Hitchcock
A.H. Yes, because it’s too close to the truth. It’s also another indication of the telepathy between Uncle Charlie and his niece.
F.T. Psycho is the only other picture in which your central figure is a villain; the character in Shadow of a Doubt even has the public’s sympathy, probably because you never actually show him in the act of killing the widows.
A.H. That may be one reason, but aside from that, he’s a killer with an ideal; he’s one of those murderers who feel that they have a mission to destroy. It’s quite possible that those widows deserved what they got, but it certainly wasn’t his job to do it. There is a moral judgment in the film. He’s destroyed at the end, isn’t he? The niece accidentally kills her uncle. What it boils down to is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white; there are grays everywhere. Uncle Charlie loved his niece, but not as much as she loved him. And yet she has to destroy him. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: “You destroy the thing you love.”
F.T. I’m puzzled by one detail of the picture. In the first scene at the station, when the train carrying Uncle Charlie is coming in, there’s a heavy cloud of black smoke coming out of the engine’s smokestack, and as the train comes close, it darkens the whole station. I have the feeling that this was done deliberately because when the train is leaving the station, at the end of the picture, there’s simply a small puff of light smoke.
A.H. That’s right; I asked for lots of black smoke for the first scene. It’s one of those ideas for which you go to a lot of trouble, although it’s seldom noticed. But here, we were lucky. The position of the sun created a beautiful shadow over the whole station.
F.T. The black smoke implies that the devil was coming to town.
A.H. Exactly. There’s a similar detail in The Birds when Jessica Tandy, in a state of shock after having discovered the farmer’s body, takes off in her car. To sustain that emotion, I had them put smoke in the truck’s exhaust and we also made the road dusty. It also served to establish a contrast with the peaceful mood of her arrival at the farm. For that scene we had the road slightly dampened and there was no smoke coming out of the truck.
F.T. With the exception of the detective, the casting is excellent, and I imagine you were very pleased with the performances of Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright. Her portrait of a young American girl was outstanding; she had a lovely face, a nice shape, and her way of walking was particularly graceful.
A.H. Teresa Wright was under contract to Goldwyn and we got her on loan. All the irony of the situation stemmed from her deep love for her uncle.
F.T. In the final scene the girl and her detective sweetheart are standing in front of the church. From the background we hear the minister’s tribute to Uncle Charlie, describing him as an exceptional person. Meanwhile, the girl and the detective are planning their future together, and she makes a rather ambiguous comment, something to the effect that they are the only ones to know the truth.
A.H. I don’t remember the exact wording, but that’s the general meaning; the girl will be in love with her Uncle Charlie for the rest of her life.
F.T. With Lifeboat we come to the type of picture that represents a challenge. Wasn’t it pretty daring to undertake to shoot a whole film in a lifeboat?II
A.H. That’s right, it was a challenge, but it was also because I wanted to prove a theory I had then. Analyzing the psychological pictures that were being turned out, it seemed to me that, visually, eighty per cent of the footage was shot in close-ups or semiclose shots. Most likely it wasn’t a conscious thing with most of the directors, but rather an instinctive need to come closer to the action. In a sense this treatment was an anticipation of what was to become the television technique.
F.T. That’s an interesting point. At any rate, you’d always been intrigued by experiments with the unity of space, time, or action. Still, another interesting aspect is that Lifeboat is the very opposite of a thriller; it’s a film of characterizations. Did the success of Shadow of a Doubt have anything to do with your choice of this subject?
A.H. No, Shadow of a Doubt had no bearing on Lifeboat, which was solely concerned with the war. It was a microcosm of the war.
F.T. At one time I was under the impression that Lifeboat intended to show that everyone is guilty, that each of us has something to be ashamed of, and that your conclusion meant that no one man is qualified to pass judgment on others. But now I believe that I was mistaken in that interpretation.
A.H. You were indeed; the concept of the film is quite different. We wanted to show that at that moment there were two world forces confronting each other, the democracies and the Nazis, and while the democracies were completely disorganized, all of the Germans were clearly headed in the same direction. So here was a statement telling the democracies to put their differences aside temporarily and to gather their forces to concentrate on the common enemy, whose strength was precisely derived from a spirit of unity and of determination.
F.T. It was quite convincing.
A.H. The seaman, played by John Hodiak, was practically a Communist, and on the other extreme you had the businessman who was more or less a Fascist. And in the great moments of indecision, no one, not even the Communist, knew just what to do. There was a lot of criticism. The famous columnist Dorothy Thompson gave the picture ten days to get out of town!
F.T. The picture isn’t only psychological; it’s also frequently moral. Toward the end, for instance, when the people in the boat want to lynch the German, you show their backs huddled together from a distance. Wasn’t it your intent to create a repulsive vision of them?
A.H. Yes, they’re like a pack of dogs.
F.T. So there’s a psychological conflict as well as a moral fable in this picture, with both elements well blended into the dramatic texture so that they never clash.
A.H. I had assigned John Steinbeck to the screenplay, but his treatment was incomplete and so I brought in MacKinlay Kantor, who worked on it for two weeks. I didn’t care for what he had written at all. He said, “Well, that’s the best I can do.” I thanked him for his efforts and hired another writer, Jo Swerling, who had worked on several films for Frank Capra. When the screenplay was completed and I was ready to shoot, I discovered that the narrative was rather shapeless. So I went over it again, trying to give a dramatic form to each of the sequences.
F.T. And you handled that by emphasizing inanimate objects, like Tallulah Bankhead’s typewriter, her jewelry, and so on?
A.H. Yes. One of the things that drew the fire of the American critics is that I had shown a German as being superior to the other characters. But at that time, 1940-41, the French had been defeated, and the Allies were not doing too well. Moreover, the German, who at first claimed to be a simple sailor, was actually a submarine commander; therefore there was every reason for his being better qualified than the others to take over the command of the lifeboat. But the critics apparently felt that a nasty Nazi couldn’t be a good sailor.
Anyway, though it wasn’t a commercial hit elsewhere, the picture had a good run in New York, perhaps because the technical challenge was enormous. I never let that camera get outside the boat, and there was no music at all; it was very rigorous. Of course, the characterization by Tallulah Bankhead dominated the whole film.
F.T. In a sense, she follows the same route as the heroine of The Birds, starting out as a jaded sophisticate and, in the course of her physical ordeal, gradually becoming more natural and humane. Her moral itinerary is punctuated by the discarding of purely material objects. It starts out with the typewriter that falls into the water and winds up with the gold bracelet being used as fish bait when the survivors are starving.
By the way, speaking of objects, I noticed that you used an old newspaper this time as a means of making your ritual appearance.III
A.H. That’s my favorite role and I must admit that I had an awful time thinking it up
. Usually I play a passer-by, but you can’t have a passer-by out on the ocean. I thought of being a dead body floating past the lifeboat, but I was afraid I’d sink. I couldn’t play one of the nine survivors, since each had to be played by a competent performer. Finally, I hit on a good idea. At the time, I was on a strenuous diet, painfully working my way from three hundred to two hundred pounds.
So I decided to immortalize my loss and get my bit part by posing for “before” and “after” pictures. These photographs were used in a newspaper ad for an imaginary drug, Reduco, and the viewers saw them—and me—when William Bendix opened an old newspaper we had put in the boat. The role was a great hit. I was literally submerged by letters from fat people who wanted to know where and how they could get Reduco.
F.T. Did the critics’ harsh reaction to Lifeboat have a bearing on your decision to undertake two propaganda shorts for the British Ministry of Information in 1944?
A.H. Not at all! I felt the need to make a little contribution to the war effort, and I was both overweight and overage for military service. I knew that if I did nothing I’d regret it for the rest of my life; it was important for me to do something and also to get right into the atmosphere of war. Before that, I had discussed my next feature for Selznick; it was to be based on an English novel called The House of Dr. Edwardes. Then I took off, but it wasn’t too easy to get to England in those days. I flew over in a bomber, sitting on the floor, and when we got halfway across the Atlantic, the plane had to turn back. I took another one two days later. In London my friend Sidney Bernstein was the head of the film section of the British Ministry of Information. It was at his request that I undertook two small films that were tributes to the work of the French Resistance.
F.T. It seems to me that I saw one of them in Paris toward the end of 1944.
A.H. That’s quite possible because the idea was to show them in parts of France where the Germans were losing ground in order to help the French people appreciate the role of the Resistance. The first short was called Bon Voyage. It was a little story about an RAF man who is being escorted out of France through the Resistance channels. His escort was a Polish officer. When he arrives in London, the RAF man is interrogated by an officer of the Free French Forces, who informs him that his Polish escort was really a Gestapo man. Upon that startling revelation, we go through the journey across France all over again, but this time we show all sorts of details that the young RAF man hadn’t noticed at first, various indications of the Pole’s complicity with the Gestapo detail. At the end of the story there was a twist showing how the Polish officer had been trapped. At the same time, the RAF man learned that the young French girl who’d helped them, and had spotted the Pole as a spy, had been killed by him.
F.T. Yes, that’s the one I saw.
A.H. It was a four-reel picture and the Free French forces supplied me with technical advisers. For instance, Claude Dauphin helped us with the dialogue. We used to work on the screenplay in my room at Claridge’s, and there was a whole group of French officers, including a certain Commander or Colonel Forestier who never agreed to anything the others suggested. We realized that the Free French were very divided against one another, and these inner conflicts became the subject of the next film, Aventure Malgache.
One of the men there was an actor and a lawyer whose Resistance name was Clarousse. He was in his late sixties, but he had lots of energy and he was always at odds with his Free French companions who finally threw him in jail, in Tananarive. It was a true story and Clarousse told it himself. But when it was finished, there was some disagreement about it and I believe they decided not to release it.
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I. The story of Shadow of a Doubt centers on Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten), opening with his arrival in Santa Rosa for a visit with his family, the real purpose of his visit is to elude two investigators who are on his trail. The family, a doting older sister, her husband, and a young, adoring niece (Teresa Wright) who has been named after her uncle, welcomes him with open arms. But gradually the young girl begins to suspect that her beloved uncle may be the mystery man wanted by the police for the killing of several widows.
Her suspicions are shared by a young detective (MacDonald Carey) who enters the household by pretending to be a fact finder for a national poll. Meanwhile, in the East, another suspect is accidentally killed just as the police are about to arrest him, and the inquiry is officially closed.
When he becomes aware of his niece’s suspicion, Uncle Charlie makes two unsuccessful attempts to kill her in the house. On boarding the train which is to take him back to New York, he tries to push her off the platform. In the ensuing scuffle he falls and is crushed to death by another passing train.
At the funeral the townfolk of Santa Rosa pay their respectful tribute to the dead man. The knowledge of his guilt will remain a secret bond between his young niece and her detective friend.
II. Played by Tallulah Baukhead, John Hodiak, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn, and Canada Lee, the story of Lifeboat is set against the background of World War II.
When a passenger-carrying freighter is torpedoed by a submarine, the group of survivors that manages to make its way to a lifeboat includes a fashion writer, a left-wing crew member, a young Army nurse, a millionaire, a Negro steward, the ship’s radio operator, an Englishwoman carrying her dead child, and a seaman with a badly injured leg.
Hit by the explosion, the U-boat is also sinking. A German emerges from the debris and swims over to the lifeboat. The group discusses whether to throw him overboard, but when his skill saves the boat from capsizing, he assumes command of the boat. As the days go by, thirst and hunger have a telling effect and tensions rise among the members of the group. Only the man at the helm is completely self-possessed. He is actually a Nazi naval officer, who is deliberately steering the lifeboat off its course, toward a German supply ship. When the wounded seaman discovers his secret, the Nazi tosses him overboard. The nexit morning he tells the others that it was a suicide, but guessing the truth, they gang up in a savage attack on the Nazi, beating him to death.
Just as they are reaching the German supply ship, it is sunk by an Allied ship. Almost unbelieving, the survivors watch as the rescuing vessel heads in their direction, bringing with it the assurance that their ordeal is over.
III. Ever since The Lodger, in which he assumed a bit part to “fill the screen.” Alfred Hitchcock has appeared in each of his pictures. In ‘The Lodger he is seen twice, the first time at a desk in a newsroom and later among a crowd of people watching an arrest. In Blackmail he is reading a newspaper in the subway while a little boy is pestering him. In Murder and The Thirty-nine Steps he is seen passing by in the street. In Young and Innocent he is a clumsy photographer outside the courtroom. In The Lady Vanishes there is a glimpse of him at a London railroad station, and in Rebecca he walks by a telephone booth. In Shadow of a Doubt he is a bridge player on the train; in Spell bound he was a man coming out of a crowded elevator; in Notorious he is one of the party guests drinking champagne. In The Paradine Case he carries a cello case, and in Rope he crosses the street after the main title. In Under Capricorn he listens to a speech, and in Stage Fright he turns back in the street to look at Jane Wyman, who is talking to herself. In Strangers on a Train he boards a train, carrying a double-bass, and in I Confess he is seen crossing the screen at the top of a staircase. In Dial M for Murder his image looks out from a college photo album. In Rear Window he is winding a clock, and in To Catch a Thief he is seated in a bus, next to Cary Grant. In The Man Who Knew Too Much he is seen from the back, watching some Arab acrobats. In Vertigo and North by Northwest he crosses the street, and in Psycho he stands on the sidewalk, wearing a wide Texan hat. In The Birds he is walking two small dogs, and in Mamie he is strolling through the hotel corridor.
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RETURN TO AMERICA ■ “SPELLBOUND” ■ COLLABORATION WITH SALVADOR DALI ■ “NOTORIOUS
” ■ “THE SONG OF THE FLAME” ■ THE URANIUM MacGUFFIN ■ 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!
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8
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. In 1944 you went back to America to make Spellbound. I notice among the credits the name of Angus MacPhail. I believe he also worked with you on Bon Voyage.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Angus MacPhail was the head of Gaumont-British’s scenario department. He had been one of those young Cambridge intellectuals who had taken an interest in cinema in the early days. I first met him on the set of The Lodger, when we were both working for Gaumont-British. I met him again in London when I went over to do those French shorts, and we outlined the first treatment of Spellbound together. But the script wasn’t tight enough, it rambled; so when I came back to Hollywood, Ben Hecht was assigned to it. Since he was very keen on psychoanalysis, he turned out to be a very fortunate choice.
F.T. In the book they’ve written about you, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol claim you intended Spellbound to be a wilder, more extravagant picture. The clinic director, for instance, was to have the Cross of Christ tattooed on his soles so that he trampled it with each step. He also engaged in various forms of black magic.
A.H. Well, the original novel, The House of Dr. Edwardes, was about a madman taking over an insane asylum. It was melodramatic and quite weird. In the book even the orderlies were lunatics and they did some very queer things. But I wanted to do something more sensible, to turn out the first picture on psychoanalysis. So I worked with Ben Hecht, who was in constant touch with prominent psychoanalysts.