Hitch (4 page)

And there, with such little triumphs to spur him on, Alfred Hitchcock might quite possibly have stayed. The company, and the job, seemed reasonably safe—Henleys was eventually merged into a conglomerate, AEI Cables, which still exists, and one or two members of the firm who joined around the same time as Hitchcock retired within the last fifteen years. But clearly Hitchcock was already chafing, reading the cinema trade papers, and spending all possible spare time at the theatre or the cinema. He was shy with girls, and did not even know many of the basic facts of life, having been kept, like most young men of his time, in discreet ignorance by his family and his teachers. All his energies as he reached his twenties were directed towards getting on in the world, and he was already determined that it should be in the direction he wanted. In 1919 he read in one of the trade papers that the Hollywood company Famous Players-Lasky (what was eventually to become Paramount) was building a studio in Islington, and was going to set up a whole production schedule of films. This sounded like a chance to get into movies. But the question, of course, was how.

Exactly why a major American company would want to set up film-making in Britain in 1919 is something of a mystery. The British film industry was already accident-prone: since Lumière first showed his films publicly in London in 1896 films had been made pretty consistently in Britain, and already the industry had undergone at least two major crises, the first in 1909 and the second as recently as 1918. The reason in both cases was much the same—the all too effectual competition of foreign, and particularly American, films. Given the choice, British filmgoers simply preferred the American product. In answer to this, American stars, directors and technicians were already being regularly imported before the 1914-18 War: in 1913 the original London Film Company was set up with largely American staff to make feature films, and the same year Florence Turner, then an important American star, came to London with her own company to produce films, while other American companies scouted for studio sites. The coming of the war to Britain in 1914, however, produced a rapid cooling of interest, and for the duration British film-makers were left to fight on as best they could. But even with the imposition of government taxes on imported film in 1915, American films continued to dominate the market, and it was somewhat ironic that in 1917 the War Office, desirous of making telling films about the war and British national identity, should have brought in big names from Hollywood, D. W. Griffith and Herbert Brenon, to do it.

In 1918 film-making in Britain had come to an almost complete halt. British film-makers got together to discuss what should be done about the situation, and mainly reminisced about the good old days. One of the problems, then as since, was that few British films were able to get adequate distribution outside their own country. Another was that for the most part they looked pretty amateurish
next to their foreign competition. It was no doubt the idea that things might get better if both these problems could be remedied which bought Famous Players-Lasky to Britain in the first months of the new peace. They could bring American know-how to bear on British film production, and, potentially even more useful, they could guarantee American distribution for the British films they made.

‘British', of course, was only a relative term. Though to ease touchy national sensibilities much was made in the trade of the Britishness of the newly formed company, Famous Players-Lasky British Producers Ltd., its control by British capital and a British board, the fact remained that its equipment, its management and most of its regular staff were American, and even those, such as director Donald Crisp and cameraman Hal Young, who were British by origin had been trained and made a name for themselves in Hollywood. Which was no doubt fair enough, in that whatever the supposed advantages of making films in Britain in terms of a specifically British atmosphere (not borne out in the event), there was little argument that what British film-making most needed right then was an infusion of superior American technique in all departments.

That was exactly what Famous Players-Lasky British brought, and what attracted the young Alfred Hitchcock to them in the first place. If one wanted to get into films, and to learn the
métier
, there was no doubt that in 1919 this company was the best place in Britain to do it. When Hitch found out that the company had among their properties set for filming Marie Corelli's novel
The Sorrows of Satan
, he rushed out and bought the book, read it and made some sketches for the designs which might go on the title-cards: suffering devils, hell flames licking, and things of that sort. Then, equipped with these, he boldly went round to the studio in Islington, not very far away from Henleys' office in the City, and showed the company his work. They said that no, unfortunately they had changed plans, and were now going to film
The Great Day
. Nothing daunted, he went away, did a lot of drawings of great days, and was back with them the following day. The company were sufficiently impressed, by his persistence if not by his art, to give him some work, which he did moonlighting from Henleys—an arrangement his immediate superior agreed to on condition that they split the profits 50/50. Very shortly, though, Famous Players offered him a full-time job. And so, at the
age of twenty, Alfred Hitchcock decisively bid farewell to the manufacture and marketing of electric cable and entered what had become his dream situation, the movie industry.

Not that his induction was glamorous. He began work very humbly doing exactly what he had shown himself able to do: designing title-cards for the films the company then had in production. At this time the title-cards were quite elaborate, and also tended to be numerous, since the new idea of various of the more intellectual film-makers, particularly in Germany, that film stories should be told as far as possible in images, with the absolute minimum of intervention by written titles, had not yet really caught on in Hollywood, let alone Britain. Hence, every stage of the story was signalled with printed dialogue and explanatory captions identifying the characters and commenting, novel-wise, on the situations to be seen on the screen. Each one of these title-cards had at least a decorative border; the title itself was generally hand-lettered; and in all probability there would be some kind of graphic flourish, of a rather naïve kind—if the title stated that the hero was leading a fast life, there might be a little drawing accompanying it of a candle burning at both ends, and such. So Hitchcock's was actually quite a sizeable job, and during the next three years he designed the titles for all eleven films made in Britain by Famous Players-Lasky, plus one made independently by one of the directors the company had brought over from Hollywood, Donald Crisp. But very early on, he hired someone to work under him, an older sign-painter with a shop down near Blackfriars Bridge—a demonstration, he says, that he always had enough common sense to realize that just because he had an idea that did not mean he was necessarily the best one to carry it out.

In the company there was a small, closely knit organization. The title department, where the titles were actually written, consisted of Tom Geraghty, who had written for Fairbanks, and Mordaunt Hall, later film critic for
The New York Times
. It was associated with the editorial department, where the subjects for filming were scrutinized and the scripts written. The editorial department consisted primarily of three women writers brought over from America—Eve Unsell, Margaret Turnbull and Ouida Bergere. It was the convention early in the 1920s that scenario-writing was importantly the province of women, like editing, and many of the leading writers in Hollywood, among them June Mathis and
Frances Marion, were women. Seasoned professionals, they ran a little factory whipping the material into shape, mostly from pre-existent plays or novels, though the first Famous Players-Lasky film to go into production in Britain,
The Call of Youth
, was actually based on an original story by one of the more successful senior playwrights in London, Henry Arthur Jones. Sometimes the job of adaptation was quite straightforward, but
Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush
(1921), for instance, was put together by Margaret Turnbull from one novel and two separate plays. There was little these ladies did not know about the technique of screen writing, and in Alfred Hitchcock they found an eager and attentive pupil.

He also learned a lot, even at this very early stage, about the possibilities the film medium offered for manipulating material. The story in silent films was of course told in pictures and words—the words of the titles. And what the young Hitchcock soon had brought home to him was the degree to which one could lie with pictures, or rearrange and reinterpret them to make them signify almost anything you wanted them to. A scene shot as drama could, if it did not come off, be re-cut and re-titled to come out as comedy: the filmmaker was sovereign in his own little world, the world he created first by shooting the film and then, even more decisively, by fiddling about with the pieces, laying them end to end first this way and then that. Their significance, he learned, was only relative: you could direct the audience into doing the work, seeing and understanding things just the way you wanted them to, could fix things so that they noticed this and disregarded that. And actors were merely counters in this game of chess—they might be more or less well designed for their purpose, but finally they were only counters, taking on significance from the way they were moved around in the course of the game. And this practical lesson came, be it noted, some three years before Kuleshov carried out his famous experiments with audience-manipulation by juxtaposing shots of various apparent stimuli with the same neutral shot of an actor registering as nearly as possible nothing.

All the same, it is unlikely that the films made by Famous Players-Lasky in Britain at Islington during the years 1920-2 were very lofty works of cinematic art. There is no way of knowing for certain, since they have all disappeared. But George Fitzmaurice was considered one of the better directors in Hollywood at the time, and Donald Crisp had a certain aura as the erstwhile assistant of
the great D. W. Griffith, whose
Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
were foremost among the films which had seized the teenage Hitchcock's imagination. And it was a time, we should remember, when despite the inroads that these two Griffith films in particular had made on the prejudice of cultivated people against this upstart fairground side-show the cinema, few filmgoers and perhaps even fewer film-makers gave much thought to the possibility that this might be an art they were dealing with.

In 1919, the year Famous Players-Lasky British was set up,
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
was being made in Germany, the first film to dramatize the incursion of the intellectual avant-garde into cinema there. In Hollywood Erich von Stroheim was directing his first film,
Blind Husbands
; Chaplin had just made
A Dog's Life
and
Shoulder Arms
, and was in the process of founding United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith. In France Abel Gance was making his first real film epic,
J' Accuse
, and Louis Delluc, first intellectual theorist of the cinema, had published his first book,
Cinéma et Cie
. In Italy the cinema was actually in decline, following its ‘golden age' which climaxed in the super-spectacle
Cabiria
(1914), while in Sweden a national cinema was securely based on the first major works of Sjóstrom and Stiller, and in Russia the first films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko were still five or six years in the future. It was a time, in other words, when much of the potential of the film medium was about to be realized, the beginning of the great period of silent movies, the first suspicions of intellectual respectability and the advent of the self-conscious artist-figure in the ranks of film-makers.

Alfred Hitchcock was to be by no means unaware of all this, but it should be emphasized that his own formation as a film-maker and first experiences were of a severely practical nature. Artistic pretensions were hardly thought of, much less encouraged, and the relation of the film to its audience—a large popular audience, since at this time in Britain films were still generally considered a diversion for the servants rather than the masters—was paramount. Hitchcock entered an
industry
, and an entertainment industry at that: he has often said that one of the great misfortunes was when someone had the bright idea of calling the place that films were made a ‘studio', with all its artistic overtones, rather than a factory. And the attitudes inculcated then have been important in his life ever since. It should perhaps not need saying, since it is a commonplace
of practically every other kind of art criticism, that no necessary relationship exists between the declared artistic aspirations of a film-maker and his artistic performance. Whether or not, for instance, the classic Hollywood directors regarded themselves as artists—and several, such as John Ford and Howard Hawks, were vocally scornful of any such idea—had little or nothing to do with the aesthetic judgements one might pass on their work, and equally the films of various directors much touted by themselves and others as artists look very faded or quite dead now. It seems unlikely that Hitchcock, even in the secret places of his heart, regarded himself as an artist, or anything other than a practical movie-maker, yet his life has been one of total, obsessive dedication to the one activity, movie-making, which many professed artists might do well to emulate. That being so, the conflict between conscious intentions and a talent which could not be stifled began early—probably right back in the days of Famous Players-Lasky in a back-street converted power station in grimy Islington.

Here, anyway, it was that he got his first opportunity to direct a film. It came about in the curiously casual way that so much happened in the early years of the cinema. The youthful Hitchcock had from the outset of his film career been working primarily with women—first and foremost the Hollywood ladies of the Famous Players-Lasky script department. It is, indeed, a curious thing for one who has so often been supposed, on the strength of his films, to be a misogynist, to observe how frequently and long throughout his career he has worked very happily and successfully surrounded by women. So it should probably not surprise us to discover him, at the age of twenty-three, getting the notice of a then somewhat powerful lady and through that, with nothing solid to show as a guarantee of talent and not even, according to his own account, any burning desire to become a film director, the opportunity to direct a film.