It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (13 page)

“Mr. Memory is one of my favorite characters,” Hitchcock told me. “I have many favorites among those who people my films, but none of whom I’m fonder than Mr. Memory. The character is based on a real person named Datas, who had an act in London when I was young. I found Memory’s compulsion to answer quite fascinating.

“He was neither a magician nor a genius, you see. Memory had this one special talent. Otherwise, he would have been ordinary, but his pride in it made him a victim. He couldn’t help showing it off, even at the cost of his life.”

Madeleine Carroll had not been Hitchcock’s first choice to be Pamela, but Alma had persuaded her husband to cast her. For Carroll, the part was expanded.

“She would have played the smaller role if I’d asked her,” Hitchcock said. “But she understood what a good part it was for her, and I wanted to get more of her real personality on the screen.

“She was extremely likable. Before
The 39 Steps,
she’d played rather cold, humorless types, but she was a good comedy actress. She was a wonderful sport about Robert Donat dragging her over the Scottish moors during a rainstorm. The weather was our regular problem.

“I am often accused of perpetrating inconsiderate practical jokes, but I never purposely left Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed together for a whole day, as rumor had it. The key being misplaced was accidental, and certainly not for long. We did, after all, have other scenes to shoot with them. I would never risk time or money, placing my film in jeopardy.

“It is true, however, that I played a bit of a joke on Robert Donat. When he complained that his suit had been ruined in the waterfall scene, I went out and bought him another one from a nearby thrift shop—a child’s sailor suit. Then, I told him I’d had a fine tailor make it especially for him.”

When the picture came out, Hitchcock took Pat to see it. “She was only seven and frightened when the woman was stabbed, so I told her, ‘It’s only a movie.’”

Pat said, “It was just a very normal life at our house. My father was a wonderful father, so dear and funny. He liked it when I was mischievous. He was. Sometimes when I was very young, I would wake up and look in the mirror, and he had drawn a clown’s face on me. This happened a lot. He never woke me, and I never knew who I would be.”

“T
HERE IS A NO
-
MAN
’
S
-
LAND
between good and evil. It is this gray area which interests me,” Hitchcock told me. That was the theme of
Secret Agent.

The film was drawn from two Somerset Maugham short stories, “The Traitor” and “The Hairless Mexican,” which were included in the
Ashenden
collection. Balcon had become interested in the subject when he saw a play by Campbell Dixon based on “The Hairless Mexican.” The project was given to Hitchcock and Montagu. A key difference between Dixon’s play and the Maugham story was the addition of a female spy who provides the love interest, an essential of the Hitchcock touch. Hitchcock also chose glamorous settings, such as the Alps, grand hotels, and international trains, his own preferences.

Maugham had based his Ashenden spy stories on his own experiences as a British spy during World War I. Driving an ambulance in France, Maugham volunteered for espionage duty and was posted to Switzerland. The character of Robert Ashenden became Maugham’s alter ego in a series of short stories based on his real career as a spy.

John Gielgud was selected for the film because Hitchcock saw a resemblance between Ashenden and Hamlet, and he was fond of using stage actors because “they weren’t afraid of speaking.” He found Gielgud “arrogant,” however, and the actor felt that he received no help from his director. Gielgud was well into his eighties when I spoke with him in New York City.

“My performance was taken for granted, and I was unaccustomed to being taken for granted. Hitchcock was, I learned later from others who worked with him, rather stingy with praise. In the theater I was used to the nourishment, after a performance, of audience applause. In film work, one looks primarily to the director, or possibly a co-star. Not only was little forthcoming from Hitchcock, but I didn’t establish a warm relationship with Madeleine Carroll. She was very good, but when our scenes ended, she seemed to be inhabiting another world. I might say the same for Peter Lorre, except that he really
was
in another world, drugs, you know.

“He was also an accomplished film actor who knew how to steal a scene by inserting business into the take that he hadn’t used in rehearsal. At the time, I was annoyed. I think now it was my own inexperience with the film medium which was responsible for my insecurity and subsequent stiffness. Then, too, I didn’t feel I was good-looking enough to be a screen leading man, especially with someone as beautiful as Madeleine Carroll. But when I saw the film rather recently, I was struck by how well we all played together.

“I have always been a passionate film fan, being an early member of the London Film Society, along with Hitchcock, whom I would see there. But in those days, it was considered beneath one’s dignity, as a stage actor, to accept employment in films. So, when I did take a few parts in the silents, I didn’t tell anyone and hoped my friends wouldn’t notice.

“I avoided making films. It was terribly exhausting to have to get up early in the morning after you’d been working in the theater the night before. And then, you’d always be thinking about the performance that evening. I must admit that I really did
Secret Agent
for the money.

“Your faults are hidden on the stage, and you seem grander than you are. In the films, every defect is magnified. And it’s forever.

“For many years, I stopped making films entirely, and I blamed Hitchcock for this, but it wasn’t his fault. Looking back, I realize I didn’t have much confidence in my talent as a film actor and, when I first saw the film, I thought my performance was rather poor. When I saw it decades later, I was stunned—by how young I looked.

“Actually, I rather enjoyed working with Hitchcock. He was a great joker. Now, I love the film and treasure my appearance in it.”

Making her English-language film debut in
Secret Agent
was Lilli Palmer, who plays Peter Lorre’s girlfriend, Lilli. Tom Helmore is the colonel in the steam bath. Michael Redgrave makes a brief appearance as an army officer. The coachman is the legendary French actor Michel Saint-Denis, who was a friend of Gielgud’s. Robert Young, already an established star in Hollywood, assumed the role of the villain, a part that was tempered with comedy.

The murder of the sympathetic British man mistaken for a German spy changed the tone of the film from spy thriller to tragedy. He is an outstanding example of another Hitchcock wrong man, although Hitchcock preferred to think of that character as “a man on the spot.”

“ ‘D
ESMOND
T
ESTICLE
. Where are you Desmond Testicle?’

“My most vivid memory of
Sabotage
was Alfred Hitchcock calling out to Desmond Tester,” Sylvia Sidney told me. “Desmond was the boy who played my little brother. Tester was his last name, and I could never forget it, because whenever Hitchcock would call upon him, he would call out in that incredible voice of his, every syllable clearly enunciated, ‘Is Des-mond Tes-ti-cle here?’”

It was in 1998 at New York City’s legendary Players Club that Sidney talked with me about her memories of 1936, more than sixty years earlier, when she was the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Sabotage.

“The boy was terribly embarrassed, but Hitchcock seemed to get a great deal of pleasure out of that. I didn’t think the joke was funny in the first place. I certainly didn’t think it was funny in the second place. And it didn’t get funnier with repetition for anyone except Hitchcock, who seemed to enjoy it so much. I personally thought it was a cruel thing to do to a child who couldn’t do anything about it except be red-faced. Fortunately, it never seemed to affect the boy’s performance, which was very good. I often wondered what became of him.

“Then, some years later, I met someone who had been working on the
Sabotage
set, and he said he happened to run into Desmond, somewhere like Australia, I think. The person told me that they were reminiscing about the picture, and he expressed his sympathy to Desmond about how Hitchcock had made fun of him. And you know what? Desmond said
he
thought it was very funny!”

Sidney and I were standing in front of a painting of the celebrated nineteenth-century actor Edwin Booth. Indicating Booth, she said, “His fame as a great actor was eclipsed by his brother, John Wilkes Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln. The negative always gets more attention than the positive.

“If I’d known how famous Alfred Hitchcock was going to be, I would have paid more attention to what he was doing. And if I’d known how long people were always going to be asking me how it was to work with Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, I would have taken notes.

“I guess I preferred Hitchcock to Fritz, who could be cruel. Hitchcock wasn’t unpleasant, but he was strange. He seemed to be more interested in things than in people. He treated props like actors. When we did the murder scene at the end, where I kill Oscar Homolka, Hitchcock was more interested in the knife than in either of us. He would just tell us, ‘Look to the right. Not so much. Less. Look away.’ He never said, ‘You’re doing it right.’ When he stopped giving you any directions, you knew you were doing it right.”

Charles Bennett remembered Sylvia Sidney as being extremely unhappy during the shooting of
Sabotage.
“She just hated Hitchcock! He called her and courted her for the picture, and then paid no attention to her. I thought she was very good. Hitch was a very tubby, brilliant man. He was tough to love and easy to hate.”

Sabotage
is loosely based on the Joseph Conrad novel
The Secret Agent.

Robert Donat was originally scheduled to play the part of Verloc, but he suffered from very bad asthma and was incapacitated by it just before shooting started. Sylvia Sidney remembered Oscar Homolka as “very old school, very old-fashioned in his approach to acting. I wasn’t used to this.”

Sidney had looked forward to working with Hitchcock, the most famous British director of that moment. She was enjoying a fine Hollywood career, which included playing the lead in Fritz Lang’s
Fury.
During a visit to England, she had been signed by Michael Balcon for
Sabotage.
She was, in fact, the reason the picture could be made.

The actress had expected to learn something from Hitchcock, but when he wanted to shoot the end of a scene before the beginning, even before they had rehearsed it, she began to wonder. His methods were so unorthodox she decided that “maybe he was going to have the rehearsal after the wrap, but he seemed to know what he was doing.” When she saw the film and her performance in it, she decided that while he was a bit aloof, he was a great director.