Alfred Hitchcock (28 page)

The three Hitchcocks stretched out the hilarity for several months, before their new script had to be handed in for filming in the winter of 1931–32. Besides Lion—the only actor carried over from the original cast—the ensemble included Anne Grey (The Girl), and Hitchcock veterans John Stuart (The Detective) and Donald Calthrop (playing yet another shady character).

Hitchcock gave Lion his mugging close-ups, but no real chance to shine; likewise he immersed the play in a froth of exaggerated special effects and hyperkinetic camera work. The play’s well-known opening—the introduction to the characters and the mysterious house—Hitchcock turned into a Grand Guignol satire, with silly, creepy music, lurid shadows, and the camera lunging around and racing up stairwells to freeze on terrified expressions.

The ending of the film was the biggest change from the stage. The three Hitchcocks devised a wild sequence with a runaway train chased by detectives in a hijacked bus, ending with the train smashing into a waiting cross-Channel ferry. Hitchcock was an acknowledged master of miniatures, and he sold the idea to Mycroft on the theory that he could stage it all cheaply with models and figurines. But some people think he deliberately staged the wild crescendo so it simply looked cheap.

The director was fed up with the studio, and determined to burn his bridges. Bryan Langley, Jack Cox’s co-cameraman, recalled that the budget was badly strained, and the director walked around griping that he was making good films “in spite of the management.” With
Number Seventeen
, he simply tore up the play and tossed it into the air like confetti. Hitchcock was right in admitting, years later, that the result was “little better than a quota quickie.” Although a minority of modern-day critics find it an exhilarating parody (“a sophisticated deconstruction of the mechanics of the thriller,” wrote Charles Barr), most rank Hitchcock’s last film for B.I.P. as among the least—a sour shrug of the shoulders from the director, and one huge practical joke on management.

Rich and Strange
was still new to theaters and
Number Seventeen
was as yet unreleased in March 1932, when, to the surprise of many, B.I.P. announced that Hitchcock would supervise a “number of pictures” for the studio in 1933. “It is intended,” according to B.I.P. publicity, “that these pictures will be made by new young directors, who will thus be enabled to develop their talent under the guidance and control of our most skilled craftsmen.”

Superficially a promotion, the supervisory post was in reality a last-ditch effort by management to bring Hitchcock to heel, and extract a few extra films carrying his magical name. For Hitchcock, it offered one final opportunity to prove himself a company man.

Hitchcock tapped Benn Levy, the writer of the sound version of
Blackmail
, to direct the first project, based on an H. A. Vachell play, a crime drama called
Lord Camber’s Ladies.
The film would have the distinction of starring the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier (“in my opinion, the best actor anywhere,” Hitchcock told Truffaut), along with Gertrude Lawrence as his mysteriously poisoned wife. Hitchcock was expected to guide and assist Levy’s directing debut.

Hitchcock and du Maurier were longtime friends and rival practical jokers; the director had once, famously, stuffed a dray horse into du Maurier’s dressing room at the St. James Theatre. But
Lord Camber’s Ladies
was a mutual low point in their careers, and they outdid themselves with fool pranks. “It was a wonder that the picture was ever completed at all,” wrote the novelist Daphne du Maurier, the actor’s daughter, “for hardly a
moment would pass without some faked telegram arriving, some bogus message being delivered, some supposed telephone bell ringing, until the practical jokers were haggard and worn with their tremendous efforts.”

Levy felt upstaged by the practical jokers, and reacted obstinately to Hitchcock’s suggestions. The two men bickered throughout the filming in the summer of 1932, and afterward didn’t speak to each other again for years. “So my handsome gesture in offering him the direction,” Hitchcock told Truffaut, “blew up in my face.”

Hitchcock briefly nurtured two other projects for the studio. One was an ambitious, yearlong street-life film offered to John Van Druten, but when Van Druten mysteriously pulled out of the directing, and
Lord Camber’s Ladies
fizzled, Hitchcock was finished at British International Pictures. Walter Mycrof terminated his contract, and suddenly England’s most acclaimed, most famous film director found himself unemployed.

In the summer of 1932, earlier than has been reported, Hitchcock was already dreaming of America.

Actress Alice Joyce, who had appeared in
The Passionate Adventure
, had a brother named Frank Joyce, a Kansas City ex-vaudevillian who had made a killing in hostelries in New York and Florida before moving to Hollywood to manage his sister’s financial affairs. The other Hollywood actress in that 1924 film, Marjorie Daw, got divorced and married Myron Selznick shortly after filming. Frank Joyce and Myron Selznick then formed the Joyce-Selznick Agency, one of the first talent agencies to focus on motion picture clientele.

After luring Ruth Chatterton, William Powell, and Kay Francis away from Paramount in the early 1930s, and then auctioning them to Warner Bros., the Joyce-Selznick Agency rocketed to prominence; before long they represented Hollywood’s most glamorous and well-paid personalities. Myron Selznick flitted in and out of London, where the agency kept a branch office, run by Harry Ham, a native Canadian who had once been an actor in Islington films. Aided by Ham, Selznick courted Hitchcock, and the English director, despondent after the low point of producing
Lord Camber’s Ladies
, started to listen.

Hitchcock didn’t actually have an agent, a publicist, or any staff between productions, other than his wife and a continuing assistant who also served as his secretary. He had a business manager, J. G. Saunders, who advised him on his contracts, investments, and business dealings. British deals were relatively straightforward compared to Hollywood contracts, and Hitchcock wasn’t immediately convinced that he needed representation by Joyce-Selznick. But he allowed the agency to float his name with U.S. producers.

The independent producer Sam Goldwyn, and Carl Laemmle Jr., the
head of Universal, were the first to declare interest. Some studios, Hitchcock liked to say, were Cartiers, while others were more like Woolworths. He was “much more keen to go with” Goldwyn—a first-class producer who already had a reputation for combining entertainment with artistic values—than a Woolworth-type studio that “went in for what I call creaking door pictures and monster movies.” But Laemmle was the more aggressive party, and Joyce-Selznick encouraged his offer. Laemmle was proud of importing foreign directors to America, and he had a special interest in Germany, where the Laemmle family had its roots. Hitchcock’s experience in Anglo-German production counted with Laemmle.

When Myron Selznick cabled that Laemmle wished to discuss specific terms, Hitchcock replied that the lowest salary he could feel comfortable with was $1,750 a week for a guaranteed eight weeks on one picture, plus round-trip transportation. What he really wanted was $2,500 a week for twenty weeks and two pictures. A two-picture commitment, Hitchcock felt, would allow him to establish a solid footing in America. The first could be a studio project, while the second might be parlayed into a Hitchcock original.

But this was still wishful thinking in 1932. Hitchcock’s timing was unfortunate. Hollywood, which had passed through the early years of the Depression virtually unscathed, was now headed into a terrible slump. The salary Hitchcock was asking would have put him among the industry’s top-paid directors, and the Englishman’s films did not yet have the box-office track record in America to justify the financial risk to Universal.

The head of Universal thought it over and wrote the Joyce-Selznick Agency that his plans had changed since first discussing Hitchcock, but he would “certainly keep him in mind for the future.” Prophetic words: the first Hollywood studio to woo Hitchcock would be where he ended up, thirty years later, during the last phase of his career.

From bad to worse: Hitchcock tried teaming up with the enterprising Hungarian-born Alexander Korda—not yet “Sir” Alexander—who could be found in 1931 at Gaumont. Hitchcock signed a contract with the independent producer, who was trying to whip together an English version of a German picture with the working title “Wings over the Jungle.” They spent nearly a year making plans—even posing for publicity photographs—without succeeding. “It was not my fault,” Hitchcock recalled. “Nor could Korda exactly be blamed. It was just one of those things.” The project later evolved into
Sanders of the River
(1935), which Hitchcock had nothing to do with, except “some of the preparatory work.”

Hitchcock was then approached by Tom Arnold, a well-known stage impresario who was making his first foray into motion pictures. Arnold hired
Hitchcock to direct
Waltzes from Vienna
, based on a sugary play about the romantic lives of composers Johann Strauss and his son Johann Jr.

It was a delightful play—and Hitchcock had been idle for too long. Others might have seen it as a desperate move, but not him. “Nothing to do with conceit,” he told François Truffaut. “It was merely an inner conviction that I was a filmmaker. 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 was.”

Waltzes from Vienna
was going to be shot at Islington, where Arnold was renting studio space from Gainsborough. For any number of reasons, it was an awkward homecoming.

For one, Hitchcock did not get along with the film’s predetermined star, Jessie Matthews, England’s musical comedy queen, cast as the pastry cook with whom Johann Jr. falls madly in love. He should have gotten along splendidly with her: Matthews routinely played the lead in musicals of the type he relished, and she knew all the Cockney jokes and slang he loved—indeed, she had spoken with a Cockney accent until elocution converted her.

But Matthews had buried her Cockney past beneath a glossy facade, and didn’t share Hitchcock’s sense of humor—about herself, or the film. The director never got past the gaffe of trying, at the very first reading, to convince the self-important star to affect a more ironic interpretation. Hitchcock “was then just an imperious young man who knew nothing about musicals,” according to Matthews. “I felt unnerved when he tried to get me to adopt a mincing operetta style. He was out of his depth and he showed that he knew it by ordering me around.”

The “imperious young man”—who together with Alma adapted Guy Bolton’s play—thought the material cried out for a sophisticated approach. “Instead of the romantic, rather serious story of the play,” recalled Esmond Knight, the only member of the stage cast to turn up in the film (as Strauss Jr.), Hitchcock tried to convert “the whole thing into a light comedy, and his ideas for many of the sequences were extremely funny—on paper.”

It didn’t help that the leading lady fought him tooth and nail. The Hitchcock means of “taking the mickey out of an actor during rehearsal,” in Knight’s words, didn’t work on Matthews. “He used to call me ‘the Quota Queen’ and send me up mercilessly,” the actress recalled. Matthews said she could never give her best during a take because she was “always anticipating some ghastly practical joke” the director was about to play on her.

Some actors “laughed and entered into the fun,” Knight admitted, but not him—like Matthews, Knight felt “continually on the
qui vive
for some elaborate leg pull at my expense, which automatically produced a feeling
of nervousness.” One of the laughers was Fay Compton, whom Hitchcock had adored onstage in
Mary Rose
and engaged to portray the Countess. He also relied upon on the good-natured personality of Edmund Gwenn, playing Strauss Sr.

Those who didn’t cooperate ran the familiar risk of being minimized by Hitchcock’s camera work. Jessie Matthews, pointedly, ended up seeming “a not too important part of the film’s design,” as the critic for the
Times
later pointed out. Film scholar Charles Barr has described one such scene in the Countess’s house, which Hitchcock cleverly staged in order to push “the possibilities of the long take”—while also abbreviating the screen time of its leading lady.

“His Excellency (her husband) gets out of bed, and the camera tracks back with him along the corridor as he reads some provocative love lyrics written by her, and goes to her room to confront her. From off screen left, behind a closed door, she replies that ‘I wrote these verses to the river Danube,’ thus mollifying him, though she will in fact be giving the verses to Schani [Strauss Jr.]. His valet enters from off screen right to call him for his bath, her maid enters from the left, and, after some by-play, the camera pans right with His Excellency as he goes across the corridor into his bathroom.

“After a moment, the valet emerges, and we pan back left with him as he joins the maid. This develops into a protracted close-shot embrace between the two servants, while they act as relay for a conversation between husband and wife, both of whom remain from now on in their respective off screen quarters. She calls out a question to the maid, who repeats it at close range to the valet, who calls it out to the husband, and so on, between the kisses. This take lasts two minutes, fifty seconds.”

When
Waltzes from Vienna
was released in February 1934, prevailing opinion saw the latest Hitchcock film as an abysmal failure. Today it’s among the rarest of Hitchcock films, not even available on video. Too bad: it’s a deft, glittering imitation of a German light musical, chuckling more winningly than
Number Seventeen
at its own conventions.

And Hitchcock’s Islington homecoming was awkward for another reason: hat in hand, he encountered an old friend, Michael Balcon, who had just been placed in charge of Gaumont. Gaumont was a new studio under the control of the banker brothers Maurice and Isidore Ostrer, who had acquired a holding interest in Gainsborough and C. M. Woolf’s rental firm. Although Gaumont took over Islington, the enterprise was headquartered at Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush, a facility dating from 1914, but recently upgraded into a state-of-the-art complex. The new main building, which opened in 1931, was a white, flat-roofed monolith almost ninety
feet high. The studio boasted five stages, a processing laboratory, three theaters, a hall for orchestra recording, and a six-hundred-seat restaurant.