Alfred Hitchcock (53 page)

The director’s anxiety was stoked further by Carole Lombard and Dan Winkler, who reminded the director over and over during the filming of
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
that he was getting a raw deal from the Selznicks, and that what he really needed to do was break his Selznick International contract and join RKO permanently.

All this may not have been conducive to lighthearted farce. When
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
was released in January 1941, though, critics found it “chucklesome” (
New York Times
) and “extremely funny in spots” (
Newsweek
); and at the box office the Hitchcock comedy coasted to profits on the strength of Lombard’s popularity. If there were a few sharply negative reviews (“as commonplace a film as one may find anywhere,” John Mosher wrote in the
New Yorker
), they didn’t hurt Hitchcock in Hollywood, where duty and versatility were expected of a director.

Hitchcock had already switched his focus to
Before the Fact.
Author A. B. (Anthony Berkeley) Cox was an Englishman of Hitchcock’s generation, who wrote detective stories under the pseudonym Anthony Berkeley, and crime novels under the name Francis Iles; it was these last—and eliminating the whodunit aspect in favor of an intense identification with the murderer or victim—that many critics believed his greatest accomplishment. The first Francis Iles book, 1931’s
Malice Aforethought
, had announced the intentions of its murderer on the first page, and came to be considered a masterpiece of its type. Its follow-up, 1932’s
Before the Fact
, once again let readers know from the outset that the victim-to-be’s husband intended to slay her.

RKO had owned the rights to Iles’s novel since publication, but the studio had failed over the years to produce a script that satisfied the Hays Office. The crime of murder always had to meet with punishment in Hollywood films, yet it was a central conceit of
Before the Fact
that a ne’er-do-well husband cheerfully succeeds in murdering his rich father-in-law and wallflower wife.

And Iles had a story twist that posed an even worse challenge to censorship: after the devoted wife realizes that her husband intends to murder her, she stages her own death as a suicide, to spare her husband punishment for the deed. (Hence the title, referring to the legal phrase “accessory before the fact”—since the wife proves an accessory to her own murder.) Suicide was also explicitly condemned by the Production Code when it offered “a means to an end, escape from justice, disgrace, etc.”.

Successful murderers and willful suicides were taboo in Hollywood. But telling Hitchcock what he
couldn’t
do exerted a kind of aphrodisiac effect
on his creativity. He had evoked lesbianism in
Rebecca
, and staged not only Rebecca’s quasi suicide but Mrs. Danvers’s self-immolation. He had even flouted the U.S. government itself with his swipe at the Neutrality Act in
Foreign Correspondent.

Now he smoothly assured RKO that he would tell
Before the Fact
“through the eyes of the woman and have her husband be villainous in her imagination only,” in the words of John Russell Taylor—even though this turned the very crux of the novel, the springboard which so appealed to him, on its head. At the same time he was busy courting Cary Grant, who had rejected
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
because it smacked of typecasting, telling him the Iles story would be a great chance for Grant to break out of his rut, and play a murderer. Hitchcock figured he could develop a working script, assuage the censors with petty concessions as the drafts progressed, and then slip Grant as a murderer past the authorities just before the closing bell.

The first treatment fell to Mrs. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison. After they finished in November, Samson Raphaelson was called in to develop the full script. Apart from being another Myron Selznick client, Raphaelson was a topflight dramatist, whose play
The Jazz Singer
had been made into America’s first talking picture. In Hollywood, Raphaelson had subsequently enjoyed collaboration with Ernst Lubitsch on several sparkling films. Arriving from New York in early December, Raphaelson met daily with the director (and usually Joan Harrison), often at St. Cloud Road, where RKO had given them permission to work. Raphaelson did most of the actual writing at the nearby Riviera Country Club, where he was staying, sending fresh pages over to the Hitchcock house by limousine.

Raphaelson recalled the Reville-Harrison treatment as incomplete, with “dummy” dialogue, and rather “long-winded” at that. Its main accomplishment was in paring down the book’s characters and subplots. (In the novel, both the cad of a husband and the wife-victim have extra lovers, who would gradually be excised as a sop to censors.) Right off, Raphaelson told Hitchcock that the treatment “didn’t agree at all with the way I would get at it [the film],” and asked if he could try his own ideas, adding, “If you don’t like what I write, we’ll fight it out.” To his surprise, Hitchcock—almost matter-of-factly—said yes.

“That story broke more easily for me than anything I have ever written,” Raphaelson reflected years later. “Everything I brought to him [Hitchcock], he’d read instantly and it was fine. I drank more than I ever drank in my life. He was drinking a lot then. He was very fat. I would come to his home in Bel Air, he would be behind the bar, shaking orange juice and gin, and he’d say, ‘Have a drink, Rafe. Got it with you?’ I’d put some pages of script down and while I was having the drink, he would
lean over the edge of the bar and turn the pages. You’d think he was scanning it. Then he’d say, ‘That’s fine, that’s fine, Rafe.’”

Hitchcock rarely offered any criticism of his pages, Raphaelson recalled. Once in a while, the director would warn the writer, “We’ve got to be careful with this scene, it’s censorable,” and Raphaelson would put on the brakes a bit. Or Hitchcock would point to a line of dialogue and say, “I’d like a little more something here, because when I photograph it I’d like to have the wind blowing through her hair.”

At night, Mr. and Mrs. Raphaelson (the actress Dorothy Wegman) went to dinner, parties, and premieres with the Hitchcocks, and soon the initially wary Raphaelson grew to like “this odd, weird, little faggish man and this sweet little boyish woman.”

Hitchcock was still falling asleep at dinner parties, and one night Raphaelson and Mrs. Hitchcock contrived to turn the tables with a little joke of their own. They slipped a Benzedrine into his cocktail; the other guests received sleeping tablets. “The dinner ended,” said Raphaelson, “with Hitch wide awake and all his guests asleep. Hitch couldn’t go to sleep, and spent the evening trying to find something to amuse himself. Finally he was able to arouse the guests sufficiently to send them yawning on their way home. Mrs. Hitchcock slept peacefully the rest of the night, and the rising sun found Hitch still wide awake.”

When Raphaelson finished his draft, Hitchcock asked the writer, rather timidly, if he would mind if Mrs. Hitchcock—who, again, was being paid separately by RKO for her contribution—was given the continuity credit that had been customary on his English films. “It pleases her,” he explained. “Good God,” answered Raphaelson, “I couldn’t care less.” Then Hitchcock broached the issue of his assistant, explaining that Joan Harrison was like “family” to him. “You know, Rafe,” explained the director, “Joan is very ambitious and she wants the credit in order to get other jobs. Of course she doesn’t want to stay with me forever. Do you mind if I add her name to yours?” Again, Raphaelson didn’t mind.

After a five-week stint Raphaelson returned to New York; for the rest of his life he would recall collaborating with Hitchcock as “the easiest and most pleasant” experience he ever had in the film industry. The two couples remained close, exchanging visits, letters, and phone calls over the years. “We had a much more affectionate relationship with Hitch and his wife,” Raphaelson recalled, “than we had with Lubitsch.”

While the script was being refined, the sets built, and the cast and crew finalized—over the winter of 1940–41—Hitchcock stole time to keep a promise he’d made to Sidney Bernstein.

One of Bernstein’s documentaries,
Men of the Lightship
, had been offered
to Twentieth Century–Fox and RKO, but both studios refused to distribute the short war film, “chiefly because the commentary and voices were unsuitable for those markets,” according to Bernstein. Bernstein cabled Hitchcock to ask how much it would cost to alter the narration, engage American actors in Hollywood, and redub everything in Yankee vernacular. Hitchcock said money was no object; he would pay the cost out of his pocket.

So he enlisted Robert Sherwood from
Rebecca
for the rewrites and Robert Montgomery from
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
as narrator. And then Hitchcock himself supervised the reediting and dubbing. Cost: $4,428. There is no evidence he was ever reimbursed.

Men of the Lightship
was subsequently accepted by Fox, and retitled
Men of Lightship 61.
^*
Hitchcock declined any credit. He would perform the same function later that year for
Target for Tonight
, a Ministry of Information film about an RAF bombing raid on Germany that earned a special Oscar. Again, his contribution went uncredited.

Meanwhile, the director’s burgeoning relationship with Cary Grant led to the announcement that Grant would star with Ida Lupino in the planned Hitchcock segment of the pro-British anthology film
Forever and a Day.
Between stints on
Before the Fact
, Hitchcock sandwiched in meetings with Alma and Charles Bennett to prepare the episode, in which Queen Victoria’s funeral procession passes by a wealthy home, and the camera picks up the handyman (Grant) and housemaid (Lupino)—a couple dreaming of escape to America. This was scheduled to be shot after
Before the Fact
, in the late spring or summer of 1941.

Unfortunately,
Before the Fact
was destined for delays and crises, and in the summer of 1941 the Hitchcock episode had to be handed off to French director René Clair, considered an “honorary member” of the British colony because he had directed a few pictures in England in the mid-1930s. Brian Aherne replaced the equivocating Grant. Yet the Aherne-Lupino segment of
Forever and a Day
might be considered another “quasi Hitchcock,” for he developed the story, which is distinguished from the rest of the film by its Anglo-American spirit.

Before he began filming
Before the Fact
, Hitchcock also took time out to attend his first Academy Awards.

Rebecca
led the field in 1940 with a remarkable eleven nominations: Best Production, Director, Actor and Actress (Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine), Supporting Actress (Judith Anderson), Adapted Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison), Cinematography (George Barnes),
Interior Decoration (Lyle Wheeler), Original Score (Franz Waxman), Editing (Hal C. Kern), and Special Effects (Jack Cosgrove).

One of
Rebecca’s
rivals for Best Production, ironically, was Hitchcock’s other film from 1940,
Foreign Correspondent
, which garnered five other Oscar nominations: Original Screenplay (Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison), Supporting Actor (Albert Basserman), Cinematography (Rudolph Maté), Black-and-White Interior Decoration (Alexander Golitzen), and Special Effects (Paul Eagler, photographic; Thomas T. Moulton, sound).

But 1940 was among Hollywood’s finest years, and the list of other Best Picture candidates was impressive:
All This, and Heaven Too, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town
, and
The Philadelphia Story.
One other director, John Ford, had two Best Picture nominees, although managing to pick up two in his first year of Hollywood residency made Hitchcock’s the more astounding achievement. (Indeed, it would be over thirty years—with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 Best Picture nominations for
The Conversation
and
The Godfather, Part II
—before the feat was repeated.)

With four out of the ten Best Picture nominees directed by either Hitchcock or Ford, one of the two seemed bound to win as Best Director. Ford’s stirring adaptation of
The Grapes of Wrath
, John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Okies vacating their dust bowl homes, was considered the Hollywood favorite, while
Rebecca
had the edge in national critics’ polls (receiving 391 first-place votes over 367 for
The Grapes of Wrath
in
Film Daily
’s annual poll of 546 professional critics).

“Rebecca
had been out of circulation for several months,” according to Mason Wiley and Damien Boa in
Inside Oscar
, “so the day after the nominations were announced, Selznick held a second gala ‘premiere’ for
Rebecca
at the newly-opened Hawaii Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. At this second premiere, Selznick read a joint resolution he had managed to wangle from the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, temporarily changing the name of Hollywood Boulevard to ‘Rebecca Lane.’ He also unveiled an extremely large seat that had been installed in the Hawaii with the inscription ‘Reserved for Alfred Hitchcock.’”

On February 27, 1941, the Hitchcocks attended the preceremony banquet at the Biltmore Hotel, joining David O. Selznick and Joan Fontaine at the table reserved for
Rebecca. Foreign Correspondent
producer Walter Wanger, the then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, hosted the actual ceremony, which was broadcast nationally on radio and preceded by an address from President Roosevelt.

Almost to the end of the evening, Hitchcock and his two nominated pictures threatened to be among the also-rans
^*
(Indeed,
Foreign Correspondent
didn’t
win a single award.) When the time came to reveal the Best Director winner, presenter Frank Capra invited the nominees up to the podium, suggesting they “shake each other’s hands for jobs well done. Warily, George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Wood and William Wyler followed orders,” according to
Inside Oscar.
John Ford was conspicuously absent; earlier, he had crustily informed reporters that he and Henry Fonda (a Best Actor nominee for
The Grapes of Wrath
) would be fishing off the coast of Mexico. Ford insisted he didn’t care about Oscars (“a trivial thing to be concerned with at times like these,” he told writer Dudley Nichols). But the American director was widely recognized as Hollywood’s greatest—and Ford was the leading contender each of the five times he was nominated in his career.
^*
Moreover,
The Grapes of Wrath
was distinguished Americana, as opposed to
Rebecca
’s vision of haunted England. So it was hardly surprising when Ford won for
The Grapes of Wrath.