Several years later one of the four chief inspectors of Scotland Yard came to see me. He had handled the investigation after Mahon’s arrest, and he told me they’d had a problem in getting hold of that head; they only found traces of it, but not the head itself. He knew the head had been burned, but he needed to have some indication of the time at which it was put in the fire and how long it had taken to burn. So he went down to the butcher shop, bought a sheep’s head and burned it in the same fireplace. In all cases involving mutilation, you see, the biggest problem for the police is to locate the head.
Now, Dr. Crippen lived in London. He murdered his wife and cut her up. When people noticed his wife had disappeared, he gave the customary explanation: “She’s gone to California.” But Crippen made a crucial blunder that turned out to be his undoing. He allowed his secretary to wear some of his wife’s jewelry, and this started the neighbors talking. Scotland Yard was brought in, and Inspector Dew went down to question Dr. Crippen, who gave a fairly plausible account of his wife’s absence, insisting that she had gone to live in California. Inspector Dew had more or less given up, but when he went back for some formality, Dr. Crippen ran away with the secretary. Naturally, there was a big hue and cry, and a description of the missing couple was sent out to all ships at sea. This was when they were just beginning to use radios on ships.
Now, if I may, I’ll jump aboard the steamship Montrose, going from Antwerp to Montreal, to give you the ship captain’s version of the sequel to this story.
The captain had noticed among his passengers a Mr. Robinson and his young son; he had also noticed that the father was particularly affectionate toward the boy. So, being a snooping man—he might have been in Rear Window—he noticed that Master Robinson’s hat, bought in Antwerp, was full of paper to make it fit. He also noticed that the boy’s pants were held together at the waist by a safety pin. According to the description he had received, Dr. Crippen wore a false top and bottom plate of teeth and there was a mark on his nose where he wore gold-rimmed glasses. The captain verified that Mr. Robinson had just such a mark. One evening the captain invited Mr. Robinson to his table and told him a joke so that he would laugh out loud, and he found that the man really had false teeth.
At this point the captain wired a message stating that he believed the wanted couple was on his ship. While that message was being transmitted, Dr. Crippen happened to walk by the radio cabin, and on hearing the spluttering of the keys, he said to the captain, “The wireless is a wonderful invention, isn’t it?”
Anyway, upon receiving the message, Inspector Dew got on a fast ship of the Canadian Pacific Line, and he reached the St. Lawrence River at a place called Father Point. He boarded the Montrose and walked up to Mr. Robinson, saying, “Good morning, Dr. Crippen.” He brought them back. Crippen was hanged and the girl got off.
F.T. So that’s what gave you the idea for the jewelry scene with Grace Kelly?
A.H. Yes, the scene with the wedding ring. If the wife had really gone on a trip, she’d have taken her wedding ring with her.
F.T. One of the things I enjoyed in the film was the dual significance of that wedding ring. Grace Kelly wants to get married but James Stewart doesn’t see it that way. She breaks into the killer’s apartment to search for evidence and she finds the wedding ring. She puts it on her finger and waves her hand behind her back so that James Stewart, looking over from the other side of the yard with his spyglasses, can see it. To Grace Kelly, that ring is a double victory: not only is it the evidence she was looking for, but who knows, it may inspire Stewart to propose to her. After all, she’s already got the ring!
A.H. Exactly. That was an ironic touch.
F.T. I was still a working critic the first time I saw Rear Window, and I remember writing that the picture was very gloomy, rather pessimistic, and quite evil. But now I don’t see it in that light at all; in fact, I feel it has a rather compassionate approach. What Stewart sees from his window is not horrible but simply a display of human weaknesses and people in pursuit of happiness. Is that the way you look at it?
A.H. Definitely.
F.T. To Catch a Thief was the first film you shot on location in France. What do you think of the picture on the whole?
A.H. It was a lightweight story.
F.T. Along the lines of the Arsène Lupin stories. Cary Grant played “The Cat,” a former high-class American thief who has retired on the Côte d’Azur. When the area is hit by a wave of jewel robberies, he is the logical suspect, both because of his police record and his expert skills. To resume his peaceful existence, he uses these skills to conduct his own investigation. Along the way he finds love, in the person of Grace Kelly, and in the end, it turns out that the guilty party is a “she-cat.”
A.H. It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. The only interesting footnote I can add is that since I hate royal-blue skies, I tried to get rid of the Technicolor blue for the night scenes. So we shot with a green filter to get the dark slate blue, the real color of night, but it still didn’t come out as I wanted it.
F.T. Like several of the others, the plot hinges around a transference of guilt, with the difference being that here the villain turns out to be a girl.
A.H. Brigitte Auber played that role. I had seen a Julien Duvivier picture called Sous le Ciel de Paris in which she played a country girl who’d come to live in the city. I chose her because the personage had to be sturdy enough to climb all over the villa roofs. At the time, I wasn’t aware that between films Brigitte Auber worked as an acrobat. That turned out to be a happy coincidence.
F.T. This is the picture that aroused the press’s interest in your concept of movie heroines. You stated several times that Grace Kelly especially appealed to you because her sex appeal is “indirect.”
A.H. Sex on the screen should be suspenseful, I feel. If sex is too blatant or obvious, there’s no suspense. You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom. Poor Marilyn Monroe had sex written all over her face, and Brigitte Bardot isn’t very subtle either.
F.T. In other words, what intrigues you is the paradox between the inner fire and the cool surface.
A.H. Definitely, I think the most interesting women, sexually, are the English women. I feel that the English women, the Swedes, the northern Germans, and Scandinavians are a great deal more exciting than the Latin, the Italian, and the French women. Sex should not be advertised. An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise, she’ll probably pull a man’s pants open.
F.T. I appreciate your viewpoint, but I doubt whether the majority of the public shares your tastes in this matter. I think the male audience prefers a highly carnal woman. The very fact that Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and Brigitte Bardot became stars, despite the many flops in which they appeared, seems to bear this out. The majority of the public, it seems to me, prefers the kind of sensuality that’s blatant.
A.H. That may well be true, but you yourself admit that those actresses generally make bad films. Do you know why? Because without the element of surprise the scenes become meaningless. There’s no possibility to discover sex. Look at the opening of To Catch a Thief. I deliberately photographed Grace Kelly ice-cold and I kept cutting to her profile, looking classical, beautiful, and very distant. And then, when Cary Grant accompanies her to the door of her hotel room, what does she do? She thrusts her lips right up to his mouth.
F.T. I’m willing to grant that you manage to impose that concept of icy sexuality on the screen, but I still feel the audience prefers the kind of sex that’s obvious and tangible.
A.H. Maybe so. Anyway, when the picture is over, the public’s pretty satisfied with it.
F.T. I’m not overlooking that, but my guess is that this is one aspect of your pictures that’s probably
more satisfying to the feminine viewers than to the male audience.
A.H. I’d like to point out that it’s generally the woman who has the final say on which picture a couple is going to see. In fact, it’s generally the woman who will decide, later on, whether it was a good or a bad picture. On condition that it’s not displayed by a person of their own sex, women will not object to vulgarity on the screen. Anyway, to build up Grace Kelly, in each picture between Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief we made her role a more interesting one.
Since To Catch a Thief is in a rather nostalgic mood, I didn’t want to wind up with a completely happy ending. That’s why I put in that scene by the tree, when Cary Grant agrees to marry Grace Kelly. It turns out that the mother-in-law will come and live with them, so the final note is pretty grim.
F.T. After that you made a very unusual picture, The Trouble with Harry. In Paris it opened in a very small theater on the Champs-Elysées. It was expected to run no more than a week or two, but it played to packed houses for half a year. I was never able to figure out whether it was entertaining to Parisians or whether the audience was made up entirely of British and American tourists. I believe it wasn’t too successful in other parts of the world.III
A.H. I chose that novel and was given a free hand with it. When it was finished, the distributors didn’t know how to exploit it. It needed special handling. They felt it was too special, but I didn’t see it that way. It’s taken from a British novel by Jack Trevor Story and I didn’t change it very much. To my taste, the humor is quite rich. One of the best lines is when old Edmund Gwenn is dragging the body along for the first time and a woman comes up to him on the hill and says, “What seems to be the trouble, Captain?” To me that’s terribly funny; that’s the spirit of the whole story.
The Trouble with Harry. The year is 1954. Since 1922, Alma Hitchcock, seated at the bottom and to the left, has kept a discreet but attentive eye on her husband’s work.
F.T. I understand that you’re especially fond of this picture.
A.H. I’ve always been interested in establishing a contrast, in going against the traditional and in breaking away from clichés. With Harry I took melodrama out of the pitch-black night and brought it out in the sunshine. It’s as if I had set up a murder alongside a rustling brook and spilled a drop of blood in the clear water. These contrasts establish a counterpoint; they elevate the commonplace in life to a higher level.
F.T. I must say you successfully demonstrate how horrible or terrifying things—elements that might easily become morbid or sordid—can be filmed in such a way that they’re never repulsive. Very often, they’re even fascinating.
Toward the end of the picture each of the characters has the chance to make a wish, and since Shirley MacLaine whispers her request into someone’s ear, there’s no way of knowing exactly what it is, but one guesses it must be something very special. Then, at the very end, we find out that what she wanted was a double bed. That wasn’t in the book, was it?
A.H. No. John Michael Hayes put that in.
F.T. That little touch creates a sort of suspenseful question mark that heightens the interest of the final reel.
A.H. It’s the equivalent of the crescendo or the coda in my other pictures. We did the same sort of thing at the end of Lifeboat and Rope. The Trouble with Harry was Shirley MacLaine’s first picture. She was very good in it and she made out very well afterward. The young man, John Forsythe, now very popular in television, had the lead in one of my first hour shows.
F.T. The whole humor of the picture hinges on a single device: an attitude of disconcerting nonchalance. The characters discuss the corpse as casually as if they were talking about a pack of cigarettes.
A.H. That’s the idea. Nothing amuses me so much as understatement.
F.T. We’ve already talked about the differences between the British version of The Man Who Knew Too MuchIV and the American remake. One of those differences is, of course, James Stewart’s performance in the remake. He’s a fine actor and you certainly bring out his best points. It might seem as if Cary Grant and James Stewart were interchangeable in your work, but you actually use each one in a different way. With Cary Grant the picture is more humorous, and with James Stewart the emphasis is on emotion.
A.H. Naturally. Despite the similarities, they’re really quite different from each other. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, James Stewart portrayed an earnest and quiet man. Cary Grant couldn’t have done it that way. If I’d used him in the picture, the character would have, been altogether different.
F.T. You went to some trouble, I notice, to avoid mention of a specific country; that might raise censorship problems. Whereas the original version starts out in Switzerland, the second one opens in Morocco, and it’s never clearly stated whether the diplomat who’s slated to be assassinated represents one of the people’s democracies or not.
A.H. Of course, I didn’t want to commit myself to any country; we simply indicated that by killing the ambassador, the spies hoped to embarrass the British Government. One thing that bothered me, though, was the choice of an actor to play the ambassador. You simply can’t trust the casting department’s judgment. I suspect when you ask them for someone to play an elevator boy, they take out a big register and open it up to the letter “E,” and then they call in every actor who’s ever played an elevator boy.
F.T. Is that the way they do it?
A.H. That’s exactly how they work. When I was in London I asked for a man to play the ambassador, and they sent me a lot of small men with little beards. I’d ask them, “What have you played?” One man would tell me, “I was the prime minister in such and such a picture,” and another would say, “I had the role of the chargé d’affaires in such and such a picture.” Finally, I told the casting department to stop sending me ambassadors. I asked them to send someone down to a newspaper morgue and bring me back a picture of all of the ambassadors stationed in London at the time. Well, I looked at the pictures and not one of them had a beard!
F.T. The man you chose was awfully good—completely bald, with a look of bland innocence that’s almost childlike.
A.H. He was a very prominent stage actor in Copenhagen.
F.T. Let’s get back to the opening of the picture, in Marrakech. In the original version Pierre Fresnay was shot down, but in this one Daniel Gelin is stabbed in the back.
A.H. That knife in his back comes from an idea I’d had a long time ago and I managed to use part of it in this picture.
The idea was to show a ship from India sailing into the London docks, with a crew that was three-fourths Indian. One of the sailors was being chased by the police and he’d managed to get on a bus that was going to St. Paul’s Cathedral on Sunday morning. He gets up into what’s called the Whispering Gallery. The police are up there and he runs to one side while the police run around the other way. Then, just as they nearly catch up with him, he jumps over and falls in front of the altar. The service is interrupted as the congregation rises and the choir stops its singing. Everyone rushes over to the fallen man’s body, and when they turn it over, they discover a knife in his back. Then someone touches his face and the black comes off, showing white streaks. It turns out he wasn’t a real Indian.
F.T. That part—the white streaks on the face—is in the picture, when Daniel Gelin is killed . . .
A.H. Yes, but I never completed the idea. It would have been interesting to work out the puzzle of how a man being chased by the police can get stabbed in the back after he jumps down.
F.T. That’s an intriguing thought, and the dyed face is a nice touch. But there’s something strange in that scene. When James Stewart raises his hand after touching Daniel Gelin’s blackened face, there’s a blue stain on it. It’s rather mystifying.
A.H. Well, that’s another idea that wasn’t completed. At the beginning of that chase sequence with Daniel Gelin in Marrake
ch, there was to be a scene in the market place in which Daniel Gelin would collide with some men who were dyeing wool. As he passed by, his foot and his robe would have dipped into the blue dye so that he leaves a blue trail in his footsteps as he runs away. It’s a variant on the old trail of blood, but instead of following a red trail, the pursuers would be following a blue one.
F.T. It’s also a variant on Tom Thumb and the little white stones he drops along his path. We’ve already discussed some of the differences between the Albert Hall scenes in the 1934 British version and the 1956 American version. The second one is superior by far.
A.H. Yes, I believe we went over that when we were talking about the first version. I can’t help feeling that ideally, for that scene to have maximum effect, all of the viewers should be able to read a musical score.V
F.T. Why is that?
A.H. I went to great pains to make sure that everyone would clearly understand the role of the cymbals, but do you remember the moment when the camera sweeps over to the cymbalist’s musical score?
F.T. Yes, you had a panning shot right across the bar of notes.