It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (24 page)

She answered the phone pretending to be her maid.

Her lifeline became the telephone. She loved to talk with friends, especially in America at three or four in the morning, which with six hours difference in time was a good moment for her. She liked to make the call, choosing the moment that suited her mood, rather than accepting a call. It was difficult even for close friends to guess the right moment.

When I called her in Paris, the phone was answered by a distinctive voice, speaking French, but with a German accent, immediately recognizable as that of Miss Dietrich. She said, “Miss Dietrich is out—out of the country. She will not be back for a very long time.” The implication was that for
you
she would
never
be back.

I finally had the opportunity to ask Marlene Dietrich about
Stage Fright.
“Oh, which one was that, dear?” she said. When I reminded her that it was her Hitchcock picture, she laughed. She said that most people thought
Witness for the Prosecution,
in which she also starred, was her Hitchcock picture. I asked her how the two directors were different.

She explained that she never knew Mr. Hitchcock in the same way she knew Billy Wilder. “What a charming, funny, and kind man Billy was,” she said. “Mr. Hitchcock was a very intelligent director, and he was a gentleman, an English gentleman, though I found him very European. I never cooked chicken soup for Mr. Hitchcock the way I did for Billy Wilder. But I gave him some recipes. He was interested in cooking, but more in eating. I told him I always wore a hair net when I cooked. He did not have to worry about that, though, because he did not have so many hairs.

“We talked about food. He loved European restaurants, and luxe hotels. Mr. Hitchcock and Billy both knew French. Both men were gallant.” They never “interfered” with her as she remembered.

“I was with Tyrone Power in the Wilder film and with Richard Todd in Mr. Hitchcock’s picture. They looked alike. They were both very handsome men, and it is always a pleasure to look at a handsome man.”

“I
N THE EARLY
1950
S
, I was producing a radio and television show called
Twenty Questions,”
publicist Gary Stevens told me. “It was sponsored by Ronson Lighters.

“One day the vice president of sales approached me and said blatantly, ‘I know you know Alfred Hitchcock. Why can’t you get a plug for Ronson Lighters in one of his movies? We don’t have to get the name mentioned, because people seeing it will know it’s a Ronson.’

“Hitchcock was preparing a picture at the time called
Strangers on a Train.
When I told him about it, he said, ‘If this is important to you, I’ll get it in some way. I’ll work out something.’

“I thought he would throw it in on a table or something, but one of the thematic points in the entire movie was the lighter. Well, you’re talking to the guy who planted that thing. Hitchcock made a picture about a lighter, and he did it for me as a favor.

“We had dinner one night, and he said, ‘Gary, you better do a good job on this one, because I put your damn lighter in there.’

“After that, I was a very big man with the company, and they should have given me a few thousand dollars for it. I got a set of the lighter and a platter. It was worth $125, cost them $49.”

H
ITCHCOCK WAS IMPRESSED
by a novel he had just read,
Strangers on a Train,
by the then unknown Patricia Highsmith. Though anxious to buy the film rights, he instructed his representatives not to reveal the bidder. It had been his experience that not only would they have to pay an “unreasonable” sum, but that sometimes the agents might decide the property had such an exalted value that it would never be purchased at all. “Terrible,” he said. “Writers can be difficult, but their agents, worse.”

Hitchcock selected mystery writer Raymond Chandler to write the screenplay. As with Billy Wilder on
Double Indemnity,
Chandler was an incompatible collaborator. Though he was a fast worker, Chandler’s first draft didn’t please Hitchcock, and Ben Hecht was asked to work on it. Being unavailable, Hecht recommended his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, who completed the script after shooting had begun.

Hitchcock originally had wanted William Holden for the part of Guy Haines, the professional tennis player who unwittingly becomes involved in a murder by a clever madman. Farley Granger won the part. For the insane Bruno Anthony, Hitchcock wanted Robert Walker, casting him against type. Pat Hitchcock was cast as Barbara, the younger sister of Ruth Roman, the tennis player’s love interest.
Strangers
was the beginning of cinematographer Robert Burks’s long association with Hitchcock.

The runaway merry-go-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses were added for the film. Chandler had ended his version of the screenplay with Bruno straitjacketed in an asylum. Hitchcock remembered a runaway merry-go-round in an English novel called
The Moving Toy Shop.
In the novel
Strangers on a Train,
Guy, who is an architect, leaves a book in Bruno’s train compartment, not a lighter.

This novel was for Hitchcock a “delicious” example of the kinds of characters he liked: the charming villain and a mixture of shades of gray in the hero, not just black and white, and the exchange-of-murders concept delighted him. The finished film was one of his favorites.

Farley Granger and I met for coffee and cake at the Petrossian Café in New York City after
Strangers
had played the night before on television. In 2003, except for his silver hair, he looked very much like Guy Haines in 1951, ready for a set of tennis. I asked him if, when he made that film, he had any idea people would be watching it a half century later on television?

He laughed. “I didn’t even know how important
television
was going to be, and I certainly didn’t know I’d be here to watch it!”

He described how he came to be in
Strangers on a Train.

“I got a phone call to go to Hitch’s house. I’d just come back from Europe. We sat out on the terrace of this wonderful little house he had for years and years and years. And he told me the whole story of
Strangers.

“His telling it was as good as seeing it, because he was a wonderful storyteller. He said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ and I said, ‘Of course I would.’ And he said, ‘All right.’

“He’d cast Robert Walker in the part of the murderer. A very interesting idea. Walker had a lot of trouble at this time. Drunkenness and everything, because he really did love Jennifer Jones, and he’d lost her to [David] Selznick. I said, ‘Oh, I think that’s terrific. He’s just a wonderful, wonderful actor.’ Hitch said, ‘Yes. Wouldn’t it be interesting if something happened during the movie.’ I said, ‘Hitch, that’s
terrible
to say that,’ and he laughed. I
think
he meant a scandal.

“Walker had always, up to that moment, played the boy next door in movies like
The Clock,
but Hitchcock cast him as evil, manipulative, a nut case. It started his career up again, you know.

“The last time I saw Robert Walker was at somebody’s house. He said, ‘We’ve got to get together. You know, we haven’t seen each other for a long time.’ I said, ‘Sure, we will.’ And he died, and we never did.

“Hitchcock had to take Ruth Roman because it was a Warner’s movie, and no one else in the cast was under contract to Warner’s. I thought she was good, but he didn’t like her much, and she didn’t go for him, because she felt he hadn’t wanted her.

“He treated Pat [Hitchcock] as just one of the cast. And she behaved like that. They had evidently made a bargain, and they were totally professional.”

“Were you really that good a tennis player?” I asked.

“No, but I played. A lot of it is me. I was proud of that. As soon as I knew I was doing it, they set me up taking lessons, but I’d been playing tennis for quite a while at Charlie Chaplin’s house. So, I did know pretty well. Chaplin wanted people to come and play tennis, and I just got to know him and his wife Oona, who was the daughter of Eugene O’Neill.”

“What was the most difficult scene for you?” I asked.

“The merry-go-round.”

Hitchcock told me that this was the most personally frightening moment for him in any of his films. The man who crawled under the out-of-control carousel was not an actor or a stuntman, but a carousel operator who volunteered for the job. “If the man had raised his head even slightly,” Hitchcock said, “it would have gone from being a suspense film into a horror film.”

“Hitchcock was a genius,” Granger continued. “You felt his mind always working under that calm exterior, which didn’t show any strain. The technical people loved and respected him. He not only understood what they were doing, he had conceived it and created the effects, and he could explain it to them, how to achieve more than they thought they could, like with actors. A thing I loved was if you went up on a line or something wasn’t right with what you did, he’d say, ‘Let’s do another one.’ I’d say, ‘Oh, damn it! I’m sorry, Hitch,’ and he’d say, ‘It’s only a
moo
-vie.’

“I love that thing with our feet in the beginning, the contrast in the shoes we were wearing, and what it tells about us, and then how it’s our shoes that meet first. And Hitchcock making his cameo carrying a double bass fiddle. He could poke a little fun at himself.

“Sometime at home, in front of guests, he’d say something terrible and outrageous. And Alma would say, ‘Oh, Hitchie! Oh, Hitchie!’

“You know, when we were making this film, it was a thrill to work with the master, Hitchcock, and we thought the picture was really good, but we didn’t know it was going to be one of the greats, and that half a century later, we’d appreciate it more, those of us who are around to appreciate it. I look so young, and I’m proud of my performance.

“Something that really impressed me was that he was so very formal and always wore a dark suit and tie, even when we were working outside on the tennis court, when it was nearly a hundred. Hitch never took off his jacket. He didn’t even loosen his tie. I took it as an act of respect for the film.

“Hitch talked a lot with Robert Burks, the cinematographer. He seemed to think a lot of him.”

This was the first of twelve films Burks would do for Hitchcock, the last of which would be
Marnie.
He missed
Psycho
because Hitchcock used his television crew.

Granger continued: “I remember Hitchcock said to me one night when we were shooting that he was bored because he knew how the story ended. I took it straight when he said it to me, because I was really new to everything, but I think he was really worried about getting the picture up there on the screen as good as the one he’d seen in his head.

“He had absolutely everything figured out and had this wonderful memory, so he never forgot anything. I wish I had his memory. Well, maybe not. Sometimes there are a few things you want to forget.

“I don’t think I ever saw him get emotional so it showed, and some of the time he must have been frustrated. He seemed detached to some people, but I think he felt a great deal. He just had to keep this detachment, so he would always seem in perfect control. He was always very kind to me, and I liked him. Still do.

“We never discussed any homoerotic attraction Walker’s character had for me, but I think Hitch did that with Walker, and he just wanted me to act kind of normal and not be aware of too much undercurrent. Of course, Hitch understood all of this, and he knew what he could do, and what we could do. He had a light touch. It was his way, and it worked because he got the best out of you.

“I’m asked more about
Strangers on a Train
than any of my other films.
Strangers
has a wonderful aura. The darkness of it, and then the brightness of the tennis. It’s still so funny. I love it.”

The British
Strangers on a Train
lasted two minutes longer than the American. The ending on a train with a minister unsuccessfully trying to have a conversation with Guy and Anne was cut for American audiences as well as in some British prints.

Hitchcock told me that the picture should have ended with Guy at the amusement park after he has been cleared of murdering his wife. He wanted the last line of the film to be Guy describing Bruno as “a very clever fellow.” This ending, however, was not acceptable for Warner Brothers.

For the American ending, in which Anne and Barbara are waiting for Guy’s call, Hitchcock had an oversized telephone built and put in the foreground, to emphasize the importance of the call they were expecting, while enabling the cameraman to keep the foreground and background in focus.

When the phone rings, Anne reaches for it and then answers a normal-sized phone. “I did that on one take,” Hitchcock explained, “by moving in on Anne so that the big phone went out of the frame as she reached for it. Then a grip put a normal-sized phone on the table, where she picked it up.”

One of the most memorable images in a Hitchcock film is the reflection in Miriam’s fallen eyeglasses of Bruno strangling her.

“This scene is studied by film classes,” Laura Elliott, who played Miriam, told me. “Bob Walker strangles me, and my glasses fall to the ground. To get the shot, the camera seems to shoot into the lens, and you see me floating down to the earth, Bob Walker standing up with his hands held out and his hat on and the leaves around him.

“We shot that on an absolutely empty soundstage, and Robert Walker was not even there.

“We shot the master in the exterior. Where he puts his hands around my throat, he was there, of course. Then the glasses fall off, I fall, and you cut to the shot on the soundstage. On the floor was a round, maybe three-foot-diameter kind of concave reflector, not a mirror, but a reflector, and the camera shot into that reflector.

“Mr. Hitchcock said, ‘All right, Laura, now go stand with your back to the mirror,’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I want you to float backwards, all the way to the floor.’

“I looked at him. ‘You want me to
float
to the floor?’