Alfred Hitchcock (22 page)

The Hitchcocks beamed. Years later, in his autobiography, Powell reflected that Hitchcock probably “had never been near the British Museum Reading Room,” which was why Powell felt entitled to “make a modest claim to being the inventor of the Hitchcock Climax, unveiled to the world through the chase in
Blackmail
, and which led us all on many a delightful dance from Tower Bridge to Mount Rushmore, from the Statue of Liberty to you name it.” What Powell overlooked was that he was hired expressly because the Hitchcocks recognized in him a kinship—in short, that he was “Hitchcockian” enough for the job, and just the kind of writer who might well come up with such ideas.
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The British Museum pursuit, and the toppling death of the blackmailer, were the film script’s major innovations, but Alice’s ultimate fate was another difference from the play. The stage version of
Blackmail
ended with a twist revelation: the artist hasn’t been murdered by Alice after all—he has actually been felled by an undetected heart attack! (According to film historian John Belton in his study of Charles Bennett’s work, the published play even differed from the produced play, for there Tallulah Bankhead insisted on having Alice surrender to police.)

Hitchcock tried to preserve Bankhead’s version, with an ending that would have mirrored the prologue: After the blackmailer falls to his death, the detective boyfriend is forced to arrest and fingerprint his own girlfriend. The detective doesn’t dare let on that he knows Alice, because he has been complicit. As he leaves the station afterward, another officer asks, “Well, what are you doing tonight, going out with your girl?” and he answers stonily, “No, not tonight.”

Once again, though, the front office stymied Hitchcock. B.I.P. objected to the leading lady being arrested for murder at the end of the film; they didn’t want Anny Ondra winding up behind bars, any more than Gainsborough had wanted Ivor Novello to be perceived as Jack the Ripper. They said it would be “too depressing,” Hitchcock told Truffaut.

So the three Hitchcocks hastily revised the ending: The police would still trap the blackmailer on the roof of the British Museum, where he falls to his death. Discovering the blackmailer has a prior criminal record, the police are happy to close the books on the artist’s murder. Tortured by guilt, however, Alice appears at the police station; she is on the verge of confessing—as guilty parties seem inevitably compelled to do in Hitchcock’s films—when she is interrupted and hurried away by her detective boyfriend.

It’s far from a happy ending, as the actors’ haunted looks convey. The detective has obstructed justice, and Alice is saddled with guilt. Hitchcock still thought the ending sugarcoated. “My life’s full of compromises,” he would sigh to Peter Bogdanovich when recounting the saga of the film years later.

The Islington brothers Norman and Charles Wilfred Arnold shared the art direction, and Jack Cox was the cameraman, when
Blackmail
started filming in February 1929.

Tall, handsome John Longden played Frank, the detective boyfriend; the shorter, less handsome Donald Calthrop played the blackmailer. (A character actor Hitchcock admired enough to use several times, Calthrop also appears in
Elstree Calling, Murder!
, and
Number Seventeen.
The director once said that Calthrop “could be compared with a Wurlitzer organ, which can give you everything from tremendous volume to the softest notes.”) Cyril Ritchard, an elegant song-and-dance man from Australia, was cast against type as the ill-fated artist-seducer. Irish-born actress Sara Allgood, the tragedy queen of the Dublin theater, and music hall veteran Charles Paton portrayed Alice’s parents.

Everyone still thought
Blackmail
was going to be a silent picture. That is what the studio told Hitchcock—which “bitterly disappointed” him, he said later. Ronald Neame, an assistant cameraman on the film and later a prominent director in his own right, observed in an interview that Ondra’s casting proved that Hitchcock was expecting
Blackmail
to remain silent. “He wouldn’t have cast Anny Ondra, because Anny was Czechoslovakian, and she was playing the part of a London girl. She had a strong accent, and there was no such thing as dubbing. I don’t think he would have landed himself in that problem had he known he was going to do sound.”

But Hitchcock loved to wave his magic wand over insoluble problems; throughout his career he gulled studios by consigning worries to the back burner while plowing ahead on his own terms.

In the helter-skelter tradition of English film, which he would carry on for the rest of his career, even in the stricter confines of Hollywood, Hitchcock shot the prologue with the second unit—and with John Longden, the only principal required—before the script was even finished. If the police rigmarole seems overdone from today’s viewpoint, it held an inherent fascination for audiences of the time, and would have served a symmetrical purpose if Hitchcock had been allowed his original ending. Shot without sound, the prologue stayed silent—“a compendium of the art of the silent film,” in the words of British film historian Tom Ryall.

Partly because Hitchcock often started with a second unit before the script was completed, there could be a surprising amount of tinkering
during filming, for a director who prided himself on careful planning. Another young man behind the scenes of
Blackmail
was Freddie Young, destined to become the illustrious cinematographer of
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Doctor Zhivago.
Young was delegated by Hitchcock to create a minor montage, and he recalled instructions as exacting as they were changeable.

Nowadays, each shot of a montage is photographed separately; then the sequence is folded together easily on a digital editing system. In the silent era, all the dissolves had to be created inside the camera. Before starting one had to know precisely how many feet of film to expose for each image, and the exact order of the images. “During filming it was often necessary to wind the film back or forward in the camera,” Young explained, “and every time you did that you ran the risk of scratching it in the gate. If only one thing went wrong it would ruin the whole lot and you’d have to start all over again.”

Hitchcock handed Young one page of the
Blackmail
script, “indicating—I forget the exact details—a shot of feet walking, followed by thunderclouds, a train, horses galloping.” Young dutifully went off to create the prescribed sequence. “When I’d finished,” recalled Young in his autobiography, “I showed it to him in the viewing room, and he said, ‘That’s fine, Freddie, but I’ve changed my mind. I’d like you to start with the train, then go to the feet and the horses’ hooves, and finish with the clouds.’” Thus he had to start again from scratch.

Major and minor scenes of
Blackmail
were filmed in just such a fashion, shot by laborious shot, during February and March. Act One of the film climaxed with an especially bold sequence, in which Alice fends off the artist-seducer, finally stabbing him to death. It was a highlight carried over from the play, which Hitchcock restaged as pure cinema—pieces of film orchestrated into a series of viscerally thrilling chords.

In the scene Alice is quarreling with her detective boyfriend. She sneaks off for what is intended as a platonic tryst with the artist, and their date ends with him inviting Alice up to his flat to see his paintings. As they enter his apartment building, they are observed by the seedy Tracy (Donald Calthrop), lurking to collect a debt.

Upstairs in the flat, Alice is coaxed into putting on a tutu worn by the artist’s models. She dances around like a flirtatious firefly, but when the artist steals a kiss, she stops cold; she decides to leave, but, still playfully, he hides her street clothing. Then he grabs her.

Lightness turns to dark. The struggle grows serious. They stumble around violently and slip behind a curtain. It’s hard to tell what is happening: Hitchcock was always forcing his audiences to participate in the danger, to fill in gaps with their imagination.

Wrestling shadows. Writhing curtains. Alice’s hand reaches out from
behind the drapery, just her hand—groping frantically—until her fingers finally close on a large table knife. The knife is pulled behind the curtain. Intense struggle, and then, after a beat, all movement ceases. The artist’s arm pierces the curtain, lifelessly outstretched.

All of it was done very simply—a counterpoint to the British Museum climax, a more complicated, expensive, and decidedly Germanic highlight. Because the museum wouldn’t allow a full cast and crew to occupy its premises (and the budget couldn’t indulge the location work), the Hitchcock magic required the talents of the studio’s effects wizards—and the Schüfftan process. According to Hitchcock, the studio knew “nothing” about the process, and officials “might have raised objections, so I did all of this without their knowledge.”

As with
The Ring
, the famous backdrops were photographed first, and then the actors went through their paces separately; what the audience saw was a composite. Years hence, the director still reveled in the accomplishment, describing the technical challenges to a T. “You have a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees,” Hitchcock recalled, “and in it you reflect a full picture of the British Museum. I had some photos taken with half-hour exposures—nine of them taken in various rooms in the museum—and we made them into transparencies so that we could backlight them. That is more luminous than a flat photograph. It was like a big lantern slide, about twelve by fourteen. And then I scraped the silvering away in the mirror only in the portions where I wanted the man to be seen running, and those portions we built on the stage. For example, one room was the Egyptian room—there were glass cases in there. All we built were the door frames from one room to another. We even had a man looking into a case, and he wasn’t looking into anything on the stage. I did nine shots like this.”

Meticulous staging and special effects sequences always took an inordinate amount of time, but Hitchcock seemed almost to dawdle during the filming. John Maxwell dropped by more than once to check the slow progress of
Blackmail.
Hitchcock and his complicit cameraman were ready for the B.I.P. boss. They arranged a dummy camera and lights on a nearby stage, on the pretense that they were photographing “a letter for an insert,” in the director’s words. Whenever Maxwell materialized, they started shooting the insert. The studio head grew bored and left.

By late March the weather had improved, and they could venture outdoors. One night, a screen trade columnist watched the filming at the Lyons Corner House, a well-known West End restaurant. Police tried to keep “the homegoing theater crowds” away, but the Saturday night throng refused to budge, watching Hitchcock shoot exteriors for the first scene between Alice and Frank, when they quarrel at dinner. The public was invited to merge with extras to form the crowd in the film, and it was “early
on Sunday morning [before] Hitchcock and Jack Cox were satisfied with the results,” the columnist wrote.

As far as anyone knew,
Blackmail
was still officially a silent picture.

In early April came the news that B.I.P. had completed temporary sound-stages. The larger permanent facilities would not be ready until midsummer, but John Maxwell felt confident enough to announce an ambitious program of fifteen to twenty talking pictures for 1928–29. And the first of these, according to the trade papers, would be
Blackmail
—a newly scheduled “talkie version,” with dialogue inserts already being hastily written by Hitchcock and Benn Levy.

Levy was a young Oxford-educated playwright who had just returned from Hollywood, and writing talkies there. (He would shortly marry the well-known American actress Constance Cummings.) Foreseeing the need for dialogue, Hitchcock had begun meeting with Levy in the spring, early enough that Levy’s pages were ready by mid-April.

Maxwell only authorized the addition of “limited” sound to scenes already photographed. Yet, anticipating this cost-conscious approach, Hitchcock had shot key scenes with parts in mind that he could substitute out, and earmarked sections leading into or out of the silent scenes, “where sound could be tacked on afterward,” in his words. According to British film historian Charles Barr, who compared both versions of
Blackmail
, “while shooting the silent version of the film sanctioned by Maxwell, Hitchcock was also shooting separate takes of each shot in order to prepare a negative for the sound version of the film.”

“Since I suspected the producers might change their minds, and might eventually want an all-sound picture,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “I worked it out that way.”

Anny Ondra was the most delicate issue. Hitchcock adored her; by all accounts, everyone did. Besides being adorable, she was funny, intelligent, down-to-earth. The director preferred a leading lady he could flirt with, and the ones that flirted back fared best with him. Ondra was a flirt, but also a genuine friend. (Later in life Hitchcock would visit her whenever he passed through Germany.) Accent or no accent, he was going to stick with Ondra.

Ondra spoke with a thick Czech pronunciation, however, which wasn’t right for an actress playing the daughter of a typically English newsagent. Hitchcock had had a potential solution in mind all along, but first he went to the bother of arranging a sound test for Ondra. The test would demonstrate the barrier of her accent—so that she would understand his dilemma.

The test footage, undated, survives in British Film Institute archives, and transcripts have been reprinted in books and documentaries about
Hitchcock. He is seen standing next to Ondra, reassuring her, prodding her to speak, while also teasing her mercilessly.