Alfred Hitchcock (98 page)

Bazin took consolation in forcing Hitchcock to take note of at least one recurrent theme in his films, “that, because of its moral and intellectual level, surely went beyond the scope of simple ‘suspense’—that of the identification of the weak with the strong.” As the director listened to him, Bazin listed examples from
Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, I Confess
—good and evil linked by names, train tickets, the confessional, etc.

“The translation of such a subtle argument was not very easy,” recalled Bazin in his article. “Hitchcock listened to it with attention and intensity.
When he finally understood it I saw him touched, for the first and only time in the interview, by an unforeseen and unforeseeable idea. I had found the crack in that humorous armor. He broke into a delighted smile and I could follow his train of thought by the expression on his face.”

The French critic and essayist noted, however, that “the relatively serious nature of my questions undoubtedly had little in common with what he was accustomed to in American interviews, and the sudden change in critical climate may have upset him.”

The critics of
Cahiers
and
Positif
—an equally serious rival French film journal—began to redefine Hitchcock as an artist in such a persuasive, assertive fashion that the rest of the world was ultimately forced to take notice. Foremost among the voices leading that charge were the young French critics he met in 1955: Bazin (the mentor of the “auteur” movement, although his own approach was more eclectic), Godard (the first aggressive champion of Hitchcock), Chabrol and Eric Rohmer (who teamed up to write the first book about him), and Truffaut (who would reenter Hitchcock’s life some years later and definitively shape his legacy).

Another, even bigger seed was being planted in America, where Lew Wasserman watched over his client’s interests. It was supposedly Wasserman who had the idea—and whoever had it, it was a hell of an idea—to put Hitchcock on television.

Hitchcock always said it was Wasserman’s idea, just as he always said it was Michael Balcon’s idea that he should try directing. But it was also true that he had spent years trying to launch a national radio series, and just as true that he was already choosing favorite suspense stories, writing introductions, and lending his name as editor to an anthology series of books.

However it transpired, Hitchcock made a show of reluctance when Wasserman brought up the idea in the spring of 1955. He himself wasn’t a big TV watcher (he liked quiz shows, he told one interviewer, and public affairs programs “of an international nature”). He saw the epidemic popularity of television as a threat to the film industry, to which he was unreservedly loyal. And no other director of his caliber had dared defect to the small screen.

Yet it hadn’t escaped his notice that MCA was a growing power in television, packaging programs with talent and advertisers. Or that a year earlier, in mid-1954, Sidney Bernstein had played a role in formulating England’s Television Bill, and had then won an independent television contract, adding broadcasting to his Granada empire (permanently closing the door on any future Transatlantic films in the process). When Wasserman suggested (or so Hitchcock always said) that another old friend, Joan Harrison,
might help with a Hitchcock series, it sealed his interest. Although it was important that Hitchcock himself supervise the launch of the series, Harrison could shoulder much of the day-to-day work.

Harrison had moved to New York to produce
Janet Dean, Registered Nurse
, starring Ella Raines, for syndication. Hitchcock’s onetime protégée had actually entered television before him, after one of her film partners, director Robert Siodmak, left Hollywood to return to Germany, and the other, actor-director Robert Montgomery, jumped to prime time with his own series. Now Harrison returned to Hollywood, joining the television project as associate producer.

With Wasserman oiling the gears, CBS offered Hitchcock a state-of-the-art contract. He would lend his name to the series, serving as host and producer and directing a set number of episodes. His salary would be higher than he received for many of the feature films he had directed—reportedly $125,000 per episode. And in one of those clauses that were Wasserman’s specialty, all rights to the series would revert to him after first broadcast.

A separate production company—named Shamley Productions, for Hitchcock’s English country cottage—was duly incorporated. Planning began for the first season.

MCA would help with the stories, the writers, and the casting. With Wasserman powering its growth, the firm was evolving into a superagency, an octopus with long tentacles. “I am entering television,” Hitchcock joked to the
Los Angeles Times
, “because I am the tip of a tendril. I am a slave to MCA.” But
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
would boost the director’s fame and wealth in ways neither he nor Wasserman could have guessed.

The late spring and summer were taken up with filming
The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The director met in London with Angus MacPhail, who had preceded him there, and together they flew to Marrakech in the second week of May. MacPhail was more sophisticated than Hayes when it came to foreign locations, and in Marrakech he was expected to serve as Hitchcock’s Johnny-on-the-spot, performing minor script touch-ups (“to edit and make notes on the script pages as they were sent by Hayes,” according to DeRosa’s book) while also brainstorming the gags and bits of comedy that were supposedly his specialty.

Hayes stayed away from Marrakech, and knew only vaguely how MacPhail, whom he thought of as a charity case, had preceded him on both versions of
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
This was the first time Hitchcock had forced Hayes, who hadn’t shared credit with anyone on
Rear Window, To Catch a Thief
, or
The Trouble with Harry
, into a shotgun marriage with another writer. He hadn’t experienced the director’s
long-standing custom of crediting as many writers as it took to finish the job—often including Mrs. Hitchcock.

Hayes had just been nominated for an Oscar for
Rear Window
,
^*
and couldn’t help but see what was happening to him now as devaluing his name and reputation. When his completed draft was delivered by air to Marrakech, with a cover page that proclaimed “Final Screen Play by John Michael Hayes,” with no reference to MacPhail, Herbert Coleman knew there was going to be trouble. He stalled handing the script over to Hitchcock, who took one look at the cover page and “blew his top,” in Coleman’s words. This was a betrayal that struck at MacPhail’s genuine contribution, and at Hitchcock’s effort to aid an old friend. “Call the boys,” said Hitchcock—meaning MCA—“and tell them to fire that man right now.”

But Coleman didn’t call the boys, and MCA wasn’t ordered to fire Hayes right away. Instead, Hayes was officially cautioned by Coleman, in a studio memo, not to sign or describe any script as “final” until Hitchcock had first approved of the pages. Everyone in the know hoped it was a misunderstanding that would blow over. When Hayes, still blithely confident of his standing, showed up for final revisions on location in London, he perceived that he was in bad odor, but wasn’t sure why.

These three Hitchcocks—Hayes, MacPhail, and the director—convened awkwardly in a London hotel room in early June to revise the Albert Hall and embassy sequences under the gun. “We wrote during the day, mimeographed at night, and brought it to the set the next morning,” recalled Hayes. “I don’t know whether it suffered or not.”

The script was done by the time the company returned to Hollywood for interiors later in June. Certainly Hayes was done. The writer didn’t speak with Hitchcock for the rest of the filming, and Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock (quietly and without credit) made “minor editorial changes,” in the words of DeRosa. And though it had its virtues, the script did suffer.

Until late 1954, Hitchcock had held out a faint hope of reteaming Grace Kelly with James Stewart in the remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Reunited, these two stars might have given the “old married couple” that playful hint of sexual chemistry that is hinted at in the film, when Louis Bernard declares it is too bad that Jo McKenna, who has been singing a bedtime song to her son, has been interrupted in midrefrain. McKenna mutters, “I had that same feeling myself many times.” Stewart’s
eyes twinkle when he speaks that line, but the meaning was different with Doris Day—and Hitchcock’s camera veers away.

New York film critics had voted Grace Kelly Best Actress of the Year in 1954, for three pictures:
Dial M for Murder, Rear Window
, and
The Country Girl.
None of these were produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which owned her contract, and her dispute with the studio had persisted with a suspension. MGM lifted the suspension in the spring of 1955, in time for Kelly to accept the Best Actress Oscar for her deglamorized star turn in
The Country Girl
, but the Oscar-winning actress stayed inactive for another six months while she continued to reject what she considered inferior MGM vehicles. Thus it became clear that Hitchcock’s favorite leading lady would have to be crossed off his list if he wanted to shoot his film in the summer of 1955. Then at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the actress was heading the American delegation, Kelly met Prince Rainier III of Monaco. …

The rest, as they say, is history.

Doris Day was usually typecast as a Little Mary Sunshine, but Hitchcock had been intrigued by her performance in
Storm Warning
, in which the singing actress had a rare nonmusical role as a waitress whose truck-driving husband is a Ku Klux Klan enforcer. Encountering the actress at a Hollywood party after seeing the film, Hitchcock told her, “You can act. I hope to use you in one of my pictures.”

Or perhaps he was just being polite. According to songwriter Jay Livingston, who wrote the theme song for
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, Day wouldn’t have appeared in the remake if not for pressure from MCA, which represented Hitchcock and the actress. “His agent, MCA, said he couldn’t have [James] Stewart unless he took Doris Day,” recalled Livingston. “He told us he didn’t want Doris Day, but he had to take her. He was very happy with her later.”

When Day signed on in the spring of 1955, her persona forced a change in the evolving script. Anything other than a wholesome type seemed a stretch for Day—and for her loyal audiences. In the original
Man Who Knew Too Much
, the mother-character is a flirt who dances with Louis Bernard; not in the remake, where she chiefly shows suspicion toward the Frenchman. And when the McKennas tour the Marrakech bazaar in the remake and Jo notices an Arab woman with an infant slung over her back, she astonishes her husband by blurting out, “When are we going to have another baby?” This raises a subtext—thwarted sexuality, or motherhood—that is never revisited.

Although Jimmy Stewart would assume his well-rehearsed rube persona for the film, in real life it was Day who more closely resembled the “typical American.” At the time of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, she had never been outside the United States; she was petrified of airplanes, traveling
whenever possible by boat. Arriving in Marrakech, she found the climate “ungodly hot,” and was shocked by the “poverty and malnutrition.” There wasn’t much she could do about the poverty, but as an animal lover the star used her clout to demand that all the hoofed and feathered creatures used in the production be well fed on the film budget.

On-screen it was Stewart who fumbled his way through the Moroccan dining experience, but off-camera it was Day.
^*
“The diners filled their plates from a community pot
with their hands!
” she wrote in her memoirs. “Well, D. Day is a lady of rather simple, hygienic eating habits and there was no way I was going to dig into the couscous or anything else.” Although Hitchcock hosted the occasional rescue dinner with food flown in from Paris, Day was miserable in Marrakech, taking to her bed for days with pleurisy.

She waited in vain for the great director Alfred Hitchcock to step up and
direct
her. “I loved him personally,” Day recalled. “We would go to dinner and laugh, and he was warm and loving, just really sweet. But I didn’t understand him on the set.” Did Hitchcock even approve of the way she was performing her role? She had no clue. Left to her own devices, the actress feared she was floundering. When Day complained about Hitchcock to Stewart, her costar tried to reassure her: “That’s the way he is.”

In other films Day could be a deft comedienne, but in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
the on-screen bumbling was shifted almost entirely to the leading man. Hitchcock had always minimized the aw-shucks side of Jimmy Stewart, but now he encouraged the star to improvise for laughs. Yet Stewart’s fish-out-of-water antics as he struggles to learn Moroccan table manners are feeble (and illogical, considering that his character might have learned something about the culture during World War II). The British tourists of the original are sophisticates; the remake Americans seem blithely ignorant of the cuisine, language, and customs of their hosts.

The scene where Stewart gets into a comic scuffle with a taxidermist (getting his hand bitten by a stuffed tiger) had been deliberately underwritten to allow for impromptu creativity on the set; but this, too, became a weak scene—and a particular mistake, as Hitchcock conceded in later interviews, considering the hilarity of the dentist scene from the original that it replaced.

Stewart was curiously better in high drama for Hitchcock; he doesn’t reach his best in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
until after the kidnapping,
when his character is reduced to impotence and desperate action. Surprisingly, for one of Hollywood’s gifted gabbers, Stewart was better for Hitchcock when he
wasn’t
talking; he was better watching and agonizing—as in the Albert Hall sequence. After one run-through, Hitchcock told Stewart to forget all about the script, and then he wiped out his dialogue on the sound track; the actor’s mouth works furiously throughout the scene, but all that can be heard is the orchestral score.