Alfred Hitchcock (68 page)

In any event, he and Hecht both realized that
The House of Dr. Edwardes
wasn’t going to end up as a thoughtful investigation of psychoanalysis. For Hitchcock, the primary allure of the film was the opportunity to give cinematic life to the dreams that help to unravel the amnesiac’s identity. Although Salvador Dalí’s name didn’t surface officially until late spring, from the outset Hitchcock envisioned turning the dreams over to the famed surrealist—holding back on the idea until the script gained acceptance with Selznick. By late spring the latest draft was describing one dream that plainly evoked 1928’s
Un Chien Andalou
, one of two celebrated surrealist films designed by Dalí and directed by Luis Buñuel. The opening of
Un Chien Andalou
shows an eyeball sliced with a razor; the Hitchcock script featured a man cutting painted eyes in half with a giant scissors.

Hitchcock felt confident that the prospect of a Hollywood job would tempt the extravagantly mustachioed Spanish artist, and he counted on Dalí’s spicing up the film with his unique fantasies. “Traditionally, up to
that time,” he explained later, “dream sequences in film were all in swirling smoke, slightly out of focus with all the figures walking through this mist, made by dry ice with smoke pumped across the top. It was a convention. I decided to do these hallucinatory dreams in his style, which was just the opposite of the swirling misty dreams. I could have chosen [Italian surrealist Giorgio] de Chirico, Max Ernst—there are many who follow that pattern, but none as imaginative and wild as Dalí.”

For two months, March and April, Hitchcock and Hecht stuck to the East Coast. Myron Selznick’s death had plunged his brother into “a deep depression,” according to David Thomson, and it wasn’t until the two arrived in Hollywood in May that the usual whirlwind of meetings and memos commenced.

As usual, Selznick spouted criticisms like a geyser. Hitchcock and Hecht had fashioned a documentary-style opening depicting actual psychiatric techniques; the procedural montage echoed the prelude to
Blackmail
, but Selznick found it tedious. The early drafts poked fleeting fun at psychiatry—with one intriguing highlight of the Hitchcock-MacPhail treatment being a production by psychiatric inmates of
The Way of the World
, William Congreve’s masterpiece of Restoration comedy—but as with
Rebecca
, Hitchcockian humor was unwelcome in Selznick’s world.

One of the Hitchcock-Hecht versions opened teasingly with two men sharing a train compartment. One grabs a fly and pulls its wings off, and the other says, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” One of the two men is a psychoanalyst, and the other is a new patient, but the audience has “to figure out which was the crazy man,” according to Hitchcock. Alas, few such “wonderful gags” would survive Selznick’s blue pencil.

Meanwhile, to authenticate the film’s psychiatric content—and give
Dr. Edwardes
an official seal of respectability—Selznick called in his own psychiatrist, May Romm, a motherly Freudian who made a specialty of treating celebrities. (She would be credited on-screen as “Psychiatric Advisor.”) Romm’s advice “significantly improved” the script, according to Leonard Leff—although, as usual, Hitchcock didn’t care about tedious authenticity, and the final film’s depiction of psychoanalysis never really rose above the level of simplistic vulgarization.
^*

Hitchcock’s attitude toward the Selznick-vetted final script, despite his best efforts with Hecht, was less than satisfied. “I used to tell him [Hitchcock] that I got so many really awful scripts that I got so mad I’d throw them at the wall and say I just couldn’t stand it,” recalled Ingrid Bergman
in an interview. “Anyway I got this script from Hitchcock and he said, ‘Remove your husband and child before you throw it at the wall!’ ”

Like Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman was obligated to David O. Selznick; she was in no better position to throw the script against the wall than he was. Regardless, the director met with the actress several times to allay her concerns that the love story was illogical and the psychologizing just so much folderol. Don’t worry, Hitchcock assured the actress, love isn’t logical. (Or, as Dr. Brulov says in the film, “The mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of the intellect.”) Nor, he said, was he intending to make a documentary—so she should forget all about any pretensions to realism.

Almost from their first meeting, Hitchcock developed an unusually intense friendship with the sensual Swedish actress. (In his biography of Bergman, Donald Spoto describes it as an “acute, unrequited passion.”) They were kindred spirits. They shared the belief that Selznick contracts had trapped them in an “absolute prison,” in Bergman’s words. Both saw themselves as outsiders in Hollywood, and pined for the culture and sophistication they’d left behind in Europe. Both were refreshingly earthy personalities, with blunt senses of humor. Even more than Salvador Dalí, Bergman was sufficient reason for Hitchcock to make
Spellbound
, as the adaptation of
The House of Dr. Edwardes
was now retitled.

Cary Grant was another story. Grant could toss an unpromising script whenever he wanted, and often did. His own boss, Grant declined
Spellbound.
Selznick didn’t mind; he wasn’t looking forward to paying Grant’s sky-high salary, when Hitchcock could just as easily use one of his contract players. Joseph Cotten was Hitchcock’s preference from the Selznick stable, but the producer nominated a tall, darkly handsome younger man with “a rather rugged face”—as Bergman describes him in
Spellbound.
Gregory Peck had appeared in only two pictures, but he had been catapulted to stardom with his Oscar-nominated role as a saintly missionary in
The Keys of the Kingdom.

Hitchcock shrugged, and accepted Peck in the role of the mentally unbalanced Edwardes. Like Joel McCrea, Peck was a California native, and perhaps for that reason Hitchcock initially saw him as “kind of rough around the edges, a small-town American boy.” (In truth, Peck was no such thing: from medium-size La Jolla, he was formally trained in the Stanislavsky Method and had acted on Broadway.)

But the director tried to treat Peck like one of “Hitch’s boys,” mentoring him. He showed him how to comport himself like a gentleman—à la Cary Grant. “I was given to wearing brown suits,” Peck recalled in one interview, “but he pointed me toward gray and dark blue and black. ‘One
wears brown in the country, you know, but gray or navy in the city,’ he told me one day. Well, I did what he said. But then one day I showed up in a blue suit with brown shoes. They were dark brown, and I thought they looked pretty good. ‘Oh, Gregory, don’t ever wear brown shoes with a blue suit!’ he scolded me in his avuncular way.”

Uncle Hitch also offered instruction in fine wines and spirits. “He did a wonderful, generous thing, by the way, which he later tossed off,” Peck recalled. “He sent me a case of twelve assorted bottles of wine, each a fine vintage, and on each one he had attached a handwritten label: ‘this is best with roast beef; and ‘this is best with filet of sole’; and ‘this is desert wine.’ All of them were Lafite-Rothschild, or Montrachet, or something equally good.”

Selznick got his preferred leading man; Hitchcock concentrated on the supporting cast. Another Selznick actress, Kim Hunter, stood in for Bergman during the numerous test scenes with actors up for the role of Fleurot, a rakish psychiatrist. Hunter recalled how Hitchcock addressed each candidate at inordinate length, “giving them a gorgeously articulate, detailed description of who they were, what their character wanted, what was going on in the scene, what the whole film was about. … It couldn’t have been clearer.”

At the end of “each magnificent offering to the actor,” in Hunter’s words, the director would turn to her and elaborately inquire, “Do you agree, Miss Hunter? Do you think that’s right?” Hunter recalled, “I think he took an evil pleasure in seeing me blush scarlet and stammer some inanity in reply. He teased me unmercifully. But it didn’t for one minute accomplish what I presume he also had in mind, to put the chaps who were testing at ease. At my expense, of course. It just made them more frightened.”
^*

John Emery, one of Tallulah Bankhead’s ex-husbands, ended up with that part. But who would play the third-billed Dr. Murchison, the head of the clinic, who has murdered the real Dr. Edwardes on the ski slopes? During the rewrites, DOS kept trying to inject jealousy into the relationship among Dr. Murchison, the Edwardes impostor (Peck), and Dr. Petersen (Bergman), while Hitchcock—who was probably just being contrary—kept resisting any such triangulation. When Hitchcock chose Leo G. Carroll, the decidedly unsexy Englishman from
Rebecca
and
Suspicion
, the hint of romantic tension among the three all but vanished.

The actor Hitchcock cast as Dr. Brulov, Bergman’s mentor, was Michael Chekhov. The Russian-born nephew of the famous playwright, Chekhov
had run acting schools in London and New York before settling in Hollywood. Although well regarded as a mentor of performers, Chekhov had acted on-screen only twice in America, in
In Our Time
and
Song of Russia.

Predictably, DOS bolstered his hand with a crew whose loyalty would be primarily to him—art director James Basevi, editor Hal C. Kern, and cameraman George Barnes, all veterans of
Gone With the Wind
and
Rebecca.
Hitchcock regarded Barnes as almost an enemy, “a woman’s cameraman,” in his words, “whose whole reputation and living was built on the demand for his services by certain stars.” During the filming Barnes antagonized Hitchcock—insisting, whenever possible, on diffusing his lens to achieve his signature soft look. Hitchcock fought him, scene after scene.

With Selznick’s permission, Hitchcock engaged Budapest-born composer Miklós Rózsa, who often wrote lush violin themes over rich strings—music that throbbed with gypsy wildness. His music for Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity
, released earlier in the year, was the most admired score of 1944. (Wilder was another director whose films Hitchcock watched religiously.) Hitchcock gave the composer very “precise” instructions for
Spellbound
, according to Rózsa, including “a big sweeping love theme for Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck and a ‘new sound’ for the paranoia which formed the subject of the picture.”

Filming began in the first week of June 1944.

Selznick, meanwhile, was brooding over postproduction on
Since You Went Away
, his first picture since
Rebecca
four years earlier and his first to star actress Jennifer Jones. Though dizzily in love with Jones, he was also stewing over his divorce. His brother’s recent death had plunged him into depression. Most of the summer DOS spent “out of Hollywood,” wrote Leonard Leff—away from Hitchcock and
Spellbound.

During
Rebecca
, Hitchcock had been forced to suffer the occasional humiliation of the producer hovering over the filming, judging him with his watchful eyes. The rare times Selznick materialized on the set of
Spellbound
, Hitchcock reverted to his old English tricks, staging a phony mechanical failure. Although Selznick monitored dailies and wrote memos, “this didn’t perturb Hitchcock,” recalled Ingrid Bergman. He “just said, ‘That’s too bad’ if he didn’t agree. The movie was his.” Even if the script was again shaped by Selznick’s dictates, what happened on the set was the director’s exclusive province, and Hitchcock could direct such mumbo jumbo in his sleep.

And sometimes it certainly seemed he was sleeping. Hitchcock was “constantly nodding off,” recalled Gregory Peck. “He would sit in his canvas chair with his four chins drooping, sound asleep while they finished up the lighting. The first assistant, who was very tactful, would stand alongside him and jiggle him to wake him.”

Yet a sleeping Hitchcock could be a deceptive, dangerous Hitchcock. When he woke up, said Peck, he seemed to know “exactly what was going on. He had the entire picture in his head, in his mind’s eye. Every shot and every frame was rolling through his head.”

It took Peck and Bergman a while to adjust to working with a man who appeared to have every image in his head, right down to the actors’ gestures and intonations. Norman Lloyd was playing a small role in
Spellbound
, as a mental patient who insists he has murdered his father. His first scene was with Bergman; it was also the first scene in which Hitchcock directed the actress. Lloyd watched their battle of wills with fascination. Bergman wanted to play the scene according to her instincts, to speak and move in her own way. But Hitchcock, whose ideas for a scene grew more rigid whenever he was working under strain—or didn’t yet trust a performer—wouldn’t budge.

“He would sit patiently,” Bergman recalled years later, “and he would listen to my objections that I couldn’t move behind a certain table, for instance, or that a gesture on a certain line was awkward. And then when I was finished complaining to him and I thought I’d won him over to my point of view he would say very sweetly, ‘Fake it!’ This advice was a great help to me later, when other directors wanted something difficult and I thought no, it was impossible. Then I would remember Hitchcock saying to me, ‘Fake it.’ ”

Peck made the mistake of inquiring about his motivation in a particular scene. What were his character’s inner life and feelings? What should he be thinking? “My dear boy,” Hitchcock drawled, “I couldn’t care less what you’re thinking. Just let your face drain of all expression.” Peck’s “soul-searching and … lack of ready technique,” in the actor’s words, tested Hitchcock’s patience. The inexperienced leading man hungered for guidance. Much of the time Peck felt adrift, vulnerable—rather like the character he was playing. Although the drained expression was a guise, it also suggested the reality of an uncertain actor.

Spellbound
was not a film, however, in which Hitchcock required the stars to deliver immortal performances. The Bergman-Peck love story had been carefully mapped out in advance by the director as mainly a feat of camera work. Their hypnotic attraction to each other would be defined by some of his most sensuous, gliding camera moves, and by gorgeous, lingering close-ups that externalized her longing and his tortured doubt.