Hitchcock

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgment

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  Introduction

  1: Childhood • Behind prison bars • “Came the dawn” • Michael Balcon • Woman to Woman • Number Thirteen • Introducing the future Mrs. Hitchcock • A melodramatic shooting: The Pleasure Garden • The Mountain Eagle

  2: The first true Hitchcock: The Lodger • Creating a purely visual form • The glass floor • Handcuffs and sex • Why Hitchcock appears in his films • Downhill • Easy Virtue • The Ring and One-Round Jack • The Farmer’s Wife • The Griffith influence • Champagne • The last silent movie: The Manxman

  3: Hitchcock’s first sound film: Blackmail • The Shuftan process • Juno and the Paycock • Why Hitchcock will never film Crime and Punishment • What is suspense? • Murder • The Skin Game • Rich and Strange • Two innocents in Paris • Number Seventeen • Cats, cats everywhere • Waltzes from Vienna • The lowest ebb and the comeback

  4: The Man Who Knew Too Much • When Churchill was chief of police • M • From “The One Note Man” to the deadly cymbals • Clarification and simplification • The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan’s influence • Understatement • An old, bawdy story • Mr. Memory • Slice of life and slice of cake

  5: The Secret Agent • You don’t always need a happy ending • What do they have in Switzerland? • Sabotage • The child and the bomb • An example of suspense • The Lady Vanishes • The plausibles • A wire from David O. Selznick • The last British film: Jamaica Inn • Some conclusions about the British period

  6: Rebecca: A Cinderella-like story • “I’ve never received an Oscar” • Foreign Correspondent • Gary Cooper’s mistake • In Holland, windmills and rain • The bloodstained tulip • What’s a MacGuffin? • Flashback to The Thirty-nine Steps • Mr. and Mrs. Smith • “All actors are cattle” Suspicion • The luminous glass of milk

  7: Sabotage versus Saboteur • A mass of ideas clutters up a picture • Shadow of a Doubt • Tribute to Thornton Wilder • “The Merry Widow” • An idealistic killer • Lifeboat • A microcosm of war • Like a pack of dogs • Return to London • Modest war contribution: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache

  8: Return to America • Spellbound • Collaboration with Salvador Dali • Notorious • “The Song of the Flame” • The uranium MacCuffin • Under surveillance by the FBI • A film about the cinema • The Paradine Case • Can Gregory Peck play a British lawyer? • An intricate shot • Horny hands, like the devil!

  9: Rope: From 7:30 to 9:15 in one shot • Clouds of spun glass • Colors and shadows • Walls that fade away • Films must be cut • How to make noises rise from the street • Under Capricorn • Infantilism and other errors in judgment • Run for cover! • “Ingrid, it’s only a movie!” • Stage Fright • The flashback that lied • The better the villain, the better the picture

  10: Spectacular comeback via Strangers on a Train • A monopoly on the suspense genre • The little man who crawled • A bitchy wife • I Confess • A “barbaric sophisticate” • The sanctity of confession • Experience alone is not enough • Fear of the police • Story of a ménage à trois

  11: Dial M for Murder • Filming in 3-D • The theater confines the action • Rear Window • The Kuleshov experiment • We are all voyeurs • Death of a small dog • The size of the image has a dramatic purpose • The surprise kiss versus the suspense kiss • The Patrick Mahon case and the Dr. Crippen case • To Catch a Thief • Sex on the screen • The Trouble with Harry • The humor of understatement • The Man Who Knew Too Much • A knife in the back • The clash of cymbals

  12: The Wrong Man • Absolute authenticity • Vertigo • The usual alternatives: suspense or surprise • Necrophilia • Kim Novak on the set • Two projects that were never filmed • A political suspense movie • North by Northwest • The importance of photographic documentation • Dealing with time and space • The practice of the absurd • The body that came from nowhere

  13: Ideas in the middle of the night • The longest kiss in screen history • A case of pure exhibitionism • Never waste space • Screen imagery is make-believe • Psycho • Janet Leigh’s brassière • Red herrings • Directing the audience • How Arbogast was killed • A shower stabbing • Stuffed birds • How to get mass emotions • Psycho: A film-maker’s film

  14: The Birds • The elderly ornithologist • The gouged-out eyes • The girl in a gilded cage • Improvisations • The size of the image • The scene that was dropped • An emotional truck • Electronic sounds • Practical jokes

  15: Marnie • A fetishist love • The Three Hostages, Mary Rose, and R.R.R.R. • Torn Curtain • The bus is the villain • The scene in the factory • Every film is a brand-new experience • The rising curve • The situation film versus the character film • “I only read the London Times” • A strictly visual mind • Hitchcock a Catholic film-maker? • A dream for the future: A film showing twenty-four hours in the life of a city

  16: Hitchcock’s final years • Grace Kelly abandons the cinema • More on The Birds, Marnie, and Torn Curtain • Hitch misses the stars • The “great flawed films” • A project that was dropped • Topaz made to order for the front office • Return to London with Frenzy • The pacemaker and Family Plot • Hitchcock laden down with tributes and honors • Love and espionage • The Short Night • Hitchcock is ill, Sir Alfred is dead • The end

  The Films of Alfred Hitchcock

  Selected Bibliography

  Index of Film Titles

  Index of Names

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  We wish to thank all those who helped in conceiving, completing or illustrating this hook: Aimée Alexandre, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuele Bernheim, Peter Bogdanovich, René Bonnell, Raymond Cauchetier, Carlos Clarens, Josiane Couëdel, Roger Dagieu, L’Express, Odette Ferry, Lucette de Givray, Philippe Halsman, Monique Ilolveck, Christophe L., Jean-François Lentretien, Lydie Mahias, Madeleine Morgenstern, Christine Pellé, George Perry, Peggy Robertson, Laura Truffaut-Wong, Oliver Vaughan, Alain Venisse, Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinémathèque Française, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Film Archive, London.

  PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

  Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case.

  In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case.

  His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film.

  In 1962, while in New York to present Jules and Jim, I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question: “Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock so seriously? He’s rich and successful, but his movies have no substance.” In the course of an interview during which I praised Rear Window to the skies, an American critic surprised me by commenting, “You love
Rear Window because, as a stranger to New York, you know nothing about Greenwich Village.” To this absurd statement, I replied, “Rear Window is not about Greenwich Village, it is a film about cinema, and I do know cinema.”

  Upon my return to Paris, I was still disturbed by this exchange. From my past career as a critic, in common with all of the young writers from Cahiers du Cinéma, I still felt the imperative need to convince. It was obvious that Hitchcock, whose genius for publicity was equalled only by that of Salvador Dali, had in the long run been victimized in American intellectual circles because of his facetious response to interviewers and his deliberate practice of deriding their questions. In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock.

  That is what this book is all about. Patiently prepared with the help of Helen Scott, whose editorial experience was a decisive factor, I dare say that our book achieved this result. At the time it was published, however, a young American film professor predicted: “This book will do more harm to your reputation in America than your worst film.” As it happens, Charles Thomas Samuels was mistaken. He committed suicide a year or two later, undoubtedly for other reasons. In fact, from 1968 on, American critics began to take Hitchcock’s work more seriously. Today, a movie like Psycho is regarded as a classic, and young film buffs have adopted Hitchcock wholeheartedly, without begrudging him his success, wealth, and fame.

  While we were recording these talks with Hitchcock in August 1962, the final editing of The Birds, his forty-eighth picture, was under way. It took us some four years to transcribe the tapes and gather the photographs. Whenever I met Hitchcock during this period, I would question him in order to update the book I called “the hitchbook.” The first edition, therefore, published at the end of 1967, concludes with his fiftieth film, Torn Curtain. In the final part of the present edition, there is an additional chapter commenting on Topaz, Frenzy (his last relative success), Family Plot, and, finally, The Short Night, a film he was preparing and constantly revising. In truth, his whole entourage was aware that Hitchcock’s health and morale had deteriorated to such a point that a fifty-fourth picture was out of the question.

  In the case of a man like Hitchcock, who lived only through and for his work, to cease activity was tantamount to a death sentence. He knew it as well as everybody else, and this is why the last four years of his life were so sad.

  On May 2, 1980, a few days after his death, a mass was held in a small church on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. One year before, a farewell to Jean Renoir had taken place in the same church. Jean Renoir’s coffin had been placed in front of the altar. Family, friends, neighbors, film buffs, and people off the street attended the ceremony. For Hitchcock, it was different. There was no coffin—it had been removed to an unknown destination. The guests, who had been invited by telegram, were checked in at the door by Universal’s security men. The police kept the crowds outside at bay.

  It was the burial of a timid man who had become intimidating and who, for the first time, was avoiding publicity, since it wouldn’t help his work—a man who, since his adolescence, had trained himself to be in control of the situation.

  The man was dead, but not the film-maker. For his pictures, made with loving care, an exclusive passion, and deep emotions concealed by exceptional technical mastery, are destined to circulate throughout the world, competing with newer productions, defying the test of time, and confirming Jean Cocteau’s image of Marcel Proust: “His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers.”

  FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT

  INTRODUCTION

  It all began when we broke the ice.

  That happened in the winter of 1955, when Alfred Hitchcock, having completed the location shooting of To Catch a Thief on the Côte d’Azur, came to the Saint-Maurice studios, in Joinville, for the post-synchronization of the picture. My friend Claude Chabrol and I decided to go there to interview him for Cahiers du Cinéma. Armed with a long list of intricate questions and a borrowed tape recorder, we sallied forth in high spirits.

  In Joinville we were directed to a pitch-black auditorium, where a loop showing Cary Grant and Brigitte Auber in a motorboat was being run continuously on the screen. In the darkness we introduced ourselves to Hitchcock, who courteously asked us to wait for him at the studio bar, across the courtyard.

  Both movie-crazy, thrilled by our brief preview of Hitchcock’s latest work, we emerged into the blinding glare of daylight, literally bursting with excitement. In the heat of our discussion we failed to notice the dark-gray frozen pond in the middle of the courtyard. With a single step forward we went over the ledge, landing on a thin layer of ice, which immediately gave way. Within seconds we were immersed in a pool of freezing water and a state of shock. In a hollow voice I asked Chabrol, “What about the tape recorder?” He replied by slowly raising his left arm to hold the case in mid-air, with the water bleakly oozing out from all sides like a stream of tears.

  Staggering around the sloping basin, unable to reach the edge without sliding right back to the center, we were trapped in a situation straight out of a Hitchcock movie. Eventually, with the helping hand of a charitable bystander, we managed to reach firm ground.

  A wardrobe mistress who was passing by invited us to follow her to a dressing room where we might take off our clothes and dry out. When we attempted to thank her for her kindness, she said in a businesslike way, “What a way to make a living! Are you extras for Rififi?” Upon learning that we were reporters, she lost all interest and told us to clear out.

  A few minutes later, still soaking wet and shivering with cold, we made our way to the bar, where Hitchcock awaited us. He merely looked us over and, without a single comment on our appearance, amiably suggested another appointment for that evening at the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

  A year later, upon spotting us at one of his Paris press conferences, Hitchcock finally acknowledged the incident by saying, “Gentlemen, every time I see a pair of ice cubes clicking together in a glass of whiskey, I think of you two.”

  We subsequently learned that he had embellished the story with a twist of his own. According to the Hitchcock version, Chabrol was dressed as a priest and I was wearing a gendarme’s uniform when we turned up for the interview.

  It was almost a decade after that preliminary aquatic contact that I undertook to approach Hitchcock again with a series of probing questions about his work. What prompted me to emulate Oedipus’ consultation of the oracle was that my own efforts as a film-maker, in the years that followed, made me increasingly aware of the exceptional importance of Hitchcock’s contribution and of its particular value to all those who work in the screen medium.

  The examination of Hitchcock’s directorial career, ranging as it does from his silent movies in Great Britain to his current color films in Hollywood, is a richly rewarding source of discovery. In Hitchcock’s work a film-maker is bound to find the answer to many of his own problems, including the most fundamental question of all: how to express oneself by purely visual means.

  I am not so much the author as the initiator, or if you prefer, the instigator, of this work on Alfred Hitchcock. The book is essentially a journalistic work, made possible when Alfred Hitchcock agreed to a fifty-hour-long interview.

  In 1962 I wrote to Mr. Hitchcock, asking whether he would answer some five hundred questions dealing solely with his career, in chronological order, and suggesting that our discussion deal with the following:

  (a) the circumstances attending the inception of each picture;

  (b) the preparation and structure of the screenplays;

  (c) specific directorial problems on each film;

  (d) Hitchcock’s own assessment of the commercial and artistic results in relation to his initial expectations
for each picture.

  Hitchcock cabled his agreement. There now remained one last hurdle, the language barrier, and I turned to my friend Helen Scott, of the French Film Office in New York. An American raised in France, her thorough command of the cinema vocabulary, her sound judgment and exceptional human qualities, made her the ideal accomplice for the project.

  We arrived in Hollywood on August 13, Hitchcock’s birthday. Every morning he would pick us up at the Beverly Hills Hotel to take us to his office at Universal studios. With each of us wearing a microphone, and a sound engineer in the next room recording our voices, we kept up a running conversation from nine to six every day, achieving something of a track record as we talked our way through lunches.

  A witty raconteur, noted for his entertaining interviews, Hitchcock started out true to form, regaling us with a series of amusing anecdotes. It was only on the third day that he became more sober and thoughtful in spelling out the ups and downs of his career. His assessment of the achievements and the failures was genuinely self-critical, and his account of his doubts, frustrations, and hopes was completely sincere.

  What emerged, as the talks progressed, was a striking contrast between Hitchcock’s public image and his real self. Under the invariably self-possessed and often cynical surface is a deeply vulnerable, sensitive, and emotional man who feels with particular intensity the sensations he communicates to his audience.

  The man who excels at filming fear is himself a very fearful person, and I suspect that this trait of his personality has a direct bearing on his success. Throughout his entire career he has felt the need to protect himself from the actors, producers, and technicians who, insofar as their slightest lapse or whim may jeopardize the integrity of his work, all represent as many hazards to a director. How better to defend oneself than to become the director no actor will question, to become one’s own producer, and to know more about technique than the technicians?