A.H. During that shot the camera travels over all those silent passages to close in on the single note the cymbalist is supposed to play. Wouldn’t the suspense have been stronger if people could actually read that score?
F.T. Naturally, that would have been ideal. In the original version the cymbalist’s face isn’t shown, but I notice this omission was corrected in the remake. By the way, the musician looks a little like you.
A.H. Just a coincidence!
F.T. He’s completely impassive.
A.H. Well, that impassivity was extremely important since the man is unaware that he is the instrument of death. He doesn’t know it, but in fact, he’s the real killer.
* * *
I. A tennis player (Ray Milland), with no money of his own, is concerned over his wealthy wife’s (Grace Kelly) interest in novelist Robert Cummings. He decides to murder her and blackmails an adventurer with a criminal record (Anthony Dawson) into becoming his active accomplice. The carefully worked-out plan calls for Dawson to strangle the wife at home while Milland establishes an alibi by being at a club during the killing.
But things go awry when the young woman unexpectedly manages to get out of the stranglehold. In the ensuing struggle she kills her attacker. Concealing his disappointment, the husband makes the best of the circumstances and comforts his distraught wife. But his overcooperative manner arouses the suspicions of a sharp police inspector who, with the help of the wife and her novelist friend, sets up a trap. The stratagem works and the picture winds up with the husband exposed as the author of the almost-perfect crime.
II. A news photographer (James Stewart), confined to a wheelchair by a broken leg, gazes idly at the behavior of the neighbors across the courtyard of his Greenwich Village apartment. His observations lead him to suspect that one of the neighbors (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife, but he is unable to convince his fiancée (Grace Kelly) and his detective friend (Wendell Corey) that he is right. Eventually, when Stewart’s fiancée discovers incriminating evidence confirming his suspicions, the killer discovers he is being watched and tries to kill the photographer. The snooper is saved in the nick of time, though his second leg is broken in the course of the rescue operation.
III. In the rural countryside of Vermont on a fall day, three shots are heard. A little boy playing in the woods discovers the body of a man who, upon investigation, turns out to be Harry. Several people in the community, among them his former wife, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), have motives for killing Harry; and others, including an abstract painter (John Forsythe), a retired sea captain (Edmund Gwenn), and an old maid and a nearsighted doctor, believe they may be responsible for his accidental death. Adding to the confusion, Harry keeps showing up in all the splendor of rigor mortis at the most embarrassing moments. Eventually, it turns out that Harry has simply died of natural causes and the community resumes its uneventful ways. But for the abstract painter, who has fallen under the spell of Jennifer’s very concrete charm, life may never again be the same.
IV. See here.
V. The reader will recall that the spy who’s been assigned to kill the diplomat during the Albert Hall concert has been instructed to fire precisely at the moment the score calls for the unique clash of cymbals so that the noise will drown out the sound of the fatal crack.
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“THE WRONG MAN” ■ ABSOLUTE AUTHENTICITY ■ “VERTIGO” ■ THE USUAL ALTERNATIVES: SUSPENSE OR SURPRISE ■ NECROPHILIA ■ KIM NOVAK ON THE SET ■ TWO PROJECTS THAT WERE NEVER FILMED ■ A POLITICAL SUSPENSE MOVIE ■ “NORTH BY NORTHWEST” ■ THE IMPORTANCE OE PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION ■ DEALING WITH TIME AND SPACE ■ THE PRACTICE OF THE ABSURD ■ THE BODY THAT CAME FROM NOWHERE
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12
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. After that you went on to make The Wrong Man, which is a fairly faithful account of a real-life news story.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. The screenplay was based on a story I read in Life magazine. In 1952, I think, a musician at New York’s Stork Club went home at two o’clock in the morning. In front of his door he was met by two men who hauled him off to different places, like saloons, and asked various people there, “Is this the man?” Anyway, he was arrested and charged with a holdup. Though he was completely innocent, he had to stand trial, and eventually, as a result of all the trouble, his wife lost her mind and was put in an insane asylum.
She’s probably still there. One of the jurors at the trial was so convinced of the man’s guilt that, while the defense lawyer was cross-questioning a witness for the prosecution, he got up and said, “Your Honor, is it absolutely necessary for us to go through all this?” As a result of this violation of the ritual, they had to declare a mistrial. Meanwhile, the police caught the real thief before the new trial opened.
I thought the story would make an interesting picture if all the events were shown from the viewpoint of the innocent man, describing his suffering as a result of a crime committed by someone else. What makes the whole ordeal even more dreadful is that when he protests his innocence, all the people around him are very nice about it, saying, “Yes, of course!”
F.T. I can see why it appealed to you: a concrete, real-life illustration of your favorite theme—the man convicted of a crime committed by someone else, with all the circumstantial evidence working against him. I’m curious to know to what degree your film is authentic; in other words, where and why you found it necessary to depart from the truth.
A.H. That’s a good question because in the course of shooting that picture I learned a great deal. For instance, for the sake of authenticity everything was minutely reconstructed with the people who were actually involved in that drama. We even used some of them in some of the episodes and, wherever possible, relatively unknown actors. We shot on the locations where the events really took place. Inside the prison we observed how the inmates handle their bedding and their clothes; then we found an empty cell for Fonda and we made him handle these routines exactly as the real inmates had done. We also used the actual psychiatric rest home to which the wife was sent and had the actual doctors playing themselves.
But here’s an instance of what we learn by shooting a film in which all the scenes are authentically reconstructed. At the end, the real guilty party is captured while he’s trying to hold up a delicatessen, through the courage of the lady owner. I imagined that the way to do that scene was to have the man go into the store, take out his gun and demand the contents of the cash drawer. The lady would manage in some way to sound the alarm, or there might be a struggle of some kind in which the thief was pinned down. Well, what really took place—and this is the way we did it in the picture—is that the man walked into the shop and asked the lady for some frankfurters and some ham. As she passed him to get behind the counter, he held his gun in his pocket and aimed it at her. The woman had in her hand a large knife to cut the ham with. Without losing her nerve, she pointed the point of the knife against his stomach, and as he stood there, taken aback, she stamped her foot twice on the floor. The man, rather worried, said, “Take it easy, lady.” But the woman, remaining surprisingly calm, didn’t budge an inch and didn’t say a word. The man was so taken aback by her sang-froid that he couldn’t think of what to do next. All of a sudden the woman’s husband, warned by her stamping, came up from the cellar and grabbed the thief by the shoulders to push him into a corner of the shop against the food shelves while his wife called the police. The thief, thoroughly scared, began to whine: “Let me go. My wife and kids are waiting for me.” I loved that line; it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t dream of writing into a scenario, and even if it occurred to you, you simply wouldn’t dare use it.
F.T. Of course, truth is stranger than fiction. But even so, it’s obvious that you had to dramatize the story. In what way did you do that?
A.H. Naturally, that was the problem. For instance, I tried to dramatize the discovery of the real culprit. We showed Henry Fonda murmuring a prayer in front of
a holy picture, and from him we dissolved to the real culprit and superimposed his face over Fonda’s.
Then again, to the contrary of such pictures as Boomerang or Northside 777, in which the whole thing is shown through the investigator who is working on the outside to get the innocent man in jail released, my picture is made from the viewpoint of the prisoner himself. From the very outset, when he’s arrested, he’s seated in the car between the two detectives. There’s a close-up of his face, and as he looks to the left, we see the solid profile of his guard from his viewpoint. Then he turns to the right, and we see his other guard lighting a cigar; he looks straight ahead, and in the mirror he sees the driver of the car observing him. The car starts off and he looks back at his house. At the corner of the block is the bar he usually goes to, with some little girls playing in front of it. As they pass a parked car, he sees that the young woman inside is turning on the radio. Everything in the outside world is taking place normally, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and yet he himself is a prisoner inside the car.
The whole approach is subjective. For instance, they’ve slipped on a pair of handcuffs to link him to another prisoner. During the journey between the station house and the prison, there are different men guarding him, but since he’s ashamed, he keeps his head down, staring at his shoes, so we never show the guards. From time to time one of the handcuffs is opened, and we see a different wrist. In the same way, during the whole trip, we only show the guards’ feet, their lower legs, the floor, and the bottom parts of the doors.
F.T. I noticed all of that painstaking detail, but I can’t help wondering whether you’re fully satisfied with the end result. In other words, do you feel The Wrong Man lived up to your usual standards?
A.H. Well, that faithfulness to the original story resulted in some deficiencies in the film’s construction. The first weakness was the long interruption in the man’s story in order to show how the wife was gradually losing her mind. By the time we got to the trial, it had become anti-climactic. Then, the trial ended abruptly, as it did in real life. It’s possible I was too concerned with veracity to take sufficient dramatic license.
F.T. The main trouble, I think, is that your style, which has found its perfection in the fiction area, happens to be in total conflict with the esthetics of the documentary and that contradiction is apparent throughout the picture. Faces, looks, and gestures have been stylized, whereas reality can never be stylized. Wouldn’t you agree that the dramatization of authentic events actually served to detract from their reality?
A.H. You’ve got to remember that The Wrong Man was being made as a commercial picture.
F.T. Naturally. And yet I can’t help feeling that the picture might have been more commercial had it been directed by another film-maker—someone less talented, less painstaking . . . someone who wouldn’t have bothered with the dramatic rules concerning audience participation, or who didn’t even know about them. It would have been an entirely different picture, of course, handled in a purely objective way, like a documentary. I hope you don’t mind my saying these things.
A.H. Not at all. It isn’t that I disagree with you, but I do feel that it’s rather a difficult thing to analyze. What it amounts to, according to your reasoning, is that when you have to tell a story of truly major human importance, it would have to be filmed without actors.
F.T. Not necessarily. Henry fonda was perfect, very natural and just as authentic as any man on the street. The real problem is with the direction. You’re trying to make the public identify with Fonda, but when he goes into his cell, for instance, you show the walls spinning in front of the camera. That’s an antirealistic effect. I feel it would have been a good deal more convincing if you had simply shown Henry Fonda sitting on a stool in the cell.
A.H. Maybe so, but wouldn’t that be rather dull?
F.T. Frankly, I don’t think so, because this case history has a dramatic strength of its own. It should have been done in a very objective way, with the camera always at normal level, like a documentary; it should have been handled like a newsreel reportage.
A.H. It seems to me that you want me to work for the art houses.
F.T. Of course not. I hope you’ll forgive my insistence on this point. The scenes inspired by the true-life cases of Dr. Crippen and Patrick Mahon were very successfully integrated into Rear Window, but I sincerely believe the kind of material that is a hundred per cent authentic isn’t suitable for your style.
A.H. Let’s just say it wasn’t my kind of picture. But the industry was in a crisis at the time, and since I’d done a lot of work for Warner Brothers, I made this picture for them without taking any salary for my work. It was their property.
F.T. I’d like to point out that my objections to this picture are based on your own viewpoint. You’ve convinced me that the best Hitchcock films are the ones that are the most popular with the audience. That’s exactly as it should be, since the public’s reaction is an essential component of your work.
Still, I should mention that I liked some of The Wrong Man scenes very much. In particular, the second scene in the lawyer’s office. Previously there was a scene there in which Henry Fonda appeared to be very disheartened, while Vera Miles was so lively and talkative that she rather annoyed the lawyer. In the second scene Henry Fonda is more confident and eloquent than the first time and the lawyer seems to be more optimistic as well. On the other hand, Vera Miles is now completely apathetic; she hardly listens to what they are saying. And because Henry Fonda sees her every day, he doesn’t seem to be aware of the change in his wife, but the lawyer is obviously surprised and disturbed by what’s happened to her. As he rises from his desk to walk around the office behind the couple, his face shows what he’s thinking. It’s obvious that he believes his client’s wife is losing her mind. Although the dialogue is perfectly innocuous, all of this comes through very clearly. It’s a superb instance of a purely cinematic scene, a specifically Hitchcockian scene. But I must point out that here you departed from the faithful reconstruction of the real story to return to the fiction form.
A.H. Well, let’s file The Wrong Man among the indifferent Hitchcocks.
F.T. That’s not what I was getting at. I hoped you might defend the picture.
A.H. Impossible, I don’t feel that strongly about it. But I did fancy the opening of the picture because of my own fear of the police. I also liked the part where the real culprit is discovered just as Fonda is praying. Yes, I liked that ironic coincidence.
* * *
F.T. Vertigo is taken from the Boileau-Narcejac novel D’Entre les Morts, which was especially written so that you might do a screen version of it.
A.H. No, it wasn’t. The novel was out before we acquired the rights to the property.
F.T. Just the same, that book was especially written for you.
A.H. Do you really think so? What if I hadn’t bought it?
F.T. In that case it would have been bought by some French director, on account of the success of Diabolique. As a matter of fact, Boileau and Narcejac did four or five novels on that theory. When they found out that you had been interested in acquiring the rights to Diabolique, they went to work and wrote D’Entre les Morts, which Paramount bought for you.
Can you tell me what it was about this book that specially appealed to you?I
A.H. I was intrigued by the hero’s attempts to re-create the image of a dead woman through another one who’s alive.
As you know, the story is divided into two parts. The first part goes up to Madeleine’s death, when she falls from the steeple, and the second part opens with the hero’s meeting with Judy, a brunette who looks just like Madeleine. In the book it’s at the beginning of that second part that the hero meets Judy and tries to get her to look like Madeleine, and it’s only at the very end that both he and the reader discover that Madeleine and Judy are one and the same girl. That
’s the final surprise twist.
In the screenplay we used a different approach. At the beginning of the second part, when Stewart meets the brunette, the truth about Judy’s identity is disclosed, but only to the viewer. Though Stewart isn’t aware of it yet, the viewers already know that Judy isn’t just a girl who looks like Madeleine, but that she is Madeleine! Everyone around me was against this change; they all felt that the revelation should be saved for the end of the picture. I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story. When there’s a pause in her narration, the child always says, “What comes next, Mommy?” Well, I felt that the second part of the novel was written as if nothing came next, whereas in my formula, the little boy, knowing that Madeleine and Judy are the same person, would then ask, “And Stewart doesn’t know it, does he? What will he do when he finds out about it?”
In other words, we’re back to our usual alternatives: Do we want suspense or surprise? We followed the book up to a certain point. At first Stewart thinks Judy may be Madeleine; then he resigns himself to the fact that she isn’t, on condition that Judy will agree to resemble Madeleine in every respect. But now we give the public the truth about the hoax so that our suspense will hinge around the question of how Stewart is going to react when he discovers that Judy and Madeleine are actually the same person.
That’s the main line of thought. But there’s an additional point of interest in the screenplay. You will remember that Judy resisted the idea of being made to look like Madeleine. In the book she was simply reluctant to change her appearance, with no justification for her attitude. Whereas in the film, the girl’s reason for fighting off the changes is that she would eventually be unmasked. So much for the plot. To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who’s dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia.