Alfred Hitchcock (37 page)

The point of the film, after all, is not the missing clue, or the mystery detection, but the irresistible attraction between the wronged man and the policeman’s daughter. (Only the barest hint of any romantic chemistry exists between the two characters in the book.) And, as usual, the very best scenes—the blindman’s buff at a child’s birthday party (darkly reprised in
The Birds
) and the stunningly choreographed hotel ballroom crescendo that reveals the killer’s identity—have no counterpart in Tey’s book. In the end, the novel was altered so drastically that the studio looked kindly upon Hitchcock’s new title:
Young and Innocent.

Hitchcock’s returning cameraman was Bernard Knowles, and his editor again was Charles Frend. Ufa alumnus Alfred Junge, busy elsewhere since
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, would return to oversee the spectacular sets (all the more spectacular for being manufactured on a strict budget): one of Junge’s triumphs is the collapsible mine shaft, down which plunges the escaping couple’s car, along with their sole witness.

In keeping with Black’s policy, the stars were English. Although the story was episodic and the settings were multiple, the leading man and lady—the writer on the lam and the tagalong who falls in love with him—would appear, singly or together, in virtually every scene.

For the wronged man, the director cast Derrick de Marney, conventionally handsome and lightweight in the emerging Hitchcock tradition, who had been onstage since a teenager and in pictures since 1928. For the constable’s daughter Hitchcock could have had anyone in England, but he returned to sweet Nova Pilbeam, now eighteen and blossoming.

After this production, Hitchcock would have only one picture remaining on his Gaumont contract, and that was never far from his mind during the filming of
Young and Innocent.

It hasn’t generally been appreciated what obstacles he endured in his career. His first film as director was halted for lack of money. He was one of a handful who survived the massive layoffs at Islington in 1923.
The Lodger
was all but stolen away from him in postproduction. At B.I.P. he went within weeks from acclaim for making the first British talkie to dodging another round of mass firings. Within months of
Blackmail
, he was making virtual “quota quickies.” At the peak of his fame in the early 1930s, he was discharged in England and cold-shouldered in Hollywood, forced into freelancing on fly-by-night pictures. Now, in the summer of 1937, his sixth or seventh professional crisis was bearing down on him.

One could see it in his weight, which had swollen grotesquely. One could see it in the first published accounts of the director nodding off to sleep on the set. Derrick de Marney had no compunction about telling the press that Hitchcock stole catnaps between takes, and rushed him and his
costar at least once through a scene at “express train tempo.” When the take was over, however, Hitchcock did open his eyes “with difficulty,” according to de Marney, in order to consult his watch. “Too slow,” the director murmured; “I had that scene marked for thirty seconds and it took you fifty seconds. We’ll have to retake.”

One could see it, too, in the upsurge of pranks and defensive sarcasm that marked Hitchcock’s behavior during these months. De Marney complained to the press that the director subjected his actors to “merciless ribbing.” Not all the cast: one he exempted was Nova Pilbeam, who was indeed a young and innocent actress—playing a constable’s rebellious daughter (a little like Hitchcock’s mother) who happens to be a whiz with automobiles (a little like Hitchcock’s wife). With Pilbeam, Hitchcock seemed remarkably “deferential,” de Marney said a little resentfully, “both on and off the lot.”

Better than deferential: years later, Pilbeam still recalled
Young and Innocent
as “quite the sunniest film I was involved with.” Yes, she conceded, “one was rather moved around and manipulated, but, having said that, I liked him [Hitchcock] very much.”

Hitchcock went out of his way to spoil his young star: Her character had a pet dog in the story, she recalled, and both she and the director doted on the animal. When the dog finished its scenes, a handler stood by to take it away. “We were both so upset,” Pilbeam said, “that Hitch decided to write him another sequence, so we kept him for another five or six days.”

Hitchcock could be tender—or he could be merciless, if the scene he was shooting brought that out in him. Pilbeam recalled that when the car driven by Robert (de Marney) crashes through the floor of an abandoned mine, Robert and Old Will the Hobo (Edward Rigby) manage to leap to safety, but Erica (Pilbeam) just barely hangs on between the collapsing vehicle and the edge of the pit. Crawling toward her, Robert reaches out and grabs her hand. “I was terrified!” recalled Pilbeam. “But Hitch had this quirky sense of humor and made that scene go on and on, so that I thought my arm would come out of its socket.”
^*

The mine-shaft sequence is thrilling, but it’s topped by the film’s final, brilliant crescendo, which takes place at a thronged
thé dansant
in the ballroom of a seaside hotel. In this sequence, Erica and Old Will have staked out the ballroom, searching for the elusive killer. They only have one clue: the man’s eyes twitch uncontrollably—a detail that isn’t in the book, of course; it’s a classic Hitchcock touch.

They sit at a table and survey the crowd. Couples are dancing to a band
playing a song first heard over the opening credits. The musical refrain is insistent: “He’s right here, it’s the Drummer Man …” Hitchcock made the song as specific to the scene as the camera work. The music and pointed lyrics were assigned to three Americans in England: Sammy Lerner, Al Goodhart, and Al Hoffman.
^*

The tour de force shot Hitchcock planned required a special camera boom and lens, and then two days to block and shoot the elaborately rehearsed action. The camera starts high on a crane above a chandelier at the far end of the dance floor, then lowers itself onto the floor and maneuvers past whirling dancers to gradually approach the bandstand, where the musicians are finally seen—performing in blackface. The camera creeps closer to the faces, finally halting only a few inches from the drummer’s eyes. An extreme close-up reveals the “drummer man”—the killer—his white eyes madly darting and twitching.

“At that moment,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut thirty years later, “I cut right back to the old man and the girl, still sitting at the other end of the room. Now, the audience has the information and the question is: How are this girl and this old boy going to spot the man? A policeman outside sees the girl, who is the daughter of his chief. He goes to the phone. Meanwhile, the band has stopped for a break, and the drummer, having a smoke outside in the alley, sees a group of police hurrying toward the rear entrance of the hotel. Since he’s guilty, he quickly ducks back inside to the bandstand, where the music resumes.

“Now the jittery drummer sees the policeman talking to the tramp and the girl at the other end of the ballroom. He thinks they’re looking for him, and his nervousness is reflected in the drumbeat, which is out of tune with the rest of the band. The rhythm gets worse and worse. Meanwhile, the tramp, the girl, and the police are preparing to leave through an exit near the bandstand. In fact, the drummer is out of danger, but he doesn’t know it. All he can see are those uniforms moving in his direction, and his twitching eyes indicate that he’s in a panic. Finally, his beat is so far out of rhythm that the band stops playing and the dancers stop their dancing. And just as the little group is making its way out the door, he falls with a loud crash into his drum.

“They stop to find out the reason for the commotion, and the girl and the tramp move over to the unconscious man. At the beginning of the story we had established that the heroine is a Girl Scout and an expert on first aid. In fact, she and the hero first got together when he fainted in the police station and she took care of him. So now she volunteers to help the
unconscious drummer, and as she leans over him, she notices the twitching eyes. Very quietly she says, ‘Will someone please get me a wet cloth to wipe his face off,’ at the same time beckoning the tramp to come over. A waiter hands her the towel—she wipes the man’s face of its black makeup and looks up at the tramp, who nods and says, ‘Yes, that’s the man.’”

This justly celebrated sequence is followed by a quick, tenderhearted coda. The vindicated Erica proudly drags Robert over to reintroduce him to her father, the chief constable, who has chased him futilely throughout the film. As the policeman and the wronged man awkwardly shake hands, the camera inches back to frame the trio standing together. Erica beams as her gaze shifts ambiguously from her father to her new beau.

Pilbeam was never pluckier. No Hitchcock heroine was ever treated as gallantly. De Marney, sometimes as off balance on the screen as he must have felt on the set, was nonetheless winning. The cops are Keystone, the tone almost that of a screwball comedy. Such pleasures abound in
Young and Innocent
, a clear, confident gem of Hitchcockery, yet one that was created under duress by a director who was gazing upon an uncertain future.

Michael Balcon was snapped up by MGM in mid-1937 to head its new studio in London, an operation largely intended to fulfill the English “quota laws” that forced U.S. companies to invest in English film production. Balcon immediately tried to recruit Hitchcock to MGM-British, offering the seeming security of a two-year, multipicture contract. The majority of the films would have to be shot in England, but the offer included the possibility of loan-outs to MGM proper in Hollywood. A tempting offer it was, and given Balcon’s long, fruitful association with Hitchcock, MGM-British was optimistic about signing the director.

But the temptation of America had become irresistible. And after the Christmas 1936 massacre, and a fresh rash of bankruptcies that swept the film industry, Hitchcock was resolved to leave England.

Hitchcock often said that London’s gloomy weather was his signal motivation. “The sky was always gray, the rain was gray, the mud was gray, and I was gray,” he told matte artist Albert Whitlock. (Even the kindly old diplomat visiting London in
Foreign Correspondent
complains about the fog and rain.)

In February 1937, Hitchcock penned an article for the
New York Times
complaining that the “greatest difficulty we have in making films in England is to combat the climate.” He described his discouragement one
night as he waited for the rain to stop and the sky to clear, in order to shoot an outdoor scene for
Sabotage.
“The cameras are covered up, the microphone is shrouded,” the director wrote. “The crowds stand huddled against the shops. I crouch, muffled up and chilled to the marrow, in a temporary shelter; my stars, Sylvia Sidney and John Loder, wait desolate and frozen in a doorway. And why? Because it is raining as it has never rained before, rain which drips off my hat and down my collar and which has held us up till tempers are frayed for three nights running.”

The climate fueled his discontent, but the perpetual woes of the English film industry were just as important an impetus behind increasingly public hints that he wanted a U.S. contract. In America, after ten years as a relative unknown, his Gaumont films had finally conquered the critics and compelled the attention of Hollywood producers—even though his films still boasted only modest revenue, their distribution limited to select theaters in big cities.