It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (39 page)

“‘The great Russian director Pudovkin filmed a lady looking down at her lap. He said she should be staring at nothing, just staring down. The director then inserted two different things: an empty plate, which signified hunger, and then a dead baby, with the same look, staring at her lap, remorse, horrible remorse.’

“So, what Mr. Hitchcock was telling me was, if you’ve got a strong enough framework around you, the director is doing most of the work, so don’t muck it up.

“There’s a great scene where Rico Parra hears something from a woman holding her dying husband in her arms, and they’re traitors. Rico comes into the room, and he says, ‘What’s going on?’ She sort of mumbles. So he gets closer, and finally his ear goes practically into her mouth, and he gets the bad news that his lady friend is a traitor. Then, of course, he pulls back, and there’s a shot of him taking it in.

“The next day Mr. Hitchcock says, ‘John, we have to do that scene again.’ Just after you hear the bad news. ‘I was a little too far away from you. I shouldn’t have cut you below the knees. I should have cut you
at
the knees.’ So, talk about a mathematician or something!

“He fell asleep once during a long take, and no one dared wake him up. But we didn’t want him to stay there the whole afternoon. Finally, he started to clear his throat. He quietly opened his eyes. He looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, how was it John?’ I didn’t know what the hell to say. He started to laugh, and that was it.

“When I shoot Juanita, it was a love scene, really, holding her at arm’s length, and looking down at her like that. Meanwhile, the gun is coming out of the holster, which you never see, and she’s shot.

“There was another scene in a big conference room where the camera seemed to skim right along the table. There were stagehands on either side of the table, who pulled the chairs right out of the scene to allow the camera in. That was a ballet off-screen.

“Mr. Hitchcock was never late. Sometimes he’d say, ‘We’ll finish a little early. Come into my study,’ his trailer, ‘and we’ll imbibe and tell stories.’

“When Mr. Hitchcock died, Pat and her husband received a lot of things, and one of them was a $6 million cache of wine, from all over the world. And Pat’s husband, Joe was his name, said, ‘John, you won’t believe it. I got all this wine, and I’ve got twenty-five years AA.’”

I
N ITS FRAGMENTED PLOT
and documentary style,
Topaz
harks back to Hitchcock’s 1944 World War II French shorts,
Bon Voyage
and
Aventure malgache.
Jeanne’s murder by the Gestapo agent in
Bon Voyage
is similar to Juanita’s death in
Topaz,
and in both, the pistols that kill the sympathetic women are not shown. Like
Topaz, Aventure malgache
is a complex story about politically duplicitous people with no really central characters. Like the French shorts,
Topaz
is set during a critical international moment, when the Cold War threatened to become a hot war.

Topaz
was shot in Copenhagen, Wiesbaden, Paris, Washington, D.C., New York, and at Universal Studios in Hollywood. It was not successful financially or critically.

While in Europe making preparations for the filming of
Topaz,
Hitchcock visited Ingmar Bergman in Stockholm. Bergman suggested he use two Swedish actors, Per-Axel Arosenius and Sonja Kolthoff, for the Soviet defector and his wife. Then, Hitchcock traveled with Coleman and Taylor to Finland to scout locations for
The Short Night,
another Cold War novel he hoped to bring to the screen. His next film, however, was to be
Frenzy.

The camera operator on
Frenzy,
Paul Wilson, spoke with me about Hitchcock.

“When I got to know him better, he was always asking after your family. He was a lovely man. He could be hard with people, actors in particular. He used to purposely fall asleep if he was fed up with the performance. I think he’d lay it on. He’d do a bit of pretense. And in pretending, he
did
fall asleep.

“He drew a lot of pictures, and when you put the camera near to what he wanted, it all fell in line. Uncanny. He’d made the picture in his head. He would tell me what I’d got in the camera, and it was right there on the ground glass exactly as he said.

“If there was a problem, it was always, ‘We’ve got a problem with that shot,’ not ‘
You’ve
got a problem,’ or ‘
I’ve
got a problem.’”

Wilson also worked with Charlie Chaplin as the camera operator on
The Countess from Hong Kong.

“They were extraordinary people, completely opposite. Charlie Chaplin hated to move the camera. I suggested on one occasion that we track into a wedding cake. And he said, ‘I don’t want any Hitchcock stuff in
my
picture.’

“Chaplin didn’t just have his dolly marks chalked in, he had them
painted
in, because that was where the camera was going to stay. It was the same with the actors. During a rehearsal, Marlon Brando, having been standing in the same place for several pages of dialogue, said, ‘Charlie, I feel I ought to move a little during all of this.’

“‘Marlon,’ Chaplin replied, ‘when I want you to move, I’ll tell you.’

“‘Okay, Charlie,’ said Brando, and that was it.

“With Hitchcock, it was totally different. There was nearly always a technically challenging shot in each film. In
Frenzy,
it was when we follow Barry Foster as he leads Anna Massey from the street up the stairs to his room, and then after they go in, we pull back down the stairs and back into Covent Garden and look up at the window where that room is. It had to appear as if it was shot continuously when it was actually two shots, half studio interior and half location, joined by a useful sack of beetroots. It gave me and my assistant, Gil Taylor, quite a workout.”

Rusty Coppleman, the sound editor for
Frenzy,
appreciated Hitchcock’s sense of humor.

“In the scene where the hero thinks he’s beating the villain about the head with an automobile crank, Hitch was a bit concerned, censorship-wise, about the noise that we should apply on this. He said, “Go out and buy a couple of melons, and hit those and see what sound you get.’” The melon sounded extremely bloodthirsty, like brains being splattered. A cabbage didn’t work, so I devised a sound.

“Then, I wrapped a bandage around my head, with a few streaks of red on it from a marking pen. We ran this scene with the sound I’d created, and Hitch said, ‘That’s very good.’

“I said, ‘I hope that sounded authentic enough for you.’

“He saw the bandage, with the red on it, and said, ‘Do you want an aspirin?’

Hitchcock chose a playwright rather than the novelist to adapt
Frenzy,
which was based on the book
Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square,
by Arthur La Bern. The title of the novel was taken from the popular World War I song, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

“I would say the playwright rather than the novelist is generally the better for adapting for the screen,” Hitchcock explained. “You need scenes that can ‘play’ as people from the theater can write them for you. Who was it who once said that drama is life with the dull bits cut out? Compression belongs to the playwright, not the novelist.”

On New Year’s Eve, just before 1970 became 1971, playwright Anthony Shaffer received what he considered one of the most memorable phone calls of his life. Amidst the banging sounds of cracker party favors, the popping of corks, and the buzz of celebratory conversations, Shaffer heard a strangely familiar voice, announcing himself as Alfred Hitchcock. The voice asked would he, Anthony Shaffer, be interested in writing a screenplay for his next film?

Shaffer assumed it must be a joke, because who, after all, would call anyone at a time like that to ask if he would like to write the screenplay for a Hitchcock film? He listened for a while, trying to detect which of his friends was trying to fool him. As he listened, it dawned on him that the caller might really
be
Alfred Hitchcock.

Peter Shaffer recalled how his twin brother, Anthony, became the screenplay writer for
Frenzy.
At the time, Anthony’s play
Sleuth
was playing on the London stage to great acclaim.

“Hitchcock was interviewing Tony, and they were talking about Hitchcock’s sort of credo, the MacGuffin, and all that, the willing suspension of disbelief, and so on. Hitchcock was saying that although his pictures are very often high melodrama and border on the improbable, there was absolutely nothing in them that was illogical or dependent on pure chance.

“‘I challenge you, dear boy,’ Hitchcock said. ‘You’ll never find anything like that in the plots of my films.’

“Tony said, ‘Oh, really? I wonder if I can take you up on that?’

“They went to the little cinema by Hitchcock’s office, and Tony said, ‘Can we see
North by Northwest
?’

“There was the scene where Cary Grant is being chased by both the spies and the police in New York, and he ends up desperate and frightened in the concourse of Grand Central. He says to the man behind the grille of the ticket office, ‘Give me a ticket to Chicago.’ When the ticket seller hesitates because he recognizes him as a wanted man, Cary Grant leaves without a ticket and boards the
20th Century Limited.
Eva Marie Saint and the villains are already there.

“Tony asked, ‘How did they know which train he was going to take?’

“Hitchcock responded, ‘Daggers at dawn.’

“After a long silence, Hitchcock said, ‘You’ve got the job, if you want it.’”

As he worked with Hitchcock, Shaffer found he was always hungry. Their daily lunch in Hitchcock’s bungalow on the Universal lot was leaving him wishing for more food, and for some variety.

Hitchcock followed his daily regimen of steak, ground or filet, and during the first days, Shaffer ate the same and didn’t say anything. He depended on the candy bar machine to sustain him.

One day, referring to the steak, potatoes, and salad lunch, Hitchcock said, “That was delicious.”

Shaffer agreed. Then he ventured, “But I thought I might like to order something different one of these days.”

“Of course, dear boy, of course,” Hitchcock said. “Tomorrow.”

The next day, Shaffer joined Hitchcock in his studio bungalow for lunch, expecting to be offered a wider range of choices from the Universal commissary menu. Instead, he was stunned to find the office filled with elaborate serving trays, chafing dishes, food warmers, and casseroles, succulent entrées, appetizing aromas, and an enticing dessert cart.

Hitchcock had ordered what Shaffer described as “a fifteen-course meal” from Chasen’s, complete with a waiter from the restaurant to serve it. After lunch, Shaffer, far from being able to work more effectively, could scarely work at all. He could think only about a nap. The next day it was back to steak and potatoes.

Film and theatrical producer David Brown remembered once flying cross-country on the same flight with Hitchcock and Alma. “They were going to New York, and Hitchcock spent the whole trip talking about what restaurants they were going to and what he was going to order in each. In those days, it was Lutèce and Pavillon.

“During the luncheons at Universal that Dick Zanuck and I had with Hitch in his private dining room, he would expound on his theories of filmmaking. He told us he never shot anything that wouldn’t be used in the film. Another theory was it’s better if we know who the perpetrator is and the characters don’t. That was one of his chief theories of suspense.”

Curtis Harrington, in London at the time Hitchcock was filming
Frenzy,
spoke with him and Alma during their happy days there, before her stroke. Invited by friends to an elegant and very expensive restaurant, Harrington saw the Hitchcocks and Joan Harrison at another table.

“I discreetly waited until they finished their dessert and coffee before I went over to pay my respects,” Harrington remembered. Mr. Hitchcock immediately recognized me, and he greeted me warmly. He introduced me to his wife and Miss Harrison, and at that moment, the captain arrived with the check. Mr. Hitchcock reached for his wallet. He couldn’t find it. He looked up at me, very innocently.

“‘Oh, Curtis,’ he said, clearly enunciating my name, ‘I seem to have come out without my wallet. I wonder, could you…’

“I nearly died. I didn’t have that kind of money on me. Or off me. I was probably looking pale. He reached into his pocket again, and this time, he found his wallet. That was his sense of humor.”