Alfred Hitchcock (29 page)

Balcon was visiting the set of
Waltzes from Vienna
, ostensibly to say hello to Glen MacWilliams, the frequent cameraman of Jessie Matthews vehicles, when MacWilliams reminded him who was directing and brought the two men together. Hitchcock shook Balcon’s hand uncomfortably, but as the two made small talk they gradually warmed up to each other. Balcon asked his old friend what he had next on his lineup. “Nothing yet,” replied Hitchcock mildly.

Hitchcock told Balcon about a script he had begun to develop while still at B.I.P., in collaboration with
Blackmail
playwright Charles Bennett. The script was based on the Bulldog Drummond stories by Herman Cyril McNeile (a.k.a. “Sapper”). B.I.P. owned the rights to the novel, its many sequels, and all of Sapper’s characters. Their initial treatment had Drummond, a debonair ex-war hero turned sleuth, stumbling onto an international spy ring while vacationing in Switzerland. The spies, in order to enforce Drummond’s silence, kidnap his baby. Hence their working title: “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby.”

Their scenario had rung budget alarms with John Maxwell, who had killed the project. Balcon was intrigued. Could Hitchcock retrieve the rights? The director thought so, and promptly bought back “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby” for £250—then resold it to Balcon at twice that sum. “I was so ashamed of the one hundred per cent profit,” Hitchcock admitted later, “that I had the sculptor Jacob Epstein do a bust of Balcon with the money.”
^*

Balcon had given him his first directing job; now he rescued him from embarrassing freelancing. Hitchcock was eternally grateful. “It’s to the credit of Michael Balcon that he originally started me as a director,” he told François Truffaut, “and later gave me a second chance.”

Buoyed with optimism, the director signed a multipicture contract and took up new offices at Lime Grove. For Gaumont, from 1933 to 1938, he would have freer rein than ever before. Balcon still had approval over stories, casting, and budgets, yet now their relationship was reshaped by Hitchcock’s reputation as England’s most important director. Balcon still made the vital business decisions, but creatively he left Hitchcock alone.

Enter Charles Bennett, the latest, some might say the greatest, of the third Hitchcocks. The director may have been the master of suspense, Bennett liked to boast, but suspense was his middle name.

Born in Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex in the same month and year as Hitchcock, Bennett was the son of actress Lillian Langrishe Bennett. Once an actor himself—he was charming and handsome in the leading-man mold—Bennett turned playwright in 1927.
The Return
was his first produced play,
Blackmail
his second.

Bennett had had little to do with Hitchcock’s film of
Blackmail.
But the two did meet during the production, and they struck up a friendship. Rakish, jovial, and sharp-witted, Bennett was boon company: a talker and a drinker. In the early 1930s, when the West End playhouses began to “tumble like ninepins,” in Bennett’s words, he joined the enemy: motion pictures.

Under contract at B.I.P. at the same time as Hitchcock, Bennett mainly wrote low-budget thrillers, often for director George King. His forte, like Michael Morton and Eliot Stannard before him, was organizing the cause and effect of suspense, the undergirding and sequencing of the drama. Once Hitchcock committed himself to a film project, this was the step of the process he plunged into first: laying out the continuity, usually in one
of the prose treatments that he found so useful. Adding context, refining the characters, and creating a proper script came later.

Hitchcock often said that playwrights or novelists, with their structural expertise, delivered the best first strike on film scripts—especially when it came to Hitchcock originals. Professional scenarists familiar with screen conventions were more useful, he felt,
after
the treatment or first draft. Hitchcock had a derisive, if affectionate, term for the professionals: “stooge writers.” Bennett was both: a produced playwright but, by 1933, also a “stooge” seasoned in film. Hitchcock would come to call him “the world’s finest stooge.”

Their relationship would be dictated, nevertheless, by Hitchcock’s formidable reputation, and by a subtle change in his attitude toward scriptwriting, which first manifested itself at Gaumont. Until now the director had shared writing credit for most of his films, but in the future Hitchcock would write only in a pinch, only crucial scenes, and he would never again take a script credit. Directing, he had grown to believe, took precedence over the writing. While he was forced to negotiate with producers throughout most of his career, he would always insist on dominating the writers he worked with.

“Without in any way detracting from the importance of the contribution made by the writer of either basic story material or screenplay,” Hitchcock explained in an unusual deposition for the Directors Guild of America in 1967, offered to aid in a battle with the Writers Guild over possessory credits, “the writing is but a
single element
in the production of a film. It is the director who bears the primary responsibility to produce the integrated film and to edit it in such a manner that the various elements are perfectly combined.

“This has sometimes been referred to as ‘creative magic,’ but in every day terms it is not magic but tremendously hard work and effort on the part of the director which creates the film.”

Just as Jack the Ripper inspired the many Hitchcock films featuring psychotic murderers, World War I—and its historical doppelgänger, World War II—loomed over his political films.

In January of the same year that Hitchcock joined Gaumont, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany; a month later the Reichstag burned down mysteriously, paving the way for the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers. The world seemed to be igniting with hate and violence. The feeling extended even to America, where, the same month as the Reichstag fire, a crazed man tried to assassinate President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a speech in Miami, missing his target but killing the mayor of Chicago.

The Man Who Knew Too Much
was written in the shadow of these events.

After Hitchcock moved to Lime Grove, he and Charles Bennett began revising “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby,” their first order of business being to remove Bulldog Drummond (for Sapper’s fictional hero still belonged to B.I.P.)
and
the baby.
^*

Hitchcock didn’t like to drive, so he hitched a ride to the studio with Bennett most mornings. They always began with small talk, Bennett recalled; sometimes they were joined by the studio barber, who gave Hitchcock a shave and cut his increasingly sparse hair—“so there really wasn’t much that went on before lunch at all,” in Bennett’s words. At 12:30
P.M.
, the two would adjourn to the Mayflower Hotel for lunch, after which they’d return to the studio, where Hitchcock usually stole a nap, according to Bennett. When the director woke up they’d talk some more; around five, they’d repair to Cromwell Road.

Bennett liked to make it sound as though it were all idle conversation, with the real writing left up to him. But for Hitchcock collaboration was always a seduction, its goal a productive marriage. Hitchcock set the tone with idle talk, which lowered his writers’ defenses. He lured them with digressions, gossip, tasteless jokes. He would offer up preposterous ideas for Bennett to dismiss, and resist perfectly sensible ideas himself. He studied each new idea endlessly, and from all sides, as though it were a polyhedron. He insisted that his writers “fill in the tapestry.”

Bennett boiled with ideas. And he fought for them, too, which the young, feisty Hitchcock liked—up to a point. “Hitch was, always, so exasperated [by Bennett] that he was stimulated to action—or counteraction as the case might be,” recalled story editor Angus MacPhail. “Bang him, bash him, vilify him, and up he [Bennett] comes smiling.”

Everybody at the studio seemed to boil with ideas. Hitchcock thrived on interaction with writers—the more, the merrier. He told and retold the stories of his films to anyone who would listen, filing away their reactions for future reference. Now at Lime Grove he was reunited with his old friends Ivor Montagu and Angus MacPhail; their involvement would become integral to the style and quality of the Hitchcock films over the next several years.

At B.I.P. he had sorely missed the sophistication and constructive criticism of Montagu, who had spent time in Hollywood after leaving Gainsborough, working at Paramount with the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Their projects never quite jelled, however, and Montagu had
returned to England, disgusted with the film business and intent on staying out of it. Balcon coaxed him over to Gaumont as Hitchcock’s supervisory producer.

MacPhail was still the head of Michael Balcon’s story department, and Hitchcock trusted his expertise. Although MacPhail’s “filmic knowledge was encyclopedic and his memory so good that he could find a parallel in almost any suggested story situation,” according to writer T. E. B. Clarke, “this made him, as a writer, rather too prone to rely on film clichés” to be a good screenwriter; “but it equipped him to be a marvelous scenario editor.” Personally, Hitchcock and MacPhail were even more the kindred spirits; MacPhail, too, was a lover of lowbrow music hall and high-minded theater, and an incorrigible, egregious punster. He was also among the few to humble the great Hitchcock, reminding him once a year in his Christmas card of the inane title cards of
Downhill.

Although the heavy lifting was done by Hitchcock and Bennett at the studio, some of the best ideas for
The Man Who Knew Too Much
surfaced at night at Cromwell Road, where the director presided over an informal film society of friends and associates. Regularly taking part in these evening sessions, besides Bennett, Montagu, and MacPhail, was their hostess, Mrs. Hitchcock. Others stopped by. Dinner was served; drinks flowed.

The nights at Cromwell Road were deliberately playful, “a feast of fancy and dialectic,” in Montagu’s words, “a mixture of composing crosswords and solving them.” The underlying goal might be serious, but the dedicated clowning oiled the gears of creativity. Hitchcock told lewd anecdotes, and played his favorite musical recordings (the director was in a Hungarian phase in the early 1930s, Bennett recalled, and forced everyone to listen to “Play, Gypsy, Play” ad infinitum).
^*
People sang along with the recordings, or got up and danced.

The group dynamic made for scripts that were more decidedly topical, more freewheeling and densely packed with allusion, than the films Hitchcock had made at Islington or B.I.P. “The unfolding story was elaborated with suggestions from all of us,” Montagu remembered. “Everything was always welcome, if not always agreed. Like anyone else, Hitch would sometimes reject an idea when it was put forward, sleep on it, and return with it next morning as his own; which by then it undoubtedly was, since it could only be incorporated when adjusted in his own head to make it fit.”

If there was an overriding philosophy, it was symbolized by a little book called
Plotto
that Hitchcock flourished—a book boasting a compendium
of master plots with interchangeable conflicts and situations. Never mind that sometimes the inserts were implausible. “I’m not concerned with plausibility,” Hitchcock liked to boast. “That’s the easiest part, so why bother?” Or, as he put it on another occasion, “Must a picture be logical, when life is not?”

The daily newspapers were a constant source of inspiration. Although Hitchcock shied away from taking political stands himself, his circle was thoroughly socialist and antifascist, even including Communists like Montagu. (Montagu and Sidney Bernstein were among the earliest organizers of the British Committee for Victims of German Fascism.) The influence of this group affected the tough-edged world view of his Gaumont films.