Alfred Hitchcock (23 page)

Lewd repartee was business as usual for Hitchcock during camera tests, according to those who worked with him. He liked to shout out at actresses, “Have you ever slept with anyone?”—a most unusual question in those days. Besides actually being keen to know whom his leading ladies were sleeping with, Hitchcock relished the chance to elicit a spontaneous reaction, look, or expression—a peek behind the professional mask.

Ondra’s voice test, along with Hitchcock’s “home movies” of
Blackmail
, confirm that she and the director had a warm, playful chemistry. There is footage of Hitchcock lifting up her dress and grabbing at her underwear, of her shooing him away through gusts of laughter. The director’s leading men were treated much the same way. Actor Henry Kendall, for example, recalled that during his test for
Rich and Strange
Hitchcock “talked to me from behind the camera and would in the ordinary way have been asking me about my experience and for details of my career, but this time the conversation took a very Rabelaisian turn, and he kept me in fits of laughter so that I could hardly do more than stand in front of the camera and shake.”

The test convinced Ondra, and voilà!—Hitchcock brought out his Alice-in-reserve: Joan Barry, a young British actress whose diction had been refined by study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Ondra would mouth her lines while Barry stood outside the framing of the camera and gave simultaneous voice to Alice’s dialogue. (Never mind that Barry’s upper-class accent was totally inappropriate for the character.) Hitchcock’s solution meant more pressure all around—all three had to rehearse the exact timing of the scenes, every night after filming, in order to be ready for the next day.

The director’s loyalty to Ondra carried the day, though her best scenes, as it turned out, are the silent ones without the distracting “voice double”—those that take place after the killing, when she is traumatized. But Hitchcock’s fondness for Ondra didn’t keep him from reducing her (as he had another favorite actress, Lilian Hall-Davis) to tears, until she gave him the suffering quality he wanted.

If there is one film, one character, one actress at the heart of Hitchcock’s work, it is Anny Ondra in
Blackmail.
Hitchcock’s male heroes generally do all right in the end, except for the guilt and shame. His women must kill or die, be humiliated, or endure a frustrating romance with an impotent hero on the run. One way or another the beautiful women always suffered.

Blackmail
moved into B.I.P.’s new temporary soundstage: a padded house on the Elstree grounds.
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The walls were cushioned with blankets. Draped felt was sandwiched under the corrugated-iron roof. The sound cameras were motor driven, and the motors made constant noise, so the cameras had to be encased in telephone-booth-like kiosks on wheels. The camera couldn’t track or dolly without wheeling the entire booth around the room. Camera movement—already a Hitchcock trademark—basically ground to a halt.

The standard carbon arc lamps produced an incessant hum and splutter, so the cameramen began experimenting with five- and ten-kilowatt incandescents. This worked out well for illumination purposes, but created a near-suffocating heat inside the stage area—“like being in a bakehouse,” as Freddie Young recalled. “In between calls, the actors lay down on the floor and napped as best they could in the sweltering heat.”

The camera booth, a smaller confined space, was hellish—an even more punishing sweatbox. It was covered in front by a thick glass panel that had to be wiped clean constantly with alcohol. The crew even grabbed their tea breaks inside. “The operator was locked inside,” recalled Young, who was assistant cameraman on another B.I.P. talkie (which actually preceded
Blackmail
in the temporary sound facility), “and there he’d stay until the end of the take, when he’d stagger out sweating and gasping for air.”

“My first impression was of a largish room packed to capacity with a vast amount of junk,” recalled Arthur Graham, a B.I.P. cameraman who
dropped by to watch. “There were flats everywhere, cables snaking all over the place and a floor covered with a jungle of lamp stands.”

Hitchcock, most of the time, was stationed in a separate recording booth that was every bit as hot and suffocating, wearing outsize earphones to monitor the audio quality.

“Utter chaos,” thought cameraman Graham. Under the circumstances the director had to radiate confidence enough for everybody, but Hitchcock never lacked for confidence. It should have been embossed on his business card: Authority and Confidence. While every other British director was half paralyzed by the new equipment, Hitchcock methodically added not only key dialogue to the script, but incidental music and sound effects as well.

The effects specialists lined up on the sidelines, letting forth screams and laughter, making doors slam, horns honk, and birds sing—filling the film with noise.

The director sat Cyril Ritchard down at the piano and had him sing a snippet of a popular song just before his stabbing death. In another scene, where John Longden nonchalantly paced around a room, searching for clues, the director suggested that the actor whistle “Sonny Boy” from
The Jazz Singer
—the first American talkie, which was still the rage in British theaters. Longden thought that the cheekiest Hitchcock touch of all.

Hitchcock was quick to see sound as another means of editing, which could link images in novel fashion—as when he cut from the outstretched hand of a tramp Alice spies on the street to the scream of a landlady discovering the stiff, protruding limb of the dead artist.

He even deliberately distorted sound. The most audacious example comes after the murder, when Alice sits, trancelike, at the breakfast table with her parents, her secret weighing on her mind. Just behind them, a neighbor woman, standing in the family’s news shop, loudly discusses the murder. She complains about the very “un-British” method of stabbing someone with a knife. “Now I would have used a brick maybe, but I’d never use a knife. A
knife
is a terrible thing. A
knife
is so messy and dreadful. …” Over and over the offending word is repeated, magnified, exaggerated, becoming, in Hitchcock’s words, “a confusion of vague noises.”

Hitchcock intercut this hilarious “knife” recitative with close shots of Alice, her eyes darting back and forth guiltily. The tension builds as Alice’s father asks for a slice of bread. Alice’s hand edges slowly toward the bread knife, until the word “knife” is heard one last sharply accusing time. She gives a start, and hurls the blade from the table.

There wasn’t the budget to reconvene extras or rebuild entire sets in the padded building. For the Corner House supper shared by Frank and Alice at the beginning of the story, Hitchcock had planned ahead, and now restricted the new setup to one table, with the camera focused on the two
principals. Now and then Frank steps busily out of the frame, and Hitchcock cuts to shots of other diners from the silent version. The effects specialists furnished the dining-room clatter.

Their sly dialogue reminds the audience they are watching a film. Hitchcock’s characters
go
to films; they
talk
about films; and in
Rope
, they even advertise another Hitchcock film. It’s another one of the director’s Chinese-box qualities.

In this scene Frank has invited Alice to the premiere of a new crime film (not unlike the one the audience is watching). When Frank mentions Scotland Yard, however, Alice stifles a yawn. “If it weren’t for Edgar Wallace,
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no one would have ever heard of it [the Yard],” she says. Frank insists that the picture should be amusing. “However, they’re bound to get all the details wrong,” Frank chuckles—a gibe at Hitchcock’s own craft! While others were deep-thinking sound, Hitchcock was having fun.

Sound was Hitchcock’s brand new toy. Chortling over his own cleverness, he handed his personal 16 mm camera to Ronald Neame, and guided him through the making of a backstage “home movie” about the filming of
Blackmail.
With his penchant for teasing the boundaries between artifice and reality, Hitchcock positioned Neame behind the curtain during the scene where Alice stabs the artist, urging him to get plenty of footage of the property man lathering blood on the knife.

All England sensed the historic moment. The duke and duchess of York (later queen to George VI, and then Queen Mother) visited the
Blackmail
soundstage in May. The duchess, known to be a motion picture fan, wanted to witness the making of a talkie. “I remember taking her into one of those camera booths,” Hitchcock recalled, “and it was an awful crush, since they were very tiny.” (She squeezed in with him, the cameraman, and the focus boy—“It was almost a matter of committing
lèse-majesté
”) Then the duchess visited the sound booth, where Hitchcock encouraged the royal visitor to do what, traditionally, royalty never did—doff her hat—and try on the earphones. That was just what she did.

After the sound footage was matched up with the silent stuff, the finished product had to be manufactured at low budget and top speed to beat any rivals to claim the title of the first British talkie. Still, some purists, and some eyewitnesses, insist that
Blackmail
really wasn’t the first.

As noted, before Hitchcock, Freddie Young had already shot several “dialogue scenes” in the padded building for a picture called
White Cargo.
In his memoir Young argued that
White Cargo
deserved to boast of being
“the first sound sequence to be filmed for a British feature.” Another English director, Thomas Bentley, had already completed a “talking” two-reeler called
The Man in the Street
, and he sniffed in interviews that
Blackmail
was “only half-sound.” Victor Saville’s
Kitty
was another film trumpeted by some as the first British talkie, and maybe it was—except that only the last reels “talked” (the rest were scored with music), and the sound sequences were added in New York on an experimental stage owned by RCA.
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Other British talkies might have been shot first, but Hitchcock’s exceptional planning translated into speed and efficiency in postproduction. The filming in the padded building was finished by late May, and the talkie
Blackmail
was ready for trade screening on June 21.

And there is something else: those rival first talkies have faded into obscurity, while
Blackmail
remains a milestone—not only a film at the forefront of sound, but a film whose subject and style were ahead of its time in every way. Arguably, it was Hitchcock’s first mastery of suspense.

When the talkie
Blackmail
had its premiere at select theaters in July 1929, the London film critics were unanimous. The
Daily Mail
said the new Hitchcock film was “the best talking film yet—and British,” while
Kine Weekly
described it as “a splendid example of popular all-talkie screen entertainment.” The London reviewer for
Variety
noted that “silent, it would be an unusually good film; as it is, it comes near to being a landmark.”

Yet
Blackmail
also existed as a silent film, and the soundless version was quietly released a short time later, drawing bigger crowds at the hundreds of English theaters not yet wired for talkies. In 1993, when the British Film Institute restored the silent version, commissioning a Jonathan Lloyd score to accompany a world tour, contemporary critics got a chance to see the “other”
Blackmail.
Most agreed that it stood up equally well.

Hitchcock had appeared in
The Lodger
and
Easy Virtue
(strolling past a tennis court in the latter), but
Blackmail
contained his most extended cameo to date. Alice and Frank, in one scene, are riding on the Underground. Among the passengers is the director, intently reading a book. A small boy leans over and jabs Hitchcock’s hat, knocking it down over his eyes. He returns the poke, but cowers as the little nuisance approaches him again. The scene fades. Shot silent, the cameo remained intact and soundless in both versions.

Hitchcock was already a celebrity by the summer of 1929, and he had reason to feel on top of the world. But it was a small world—the world of
British film—and he had constant evidence of its fickleness. Late August brought one grim reminder.

With little warning, B.I.P. announced massive layoffs, firing nearly one hundred people, or roughly 20 percent of its personnel. The studio instituted severe budget restrictions and a general policy of retrenchment in production. The shock waves reverberated throughout the industry, and layoffs and cutbacks spread to other studios.

The mood was bitter at Elstree. Although the books continued to show profits, John Maxwell had tied up too much capital in “the round dozen of finished, dialogue, synchronized and silent pictures, at present in cold storage,” in the words of one trade paper; and given the limited number of English venues ready to show them, B.I.P.’s expensive talkies couldn’t make back their investment without conquering foreign markets. The United States continued its immunity to even the best English films, a phenomenon of which
Blackmail
became a sore example. The first British talkie was rejected outright for distribution in the U. S., according to film historian Paul Rotha, even though it was “infinitely better than any American dialogue picture of the same time.” The reasons given were many and irritating, but the upshot was simple: Americans couldn’t decipher the English accents.

The failure of the Hitchcock talkie in America, and outside of England generally, was counted a “hard blow” to the studio, according to Rotha. “Even the Dominions cold-shouldered”
Blackmail
, wrote the film historian. “Censorship authorities in Australia at first prevented the picture from being shown,” though the ban was later reversed.

The burgeoning crisis gave Maxwell an excuse to get more personally involved in production decisions. He decreed new belt-tightening measures: Pictures would have to be made cheaper and faster, and now more than ever with English audiences uppermost in mind. Foreign stars simply did not justify their investment.
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Costly and adventurous travel would be curtailed in favor of filming on studio stages, which were already figured into the overhead.