Alfred Hitchcock (6 page)

The British film industry was falling apart during World War I, and it would take a decade to recover its vitality. American pictures and stars dominated Hitchcock’s calendar, and later, his memory: asked his opinion of the greatest chase ever filmed, Hitchcock would consistently cite the icefloe sequence with Lillian Gish in D. W Griffith’s
Way Down East
, from 1920, along with Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
(“the ride of the hooded men”) and
Intolerance
(“the chase to save a man from the gallows”). He loved Chaplin, whom he would come to know personally, and fifty years after seeing
The Pilgrim
(1923) he could describe certain scenes shot by shot.

He grew to admire the “technical superiority” of American films. “While British films presented a flat image, background and foreground figures blending together,” he noticed, thinking for the first time about the camera work and pictorial quality, “the American films employed backlighting which made foreground figures or characters stand out in relief against the backgrounds.”

Shuttling back and forth between plays and pictures, Hitchcock felt the first stirrings of ambition and a personal aesthetic. Attending the theater, he thought about film; attending pictures, he thought about stage plays. Although he adored theater and in his career adapted a number of plays into very good films, Hitchcock began to feel that film should be a different experience, almost “anti-theater.”

Most film directors rely heavily on master shots and dissolves, but to Hitchcock these would come to feel like stage-bound techniques—like curtains opening and closing. He began to develop his own ideas about how
to tell a story visually, how to fill up what he called “the white rectangle.” He even had his own musical language: High shots were like tremolos. A quick shot jumping in was a staccato movement. A close-up of a person (or the “big head,” as he liked to call it) was for shock impact, or emotional value; that was more of a loud note, a sounding of brass.

Unusual for his time, Hitchcock rarely resorted to “camera coverage”; he rejected the safe convention of opening on a proscenium-type view, then shifting to a medium shot, before cutting to a close-up. Hitchcock wanted to control the perspective; he preferred to open with the big head, perhaps close with the master shot. And his camera hovered over the action—
he
hovered—as though he were onstage with the actors, breathing down their necks.

Plays depended on interesting talk and music. Film was silent, and depended on images—interesting pictures. Watching plays and films as he practiced and studied art, he found himself thinking more and more in pictures, and of how the “orchestration” of pictures might tell a story.

Although he remained responsible and attentive to his mother, by the time he was seventeen or eighteen Hitchcock had moved from Salmon Lane into a London flat that was owned by one of his uncles. By the time World War I ended, he had been mired in sales at Henley’s for four years. He was nineteen.

Though he performed his duties well, Hitchcock had developed into “somewhat of a square peg in a round hole,” according to W A. Moore, the head of Henley’s advertising department. “I was kind of lazy,” Hitchcock admitted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich forty years later, “so I’d pile them [requests for estimates] up on my desk and they’d go up to a big stack. And I used to say, ‘Well, I’ve got to get down to this,’ and then I polished them off like anything—and used to get praised for the prodigious amount of work I’d done on that particular day. This lasted until the complaints began to come in about the delay in answering. That’s the way I still feel about working. Certain writers want to work every hour of the day—they’re very facile. I’m not that way. I want to say, ‘Let’s lay off for several hours—let’s play.’”

Moore befriended the “square peg,” listening to Hitchcock’s pleas to be transferred to another department. “Routine clerical work was never his great feature,” Moore noted. “Art and strong imaginative work—creative work—were interwoven with his nature.”

In late 1917 or early 1918, in accordance with his wishes, Hitchcock was sent over to advertising. His new job was more picture-oriented: designing, laying out, and pasting up the advertisements and brochures for Henley’s products.

The tasks weren’t always exciting, but there were lessons to be learned. “You will notice in many ads,” Hitchcock reflected in a later interview, “the picture is contrapuntal to the words. You will see a shot of a locomotive rushing through the countryside and you’ll find it’s an ad for face cream. ‘A smooth ride over your skin.’”

And there was opportunity for personal flair. “One example of his inventiveness,” narrated John Russell Taylor, “was a brochure for a certain kind of lead-covered electric wire designed specially for use in churches and other historic buildings where it would be virtually invisible against old stonework. The brochure was upright, coffin-shaped, and Hitchcock designed it so that at the bottom of the cover was a drawing of an altar frontal, with two big brass candlesticks on top of it, and then above, at the top of the page, the words ‘Church Lighting’ in heavy Gothic type. No mention of electricity, and of course no indication of wiring, since the whole point of the selling line was the discreetness.”

In the advertising branch Hitchcock found himself surrounded for the first time by artists and writers. The myth that Hitchcock was an odd loner—a fat boy aloof from others, contemptuous of ordinary activity—is disproved by what happened next. Not yet twenty, Hitchcock emerged as a leader, a young man who attracted collaborators, spurred teamwork, and united people to pursue a common goal.

It was no accident that within a year of his transfer Henley’s launched a new magazine featuring, apart from company news and gossip, “Contributions—Grave or Gay”: cartoons, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays.
The Henley Telegraph
, which sold for sixpence (“By Post: Eight-pence”), was beloved by employees and even hailed outside the company. The
Organizer
, a London business periodical, found it one of “the best written, best edited and best produced” of the city’s house organs.

Not only was Hitchcock a founding editor, he also served as business manager, “very much to the despair of the chief accountant,” according to Moore. Not only that, he was the
Telegraph
’s most prolific contributor.

Back at St. Ignatius there had been student publications, and Hitchcock may have tried his hand at writing, though the issues of those years are lost. Surely he learned about writing and literature from Father Richard Mangan, the same priest who gave that well-remembered exhortation about dying honorably. Mangan presided over an English curriculum that stressed Platonic and Chaucerian princples of dramatic literature. This included an emphasis on the logic, the structure, the internal symmetry and unity of ideas, what Galsworthy in
The Forsyte Saga
called the “significant trifle”—a detail which “embodies the whole character of a scene, a place, or a person”—and, when possible, a universality concerned with aspects of human nature and behavior.

A beloved theatrical instructor, Father Mangan was also known for his superb investigations of Shakespeare, and delighted students with his
spellbinding rendition of Macbeth’s famous speech, rendered in a broad Lancashire accent: “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” He encouraged humorous as well as formal essays, contrary to tradition, and didn’t mind if the two were blended.

Starting with his debut piece in
The Henley Telegraph
—in the premiere issue, volume 1, number 1, June 1919—Hitchcock also blended drama with dark humor:

She had never been in this part of Paris before, only reading of it in the novels of Duvain; or seeing it at the Grand Guignol. So this was the Montmartre? That horror where danger lurked under cover of night, where innocent souls perished without warning—where doom confronted the unwary—where the Apache reveled.

She moved cautiously in the shadow of the high wall, looking furtively backward for the hidden menace that might be dogging her steps. Suddenly she darted into an alley way, little heeding where it led—groping her way on in the inky blackness, the one thought of eluding the pursuit firmly fixed in her mind—on she went—Oh! when would it end?—

Then a doorway from which a light streamed lent itself to her vision—In here—anywhere, she thought.

The door stood at the head of a flight of stairs—stairs that creaked with age, as she endeavoured to creep down—then she heard the sound of drunken laughter and shuddered—surely this was—No, not that! Anything but that! She reached the foot of the stairs and saw an evil smelling wine bar, with wrecks of what were once men and women indulging in a drunken orgy—then they saw her, a vision of affrighted purity. Half a dozen men rushed towards her amid the encouraging shouts of the rest. She was seized. She screamed with terror—better had she been caught by her pursuer, was her one fleeting thought, as they dragged her roughly across the room. The fiends lost no time in settling her fate. They would share her belongings—and she—

Why! Was not this the heart of Montmartre? She should go—the rats should feast. Then they bound her and carried her down the dark passage. Up a flight of stairs to the riverside. The water rats should feast, they said. And then—then, swinging her bound body to and fro, dropped her with a splash into the dark, swirling waters. Down, she went, down, down; conscious only of a choking sensation, this was death.

—then—

“It’s out Madam,” said the dentist. “Half a crown please.”
^*

The Grand Guignol atmosphere and the beautiful woman in peril mark this as distinctly “Hitch,” which is how he signed this first Hitchcock work and the rest of his
Telegraph
contributions.

A close-up of a woman’s face swollen with terror became a Hitchcock staple, one of those images he teasingly reprised in film after film. The opening image of
The Lodger
, his very first popular success, is a woman screaming. (And it didn’t always have to be a woman: in the opening shots of
Rope
, a man gets the same treatment.)

“Gas” has been published in other books concerning Hitchcock. Donald Spoto, in
The Dark Side of Genius
, found the story a sophomoric Poe imitation, plainly evidencing the Hitchcockian “images of sadism” (and of “the woman plunged into water”) that were integral to Spoto’s dark portrait of the director. As he did more than once when analyzing Hitchcock’s career, however, Spoto overlooked the humor: the sadism is undercut by the twist ending, in which the reader’s expectations are turned on their head.

One of the clichés about the English is their avoidance of dental care, and Hitchcock himself was notorious for stained, crooked teeth and foul breath. His very English trepidation about dentists is deployed to comic effect in “Gas”—and again and again in his films.

The first published example of one of Hitchcock’s “twist” stories, “Gas” is ultimately more comic than sadistic. The woman isn’t being confronted by any real danger, it turns out, but by a hallucination induced by the anesthetic. In his films Hitchcock was drawn to visualizing all types of what he called “phantasmagoria of the mind”—hypnosis, concussions, dizziness, drunkenness, dreams. But in this instance the particular anesthetic supplies another level of meaning: the standard anesthetic used by dentists at the time was nitrous oxide or “laughing gas,” known to cause hilarity along with its hallucinations.

While “Gas” alone might suggest “images of sadism,” the array of other pieces that Hitchcock penned for the
Telegraph
, brought to light for the first time during research for this book, reveals a more humane, playful, faceted sensibility. Hitchcock wrote for every issue of the
Telegraph
published during his tenure at Henley’s. “His articles were always of the quaint, fantastic type,” said W. A. Moore, and “reflective of his character.”

His contribution to the second issue, in September 1919, was especially cinematic, and especially remarkable for anticipating the voyeuristic obsessions, the complex narrative architecture, and the psychologically subjective perspective of Hitchcock films:

Curse you!—Winnie, you devil—I’ll——

“Bah!” He shook her off, roughly, and she fell, a crumpled heap at his feet. Roy Fleming saw it all. —Saw his own wife thus treated by a man who was little more than a fiend. — His wife, who, scarcely an hour ago had kissed him, as she lingered caressingly over the dainty cradle cot, where the centre of their universe lay sleeping. Scarcely an hour ago—and now he saw her, the prostrate object of another man’s scorn; the discarded plaything of a villain’s brutish passion.

She rose to her knees, and stretched her delicate white arms in passionate appeal toward the man who had spurned her.

“Arnold, don’t you understand? You never really cared for her. It was a moment’s fancy—a madness, and will pass away. It is I you love. Think of those days in Paris. Do you remember when we went away together, Arnold, you and I, and forgot everything? How we went down the river, drifting with the stream as it wound its way like a coil of silver across the peaceful pasture lands. Oh, the scent of the may and lilac blossoms that morning! The songs of the birds, the joy of watching the swallows sweeping across the river before us—Arnold, you have not forgotten? It was the first day you kissed me.—Hidden in that sheltered sweetness where only the rippling sunbeams moved upon the myrtle-tinted stream—Arnold, you have not forgotten!”

The man crossed the room, and leaned upon a table, not far from where she crouched, gazing down at her with a look from which she shrank away.

“No,” he said bitterly, “I have never forgotten!”

Still kneeling, she moved nearer, and laid a trembling hand on his knee:—“Arnold, don’t you understand? I must leave England at once. I must go into hiding somewhere—anywhere—a long way from here. I killed her, Arnold, for your sake. I killed her because she had taken you from me. They will call it murder. But if only you will come with me, I do not care. In a new country we will begin all over again—together, you and I.” Roy Fleming saw and heard it all. This abandoned murderess was the woman who had sworn to love and honour him until death should part them. So this was—yes, and more than that. But Roy made no movement.