Alfred Hitchcock (11 page)

Greet’s generosity was another gesture he never forgot. Hitchcock had a soft spot for onetime leading ladies of the stage, whom he often called on for eccentric supporting roles. Greet would turn up in future Hitchcock films more than any other performer.
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Undoubtedly there would have been an Alfred Hitchcock even if there had never been a British Famous Players-Lasky. But the director was forged in the crucible of Islington. His budding talent and buoyant, self-assured personality set him apart, and many of his signature ideas and techniques—not to mention long-standing relationships—dated to his first film job. Through thick and thin at Islington, Hitchcock slyly positioned himself at the very heart of the studio.

Quite apart from what befell British Famous Players-Lasky, the early 1920s marked one in a series of precarious junctures in English film history, with several studios showing huge losses and teetering close to bankruptcy. England never had the wherewithal of Hollywood—the massive capital, the domestic audience numbers, the global marketing organization. But times of crisis always attracted brave young blood, and in the spring of 1923 several people who would loom large in Hitchcock’s future arrived at Islington.

Michael Balcon and Victor Saville hailed from Birmingham, with backgrounds in film rentals. Saville had handled Midlands sales of the D. W. Griffith epics
The Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
, and after World War I he joined with the brothers Charles and Herbert Wilcox in a cinema-booking partnership. Saville and Balcon then formed a company to make advertising films, and coproduced their first short feature with a promising up-and-comer—the exhibitor Sidney Bernstein.

One of Herbert Wilcox’s friends was a Newcastle upon Tyne exhibitor
named Jack Graham Cutts, another passionate D. W. Griffith promoter. When Wilcox made the plunge into feature production in 1919, he hired Cutts to direct his first picture,
The Wonderful Story.
Victor Saville was fortuitously married to the niece of C. M. Woolf, who owned England’s largest rental operation, W & F (named for Woolf and his partner, John M. Freedman). When Wilcox and Cutts split up, Balcon, Saville, and Jack Freedman—John M.’s son—formed a new company, and snapped up Cutts as their marquee director.

Saville and Balcon were intelligent and well-bred. Over time Hitchcock would feel closer to Saville, a witty, artistic-minded kindred spirit who soon turned to directing, creating an underrated body of work in England and Hollywood. Balcon was more a born producer—after Alexander Korda, arguably the single most important in British film history—with an exemplary career that extended from Islington in 1923 to his final film in 1963. Cool and quick-witted, Balcon was a master businessman whose worldly salesmanship was sometimes at odds with his staunchly English (Michael Powell said “suburban”) sensibility. Hitchcock owed a lasting debt to Balcon, although over the years their relationship would sometimes be rocky.

Not only did Balcon-Saville-Freedman find the financial backing they needed in England, they also traveled to the United States to pave the way for an American distribution deal with the Select Organization, run by Lewis Selznick. A scrappy motion picture production and distribution pioneer on the East Coast before World War I, Selznick had fallen on hard times by the early twenties, and was trying to reorganize. Eager for product, Select was willing to peddle inexpensive British features to a small eastern chain of U.S. theaters.

Selznick was the father of two go-getter sons. The younger, David, would later become a prestigious producer and give Hitchcock his first contract in America. But the older brother, Myron, was just as important to the director’s future. Serving as his father’s unofficial ambassador to London, Myron first shook hands with Hitchcock on a visit as early as December 1921; in time he would become Hitchcock’s first agent in Hollywood.

When Balcon-Saville-Freedman became tenants at Islington, Balcon encountered Hitchcock, “obviously a live wire,” a general handyman and draftsman eager to do more. The first-time producer engaged Hitchcock to act as Cutts’s assistant director on
Woman to Woman
, a 1921 stage play slated as the new company’s maiden film production. “At one of our earliest meetings,” Balcon recalled, “I asked him if he knew of a good scriptwriter, as we had not yet turned the play into film form. Hitch replied immediately, ‘Yes, me.’ I asked him what he had done by way of script-writing, and he produced a script he had written but which had never been filmed. I read it and put Hitch to work at once.”

Woman to Woman
, in Hitchcock’s words, was “the story of a man who
has a mistress in Paris, who bangs his head, loses his memory, and starts going with another woman, who gives him a child.” He had to use his imagination in concocting such a story, he explained later, for at the tender age of twenty-three Alfred Hitchcock was still a virgin. He had never even been on a date, and was ignorant of “the mechanics of sex.” “I’d never been with a woman,” Hitchcock recalled in one interview, “and I didn’t have the slightest idea what a woman did to have a child. I had even less idea what a man did when he was with his mistress in Paris, or when he was with another woman who was giving him a child.”

But he must have had at least a
general
idea, since he had the benefit of a solid play from which to adapt—and the opportunity to collaborate with the playwright himself: Michael Morton. A Boston native living in London, Morton was a former actor and the brother of well-known Broadway playwright Martha Morton. The author of two decades’ worth of London and New York stage hits, at fifty-nine Morton was old enough to be Hitchcock’s father, and now he set about teaching the younger man the rules of dramaturgy.

Morton’s play was about a young English army engineer’s affair with a Moulin Rouge dancer in Paris, just before the outbreak of World War I. The Englishman goes off to battle, the dancer gives birth to an out-of-wedlock baby boy, and the soldier, wounded, suffers amnesia. Assuming a new identity, he marries a social butterfly, who denies him the sole wish of his life: a son. Years later, in London, he meets the mistress, an artistic dancer, now gravely ill. The title came from the climactic confrontation between the wife and dancer. After nobly offering to give her son up to the man’s wife, the onetime chorine keeps a dancing engagement that imperils her life. The dance-suicide at the very end of the play (and film) was considered especially unconventional and thrilling; it became the first of a surprising number of “self-murders” to end a Hitchcock film.
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Woman to Woman
called for a research trip to Paris, and off Hitchcock went with Cutts to do a little scouting, according to John Russell Taylor. Paris was already a kind of home away from home. Hitchcock loved the exhibitions (the art as well as vice museums), the restaurants, the street life, and risqué nightclubs.

The first thing Hitchcock did after arriving, according to Taylor, was attend Mass at the Church of the Madeleine. His next move, one might say, was equally Catholic: he toured Montmartre and visited the Moulin Rouge, the better to soak up the hedonistic atmosphere and create, in Hitchcock’s words, “an exact replica” of the famous cabaret. Though enjoying
himself, his mind was also at work. “What’s suggested is always more potent than what’s shown,” he said in a later interview, offering one of his theories on sex appeal. “Look at the girls that dance the can-can. They’re covered in clothes, except for two provocative glimpses of flesh.”

By now Hitchcock was officially serving as the assistant director
and
cowriter of
Woman to Woman.
Someone else had been slated as art director, but when he bowed out Hitchcock told Balcon he’d be happy to do that job, too. With all his accumulating responsibility he was obliged to hire a staff, and Alma Reville was rather astonished to receive a telephone call. Up to this time he had barely acknowledged her existence. Now he announced he was hiring for a new picture; would Alma be available as editor?

They had both worked at Islington, but this was the first time they collaborated on the same film. Working side by side on five Graham Cutts productions would cement their extraordinary lifelong partnership.

The romantic Englishman Clive Brook played the amnesiac, but Lewis Selznick insisted on an American leading lady—Hollywood stars were box-office insurance around the world. Victor Saville went to Hollywood to recruit Betty Compson, a stunning but down-to-earth blonde who had made the transition from vaudeville and comedy to serious dramatic parts. A star of her magnitude needed to be convinced she was not “making a mistake with a leap into the dark of a British studio,” wrote Saville in his memoir. “I not only had to sell the screenplay but all the technical aids as well—did the studio use a Bell & Howell camera, had the cameraman a good track record, how experienced was the make-up man, and so on and so forth, right down to the efficiency of the wardrobe mistress.”

Compson arrived in London in May 1923, and was lavishly feted at a press party at the Savoy. Hitchcock met the American actress there, and they struck up a fast friendship. He was grateful that such a big star would take more than passing note of a young nonentity, and he never lost touch with the actress. Seventeen years later, when she needed work to qualify for guild pension and benefits, he paid Compson back with one of her last roles, the minor part of Gertie in his comedy
Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

When Hitchcock found something that worked, he remembered it and carried it forward. And in Betty Compson—the star of the first finished film he helped direct—he found the first Hitchcock blonde.

“No pains were spared in photographing the female star,” Saville recalled. “Never less than an hour, and more often longer, was occupied in arranging the oh-so-many lamps and then deftly shading the light so that it only illuminated that part of the face to round the features and flatten out those creases that make-up had not successfully concealed.” There was
always a patch of gauze in front of the camera lens; Compson was photographed as “a chocolate box perfection of beauty,” in Saville’s words.

Most of the filming took place at Islington in May 1923, but the company made a brief excursion to Paramount’s branch studio at Joinville, France, where Hitchcock re-created the Casino de Paris in all its sin and splendor. They borrowed casino dancers from the current show, substituting Compson for the lead dancer. After the last performance on Saturday night, the dancers were transported to the studio, where they toiled for the cameras all night before returning to Paris in time for the Sunday matinee.

Hitchcock had stipulated replicas of the revealing casino costumes, but
Woman to Woman
was his first brush with the puritanical censorship he would battle relentlessly throughout his career. It was also a defeat. “We had to employ a group of needle women,” remembered Saville, “to fit the chorus with brassieres—no French breast could be exposed on the screens of England or America.”

Since Hollywood stars could be brought over to England only at considerable expense, it was standard practice for them to appear in two pictures back to back. As soon as filming on their first production was finished, then, Balcon-Saville-Freedman hastily assembled their next picture, advertised as featuring “The Same Star, Producer, Author, Hero, Cameraman, Scenic Artist, Staff, Studio, Renting Company as
Woman to Woman.
” Once again Graham Cutts directed and Betty Compson starred (as twins); once again Claude McDonnell was behind the camera; once again Paris was the setting. And Alfred Hitchcock was once again the assistant director, “scenic artist,” and coauthor with Michael Morton of the scenario, apparently based on an unpublished Morton novel.

The novel was called
Children of Chance.
One source tantalizingly summarized Morton’s story: “Wild girl becomes possessed by soul of twin who died to save her life.”

Woman to Woman
met with acclaim when it was presented to the trade and press in the late fall of 1923. Lewis Selznick paid a reported record sum for the U.S. and foreign rights, and the first Balcon-Saville-Freedman production actually premiered in New York before London. It went on to become the rare English picture to score a commercial success in American theaters. Thereafter it was distributed by Select in Germany, where for too long English films had been hurt by postwar political antipathies. All the more miraculous, therefore, that in Germany
Woman to Woman
repeated its box-office triumph, and boasted “the distinction of being the first British film shown [profitably] in Germany since the war,” according to the
Bioscope.

English critics praised the film’s expressive atmosphere and inventive
camera work, crediting director Cutts, then at the height of his reputation. But reviews also commented on the sturdy script; indeed, a version was published in the United States in
Representative Photoplays Analyzed
as a sterling example of scenario writing.

When
The White Shadow
, the film version of
Children of Chance
, followed quickly on
Woman to Woman
’s heels, however, the second film proved an unmitigated disaster. Critics and audiences hated it. Why? So many years later, it is impossible to say. No one can claim to have seen either of these long-lost films since their initial release in 1923 and 1924.

Whatever the cause, disaster mounted in the wake of the failure of
The White Shadow.
The Select Organization plunged into receivership. Selznick’s troubles had little or nothing to do with the few English pictures he was handling; indeed, the canny bargain he struck with Balcon more or less guaranteed that all the American and German revenue went to Select. But after
The White Shadow
faltered, C. M. Woolf, the rental magnate who controlled domestic distribution, dealt the studio a death blow.

A former furrier who had made a fortune distributing Tarzan pictures and Harold Lloyd comedies, Woolf spent his career trying to impose his taste on a succession of film companies in which he invested heavily. He detested “artistic filmmaking,” and blamed the failure of
The White Shadow
on too much “artistry”; when he withdrew his financing from Balcon-Saville-Freedman, the company was forced to disband.