock his greatest freedom and independence; Hartman’s death set in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead the director away from the studio.

The second blow, more personal and devastating to Hitchcock, followed in April. During a routine physical, Mrs. Hitchcock was diagnosed with cervical cancer—which, in 1958, almost automatically carried a death sentence. Hitchcock was staggered by the news, more shaken by Alma’s illness than by his own the preceding year.

Mrs. Hitchcock opted for an experimental radiation treatment involving an injection of small particles of radioactive colloidal gold into the parametrial tissue. Some patients had died from this new method of attacking cervical carcinoma, while others had suffered debilitating side effects and major complications. But the radiogold treatment also had a promising survival rate, and Alma scheduled the operation for April 14.

That was the same week her husband was scheduled to direct “Dip in the Pool” for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
over at Universal. Norman Lloyd proposed to take over the directing, but Hitchcock balked. That would be
unprofessional—and bad luck. Alma was already in the hospital when Lloyd drove home with him to Bellagio Road to discuss the issue.

It was extremely hot that day, Lloyd recalled, and the director took off his jacket, “which is rare. He was in his shirtsleeves and tie and we sat in his garden. He started to talk about Alma. No one knew if she would live through this. And he started to weep.” According to Lloyd, Hitchcock, who was never philosophical (“the nearest he has ever come to a statement of his life’s philosophy,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “is ‘The day begins at 9 a.m.’ ”) talked philosophically that day about Alma meaning “all the world” to him.

“What is it all about?” he said, weeping uncontrollably. “What would it all mean, without Alma? After all, everything I do in film is secondary to what is really important.”

“Dip in the Pool” was rescheduled for after the operation, and Hitchcock, the consummate professional, materialized on the set “regular as clockwork,” according to John Russell Taylor, “rehearsing and shooting with his usual humorous impassivity, so that no one there knew anything was wrong. Then he would drive straight to the hospital, weeping and shaking convulsively all the way, and on arrival would put on his cheerful face again and spend the evening talking with Alma as though this were the most usual thing in the world.”

Some time passed before it became clear that the radiogold treatment had succeeded, that Mrs. Hitchcock had beaten the cancer. But her strength returned in time for her to take a July trip to London with her husband, and all the signs were hopeful.