Alfred Hitchcock (14 page)

Nonetheless, Hitchcock, whose sensitivity to budget and schedule was inculcated from childhood and reinforced by the rude exigencies of British film, finished photography by the end of August. Michael Balcon went to Munich for the first screening, proudly declaring that the young director’s debut possessed an “American look,” which was what Gainsborough and Emelka needed if the film was going to have any serious international
prospects. To anyone who sees
The Pleasure Garden
today, its “German look” (full of “witty angles and camera movements,” in the words of Philip Kemp) seems equally acute.

In the meantime, Michael Balcon was busy raising money to take Islington over from British Famous Players-Lasky.

Charles Lapworth, a well-traveled Englishman who had worked as a journalist and as an agent in Hollywood, and then as a publicist for the Goldwyn organization in London, joined Gainsborough as its editorial director. Lapworth had written a story called “Fear o’ God,” which was announced as the second Gainsborough-Emelka production, and the second to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. There was only a two-month interlude before the start of filming, but Hitchcock and Alma returned to London to consult with Eliot Stannard, who was crafting the scenario from Lapworth’s story.

“Fear o’ God” concerned a mountain-town schoolteacher who is first courted and then persecuted by a possessive justice of the peace, who drives her into the arms of a mysterious hermit. The hermit, dubbed Fear o’ God, was to be played by Britain’s Malcolm Keen; Bernhard Goetzke, whom Hitchcock had befriended on the set of
The Blackguard
, agreed to portray the judge. The schoolteacher would be played by Nita Naldi, the sexy vamp in Cecil B. De Mille’s
The Ten Commandments
and the temptress opposite Rudolph Valentino in
Blood and Sand.
The casting, thus, covered the three target markets: England, Germany, and the United States.

The director returned to Munich early in November, to shoot initial exteriors while the script was still being completed. In need of “a nice thatched village with snowy mountains in the background and nice tree stuff in the foreground and no modern stuff,” as Hitchcock recalled, the director spotted a postcard depicting picturesque Obergurgl in the Tyrolean Alps near the Italian border. The trip involved a long train ride to Innsbruck and then another long ride by automobile to Obergurgl. Upon arrival Hitchcock declared the setting perfect, and went to bed feeling fine. But it snowed heavily that night, and when Hitchcock and his crew woke up Obergurgl was blanketed in white. They switched to nearby Umhaus; then it snowed in Umhaus. It took all the director’s powers of persuasion—and extra money from the beleaguered budget—to convince local firemen to get out their hoses and wash away the snow.

After a week or two of outdoor photography, Hitchcock hastened back to Munich to greet his leading lady, just then arriving from Hollywood. But when Nita Naldi stepped off the train, he recalled, “Munich quite audibly gasped.” The heroine of the picture was supposed to be a “demure” schoolmarm; yet the glamorous Naldi was “dark, Latin, Junoesque, statuesque,
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slinky, with slanting eyes, four-inch heels, nails like a mandarin’s, and a black dog to match her black swathed dress,” according to Hitchcock. She was accompanied by an elderly gentleman who looked old enough to be her father; indeed, that is how she introduced him—as “Papa” (though Hitchcock had his doubts).

How to transform this glamorous vision into a rustic mountain woman? Of course the high heels, long nails, sultry makeup, and hairdo had to go. “Nita put up a magnificent fight for the appearance that had made her,” Hitchcock recalled. She fought her new hairdo, her designated makeup and wardrobe, but lost every battle to the director. Alma took the star “round and made her buy cotton aprons instead of silk and compelled her to choose cloth instead of satin frocks,” in Hitchcock’s words.

This time the interiors were photographed at Orbis-Studio, also in Munich. A replica mountain town was designed and built by Willy Reiber, who had created the London settings for
The Pleasure Garden.
But there were rewrites, and other vexing delays; Hitchcock was learning to be philosophical about such problems.
The Mountain Eagle
, or
Der Bergadler
—as “Fear o’ God” was retitled—was scheduled to finish filming by Christmas 1925, but it would be January before it wrapped.

For all the crises and emergencies of the Emelka productions, Hitchcock was having the time of his life. Filmmaking was never as fun: the crises seemed to invigorate him. In spite of his doubts, Naldi turned out to be “a grand person,” a born trouper who ultimately did whatever Hitchcock asked, no matter how many takes were required. Keen and Goetzke were equally professional, equally grand.

The Mountain Eagle
may have turned out an inferior picture (“a very bad movie,” Hitchcock flatly told Truffaut), but the director’s memories of that time were only fond ones. For years thereafter the Hitchcocks returned together to Lake Como, St. Moritz, and Munich; these were the places where he and Alma first made films, and where they fell in love.
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Returning to England after the filming, Hitchcock had reason to feel flushed with pride. “The career of this young man reads like a romance,” his old Henley’s boss, W. A. Moore, boasted. Only twenty-six, just four years out of the advertising department of Henley’s, Hitchcock was now a film director with two pictures under his belt. He had done almost everything there was to do behind the camera, except step in front of it himself. (And of course, even that would come shortly.)

Indeed,
The Mountain Eagle
marked a personal as well as professional milestone: Hitchcock had prevailed upon Malcolm Keen to bring over a ring the young director had secretly picked out in London, and by the time he and Alma left Munich Hitchcock had a private script planned out.

The return trip to England proved an unusually violent ride. A fierce storm shook the boat; the wind blew and roared, the swells ran high. Desperately seasick, Alma took to bed. “As I tossed fitfully on my bed of pain, there was a knock on my door of my cabin and Hitch came in,” Alma remembered. “It was the first time I had ever seen him in a state of disorder, and the last time too. His hair had been blown about by the wind and his clothes had been soaked with ocean spray.”

Born salesman and storyteller, Hitchcock was also a born actor. He had rehearsed the moment, with a few lines in his head. “Will you marry me?”

“I was too ill to lift up my head,” recalled Alma, “but not so ill that I couldn’t make an affirmative gesture.”

“I thought I’d catch you when you were too weak to say no,” Hitchcock told her.

Several versions of this anecdote have come down through the years, though their details vary. “It was one of my greatest scenes, a little weak on dialogue, perhaps, but beautifully staged and not overplayed,” Hitchcock boasted on one occasion. “Alma’s acceptance stood for complete triumph. I had wanted to become, first, a movie director and, second, Alma’s husband—not in order of emotional preference, to be sure, but because I felt the bargaining power implicit in the first was necessary in obtaining the second.”

Then again, maybe Alma was the instigator. “I married her, because she asked me to,” Hitchcock told Oriana Fallaci on another occasion. “We’d been traveling around and working together for years, and I’d never so much as touched her little finger.” That is certainly the way it plays in
Champagne
, a 1928 Hitchcock silent picture featuring a shipboard betrothal, with Betty Balfour proposing to woozy Jean Bradin.

Foreign Correspondent
and
Lifeboat
also feature marriage proposals at sea, and there are shipboard romances in
Rich and Strange
and
Torn Curtain.
Hitchcock was among the most personal of directors, and autobiography with subtle variations was a staple of the archetypal Hitchcock story line. Even Alma’s shipboard nausea would find its way on-screen: “I always get seasick,” Ingrid Bergman complains in
Notorious
—and what is
Lifeboat
if not the ultimate seasickness film?

Back in England, Gainsborough completed the acquisition of Islington and announced an ambitious slate of nine pictures for 1926, with rental magnate
C. M. Woolf returning to the directorate and promising a fresh infusion of capital. Significant U.S. interest was reported in the reinvigorated company, and Michael Balcon and Charles Lapworth traveled to New York to firm up distribution. Nevertheless, Gainsborough’s publicity emphasized that the studio program would be “British in every way save for the inclusion in each of one American actor or actress.”

Parliament was already debating a “quota act” to limit the nefarious influence of Hollywood, and to stimulate native English filmmaking. Some form of the controversial 1927 Cinematograph Films Act would be in place up through the 1930s. The days of American stars and international coproduction were numbered—one reason the next decade would become known as Hitchcock’s “most English.”

For the moment, though, Alfred Hitchcock was England’s most German director. Before the Emelka films were released, he was still relatively unknown outside the small realm of Islington. Indeed, Alma Reville was the bigger celebrity. She had been lionized in the trades as early as October 1925, in an article (with photograph) describing her as “clever and experienced,” attesting that “she had much to do with the finish of all Graham Cutts’s big pictures.” In December 1925, Alma was featured in a full-page profile in the
Picturegoer.

Hitchcock was still experimenting with his image. His caricature was drawn and identified as “A. J. Hitchcock” in
The Motion Picture Studio
in 1923, and he was promoted as “Alfred J. Hitchcock” in earliest publicity. He wore a duster’s mustache for publicity stills, and still favored a bow tie. He toyed with a personal logo sketch linking his three initials. The exact billing and Hitchcock persona were still in formation, still fluid.

But Balcon had faith in Hitchcock, and he reserved one of Gainsborough’s most prestigious projects of 1926 for the young Englishman fresh from his German triumph. In early December 1925 the trade papers carried this notice: “Almost immediately on his return Hitchcock will take up the megaphone on a third production for Gainsborough,
The Lodger
by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes.”

In Germany, Hitchcock had immersed himself in expressionism. Now, returning to London, partly through the newly organized Film Society of London, he grew equally attentive to Soviet film, and the theories of Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and V. I. Pudovkin.

“Film-art,” wrote Pudovkin, “begins from the moment when the director begins to combine and join the various pieces of film.”

Or “pure cinema,” as Hitchcock liked to say, “is complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody.”

He familiarized himself with Kuleshov’s experiments with editing, as described by Pudovkin. Hitchcock could precisely describe Kuleshov’s famous experiment with a stage matinee idol, whose blank face Kuleshov intercut with a bowl of hot soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear, obtaining different audience reactions with each new combination. Hitchcock knew the experiment so well he could pronounce the actor’s name, and spell it for interviewers: Ivan Mozhukin.
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He even demonstrated Kuleshov’s idea during a 1965 television program, filming
himself with a suggestive smile, then intercutting the image first with tenderhearted footage of a mother and a baby, then with a beautiful young woman in a sexy bikini, winkingly making his point that the order and arrangement of the images—the editing—drastically altered the message.

Hitchcock was still in Munich in October 1925, when the Film Society launched its first official subscription event. The program featured comedy shorts by the nonconformist Adrian Brunel, a Western by “Bronco Billy” Anderson, and two celebrated German pictures—an experimental work by Walter Ruttmann, and the three-part
Waxworks
by Paul Leni.

German and Russian films were standard Film Society fare. Besides foreign films, the Sunday afternoon showings at the New Gallery and (later) the Tivoli also featured overlooked American pictures, controversial British works frowned on by government censors, and avant-garde films scorned by the official industry, which regarded the Film Society as anti-commercial, artistically highbrow, and faintly communistic.

Although Hitchcock missed the premiere, he took enthusiastic part in the Film Society, and knew all the movers and shakers. These included Iris Barry, the film critic of the
Spectator;
Walter Mycroft, an editor and critic of the
Evening Standard;
the up-and-coming filmmakers Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu; actor Hugh Miller (from
The Prude’s Fall
); the sculptor Frank Dobson; and Sidney Bernstein, then managing his family’s chain of cinemas. Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw also lent the luster of their names.