Alfred Hitchcock (83 page)

“Do you think that, as it is Marlene Dietrich playing the part,” Hitchcock had asked Bridie as filming approached, “we could round her off [at the end] a little more strongly than we have done at the moment? I wondered if you could give her something with a little philosophy. I know that Dietrich herself (who is no fool) would like to go out of the picture not feeling sorry for herself as she is doing at the moment. Naturally it doesn’t call for any profundities, but something a little longer than we have now. It might be possible, do you think?”

Even as filming on
Stage Fright
began, Hitchcock continued to “rough in” his own changes to Dietrich’s dialogue, asking Bridie to critique his tinkering. It wasn’t until mid-July, midway through photography, that work on her lines ceased. Bridie said he heartily approved of Hitchcock’s “cuts and alterations.” Bridie added, “Charlotte particularly at last comes to life. In neither the Alma-Whitfield version nor in mine was she worth a damn.”

The best available man, Wilkie Cooper (who had shot
The Hasty Heart
), was the cameraman when photography began on June 1, and the largely English cast included Kay Walsh (then married to David Lean) as Charlotte’s mercenary “dresser,” and toothy comedienne Joyce Grenfell, who runs the shooting gallery at the theatrical garden party.

In the book, Eve has no mother, just an aunt. One character Hitchcock created expressly for the film was the Commodore’s estranged wife, a role earmarked for the preeminent stage actress Sybil Thorndike. Mrs. Gill is depicted as a vague, distracted character, not without charm, who never quite catches up to what is going on. Speaking to
Films in Review
shortly after the New York opening of
Stage Fright
in 1950, Hitchcock made a point of calling the film’s characters “quite normal people,” and remarking that “I know the kind of people.” Moreover, he added, “the heroine’s mother,” Mrs. Gill, was “like my mother”—the only time he ever compared Emma Hitchcock to one of his fictional characters.

“Casting is characterization,” Hitchcock often said, and once again the characters he liked were the actors he liked, a fact borne out on the screen. He never got past Richard Todd’s personality, which disappointed him off- and on-camera. (“Nice but nothing there,” Dietrich decided.) Todd wondered why the director seemed so “cold and diagrammatic in his approach” during filming, “as if he were not really very interested in the picture.” He certainly didn’t seem very interested in
Todd—whose importance, already tainted by the script debate, dwindled—except for Hitchcock telling Todd that he possessed “expressive eyes,” and then squandering “a lot of time doing shots on me where only the eyes were lit.”

If the film’s putative hero disappointed the director, so, alas, did the heroine. According to Hitchcock, Jane Wyman burst into tears when she first saw herself in homely drag in the rushes, for the scenes where she is disguised as Dietrich’s maid. Not only did Dietrich have better dialogue in the film, the older actress looked ten times more beautiful. Eve’s disguise is a fundamental conceit of the novel, and had been dutifully written into the script as part of the reality-versus-illusion theme. Yet after seeing the dailies, Wyman insisted on spiffing herself up in obvious ways. Hitchcock spoke to the actress about it more than once, in his suite and in her trailer, yet she persisted—with the backing of Warner’s, which saw no advantage in having one of the studio’s marquee attractions look drab and feel worse.

“The lack of reality” in her character hurt the film, Hitchcock said later. “She should have been a pimply-faced girl. Wyman just refused to be that and I was stuck with her.”

In reaction, the director turned his gaze to someone who wouldn’t let him down. Just as Hitchcock had indulged Tallulah Bankhead, allowing her to tyrannize the cast of
Lifeboat
, now he stood back while Marlene Dietrich “directed”
Stage Fright.
She mothered the ensemble. She rehearsed her production numbers to a fault. She advised the director on her lighting.

“La Vie en Rose” is heard twice in the film, both times incompletely. “The Laziest Gal in Town,” the song Hitchcock forced on Dietrich, is heard in full—with Dietrich giving a full-throttle performance, before an auditorium of rapt extras whose presence she demanded. The extras gave her a standing ovation. Hitchcock’s camera is fixed on her throughout the song. Vincente Minnelli couldn’t have filmed it more simply, or effectively. A highlight of the film, the Cole Porter song entered Dietrich’s permanent repertoire.

Singing or acting, her hypnotic performance holds the film together. Dietrich played only a handful of important roles after World War II, but
Stage Fright
is one of the best. Although the film was Hitchcock’s homage to Dietrich, still he “frightened the daylights” out of her, the actress told John Russell Taylor. “A strange little man,” she told her daughter, Maria Riva. “I don’t like him. Why they all think he is so great, I don’t know. The film is bad—maybe in the cutting he does all his famous ‘suspense’ but he certainly didn’t do it in the shooting.”

Hitchcock “knew exactly what he wanted,” Dietrich conceded in her interview
with Taylor for his biography, “a fact that I adore, but I was never quite sure if I did it right. After work he would take us to the Caprice restaurant and feed us with steaks he had flown in from New York, because he thought they were better than the British meat, and I always thought he did that to show that he was not really disgusted with our work.”

So Hitchcock didn’t cuddle with Dietrich. That was a job for Michael Wilding, the self-effacing third-billed star, who was swept up in an affair with the diva. Wilding had the sneaky feeling that as their romance heated up, so did his value to Hitchcock and the film. “At her suggestion my role was greatly enlarged,” Wilding said, “and without being the least bit patronizing, she started giving me helpful suggestions, which brought out the best in me.”

Wilding was putty in Dietrich’s hands. The Hitchcocks, silently observing, were amused.

Whitfield Cook flew back to America on June 25. Alma, who initially stayed behind to help monitor the dailies, “wrote me letters about what was going on in the cast,” Cook recalled, “who was sleeping with whom.” When Mrs. Hitchcock returned to Hollywood on August 9 ahead of her husband, Cook met her at the airport. The next week the two enjoyed each other’s company in Santa Cruz, swimming and taking long walks in sublime weather. With her editorial instincts, Alma enjoyed listening to Cook’s story ideas and giving him advice.

But she was apprehensive about the forthcoming release of
Under Capricorn.
During postproduction Sidney Bernstein had convinced Hitchcock to abbreviate some of the long takes he had persisted in filming, but early screenings hadn’t generated enthusiasm for the film’s style or its subject matter. Mrs. Hitchcock blamed herself—her initial championing of the story, and her early role in the development of the script.

Under Capricorn
opened at Radio City Music Hall in mid-September, while the director was still occupied overseas. Although the film was a disappointment from Ingrid Bergman and Hitchcock, the critical reaction was mild. Howard Barnes of the
New York World Telegram
wrote, for example, merely that Hitchcock had “stumbled.”

Regardless of reviews, Transatlantic was counting on Bergman to draw in audiences. But dramatic events had overtaken her life. Bergman had joined Roberto Rossellini in Italy, and by the end of the summer of 1949 their romance was news, her out-of-wedlock pregnancy a growing scandal. Catholic organizations were quick to condemn her morals; a few congressmen even got into the act, excoriating Bergman on the floor of the House. And across the United States, exhibitors shrank from booking
Under Capricorn.

Upset at the blackening of her name, Bergman refused to do publicity for Hitchcock’s film, refusing even to appear at its London opening. “I don’t intend ever again of my own free will to see the press and answer questions,” the actress wrote Sidney Bernstein from Stromboli. Hitchcock was mystified; he might have been jealous that Bergman had left him and Hollywood for a different sort of career, but he really didn’t care whom Bergman was sleeping with. What bothered him more was that she was shirking her responsibility to the film.

The London reviews were worse, and
Under Capricorn
soon became a debacle outstripping even
Rope
or
The Paradine Case.
The banks moved to repossess it; more galling, the second Transatlantic film was then handed over to Dan O’Shea, who thought he might be able to squeeze additional revenue out of it as a Selznick release. Hitchcock suspected O’Shea of bearing him a permanent grudge, and neglecting
Under Capricorn
; indeed, when the Museum of Modern Art presented its Hitchcock retrospective in 1963, O’Shea refused to loan the film. To this day, it remains the least widely seen film of Hitchcock’s American period.

And it’s not a terrible film. Though strange and awkward, it’s stylish and heartfelt at its center, with a loyalty between the married Fluskys that ultimately is stirring. In France
Under Capricorn
claims a cult reputation, and Hitchcock himself never lost his fondness for it. “I would have liked it to have been a success, even outside of commercial considerations,” he told François Truffaut. “With all the enthusiasm we invested in that picture, it was a shame that it didn’t amount to anything.” The French appreciated the film, the director told Peter Bogdanovich, “because they looked at it for what it was and not what people expected.”

In Santa Cruz, where she and Cook had repaired for the weekend, Alma read the notices. Cook was astonished at how distraught she was. Alma wept and wept. He could not console her.

Alma Reville was never again credited with writing a film. Although she remained the gatekeeper of all Hitchcock’s films—from choice of story to a film’s final cut—she never officially wrote another script.

Years later, the Hitchcocks both went to lengths to deny that Mrs. Hitchcock had ever written scripts at all. When in 1974 an author asked to include her in a book about “The Women Who Wrote the Movies,” her husband shielded her by declining on her behalf, insisting that Alma was never a
real
writer. Early in her career she had been obliged to “make notes on the set,” Hitchcock explained, “and afterwards her main job would be to cut and assemble the film for the first showing to the director.” She evolved into a “technical writer,” merely “cutting it up into shots and so forth,” he said, but “never a creative writer in the sense we know it today.”

But Mrs. Hitchcock’s involvement with her husband’s films was far deeper than that suggests, on both a creative and an emotional level. If a Hitchcock film failed it was painful to Alma, while her husband was capable of shrugging off reviews or box-office failures. Once asked “the secret of his serenity,” Hitchcock replied, “I always try to look at things as though I were remembering them three years later.” He always did look ahead. After a film was done, it was “gone,” recalled Whitfield Cook,
“and he was interested in the next thing.” In spite of what has been written about him, Hitchcock was far from a perfectionist. He didn’t set out to make masterpieces. He was a master of accepting flaws, papering over them, and moving on.

Once, in an interview, film historian William K. Everson asked the director if he would like to remake certain of his pictures and correct their faults. Hitchcock quickly replied, “I don’t think I would care to do that,” adding, “I’ll go further. I wish I didn’t have to make them” in the first instance. After the script has been finished, the director explained, “sixty per cent of the original conception” was all he ever dared hope to realize on the screen.

Then why make the films at all? Everson asked. Well, “there’s some fun,” Hitchcock admitted. “There’s tempo involved, and size of image”—and then there’s the cutting, one last chance to “get it right.”

Before the failure of
Under Capricorn
, Alma had produced a fresh treatment for
I Confess
, transferring the setting from San Francisco to Quebec. But after she said she didn’t want to write any more scripts, the project needed a new and deft writer, for the bulk of the task remained of moving the nineteenth-century French play across the Atlantic, and forward to a contemporary time.

After meeting with Hitchcock in London during the making of
Stage Fright
, Lesley Storm—a.k.a. Mabel Margaret Clark, the novelist and dramatist, who cowrote the Carol Reed film
The Fallen Idol
—was engaged for the job. Everyone felt encouraged when Storm brought her notes and pages to Paris for a script conference with Hitchcock, Sidney Bernstein, and Victor Peers. The project seemed finally on the verge of a breakthrough—until Storm went incommunicado for weeks, leaving Bernstein and Hitchcock angry and mystified as they awaited her revised treatment. Ultimately, Storm was discharged.