It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (7 page)

In 1924, Hitchcock was sent by Balcon to Berlin as assistant director on
The Prude’s Fall,
an Anglo-German production again directed by Cutts. Alma was sent as Hitchcock’s assistant.

At UFA (Universum-Film Aktien Gesellschaft), the great German studio founded by Universal in Neubabelsberg, they were able to watch F. W. Murnau directing
The Last Laugh
(
Der letzte Mann
), as well as Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, and other important German directors. Hitchcock learned from the German technicians as they worked.

At that time, UFA was more artistically and technically advanced in filmmaking than England, and was challenging Hollywood. Murnau was generous to Hitchcock, answering whatever questions he asked, explaining what he was doing, inviting him to watch the filming, and encouraging him in his career. Murnau’s influence on Hitchcock would last a lifetime, according to Hitchcock: “From Murnau, I learned how to tell a story without words.”

Aboard the ship returning from Germany where they had been scouting locations for
The Prude’s Fall,
Hitchcock had determined he would ask Alma to marry him “before our feet touched English soil.” He hoped that she would still feel somewhat carried away by their odyssey. His plan was complicated by her bout of seasickness. It was almost continuous from the moment they boarded the ship, which made Hitchcock hesitate. Even if the situation was not as romantic as he might have wished, he wondered if her weakened condition might help his cause, lowering her resistance. He could not imagine his future life without Alma. He had never before felt so comfortable with a woman. He realized that she was socially graceful, as he believed he could never be, and he felt that she could have anyone in the world she wanted. It was a daunting prospect, but Hitchcock was never one to say no to himself.

He planned his words and pondered scenarios. The end of the voyage, however, drew close, with Alma’s seasickness, which she believed was terminal, showing no sign of abating.

As Alma, “looking green,” lay in agony on her bunk, Hitchcock remembered paying her a visit and blurting out his proposal. It didn’t come out as he had rehearsed it, but she didn’t say no. She only burped, which Hitchcock took as yes.

Alma told me, “I was too weak to say yes, or I would have said it.”

W
HEN THE
I
SLINGTON
S
TUDIOS
were offered for sale, and Balcon bought them for Gainsborough Pictures, it was for a fraction of the asking price, to be paid out over a period of seven years. Balcon was on his way to becoming one of Britain’s most important producers.

The next Cutts-directed Gainsborough picture to be shot in Germany was
The Blackguard,
for which Hitchcock was able to incorporate into his set designs some of the ideas of forced perspective he had been observing at UFA. He was also able to save a great deal of money by using suggestion rather than showing everything.

“One of the important things I learned at UFA was that you are only responsible for what is in the frame. If you want to give the impression of a great European cathedral, all you have to do is show an important detail. The audience will see the whole cathedral in its mind.”

When Cutts said that he did not want to work with Hitchcock again, Balcon decided it was time to give the younger man a chance to prove himself. In 1925, Hitchcock was assigned to direct another Anglo-German production,
The Pleasure Garden,
to be shot in Munich and Italy. Alma would be his assistant director.

“Someone told me,” Hitchcock recalled, “that Cutts said to Balcon, ‘I don’t want to work anymore with that know-it-all son-of-a-bitch, Hitchcock.’

“Well, Cutts not wanting me could have ruined my career, but instead, it was the making of it. It gave me the opportunity I didn’t even know yet I wanted. I was to be a director.”

W
HEN
I
WAS STARTING OUT
in films,” Hitchcock told me, “I was a cub director. But I didn’t want anyone to know it.

“Nita Naldi was my first murder. I’d never killed anyone before—in a picture I directed, that is. In
The Pleasure Garden,
she’s drowned by the villain, though it was actually her stand-in who was murdered, since Miss Naldi hadn’t arrived in Italy yet.

“Someone said that I didn’t personally direct that murder, but I am guilty of every one of my screen murders. It’s how I’ve earned my blood money.”

Balcon preferred that Hitchcock prove himself as a director away from England, so he was sent to Munich, where he and Alma would work with a German company. For the American market, Balcon had contracted Nita Naldi, Virginia Valli, and Carmelita Geraghty, well-known Hollywood actors, as the stars. Naldi had just starred with Rudolph Valentino in
Blood and Sand.
The actual filming would be done at the Emelka Studios in Munich, as well as on location in Italy.

After preparations in Munich, Alma went to Cherbourg to meet Valli and Geraghty, while Hitchcock went to Genoa to shoot the departure of a ship. Accompanying him were actor Miles Mander, who was also to be in the film, and the cameraman, the Baron Gaetano di Ventimiglia.

At the Italian border, their film stock was confiscated. In Genoa, after Hitchcock had sent for more film, the confiscated film arrived with an unexpected duty imposed. As other unexpected expenses accrued, Hitchcock’s money was stolen from his hotel room, and he had to borrow from Mander and Ventimiglia in order to shoot the scene.

When he returned to Munich already over-budget, Hitchcock found that the Hollywood stars had demanded first-class accommodations from Cherbourg to Munich. At the end of shooting, in late summer of 1925, they were left “virtually pfennig-less,” said Hitchcock. “Until a check arrived from London, we were dependent on the hospitality of our German friends, who saw to it that we lost no weight, unfortunately. Looking back at some snaps Alma took of me at the time, a bit of hunger might have done me some good.”

Alma told me that during the years of World War II, she and Hitch thought many times about these people who had been so kind to them, and the Hitchcocks worried about their fate.

Balcon was so pleased with
The Pleasure Garden,
he assigned Hitchcock to his second Anglo-German film at Emelka,
The Mountain Eagle,
also starring Nita Naldi.
The Pleasure Garden
would, however, have to wait for two years to be released because a powerful backer of Gainsborough, the financier and distributor C. M. Woolf, did not think it was suitable for English audiences.

The Mountain Eagle
was shot in the Tyrolean Alps in late 1925.

After being distributed in England, Germany, and America, all prints and the negative of the film disappeared. Much of the script has also disappeared, leaving only a few production photos. The synopsis is based on Peter Noble’s reconstruction for the British Film Institute.

Woolf again disapproved of Hitchcock’s finished film, so
The Mountain Eagle
was held and released only after the huge success of his third film,
The Lodger.

Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote
The Lodger
first in 1911 as a magazine short story, and then as a novel in 1913. It was based on the 1888 serial killings of young women in London’s East End slums, the notorious Jack the Ripper murders. In the novel, the landlady never finds out if her lodger is indeed the infamous killer.

Hitchcock, with writer Eliot Stannard, emphasized that part of the novel which dealt with the fear and uncertainty the family feels about their lodger.

Hitchcock said that the ending he would have preferred was to have the lodger really turn out to be Jack the Ripper, who goes free at the end, thought to be innocent, “while the audience knows he’s going to go on about his dirty business. At the very least, there might have been some doubt left as to whether he had done the nefarious deeds or not. But it would have been unacceptable to cast a leading man like Ivor Novello as a villain. I had the same problem later with Cary Grant in
Suspicion.
”

A memorable image in
The Lodger
is an overhead shot of a stairwell, with the lodger slowly descending the stairs, shown only by his gloved hand on the guard railing as the hand slides down.

“This was a substitute for sound,” Hitchcock said. “Nowadays, we wouldn’t do that.

“Later on, I show how he paces up and down in his room. I have the faces of the people below, looking up to the ceiling. So I dissolved the ceiling away to show this agitated man. I had a one-inch-thick plate glass floor made so his feet showed through. This was instead of sound.”

The Lodger
was the first film in which Hitchcock had a cameo appearance. He is in the newsroom at the beginning and in the crowd pursuing Novello near the end. “Two actors didn’t show up. In those days you used to be able to hop in and do a bit if necessary,” he recalled.

Balcon brought in a young editor, Ivor Montagu, to work with Hitchcock. They recognized each other as fellow members of the London Film Society, and they were immediately compatible.

“When
The Lodger
was ready,” Hitchcock said, “the distributors screened the film and said it was dreadful. C. M. Woolf particularly objected to the transparent ceiling. He wanted to give the story to another director to reshoot.

“I was at a pretty low ebb in my career.
The Lodger
was shelved for several months, and then they decided to show it after all. They had an investment, and wanted their money back. It was shown, and acclaimed as the greatest British picture ever made. So, there, you see, is that thin line between failure and success.

“If I’d made the story again as a talker,” Hitchcock told me, “I would have wanted to do something different. Perhaps
Jacqueline the Ripper.
”

“My father always referred to
The Lodger
as the first true Hitchcock picture,” Pat Hitchcock told me. With this film, Hitchcock led the emergence of the British cinema.