Alfred Hitchcock (31 page)

Not least important, the director needed an intelligent, highly organized personal assistant, who according to industry custom was likely to be a charming young woman. At B.I.P., this job had belonged to Renee Pargenter, but, shortly after Hitchcock joined Gaumont, Pargenter got married and gave notice. Hitchcock placed an advertisement in the
Daily Telegraph
and other publications seeking a “young lady, highest educational qualifications, must be able to speak, read and write French and German fluently, by producer of films.”

Twenty-six-year-old Joan Harrison spotted the ad and applied. Although she was a graduate of St. Hugh’s and the Sorbonne, her résumé modestly boasted only college stints as a film critic and sales experience in a London dress shop. On her mother’s advice Harrison wore a hat to the job interview. She found herself last in a long queue, and it was nearly lunchtime before she was beckoned into Hitchcock’s office. The director stared at her momentarily, then asked her to take off her hat. She was revealed to be exactly the sort of well-bred young lady he was looking for.

Petite, with coiffed blond hair and flashing blue eyes—then, as always, immaculately dressed—Harrison was beautiful enough to be a leading lady. When Curt Courant first met her, he thought she ought to be in the film, not holding a script on the sidelines. The cameraman talked Hitchcock into giving her a screen test. (Well, it wasn’t too hard to convince him: “Who have you slept with, Miss Harrison?!”) But that is far as it went.

Could Harrison speak any German? Hitchcock needed her to bridge the communication gap with the art director and cameraman. No, she admitted,
but her French was not so bad. (“High honors” at the Sorbonne, according to Charles Bennett.) Well, Hitchcock sighed, his own German would suffice. Anyway, he was famished, he said; Harrison could have the job if she joined him in a meal.

At lunch, they talked easily. Harrison’s uncle, it turned out, was Harold Harrison, keeper of the Old Bailey—the official who assigned cases to different courts for trial. She had taken to following the courts herself, and could recount the particulars of a succession of trials with superb recall and evident relish. Uncle Harry “was one of those uncles young girls adore,” Harrison once recalled. “He not only took you to lunch, but he knew the grisly details of all the most shocking crimes. For years I’ve read the transcript of every interesting trial I could lay hands on.”

She was every bit as much an aficionado of show business. In college, recalled classmate Rita Landale, Harrison was “always reading a play.” She had an encyclopedic recall of actors. Although her formal film experience was limited to a few reviews in college and for the
Advertiser
, her father’s Guildford, Surrey, biweekly (“when I was a girl, so I could get passes”), she was also an avid, knowledgeable moviegoer.

So Harrison was hired as Hitchcock’s assistant, working informally in the same capacity for Mrs. Hitchcock as well, helping out with synopses and treatments. Right away she was given promising plays and novels and told to weed out extraneous matter and boil the stories down for possible screen adaptation. Right away she began to learn “continuity.”

Starting with
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, then, Harrison got a crash course in every aspect of the film business from a master professor. At first Harrison was the lowliest member of the team, but swiftly she rose up; she would ultimately become as important to Hitchcock’s career as anyone but Mrs. Hitchcock.

“I think you’ll find the real start of my career was
The Man Who Knew Too Much
,” Hitchcock once said, and it’s true: the film turned a corner for him, conclusively establishing his greatness.

Hugh Stewart always remembered how, on the first day of filming in June 1934, Hitchcock arrived on the set and made a show of slapping the script down on a desk and announcing, “Another picture in the bag!” It was Hitchcock back on top, confidence renewed—and the first recorded instance of his public credo that the job was done long before the cameras rolled.

As credos go, this one was mainly for show. “One of the reasons against that argument,” explained Peggy Robertson, his longtime personal assistant in Hollywood, “is that the script was very seldom finished before we started shooting. We always had trouble with endings. ‘What are we going to do? How is it going to end?’ We’d have minute sketches of the tiniest camera movement, but how would the whole sequence end? He didn’t know.”

“He’s a master of well thought out effects,” colleague George Cukor mused in one interview, but not all the effects were manifest in the script or storyboards. Himself renowned as an “actor’s director,” Cukor knew Hitchcock personally and admired him professionally for, among other things, the extraordinary performances he often extracted. But “I’m not quite sure that he is telling the complete truth [about having everything planned so carefully in advance]. He must improvise with performances sometimes. … [And] he is hiding things from you; he doesn’t say how he works, how he achieves effects—easier to say it was all planned in the script and the rest is mechanics.”

One thing that didn’t change when “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby” became
The Man Who Knew Too Much
was the St. Moritz opening. Hitchcock made a habit of wielding such opening scenes in his films to lull his audiences into a false security. He often chose what he liked to call picture-postcard or sightseeing clichés to establish a setting. “Local topographical features,” he said: Think of Holland, and you think of windmills. Think of Switzerland, and what comes to mind? Skiing and winter games.

This time, Hitchcock began with the guests of an exclusive hotel engaged in outdoor contests. Edna Best is a lovely sharpshooter distracted by her precocious daughter, Nova Pilbeam, during a skeet shoot. The audience would do well to remember the mother’s skill with a gun.

That night, in the hotel ballroom, the rakish Pierre Fresnay whisks Best onto the dance floor, in a buoyant sequence that begins deceptively—with the two of them getting tangled up in a skein of yarn, which has been pinned to their clothing by Best’s sulking husband, Leslie Banks. When an unseen enemy shoots Fresnay, the music muffles the gunfire; dying in Best’s arms, the dashing Frenchman whispers the Macguffin.

He started the film that way, the director once explained, “to show that death comes when you least expect it.” Light shifts into darkness, and the real Hitchcock dance begins.

Ironically, given John Maxwell’s cost-conscious opposition to “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby,” the Gaumont films were among Hitchcock’s cheapest. One of Hitchcock’s unsung virtues as a director was his ingenuity at saving money, at creating the illusion of luxury under constrained conditions. Only small crews traveled to locations beyond England in the mid-1930s, so Hitchcock conjured up his beloved Swiss scenery out of bits and pieces of precisely stipulated second-unit footage and a few painted backdrops; the lavish-seeming Albert Hall and Sidney Street highlights were also modestly budgeted, ingeniously fabricated illusions.

For the first climax, Hitchcock returned to the Schüfftan process, which he had employed for
The Ring
and
Blackmail.
Gaumont couldn’t afford hundreds of extras; nor, in any case, would the studio be allowed to take over Albert Hall for protracted filming. So Hitchcock had long exposures made of various angles of the auditorium, which were then blown up into
oversize transparencies. The Italian-born artist Fortunino Matania, a frequent contributor to all the finest London periodicals, made realistic paintings of the audience on each transparency. “We went back to the Albert Hall and set up the Schüfftan camera in exactly the same spots where the original photographs were taken,” Hitchcock proudly explained to Peter Bogdanovich. “Now the mirror reflected this little transparency with a full audience, and we scraped the silvering here and there—a box near the entrance and the whole of the orchestra. Then in the box we had a real woman opening a program and so forth, and the eye immediately went to the movement. All the rest was static.”

The Albert Hall scene remains an unforgettable mosaic, a shoo-in for any highlight reel of the greatest sequences in film history. Hitchcock’s camera begins on the faces of the audience and the orchestra as the cantata begins and the searching mother arrives. As the haunting music swells, his camera returns to the mother, her despair growing ever deeper. From the mother he cuts to a gun barrel gradually protruding from behind the curtain; at first the image seems like an abstraction out of modern art, but as the gun slowly wheels to point toward the camera—and its target—the frightening image merges with the gunshot and the mother’s scream.

As always with the best Hitchcock films, the director set aside privileged moments for his preferred actors—usually those playing the most innocent characters, or the most depraved. The director doted on Pilbeam, and his tenderness toward the sacrificial lamb of the story (the young, kidnapped daughter) is the beating heart beneath the film’s essential cruelty.

The other actor who fascinated him was the sardonic, moonfaced Peter Lorre. Among other things the two men shared a malicious sense of humor. Lorre’s first line, “Better ask my nurse,” the director made him repeat over and over, mocking his pronunciation. (“What? Pederast my nurse?!” Hitchcock echoed incredulously from behind the camera.) Their banter switched back and forth from English to German slang. “That may have been a little Hitchcockery,” editor Hugh Stewart said, “because nobody else except Lorre understood Hitchcock.”

Hitchcock dubbed Lorre “the Walking Overcoat” for the long coat the actor habitually wore, which drooped down to his shoes. Evenings and weekends, Lorre and actress Celia Lovsky (whom he married during the filming) became frequent guests at Cromwell Road, along with others from the production. During filming, the Hitchcocks were eager hosts, rotating a guest list that included both stars and lesser members of the company. The parties served to bolster the on-set camaraderie, which could sag during the long, tedious days.

After hours, when sufficiently libated, the director of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
needed little coaxing to perform his most notorious shtick: the host doffed his shirt, wrapped a shawl around his shoulders,
and became a sexy belly dancer with enormous breasts, undulating to music and hysterical applause. Nobody laughed louder than Lorre.

The only thing that bored Hitchcock more than a straight hero was a bland villain. His villains could be as handsome and impotent as his heroes, but the best of them evoked pity. Lorre offscreen was a tortured soul, already saddled with a drug habit that would grow worse as he aged. He was the Reggie Dunn character of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, but also the most personable, most fully human being in the film: Hitchcock’s first great villain, before Bruno Anthony or Norman Bates.

The Sidney Street-style siege begins with an incisive succession of police vignettes. One officer, after boasting of his prospective overtime (“Looks like an all-night job to me!”), is sent to try the front door of the hideout, and promptly gunned down. Another, after similar side-of-the-mouth comments to ingratiate himself with audiences, props a mattress up in front of a window to shield himself from gunfire—he meets a predictable fate. That is when the action breaks out on several levels of the street and buildings.

The siege, like the Albert Hall sequence, is a stunning montage, a director’s showcase. But it was also acted to the hilt by Lorre, who proved a tremendous asset to the film. His final scenes seal the magnificence of
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
First comes the two-shot of a smiling Lorre and his horse-faced adjutant (“nurse” Cicely Oates), just before she is sprayed with bullets. His reaction to her death tells us how much he loved her (despite the hints that she was very likely a lesbian). His implacability is shattered, and for just a moment we feel for him. Then, consumed by rage, Lorre finally grabs a gun and joins in.

Lorre is the only member of the gang to survive the chaotic shoot-out. We don’t see him, hiding behind a door as the police edge into the room. That is the excuse for a small but marvelous Hitchcock touch: the chiming of his watch (heard at strategic moments throughout the film) signals his last act of bravado and self-destruction.

But Hitchcock loathed happy endings, and the last shot of the reunited family isn’t very comforting. Our ultimate glimpse of the mother, after her deadeye rifle shot, reveals a face crushed by the realization of what she has done. The father will have a scar from his wound; the young daughter would surely be in therapy for the rest of her life.

The film was disturbing—so much so that its quality was not immediately apparent to studio officials. When Hitchcock previewed
The Man Who Knew Too Much
for Maurice and Isidore Ostrer, the banker brothers who presided over Gaumont’s board of directors, he was baffled by their response. After the lights went up, the Ostrers scurried out of the screening
room without uttering a polite word. Sitting alone with editor Hugh Stewart, Hitchcock furrowed his brow. “Are they always like that?” he asked. “I don’t think,” Stewart replied diplomatically, “they know what to say.”

The Ostrers thought
The Man Who Knew Too Much
might be “too artistic.” They asked for a second opinion from an expert on films too artistic: C. M. Woolf, Hitchcock’s old nemesis, still a fixture on the Gaumont board. As it happened, Woolf was virtually in charge of the studio while Michael Balcon was out of reach in the United States, making distribution and talent deals. After watching Hitchcock’s film, Woolf summoned the director and told him it was appalling rubbish. Woolf ordered up a set of new, mild scenes to be shot and inserted by Maurice Elvey. “Hitch was practically suicidal,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “and begged Woolf on his knees to let the film be shown as it was shot.”

“Our personal suspense, Hitch’s and mine, went on for days,” said Charles Bennett. Hitchcock told Bennett that until the impasse was broken they might as well set aside their next project—
The 39 Steps.
Bennett switched to working on “a cheap original I knew would pay for the milk.”