I was determined to break with the traditional way of handling dream sequences through a blurred and hazy screen. I asked Selznick if he could get Dali to work with us and he agreed, though I think he didn’t really understand my reasons for wanting Dali. He probably thought I wanted his collaboration for publicity purposes. The real reason was that I wanted to convey the dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself. I wanted Dali because of the architectural sharpness of his work. Chirico has the same quality, you know, the long shadows, the infinity of distance, and the converging lines of perspective.
Illustrations by Salvador Dali for the dream sequence in Spellbound.
But Dali had some strange ideas; he wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it, and underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by the ants! It just wasn’t possible.
My idea was to shoot the Dali dream scenes in the open air so that the whole thing, photographed in real sunshine, would be terribly sharp. I was very keen on that idea, but the producers were concerned about the expense. So we shot the dream in the studios.
F.T. Finally, there was a single dream divided into four separate parts. I saw Spellbound again recently and I must admit that I didn’t care very much for the scenario.I
A.H. Well, it’s just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis.
F.T. The peculiar thing is that several of your pictures—among them Notorious and Vertigo—really look like filmed dreams, and that’s why one expects a Hitchcock film on psychoanalysis to be wildly imaginative—way out! Instead, this turns out to be one of your most sensible pictures, with lots of dialogue. My criticism is that Spellbound is rather weak on fantasy, especially in the light of some of your other works.
A.H. Since psychoanalysis was involved, there was a reluctance to fantasize; we tried to use a logical approach to the man’s adventure.
F.T. I see. Well anyway, there are some very beautiful scenes in the picture. For instance, the one showing the seven doors opening after the kiss, and even the first meeting between Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman; that was so clearly love at first sight.
A.H. Unfortunately, the violins begin to play just then. That was terrible!
F.T. I also liked the group of shots following Gregory Peck’s arrest and the close-ups of Ingrid Bergman before she begins to cry. On the other hand, the whole sequence in which they take refuge with the elderly professor was of no particular interest. I hope you won’t be offended, but I must say I found the picture something of a disappointment.
Gregory Peck relives the scene in which he accidentally killed his brother.
A.H. Not at all. The whole thing’s too complicated, and I found the explanations toward the end very confusing.
F.T. Another serious weakness of this film—and this also applies to The Paradine Case—is Gregory Peck. Whereas Ingrid Bergman is an extraordinary actress, ideally well suited to your style, Gregory Peck isn’t a Hitchcockian actor. He’s shallow for one, but the main thing is the lack of expression in his eyes. Even so, I prefer The Paradine Case to Spellbound. How about you?
A.H. I don’t know. There are several errors in that one as well.
* * *
F.T. I’m impatient to get to Notorious because this is truly my favorite Hitchcock picture; at any rate, it’s the one I prefer in the black-and-white group. In my opinion, Notorious is the very quintessence of Hitchcock.
A.H. When I started to work with Ben Hecht on the screenplay for Notorious, we were looking for a MacGuffin, and as always, we proceeded by trial and error, going off in several different directions that turned out to be too complex. The basic concept of the story was already on hand. Ingrid Bergman was to play the heroine, and Cary Grant was to portray the FBI man who accompanied her to Latin America, where she was to worm her way into the household of a nest of Nazi spies in order to find out what they were up to. Our original intention had been to bring into the story government officials and police agents and to show groups of German refugees training in secret camps in South America with the aim of setting up an enemy army. But we couldn’t figure out what they were going to do with the army once it was organized. So we dropped the whole idea in favor of a MacGuffin that was simpler, but concrete and visual: a sample of uranium concealed in a wine bottle.
At the beginning the producer had given me an old-fashioned story, “The Song of the Flame,” that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. It was the story of a young woman who had fallen in love with the son of a wealthy New York society woman. The girl was troubled about a secret in her past. She felt that her great love would be shattered if ever the young man or his mother found out about it. What was the secret? Well, during the war, the government counterspy service had approached a theatrical impresario to find them a young actress who would act as an agent; her mission was to sleep with a certain spy in order to get hold of some valuable information. The agent had suggested this young girl and she had accepted the assignment. So now, filled with apprehensions about the whole thing, she goes back to her agent and tells him all about her problem, and he, in turn, tells the whole story to the young man’s mother. The story winds up with the aristocratic mother saying, “I always hoped that my son would find the right girl, but I never expected him to marry a girl as fine as this!”
So here is the idea for a picture co-starring Ingrid Bergman and Gary Grant, to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Well, after talking it over with Ben Hecht, we decide that the idea well retain from this story is that the girl is to sleep with a spy in order to get some secret information. Gradually, we develop the story, and now I introduce the MacGuffin: four or five samples of uranium concealed in wine bottles. The producer said, “What in the name of goodness is that?”
I said, “This is uranium; it’s the thing they’re going to make an atom bomb with.”
And he asked, “What atom bomb?”
This, you must remember, was in 1944, a year before Hiroshima. I had only one clue. A writer friend of mine had told me that scientists were working on a secret project some place in New Mexico. It was so secret that once they went into the plant, they never emerged again. I was also aware that the Germans were conducting experiments with heavy water in Norway. So these clues brought me to the uranium MacGuffin. The producer was skeptical, and he felt it was absurd to use the idea of an atom bomb as the basis for our story. I told him that it wasn’t the basis for the story, but only the MacGuffin, and I explained that there was no need to attach too much importance to it.
Finally, I said, “Look, if you don’t like uranium, let’s make it industrial diamonds, which the Germans need to cut their tools with.” And I pointed out that if it had not been a wartime story, we could have hinged our plot on the theft of diamonds, that the gimmick was unimportant.
Well, I failed to convince the producers, and a few weeks later the whole project was sold to RKO. In other words, Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, the script, Ben Hecht, and myself, we were sold as a package.
There’s something else I should tell you about this uranium MacGuffin. It happened four years after Notorious was released. I was sailing on the Queen Elizabeth, and I ran into a man called Joseph Hazen, who was an associate of producer Hal Wallis. He said to me, “I’ve always wanted to find out where you got the idea for the atom bomb a year before Hiroshima. When they offered us the Notorious script, we turned it down because we thought it was such a goddamn foolish thing to base a movie on.”
There was another incident that took place prior to the shooting of Notorious. Ben Hecht and I went over to the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena to meet Dr. Millikan, at that time one of the leading scientists in America. We were shown into his office, and there in a corner was a bust of Einstein. Very impressive. The first question we asked him was: “Dr. Millikan, how large would an atom bomb be?”
He looked at us and said, “You want to h
ave yourselves arrested and have me arrested as well?” Then he spent an hour telling us how impossible our idea was, and he concluded that if only they could harness hydrogen, then that would be something. He thought he had succeeded in convincing us that we were barking up the wrong tree, but I learned later that afterward the FBI had me under surveillance for three months.
To get back to Mr. Hazen on the boat, when he told me how idiotic he had thought our gimmick was, I answered, “Well, all it goes to show is that you were wrong to attach any importance to the MacGuffin. Notorious was simply the story of a man in love with a girl who, in the course of her official duties, had to go to bed with another man and even had to marry him. That’s the story. That mistake of yours cost you a lot of money, because the movie cost two million dollars to make and grossed eight million dollars for the producers.”
F.T. So it was a big hit. Incidentally, how did Spellbound fare, in terms of dollars and cents?
A.H. Spellbound was less expensive; it cost us about a million and a half dollars to make, and it brought in seven million to the producer.
F.T. I’m awfully pleased to see that Notorious is re-released time and again all over the world. Despite a lapse of twenty years it’s still a remarkably modern picture, with very few scenes and an exceptionally pure story line. In the sense that it gets a maximum effect from a minimum of elements, it’s really a model of scenario construction.II All of the suspense scenes hinge around two objects, always the same, namely the key and the fake wine bottle. The sentimental angle is the simplest in the world: two men in love with the same woman. It seems to me that of all of your pictures this is the one in which one feels the most perfect correlation between what you are aiming at and what appears on the screen. I don’t know whether you were already drawing detailed sketches of each shot, but to the eye, the ensemble is as precise as an animated cartoon. Of all its qualities, the outstanding achievement is perhaps that in Notorious you have at once a maximum of stylization and a maximum of simplicity.
A.H. I’m pleased you should mention that, because we did try for simplicity. As a rule, there’s a good deal of violence in movies dealing with espionage, and here we tried to avoid that. We used a method of killing that was quite simple; it was as commonplace as the real-life killings you read about in newspaper stories. Claude Rains and his mother try to kill Ingrid Bergman by poisoning her very slowly with arsenic. Isn’t that the conventional method for disposing of someone without being caught? Usually, when film spies are trying to get rid of someone, they don’t take so many precautions; they shoot a man down or they take him for a ride in some isolated spot and then simulate an accident by hurling the car down from a high cliff. Here, there was an attempt to make the spies behave with reasonable evil.
At the end of Notorious (1946), Cary Grant rescues Ingrid Bergman while her husband, Claude Rains, watches, unable to say anything, paralysed by the presence of other spies who are going to ask him for an explanation. At far right, planning the famous zoom-in on the key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand.
F.T. That’s true; the villains are human and even vulnerable. They’re frightening and yet we sense that they, too, are afraid.
A.H. That was the approach we used throughout the entire film. Do you remember the scene in which Ingrid Bergman, after having carried out her instructions to become friendly with Claude Rains, meets Cary Grant to report to him? In speaking of Claude Rains, she says, “He wants to marry me.” Now that’s a simple statement and the dialogue is quite ordinary, but that scene is photographed in a way that belies that simplicity. There are only two people in the frame, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and the whole scene hinges on that sentence: “He wants to marry me.” The impression is that it calls for some sort of sentimental suspense around whether she’s going to allow Claude Rains to marry her or not. But we didn’t do that because the answer to that question is beside the point. It has nothing to do with the scene; the public can simply assume that the marriage will take place. I deliberately left what appears to be the important emotional factor aside. You see, the question isn’t whether Ingrid will or will not marry Claude Rains. The thing that really matters is that, against all expectations, the man she’s spying on has just asked her to marry him.
F.T. If I understand you correctly, the important thing in this scene isn’t Ingrid Bergman’s reply to the proposal, but the fact that such a proposal has been made.
A.H. That’s it.
F.T. It’s also interesting in that the proposal comes as a sort of bombshell. Somehow, one doesn’t expect the subject of marriage to crop up in a story about spies.
Something else that impressed me—and you deal with it again in Under Capricorn—is the imperceptible transition from one form of intoxication to another, going from liquor to poison. In the scene where Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are seated together on a bench, she’s beginning to feel the effects of the arsenic, but he assumes she’s gone back to her drinking and he’s rather contemptuous. There’s real dramatic impact in this misunderstanding.
Planning the famous zoom-in on the key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand.
A.H. I felt it important to graduate this poisoning in the most normal manner possible; I didn’t want it to look wild or melodramatic. In a sense, it’s almost a transference of emotion.
The story of Notorious is the old conflict between love and duty. Cary Grant’s job—and it’s a rather ironic situation—is to push Ingrid Bergman into Claude Rains’s bed. One can hardly blame him for seeming bitter throughout the story, whereas Claude Rains is a rather appealing figure, both because his confidence is being betrayed and because his love for Ingrid Bergman is probably deeper than Cary Grant’s. All of these elements of psychological drama have been woven into the spy story.
F.T. Ted Tetzlaff’s photography is excellent.
A.H. In the early stages of the film, we were doing the scene of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant driving in the car; she’s a little drunk and she’s driving too fast. We were working in the studios, with transparencies. On the transparency screen we showed a motorcycle cop in the background; he’s getting gradually closer to the car, and just as he goes out of the frame, on the right side, I cut to a cross angle and continue the scene, with the motorcycle cop inside the studio this time, showing him as he pulls up to them and stops the car.
When Tetzlaff announced he was all set to shoot, I said, “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to have a little light on the side, sweeping across the backs of their necks, to represent the motorcycle headlights that are shown on the transparency screen?”
He had never done anything like that, and he was not too pleased that I should draw his attention to it. And he said, “Getting a bit technical, aren’t you, Pop?”
A little incident came up while we were making the picture that was rather sad. We needed to use a house in Beverly Hills to represent the exterior of the big spy house in Rio. The head of the location department sent a minor member of his staff to show me the house they’d selected, a very quiet, little man who said to me, “Mr. Hitchcock, will this house do?” That little man was the same man to whom I originally submitted my titles at Famous Players-Lasky when I was starting out in 1920.
F.T. That’s awful.
A.H. Yes, it took me a little while to recognize him; when I did I felt terrible.
F.T. Did you show him you knew who he was?
A.H. No, I didn’t. That’s one of the occupational tragedies of this industry. When I was shooting The Thirty-nine Steps, there were some odd, extra shots to be done, and in order to speed up the production, the producer offered to get someone to do it. When I asked him whom he had in mind, he answered, “Graham Cutts.”
I said, “No, I won’t have it. I used to work for him; I did the writing on Woman to Woman for him. How can I have him come on as my assistant?”
And he answered, “Well, if you won’t use him, you’ll be doing him out of
a job and he really needs the money.”
So I finally agreed, but it’s a terrible thing, don’t you think so?
F.T. It is, indeed. But, getting back to Notorious, I wanted to say that a key factor in the picture’s success is probably the perfect casting: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Leopoldine Konstantin. With Robert Walker and Joseph Cotten, Claude Rains was undoubtedly your best villain. He was extremely human. It’s rather touching: the small man in love with a taller woman. . . .
A.H. Yes, Claude Rains and Ingrid Bergman made a nice couple, but in the close shots the difference between them was so marked that if I wanted them both in a frame, I had to stand Claude Rains on a box. On one occasion we wanted to show them both coming from a distance, with the camera panning from him to Bergman. Well, we couldn’t have any boxes out there on the floor, so what I did was to have a plank of wood gradually rising as he walked toward the camera.
F.T. Working these snags out can be pretty funny, especially when you’re shooting in CinemaScope, because there, for each separate shot, you’ve got to have the chandeliers, the paintings, and all wall installations brought down, while at the same time, the beds, tables and chairs, and anything else that happens to be on the floor, have to be raised. For a visitor who accidentally wanders in on the set, it’s truly a ridiculous sight. It’s often occurred to me that one might make a first-rate comedy on the making of a movie.
A.H. It’s a pretty good idea, and the way I’d do it is to have everything take place inside a film studio. But the drama would not be in front of the camera, but off the set, between takes. The stars in the picture would be minor characters and the real heroes would be the extras. In this way you’d get a wonderful counterpoint between the banal story being filmed and the real drama that takes place off stage. You might have a great feud between the cameraman and one of the electricians, so that when the cameraman sits down on the crane, it rises to the rigging loft, and the two men take a few minutes out to swap insults. Of course, you’d have satirical elements in the background of the whole thing.