Hitchcock Page 6

  What comes after The Farmer’s Wife?

  F.T.  The next one was Champagne.

  A.H.  That was probably the lowest ebb in my output.

  F.T.  That’s not fair. I enjoyed it. Some of the scenes have the lively quality of the Griffith comedies.

  It can be summed up in a few words: A millionaire father objects to the man his daughter is in love with and the girl leaves home and sails to France. To teach her a lesson her father allows her to think he’s bankrupt, so that she will have to make her own living. The heroine goes to work in a cabaret, where her job consists of encouraging the clientele to drink the very same champagne to which the family owes its fortune. Eventually, the father, who’s had a detective keeping an eye on her all along, realizes that he’s gone too far, and he finally agrees to her marriage to the man she loves. That’s the story.

  A.H.  That’s just the trouble. There is no story!

  F.T.  I see that you’re not very much interested in talking about Champagne. could you just answer one question: Was the film an assignment from the company or was it your own idea?

  A.H.  What happened, I think, is that someone said, “Let’s do a picture with the title Champagne,” and I thought of beginning it in a certain way, which was rather old-fashioned and a little like that very old picture of Griffith’s, Way Down East. The story of a young girl going to the big city.

  On the set of Champagne. From right to left: E. A. Dupont (director of Variety), Monty Banks. John Maxwell (producer), Prince Aage, J. Thorpe, Betty Balfour, J. Grossman (studio manager) and Hitchcock.

  My idea was to show a girl, working in Reims, whose job is to nail down the crates of champagne. And always, the champagne is put on the train. She never drinks any—just looks at it. But eventually she would go to the city herself, and she would follow the route of the champagne—the night clubs, the parties. And naturally she would get to drink some. In the end, thoroughly disillusioned, she would return to her old job at Reims, by then hating champagne. I dropped the whole idea—probably because of the moralizing aspect.

  F.T.  There were lots of sight gags in the version I saw.

  A.H.  The nicest one, I think, was the drunkard who’s staggering down the ship’s corridor and swaying from side to side when the ship is steady, but when it is rolling like hell and everyone else is having a hard time trying to keep his balance, he walks in a perfectly straight line.

  F.T.  I also remember the dish that starts out from the kitchen looking very messy, with everybody putting his filthy fingers in it. As it is carried to the dining room, refining touches are added en route. And what has started out as a revolting-looking mess in the kitchen becomes very elegant and grand by the time it reaches the customer. The picture was full of these humorous inventions.

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  F.T.  The Manxman, in contrast with Champagne, is a very serious picture.III

  A.H.  The only point of interest about that movie is that it was my last silent one.

  F.T.  Another point of interest is that it suggested the talkies. I remember that at one moment the heroine says, “I’m expecting a baby.” She articulates the phrase so clearly that one can read her lips. In fact, you dispensed with a title.

  A.H.  That’s true, but it was a very banal picture.

  F.T.  True, it was fairly humorless, yet, the story, in some respects, bears a resemblance to Under Capricorn or I Confess. One feels you really believed in this film.

  A.H.  It’s not a matter of conviction, but the picture was the adaptation of a very well-known book by Sir Hall Caine. The novel had quite a reputation and it belonged to a tradition. We had to respect that reputation and that tradition. It was not a Hitchcock movie, whereas Blackmail . . .

  F.T.  Before going on to Blackmail, which is your first talking picture, I would like a few words on silent films, in general.

  A.H.  Well, the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In other words, since all that was missing was simply natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.

  F.T.  I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great film-makers—in fact, almost the whole of production—had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. I mean that this was precisely the time when the high screen standards of so many brilliant directors showed up the woeful inadequacy of the others, and the lesser talents were gradually being eliminated from the field. In this sense one might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.

  A.H.  I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that’s true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call “photographs of people talking.” When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

  It seems unfortunate that with the arrival of sound the motion picture, overnight, assumed a theatrical form. The mobility of the camera doesn’t alter this fact. Even though the camera may move along the sidewalk, it’s still theater. One result of this is the loss of cinematic style, and another is the loss of fantasy.

  In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and, whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you choose to stage the action, your main concern is to hold the audience’s fullest attention. Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.

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  I. Alfred Hitchcock can also be recognized in a later sequence of the picture, in which, wearing a cap and leaning against a railing, he is one of the bystanders looking on as Ivor Novello is captured by the police.

  II. After becoming champion, the Australian Falls in love with the heroine and presents her with a serpentine bracelet. As they embrace, the girl moves the bracelet high up on her arm, above the elbow. When her fiancé, Jack, arrives on the scene, the girl hastily drops the bracelet down to her wrist, concealing it with her other hand To embarrass her in front of Jack, the Australian deliberately holds out his hand to say good-by. The girl, intent on concealing the bracelet, fails to respond, and Jack takes this seeming rejection as evidence of her loyalty to him.

  In another scene, while the girl and Jack are together near a river, she accidentally drops the bracelet into the water. After retrieving it. Jack asks for an explanation. The Australian, she explains, gave it to her because he didn’t want to spend the money won in a fight against his rival on himself. "So, it’s really mine." Jack says, taking the bracelet from her and winding it around her finger, like a wedding band.

  In this, and several other ways, the sinuous bracelet weaves its wav through the theme and winds up being twisted around itself, like a snake. The film’s title, The Ring, may be taken in its dual sense, referring both to a boxing arena and a wedding band.

  III. The action takes place on the Isle of Man. The plot centers around three characters: Peter, a poor fisherman, and Philip, a lawyer, are both in love with Kate. When Peter’s proposal of marriage is rejected by the girl’s father on the grounds that he can’t support her, he leaves the island, telling Kate he will return for her after he has made a fortune. When they hear a report that Peter has died, Kate discovers that Philip has been in love with her and she admits her feelings for him. But one day Peter unexpectedly turns up again, and Kate, faithful to her promise, marries him. When she gives birth to Philip’s child, she realizes she cannot continue living with Peter and asks Philip to run away with her. When he refuses, she attempts suicide. Since suicide is considered a crime on the island
, she is summoned before a tribunal, where she and Philip are forced into a public confession. The story winds up with Kate and Philip leaving the isle with their child.

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  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

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  3

  FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT.  This brings us to the end of 1928, when you started your first talking picture, Blackmail. Were you satisfied with the screenplay?

  ALFRED HITCHCOCK.  It was a rather simple story, but I never did it the way I really wanted to. We used the same exposition as for The Lodger. In the first reel I show the procedure of an arrest: the detectives go out in the morning; they pick up the man; he has a gun; they take it away and put the handcuffs on. He’s taken to the police station, booked, fingerprinted, and questioned. They take a mug shot and lock him up in a cell. And then we come back to the two detectives going to the men’s room and washing their hands, just as though they were two office workers. To them it was just the end of a day’s work. The younger detective’s girl is waiting for him; they go to a restaurant, have a row and go their separate ways. She’s picked up by an artist who takes her to his place and tries to rape her. She kills him. As it happens, her young man is assigned to the case. He finds a clue, and when he realizes that his girl is involved, he conceals it from his superiors. Then the blackmailer comes into the scene and there’s a conflict between him and the girl, with the young detective in between the two. The detective calls the blackmailer’s bluff, and the villain stands his ground at first, but in the end he loses his head. There is a chase around the roofs of the British Museum. He falls to his death. Against her boy friend’s advice, the girl insists upon going to Scotland Yard to tell them everything. But when she gets there, the clerk turns her over to her young man, who, of course, takes her home.

  The ending I originally wanted was different. After the chase and the death of the blackmailer, the girl would have been arrested and the young man would have had to do the same things to her that we saw at the beginning: handcuffs, booking at the police station, and so on. Then he would meet his older partner in the men’s room, and the other man, unaware of what had taken place, would say, “Are you going out with your girl tonight?” And he would have answered, “No, I’m going straight home.’ And the picture would have ended in that way. But the producers claimed it was too depressing.

  F.T.  At the cinémathèques there are two versions of Blackmail, one silent and the other a sound picture.

  A.H.  What happened was that after a good deal of hesitation, the producers decided it would be silent except for the last reel. In those days they would advertise these as “part-sound pictures.” But since I suspected the producers might change their minds and eventually want an all-sound picture, I worked it out that way. We utilized the techniques of talkies, but without sound. Then, when the picture was completed, I raised objections to the part-sound version, and they gave me carte blanche to shoot some of the scenes over. The star was Anny Ondra, the German actress, who, naturally, hardly spoke any English. We couldn’t dub in the voices then as we do today. So I got around the difficulty by calling on an English actress, Joan Barry, who did the dialogue standing outside the frame, with her own microphone, while Miss Ondra pantomimed the words.

  F.T.  I imagine you were searching for sound innovations comparable to the visual ideas you introduced in The Lodger.

  A.H.  Well, I tried. After the girl has killed the painter, there is a scene showing a breakfast, with her family seated around the table. One of the neighbors is discussing the murder. She says, “What a terrible way to kill a man, with a knife in his back. If I had killed him, I might have struck him over the head with a brick, but I wouldn’t use a knife.”

  And the talk goes on and on, becoming a confusion of vague noises to which the girl no longer listens. Except for the one word, “Knife, knife,” which is said over and over again and becomes fainter and fainter. Then suddenly she hears her father’s normal, loud voice: “Alice, please pass me the bread knife.” And Alice has to pick up a knife similar to the one she’s used for the killing, while the others go on chattering about the crime.

  F.T.  You used a good many trick shots in the picture, I believe. For instance, the sequence of the chase through the British Museum.

  A.H.  That’s right; we used the Shuftan process because there wasn’t enough light in the museum to shoot there. You set a mirror at an angle of forty-five degrees and you reflect a full picture of the British Museum in it. The pictures were taken with thirty-minute exposures. We had nine of these pictures, showing various rooms, and we made them into transparencies so that we could backlight them.

  Then we scraped the silvering away in the mirror in certain places corresponding to a decor prop we had built on the set. For instance, a doorframe through which one of the characters came in.

  The producers knew nothing about the Shuftan process and they might have raised objections, so I did all of this without their knowledge.

  F.T.  In that picture there’s one scene that was subsequently used by several other directors of American films. That’s the scene in which the painter lures the girl to his apartment with the intention of seducing her and which winds up with his being killed.

  HITCHCOCK: Now, Miss Ondra, we are going to do a sound test. Isn’t that what you wanted? Now come right over here.

  ONDRA: I don’t know what to say. I’m so nervous!

  HITCHCOCK: Have you been a good girl?

  ONDRA: Oh, no!

  HITCHCOCK: No? Have you slept with men?

  ONDRA: No!

  HITCHCOCK: Now come right over here, Miss Ondra, and stand still in your place, or it won’t come out right—as the girl said to the soldier.

  ONDRA: Oh, Hitch, you make me embarrassed!

  HITCHCOCK: Cut!

  Hitchcock fends off a mischievous brat in Blackmail (1929). In the center, the detective hero, played by John Longden.

  A.H.  Of course. I did a funny thing in that scene, a sort of farewell to silent pictures. On the silent screen the villain was generally a man with a mustache. Well, my villain was clean-shaven, but an ironwork chandelier in his studio cast a shadow on his upper lip that suggested an absolutely fierce-looking mustache!

  F.T.  Then, in 1930, you were asked to direct one or two sequences of the first British musical comedy, a picture entitled Elstree Calling.

  A.H.  Of no interest whatever.

  F.T.  In that case let’s go on to Juno and the Paycock, taken from the Sean O’Casey play.I

  A.H.  Juno and the Paycock was made with the Irish Players. I must say that I didn’t feel like making the picture because, although I read the play over and over again, I could see no way of narrating it in cinematic form. It’s an excellent play, though, and I liked the story, the mood, the characters, and the blend of humor and tragedy very much. As a matter of fact, I had O’Casey in mind when I showed a bum in a café announcing the end of the world in The Birds. I photographed the play as imaginatively as possible, but from a creative viewpoint it was not a pleasant experience.

  The film got very good notices, but I was actually ashamed, because it had nothing to do with cinema. The critics praised the picture, and I had the feeling I was dishonest, that I had stolen something.

  F.T.  As a matter of fact, I have here a British review, written by James Agate, which appeared in The Tatler in March, 1930. It reads: “Juno and the Paycock appears to me to be very nearly a masterpiece. Bravo Mr. Hitchcock! Bravo the Irish Players and Bravo Edward Chapman! This is a magnificent British picture.”

  But I understand your reaction because it’s quite tru
e that critics generally tend to assess a picture on the basis of its literary quality rather than its cinematic value.

  Your scruples in relation to O’Casey, no doubt, account for your reluctance to adapt great literary works to the screen. Your own works include a great many adaptations, but mostly they are popular or light entertainment novels, which are so freely refashioned in your own manner that they ultimately become a Hitchcock creation. Many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for instance.

  Sara Allgood and Kathleen O’Regan in Juno and the Paycock.

  A.H.  Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that. An author takes three or four years to write a fine novel; it’s his whole life. Then other people take it over completely. Craftsmen and technicians fiddle around with it and eventually someone winds up as a candidate for an Oscar, while the author is entirely forgotten. I simply can’t see that.