Alfred Hitchcock (21 page)

Hitchcock was an inveterate gambler on himself and always tempted by a technical dare. Despite his antipathy to “talkies,” he took the challenge eagerly.

If the sound revolution intimidated America (and it did), it was even more daunting for England. There were so many disparate recording systems, and the costs of standardizing studio and theater equipment were exorbitant. For a long time, the leading artists, producers, and exhibitors of the English film industry were remarkably united—in trepidation.

After the September 1928 premiere of
The Jazz Singer
, though, resistance evaporated. Editorials in major newspapers declared that talkies had arrived, and even the
Bioscope
proclaimed the public demonstration a milestone. “Certain conclusions are inevitable,” the trade paper averred, reversing its previous editorial opinion. “Sound has joined the pictures and the union is not a companionate marriage, but a permanent one. The new art will make film production more difficult, but will enormously increase the emotional and dramatic appeal of the well-made film.”

At least one London studio was already producing “talking” short subjects, and others rushed to add brief dialogue scenes or musical background to completed silent pictures. The head of British International
Pictures, John Maxwell, notwithstanding his public statements to the contrary, forged connections with Pathé and De Forest Phonofilm to facilitate the swiftest possible switchover to synchronized sound. Elstree began soundproofing renovations.

Hitchcock couldn’t be certain that sound would be in place in time for his next film. But right away he planned for contingencies. “Hitchcock,” said Ronald Neame, an assistant cameraman on the director’s next planned project, “was way ahead of the game. He just loved the idea of using sound.”

Shortly after the premiere of
The Jazz Singer
, a writer named Garnett Weston, who had just signed to a contract with British International Pictures, arrived in London. Canadian by birth, Weston was considered a suspense specialist (he later became a mystery novelist). Fresh from a stint with Cecil B. De Mille in Hollywood, he was up-to-date on talkies. To the surprise of many in the trade, Weston was announced as Hitchcock’s collaborator on the B.I.P. adaptation of
Blackmail
, a Charles Bennett stage play starring Tallulah Bankhead that had been a sensation at the Globe in 1928.

Eliot Stannard, who had worked on every one of Hitchcock’s silent pictures, was thus unceremoniously dismissed. Whether Hitchcock and Stannard had quarreled again, or the silent-film writer was just considered too old-fashioned (fellow director George Pearson remembered that Stannard had the quaint habit of heading his master scenes “with a hint as to their mood, joyous, tragic, equivocal, etc.”), Hitchcock left no clue. But this was the first signal that
Blackmail
would break with the past.

Stannard continued to write films, but after parting with Hitchcock he lost the stature he once enjoyed. He was still writing for Gaumont in 1944, a chain-smoking elder guru of the field; one colleague recalled him complaining vigorously that “Hitchcock took all the credit for writing
The Ring
, but at least fifty per cent of the most important ideas were mine.” Stannard died later that same year.

The received history of the making of
Blackmail
—“the first British talkie”—is a
Rashomon
of conflicting accounts.

The Manxman
was completed in September, but Hitchcock didn’t launch photography of his next film until late February 1929. Hitchcock had a way of slowing down the pace of production for his most important films, and with Elstree taking baby steps toward sound, there was good reason to take his time.

Nearly everything Hitchcock did, he broke down into steps and components. And while he didn’t always have the luxury of following each step, especially in England, Hitchcock liked to start with a fifty-to-seventy-five-word description of the story’s kernel, or main idea, articulating its
through-line, or narrative thread. In Hollywood slang, this was known as a long “weenie.”
^*

After the weenie came a lengthy prose treatment, of sixty to one hundred pages. Hitchcock liked to read the story in this prose form before launching into actual scriptwriting. The treatment was “scene by scene and action by action, without dialogue,” according to the director. “The best way I can describe this outline—it’s as though you’d looked at the film and cut the sound out.”

At every stage of the scriptwriting Hitchcock liked to tell and retell the story, and have it told back to him by the writer or writers he was working with; it was a form of mental rehearsal that helped the director visualize key scenes, spot potential problems, and suggest emendations while changing the story into
his
story.

As treatment was transformed into script, the tellings and retellings continued. “I’m bringing the writer into the direction of the picture,” Hitchcock once explained, “letting him know how I’m going to direct it.” A Hitchcock script thus evolved in stages, with each stage indebted, obscurely, to the contributions of preceding writers. And each stage allowed Hitchcock to embroider his vision. “Oh, I make it [the film] before the script,” he told one interviewer. “The script is the second stage.”

Especially for his early sound pictures, and in an ongoing fashion throughout his Hollywood years, his favorite listener was also the author of the initial, lengthy treatment: usually it was Mrs. Hitchcock. At this time Alma became the true replacement for Eliot Stannard.

Hitchcock envisioned
Blackmail
as a splendid pretext for exploring the primal commingling of sex and violence that he had already marked as his territory in
The Lodger
and other films.

The plot concerned a triangle of cross-purposes: a young woman impulsively stabs an artist while fending off his sexual advances; an unscrupulous witness tries to blackmail the woman; her boyfriend, a police detective who is torn between duty to his profession and devotion to love, joins in framing the blackmailer for the murder.

Charles Bennett’s play offered a solid foundation, but Hitchcock envisioned major changes for the film: opening up the settings, creating action, replacing the “third act.”

The first team of “three Hitchcocks” on
Blackmail
included Garnett Weston, who contributed to the treatment before moving on. Often a writer left a Hitchcock project for no reason more sinister than a prior professional commitment; sometimes, however, it was poor chemistry. In
January 1929, Weston was shunted off to another B.I.P. assignment, and Hitchcock searched around the studio for a new writer.

Seeking a younger voice for a film he wanted to suffuse with a modern sensibility, Hitchcock didn’t have to look very far. With his instinct for discovering young talent, he remembered Michael Powell, the young still photographer, whose magnificent career (as the director of
The Red Shoes
and the Hitchcock-like
Peeping Tom
, among other first-rate films) couldn’t have been easy to foresee in 1929. But the twenty-three-year-old Powell was clever, thoughtful, a good talker and listener; Hitchcock liked him, and so did Mrs. Hitchcock.

Powell was befriended by the Hitchcocks and invited down to Shamley Green, a hamlet amidst the woods and lanes of Surrey, where the couple had established a half-timbered cottage for weekend escapes from Cromwell Road. There the director tended his flower beds (he was a passionate horticulturist), and they all took long country walks.

“They were kind to me,” Powell recalled. “I never could understand what they saw in that moody, silent boy. I think that it was my association with great men [Rex Ingram and Harry Lachman] and great films. Something had brushed off. Like me, Hitch adored films and had great ambitions. Like me, he was impatient with the men who financed the struggling British film industry, looking inward instead of outward.”

During the filming of
The Manxman
Hitchcock had handed Powell a copy of the Charles Bennett play, telling him that
Blackmail
was well crafted until the weak third act. Hitchcock liked fireworks for his third acts, the dramatic set pieces he called “crescendos,” which topped everything that went before.

See what you think of the play, Hitchcock told Powell, and let me know how you think it might be improved for a film. It was the kind of remark Hitchcock often meant as a little test, but Powell passed swimmingly. He returned to tell Hitchcock he agreed with him—
Blackmail
would make a “swell movie.” When Hitchcock then asked about the “rotten” third act, Powell said, “To hell with the third act. We’ll make it a chase.”

The original January start was postponed several times as the new three Hitchcocks went to work. By this point Anny Ondra had already been chosen to play Alice, the young woman who stabs the artist-seducer. Ondra had been luminous under Hitchcock’s tutelage in
The Manxman
, a precursor to Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and Tippi Hedren in the long line of exceptional actresses who beguiled him. One of the secrets of his success—although it was an advantage he did not always have—was that signing the stars he wanted, early on, allowed him to build the script, and by extension the whole film, around their personalities.

As the writing team carried on, Powell was able to take long walks and get to know Ondra, who was also a regular guest of the Hitchcocks at Shamley Green. Besides the writing, Powell took “romantic still photographs
of her charming face and body in the woods.” Hitchcock often joined these woodland expeditions, “moodily” observing. “I am sure he wanted Anny as much as I did,” Powell mused in
A Life in Movies.

Hitchcock was incorrigible, recalled Powell, a “director” of people off as much as on the set. His provocateur’s personality never relaxed. “You don’t want to take all those solos [snapshots] of Anny,” Hitchcock advised Powell on one occasion. “You want to get a boy with her in the hay and she’s pressing up against him to feel his cock against her leg.” (“He loved to talk bawdy,” Powell remembered. “It made up for his gross, clumsy body.”)

From Shamley Green to Cromwell Road, the script progressed. In London, Hitchcock rejoiced in his “researches”: always, with crime films, paying visits to Scotland Yard, meeting with detectives, or visiting courts and prisons, collecting atmosphere and lore.

The film’s procedural prologue grew out of the team’s script talks and research. The prologue would feature a flying squad racing through London streets, an arrest, the interrogation and “identification parade,” and the fingerprinting and jailing of a suspect. (The sequence then ends with a true Hitchcockian touch: a side trip to the policemen’s washroom.)

As part of the director’s by now standard operating procedure, Hitchcock and Powell also visited a series of typical settings where their characters might live and work. Powell was struck by the how the director, with his East End background, evinced a “peculiar and delightful” view of people and places “east of Temple Bar,” while “toward the West End” Hitchcock seemed to fall back on “a more conventional approach because, to him, it only meant eating well in expensive restaurants, or going to the theater to see some actor or actress who had made a hit. But with the lower-middle-class Londoners of our film, shopkeepers, barrow-boys, hawkers, match-girls, hangers-on at the tails of the garment business, policemen, detectives, reporters, coppers’ narks, thieves and pickpockets, he continually delighted me with the extent of his knowledge and the sharpness of his observation.”

Hitchcock specialized in writers who reached for the spot that itched. At one script session, according to Powell, the director “broached an idea that I had been maturing for a while.”
Blackmail
ought to conclude, Powell suggested, with an elaborate chase that takes place in “some bizarre location that is entertaining in itself.”

“What do you mean?” asked Hitchcock, raising his eyebrows. “What do you think Michael means, Alma?” Right on cue, Mrs. Hitchcock gave Powell an encouraging nod.

Powell had been pondering his boyhood visits to the British Museum Reading Room, that hallowed edifice with its glass dome. “Let’s have him [the blackmailer, pursued by police] slip into the British Museum at night,” Powell offered, “and get chased through rooms full of Egyptian mummies
and Elgin Marbles, and climb higher to escape, and be cornered and then fall through the glass dome of the Reading Room and break his neck.”