Alfred Hitchcock (96 page)

But all the headaches with French accents during
To Catch a Thief
helped put Hitchcock off the idea of Auber, and even en route to New England Hitchcock still didn’t have his leading lady. Producer Hal Wallis had rhapsodized about a twenty-year-old dancer who stepped in for the lead one night in the Broadway musical
The Pajama Game.
The dancer had made a screen test for Wallis, which Hitchcock watched appreciatively. Coleman then visited the understudy backstage in New York on the director’s behalf, noting her lithe tomboy looks (quite like those of Auber). Coleman told the understudy Hitchcock was looking for a “suitably fey creature” to play the lead of his next picture.

Meeting with Shirley MacLaine (no blonde) for the first time at the St. Regis, the director had a few questions: What movies had she done? Could he see any television film on her? What Broadway roles had she acted? None, nothing; she was only a chorus girl, an understudy. “Suddenly,” MacLaine recalled, “his leg shot up, his foot came down heavily on the seat of a chair, and his elbow came to rest on his knee, all in one lightning motion.”

“That makes you about the color of a shamrock, doesn’t it?” said Hitchcock.

“Yes, sir, I suppose so,” she replied, standing up. “Should I go now?”

“Of course not. Sit down. All this simply means that I shall have fewer bad knots to untie. You’re hired.”

She fell back into her chair.

“I shall need you on location—in Vermont—in three days. Can you make it?”

It was okay to have a nobody as the perky, young mother—if Hitchcock could boast a marquee attraction as the tortured artist. Early on, he had teased the front office with the idea of Cary Grant, but Grant’s salary and percentage demands were escalating out of sight, and Hitchcock was determined to keep
The Trouble with Harry
a “little” picture. Moreover, Grant could be a nuisance: rewriting the part to please him would be a headache, and might change the flavor of the story beyond recognition.

William Holden was Hitchcock’s real preference, and once again the director hotly pursued the actor. But whether for budget or loan-out reasons, or because of the accelerated schedule, Holden vanished from the horizon even as Hitchcock was passing through New York. The director had a reasonable average with Cary Grant, but his repeated attempts to coax Holden into a Hitchcock film were unsuccessful.

In New York, Hitchcock met with John Forsythe, who agreed to a ten-week leave from playing Captain Fisby in
Teahouse of the August Moon
to appear in
The Trouble with Harry.
A debonair actor with a reserve of quirkiness, Forsythe had appeared in several undistinguished films, but his Broadway credits were prestigious and his radio work extensive (including multiple appearances on Hitchcock’s beloved
Suspense
).

That’s how reflexive his instincts were, how fast Hitchcock was moving. As late as September 14, when his arrival in Vermont was splashed across the
Barre Daily Times
—shaking hands with Governor Lee Emerson at the airport—official publicity was still insisting that Hitchcock’s star for
The Trouble with Harry
was William Holden.

Not only did Hitchcock cast a former understudy and a no-name as his two leads, but the true star of
The Trouble with Harry
was an octogenarian friend of the director’s. The central character of Jack Trevor Story’s novel is the aged, retired captain of a Thames barge, who believes he may have shot the stranger accidentally while hunting. (In the film he is the retired commander of an East River tugboat.) All along, Hitchcock had envisioned this role for the English actor Edmund Gwenn, whom he had previously directed in
The Skin Game, Waltzes from Vienna
, and
Foreign Correspondent.

The winking humor of
To Catch a Thief
spilled over to
The Trouble with Harry
, and some of John Michael Hayes’s sexiest double entendres ever came from the mouth of the octogenarian. “Do you realize you’ll be the first man to cross her threshold?” Sam (John Forsythe) teases the Captain (Edmund Gwenn) in their first scene together, referring to his courtship of the spinster, Miss Gravelly. “It’s not too late, you know. She’s a well-preserved woman,” replies the Captain defensively. “I envy you,” Sam says. “Very well-preserved,” the Captain muses, “and preserves have to be opened some day.”

From the first draft, Paramount and code officials noticed this exchange; Hitchcock promised to do something about the lines—but, once again, found a way to keep them in the film.

The other members of the cast weren’t going to help the box office much either. Mildred Natwick, an accomplished interpreter of Shakespeare, Shaw, O’Neill, and Ibsen and a semiregular in John Ford films, was cast as Miss Gravelly. Mildred Dunnock, who had been poignant as the wife in
Death of a Salesman
on Broadway and then on film, would play Mrs. Wiggs, the country-store proprietor, village postmistress, and agent for Sam’s unsalable art. Tall, craggy-faced Royal Dano, Elijah in John Huston’s film of
Moby-Dick
, became the deputy sheriff, while seven-year-old Jerry Mathers—later the star of TV’s
Leave It to Beaver
—had a rascally part, enhanced from the book, as the little boy who first discovers the body.

Herbert Coleman and Doc Ericksen had scouted ahead to find a quaint Vermont village with plenty of atmosphere and mountain scenery, settling on the vicinity around St. Johnsbury, a place where sidewalk repairs were reported on the front page of the newspaper. Unfortunately Hurricane Carol blew through on September 1, spending itself out in Canada and
New England, including parts of northeastern Vermont and St. Johns-bury—followed a week later by heavy electrical storms that washed out local roads.

Hitchcock had been looking forward to filming the brilliant autumn leaves of New England. Instead the trees were down everywhere, the streets were littered with storm wreckage, and tree branches were naked. John Michael Hayes probably didn’t mind; he was still polishing the script, on location. Coleman and Ericksen, on the other hand, had to scramble to relocate. Initial photography was delayed until the end of the third week of September, but the bad luck never abated. It was colder and wetter than average that year in Vermont.

Alma traveled with her husband, joining him frequently on the set to watch the filming. To observers, the director seemed in fine fettle. The location difficulties didn’t perturb him; he waited out clouds and rain by shooting a few interiors, and then, when close-ups of the foliage proved disappointing he filled in with long-distance vistas. By mid-October, though, it was clear that inclement weather had settled in for the winter, and the company was forced to abandon Vermont for Hollywood, leaving a skeleton crew behind to shoot stand-ins against the landscape.

It was time for a little Hitchcockery. The director had leaf samples sent back to Hollywood ahead of his arrival to help the craft departments recreate the Vermont countryside on a soundstage. Paramount art director John Goodman had to weave wonders with artificial trees and leaves, while effects specialist John P. Fulton and cameraman Robert Burks had to match the studio lighting and colors to the location footage.

The Trouble with Harry
troubled even less with the niceties of logic and reality than
To Catch a Thief.
But Hitchcock completed his second film of 1954—by any measure a very good year—in time for Christmas. Once again the Hitchcocks celebrated by flying to Europe, making stops in St. Moritz, Paris, and London before returning home to America.

The winter of 1954–55 was devoted to postproduction on
To Catch a Thief
and
The Trouble with Harry
, more or less concurrently.

When
To Catch a Thief
proved a mess of looping, dubbing, and laboratory effects, and George Tomasini got bogged down in the editing room, Hitchcock had to grab another studio editor, Alma Macrorie, to cut
The Trouble with Harry.
And when
To Catch a Thief
started to lag behind, so did composer Lynn Murray, and Hitchcock found himself in need of someone else to create the music for
The Trouble with Harry.
Murray recommended his friend Bernard Herrmann.

Trained at Juilliard, influenced heavily by Debussy and Ravel, Herrmann was a composer of ballets and opera, and an orchestra conductor who supported
his “serious” musicianship by writing music and conducting for films and CBS Radio. In 1941, his first year in Hollywood, Herrmann had been nominated for two Academy Awards—winning the Oscar for
The Devil and Daniel Webster
over his more famous score for Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane.
He also contributed brooding, experimental, atonal music to
The Magnificent Ambersons, Jane Eyre, Hangover Square, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day the Earth Stood Still
, and other films—and lately, among his myriad activities, he had been scoring episodes of
Suspense
for radio.

Although Hitchcock had often inserted select pieces of music into his films, up to this time he hadn’t been able to control the overall scores—so the scores inevitably disappointed him. Even
Rear Window:
he often said that one flaw of that film was the conceit of the pop song, which is being composed throughout the story, and then is heard with a flourish at the end as played by an entire orchestra. Franz Waxman, who had also scored
Rebecca
and
Spellbound
, couldn’t deliver the kind of pop tune Hitchcock wanted. “It didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, and I was quite disappointed,” he told Truffaut.

Arrogant, contentious, moody, Herrmann seemed an unlikely Hitchcock soulmate. Even his best friends thought the brilliant composer was sometimes his own worst enemy. Yet when Hitchcock met with him in January 1955, they discovered they shared “a great unanimity of ideas,” in Herrmann’s words. Both were practical artists who felt most comfortable collaborating with people they liked or admired. “Many directors can make one or two good movies,” Herrmann said in 1968, even after he and Hitchcock had had a bitter parting of ways, “but how many can make fifty great ones like Hitchcock? Somerset Maugham once said, ‘Anyone has one good novel in him—it’s the second one I’m interested in.’ ”

Beginning modestly with what film music scholar Royal S. Brown has described as his “bantering and scherzo-like music” for
The Trouble with Harry
, Herrmann’s scores would immeasurably enhance Hitchcock’s greatest films to come. His music would contribute an “affective depth” to those films, wrote Brown, “precisely what Hitchcock’s cinema needed, what, in fact, it had sorely lacked even in certain masterpieces of the early 1950s, such as
Strangers on a Train.
”

That affective depth was there instantly in their relationship, so after
The Trouble with Harry
Hitchcock began to bring Herrmann in, according to the latter, “from the time of script. He depends on music and often photographs a scene knowing that music will complete it.” The director also brought the composer into every stage of the editing, according to Herrmann, because “if you’re using music, he’ll cut it differently.”

At the same time that he was busy with postproduction of
To Catch a Thief and The Trouble with Harry
, Hitchcock launched into scriptwork on the remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Almost from his initial trip to Hollywood he had been thinking about Americanizing
The Man Who Knew Too Much
—first describing the North African bazaar scene, with the smudge coming off the face of a murdered secret agent, in his
New Yorker
profile in 1938. Then as early as 1940, his second year in Hollywood, Hitchcock had pitched the idea to David O. Selznick—who had briefly encouraged it.

The remake was always linked to Hitchcock’s friendship with Angus MacPhail, who had been pivotally involved in the original; and it was after Hitchcock and MacPhail got back together to collaborate on
Bon Voyage
and
Aventure Malgache
during World War II that Hitchcock renewed his pursuit of the rights. Sidney Bernstein finally secured a deal, for Transatlantic.

MacPhail had been productive at Ealing for some years after the war, contributing to the scripts of
Whisky Galore
(1948) and
Train of Events
(1949). But always a genial alcoholic, he gradually drank himself into a physical and financial state from which he seemed unable to rebound. He wrote to Hitchcock from Nice in February 1953, explaining that he was neurasthenic, in debt, and unable to pay his hotel bill. Hitchcock immediately wired some money, and later subscribed to an informal group of MacPhail friends who paid his back taxes so he could return to England, and then furnished an allowance to keep him afloat.

To employ MacPhail and help rehabilitate him was part of what motivated Hitchcock to press forward with the remake. Not only could MacPhail help update the script, he could obtain an American screen credit that would legitimize his membership in the Screen Writers Guild, whose health and insurance benefits could ease his future financial burdens.