Alfred Hitchcock (13 page)

Success had transformed Cutts into a drinker and extravagant womanizer. “Famed for such feats as having two sisters in his dressing room in the course of one lunch break,” according to John Russell Taylor, Cutts in Berlin plunged into an affair with an Estonian dancer, while trying to keep that romance secret from another woman with whom he was cohabiting in his rented flat. (Cutts always insisted that the other woman was his wife, but Hitchcock suspected otherwise.)

Cutts’s “erratic and unpredictable” comportment bothered Hitchcock only insofar as it affected his work; though he loved gossip about extramarital affairs, Hitchcock was rarely judgmental about them, in life or in his films. Unfortunately, Hitchcock (on the living-room sofa) and Alma (in a small bedroom) were cohabiting with “the Cuttses,” and the assistants
were expected to aid and abet the great man’s peccadilloes. Cutts would arrange a rendezvous with his Estonian girlfriend; Hitchcock and Alma were then expected to provide an alibi with “Mrs. Cutts.” After a protracted evening on the town, all four would pile into a car to head home, and Cutts would insist on “just stopping off” at the girlfriend’s place. While Cutts and his Estonian disappeared upstairs, Hitchcock and Alma waited—and waited—in the car. When Cutts finally reappeared, they’d hurry back “very late, to a heavy English meal prepared by Mrs. Cutts (steak-and-kidney pudding and such),” according to Taylor, “which of course they could not refuse without arousing suspicion, so that Hitch got to the point of regularly excusing himself from table to run out, throw up and return for the rest of the ordeal.”

Though these charades put a strain on Hitchcock’s relationship with Cutts, they also cemented his growing love affair with Alma. The unspoken bond between the first and second assistant, their glances mingling horror and amusement, were like those of Robert (Derrick de Marney) and Erica (Nova Pilbeam), trapped in the game of blindman’s buff in
Young and Innocent
—their mission a shared secret. If anything summed up the Hitchcocks’ kinship, it was this sense of unspoken communion, the mutual amusement and horror of a shared adventure.

Things went from bad to worse with Cutts, until one day the director fled Berlin with his Estonian mistress, bequeathing the few remaining scenes to his somewhat relieved assistant.
The Blackguard
wasn’t completed until early December, but it might be considered another quasi Hitchcock. Seen today, the film has the scope and flavor of an Ufa spectacular, including stirring crowd scenes, magnificent sets, and passionate acting, with a hypnotic performance by Bernhard Goetzke.

Returning to London shortly thereafter, Hitchcock learned that Graham Cutts had retreated to Calais on the coast of France, where he was stranded with the Estonian, who lacked the proper papers to be admitted to England. The script Hitchcock was working on—the next planned Gainsborough film,
The Prude’s Fall
, based on a play by Rudolf Besier and May Edginton—had to be messengered to Calais. The new film was slated to be shot in the winter of 1924–25, and Jane Novak was staying on salary.

To keep ahead of schedule, Cutts decided to photograph exteriors on the Continent, even as the script was still being written. This was common in the English film industry, and would become all too common in Hitchcock’s career as well. Cutts led a small unit (including Hitchcock, Alma Reville, and Jane Novak) first to Italy, where they filmed exteriors around Lake Como and Venice, then on to St. Moritz, Switzerland. But the
weather was miserable everywhere they went, the Estonian was prickly, and Cutts was distracted by his romantic problems; they ended up collecting little usable footage. The lark turned sour, and the unit returned to England in general ill temper. Sans Estonian, Cutts was forced to shoot
The Prude’s Fall
at Islington, and as expeditiously as possible.

After
The Blackguard, The Prude’s Fall
was a disappointment. The last Cutts-Hitchcock picture reflected its troubled history, with a disjointed story line and scenes that looked hastily assembled for interior stages.

And the conflicts behind the scenes tolled the demise of the team. Cutts was fourteen years older than Hitchcock, and increasingly saw him as a rival. Behind Hitchcock’s back, Cutts bad-mouthed the upstart. Years later, Alma said that Cutts “wasn’t really a pleasant man; he knew very little, so we literally carried him.” Hitchcock himself averred that in those days he was “running even the director,” adding, “I used to whisper in his ear. I was the soul of discretion in asserting myself.”

But Hitchcock always claimed to be oblivious of any tension between them. Years later, the once prominent silent-era director, down on his luck, applied for remedial work on
The 39 Steps;
by then the leading figure in English film, Hitchcock quietly arranged for Cutts to shoot close-ups of the film’s star, Robert Donat. Later still, he gave Cutts’s daughter an uncredited walk-on in
North by Northwest.

In 1924, though, Cutts was still the big name, and it was up to Michael Balcon to devise a Solomonic solution. Balcon did just that. The Ufa deal had fallen through, but the producer had just negotiated a fresh agreement between Gainsborough and Emelka, a Munich-based competitor of Ufa. Balcon sent Hitchcock back to Germany as a bona fide director, and chose him to guide the first Gainsborough-Emelka coproduction.

Although he was a man who had always acted consciously and decisively, who had already directed, at least partially, a handful of film, and who once admitted that by 1924 “I was already toying with the idea of directing,” Hitchcock usually gave credit for this turning point to Balcon. “Balcon is really the man responsible for Hitchcock,” the director told Peter Bogdanovich. “I had been quite content at the time, writing scripts and designing.” This statement seems all the more generous, considering the strong differences and misunderstandings that would arise over the years between the two.

Like Ufa, Münchener Lichtspielkunst was known by the phonetic reading of its initials, MLK, or “Em-el-ka.” Formed in 1918 as a distinctly Bavarian alternative to Berlin’s domination of the German film industry, Emelka was a leading proponent of mountain,
Heimat
(homeland),
Krimis
(crime), and other frankly commercial genres, as compared to Ufa’s avowed artistic
mission. Michael Balcon’s five-picture deal was intended to help Emelka surpass Ufa, in and outside Germany.

The first Gainsborough-Emelka coproduction was to be
The Pleasure Garden
, based on a 1923 novel by Oliver Sandys, the nom de plume of Marguerite Florence Barclay. The plot revolved around the friendship and intertwined fates of two nightclub dancers. One of the chorus girls is corrupted by success and marriage, while the other is betrayed by her husband, who leads a double life in a foreign land with a native mistress.

The film needed a recognizable star, “a name the public would know, which at that time meant it had to be a Hollywood name,” in Michael Balcon’s words. This time it was Virginia Valli, who had launched her career at the old Essanay Studio in Chicago in 1915, before achieving stardom with Fox and Universal. Valli would play the chorus girl with an unfaithful husband, while another American actress, Carmelita Geraghty—the daughter of former Islington story editor Tom Geraghty—would portray her ingenuous friend. Englishman Miles Mander was cast as Valli’s unscrupulous husband. The smaller parts would be filled on location, with the bouillabaisse of nationalities that would become another Hitchcock trademark.

The scenario was by Eliot Stannard, who would remain an important colleague behind the scenes for the rest of Hitchcock’s silent period. The cameraman, Baron Gaetano Ventimiglia, was a Sicilian descended from Italian nobility, but he had also worked in the United States for the Associated Press and the
Newark Times
before switching to film. He had shot pictures in Hollywood, Berlin, Nice, and, most recently, Islington.

From Hitchcock’s point of view, though, the key member of his small band traveling from London to Munich late in the spring of 1925 was Alma Reville. Her official functions were as editor and assistant director, but her actual role was far more important. Over the brief time they had worked together, Hitchcock and his assistant had enjoyed total rapport. They loved food and art and music and theater. They shared a similar sense of humor. Alma complemented Hitchcock’s ideas about storytelling and performance and decor. She was willing to listen at length to him, sometimes finishing his dangling sentences. Already Alma was his muse.

The arrangement with Emelka stipulated that interiors would be shot at the Geiselgasteig studio outside Munich on a clearing of fifty acres in a forested area dotted with thirty to forty permanent outdoor sets. Although the main story took place in England, the violent climax was set in an African outpost. The exteriors would be shot first in Italy while the nightclub and other sets were being constructed at Geiselgasteig.

Photography was set to start at the seaport of Genoa on the Italian Riviera. Alma journeyed ahead to Cherbourg to collect the two Americans, Valli and Geraghty, arriving on the
Aquitania.
She escorted them to Paris, where the stars insisted on stretching the budget and staying at the Claridge
on the Champs-élysées. It was Alma who then took the women to Paris shops, selecting their frocks and arranging their hairdos.

After the farmer decides to marry the housemaid in Hitchcock’s 1928 film
The Farmer’s Wife
, he insists she must immediately change her hair and put on new clothes. “To mark the change,” the farmer declares, “you must blossom out this very minute!” From the outset of his career, Hitchcock’s actresses, to mark their transformation into leading roles, also had to “blossom out.”

It’s a mystery where his firm ideas in the wardrobe and hair department came from. Perhaps he dealt with models in art classes, or at Henley’s; he may have learned something from his sister, Nellie, who was a model. But reshaping the look of his leading ladies, from head to heels, was also part of his process of arousal—“putting himself through it” before the audience. And, starting with
The Pleasure Garden
, Alma also helped to shape his aesthetic of feminine beauty.

The first Hitchcock film was a trial by fire. So much went wrong that the experience prepared him for all future disasters; he never tired of telling the anecdotes.

How simple life was in the silent era; how lightly a director and his company traveled! Hitchcock could recall the precise time he left Munich for Italy (“at twenty minutes to eight one Saturday evening”), accompanied only by Miles Mander (whom Hitchcock later admitted he disliked from the start), Baron Ventimiglia, and a “newsreel man” invited along to shoot the shipboard scenes in newsreel style. (This too became a typical Hitchcock gambit—engaging quick, adaptable, and inexpensive newsreel men to work independent of the primary unit, shooting filler scenes to his detailed instructions.)

Besides the main cameras, the small company carried little in the way of equipment. “No lighting, no reflectors, nothing else at all, except the film—ten thousand feet of it.” Alma was still in Paris as they proceeded by train to Italy. According to Hitchcock, Ventimiglia told him not to declare their film stock to customs when they reached the Brenner Pass, to save on surcharges. The officials discovered the film, however, and “confiscated the lot.” They had to pay a fine, and arrived in Genoa on a Monday morning “without any film and on Tuesday noon I had to shoot the departure on an ocean liner from the port,” Hitchcock recalled. They had to send to Milan for a fresh supply.

The filming began in the last week of May 1925, though inauspiciously. The young German actress playing Mander’s mistress had to be replaced when she informed Hitchcock she couldn’t wade into the water for her big scene.
“Heute darf ich nicht ins Wasser gehen,”
she said, and the translation
(“Today, I should not go into the water”) supposedly baffled Hitchcock. Why, he later protested to interviewers, he had never even heard of menstruation! Scrambling for a replacement, the director finally enlisted the waitress of a local hotel. But the waitress was too plump; a series of retakes was necessary for the scene where Mander had to carry her into the water.

The budget had already been taxed by the Paris luxuries and the added film-stock expenses, and the crises mounted. Hitchcock had to wire to London for some of his own money; at one point, his wallet was even stolen. Hitchcock was kept busy with his least favorite pastime: bookkeeping. “Most of my evenings were spent translating marks into lira via pounds,” he recalled. He borrowed small sums from the deep-pocketed stars. (“They weren’t very nice about that,” Hitchcock said.) Returning by rail via Belgrade, Vienna, and Zurich, they had to stint on meals. After paying a surtax on the Hollywood actresses’ excess luggage, and another penalty for a window accidentally broken in the Zurich train station, Hitchcock returned to Munich—with only one pfenning in his pocket, he claimed, “the smallest German coin minted, worth considerably less than a farthing.”

He wouldn’t have gotten through it without his muse. Alma Reville caught up with them at the Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como, where they were shooting the picturesque honeymoon scenes. Feeling very much a beginner, Hitchcock found himself in a “cold sweat” staring at the famous Virginia Valli. “I was terrified at giving her instructions,” he said. “I’ve no idea how many times I asked my future wife if I was doing the right thing.”

Alma was a Rock of Gibraltar, staying close by Hitchcock’s side for every shot on location, and then later in the studio. After photographing each take, Hitchcock would turn to her and ask, “Was it all right?” A satisfied nod, and he could move on to the next.

Back in Munich by the last week of July, they shot the nightclub dance numbers in a
Glashaus
(glass-roofed studio), under conditions made unbearable by the scorching summer heat. The dance sequences required intricate staging and endless retakes. Although by now Hitchcock had picked up a smattering of German—enough to fling colorful phrases around for years to come, lampooning the geniuses he had first observed at Ufa—the German trade publications noted that the Englishman needed a translator to give precise technical instructions.