F.T. Like the main title of Vertigo?
A.H. Yes, that’s it. In Rich and Strange there was a scene in which the young man is swimming with a girl and she stands with her legs astride, saying to him, “I bet you can’t swim between my legs.”
I shot it in a tank. The boy dives, and when he’s about to pass between her legs, she suddenly locks his head between her legs and you see the bubbles rising from his mouth. Finally, she releases him, and as he comes up, gasping for air, he sputters out, “You almost killed me that time,” and she answers, “Wouldn’t that have been a beautiful death?”
I don’t think we could show that today because of censorship.
F.T. I’ve seen two different prints of that picture, but neither one showed that scene. However, I remember a funny episode that took place aboard a Chinese junk.
A.H. Oh yes! The young couple is in the Far East and the ship on which they are traveling is wrecked. They manage to get off the ship, taking with them a bottle of crème de menthe and the ship’s black cat, and they’re picked up by a Chinese junk. They huddle up in front of the junk, and after a while the Chinese bring them some food and chopsticks. It’s delicious, the best meal they’ve ever tasted. When it’s over, they walk to the rear of the junk and there they see the cat’s skin being pinned out to dry. Stunned as well as nauseated, they rush over to the side.
F.T. It was quite a good film, but I believe that the critics were not overly cordial to Rich and Strange.
A.H. They felt that the characterizations weren’t sufficiently convincing. The actors were all right, but we should have had a stronger cast—in the box-office sense, I mean. I liked the picture; it should have been more successful.
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F.T. You made Number Seventeen in 1932. I saw the film at the Cinémathèque. It was quite funny, but the story was rather confusing.
A.H. A disaster! But there was a funny incident during the shooting. Part of the film was set in an empty house in which gangsters were hiding out, and there was to be a fair amount of gunplay. It occurred to me that it would be an intriguing idea if we used this house also as a refuge for all the stray cats of the neighborhood. Every time a gun was shot, a hundred cats would run up or down the stairs. These shots were to be separated from the action, for greater facility, in order to play around with the scene in the editing stage.
The camera was set up at the bottom of the stairway. On the morning we were finally all set to shoot the cats, I arrived to find the studio full of people. I asked why there were so many extras. “They’re not extras,” I was told. “They’re the people who own the cats.”
We put flat panels all around the bottom of the stairway. Each owner came forward and put his or her cat in the stall and then we were ready to shoot. The cameraman switched his motor on and the prop man fired a gun. All the cats leaped right over the barrier; not one went up the stairs. They were all over the studio. And for the next few hours all you could hear was the owners going around saying, “Pussy, pussy, pussy.”
“That’s my cat!”
“No, it’s mine!”
Eventually, we got them all together again, and this time we had a wire netting put around so that they couldn’t run away. Everything was ready. Camera. Bang! This time only three ran up the stairs. All the rest turned and clung desperately to the netting. So I gave it up.
F.T. The picture was based on a novel that had also been a stage play. Did you choose the story?
The railing to which the principals of Number Seventeen (1932) are attached is about to collapse.
A.H. No, it was bought by the studio and they assigned me to the picture.
F.T. As movies go, this one was rather short; it ran for about an hour. The first part, inside the house, is probably taken from the play. The second half, as I remember it, was better. There was a long chase sequence, with wonderful miniature models of cars and trains. As a matter of fact, the miniatures in your films are always very handsome. After that you went on to produce Lord Camber’s Ladies, with Benn W. Levy handling the direction for you, the man who was the author of the dialogue of Blackmail.
A.H. The American companies had contracted to release films that were a hundred per cent British; they were called “quota pictures” and were usually made very cheaply. When British International Pictures took on some of these films at the Elstree Studios, I agreed to produce one or two. My idea was to turn over the direction to Levy, who was a friend and was quite well known as a playwright. We had a very fine cast, with Gertrude Lawrence, a great star in those days, and Sir Gerald du Maurier, the leading actor of London at the time, and in my opinion, the best actor anywhere. Unfortunately, Mr. Levy turned out to be a very obstinate gentleman. So my handsome gesture, in offering him the direction, blew up in my face. I had two other projects to produce. I wanted to give one of them to John Van Druten, a rather successful playwright, who had written several plays with two characters. I offered him the facilities of shooting the film in the streets of London, with a small crew. Everybody would be paid for a whole year, so that if it rained, he could work in a studio or, if he felt like it, he could lay the whole project aside and start up again when he was ready. He was also offered two very good young actors who would be signed up for a year. In effect, I was offering him a camera in the place of his typewriter.
Number Seventeen: the chase sequence.
Though these were facilities that I had never enjoyed myself, Van Druten turned the proposition down. I was never able to figure out why. Meanwhile, I was also considering a story written by Countess Russell. The story was about a princess who steals away from the court and has two weeks of fun and adventure with a commoner. Does that sound familiar to you?
F.T. Of course. It’s Roman Holiday.
A.H. Well, we never made it. Then I embarked on a Bulldog Drummond story, with two writers. It was a very good script, and the producer, John Maxwell . . .
F.T. Maxwell is the man who had produced all of your movies since The Ring, in 1927?
A.H. Yes. Maxwell sent me a letter saying: “It’s a brilliant scenario, a tour de force, but I don’t want to produce it.” I have a hunch that a critic whom I had brought into the studio and recommended as story editor was intriguing against me and the picture. So it was never made. And that was the end of my period with British International Pictures.
F.T. Which brings us to 1933. Things were not going too well for you at this time. I can’t believe Waltzes from Vienna was your own choice.
A.H. It was a musical without music, made very cheaply. It had no relation to my usual work. In fact, at this time my reputation wasn’t very good, but luckily I was unaware of this.
Nothing to do with conceit; it was merely an inner conviction that I was a film-maker. I don’t ever remember saying to myself, “You’re finished; your career is at its lowest ebb.” And yet outwardly, to other people, I believe it was.
Rich and Strange had been a disappointment, and Number Seventeen reflected a careless approach to my work. There was no careful analysis of what I was doing. Since those days I’ve learned to be very self-critical, to step back and take a second look. And never to embark on a project unless there’s an inner feeling of comfort about it, a conviction that something good will come of it. It’s as if you were about to put up a building. You have to see the steel structure first. I’m not talking about the story structure, but about the concept of the film as a whole. If the basic concept is solid, things will work out. What happens to the film, of course, becomes a matter of degree, but there should be no question that the concept is a sound one. My mistake with Rich and Strange was my failure to make sure that the two leading players would be attractive to the critics and audience alike. With a story that good, I should not have allowed indifferent casting.
Sir Gerald du Maurier in Lord Cambers Ladies.
While we were shooting Waltzes from Vienna, at this low ebb of my
career, Michael Balcon came to see me working at the studio. He had given me my first chance to become a director. He said: “What are you doing after this picture?” I said, “I have a script that was written some time ago; it’s in a drawer, somewhere.” I brought in the scenario; he liked it and offered to buy it. So I went to my former producer, John Maxwell, and bought it from him for two hundred and fifty pounds. I sold it to the new Gaumont-British company, which was headed by Balcon, for five hundred pounds. But I was so ashamed of the hundred per cent profit that I had the sculptor Jacob Epstein do a bust of Balcon with the money. And I presented Balcon with Epstein’s bust of him.
F.T. And that was the scenario of The Man Who Knew Too Much?II
The cook as voyeur in Waltzes from Vienna (1933).
A.H. That’s right. It was based on an original Bulldog Drummond story by “Sapper” and adapted by Charles Bennett, with a newspaper columnist, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, doing the dialogue. So actually, it’s to the credit of Michael Balcon that he originally started me as a director and later gave me a second chance. Of course, he was always very possessive of me, and that’s why he was very angry, later on, when I left for Hollywood. But before talking about The Man Who Knew Too Much, I want to make a point. And that is that whatever happens in the course of your career, your talent is always there. To all appearances, I seemed to have gone into a creative decline in 1933 when I made Waltzes from Vienna, which was very bad. And yet the talent must have been there all along since I had already conceived the project for The Man Who Knew Too Much, the picture that re-established my creative prestige.
Anyway, to get back to 1934. First, there’s a thoroughly sobering self-examination. And now, I’m ready to go to work on The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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I. The story is too long to be properly summed up. It takes place during the Dublin uprising and tells about the eccentric goings on of an impoverished family that’s about to inherit some money. The prospect of the inheritance unbalances the head of the family, the self-appointed “Captain” Boyle (the Paycock), whereas his plump wife, Juno, is solid and down to earth. In the end, when it turns out there is no inheritance, the family is disgraced, with the daughter expecting an illegitimate child and the son shot as an informer.
II. In accordance with the chronological arrangement of these conversations, the above-mentioned picture is the original British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, made in 1954. Twenty-two years later, in 1956, Alfred Hitchcock directed a remake of the picture, co-starring James Stewart and Doris Day.
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“THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH” ■ WHEN CHURCHILL WAS CHIEF OF POLICE ■ “M” ■ FROM “THE ONE NOTE MAN” TO THE: DEADLY CYMBALS ■ CLARIFICATION AND SIMPLIFICATION ■ “THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS” ■ JOHN BUOHAN’S INFLUENCE ■ UNDERSTATEMENT ■ AN OLD, BAWDY STORY ■ MR. MEMORY ■ SLICE OF LIFE AND SLICE OF CAKE
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4
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. The Man Who Knew Too Much was your greatest British success and I think it was a big hit in the United States as well.
In the original version the story was about a couple of British tourists traveling in Switzerland with their daughter. They witness the assassination of a Frenchman who, before he dies, tells them about a plot to murder a foreign diplomat in London. To ensure the couple’s silence, the spy ring captures the little girl. The couple returns to London to track down the kidnappers, and the mother manages to save the ambassador’s life just as he’s about to be shot down during a concert at Albert Hall. The picture winds up with the police smoking the spy gang out of their hiding place and the saving of the little girl.
I’ve read somewhere that it was inspired by a true-life story, an incident in which Winston Churchill was involved at the time he headed the police force.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. You mean the ending was based on a real-life occurrence. That’s true. The incident took place around 1910, I think, and was known as the Sidney Street siege. Some Russian anarchists were holed up in a house and were shooting while the police were trying to get them out of there. It was a very difficult operation so they called out the soldiers. Churchill came down to supervise the operation. That incident was to cause me a lot of trouble with the censors. I’ll explain why. You see, the British police don’t carry firearms, and during this siege, as I said before, they had to bring out the military. They were even about to call on the artillery when the house caught fire and the anarchists came out. So, when I was shooting the picture, many years later, the censors took the view that the incident was a blot on the record of the British police. Yet they wouldn’t allow us to show them carrying weapons. When I asked how we were going to get the spies out, the censors suggested that we use water hoses. I did some research and discovered that Winston Churchill himself had made that very suggestion. Finally, the censors agreed to let the police fire some guns, provided I would show them going to a local gunsmith to pick out all sorts of antique weapons. This was to make it perfectly clear that the police are not used to firearms. The whole thing was so ludicrous that I ignored them. Instead, we had a flash showing the arrival of a truck from which rifles were handed out to the police.
F.T. In the American version of 1956, the picture opens in Marrakech, but in the original the action begins in Switzerland.
A.H. The picture opens with a scene at St. Moritz, in Switzerland, because that’s where I spent my honeymoon with my wife. From our window I could see the skating rink. And it occurred to me that we might start the picture by showing an ice skater tracing numbers—eight—six—zero—two—on the rink. An espionage code, of course. But I dropped the idea.
F.T. Because you couldn’t get the shot?
A.H. No. It simply had no place in the story. But the point I was trying to make is that from the very outset the contrast between the snowy Alps and the congested streets of London was a decisive factor. That visual concept had to be embodied in the film.
F.T. You used Pierre Fresnay in the original and Daniel Gelin in the remake. Why did you want a French actor in that role?
A.H. I didn’t especially want a Frenchman; I believe that came from the producer’s side. But I did insist on having Peter Lorre. He had just done M with Fritz Lang and this was his first British role. He had a very sharp sense of humor. They called him “the walking overcoat” because he went around in a long coat that came down to his feet.
F.T. Had you seen M?
A.H. Yes. I don’t remember it too well. Wasn’t there a whistling man in it?
F.T. Yes, that was Peter Lorre! You must have seen some of the other Fritz Lang films at that time—The Spy and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
A.H. Mabuse—that’s a long time back. Do you remember, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, there’s a scene in the dentist’s office? At first I had intended to do it in a barbershop, with the hot towels masking the men’s faces. But just before the shooting I saw Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, with Paul Muni, which had a scene just like it. So I transposed it to a dentist’s office, and while I was at it, I changed a few other things I didn’t like. For instance, at the opening of the film we established the fact that the heroine—the mother of the little girl who’s been kidnaped—was a first-rate shot. So the villains were to hypnotize the mother at the chapel. And while she’s in a trance, they would take her to Albert Hall, where she would kill the ambassador herself. On thinking it over, I felt that even a crack shot might not aim accurately while in a hypnotic trance. So I dropped it.
F.T. It’s rather interesting that what you did, in fact, was to reverse the idea completely. Instead of shooting the ambassador, the woman actually saves his life by crying out at the right moment.
The situation, as I remember it, has a group of spies planning to assassinate an important foreign statesman. Their plan is to shoot him during the playing of a cantata at a concert in Albert Hall. The killer is to fire at the precise instant when t
he musical score calls for a clash of cymbals. To make sure of their timing, they rehearse the killing to the sound of a recording of the cantata.
Finally, the concert itself begins, with all the characters in their proper places. And we wait, with rising tension, for that moment when the impassive cymbal player will use his instrument.
A.H. The idea for the cymbals was inspired by a cartoon, or rather by a comic strip that appeared in a satirical magazine like Punch. The drawings showed a man who wakes up in the morning, gets out of bed, goes into the bathroom, gargles, shaves, takes a shower, gets dressed and has his breakfast. Then he puts on his hat and coat, picks up a small leather instrument case and goes out. On the street he gets on a bus that takes him into the city and in front of Albert Hall. He goes in, using the musicians’ entrance, takes off his hat and his coat, opens up the case, takes out a small flute. Then, with the other musicians, he traipses onto the large podium and sits down in his place. Eventually, the conductor comes in, gives the signal and the symphony begins. Our little man is sitting there, turning the pages and awaiting his turn. At last the conductor waves the baton in his direction and the little man blows out a single note “Bloop!” When that’s over, he puts the flute back into the case, tiptoes out, puts on his hat and coat and goes out. By now the street is dark. He gets on a bus, arrives home. Supper is ready. He eats, goes up to his room, takes off his clothes, steps into the bathroom, gargles, puts on his pajamas, gets into bed and turns off the lights.
F.T. It’s so good that they’ve used variants of that idea in several animated cartoons.