Alfred Hitchcock (17 page)

There is some debate about Hitchcock’s initial cameo in
The Lodger
—indeed, over whether there might be two cameos. The first, early in the story, finds Hitchcock in a newsroom among the reporters; some people think the director can also be glimpsed at the end of the film, as a lout among the bystanders watching the lodger’s near-lynching. “Once he said yes, it was he,” recalled writer David Freeman, who worked on Hitchcock’s last, unrealized project, “The Short Night.” “The other time he said no, it wasn’t.”

Hitchcock told some interviewers that this first cameo was merely a matter of saving on schedule and expense by standing in for an actor. According to Ivor Montagu, Hitchcock offered a different, contemporaneous explanation at one of Adrian Brunel’s Hate Parties. The director insisted that his “momentary flash appearances” were inspired by his admiration for D. W Griffith, who took small parts in his earliest films, and by Chaplin’s cameo in
A Woman of Paris.
Griffith and Chaplin always remained, for him, touchstones of quality.

One night not long after the opening of
The Lodger
, as Film Society
habitués mingled at Brunel’s flat, someone asked, “For whom, primarily, do we make films? Whom is it most important to please?”

“The public” was considered too obvious an answer for Hitchcock, Montagu recalled. Equally unsatisfying was “the Boss”—the studio chief. “Hitch,” said Montagu, “would have none of either answer.”

Citing C. M. Woolf’s qualms about
The Lodger
, which had delayed its release, people suggested that the proper party to please might be “the distributors”—acknowledging, in Montagu’s words, “the validity of what they thought was Hitch’s point that, unless the distributor liked and would push the picture, the public might never have a chance to give it a fair box office reaction, even if you had your own boss’s support.”

To all of these Hitchcock shook his head. “Hitch’s deeper answer,” Montagu recalled, was that “you make pictures for the press. This, he explained quite frankly, was the reason for ‘the Hitchcock touches’—novel shots that the critics would pick out and comment upon—as well as those flash appearances that gradually became a trademark in his films. He went on to explain that, if you made yourself publicly known as a director—and this you could only do by getting mention in the press in connection with your directing—this would be the only way you became free to do what you wanted.

“If your name were known to the public, you would not be the prisoner of where you happened to be working—you could move on. Any newly founded company (there were many in the U.K. in those days) would be glad to have the cachet of your name as an asset in its prospectus. Any established company would like to sign you in order to score over its rivals.”

This declaration astonished some present. But close Film Society friends recognized its unique truth for Hitchcock, who was farsighted in his dealings with the press.

“We all knew this was right,” Montague wrote. “We all knew him well enough to know that while the fame and money of success might be to him a pleasant side-effect, it was not, could not be, his primary motive. He lived to make pictures. To make them better was his use for freedom. But we also knew he would never have admitted this, and so he spoke after his manner, dryly, sarcastically, cynically, teasingly, and we did not mind. He was the only one of us who might succeed in reaching his objective.”

The joy was in the process—compromises notwithstanding. A film could be illogical, and still please—himself first and foremost, but also critics and audiences. The wrong-man theme was potentially a powerful one, even if its first clear outing in
The Lodger
was a practical solution to a script and casting dilemma. Art always involved practical challenges. The stars were always going to fall short of one’s imagination.

Hitchcock was far from a perfectionist. When André Bazin interviewed him in 1954 on the set of
To Catch a Thief
, Bazin asked the director what ideal he pursued in filmmaking. Hitchcock answered: “The quality of imperfection.” Bazin was baffled by “this rather oracular line,” he later wrote. “My interpreter, Hitchcock and I spent a good quarter of an hour on this one point … but it never became perfectly clear.” Bazin thought perhaps Hitchcock was jesting—but he was never more serious.

From his first films, he would learn to field front-office dicta, cope with forced casting and censorship, tinker with endings, and create different versions of Hitchcock films for different audiences.

As blithely as he accepted the imperfections of
The Lodger
, however, he resented its idiocies, and some critics have suggested that he spent much of the rest of his career trying in one way or another to remake it without compromise. As much as he recognized the value of compromise, he loathed second-guessing—the destabilizing effects of C. M. Woolf, who had nearly consigned his first major film to the dustbin, and of Michael Balcon, who had vacillated at a critical moment.

Time and again in his career, Hitchcock would break away from the easy path and take brave steps toward risk and independence. Time and again he met resistance and opposition with decisive action. The success of
The Lodger
came after he had directed only three pictures, but his confidence was already strong; he recognized that his name would mean something on any studio’s prospectus.

And so he set about trying to divorce himself from Gainsborough.

Even as
The Lodger
was being reshot and reedited in the summer, a startling item appeared in the trade papers, announcing that “the brilliant young English director” had been signed away by a new production entity, British National Pictures, Ltd. Hitchcock still owed Gainsborough six months on his contract, but after that, it was reported, he would move over to a new studio being constructed on fifty acres on the outskirts of Elstree. Not much was known about the new studio, except that it had signed a U.S. distribution deal with Paramount.

As a man who prided himself on inside knowledge of his profession, Hitchcock realized that Gainsborough was in mounting disarray, losing money “through a series of unfortunate associations which made it a constantly moot point who was really in charge of things,” in Cedric Belfrage’s words. Charles Lapworth had left the directorate. Joining the board now was actor Carlyle Blackwell, who arrived with a financial portfolio (he was married to a diamond millionairess). But the studio’s long-term financial fortunes could be secured only by successful films, and Woolf and Balcon were still vying for control of production.

Hitchcock waged an impressive power struggle with Gainsborough. The studio announced that his next directing project would be
The Silent
Warrior
, starring Blackwell. But Hitchcock refused, and the picture was reassigned to Graham Cutts. Hitchcock planted squibs in the press, reminding the industry that his future lay with British National. Then a series of other odd items appeared, repudiating “rumors … circulating in the trade” about Hitchcock projects. In a deliberate slap at budget-strapped Gainsborough, Hitchcock announced he was shaping four ambitious future films, two of which would “require locations on a big scale outside England.”

Three months went by, after the triumphant press showing of
The Lodger
, with no activity from England’s hottest director. Hitchcock was determined to let his contract run out.

He also had personal cause to be preoccupied. Alma Reville was taking Catholic instruction, and the Hitchcocks’ wedding was scheduled for early December. He and Alma had been working and traveling together for almost four years now, and they had become inseparable. By day they went together to the studio; by night they went out to restaurants, premieres, nightclubs, gallery openings. In large and small ways they complemented each other: She drove; he read the maps. She watched the budget; he was a spendthrift. They never disagreed about anything important.

Now marriage would formalize the Hitchcock love story. At Brompton Oratory on Knightsbridge, the most fashionable church in London, they exchanged vows on December 2, 1926. Hitchcock’s brother, William, stood up for him; Alma’s younger sister, Eva, was maid of honor.

It has been speculated that Alma was obliged to convert to Catholicism at “the insistence of Hitchcock’s mother” before any ceremony could take place, but this was not the case. As the church records where the ceremony was performed state uncategorically, “Dispensatione obtenta super impedimentum mixtae religionis.”
^*
The bride was not a baptized Catholic at the time of the nuptials; and although she was eventually baptized, her Catholicism failed to “stick” as the years went on, according to one of Hitchcock’s private letters.

The newlyweds left England for their honeymoon, launching the “annual pilgrimage” they would follow at Christmas for most of their lives. First they stopped in Paris, spending a day with Nita Naldi, who was living there with her older gentleman friend; then they continued on to Lake Como and St. Moritz.

When they returned to London, the newlyweds took up residence on
the top two floors of a tall brick Georgian at 153 Cromwell Road, along a continuous line of fashionable houses west of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Their flat backed on to the Underground—“like a cliff,” in the words of Michael Powell, “so that the thunder of the passing trains was distant like the waves on the pebbles of Sandgate beach.”

The calendar now said 1927, and the nascent British National was looking less and less like a viable reality.

J. D. Williams, the new studio’s dynamic managing director, had made his first fortune selling his First National circuit of several hundred theaters to Warner Bros. Williams signed D. W Griffith star Dorothy Gish for the first three British National pictures, to be directed by Herbert Wilcox. But Williams soon alienated his business partners with his autocratic decision making and imperial lifestyle. He was fired in December, shortly after returning from a dealmaking trip to America, and the much-publicized Gish films were canceled. Wilcox, a founding partner, left to form his own studio. Rumors spread that British National was down for the count. And so, desperate to stall, British National lent Hitchcock
back
to Gainsborough.

When Gainsborough announced a new production called
Downhill
in early December there was no director attached, but by the end of the year Hitchcock had surfaced as a likely candidate. When the boy wonder returned from his honeymoon in January, it wasn’t hard to convince him that, rather than stagnating, it made sense to follow
The Lodger
with another picture capitalizing on the rage for Ivor Novello—who, along with Constance Collier (under their pen name, David L’Estrange)—had written the hit play from which
Downhill
would be adapted.
^*

Novello was poised to re-create his West End role as a public school rugby hero who shoulders the blame for his friend, the son of a clergyman, when a girl becomes pregnant. In France (inevitably), the hero suffers disgrace, becomes a race driver, and worse.

Hitchcock had little choice but to reconcile himself to filming “a rather poor play,” as he told Truffaut. But he could take satisfaction from the fact that his new overlords were able to farm him back to Gainsborough for a sum “exactly six times what he previously received,” according to Cedric Belfrage. Although the difference between his former salary and the loan-out salary went to British National, not to him—an industrywide injustice
the director suffered long before encountering David O. Selznick and Hollywood—Hitchcock did receive a fat starting bonus.

Shooting began as quickly as possible, on January 17. Once again Alma, now Mrs. Hitchcock, was his assistant director, with Claude McDonnell behind the camera. Besides Novello, the all-English ensemble included Isabel Jeans, once a leading lady of Harley Granville Barker’s theater company, and Ian Hunter, in his first of three Hitchcock roles.

Working closely with Angus MacPhail, now head of the story department at Gainsborough, Eliot Stannard had crafted a straight-line adaptation. Some last-minute remedial work and “visualizing” was the extent of Hitchcock’s contribution to the screenplay. (As if secretly relishing the script, however, he was fond of quoting Novello’s fatuous lament upon expulsion from school: “Does this mean I won’t be able to play in the Old Boy’s match, sir?”)

Though the actor was in his thirties, the early scenes required Novello to play a lad in his teens—a trick that worked better on the stage. Hitchcock didn’t think much of the whole business. “Terrible!” he always muttered about
Downhill
, pointing out the ham-handed imagery of a scene in which Novello is tossed out of his home by his father and then heads “Down” an escalator into the Underground. As he often did when saddled with tedious drama, the director tried to lighten things up with Hitch-cockian comedy; one scene he staged—a mock donnybrook—he would recall later as “ahead of its time.” The studio thought so too, insisting that he cut it out, along with other comedy flourishes.

Hitchcock would often find more affection for his
memories
of making a given film than for the finished product. The “Down” sequence had to be photographed after midnight, Hitchcock recalled, after the last train had gone home. “We went to the theater first,” the director said, “and in those days we used to go to a first night in white tie and tails and opera hats. So, after the theater, I directed this scene in white tie and top hat. The most elegant moment of direction I’ve ever had.”

He always performed to the best of his abilities, however. Hitchcock was farsighted enough to perceive that impersonal studio projects would be counted as credit toward more ambitious and worthwhile films. And
Downhill
was far from worthless: scene after scene was enhanced by his imaginative staging, expressive lighting and composition, and unusual camera work.

One particularly inventive sequence began with a close-up of a man in evening dress—a swell, one judges, until the camera sweeps back to reveal that the man is a waiter. When a nearby couple begins to dance energetically, the waiter seems to join in, before the camera swoops farther back and around to reveal that the action is all part of a revue staged for a nightclub audience. This very Hitchcockian sleight of hand—“a sort of
Chinese box of illusion within an illusion,” in John Russell Taylor’s words—had nothing to do with the main plot. It was merely an opportunity to try something interesting.