Hitch (15 page)

So here was the very English Hitch set to direct a very Irish subject—and one, moreover, which as an outstanding stage success had its own coherence and consistency and would brook very little modification, even if he had thought this a good thing to do. In fashioning the screenplay Hitch and Alma stuck very close to the original: he kept thinking desperately ‘How can I get out of the room?' but the only important point at which he felt the text could stand some expansion was at the opening. He wanted anyway to show the pub where they drank, a very important part of their
lives, so he persuaded O'Casey to write a new scene in the pub leading up to an energetically staged riot and shooting. The rest of the film follows the play so exactly that it has, Hitch says, nothing to do with cinema, as he could see no way of narrating the story in cinematic form. He did, though, photograph the stage play with a lot of imagination and sometimes considerable technical ingenuity. The imagination is still of course apparent, but it frequently needs an exercise in historical reconstruction to be fully aware of the technical ingenuity. There is a scene, for instance, in which the family is talking in the living room, gathered excitedly round the new phonograph, oblivious of the fact that the son is crouched in anguish by the fireplace. Their conversation is interrupted by a funeral passing in the street outside, and then by gunfire, and meanwhile the camera moves in from a general view of the room and the family, past them to a close-up of the guilty boy by the fire and his reactions.

Easy enough, one would say, in terms of modern film-making. But what one forgets is that at the time the film was made all the sound had to be produced and recorded on the spot. So there had to be a phonograph playing ‘If You're Irish, Come into the Parlour', and the sound of the Marian hymn being sung by the funeral procession as it passes, and the gunfire, and the conversation all created on one tiny stage. Unfortunately, to complicate matters, they could not find a suitable recording of the required song, so that too had to be done on the stage. Consequently, as well as the actors and the camera crew, there were present a small orchestra without basses to simulate the right tinny, distant sound, a prop man singing the song while holding his nose to sound as though it was coming from a phonograph, an effects man at the ready with the machinegun effect, and a choir of about twenty people to represent the funeral. All to be synchronized with the dialogue and fluctuating in relative volume and intensity as the window is opened and closed. It is a tribute to the success of the result that one would never guess at the problems involved.

Despite Hitch's anxieties about making the text cinematic, the film turned out very successfully, and was praised by the critics of the time to such an extent that it seriously embarrassed him. James Agate, famously difficult to please, wrote in the
Tatler, ‘Juno and the Paycock
appears to me to be very nearly a masterpiece. Bravo Mr. Hitchcock! Bravo the Irish Players and bravo Edward Chapman!
This is a magnificent British picture.' Others did not lag far behind. Hitch was flattered, but felt rather guilty, as though he was stealing the praise which should really have gone elsewhere, since the qualities of the film, in his view, had little to do with cinema. At least, it would seem, O'Casey did not share this view: he was so happy with the result that he and Hitch began almost immediately working together on an original screenplay to be called
The Park
, which would use the comings and goings in a small public park during one day as a sort of microcosm of city life. Some minor failure of communication—as simple as a misunderstanding about who should call whom—caused the project to fall by the wayside, but O'Casey subsequently went on to reshape the script into his play
Within the Gate
. Hitch, though he saw little or nothing of O'Casey in later years, retained an affectionate memory of him, not untinged with malice, and confesses that some of both went into the character of the old bum prophesying the imminent end of the world in
The Birds
.

Much more to Hitch's taste, and in the perspective of his later films much closer to ‘typical Hitchcock', was his next film,
Murder
. Not that, in one important respect, it is ‘typical Hitchcock'; it is a whodunit, a genre which Hitch in general disapproves of, or at least finds relatively uninteresting, as it falls foul of his oft-stated belief in suspense as opposed to surprise—too much attention is concentrated on the purely mechanical matter of the conclusion and working out which of the various possible characters did actually do whatever it was that was done. The story of
Murder
is derived from a detective thriller by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson called
Enter Sir John
; a theatrical knight turns amateur sleuth when he becomes uncertain that a jury he has been on was right to convict a young woman of murder. In the tradition of many a gentleman detective he sets out to solve the case himself, quite disinterestedly, to set his own mind at rest, and finally comes up with the odd but reasonably convincing conclusion that the real culprit is a transvestite half-caste acrobat.

Even if the whodunit structure was not particularly appealing to Hitch, he obviously found a lot to enjoy in the film itself, which gave him many opportunities to explore odd by-ways of human behaviour and is packed full of invention and recollection. The rather grand theatrical knight (an excellent performance by Herbert Marshall) is at once approved of and lightly mocked—he
can be a proper gentleman, as when he considerately eats his soup with the same spoon as his ineradicably ‘common' guest has chosen and gives subtle pointers as to what to do with the cherry in a cocktail, but also he comes in for his share of sly humour, as when he is beset with his landlady's many terrible children in bed at the crummy lodgings he has taken to inspect the scene and milieu of the crime. Hitch's memories of the grandeur of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as manager of Her Majesty's Theatre came in handy when Sir John is receiving the humble theatricals from the provinces: the vast expanse of very thick-pile carpet the trembling visitor had to traverse to reach Tree's desk in the office is exaggerated, in the film, by putting a mattress under the carpet to give the subjective impression that the visitor is actually sinking in knee deep. And the vision of his mother struggling to get both legs into one knicker leg during an air raid is recreated in the opening sequence when screams signalling that a murder has taken place awaken a whole neighbourhood, causing various kinds of response as the camera tracks along outside a row of windows.

Since so much in the story turns, or seems to turn, on nice class distinctions, a lot of attempts have been made to pin down Hitch's attitudes in the matter, snob or anti-snob, rebellious or grovelling towards the Establishment. In fact, as we might expect, he is too cagey, or naturally given to paradox, or just bound up in the dramatic values of the story from scene to scene, to commit himself unambiguously. There is no doubt that the workings of the jury in the early scenes (and consequently the conviction of the innocent young actress) turn on the most obvious kind of social one-upmanship and the class prejudice of the shakily genteel against the evidently common. And there are certainly points at which the loftiness of Sir John is humorously deflated. On the other hand one might detect a certain patronizing of people who don't know which is a soup spoon and are allowed to make fools of themselves in social games which are not worth playing anyway. No doubt a lot of this can be accounted for by the conventions of the period, such as the source of the trouble involving the real murderer being located in the secret information that he is a half-caste (it is a threat to reveal this which causes the murder)—in those days obviously, no position, liberal or otherwise, had to be taken on race prejudice and no serious question was raised over the use of terms like ‘half-caste' in an evidently derogatory sense. Whether this should be pushed further,
to assume (given the character's habit of performing in drag) that half-caste is a sort of code word for homosexual, is more arguable: despite the rather affected, effeminate presence of Esmé Percy in the role, there does not seem to be any real evidence of this intention in the film, and Hitch was even then too sophisticated in his knowledge of sexual peculiarities to make the naïve equation of transvestism (especially merely theatrical transvestism) with homosexuality.

In the course of shooting the film Hitch decided to experiment with improvised dialogue in order to get a feeling of spontaneity. He would discuss with the actors what the scene was about and, in general terms, what they should be saying, then set them to invent their own dialogue as they went along. Unfortunately the results were none too happy—the actors seemed embarrassed and self-conscious, and Hitch decided that whatever good effects others might get that way, improvisation was not for him. Other innovations in the film were more fruitful. In accord, perhaps, with the frequent references to
Hamlet
in the script (a trap is laid for a suspect with a play within a play, for instance), the hero is given a soliloquy, an interior monologue delivered on the sound track while we see Herbert Marshall's face unmoving in camera. This has the advantage of revealing his inner thoughts and providing a very direct, natural-seeming piece of exposition, and though the studio thought audiences would find it obscure (where was the voice coming from?) in practice it seems to have presented no problem. There was also a scene in which Herbert Marshall is shown shaving in his bathroom with the sound of the radio playing the Prelude to
Tristan und Isolde
—another problem, in the primitive recording conditions then prevailing, which could be solved only by tucking a thirty-piece orchestra somewhere behind the wash-basin.

Whatever problems Hitch may have had in shooting
Murder
, they were more than doubled by his having undertaken to shoot at the same time a German-language version,
Mary
. This making of versions in two or three different languages, often with widely varying casts, was a habit of early talkies, intended to counteract the sudden sharp limitation of potential audiences for any given film in Europe with the coming of dialogue. It had even been done in the silent cinema occasionally—Hitch's
Champagne
, for example, also exists in a German version directed by Géza von Bolvary. With Hitch's hard-won grasp of German he seemed to be a good person to direct both versions of this talkie, but he found it was a lot more
difficult than he thought. He did go to Berlin in advance to discuss the script, and was sufficiently confident to turn down most of the suggestions the German producers made for modifications—mistakenly, he came to feel. In English he knew the audience, he knew what would be funny and what would not, he was in complete control of the pacing and tone. But in German he was not, and constantly found his attempts to keep the German version as close as possible to the English (for budget reasons if nothing else) being thwarted by the discomfort of the German actors and sometimes their flat refusal to do things which seemed very simple and acceptable to their English counter-parts.

Alfred Abel, who played the role taken in the English version by Herbert Marshall, would not play the scene in which the actor has to be tormented by his landlady's children while taking his morning cup of tea in bed: this was not suitable treatment for such a distinguished man, he insisted. When the character goes to visit the convicted (but innocent) supposed murderess in prison, Herbert Marshall wore a raincoat and tweeds, having shed his slightly ridiculous actor-manager garb of black jacket and striped trousers for clothes more suitable for the role of detective. Abel insisted on wearing formal clothes, since he was going (whatever the circumstances) to meet a young lady, and anything less grand would have been to German audiences not rather funny but merely unseemly. Needless to say, Hitch did not get on too well with Abel (though he enjoyed working with Olga Tchekowa, later a favourite actress of Hitler's, who played opposite Abel in the German version), but he had to admit that maybe Abel was correct, in that he had for once bitten off rather more than he could chew.

Still,
Murder
, the English version anyway, did maintain his reputation with critics and public, and his next film, if a photographed stage play on much the same pattern as
Juno and the Paycock
, was a safe and intellectually respectable venture from which he extracted himself as usual with credit. John Galsworthy's play
The Skin Game
had been produced in London back in 1920, and concerned a fight to the death between two families, one country gentry, the other
nouveaux riches
industrialists, over a piece of land near the country town where they both live. It is talky, serious and meticulously constructed, offering little opportunity for opening out or unmistakably cinematic effects. In the circumstances Hitch decided to make a virtue of necessity by tackling it head on: the virtues and the
faults are much more of Galsworthy than of Hitchcock. Hitch, indeed, hardly obtrudes himself apart from some big subjective close-ups to dramatize a faint, and the whole style of the film is cool and simple, very different from the almost expressionist feeling of
Murder
. In the preparation of the film Hitch, still an avid playgoer, did get to meet the aging playwright and was invited down to a week-end at Galsworthy's country house. He found Galsworthy living in some style (the success of
The Forsyte Saga
in particular had made him rich as well as famous) surrounded by a large household. Hitch put his foot in it immediately. Mrs. Galsworthy asked him what kind of music he liked. ‘Wagner,' replied Hitch; ‘he's so melodramatic' ‘Oh, no,' said Mrs. Galsworthy conclusively; ‘
we
like Bach.' Then over dinner Hitch discovered that Galsworthy prescribed the subjects of conversation. ‘We shall talk about …' he began, and everyone tried manfully to do as he said. Then when he was tired of the subject he would begin another with ‘And now we shall discuss …' Hitch recalls, as through a haze, a rather surrealistic part of the conversation in which Galsworthy announced they would discuss the relations of objects and then said, ‘Now suppose I have one grain of sago on this side, and one on that. Neither is aware of the other. Yet there must be some connection.…' Why sago, wondered Hitch, as his attention mercifully drifted away. Hitch was amused as much as impressed by Galsworthy's assumption of the grand manner, and some of his own ambiguous feelings surely filtered into the film, where things seem ultimately to be weighted against the gentry rather more heavily than in the play.