Alfred Hitchcock (26 page)

Yet there was a method to Hitchcock’s madness, Landstone realized. The director transparently disliked Alfred Abel, a stuffy man who didn’t share his sense of humor. Abel refused, for example, to wear the same tweeds-and-raincoat costume as the English star, Herbert Marshall, because it didn’t suit his idea of formality. And he refused to follow Hitchcock’s directions for the scene where a landlady’s children climb over Sir John, who is trying to relax in bed while sipping his morning cup of tea. It is a memorable interlude in
Murder!
(experimenting with overlapping sound, Hitchcock has a baby bawling throughout), but it had to be restaged for Abel and
Sir John greift ein!
“Things that were funny to the Anglo-Saxon mind were not at all funny to Germans,” Hitchcock said later.

Abel finally stepped into the crosshairs when he objected to Marshall’s special lounge chair. No such privilege had been accorded the German lead. “Hitchcock didn’t trouble to explain,” wrote Landstone, “that Marshall was a 1914–18 war casualty and had a wooden leg, but simply said that provision would be made for the German to rest between the shots. He gave his orders to Haro-old, and after lunch a magnificent-looking armchair, far more luxurious than Marshall’s, appeared at the side of the set. On it was Abel’s name, and the latter thanked Hitchcock profusely. Noticing, however, the director’s puckish grin, the German went over to the chair and touched it gingerly with his finger, whereupon the whole contraption collapsed to the ground. Hitchcock’s roar of laughter filled the studio.”

The double filming dragged on well into May; then the double editing took the bulk of the summer. Hitchcock admitted later that he overreached on this project. “Although I spoke German, I didn’t know cadences of speech,” he explained, “and I was lost on the set. The actors sounded colloquial to me, but I really couldn’t understand what they were saying.” Not only was he experimenting with bilingual filmmaking, he had encouraged
a rare degree of improvisation from the actors. “I would explain the meaning of the scene to the actors and suggest that they make up their own dialogue,” he recalled. “The result wasn’t good; there was too much faltering.”

In the end the film suffered a mixed fate. The colloquial title
Sir John greift ein!
did not translate well in Germany, and even the name of the accused murderess had to be changed there from Diana to Mary—which became the German title. The secret of Fane’s motive was also too English, so in the bilingual, Fane murders not because of his “half-caste” blood, but to conceal the fact that he’s a prisoner on the run. The tampering was so drastic that the bilingual was barely recognizable as a Hitchcock film, and
Mary
achieved only a limited release in Germany.

Murder!
did better when it was shown in London in the fall of 1930 (though it was “too sophisticated for the provinces,” Hitchcock told Truffaut). The new Hitchcock film was hailed by the London critics as a sharp and entertaining advance in talkies. The director’s camera, rooted to one spot for most of
Blackmail
, had been freed up, and it was now darting and whirling like a dervish. The aural experimentation, too, was incessant: actors overlapped their lines; there were interior monologues and constant background noise; music blared throughout.

These days
Murder!
has an unfairly slight reputation as just “another photographed stage play.”
^*
It is dated and stagy in parts, and at times Hitchcock’s experimentation sticks out—as when the awed Markhams take a surrealistically spongy walk on Sir John’s carpet. But it is also a film of style and intelligence, marked by two ideas central to the Hitchcock oeuvre. The first is that the machinery of justice cannot always be trusted. Like Sir John, his alter ego—the last holdout on the jury—Hitchcock himself couldn’t countenance the idea that such a beautiful woman could be guilty of murder.

The second conceit is underlined by the coda the director added to the Clemence Dane-Helen Simpson story. Hitchcock’s glorious climaxes would often be followed by just such “a tranquil coda to an exciting evening,” as Doris Day’s song is termed at the end of the second
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Sir John and Diana are huddled in soothing conversation. The camera pulls back to reveal a proscenium arch, and an audience watching the last act of a play. As the actors utter their final lines, the performance—and the film—conclude together.

Another Chinese box, another paean to show business, another commentary on voyeurism—a suite of treasured Hitchcock ideas. He said it over and over again in his career, in interviews and in films: The world of
pretend was separate from the real world. Theater and film offered an escape from reality—and sometimes, in the best plays and pictures, an insightful critique of that reality.

After a brief August vacation Hitchcock went back to work, this time to prepare a film of John Galsworthy’s
The Skin Game.
The studio preferred plays to Hitchcock originals, but Hitchcock genuinely admired Galsworthy, whose novels he read and plays he never missed. He often said that Galsworthy ranked with Buchan as an influence on him.
Escape
, Galsworthy’s 1926 drama about an escaped convict who protests his innocence, was a virtual template for Hitchcock’s wrong-man films, and he had seen the original production of
The Skin Game
in 1920, then again in revival. He also saw
Hard tegen hard
, a silent Anglo-Dutch version made in Holland in 1920.

Like Sean O’Casey, Galsworthy was interested in film primarily for the added revenue—and like O’Casey, he didn’t think much of the “faking power” of the medium. Even at his most accommodating, Galsworthy preferred silent film, sniffing at talkies as “silent film spoiled.”

The director and playwright endeavored to forge common ground, meeting in September 1930 at Grove Lodge at Hampstead, and later at the playwright’s baronial manor in Sussex in Bury House. Acting as their intermediary was Leon M. Lion, one of the last of the actor-managers who lived and breathed the theater. Galsworthy liked and respected Lion, who had acted in or produced several of his plays; Hitchcock considered him a nuisance.

One memorable visit to Bury House occasioned “the most cultured dinner table I ever attended,” Hitchcock would recall. The dinner was presided over by Galsworthy in the role of chivalrous feudal lord, mandating every new subject of conversation. “Let us discuss words,” the dramatist announced on this occasion. “Words in relation to their meaning and in relation to their sounds.”

“One guest suggested the word ‘fragile’ as descriptive,” Hitchcock remembered. “Another advanced the opinion that the French ‘fragile’ was even more delicate in its sound. A third stressed the claims of ‘crepuscular’ as being ‘filled with the nuance of the twilight.’ I sat amazed at the feeling the guests had for the sound-sense of the words.”

Galsworthy, like O’Casey, had a B.I.P. agreement that outlawed, in his words, “dialogue except what is written and passed by me, and no tampering with the play’s integrity.” Hitchcock would be hemmed in on
The Skin Game
more than on
Juno and the Paycock.
Though he worked to open it up visually, he’d adhere very closely to the play—shooting most of the scenes with multiple cameras for a fluid sound track (they still “couldn’t cut sound in those days”).

Galsworthy felt strongly about casting, and he presented Hitchcock with a list of preferred actors, though his contract gave him no say in this matter. Yet in the end, the leads must have pleased the playwright. Edmund Gwenn had been the original Mr. Hornblower, the nouveau riche industrialist whose hard-driving tactics ignite a feud over a parcel of land between two families, one aristocratic and the other parvenu. Gwenn also played Hornblower in the silent film; now he would reprise his famous role for Hitchcock. And Helen Haye, another original cast member who had returned for the Anglo-Dutch silent, was back as the snobby Mrs. Hillcrist.

The rest of the ensemble was a mix of Hitchcock semiregulars and actors under studio contract. John Longden would play Hornblower’s son Charles, with Phyllis Konstam as his wife, Chloe, whose tawdry past is exploited as a bargaining chip by the upper-crust Hillcrists. Edward Chapman was cast as Dawker, the family adviser of the Hillcrists. C. V. France was Mr. Hillcrist, while Jill Esmond (then wife of Laurence Olivier) played Jill, the sympathetic Hillcrist daughter. Frank Lawton was Rolf Hornblower, whose crush on Jill is overshadowed by the rivalry between the two families.

The filming took place in November and December 1930, largely on B.I.P. soundstages, and the dialogue-heavy script was more an actor’s showcase than a director’s. Still, Hitchcock was better with actors than he’s been given credit for. He later admitted that it took him awhile to develop a conscious philosophy about actors, which he explained for a 1940s publicity article called “Actors Aren’t Really Cattle.”
^*

Where once he might have been snooty about actors, he wrote, “more and more, I have come to value responsiveness from an actor, hunt for it, cast with it in mind, nurture it.

“Silliest of all Hollywood arguments,” Hitchcock wrote, “is between the school that claims to believe the actor is completely a puppet, putting into a role only the director’s ‘genius’ (I am, God forgive me, charged with belonging to that school) and the equally asinine school of ‘natural acting’ in which the player is supposed to wander through the scenes at will, a self-propelling, floating, freewheeling, embodied inspiration.”

He insisted that all the weeks he spent “thinking and sketching, preparing” a film were in part an attempt to “create an effective cinematic framework, and to mask within that framework every contrived aid—design, lighting, timing, camera angles, costume, even hairdo—that will aid the performer to whom he’s given a hellishly difficult assignment.”

He admitted certain “garlic hates” among the profession:

“Actresses who, at shooting time, think of clothes, hairdos, camera angles. Experts are thinking of those for her.

“Actors, either sex, who apparently listen courteously and attentively to direction, and then do the scene their way.

“Actresses who let their emotions run away with them in front of the camera until their voices grow shrill, their work caricaturish.

“All ‘temperament’ not before the camera.

“Actors, either sex, who exercise their right to stop at six o-clock, regardless of whether a mood scene, after all day fumbling, is finally going right.”

He listed an arsenal of options and strategies for dealing with actors. Any great director would cite “perfect casting” as the best line of defense, he confessed. Shouting “you old bitch” at actresses—“especially pretty young ones”—had its time and place. (This, Hitchcock admitted, was of less value once the actresses found out the insults came from a “genial fraud.”) When nothing worked, why, of course, one simply hated the actor.

But Hitchcock loved Edmund Gwenn, and cast him again and again in his films. Later known as a specialist in elderly eccentrics, Gwenn, in
The Skin Game
, gives a ferocious, arresting performance as the socially wronged man. And the ensemble supporting him is equally superb.

The Skin Game
surprises on several levels; today it seems more multi-faceted and gripping, more coherent, and ultimately a more personal Hitchcock film
than Juno and the Paycock.
Hitchcock may have felt more comfortable addressing English class hypocrisies than Sean O’Casey’s Irish troubles. By the end of the film, when the despondent Chloe kills herself and Hillcrist shames his wife with the words “When we began this fight, we had clean hands—are they clean now? What’s gentility worth, if it can’t stand fire?”—Galsworthy’s famous curtain closer has become the director’s own cri de coeur.

Even in the confines of rigid adaptation, the director found opportunities for visual excitement. The country auction, where surrogates for both parties bid on the desired land parcel, is there in the original play; but the sequence in the film opens with a Hitchcockian joke: having the property praised in mumbling tones by an auctioneer so Milquetoast that nobody can quite decipher his words. Then, when the bidding begins, the camera work echoes the frantic bidding by darting, panning, and cutting among the crowd. The result isn’t perfect, but Hitchcock had a penchant for auction scenes, and would refine the ideas in
The 39 Steps, Saboteur
, and
North by Northwest.

Even before finishing
The Skin Game
in January 1931, though, the director
was yearning to get away from the straitjacket of plays. He wanted his next film to be more ambitious, a Hitchcock original; he wanted to get out of the studio and take his camera to far locations.

In the first instance, getting out of the studio meant spending more time at home, where he could avoid Walter Mycroft and John Maxwell. He still put in regular studio hours, but stole time at home—where work could be freely interrupted by naps, parties, and outings. Home is where the Hitchcock originals were nourished, and his next film,
Rich and Strange
, would be his first wholly original project since
Champagne.

Also spending a lot of time at Cromwell Road in late 1930 and early 1931 was the Australian-born novelist and travel writer Dale Collins. Slowly, this new edition of the three Hitchcocks fashioned what was intended as a picaresque tale of romance and mishap on the high seas.

Rich and Strange
was officially “based on a theme” by Collins, whose books about long sea voyages invariably entailed complacent travelers encountering apocalyptic storms, shipwrecks, or pirates. Collins’s popular novel
Ordeal
had been dramatized for stage and screen, and
The Haven
also had been filmed. Collins dabbled in film writing between voyages and books, and while living in London he had become friends with the Hitchcocks (he was an especially good-natured victim of the director’s practical jokes).

As an avid voyager himself—imaginary and otherwise—Hitchcock was enthusiastic about Collins’s story, involving young married Londoners who inherit a pile of money and follow their wanderlust to distant ports of call, experiencing dramatic reversals of fortune along the way.
Rich and Strange
was likely developed first as a lengthy treatment by Collins before he turned it into a 1930 novel, whose publication coincided with the film’s release. After the treatment, the humorist, songwriter, and handyman writer Val Valentine took Collins’s place, working with the Hitchcocks to put the story into script form.