It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (18 page)

“It has been said,” Hitchcock told me, “that I based the character of the mother in
Shadow of a Doubt
on my own mother. I can tell you that I did not deliberately do so, nor did I deliberately avoid doing so. My characters have their own identities, and for a time, at least, I share my life with them, more perhaps than I do with any except the closest members of my family.

“In this particular case, however, I have to admit that it was a time when I was thinking about my mother, who was in London. There was the constant danger from the war, as well as her own failing health. She
was
in my thoughts at the time. I suppose that if we think about a character who is a mother, it is natural to start with one’s own. The character of the mother in
Shadow of a Doubt,
you might say, is a figment of my memory.”

Hitchcock was terribly troubled by the bombing of London and what it meant to his mother, to members of his family, to friends of his and Alma’s. While Alma had gone back to London to fetch her mother and sister, he had been unable to persuade his own mother to come to California. Instead, he had convinced her that she should leave her London home for his Shamley Green country house. Still, he worried, Pat Hitchcock recalled.

Alma Hitchcock remembered their family having a wonderful time filming
Shadow of a Doubt.
Their daughter, Pat, was there helping in the coaching of the young sister of Charlie, and it was a happy set.

“Everyone knows about how my father said he saw the whole picture in his head before he made the film,” Pat Hitchcock told me. “Well, at home he said that he was happy if he got 75 percent of what he’d seen in his head. Sometimes he got more, and then he was very, very happy.”

“When I met him to talk about being in the film,” Teresa Wright told me, “he described it as if he were seeing it in his mind. The way I think of him is that he had a little projection booth up there in his head.

“On the set, he never raised his voice. I never felt any tension. He would tell you what he wanted without too much instruction, and you would know exactly what to do. You couldn’t make a mistake. If you did, you knew he would be there for you. At the same time, you felt a sense of freedom.

“I remember the actress who played my little sister was from Santa Rosa, and her father owned a grocery store. Hitchcock asked to see it, and he said it reminded him of his own childhood and his father’s greengrocery.

“
Shadow of a Doubt
is the picture I have taken with me all my life. I wasn’t Charlie. I was an actress. But I think maybe in some ways after that, Charlie journeyed with me all my life. More people ask me about that film than about all the others put together.”

Joseph Cotten told me that Hitchcock was not only a great director, but “really wonderfully easy to work with, one of the best directors I’ve worked with, including Orson [Welles], when we did
Citizen Kane,
and one of the easiest to get on with.”

Hitchcock said, “
Shadow of a Doubt
was the rare occasion when suspense and melodrama combined well with character. You know, the family can be so frightening. I do not give my first priority to character, but when good characters come through, it makes me very happy. No ice box chatter there.” This was how he described discussions in the kitchen after the film, when the audience arrives home and “starts taking apart plot discrepancies and character deficiencies.”

“Some of it was shot in the original town,” Hitchcock said, “and at that time, they were shooting an awful lot on the back lot, so it had a freshness.

“The selection of the right house for the family was essential. I had it shopped for very carefully. I wanted to know what it would cost to buy or rent the house. It was very important that the family didn’t live beyond its means. They weren’t that sort. It was also important that they didn’t live
below
their means. This was a family that knew its place. They didn’t talk about money, or feel the need to think about it.

“We located the perfect place, and the people who owned it were very happy to have their house play in a movie. In fact, they were so happy, they painted it and fixed it up, so it wasn’t right anymore. Fortunately, we were able to undo it all.”

In May 1964, Alfred Hitchcock was invited to speak at the university in Belgrade. It was a great occasion for those fortunate film students who were to have the opportunity to hear Hitchcock speak, to see one of his films, which he was bringing with him, and even to ask questions of the great filmmaker. The film Hitchcock had chosen was
Shadow of a Doubt.

Everyone looked forward especially to the question-and-answer part of the program, and began to think of his or her question. At that time, film studies were taken more seriously in Eastern Europe than in the West, and cinema was regarded as something more than art or entertainment.

During the years after World War II, American films were rarely shown in Yugoslavia. Most of the pictures seen there came from Russia, with an occasional politically correct Italian or French film, not intended purely for entertainment and usually with a message. In spite of this, film students in Belgrade were familiar with the name and reputation of Alfred Hitchcock, though few had ever seen one of his films. There was great excitement about his upcoming visit.

Vlada Petric, who was to become a world-acclaimed film professor and the director of the Harvard Film Archive, was at the time a film student in Belgrade and one of those invited to the Hitchcock event. He remembered that everyone liked
Shadow of a Doubt,
“which he told us was his own personal favorite.”

Petric had given serious thought to what question he might ask, a worthy question that would produce an interesting answer.

When the moment came, he asked Hitchcock his question: “You are fascinated by mystery and suspense, you treat fear. How did you become so interested in these themes?”

Hitchcock said, “That’s a very interesting question. I’ve never told this to anyone before, but I do know exactly. It happened when I was in my cradle.

“I was lying there, too small to move, and over me was the huge face of one of my father’s sisters. My aunt was bent over the cradle, and her big face was moving closer and closer, getting bigger and bigger as it came towards me. Suddenly, this huge face was making horrible sounds, ‘B-bibble, b-bibble, b-bibble,’ as she ran her fingers over her lips.”

Petric always remembered Hitchcock’s answer. Through the years, he noted that while Hitchcock didn’t use the close-up often, he did use it to great effect to create a feeling of horror. Some of the most memorable images in Hitchcock films are in close-up to create intense emotion. Whenever Petric saw one of the horror close-ups, he remembered that evening in Belgrade and thought of the image of that huge face peering into baby Alfred’s cradle.

“T
HERE WERE ACTUALLY
three lifeboats,” Hitchcock told me discussing his next film. “It was like Citizen Kane’s sled, Rosebud. We needed to have a stand-in for the lifeboat and then a stand-in for the stand-in. The difference between the lifeboats and the sleds was when the film wrapped, everyone wanted to take home Rosebud, and no one wanted our lifeboat.”

Starring in
Lifeboat
was Tallulah Bankhead, a celebrated nonconformist. Among her eccentricities was a disdain for undergarments. George Cukor told me about “Tallulah’s panties” or lack of them. He’d had his own somewhat embarrassing experiences with Tallulah after she asked if she could swim in his pool. “Of course, my dear,” he said. He hadn’t realized she meant without a bathing suit. Not that it bothered him, but his gardener and cook and guests were sometimes surprised, sometimes shocked. “George, there’s a naked woman in your swimming pool,” British actor John Mills mentioned to him. “Do you know her?”

Cukor did. “You knew her well, or you didn’t know her at all.” Then he told me the “Tallulah’s panties” story from the days of Hitchcock’s
Lifeboat.

“The dear girl never wore any panties. In fact, she was way ahead of her time, ahead of Marilyn in not liking to wear any underwear. She was especially against panties.

“Well, she told me that she spent the entire film in the lifeboat. Having the part involved a great deal of climbing in and out of the lifeboat. Every time she got into it, those already sitting there got a pretty good view of her at that rather unusual angle, and it was quickly no secret that she didn’t consider panties part of her costume.

“Someone complained, and the word got back to Hitch, who was told by the powers-that-be that he was supposed to say something about it to her, or delegate that responsibility to someone.

“No one ever said a word to her, and for the entire filming, she never had to don panties.

“I imagine that Hitch saw for himself and thought it funny. He would have been much too staid to say anything to her, but not too staid to have a look.

“Hitch, you know, was full of beans.”

Elizabeth Japp Fowler believed she was the model for the Tallulah Bankhead character. An American living in Ghana, she persuaded the captain of a freighter to allow her to travel on his ship in 1942. The ship was torpedoed on its way to New York, and she spent ten days in a lifeboat with thirty-four men, surviving thirst, hunger, cold, freezing rain, and circling sharks. The press reported that she mourned the Burberry coat she had lost, as the journalist in
Lifeboat
misses
her
fur coat, camera, typewriter, and her Cartier bracelet.

Hume Cronyn, who played the sunken ship’s radio operator in the film, talked with me about Hitchcock in general and
Lifeboat
in particular.

“The notion that Hitch was not concerned with his actors is utterly fallacious. I never knew how actors and people could say that. For
Lifeboat,
we began by sitting around a table for days in long read-throughs, as we would do in the theater. The lifeboat was actually very like a stage.

“Hitch would listen carefully and every once in a while, he would interrupt us with some suggestion like, ‘Speak more slowly,’ or ‘Emphasize that word’—you know, that sort of thing. He very much didn’t try to show us how to play our parts any more than he would have told a mike boom operator how to stay out of the frame. He expected us to know our jobs. That was why he had hired us. I don’t consider that being unconcerned with your actors.

“He had faith in you, and that made you feel good and gave you confidence. There are directors who are backseat actors. They don’t give you a chance to do what you can do.

“I could sense that as we read, Hitch was seeing our words more than he was hearing them. He had such a visual mind, and I feel he was watching the movie unfold in his mind’s eye as all of us spoke the words of the characters. He was working backwards, you might say, from what he saw to what he heard. Other directors work from the dialogue and action to the visual elements of the film. Hitch, I think, had a total concept of the finished movie before we sat down to read, and he was just guiding us all toward what he saw on that screen in his mind.”

Walter Slezak, who played the German U-boat commander, also disagreed with the notion that Hitchcock was unconcerned with his actors. “Far from it,” he told me, “and he knew more about how to help an actor than any director I’ve ever worked with. I remember a young actress who was having trouble with an emotional scene. He told her to lower her voice three tones, take a deep breath, and not breathe again until she’d finished her speech. It worked beautifully.”

John Steinbeck wrote the novella on which
Lifeboat
was based. Darryl F. Zanuck, who had done Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath,
was the producer. Jo Swerling and Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay.

When I asked Hitchcock if he thought the characters would keep in touch, he answered, “No, it was a wrap.” When making a film, people become friends, fall in love, vow at the wrap party to always keep in touch, and then return to their lives, forgetting it all.