It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (10 page)

“My Sean was so overjoyed, he set about writing a new play that would be right for a Hitchcock film. He wrote the screenplay. It was called
Within the Gate,
and it became a stage play. Hitchcock liked it, but it didn’t happen as a movie with him. I know Sean would have liked to have done another film with Hitchcock, but he wasn’t interested in doing one with any other director.

“With the film
Juno and the Paycock,
Hitchcock’s name joined my Sean’s, two of the great names of this century. Now I myself think how wonderful it is that it exists,
Juno and the Paycock,
an Alfred Hitchcock film, and, like Sean said, with all the great actors of that moment.”

Eileen O’Casey was welcomed as a great celebrity at the Savoy, and she enjoyed it when the hotel, happy to have Mrs. Sean O’Casey as a guest, didn’t present us with a check.

The greatest problem for early sound was post-production. There wasn’t any. Everything heard in
Juno
had to be produced while it was being shot, and it couldn’t be changed afterward. In one scene, Hitchcock had to direct an orchestra, a singer, a crowd, and the sound of machine gun fire, all offstage, while his camera, encased in a soundproof booth, was being dollied. “All of this at once,” Hitchcock said, “and it couldn’t be changed, only reshot. The amazing thing was it worked the first time.”

Barry Fitzgerald, who created the part of the Captain in the first Abbey Players production of
Juno and the Paycock
in 1924, made his screen debut as the Orator. The Orator’s speech at the beginning of the film was not in the play, but written specially for Hitchcock by O’Casey.

Sara Allgood, who had played Anny Ondra’s mother in
Blackmail,
re-created her role from the original production and two London runs of
Juno.
Her younger sister, Maire O’Neill, reprised the role she created, and Sidney Morgan also came from the Abbey Players productions.

I
N
1930, H
ITCHCOCK
directed a short,
An Elastic Affair,
and segments of two revue films,
Elstree Calling
and
Harmony Heaven.
The revue film was an early example of sound, giving the studio the opportunity to display its stars while exploiting the novelty of synchronized sound.

The next feature Hitchcock would direct was “a talker,” as the British called the new sound film, in two languages.
Murder!
and
Mary
were shot simultaneously in 1930, based on the same play, using the same sets and technical crew, but with German actors replacing the English actors for
Mary.
Herbert Marshall and Norah Baring starred in the English version, and Alfred Abel and Olga Tschechowa in the German.
Murder!
and
Mary
were based on
Enter Sir John
, a play and novel by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, who wrote
Under Capricorn.

“What people most remember about
Murder!,
” Hitchcock told me, “was Herbert Marshall’s soliloquy in front of the shaving mirror.” His lips don’t move while he’s looking into the mirror, but we hear him speaking his thoughts about the unfairness of the verdict in which he played a role. At the same time, a radio broadcast of the Prelude to
Tristan and Isolde
is heard.

“This was 1930, and we didn’t know much about sound mixing yet. The only way to do it then was to record Marshall beforehand, and then play his voice back while we shot the scene, with a thirty-piece orchestra in the background.

“We had a chance to hear the results before we shot the German version. The orchestra had been playing too loudly, and sometimes Wagner drowned out Marshall. When we shot Abel, we had them play more softly; consequently, it’s the more successful in this respect.”

Hitchcock drew on his own memory for some of the comic business in
Mary.
In the opening, the wife has to dress in a hurry without taking off her nightgown because, as Hitchcock told me, “In the Victorian England I was born into, a woman would never think of exposing herself, even under dire circumstances. Because she’s in such a panic to get dressed while preserving her modesty, it takes her much longer.” He based this on a moment when he had glimpsed his own mother trying to get into her bloomers, putting both of her legs into the same bloomer leg.

The jury room scene comes closest to Hitchcock’s early ideas of how sound film would continue the poetic tradition of the silent picture. Sir John is coerced into a guilty verdict by all of the jurors converging upon him like a Greek chorus, chanting in unison, “Guilty! Guilty!” This type of sound picture, which Hitchcock hoped to make the standard, quickly gave way to the literal, naturalistic cinema that audiences preferred.

Bryan Langley, an assistant camera operator on both
Murder!
and
Mary,
talked with me in 2003 about making those films in 1930.

“Hitchcock had been at the Babelsberg Studio in UFA, so he had a good smattering of German. On many occasions, he and the actors and everybody would be talking in German, and I was the camera assistant trying to understand what they were saying. My grip assistant, who pushed the dolly, was a Jewish man who spoke Yiddish, and he could understand German. So my instructions came from the German-speaking actors and whoever via the Yiddish-speaking grip assistant.”

Langley remembered that Hitchcock said, “‘Achtung!’ for action, and in German, he’d say, ‘Lick your lips.’ This was for the girls, you see. Before the take, they had to lick their lips to make them shine.”

“A great deal of the humor,” Hitchcock said in discussing the two films, “is based on the difficulties of the lower class trying to adjust to the upper class and the upper class trying to adjust to the lower class. This kind of British humor doesn’t travel well. In
Murder!
Sir John is an actor who becomes a gentleman, while in
Mary,
he is a gentleman who becomes an actor.”

Markham’s inability to speak at the opening without his false teeth is left out of
Mary.
The difficulty his modest wife has in getting into her bloomers in front of her husband without taking off her nightgown is simplified to putting on her stockings. Most of the comic exaggeration in
Murder!,
such as Markham’s feet sinking ankle-deep into Sir John’s rug, is not repeated in
Mary.

At the German actor’s insistence, the scene with Sir John in bed with the children and a kitten climbing all over him was modified. Only one child, a little girl, climbs onto Abel’s bed and hugs him, while one little boy stands politely beside the bed holding the kitten, thus preserving Abel’s dignity.

When Sir John visits Diana (Mary in the German version) in prison, the women guards are menacing. In
Murder!,
there are several ominous close-ups of them, while in
Mary,
they remain mere background figures. A scene with Diana in a cell watching the shadow of the gallows growing larger is not included in
Mary.

At the end of
Murder!,
Sir John and Diana greet each other in a drawing room that turns out to be a stage set. This scene is omitted in
Mary,
which ends with the next-to-last scene in
Murder!,
Sir John and Mary in the back seat of his limousine, obviously in love.

The character, Sir John Menier, Hitchcock said, was lightly based on Gerald du Maurier, a famous actor-writer-producer, who was also the father of writer Daphne du Maurier and a prank-pal of Hitchcock’s.

Once, Hitchcock invited Sir Gerald to a dinner party at the Café Royale in Regent Street, along with two hundred other guests. He told him that the evening was a fancy dress party, and he should wear a costume. Du Maurier arrived in an elaborate Shakespearean costume. Everyone else was in formal attire. During dessert, a naked girl entered the restaurant, crossed the room, and sat down on Sir Gerald’s lap, all arranged by Hitchcock.

In
Murder!,
Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance with a woman, walking past the murder victim’s house. He does not appear in
Mary.

Alma and Hitchcock worked on both the English and German versions of the screenplay adaptation. Hitchcock’s directing experience in Germany gave him enough confidence to direct the actors, but “Languages are a great deal more than words,” he told me. “They’re full of idiomatic expressions with subtle shades of meaning that take years of living in the language to understand and, even more important, to feel.”

The Hitchcocks learned enough German to put it to use as their “secret language” at home when they didn’t want their daughter, Pat, to understand what they were saying. Pat told me she wished they had used the language more often, so she could have learned it.

“
T
HE
S
KIN
G
AME
had a baronial hall,” Langley told me. “There were two big Great Dane dogs who had to parade through this thing. And their feet made—their toenails, shall we say—made an awful noise on the sound recording, ‘Clunk, Clunk, Clunk.’ So they had to make little booties to put on their feet, and then paint their toenails on these little booties for these Great Danes to walk around in silence.”

The Skin Game
was based on the play of the same name by John Galsworthy, produced on the London stage in 1921. To protect their unspoiled land from outside developers, the gentry of Long Meadows resort to blackmail, but in doing so, they compromise their own integrity, and the changes are not prevented.

Most of the film’s auction scene is shot in one camera setup, following the bidding from the auctioneer’s point of view in a series of rapid pans. Then, at the climax of the bidding, it changes unexpectedly to rapid cutting as the auction takes a surprising turn.