F.T. I take it then that you’ll never do a screen version of Crime and Punishment.
A.H. Even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good.
Shooting Juno and the Paycock (1930). Alma Reville is standing to the side of the fireplace.
F.T. Why not?
A.H. Well, in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function.
F.T. That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form.
A.H. Exactly, and to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six- to ten-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.
F.T. I agree. Moreover, your particular style and the very nature of suspense require a constant play with the flux of time, either by compressing it or, more often, by distending it. Your approach to an adaptation is entirely different from that of most directors.
A.H. The ability to shorten or lengthen time is a primary requirement in film-making. As you know, there’s no relation whatever between real time and filmic time.
F.T. Of course, that’s one of the fundamentals that one learns with one’s first picture. For instance, a fast action has to be geared down and stretched out; otherwise, it is almost imperceptible to the viewer. It takes considerable experience and know-how to handle the flux of time properly.
A.H. This is why I feel it is a mistake to have a novelist adapt his own book for the screen. A dramatist, on the other hand, may be more effective in adapting his own play. But even so, he must face up to a difficulty. In his work for the stage he is called upon to sustain the interest of the audience for three acts. These acts are broken up by two intermissions during which the audience can relax. But for a film one must hold that audience for an uninterrupted two hours or longer.
Even so, a playwright will tend to make a better screenwriter than a novelist because he is used to the building of successive climaxes.
Sequences can never stand still; they must carry the action forward, just as the wheels of a ratchet mountain railway move the train up the slope, cog by cog. A film cannot be compared to a play or a novel. It is closer to a short story, which, as a rule, sustains one idea that culminates when the action has reached the highest point of the dramatic curve.
As you know, a short story is rarely put down in the middle, and in this sense it resembles a film. And it is because of this peculiarity that there must be a steady development of the plot and the creation of gripping situations which must be presented, above all, with visual skill. Now, this brings us to suspense, which is the most powerful means of holding onto the viewer’s attention. It can be either the suspense of the situation or the suspense that makes the public ask itself, “What will happen next?”
F.T. The word “suspense” can be interpreted in several ways. In your interviews you have frequently pointed out the difference between “surprise” and “suspense.” But many people are under the impression that suspense is related to fear.
A.H. There is no relation whatever. Let’s go back to the switchboard operator in Easy Virtue. She is tuned in to the conversation between the young man and the woman who are discussing marriage and who are not shown on the screen. That switchboard operator is in suspense; she is filled with it. Is the woman on the end of the line going to marry the man whom she called? The switchboard operator is very relieved when the woman finally agrees; her own suspense is over. This is an example of suspense that is not related to fear.
F.T. Yet the switchboard operator was afraid that the woman would refuse to marry the young man, but, of course, there is no anguish in this kind of fear. Suspense, I take it, is the stretching out of an anticipation.
A.H. In the usual form of suspense it is indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all of the facts involved. Otherwise, there is no suspense.
F.T. No doubt, but isn’t it possible to have suspense in connection with hidden danger as well?
A.H. To my way of thinking, mystery is seldom suspenseful. In a whodunit, for instance, there is no suspense, but a sort of intellectual puzzle. The whodunit generates the kind of curiosity that is void of emotion, and emotion is an essential ingredient of suspense.
In the case of the switchboard operator in Easy Virtue, the emotion was her wish that the young man be accepted by the woman. In the classical situation of a bombing, it’s fear for someone’s safety. And that fear depends upon the intensity of the public’s identification with the person who is in danger. I might go further and say that with the old situation of a bombing properly presented, you might have a group of gangsters sitting around a table, a group of villains . . .
F.T. As for instance the bomb that was concealed in a briefcase in the July 20 plot on Hitler’s life.
A.H. Yes. And even in that case I don’t think the public would say, “Oh, good, they’re all going to be blown to bits,” but rather, they’ll be thinking, “Watch out. There’s a bomb!” What it means is that the apprehension of the bomb is more powerful than the feelings of sympathy or dislike for the characters involved. And you would be mistaken in thinking that this is due to the fact that the bomb is an especially frightening object. Let’s take another example. A curious person goes into somebody else’s room and begins to search through the drawers. Now, you show the person who lives in that room coming up the stairs. Then you go back to the person who is searching, and the public feels like warning him, “Be careful, watch out. Someone’s coming up the stairs.” Therefore, even if the snooper is not a likable character, the audience will still feel anxiety for him. Of course, when the character is attractive, as for instance Grace Kelly in Rear Window, the public’s emotion is greatly intensified.
F.T. Yes, that’s a good illustration.
A.H. As a matter of fact, I happened to be sitting next to Joseph Cotten’s wife at the premiere of Rear Window, and during the scene where Grace Kelly is going through the killer’s room and he appears in the hall, she was so upset that she turned to her husband and whispered, “Do something, do something!”
F.T. I’d like to have your definition of the difference between “suspense” and “surprise.”
A.H. There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise,” and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”
In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.
* * *
F.T. Your following picture, Murder, was taken from a novel about the theater by Clemence Dane.
A.H. That was an interesting picture. Did you see it?
F.T. Yes, I did. It’s about a young actress who’s accused of killing one of her friends. She’s tried and sentenced to death. Herbert Mars
hall played the juror who’s convinced of her innocence. He conducts an investigation on his own after the trial, and it eventually turns out that the guilty one is none other than the defendant’s fiancé.
A.H. That was one of the rare whodunits I made. I generally avoid this genre because as a rule all of the interest is concentrated in the ending.
F.T. As in most of the Agatha Christie novels, for instance. There is a laborious investigation, followed by a series of interrogations.
A.H. That’s right. I don’t really approve of whodunits because they’re rather like a jigsaw or a crossword puzzle. No emotion. You simply wait to find out who committed the murder. It reminds me of a story about two competing networks at the time television was in its in fancy. One network had advertised a whodunit program. And just before it was to go on the air, an announcer from the rival channel told the audience, “That play on the other network tonight—we can reveal that the butler did it!”
F.T. Even though Murder was a whodunit, I believe you were particularly interested in the filming.
A.H. Yes, because we did many things that had not been done before. It was Herbert Marshall’s first talking part and the role was perfect for him; he turned out to be excellent in the sound medium. Anyway, we had to reveal his inner thoughts, and since I hate to introduce a useless character in a story, I used a stream-of-consciousness monologue. At the time, this was regarded as an extraordinary novelty, although it had been done for ages in the theater, beginning with Shakespeare. But here we adapted the idea to the techniques of sound.
There was a scene in which Herbert Marshall had the radio on while he was shaving and he was listening to some music . . .
F.T. They were playing the Prelude from Tristan. That was one of the best scenes.
A.H. Well, I had a thirty-piece orchestra in the studio, behind the bathroom set. You see, it was impossible to add the sound later; the music had to be recorded at the same time, right there on the stage.
I also experimented with improvisations in direct sound. I would explain the meaning of the scene to the actors and suggest that they make up their own dialogue. The result wasn’t good; there was too much faltering. They would carefully think over what they were about to say and we didn’t get the spontaneity I had hoped for. The timing was wrong and it had no rhythm. I understand that you like improvisation. What’s your experience?
F.T. As you say, there is always a danger in giving voice to stammerers. And when people are searching for their words, there is the risk that a scene will turn out twice as long as it should. So I try for an intermediary formula: When dealing with a key scene I might talk it over with the performers and write it only afterward, using the words of their own vocabulary.
A.H. That’s very interesting, but it’s probably not too economical, is it?
F.T. In terms of money, footage, and time, the process is by no means economical. But let’s get back to Murder, which in essence is a thinly disguised story about homosexuality. In the final scene at the circus, the murderer is shown as a transvestite as he confesses he killed the victim because she was about to tell his fiancée all about him, about his special mores. Wasn’t that rather risqué at the period?
A.H. Yes, in that sense it was daring. There were also several references to Hamlet because we had a play within a play. The presumptive murderer was asked to read the manuscript of a play, and since the script described the killing, this was a way of tricking him. They watched the man while he was reading out loud to see whether he would show some sign of guilt, just like the king in Hamlet. The whole film was about the theater. Another novelty was that Murder was my first experience with a bilingual picture. We made the German and English versions simultaneously. I had worked in Germany and had a rough knowledge of the language—just enough to get by. In the English version the hero was Herbert Marshall, and we used a very well-known actor, Alfred Abel, for the German version. Before the shooting, when I went to Berlin to talk over the script, they proposed many changes that I turned down. As it happens, I was wrong. I refused them because I was satisfied with the English version. Besides, we didn’t want to shoot two versions that would be too different from each other, for reasons of economy.
Anyway, I returned to London without having altered the script. But as soon as we started to shoot, I realized that I had no ear for the German language. Many touches that were quite funny in the English version were not at all amusing in the German one, as, for instance, the ironic asides on the loss of dignity or on snobbishness. The German actor was ill at ease, and I came to realize that I simply didn’t know enough about the German idiom.
I don’t mean to discourage you, but this may help you understand why Clair, Duvivier, and Renoir had difficulties in the United States. They aren’t familiar enough with the American language and idiom. Strangely enough, a few Germans and Austrians, like Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, managed to adapt themselves to the local climate, and some of the Hungarian directors also succeeded here. It’s rather peculiar. My own experience helps me to appreciate what director Michael Curtiz and producer Joe Pasternak were up against when they arrived in California.
F.T. It seems to me, however, that the European directors brought to American motion pictures something that their Hollywood colleagues had failed to provide—namely, a lucid and sometimes critical look at America, which invests many of their pictures with a special interest. You won’t find this approach in the works of Hawks or McCarey, whereas the films of Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and many of your own movies often cast perceptive looks at the American way of life. In addition, the European directors also bring over some of their native folklore.
A.H. That’s particularly true with respect to humor. For instance, The Trouble with Harry is an approach to a strictly British genre, the humor of the macabre. I made that picture to prove that the American public could appreciate British humor, and it went over quite well whenever it reached an audience.
In England one is always running into people who are anti-American although they’ve never set foot in this country. And I always tell them, “There are no Americans. America is full of foreigners.” Take my own household as an example. Our housekeeper is a German from Pomerania. The housekeeper of our country home is Italian and speaks very little English, yet she’s an American citizen and she has a big American flag waving over her cottage. Our gardener is a Mexican, and many other gardeners here in Hollywood are Japanese. In the studios you will hear all kinds of different accents around you.
Anyway, to get back to Murder, it was an interesting film and was quite successful in London. But it was too sophisticated for the provinces.
F.T. The following picture, The Skin Game, was also based on a stage play, I believe. I don’t remember it too clearly. It’s the story of a fierce rivalry between a landowner and his immediate neighbor, who had made his money in business. The most important scene showed them vying with each other at an auction sale.
A.H. It was taken from the play by John Galsworthy. Edmund Gwenn, who was very famous in London at the time, starred in it. I didn’t make it by choice, and there isn’t much to be said about it.
F.T. I imagine that the higher budgets, at the advent of the sound era, presented quite a few new problems.
Edmund Gwenn in The Skin Game.
A.H. Exactly. For one thing, since it took more time to make a picture, they were often made in several versions in order to reach an international audience. Therefore each film was much more expensive.
F.T. There was no dubbing at the time?
A.H. Not yet. We shot with four cameras and with a single sound track because we couldn’t cut sound in those days. That’s why when they speak to me about the use of multiple cameras on live television, I say, “That’s nothing new. We were already doing it in 1928.”
F.T. Your next picture was Rich and Strange, in 1931. I liked that one very much.
/>
A.H. Yes, it had lots of ideas. The story was about a young couple who won a lot of money and took a trip around the world. Before shooting it, Mrs. Hitchcock and I set out to do some preliminary research on the story. She was writing the script, you know. In the picture I planned to show the young couple in Paris, going to the Folies Bergère and going down during the intermission to see the belly dancing. So we went over to the Folies Bergère. And during the intermission I turned to a young man in a tuxedo and asked him where we could see the belly dancing.
“This way, follow me, please.”
So we followed him to the street, and when I appeared surprised, he explained, “It’s in the annex.” And he put us in a cab.
Henerey Kendall and Joan Barry in Rich and Strange.
Before leaving to go around the world, one must follow the routine of office life. Standing near the camera, Hitchcock directs Rich and Strange.
I thought there must surely be some mistake. When the cab finally stopped at a door, I said to my wife, “I’ll bet he’s taking us to a brothel,” and asked whether she wanted to go in. We’d never in our lives been in a place like that, but she said, “Yes.”
The girls came down. We offered them champagne. In front of my wife, the madam asked me whether I would like one of the young ladies. Well, I’ve never had anything to do with that sort of woman to this very day! Anyway, we got out of there and went back to the theater. And only then did we realize that we weren’t at the Folies Bergère at all but at the Casino de Paris. So we had been behaving exactly like the couple in the book—two innocents abroad!
F.T. How did you plan to use the belly dancing in the film?
A.H. The reason I was interested in the belly dancing is that I wanted to show the heroine looking at a navel that goes round and round and finally dissolves to a spirallike spinning motion.