Hitch (8 page)

The answer was, that they started right away. Balcon's gesture was not one of impulse: he had been watching Hitch for a couple of years, he liked him, but more importantly he was impressed by what he could do and how skilful he was at selling other people on his ability to do it. A confidence trick, perhaps, but if so it was a confidence trick Hitch had played on himself first of all. He not only seemed confident; he really was confident. He knew with remarkable clarity what he could and could not do. If he was in any doubt, he would go away, think about it, and come back with an answer both sensible and correct. Balcon had no doubt that Hitch could direct a film because Hitch had no doubt.

Balcon's opinion was not shared by some of those around him. Cutts was jealous of the attention Hitch had been getting, and made it very clear that he wanted Hitch stopped. However, after his erratic behaviour on
The Blackguard
and
The Prude's Fall
, he was in no position to insist. The company's activities were expanding to such an extent that Cutts could not possibly direct all their films himself, and, Balcon argued, it would be silly to bring in a possibly expensive outsider when they had in their employ someone who might have been specifically trained for this purpose. Anyway, Cutts had his hands full with
The Rat
, which turned out when released late in 1925 to be a sensational success, so honour was satisfied all round.

The other problem Balcon had over the Hitchcock project was to raise money for it. None of the English distributors was willing to put up money for a film directed by an unknown. His German contacts were more enterprising—or not so choosy, depending which way you look at it: in collaboration with a Munich-based company called Emelka, Balcon was able to raise the shoe-string budget envisaged for
The Pleasure Garden
, adapted from a melodramatic
novel by Oliver Sandys, about the contrasting temperaments and fates of two chorus girls. Although the action of the story took place mainly in England and the Far East, it was part of the deal that the film must be shot in Europe, and that the female stars, as usual, should be American: this time Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty. To add to the international tone of the picture, the script-writer was English, the cameraman was Italian (the Baron Ventimiglia) and the art directors were respectively English and German. The assistant director, though, was a reliable friend and ally, since it was none other than Hitch's fiancee, Alma Reville.

The actual shooting of the picture was a succession of nightmares, most of them connected with money, or the chronic lack of it. Though the production was centred on Munich, the film actually started shooting with location scenes in Genoa, San Remo and on Lake Como. Hitch and Alma went out to Munich for some pre-production work with the English male lead, Miles Mander. There they were to separate, Alma heading back to Cherbourg to pick up the American star, Virginia Valli, and her friend Carmelita Geraghty, who was to play the second lead, from the
Aquitania
, while Hitch went on to the Mediterranean locations to get a few incidental sequences in the can. First he, Miles Mander, and the cameraman, Ventimiglia, were going down to Genoa with a newsreel cameraman and a girl playing Mander's native wife, who had to get drowned in the sea in a sequence they would shoot immediately afterwards at San Remo. The newsreel cameraman was to enable them to cover from all angles the departure of a liner from Genoa, one camera being on the ship and the other on the shore.

Almost immediately, problems. Shortly before the train is to leave for Genoa Miles Mander suddenly realizes he has left his make-up case in the taxi and goes scooting off to get it, with Hitch shouting instructions after him about how to get to Genoa the next day in time for the filming. But then the train is ten minutes late in leaving and suddenly through a commotion at the end of the platform Hitch sees his leading man sprinting towards the train and managing to leap on just as it picks up speed. So far, so good. But then as they approach the Italian border Ventimiglia gives Hitch a nasty surprise. Because the camera and the unexposed film they are carrying are liable to duty, he says, they must smuggle them through. And where are they to be hidden? Right under Hitch's berth in their
sleeper, of course. Hitch, with his famous terror of the police and authority, is instantly in a cold sweat, and rightly so, as it turns out, since though the customs do not find the camera they do find the 10,000 feet of film and confiscate it because it has not been declared. The unit arrives in Genoa on a Sunday, prepared to shoot the sequence at noon on Tuesday, with no film.

All day they search Genoa for some, to no avail. Monday in desperation Hitch dispatches the newsreel cameraman to Kodak in Milan with
£
20, a sizeable sum in relation to their tiny budget, to buy the necessary film. He has just arrived back with it when they are informed that the confiscated film has also arrived and they now have to pay the duty on it. So they have wasted the
£
20 and have, as far as Hitch can judge with all the complicated juggling from pounds to marks to lire, scarcely enough money with them to get through the location scenes. Comes Tuesday, everything seems to be going smoothly: the ship, a Lloyd Triestino liner, will leave for South America at noon, and the unit succeed in hiring a tugboat to pick up the members on board ship just outside the harbour and return them to land. But it's another
£
10, and when Hitch reaches for his wallet to pay he discovers that he has been robbed during the night at the hotel and has no money left at all. Frantic, he borrows the necessary
£
10 from his cameraman, another
£
15 from his star, and shoots the first scene of his career as a fully fledged director.

Delight. Euphoria. And then a bumpy return to earth. Whatever are they going to do? Hitch composes two letters, one to London urgently requesting an advance on his salary, the other to Munich tactfully conveying to Emelka that they may need a little more money. On consideration, he posts the first and tears up the second—for what an instant indication it would be of the incompetence he suspects they attribute to him if he must admit, for whatever reasons, to going over budget so early in the shooting of his first film. This decision taken, they have lunch at the Bristol Palace before setting off for San Remo to shoot the drowning. But then another complication comes up, one hitherto absolutely unexpected by Hitch, but undeniably educational. He finds his cameraman, the newsreel cameraman and the actress who is to play the native girl in this scene deep in a serious discussion. Ventimiglia breaks the news: she can't go into the water. Why ever not? Well, you know, it's that time of month.… What time of month? asks Hitch innocently. And
there and then he gets a careful and detailed description of periods and the physical processes of women. Aged twenty-six, and already himself engaged to be married, he has never heard of such a thing. And all he can think of is, why the hell couldn't she have told us before we spent all that money bringing her down from Munich?—Whither, along with the newsreel cameraman, who has now completed his work, she is instantly shipped back.

But this means they have at a moment's notice to find another girl who looks vaguely right and is willing to be dunked in the Mediterranean (standing in for the tropical seas of the Far East, where the film's climax takes place). Fortunately, all that is needed is a back view and some distant action: the heroine's husband, depraved by life in the tropics, decides to dispose of his native ‘wife' and make it look like a suicide, so he has to swim out after her, hold her head under water, and then drag her body back to shore claiming he could not save her. But alas, the replacement girl they have found is decidedly heftier than the original, and though the drowning can be accomplished effectively enough, when it comes time for Mander to lift her out of the water and bring her back to shore, he cannot do it, and keeps dropping her, take after take, to the great delight of a hundred or so interested onlookers on the beach. And when at last he does manage it, a little old lady gathering shells wanders right in front of the camera, gazing straight at it, so they have to do it all again.

Now for the third sequence of the film to be shot: it is a romantic one, of the heroine's honeymoon at the Villa d'Este on Lake Como with the rotter who is subsequently to give her a few nasty shocks in the tropics. It is at Como that Hitch is to meet Alma, and be introduced to his two American leading ladies. The first thing he asks Alma, of course, is whether she has any money. The answer is no: it transpires that she too has had her troubles. To her alarm, both the actresses arrived with tons of luggage and expected big-star treatment (understandably, since Virginia Valli was one of the biggest stars at Universal in those days, but very different from Betty Compson with her cheery practicality.) The wardrobe Alma was to buy them in Paris ended up costing a lot more than expected, and all attempts to get them into the modest but comfortable Hotel Westminster in the Rue de la Paix were brushed aside: it was the Hotel Claridge or nothing. Hitch dares not let Virginia Valli know this is his first film, and tries throughout to cut the confident figure
he feels he should. Only Alma is allowed to see his doubts and perplexities: each time he makes a shot he turns to her to ask urgently, ‘Was it all right?'

Somehow the Lake Como sequence gets shot: the advance on Hitch's salary arrives, and his leading man, mistrustful, insists on getting back his
£
15 immediately, on the rather improbable grounds that he has to pay his tailor. By now Hitch has screwed up enough courage to wire Munich for more money, and more—a very little more—does arrive. But the hotel bills are mounting (Carmelita Geraghty is not in these scenes, and her presence was not accounted for in the budget), there are motorboats to be hired and all kinds of incidentals. Hitch meanly manages to exert some emotional blackmail on Alma by giving her to understand it's really her fault Carmelita Geraghty is there at all, and so persuades her that
she
must borrow $200 from Virginia Valli. Naturally he can't, because the star must not suspect either how inexperienced he is or how short money is. Alma, practical as ever, thinks up some story and gets the money, so that at least Hitch can pay the hotel bill and buy their sleeper tickets back to Munich. He can even, just, pay the excess-baggage charge on the Americans' impressive array of carriage trunks.

On board the train he slyly asks the American actresses whether they really want to eat in the restaurant car, implying that only an idiot would drink the water in these dangerous foreign parts. Mercifully, they have come to the same conclusion, and opt for staying in their compartment and eating sandwiches from the hotel; this means that the rest of the unit can afford to have dinner. Then Hitch starts figuring again and discovers that they will lose money by changing lire into Swiss francs. Luckily they have only to change trains in Zurich, so that should not be much of a problem. Except that their first train is late, and they arrive to see their connection slowly steaming out of the station. Another extra expense: a night in Zurich. But then, miraculously, the departing train comes to a halt. Waving away porters (too expensive), Hitch begins desperately loading the unit's luggage through the train windows himself. More haste, less speed: there is a terrible crash of breaking glass and again he is hauled up, quaking, before authority and fined 35 Swiss francs by the stationmaster for breaking the window. They arrive in Munich exhausted with literally one pfennig in the kitty.

After this baptism of fire things could only get better. And once
safely back in the studios the rest of the shooting went off without any major difficulties. The early sequences of the film at any rate took place in a world with which Hitch was very familiar: the workaday English theatre—the ‘pleasure garden' of the title, where Virginia Valli, the apparently hard-boiled but really idealistic showgirl, gets a job for Carmelita Geraghty, the wide-eyed innocent from the country who instantly goes to the bad, steals the man her benefactress really loves and leaves the theatre for a life of gilded excess paid for by a gallery of male admirers. Even working away from home, in Munich, Hitch has no trouble in vividly recreating this very English scene. But Munich, anyway, was very different from the bustle of Neubabelsberg, much quieter and more provincial. Hitch was able to go his own way with a minimum of interference or even outside influence. In fact, the only noticeable professional differences he had were with Alma, the hot-shot editor, who edited the film in what Hitch considered an unduly flashy way. She did not think so, but their first big argument ended, like most others, in a happy compromise. When Michael Balcon came over to the first screening of the completed film he was amazed that it did not look at all like a German film: in its lighting and its cutting style it seemed completely American. But this, as Hitch points out, was only to be expected: all his formation in films had been American.

Balcon was enthusiastic: his judgement of the young man's potential had been amply borne out. The feelings of the German backers were rather more complex. Surprisingly, considering the romantic melodrama of the story, far removed from the kind of thriller with which Hitch later became associated, he already on this first venture found himself acquiring a reputation for inhumanity on screen. At the end of the film, the rotter (Miles Mander), drunken and haunted by visions of the native girl he has murdered, goes completely crazy and is just about to kill his wife (Virginia Valli) with a scimitar, when the local doctor arrives in the nick of time and shoots him. Hitch, somewhere in his omnivorous reading, had come across the theory that in death the insane return momentarily to normal, and decided to use this for dramatic effect. So at the moment the character is shot the insanity apparently leaves him, he turns and says in a very matter-of-fact way, ‘Oh, hello, doctor', then notices he is bleeding, looks down in slight mystification, and collapses and dies. The German producer was so shaken by this that he leapt up during the screening shouting, ‘It's impossible. You can't
show a scene like this. It's incredible and too brutal.' Nevertheless, it was shown just that way, and Hitch remembered the effect to use it again, brilliantly, near the beginning of the first
Man Who Knew Too Much
.