Alfred Hitchcock (51 page)

Except for the not unimportant fact that he didn’t want to miss a payday between
Foreign Correspondent
and his next assignment, in truth Hitchcock wasn’t very excited about any of the “go” projects the studios had at hand. He cared more about the
second
film in any contract—the kind of project he could develop himself—and about whatever subsidiary clauses might boost his income.

Indeed, so many scripts and offers piled up, and so confusing were the constantly shifting array of prospects, that just before he left for England in early June, the Selznick Agency asked the director to rank the studios and projects that appealed to him most. Hitchcock listed
Greenmantle
first, then
A Woman’s Face
—undoubtedly because he nursed hopes of directing both for MGM, the Cartier of Hollywood studios. Third was
Before the Fact
, followed by
The Constant Nymph
or—his own surprising last-minute addition—a remake of
The Lodger.
Then, in descending order of interest:
Jupiter Laughs
by Scottish author A. J. Cronin, a play set in a sanatorium;
And Now Goodbye; Rogue Male
, which Hitchcock admitted he hadn’t yet read in book or script form
^*
; and lastly, “Royal Mail.”

Note that “Mr. and Mrs.,” pushed hardest by RKO, Carole Lombard, and both Selznicks, didn’t even make the list. Note also that Hitchcock’s idea to remake his silent-era hit
The Lodger
came in at number four. He had never really liked the original, Hitchcock told American producers. Maurice Elvey had made a sound version in 1932, also starring Ivor Novello, but Hitchcock would give Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’s story a fresh cachet by shooting it in color: the American
Lodger
would be the first Hitchcock film in color. He announced his intention to coproduce the remake—paying for half the rights, sharing half the risk and profits.

Lately he had been thinking quite a bit about color—reaching typically iconoclastic conclusions. Color would always be subtle in a Hitchcock film, as deliberately coded as everything else. “Color should be no different from the voice which starts muted and finally arrives at a scream,” he
declaimed in one interview. “Color should start with the nearest equivalent to black and white,” he said on another occasion. Or, as he put it another time, “Color for reason, not just color to knock people’s eyes out. Make color an actor, a defined part of the whole. Make it work as an actor instead of scenery.”

He foresaw “natural color used naturally,” not “all those outdoor things with long ranges of smoky blue mountains and violent ground hues and a staring blue sky, they’re wrong. They are postcard in effect.” A color version of
The Lodger
, he said, would be more painterly than postcard; Hitchcock vowed, for example, to definitively capture the dense yellow fog that blanketed London. “I want to show how street lamps seem to drop deeper yellow tears into that swirling mess of vaporous sulfur,” he rhapsodized.

He described how he might photograph “a London family in a dismal basement dining room, all browns and grays and blacks when suddenly the plaster in the ceiling gets first damp, then pink, then red, and a drop of red falls down and splashes onto a white tablecloth and spreads out as another drop joins it. When we rush upstairs, expecting the worst, we find a man has upset a bottle of red ink and it is dripping through his floor and the ceiling below. I can even see a closeup of two murderous eyes, the white of the eyeballs stained by crimson veins, inflamed eyes. Not makeup, actually inflamed eyes.”

Hitchcock first tried this mesmerizing pitch on Walter Wanger, who was intrigued by the notion of remaking
The Lodger.
But when David Selznick heard about it, he decided that if Hitchcock was going to remake one of his silent hits, it ought to be a Selznick International production. Inquiring about the rights, DOS learned from his London representatives that Mrs. Belloc Lowndes was reluctant to sell them to any producer connected with Hitchcock, for she had detested the silent film version. The price she was asking was high: twenty thousand dollars. Hitchcock himself contacted Mrs. Lowndes to iron out their differences, explaining that the idiocies of the 1926 film weren’t his fault. But her price didn’t budge.

Half nobly, half opportunistically, Myron Selznick stepped forward, volunteering to pay half of the twenty thousand dollars and coproduce the film with Hitchcock. Myron had produced films in the 1920s, and now he was itching to best his brother in that arena, too.

One attraction of remaking
The Lodger
was the prospect that Hitchcock might be able to draw on his frozen English funds to pay his ten thousand dollars. But the director’s liquid assets didn’t run to ten thousand dollars, not even after he tossed in the value of his life insurance policy. Ultimately Myron had to
loan
Hitchcock his half of the rights fee, while Edmund Gwenn exchanged English currency for U.S. dollars to lessen the surcharges.

The Lodger
waxed, even as
Greenmantle
waned. Walter Wanger finally dropped out of the running, exhausted by all the hemming and hawing. DOS simply didn’t want to encourage a relationship with a producer who guaranteed bonuses, profit participation, and creative free rein. Shortly thereafter Wanger struck a bargain with Fritz Lang, setting up the type of close partnership with an illustrious director that he had originally sought with Hitchcock.

DOS prided himself on knowing what was best for Hitchcock; he vetoed some offers out of hand. MGM, Warner’s, Twentieth Century–Fox, Universal, and Columbia—each discouraged for different reasons—were forced to push ahead with their immediate projects, sans Hitchcock.

That left only RKO. RKO had the inside track with both Selznicks, and even Hitchcock wanted to please Carole Lombard. In mid-June, O’Shea approved a contract with the studio that gave Hitchcock one hundred thousand dollars per film for two sixteen-week productions. The first four-month period took into account “Mr. and Mrs.,” but also the extra weeks the director thought he would need to develop a proper scenario for the second Hitchcock-RKO production—which was specified in the contract as Francis Iles’s
Before the Fact.

As an incentive for Hitchcock to agree to the loan-out, O’Shea granted Hitchcock a $250 per week raise, bringing his salary to $110,000 a year. He was promised a bonus of $15,000 if he finished the two RKO films within one year’s time. (Selznick International would meanwhile earn a 100 percent-plus profit on Hitchcock’s RKO salary.)

While traveling to England, Hitchcock could begin discussing the adaptation of
Before the Fact
with Joan Harrison. But there was something else on his agenda, another project left over from the list the director had drawn up in May:
The Lodger.
Hitchcock carried with him the English currency he had managed to scrape together, intending to option the remake rights from Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. And that is what he did.

England in June 1940 was anxiously awaiting the feared Luftwaffe, which was busy installing itself on airfields within easy striking distance of London. Mothers and children were being evacuated from the cities as the men rehearsed for the Battle of Britain with blackouts and air raid sirens. Rationing was introduced. And it was in June that Winston Churchill made his dramatic plea for American aid; as film historian Mark Glancy notes in
When Hollywood Loved Britain
, the coda of
Foreign Correspondent
is “a subtle, filmic representation” of the same. “In God’s good time,” the prime minister declared, the New World, “with all of its power and might,” must step forth to rescue the Old.

In London, Hitchcock met with his old friend Sidney Bernstein, who
had just resigned the chairmanship of Granada Theatres and other directorships for an unpaid appointment as adviser to the Ministry of Information. At Bernstein’s behest the director agreed to make war propaganda films for England. He also helped to arrange the evacuation of orphans, and on the way back from England, passing through Ottawa, met with officials to “snip governmental red tape and complete arrangements to bring sixty youngsters from the Actors’ Orphanage in London to a safe haven on this side of the Atlantic,” according to published accounts.

Of all the Britishers in his Hollywood cell group, ironically, it was Hitchcock—avowedly the least political among them—who found the earliest opportunity to “do his bit.” The tense atmosphere in London stiffened his spine, and influenced the new ending he would shoot for
Foreign Correspondent
—though Hitchcock’s RKO contract indicates that an up-to-the-minute ending, a postscript to the main story, had been discussed before his trip.

Immediately upon his return, Hitchcock and Walter Wanger met with Ben Hecht to brainstorm the ringing speech that Joel McCrea delivers into a radio microphone at the end of the film, with bombs dropping on London and the broadcasting booth plunged into darkness. Hecht, one of Hollywood’s best-known, highest-paid writers—also among the speediest—took only a day to pen the curtain-closer, which cribbed from Churchill:

“All that noise you hear isn’t static, it’s death coming to London. Yes, they’re coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don’t tune me out—hang on awhile—this is a big story—and you’re part of it. It’s too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come as if the lights are all out everywhere except in America.

“Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello America, hang on to your lights, they’re the only lights left in the world!”

It was a speech “out of key with your kind of picture,” Peter Bogdanovich told Hitchcock, fishing for confirmation that it was forced upon him by the politically active producer.

“It’s all right,” replied the director blandly. “It worked.”

“Don’t you think it was the wrong package for all your fine thriller ideas?” asked Charles Thomas Samuels, in his equally extensive interview with the director.

“Got me a telegram from Harry Hopkins!” responded Hitchcock.

No wonder he remembered that telegram—proof that
Foreign Correspondent
was seen in the highest circles, by President Roosevelt himself, and his cabinet.
^*

The coda was finished by the end of the first week of July, and the swift postproduction—rarely protracted on a Hitchcock film—was completed in time for an August 16 opening.

The reaction of audiences in the summer of 1940, when the war dominated American and British headlines, cannot quite be appreciated at this remove. Though the political context of
Foreign Correspondent
was artfully disguised (the Germans never identified as Germans), the contrivance was so clever, as Mark Glancy notes, that “audiences in 1940 would have had no problem in decoding the story, and they may not have noticed that they had to decode it.”

The film’s courageous immediacy, its “mingling of realism and fantasy” (
New York Sun
), elevated it into “easily one of the year’s finest pictures” (
Time
).
Commonweal
found Hitchcock’s new work “brilliant.” The perceptive Otis Ferguson, writing in the
New Republic
, said that
Foreign Correspondent
provided “a seminar in how to make a movie travel the lightest and fastest way, in a kind of beauty that is peculiar to movies alone.” By contrast
Rebecca
was “fooling around,” wrote Ferguson, “not really a bad picture,” but inferior to
Foreign Correspondent
, and soaked with “a wispy and overwrought femininity.”

The blitz attacks launched by Germany on England on September 8 made the ending especially prescient—a “flash forward,” with McCrea’s radio address eerily presaging Edward R. Murrow’s famous broadcasts from a blacked-out London.

All the more peculiar, then, that only a week after
Foreign Correspondent
opened in the United States, producer Michael Balcon was quoted in London and New York newspapers denouncing the “famous directors” of England who had elected to hide out from the dangers of the war in Hollywood, “while we who are left behind shorthanded are trying to harness the films to our great national effort.” Although Balcon didn’t mention Hitchcock by name, he made no bones about citing “a plump young junior technician” who the producer said had been promoted upward “from department to department” by Balcon himself.

Balcon’s comment was one part of “a particularly virulent campaign of abuse,” as Sidney Bernstein’s biographer Caroline Moorehead put it, in which the absent Hitchcock was more than once smeared in the English press. Back in May 1940, Seymour Hicks had aimed a volley at expatriates “gallantly facing the footlights,” and proposed a film titled “Gone With the Wind Up,” to star Charles Laughton and Herbert Marshall, with Hitchcock behind the camera. And J. B. Priestley, just a few days after Balcon, took part in a shortwave broadcast that made similar accusations against the British in Hollywood.