Hitchcock
Here again, the younger hero is accused of a crime he hasn’t committed. He’s on the run and hiding and the girl is helping him, rather reluctantly. She tells him that she’s promised to call on her aunt and takes him to the aunt’s house, where a children’s party is taking place. The kids are playing blindman’s buff. The young man and his girl try to get away while auntie is blind-man, because if either one of them is caught, they will have to stay. So there’s lots of suspense. Auntie nearly catches them, but they manage to get away.
When the film was released in this country, that was one scene they cut out. It was absurd; that was the essence of the film!
By the way, Young and Innocent contains an illustration of that suspense rule by which the audience is provided with information the characters in the picture don’t know about. Because of this knowledge, the tension is heightened as the audience tries to figure out what’s going to happen next.
Toward the end of the picture the young girl is searching for the murderer, and she discovers an old tramp who has seen the killer and can identify him. The only clue is that the man has a nervous twitch of the eyes.
So the girl dresses up the old tramp in a good suit of clothes and she takes him to this big hotel where a thé dansant is in progress. There are lots of people there, and the tramp says, “Isn’t it ridiculous to try to spot a pair of twitching eyes in a crowd of this size.”
Just then, right on that line of dialogue, I place the camera in the highest position, above the hotel lounge, next to the ceiling, and we dolly it down, right through the lobby, into the big ballroom, and past the dancers, the bandstand, and the musicians, right up to a close-up of the drummer. The musicians are all in blackface, and we stay on the drummer’s face until his eyes fill the screen. And then, the eyes twitch. The whole thing was done in one shot.
F.T. That’s one of your rules: From the farthest to the nearest, from the smallest to the biggest . . . .
A.H. Yes. At that moment I cut right back to the old man and the girl, still sitting at the other end of the room. Now, the audience has the information and the question is: How are this girl and this old boy going to spot the man? A policeman outside sees the girl, who is the daughter of his chief. He goes to the phone. Meanwhile, the band has stopped for a break, and the drummer, having a smoke outside in the alley, sees a group of police hurrying toward the rear entrance of the hotel. Since he’s guilty, he quickly ducks back inside, to the bandstand, where the music resumes.
Now the jittery drummer sees the policemen talking to the tramp and the girl at the other end of the ballroom. He thinks they’re looking for him, and his nervousness is reflected in the drumbeat, which is out of tune with the rest of the band. The rhythm gets worse and worse. Meanwhile, the tramp, the girl, and the police are preparing to leave through an exit near the bandstand. In fact, the drummer is out of danger, but he doesn’t know it. All he can see are those uniforms moving in his direction, and his twitching eyes indicate that he’s in a panic. Finally, his beat is so far out of rhythm that the band stops playing and the dancers stop their dancing. And just as the little group is making its way out the door, he falls with a loud crash into his drum.
Rehearsing a scene from Young and Innocent (1937).
They stop to find out the reason for the commotion, and the girl and the tramp move over to the unconscious man. At the beginning of the story we had established that the heroine is a Girl Scout and an expert on first aid. In fact, she and the hero first got together when he fainted in the police station and she took care of him. So now she volunteers to help the unconscious drummer, and as she leans over him, she notices his twitching eyes. Very quietly she says, “Will someone please get me a wet cloth to wipe his face off,” at the same time beckoning the tramp to come over. A waiter hands her the towel; she wipes the man’s face clean of its black make-up and looks up at the tramp, who nods and says, “Yes, that’s the man.”
F.T. I saw the picture at the Cinémathèque a long time ago, and that scene made such an impression that it’s the only one I still remember clearly. Everyone there felt that the track shot of the ballroom was truly remarkable.
A.H. It took us two days to do that one shot.
F.T. You used a similar shot in Notorious, Starting with the camera set up high, above the large chandelier, the shot takes in the whole reception hall, to wind up on a frame of the key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand.
A.H. There again we’ve substituted the language of the camera for dialogue. In Notorious that sweeping movement of the camera is making a statement. What it’s saying is: “There’s a large reception being held in this house, but there is a drama here which no one is aware of, and at the core of that drama is this tiny object, this key.”
* * *
F.T. Now let’s talk about The Lady Vanishes. They show it very often in Paris; sometimes I see it twice in one week. Since I know it by heart, I tell myself each time that I’m going to ignore the plot, to examine the train and see if it’s really moving, or to look at the transparencies, or to study the camera movements inside the compartments. But each time I become so absorbed by the characters and the story that I’ve yet to figure out the mechanics of that film.III
A.H. It was made in 1938, on one of the smaller Islington stages, on a set ninety feet long. We used one coach; all the rest were transparencies or miniatures. There are some very interesting technical things in it. For instance, in The Lady Vanishes, there was the traditional scene of a drink being doped up. As a rule, that sort of thing is covered by the dialogue.
“Here, drink this.”
“No thanks,”
“You really should, you know. It will make you feel better.”
“Not now, later . . . You’re so kind . . .”
The character takes the glass in his hand, lifts it to his mouth, puts it down, raises it again, then begins to talk before drinking it, and so on. So I said, “Let’s not do it that way. We’ll try something else.”
I had two king-size glasses made, and we photographed part of that scene through the glasses, so that the audience might see the couple all the time, although they didn’t touch their drinks until the very end of the scene. Nowadays, I use magnified props in many pictures. It’s a good gimmick, isn’t it? The giant hand in Spellbound, for instance.
F.T. At the end of the picture, when the doctor’s hand holds the revolver in the axis of Ingrid Bergman’s silhouette?
A.H. Yes. There’s a simpler way of doing it, and that’s to flood a lot of light onto the set so that the lens can be made smaller. We were using George Barnes, a very famous cameraman, who had worked on Rebecca, and he said he couldn’t stop down because that would be bad for Ingrid’s face. The real reason he couldn’t do it is that he was a Hollywood-woman cameraman.
I have to digress for a moment to tell you that during the heyday of the great screen sirens, the general practice when stars showed signs of aging was to use gauze in front of the lens. Then they found out that the system was flattering to the face but no good at all for the look. So the cameraman would take a cigarette and burn out two holes in the gauze for the eyes. In this way the face was nice, if somewhat hazy, and the eyes sparkled, but of course it meant that the actress couldn’t move her head at all. Next, they moved away from gauze to diffusion disks, but there they ran into another problem. A star would tell the cameraman: “My friends say that I must be getting old because you’re using diffusion and it shows when my close-ups are cut into the picture.” The cameraman would answer: “I can fix that.” And it was very simple. All he had to do was to diffuse the rest of the picture, so that when the close-ups were cut in it didn’t show.
The “giant hand” Sequence in Spellbound.
The Lady Vanishes (1938): Margaret Lockwood attempts to convince Michael Redgrave of the existence of the woman who has vanished—Miss Froy. One proof exists: The old lady has written her name on the window. When Margaret Lockwood remembers and start
s to show it to Michael Redgrave, the train goes through a tunnel and the writing is mysteriously erased . . . .
The Lady Vanishes (1938): Above and below: the climax.
Anyway, in Spellbound, at first I tried to get the shot of the revolver by putting Ingrid Bergman on a screen and by placing the doctor’s hand, in focus, close to the screen, but that looked fuzzy. So I wound up using a giant hand again, and a gun four times the natural size.
F.T. That’s right. We see the doctor aiming the gun at Ingrid Bergman. Though she’s frightened, she bravely moves toward the door and leaves the room. With the camera now in the doctor’s place, we see him pointing the gun at his head and pulling the trigger, straight into the lens. It’s as if he were firing straight at the viewer.
But we seem to have wandered away from The Lady Vanishes, which is a first-rate screenplay.
A.H. Yes, by Gilliat and Launder. But let’s go back to our old friends, “the plausibles.” They might question why a message was entrusted to an elderly lady so helpless that anybody might knock her over. Also, why the counterspies simply didn’t send that message by carrier pigeon, and why they had to go through so much trouble to get that old lady on the train, with another woman standing by to change clothes, not to speak of shunting the whole coach away into the woods.
F.T. True. All the more so since the message consists of the first few bars of a little song that she’s memorized. It’s an absurd idea, but quite delightful!
A.H. It’s fantasy, sheer fantasy! Did you know that same story had been filmed three or four times?
F.T. Do you mean there were remakes?
A.H. Not remakes, but the same basic story done in different forms. The whole thing started with an ancient yarn about an old lady who travels to Paris with her daughter in 1880. They go to a hotel and there the mother is taken ill. They call a doctor, and after looking her over, he has a private talk with the hotel manager. Then he tells the girl that her mother needs a certain kind of medicine, and they send her to the other end of Paris in a horse-drawn cab. Four hours later she gets back to the hotel and says, “How is my mother?” and the manager says, “What mother? We don’t know you. Who are you?” She says, “My mother’s in room so and so.”
They take her up to the room, which is occupied by new lodgers; everything is different, including the furniture and the wallpaper. I made a half-hour television show on that, and the Rank organization made it into a film with Jean Simmons, called So Long at the Fair. It’s supposed to be a true story, and the key to the whole puzzle is that it took place during the great Paris exposition, in the year the Eiffel Tower was completed. Anyway, the women had come from India, and the doctor discovered that the mother had bubonic plague. So it occurred to him that if the news got around, it would drive the crowds who had come for the exposition away from Paris. That’s the basic idea of the story.
F.T. That type of story generally starts out in an exciting way, but as a rule, it weakens as it unfolds. Often, by the time it reaches the explanation stage, there’s total confusion. But the climax of The Lady Vanishes was great and the build-up was very neat.
A.H. Well, it originated with the book by Ethel Lina White, The Wheel Spins, and the first script was written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, a very good team. I made some changes and we added the whole last episode. When the reviews labeled it a Hitchcock picture, Launder and Gilliat decided forthwith to undertake their own producing and directing. Have you seen any of their pictures?
F.T. There was one, Green for Danger, that didn’t quite come off, and I See a Dark Stranger, that was more interesting. But the best one of all wasn’t a thriller; it was The Rake’s Progress with Rex Harrison.
The Lady Vanishes was your next-to-last British picture. I imagine you must have already been contacted by Hollywood at the time. After the successful run of The Man Who Knew Too Much in America, there must have been some concrete offers to make pictures there.
A.H. While we were shooting The Lady Vanishes, I got a cable from Selznick, asking me to come to Hollywood to direct a picture based on the sinking of the Titanic. As soon as I had finished work on The Lady Vanishes, I went to America for the first time and stayed there for ten days. That was in August of 1937. I agreed to do the picture about the Titanic, but since the contract with Selznick wasn’t due to start until April, 1939, I had time to make another British film, and that was Jamaica Inn.
Robert Newton and Charles Laughton tied up.
F.T. Which was produced by Charles Laughton?
A.H. Laughton and Erich Pommer were associated on the production of that one. The novel, as you know, is by Daphne du Maurier, and the first script was written by Clemence Dane, who was a playwright of some note. Then Sidney Gilliat came in and we did the script together. Charles Laughton wanted his part built up, and so he brought in J. B. Priestley for additional dialogue. I had first met Erich Pommer back in 1924, when I was writer and art director in Germany on The Blackguard, a picture he had co-produced with Michael Balcon, and I hadn’t seen him since that time.
Jamaica Inn was an absurd thing to undertake. If you examine the basic story, you will see that it’s a whodunit. At the end of the eighteenth century, Mary, a young Irish girl, goes to Cornwall to live with her Aunt Patience, whose husband, Joss, is an innkeeper. All sorts of things happen in that tavern, which shelters scavengers and wreckers who not only seem to enjoy total immunity, but who are also kept thoroughly informed of the movements of ships in the area. Why? Because at the head of this gang of thugs is a highly respectable man—a justice of the peace, no less—who masterminds all of their operations.
It was completely absurd, because logically the judge should have entered the scene only at the end of the adventure. He should have carefully avoided the place and made sure he was never seen in the tavern. Therefore it made no sense to cast Charles Laughton in the key role of the justice of the peace. Realizing how incongruous it was, I was truly discouraged, but the contract had been signed. Finally, I made the picture, and although it became a box-office hit, I’m still unhappy over it.
F.T. But weren’t the producers aware of this incongruity?
A.H. Erich Pommer? I’m not sure he understood the English idiom. As for Charles Laughton—well! When we started the picture, he asked me to show him only in close shots because he hadn’t yet figured out the manner of his walk. Ten days later he came in and said, “I’ve found it.” It turned out that his step had been inspired by the beat of a little German waltz, and he whistled it for us as he waddled about the room. I can still remember how he did it. Let me show you . . .
F.T. It’s great!
A.H. Maybe so, but it wasn’t serious, and I don’t like to work that way. He wasn’t really a professional film man.
* * *
F.T. Before embarking on the American phase of your career, I’d like to suggest that we draw a few conclusions about your British achievements, as we did for the silent movies, and talk about the general situation of British cinema. With the passage of time, those of us who have followed your over-all career have the feeling that it was only after your arrival in the United States that you reached your creative peak. It would almost seem as if you were destined to work in Hollywood. Would you agree with that thinking?
A.H. Let’s put it this way: the work in Britain served to develop my natural instinct, and later it enabled me to apply new, offbeat ideas. But the technical know-how, in my opinion, dates back to my work on The Lodger. As a matter of fact, the techniques and camera precepts that I learned then have continued to serve me ever since.
For want of a better term, we might label the initial phase the period of the sensation of cinema, and the second phase, the period when the ideas were fertilized.
F.T. Even so, the fact remains that while you were in England, you dreamed of making American-type pictures, whereas once you got to Hollywood, you never attempted to imi
tate the British type of film. What I’m trying to get at—and I’m not sure I’m right about this and it’s hard to define just what it is—is that there’s something about England that’s anticinematic.
A.H. I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at. What do you mean by that?
F.T. Well, to put it quite bluntly, isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms “cinema” and “Britain.” This may sound farfetched, but I get the feeling that there are national characteristics—among them, the English countryside, the subdued way of life, the stolid routine—that are antidramatic in a sense. The weather itself is anticinematic. Even British humor—that very understatement on which so many of the good crime comedies are hinged—is somehow a deterrent to strong emotion. It’s my feeling that these characteristics worked against your particular style of narration, which is essentially to color the story with fast-moving action and striking incidents. Despite the tongue-in-cheek approach and however vivid, it must be convincing. Above all, it seems to me, these national characteristics are in conflict with plastic stylization and even with the stylization of the actors.
Considering the high intellectual level in England, and in the light of the universal stature of her great writers and poets, isn’t it rather curious that in the seventy years since cinema came into being, the only two British film-makers whose works have actually survived the test of time—and space, for that matter—are Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock.
We’re talking now in the historical context—in terms of the international evolution of moviemaking. It goes without saying that there are exceptions to the rule, and we all know that new things are happening on the British film scene today.