Hitchcock Read online

  And the ship was going to stop outside the harbor to allow us to get the actors and the news-reel cameraman back to the dock to photograph the characters as they waved their farewells. The next scene was to be shot in San Remo. This scene has the native girl wading out to sea to commit suicide, and Levett, the villain in the story, is to rush out and make sure the girl is dead, by holding her head underwater. Then he’s to bring the body back to shore, saying, “I did my best to save her.”

  The following scenes take place at Lake Como, in the hotel of the Villa d’Este. Honeymoon, love scenes on the lake, beautiful romance, etc. My wife-to-be is there on the platform at Munich that evening and we are talking together. She’s not coming with us. Her job—you know, she’s only as tall as that; she was twenty-four then—was to go to Cherbourg by herself to pick up the leading lady, who was coming in from Hollywood. She was Virginia Valli, a very big star at the time, Universal’s biggest—and who played Patsy. My fiancée is to pick her up from the Aquitania at Cherbourg, take her to Paris, buy her a wardrobe there and then meet us at the Villa d’Este. That’s all.

  The train is scheduled to leave at eight o’clock.

  It is now two minutes to eight. The actor, Miles Mander, says to me, “My God, I’ve left my makeup case in the taxi,” and he runs off.

  I shout out after him, “We’ll be at the Hotel Bristol, in Genoa. Take the train tomorrow night, because we’re shooting on Tuesday.” I should remind you that this was on Saturday evening, and we were to arrive in Genoa on Sunday morning to get ready for the shooting. It’s now eight, but the train hasn’t left. A few minutes go by. Eight-ten. The train begins to move. And suddenly there’s a great row at the barrier and I see Miles Mander leaping over the gate, with three railway officials chasing him down the platform. He had found his make-up case and just manages to hop into the last car. The first bit of film drama is over, but this is only the beginning!

  The train is now on its way. We have no one to handle the accounts and I must take care of them myself. The accounting is more important than the directing. I’m terribly concerned over the money. We are in sleeping cars. As we reach the Austro-Italian border, Vintigmilia says, “Be very careful. We’re not to declare the camera. Otherwise, they will charge duty on every lens.” “What do you mean?”

  Carmelita Geraghty in The Pleasure Garden.

  “The German company told us to smuggle the camera through,” he tells me. When I ask him where the camera is, he tells me it’s under my bunk. As you know, I’ve always been afraid of policemen and I begin to sweat. And now I am also informed that the ten thousand feet of unexposed stock in our baggage is not to be declared either.

  The customs men come into our compartment. Big suspense for me. They don’t find the camera, but they discover the film. And since we haven’t declared it, they confiscate it.

  So we land in Genoa the following morning with no film. And we spend the whole day trying to buy some. On Monday morning I decide to send the newsreel man to Milan to buy some raw stock from Kodak. And I’m still busy with the bookkeeping: lire to marks, marks to pounds—it’s all terribly confusing. The cameraman returns at noon, bringing with him twenty pounds’ worth of film. And now we are advised that the ten thousand feet of unexposed film that had been confiscated at the border has arrived and I must pay the duty. So I’ve wasted twenty pounds, a very large amount in our small budget! We have barely enough money left for the shooting of the location scenes.

  On Tuesday the boat is scheduled to leave the dock at noon. It’s the Lloyd Prestino, a large ship that is on its way to South America. We have to rent a tugboat to go out of the harbor. That’s another ten pounds. Well, everything is finally settled. But at ten-thirty, when I take out my wallet to tip the tugboat man, I find it’s empty. There isn’t a sou!

  Ten thousand lire gone! I run back to the hotel, look under the bed, everywhere. No sign of the money. I go to the police to report that someone must have entered my room while I was asleep. “It’s a good thing I didn’t wake up, or I might have been stabbed,” I think. I’m very miserable, but the work must go on. And in the excitement of directing my very first scene, I forget all about the loss of the money.

  But when the shooting’s over, I’m very depressed again. I borrow ten pounds from the cameraman and fifteen from the actor. Since this doesn’t cover our needs, I write a letter to London requesting an advance on my salary. I also compose another letter to the German company, in Munich, saying, “I may need a little more money.” But I don’t dare to mail this request, because they might say, “How do you know you may need more money so early?” So I only mail the letter to London.

  Then we go back to the Hotel Bristol, where we’re to have lunch before setting out for San Remo. After the meal, I go out in the street. And there is my cameraman, Vintigmilia, with the German girl who is to play the native who throws herself into the sea. With them is the newsreel operator, who has now completed his work and is about to return to Munich. The three of them are standing there, with their heads together, talking very solemnly. I go up to them and say, “Is anything wrong?”

  “Yes,” they answer. “The girl. She can’t go into the water.”

  I ask, “What do you mean, she can’t go into the water?”

  And they insist, saying, “That’s right, she can’t go into the water. You know . . .”

  Bewildered, I reply, “No, what do you mean?” So then and there, on the sidewalk, with people walking back and forth, the two cameramen tell me all about menstruation. I’ve never heard of it in my life! They go into great detail, and I listen very carefully to what they have to say. When they’re through with their explanation, I’m still cross. All I can think about is the money I’ve wasted in bringing the girl with us, all those lire and marks. Very irritated, I mutter, “Well, why couldn’t she have told us about it in Munich, three days ago?”

  Anyway, we ship her back with the cameraman and we proceed to Alassio. We manage to find another girl, but this one was somewhat plumper than her ailing predecessor and my leading man was unable to lift her. At each attempt to haul her out of the water, he lets her drop, to the delight of a hundred onlookers, who are howling with laughter. And just as he finally succeeds in carrying her out, a little old lady, who had been quietly gathering sea shells nearby, saunters right across our scene, staring straight into the camera!

  Next, we board the train, on our way to the Villa d’Este. And I’m very nervous because Virginia Valli, the Hollywood star, has just arrived. I can’t let her know that this is my first picture.

  The first thing I say to my fiancée is, “Have you any money?”

  “No!”

  “But you had enough,” I point out.

  “Yes, but she brought another actress, Carmelita Geraghty. I tried to take them to the Hotel Westminster on the Rue de la Paix, but they insisted on the Claridge.”

  So I tell my fiancée all about my troubles. Eventually, we start the shooting and everything works out all right. In those days, of course, we shot moonlight scenes in the sun and we tinted the film blue. After each shot I’d turn back to my fiancée, asking, “Was it all right?”

  Only now do I work up the courage to send a cable to Munich saying that we need more money. Meanwhile, I have received the advance on my salary from London. The actor, being a very mean fellow, demands his money back. When I ask him why, he tells me that his tailor insists on being paid. Which wasn’t true, you know!

  And the suspense continues. I get some money from Munich, but am still fretting over the hotel bill, the rental of motorboats, and all sorts of incidentals. On the night before we’re to leave for Munich, I’m terribly nervous. You see, not only don’t I want the film star to know it’s my first picture, but I don’t want her to know that we’re short of money either—that we’re a very impoverished unit. So I do a really mean thing. I manage to twist the facts and put the whole blame on my fiancée, for bringing the extra girl. “Therefore,” I say, “you’ve got
to borrow two hundred dollars from the star.”

  She tells the star some story and returns with the money, enabling me to pay the hotel bill and buy tickets for our sleepers. We are to change trains at Zurich, in Switzerland, to arrive in Munich the following day. At the station they make me pay for excess baggage because the two American girls have trunks this high! By now we’ve almost run out of money.

  I must begin my scheming again—always those damned accounts! And, as you know, I always make my fiancée do all the dirty work. I tell her to go and ask the two Americans whether they want to have dinner. And to our relief they reply that they won’t eat the food on these foreign trains; they have brought sandwiches from the hotel. This means that the rest of us can afford to have dinner. I go back to my calculations and notice that in transferring lire into Swiss francs there is a loss of a few pennies. The train is late and there is a connection to make in Zurich. At nine P.M. we see a train moving out of the station: it’s our train! This means that we will have to spend the night in Zurich. But there’s so little money! Just then the train comes to a stop. The suspense is almost more than I can bear. The porters rush up but I wave them away—too expensive—and I start to haul the bags myself. On Swiss trains, as you know, the windows have no frames. The bottom of one of the suitcases hits a window, and there is the loudest noise of falling glass I’ve ever heard in my life!

  A railway official dashes up to us, saying, “Monsieur, this way please.”

  The young man with the mastermind, in full action; behind him, his script-girl and fiancée, Alma Reville.

  I’m taken to the office of the stationmaster, where I’m informed that the broken window will cost me thirty-five Swiss francs. So after paying for that I landed in Munich with one pfennig.

  That was my first location shooting.

  F.T.  That’s quite a story—in fact, it’s more exciting than the scenario. But it raises a point I’m curious about. You claim that, at the time, you were ignorant about sexual matters and totally innocent. Yet, in The Pleasure Garden, the two girls, Patsy and Jill, really suggest a couple, the one dressed in pajamas, the other wearing a nightgown. In The Lodger this same inference is even more explicit, with a little blonde who is shown sitting on the lap of a masculine-looking brunette in a loge. In other words, from your very first pictures on, there is a distinct impression that you were fascinated by the abnormal.

  A.H.  That may be true, but it didn’t go very deep; it was rather superficial. I was quite innocent at the time. The behavior of the two girls in The Pleasure Garden was inspired by something that happened when I was assistant director in Berlin in 1924. A highly respectable British family invited me and the director to go out with them. The young girl in the family was the daughter of one of the bosses of UFA. I didn’t understand a word of German. After dinner we wound up in a night club where men danced with each other. There were also female couples. Later on, two German girls, one around nineteen and the other about thirty years old, volunteered to drive us home. The car stopped in front of a hotel and they insisted that we go in. In the hotel room they made several propositions, to which I stolidly replied, “Nein, nein.” Then we had several cognacs, and finally the two German girls got into bed. And the young girl in our party, who was a student, put on her glasses to make sure she wouldn’t miss anything. It was a gemütlich German family soiree.

  F.T.  I see. At any rate, I take it that the studio work of The Pleasure Garden was shot entirely in Germany?

  A.H.  Yes, in Munich. We showed the finished picture to Michael Balcon, who came over from London to see it. At the end of the picture there was a scene in which Levett, the heavy, went berserk; he threatened to kill Patsy with a scimitar, and the doctor arrives with a gun. What I did was to have a shot with the gun in the foreground, and we placed the madman and the heroine in the background. The doctor shoots from a distance and the bullet hits the madman. For a moment the shock returns him to sanity. The wild look leaves his face as he turns to the doctor and says in a completely normal manner, “Oh, hello, doctor.” Then, noticing that he is bleeding, he says, “Oh,” then collapses and dies.

  During the showing of this episode, one of the German producers, a very important man, got up and said, “It’s impossible. You cannot show a scene like this. It’s incredible and it’s too brutal.” At the end of the screening, Michael Balcon said, “The surprising thing is that technically it doesn’t look like a continental picture. It’s more like an American film.” Anyway, it got a very good press. The London Daily Express ran a headline describing me as the “Young man with a master mind.”

  F.T.  The following year you made your second picture, The Mountain Eagle. It was filmed in the studio and on location in the Tyrol.

  These six photos are probably all that remains of The Mountain Eagle.

  A.H.  It was a very bad movie. The producers were always trying to break into the American market, so they wanted another film star. And so, for the part of the village schoolmistress, they sent me Nita Naldi, the successor to Theda Bara. She had fingernails out to there. Ridiculous!

  F.T.  I have the scenario here. The story is about a store manager who is after an innocent young schoolteacher. She takes refuge in the mountains, under the protection of a recluse, whom she eventually marries. Is that right?

  A.H.  I’m afraid it is!

  * * *

  I. Patsy, a chorus girl at the Pleasure Garden Theater, gets her girl friend Jill a job in the troupe. Jill is engaged to Hugh, who is stationed in the colonies.

  Patsy marries Levett, a colleague of Hugh’s, and following a honeymoon at Lake Como, Levett also sails for the colonies. Jill, who is having the time of her life in London and enjoying the attentions of other men, keeps on postponing her departure for the islands, where her fiancé awaits her.

  But Patsy leaves to join her husband. On her arrival, she discovers him in the arms of a native woman and totally depraved. When she announces her decision to leave him, Levett, in a panic, maneuvers the native woman into drowning, making her death appear a suicide. Then he turns against Patsy, and just as he is about to kill her, he is shot down by the local doctor. Hugh, abandoned by Jill, is drawn to Patsy, and the two embark on a new life together.

  * * *

  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”

  * * *

  2

  FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT.  The Lodger, I believe, was your first important film venture.

  ALFRED HITCHCOCK.  That’s another story. The Lodger was the first true “Hitchcock movie.” I had seen a play called Who Is He?, based on Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’s novel The Lodger. The action was set in a house that took in roomers and the landlady wondered whether her new boarder was Jack the Ripper or not. I treated it very simply, purely from her point of view. Since then there have been two or three remakes, but they are too elaborate.

  F.T.  In actual fact, the hero was innocent. He was not Jack the Ripper.

  A.H.  That was the difficulty. Ivor Novello, the leading man, was a matinee idol in England. He was a very big name at the time. These are the problems we face with the star system. Very often the story line is jeopardized because a star cannot be a villain.

  F.T.  I gather that you would have preferred the hero to turn out to be Jack the Ripper?

  A.H.  Not necessarily. But in a story of this kind I might have liked him to go off in the night, so that we would never really know for sure. But with the hero played by a big star, one can’t do that. You have to clearly spell it out in big letters: “He is innocent.”

  F.T.  You know, I am rather surprised that you would consider an ending that failed to provide the public with the answe
r to its question.

  A.H.  In this case, if your suspense revolves around the question: “Is he or is he not Jack the Ripper?” and you reply, “Yes, he is Jack the Ripper,” you’ve merely confirmed a suspicion. To me, this is not dramatic. But here, we went in the other direction and showed that he wasn’t Jack the Ripper at all.

  I ran into the same problem sixteen years later when I made Suspicion with Cary Grant. Cary Grant could not be a murderer.

  F.T.  Would he have refused?

  A.H.  No, not necessarily. But the producers would surely have refused. The Lodger is the first picture possibly influenced by my period in Germany. The whole approach to this film was instinctive with me. It was the first time I exercised my style. In truth, you might almost say that The Lodger was my first picture.

  F.T.  A very good movie which showed great visual inventiveness. I really enjoyed it.

  A.H.  As a matter of fact, I took a pure narrative and, for the first time, presented ideas in purely visual terms. We took fifteen minutes of a winter afternoon in London, starting about five-twenty. We opened with the head of a blond girl who is screaming. I remember the way I photographed it. I took a sheet of glass, placed the girl’s head on the glass and spread her hair around until it filled the frame. Then we lit the glass from behind so that one would be struck by her light hair. Then we cut to show an electric sign advertising a musical play, Tonight, Golden Curls, with the reflection flickering in the water. The girl has drowned. She’s hauled out of the water and pulled ashore. The consternation of the bystanders suggests that a murder has been committed. The police arrive on the scene, and then the press. The camera follows one of the newsmen as he moves toward a telephone. He isn’t a local reporter, but a wire-service man who is calling his office. And now I proceed to show everything that happens as the news spreads around.