Hitchcock
In our discussions about The Lodger, you referred to Suspicion and said that the producers would have objected to Cary Grant being the killer. If I understood you correctly, you’d have preferred that he be the guilty one.
A.H. Well, I’m not too pleased with the way Suspicion ends. I had something else in mind. The scene I wanted, but it was never shot, was for Cary Grant to bring her a glass of milk that’s been poisoned and Joan Fontaine has just finished a letter to her mother: “Dear Mother, I’m desperately in love with him, but I don’t want to live because he’s a killer. Though I’d rather die, I think society should be protected from him.” Then, Cary Grant comes in with the fatal glass and she says, “Will you mail this letter to Mother for me, dear?” She drinks the milk and dies. Fade out and fade in on one short shot: Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in.
F.T. That would have been a great twist. I’ve read the novel and I liked it, but the screenplay’s just as good. It is not a compromise; it’s actually a different story. The film version, showing a woman who believes her husband is a killer, is less farfetched than the novel, which is about a woman who accepts the fact that her husband is a murderer. It seems to me that the film, in terms of its psychological values, has an edge over the novel because it allows for subtler nuances in the characterizations.
One might even say that Hollywood’s unwritten laws and taboos helped to purify Suspicion by dedramatizing it, in contrast with routine screen adaptations, which tend to magnify the melodramatic elements. I’m not saying that the picture is superior to the novel, but I do feel that a novel that followed the story line of your screenplay might have made a better book than Before the Fact.
A.H. That may or may not be; I can’t say, but I do know that I ran into lots of difficulties on that picture. When it was finished, I spent two weeks in New York, and I had quite a shock when I came back. One of RKO’s producers had screened the picture, and he found that many of the scenes gave the impression that Cary Grant was a killer. So he simply went ahead and ordered that all of these indications be deleted; the cut version only ran fifty-five minutes. Fortunately, the head of RKO realized that the result was ludicrous, and they allowed me to put the whole thing back together again.
F.T. Aside from that, are you satisfied with Suspicion?
A.H. Up to a point. The elegant sitting rooms, the grand staircases, the lavish bedrooms, and so forth, those were the elements that displeased me. We came up against the same problem we had with Rebecca, an English setting laid in America. For a story of that kind, I wanted authentic location shots. Another weakness is that the photography was too glossy. By the way, did you like the scene with the glass of milk?
F.T. When Cary Grant takes it upstairs? Yes, it was very good.
A.H. I put a light in the milk.
F.T. You mean a spotlight on it?
A.H. No, I put a light right inside the glass because I wanted it to be luminous. Cary Grant’s walking up the stairs and everyone’s attention had to be focused on that glass.
F.T. Well, that’s just the way it worked out. It was a very effective touch.
Joan Fontaine thinks her husband is a murderer.
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“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”
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7
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. Since Saboteur is often confused with Sabotage, which was made in Britain six years earlier, let’s point out that Saboteur was filmed in Hollywood and New York in 1942.
A young worker in a munitions factory is wrongfully accused of sabotage. He runs away and meets a girl who at first wants to turn him over to the police but then decides to help him. The story, on the whole, is not too different from most of your manhunt yarns, so that the best way to recall this one is to mention the finale, on top of the Statue of Liberty.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. In several respects Saboteur belongs to The Thirty-nine Steps, the Foreign Correspondent, and the North by Northwest kind of film. Here again, we have a MacGuffin, the handcuffs, and a story that covers lots of territory, a variety of locales.
A major problem with this sort of film is getting an actor of stature to play the central figure. I’ve learned from experience that whenever the hero isn’t portrayed by a star, the whole picture suffers, you see, because audiences are far less concerned about the predicament of a character who’s played by someone they don’t know. Robert Cummings played the hero of Saboteur; he’s a competent performer, but he belongs to the light-comedy class of actors. Aside from that, he has an amusing face, so that even when he’s in desperate straits, his features don’t convey any anguish.
I ran into another problem on this picture. I was on loan by Selznick to an independent producer releasing through Universal. Without consulting me, they imposed the leading lady on me as a fait accompli. She simply wasn’t the right type for a Hitchcock picture.
F.T. No doubt that Priscilla Lane is hardly a sophisticated woman. She’s too familiar, in fact.
A.H. When I approached him his wife was very; was double-crossed on that. The third frustration in connection with this picture was the casting of the villain. We were in 1941 and there were pro-German elements who called themselves America Firsters and who were, in fact, American Fascists. This was the group I had in mind while writing the scenario, and for the role of the heavy I had thought of a very popular actor, Harry Carey, who generally played the good guy in westerns.
When I approached him his wife was very indignant. She said, “I am shocked that you should dare to offer my husband a part like this. After all, since Will Rogers’ death, the youth of America have looked up to my husband!” So, the loss of that counterpoint element was another disappointment. In the end we wound up with a conventional heavy.
F.T. The other villain, the man who falls from the Statue of Liberty, is quite good. I saw him again in Limelight.
A.H. Yes, he’s a very fine actor, Norman Lloyd.
F.T. I notice that the producers of the picture are J. Skirball and F. Lloyd. Is that the Frank Lloyd who used to be a film director?
A.H. Yes, that’s the man. The famous Dorothy Parker collaborated on the screenplay. Some of her touches, I’m afraid, were missed altogether; they were too subtle. There was the scene of the couple who boarded a train and landed in what turned out to be the car for circus freaks. A midget opens the door, and at first the couple can’t see anyone; it’s only when they look down that they see the midget. Then there was the bearded lady with her beard done up in curlers for the night. And the row between the thin man and the midget, who was known as “the Major.” The Siamese twins who weren’t on speaking terms with each other and communicated through a third person had a funny line. One of them says, “I wish you’d tell her to do something about her insomnia. I do nothing but toss and turn all night!”
F.T. Those things came across very well; I remember people roaring with laughter throughout that whole scene.
A.H. One interesting thing: Fry, the real saboteur, in a cab on his way to the Statue of Liberty, looks out of the window on the right and I cut to the hulk of the Normandie which was then lying on its side, following the fire in the harbor of New York. I cut back to a close-up of the saboteur, who, after staring at the wreck, turns around with a slightly smug smile on his face. The Navy raised hell with Universal about these three shots because I implied that the Normandie had been sabotaged, which was a reflection on their lack of vigilance in guarding it.
F.T. I noticed the wreckage but hadn’t realized it was the Normandie. Another interesting touch is the scene of the fight on top of the Statue of Liberty, when th
e villain is suspended in midair. You have a close-up there of his sleeve that’s coming apart at the shoulder seam, and what the scene is saying is that against the towering background of the Statue of Liberty, a life hangs by a mere thread. Here again, there is dramatic force in your way of going from the smallest to the greatest, from the trivial to the all-important.
A.H. Yes, I do like to work that into the texture. Still, there’s a serious error in this scene. If we’d had the hero instead of the villain hanging in mid-air, the audience’s anguish would have been much greater.
F.T. Probably, but the scene is so powerful that the public can’t help being terrified just the same. Besides, the hero is endangered later on, at the end of that scene, when Priscilla Lane grabs his arm to haul him back to the railing. That bit is the forerunner of one of the final shots of North by Northwest, but there the traction idea is enriched and completed by the jump cut of the hauling hands which go directly from the top of Mount Rushmore to the train compartment.
A.H. Yes, it was far better in North by Northwest. And the final shot, immediately following that scene in the sleeping-car, is probably one of the most impudent shots I ever made.
F.T. When the train goes into the tunnel?
A.H. Yes. The phallic symbol.
F.T. All the more important since North by Northwest, unlike Psycho, is a family-type picture, the kind one takes the kiddies to. In some respects, North by Northwest can be seen as a remake of Saboteur.
A.H. The approach to both pictures was a desire to cover various parts of America in the same way that The Thirty-nine Steps traveled across England and Scotland. But North by Northwest had a bigger leading man and I managed to embody Mount Rushmore in the action; I’d been wanting to do that for years.
F.T. In a sense, just as The Thirty-nine Steps is regarded as the synthesis of all of your British work, North by Northwest can be seen as the compendium of your American pictures.
A.H. That’s true. Anyway, to get back to Saboteur, I felt that it was cluttered with too many ideas; there’s the hero in handcuffs leaping down from a bridge; the scene of the elderly blind man in the house; the ghost town with the deserted workyards; and the long shot of Boulder Dam. I think we covered too much ground.
F.T. I saw nothing wrong with that. In scenarios of this kind, involving a man who’s in danger, the major difficulty is how to deal with the girl, how to introduce her into a scene, then separate her from the hero, before bringing them back together again.
A.H. You’re quite right; it is a major headache.
F.T. Which accounts for a sort of parallel montage throughout the whole last part of Saboteur. The man and girl are locked up separately; each one makes a separate getaway and this alternation of sequences, shifting from the man to the girl, is rather bad for the dramatic curve of the picture. In fact, the strongest scenes are those in which the two are coupled in danger; for instance, the scene in the grand ballroom.
A.H. I remember asking myself how I could create an impression of a man and a girl being absolutely trapped in a public place. Anyone in that situation would go up to someone and say, “Look, I’m a prisoner here.” And the answer would be: “You must be crazy.” And yet, if they moved over to any one of the doors or windows, the villains were there waiting for them. To the average person, that situation is so fantastic as to be unbelievable. It was very difficult to find a way of handling it.
F.T. Yet that concept of a man being more isolated in the middle of a crowd than in a deserted spot recurs in many of your films; your hero is often trapped in a movie house, in a music hall, at a political rally, at an auction sale, in a ballroom, or at a fund-raising event. It sets up a contrast within the scenario, especially when the hero starts out more or less on his own, or in isolated surroundings. Those crowd-filled scenes, I imagine, also are to dispose of the objection: “But the whole thing’s idiotic. Why doesn’t he call the police, or go up to someone on the street?”
A.H. Absolutely. You can see what happens in The Man Who Knew Too Much when James Stewart goes up to the policemen in the Albert Hall to warn them the ambassador is about to be shot. The policemen simply take him to be a crank.
But looking back on Saboteur, I would say that the script lacks discipline. I don’t think I exercised a clear, sharp approach to the original construction of the screenplay. There was a mass of ideas, but they weren’t sorted out in proper order; they weren’t selected with sufficient care. I feel the whole thing should have been pruned and tightly edited long before the actual shooting. It goes to show that a mass of ideas, however good they are, is not sufficient to create a successful picture. They’ve got to be carefully presented with a constant awareness of the shape of the whole. And this raises a big problem in American film-making, the difficulty of finding a responsible writer who is competent at building and sustaining the fantasy of a story.
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F.T. I take it that of all the pictures you’ve made, Shadow of a Doubt is the one you prefer. And yet it gives a rather distorted idea of the Hitchcock touch. I feel that the film which provides the most accurate image of the ensemble of your work, as well as of your style, is Notorious.
A.H. I wouldn’t say that Shadow of a Doubt is my favorite picture; if I’ve given that impression, it’s probably because I feel that here is something that our friends, the plausibles and logicians, cannot complain about.
F.T. What about the psychologists?
A.H. That’s right, the psychologists as well! In a sense, it reveals a weakness. On the one hand I claim to dismiss the plausibles, and on the other I’m worried about them. After all, I’m only human! But that impression is also due to my very pleasant memories of working on it with Thornton Wilder. In England I’d always had the collaboration of top stars and the finest writers, but in America things were quite different. I was turned down by many stars and by writers who looked down their noses at the genre I work in. That’s why it was so gratifying for me to find out that one of America’s most eminent playwrights was willing to work with me and, indeed, that he took the whole thing quite seriously.
F.T. Did you select Thornton Wilder or did someone suggest him to you?
A.H. I wanted him. Let’s go back a little into the history of the picture. A woman called Margaret MacDonell, who was head of Selznick’s story department, had a husband who was a novelist. One day she told me her husband had an idea for a story but he hadn’t written it down yet. So we went to lunch at the Brown Derby and they told me the story, which we elaborated together as we were eating. Then I told him to go home and type it up.
In this way we got the skeleton of the story into a nine-page draft that was sent to Thornton Wilder. He came right here, to this studio we are now in, to work on it. We worked together in the morning, and he would work on his own in the afternoon, writing by hand in a school notebook. He never worked consecutively, but jumped about from one scene to another according to his fancy. I might add that the reason I wanted Wilder is that he had written a wonderful play called Our Town.
Uncle Charlie busies himself trying to revive his niece, who has been found unconscious in the garage—but he is the one who locked her in there (kneeling, at left, Hume Cronyn.
F.T. I saw Sam Wood’s screen version of that play.
A.H. When the script was finished, Wilder enlisted in the Psychological Warfare Department of the U.S. Army. But I felt there was still something lacking in our screenplay, and I wanted someone who could inject some comedy highlights that would counterpoint the drama. Thornton Wilder had recommended an M-G-M writer, Robert Audrey, but he struck me as being more inclined toward serious drama, so Sally Benson was brought in.I
Before the writing, Wilder and I went to great pains to be realistic about the town, the people, and the decor. We chose a town and we went there to search for the right house. We found one, but Wilder felt that it was too big for a bank c
lerk. Upon investigation it turned out that the man who lived there was in the same financial bracket as our character, so Wilder agreed to use it. But when we came back, two weeks prior to the shooting, the owner was so pleased that his house was going to be in a picture that he had had it completely repainted. So we had to go in and get his permission to paint it dirty again. And when we were through, naturally, we had it done all over again with bright, new colors.
F.T. The acknowledgment to Thornton Wilder in the main credits of Shadow of a Doubt is rather unusual.
A.H. It was an emotional gesture; I was touched by his qualities.
F.T. In that case, why didn’t you work with him on other screenplays?
A.H. Because he went off to war and I didn’t see him for several years after that.
F.T. I was wondering where you got the idea of illustrating the tune of “The Merry Widow” with dancing couples. It’s an image that reappears several times.
A.H. I even used it as a background for the credits.
F.T. Was it a stock shot?
A.H. No, I made it up especially for the picture. I can’t remember now whether Uncle Charlie is the one who first had the idea of whistling a few bars of “The Merry Widow” or whether it was the girl.
F.T. At first you showed the dancing couples and the air is played by an orchestra. Then the mother hums the opening bars and everyone at the table is trying to remember the title of the song. Joseph Cotten, who’s a little disturbed, says that it’s the “Blue Danube,” and his niece then says, “That’s right . . . Oh no, it’s The Merry . . .” Whereupon Cotten spills his glass to create a diversion.