It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (9 page)

H
ITCHCOCK AND
A
LMA
liked the area so much where they were filming
The Farmer’s Wife
that they bought a Tudor cottage with surrounding land, in Shamley Green, near Guildford, about thirty miles out of London. When, in 1955, Hitchcock set up a production company for his television program,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
he called it Shamley Productions.

Patricia Alma Hitchcock was born on July 7, 1928. “I wanted a girl very much,” Hitchcock told me, “but I never told Alma. I said I would be just as happy with a girl or a boy. I didn’t like saying something to her that wasn’t true, but I couldn’t have her think I would be disappointed if our little Patricia had happened to be a Patrick.

“When I asked Pat’s mother which she wanted, a boy or a girl, she always said she had no preference. Afterwards, she told me that she very much had wanted a girl.”

T
HE HEAD OF PRODUCTION
at British International suggested that Hitchcock make a film about champagne, because, Hitchcock told me, “He said, ‘Everybody loves it.’

“I came up with a little fable about a French girl who works in a wine cellar in Rheims. She has a romantic notion about what happens to all those bottles of champagne in Paris, so one day, she decides to follow them. In Paris, instead of finding glamour, she loses her virtue and becomes a sort of fallen woman, tearful and disillusioned. She returns to her old job in Rheims, where she watches the bottles going off and wonders who will be seduced next by their false promise. They thought my story too simple. The only agreement we had on the film was that we all disagreed.”

What eventually evolved was a film that bore little resemblance to Hitchcock’s scenario, although it was titled
Champagne.

“I was quite pleased to give the head of production full credit for the story,” Hitchcock said. “This was flat champagne, champagne without bubbles.”

An uncredited contribution was made by the young Michael Powell. One of the legendary director’s earliest jobs was as the stills photographer on
Champagne.

The Manxman,
Hitchcock’s next film, released in early 1929, was based on an 1894 novel by Hall Caine, an Isle of Man writer. The film was adapted by Eliot Stannard, one of Hitchcock’s favorite collaborators, primarily because Alma was not available. Just after their daughter was born, Alma was occupied in writing a screenplay,
After the Verdict,
for Henrik Galeen. It was the last time she would ever work with someone other than her husband.

For
The Manxman,
Hitchcock chose as a location the Cornwall coast rather than the Isle of Man. Danish Carl Brisson played the Manx fisherman Pete, and Czechoslovakian Anny Ondra played Kate, the daughter of an Isle of Man innkeeper. “She was a very nice woman,” Hitchcock told me. “Charming. She married the German boxer Max Schmeling.”

Because British International Pictures head John Maxwell disliked
The Manxman,
distribution was delayed until after the sound premiere of
Blackmail
in 1929.
The Manxman
is sometimes listed as Hitchcock’s last silent film, although a silent version of
Blackmail
exists that differs from the sound version. As a result,
Blackmail
really qualifies as both Hitchcock’s last silent film and his first sound film.

Charles Bennett, author of the stage play
Blackmail,
told me, more than sixty years afterward, that he found the silent
Blackmail
“infinitely superior.”

“It was Hitchcock who wanted the studio to buy it for him. After they got it, he and I talked immense hours together about what had to be done. I didn’t take any credit because I had plays running at the time in London, so I didn’t care.” Bennett was also acting on the stage.

Bennett and Hitchcock were born in the same year and shared the experience of having grown up with the motion picture. Bennett told me, “I can not only remember when the moving pictures couldn’t talk, I can remember when they couldn’t move.”

While Hitchcock was making
Blackmail
as a silent feature, he was planning how it could also be shot as “a talker.” He was not intimidated by the introduction of sound.

“Most dialogue in a film is only a borrowing from the theater,” he said, “photographs of people talking. I believed sound should liberate the cinema, not be merely a stepsister of theater.

“I foresaw sound being used in the same imaginative manner as photography had been used in film. In the early days of the cinema, they simply shot exactly what was happening on a set without any camera movement or editing, to achieve a dramatic, emotional effect.”

Ronald Neame, living in California when I spoke with him, described what it was like to work on
Blackmail.

“I was Jack Cox’s assistant cameraman shooting
Blackmail.
We were shooting silent, but there were rumors that BIP was considering the addition of sound. Charles Bennett, who wrote the stage play, and Benn Levy, were brought in to write dialogue, a good hint.

“Hitch kept the sets so they could be quickly put up again. A lot of what we had already shot on
Blackmail
could be used in the sound version.

“Jack and I were installed, along with our noisy camera, in a sealed soundproof booth with a large glass window. Two men could push the booth backwards and forwards on rails to track, and they could also pivot the booth when we had to pan more than the width of our window. There was just enough room for a hotplate so we could make tea.

“Unless the microphone was practically touching the actor’s head, the sound was unusable. The hum from our arc lights made so much noise we had to switch to incandescent lamps, but they weren’t bright enough for the slow film stock we had in those days.

“Then, the enormous mike cast heavy shadows on the walls of the set, spoiling Jack’s lighting. Jack would request they raise the mike, and they’d refuse because then it wouldn’t record anything. They’d complain about the noise of our booth. Sometimes we’d retreat into our respective booths uttering words I can’t tell you.

“But Hitch wasn’t ever ruffled by anything. He never shouted. He wore a black suit, white shirt, and dark tie, and never seemed to perspire. The rest of us were dripping, sealed up in our booths.”

The most difficult technical problem for the sound version, however, was Anny Ondra’s heavy accent. Since so many of her scenes had already been filmed for the silent version, Hitchcock created his own early form of dubbing.

He engaged Joan Barry to speak for Ondra. Barry stood to the side with her separate microphone, and as she spoke the lines, Ondra mouthed them silently.

One day Hitchcock handed Neame a 16mm camera to shoot a view of the murder the audience never saw. Neame remembered it well.

“In the film, Ritchard drags Anny through some drapes into the alcove where he keeps his cot. The drapes undulate, indicating struggle. You see Alice’s hand come out from behind the drapes. She reaches out for something, coming up with a knife from the table. Shortly afterwards, the artist’s hand drops down from between the drapes. He’s been stabbed. He’s dead. Alice appears with the bloody knife in her hand.

“With that camera Hitchcock gave me, I filmed what really happened. On the other side of the drapes, a prop man ruffled them to seem like a struggle. Alice reached for the knife. Behind the drapes, a second property man smeared some ‘blood’ on the knife. The artist dropped his hand through the drapes to show his death. I only hope someday someone will find that film.

“Hitch liked to work late in those days, never finishing before eleven p.m., and often we were still working at midnight. At about eight o’clock, we broke for supper, and Hitch, the actors, and sometimes Jack Cox would go to a pub called the Plough, where they ate a delicious hot meal. The rest of us got a sandwich and a glass of beer.

“If we worked past the last train, we were driven home. The driver figured out how to deliver home four people who lived in opposite directions. No matter how late I arrived at my flat, I had to be back on the set the next morning by eight o’clock.”

With the success of
Blackmail
, Alfred Hitchcock became firmly established as the preeminent British director.

“Y
EARS AGO
I made a movie of Sean O’Casey’s play
Juno and the Paycock,
” Hitchcock told me, “and I could not for the life of me find out what to do except to photograph it in one room, with a few exteriors which aren’t in the play. The film was successful, and I was ashamed to read those laudatory notices I had nothing to do with, except just to photograph the Irish players doing their job.”

Sitting with Eileen O’Casey, the widow of Sean O’Casey, at London’s Savoy Hotel many years after the death of her husband, I was told about his happy reaction to Hitchcock’s
Juno and the Paycock.
The original play had no greater supporter than O’Casey’s widow, who said the play had been a prime reason she fell in love with Sean.

“Sean was pleased about Hitchcock’s making the film, and he told Hitchcock to feel free. He liked the idea of the record of the play being there for people to see in all the years to come in a great performance.

“For me, any change to the play was sacrilegious, but Sean was very cooperative and even wrote some new material for the opening scene. It was important that Hitchcock was the kind of director he was because there were some who wouldn’t have gone back to Sean to make certain every word was his and to have him approve it.

“I personally preferred Sean’s ending on the stage, though when I saw it some years later, I thought it was a very good film in spite of end tampering.”

The ending Eileen O’Casey would have preferred was the Captain returning home so drunk that he didn’t understand and couldn’t comprehend the death of his son, instead of just having Juno and her daughter leave him.