Alfred Hitchcock (61 page)

This was the first time the American press streamed to a Hitchcock set, lured by the novelty of the location angle and by interviews with an always quotable director. Universal may have been a lowly studio in some regards, but its publicity department was among the best. Reporters from
Life
, the
New York Times
, and Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco newspapers, and from the screen trade publications, as well as wire-service representatives,
were all invited to watch. Publicity for
Rebecca
, orchestrated by Selznick International, had lionized the producer and director equally; now Universal focused its publicity on Hitchcock, and the clippings boosted his growing celebrity outside New York and California.

Hitchcock had an impressive ability to compartmentalize—to deliver an entertaining interview to a reporter amidst the tumult, then snap to attention and jump from his chair to zero in on a detail. Outside the controlled conditions of a studio, away from pesky producers—and despite the vicissitudes of location work—Hitchcock was a man often more relaxed and expansive than he could be in Hollywood. On weekend nights in Santa Rosa, he presided over elaborate dinners for a rotating list of guests at the Occidental Hotel, where he and his family were staying. Martinis preceded a menu he specially ordered; the lamb, he directed, had to be pink.

“The martinis, the meal, his immense weight, to say nothing of the day’s work, would take their toll until Hitch’s chins would rest on his chest and he would start to snore gently,” Cronyn recalled. “Alma would reach out her forefinger and, with the gesture of someone lifting the latch on a garden gate, chuck him under the nose. It always seemed to me like a frightful indignity, but Hitch never seemed to mind. He would smile, reach for a toothpick, and with his free hand coyly cover his mouth while picking his teeth. Eventually he would catch the thread of conversation and rejoin us.”

After a month on location, cast and crew returned to Universal to shoot interiors, which had been replicated from photographs and Robert Boyle’s sketches, on stage 22. The
New York Times
called the sets “quite a phenomenon,” with their breakaway walls and several prop dinner tables of different sizes, allowing the camera to exploit unlikely angles in the family scenes. As much as Hitchcock was drawn to locations, he usually saved his greatest Hitchcockery—his pure-cinema highlights—for inside the studio, where the storyboards ruled, and the conditions could be manufactured.

The actors didn’t always understand Hitchcock’s sleight of hand, at least not during the shooting. Seated at the family dinner table for one scene, Hume Cronyn was supposed to react in surprise at something young Charlie (Teresa Wright) said. Hitchcock told him to rise abruptly—which the actor did, pushing off his chair and stepping back.

“That’s all right, Hume,” said the director, “but rise and step
in.
”

“
Toward
Teresa?”

“Yes, step in and lean forward.”

“But she’s just said something very offensive.”

“I know.”

“But … yes sir.”

Cronyn made the move as directed, he later recalled, “and it felt terrible,
completely false.” When Hitchcock asked for another take, Cronyn repeated his original movement, stepping back. You’ve done it wrong again, the director said. “I know,” muttered Cronyn, “I’m terribly sorry. It just feels so uncomfortable.”

“There’s no law that says actors have to be comfortable,” purred Hitchcock ominously. “Step back if you like—but then we’ll have a comfortable actor without a head.”

After Cronyn mastered the move, Hitchcock took the screen novice aside and consoled him. “Come and see the rushes,” the director urged. “You’ll never know which way you stepped. The camera lies, you know—not always, but sometimes. You have to learn to accommodate it when it does.”

Cronyn went to the rushes, and of course Hitchcock was right.

The actors Hitchcock took a special interest in became the sympathetic focus of his most expressive camera work. One day Teresa Wright had a question about the scene where she walks down a flight of stairs wearing a ring taken from one of Uncle Charlie’s victims. Preparing to deliver a toast, Uncle Charlie spots the incriminating ring, instantly realizes her implicit threat, and changes his toast: “Just in time—I’m leaving tomorrow!” Wright understood the import of the scene, but couldn’t figure out why it was taking so long to prepare the shot. Hitchcock sat down and patiently explained the technical challenges involved in sending a camera speeding into a close-up of her ring as she descends.

The resulting shot was a classic Hitchcock moment, of a kind he repeated, with variations, in countless other films. The director enjoyed the technical challenges of such bravura camera work, but it was also designed to serve the story—in this case, immersing the audience in the tension, guiding them subjectively from “the general to the particular,” in the words of screenwriter David Freeman, “the farthest to the nearest.”

The “two really spectacular shots” in
Shadow of a Doubt
, in Wright’s words, were both created in the studio, and both were designed around her character. One was the scene where she confronts Uncle Charlie with the damning evidence of the ring. The other was a shot of young Charlie at the town library late one night, researching her uncle’s crimes. When she reads an article that confirms the terrible truth, the camera pulls back dramatically into an impossibly high crane shot. As young Charlie runs abjectly from the library, the God’s-eye view casts pity on her torment and solitude.

Shadow of a Doubt
had begun with its focus on Uncle Charlie, but the production gravitated to young Charlie—as the director was drawn to the engaging innocence Wright brought to the role. At the end, at Uncle Charlie’s funeral, where young Charlie is consoled by the smitten detective (who has arrived late to the finish, as usual with Hitchcock’s police), the
director allowed her a final moving soliloquy about all the good there is in the world—an idealistic statement, rare, perhaps even unique, in a Hitchcock film.

Casting a cloud over the final weeks of filming was news from England: Hitchcock’s mother was gravely ill. On September 26, 1942, just as
Shadow of a Doubt
wound down, Emma Hitchcock passed away at the Shamley Green cottage. At her bedside was her firstborn, William, and a physician who recorded her death, at age seventy-nine, from acute pyelonephritis, an abdominal fistula, and an intestinal perforation.

Donald Spoto has hypothesized that young Charlie’s mother was named Emma in honor of Hitchcock’s mother, and that the character, conceived during her final months of life, was “the last benevolent rendering of a mother figure in Hitchcock’s films.” He cites the scene where young Charlie’s mother shouts into the telephone, evoking Emma Hitchcock’s similar “amusing habit,” which dated from “early days in Leytonstone.”

But shouting into the telephone was common comedy at the time, in British and American films alike. Hitchcock must have known that his mother was failing, and it is possible he shaped Charlie’s mother as a kind of tribute. His close friends and relatives insist, however, that he never uttered a harsh word about his mother, neither publicly nor privately. “Hitch
adored
his mother,” insisted his longtime assistant Peggy Robertson.

Did Hitchcock really turn against mothers in his films after the death of his own? It certainly is true that Hitchcock later created a number of monstrous mothers. Perhaps Emma Hitchcock’s death liberated this side of him; perhaps, as a loving son, he’d avoided any chance of offending her with such characters when she was alive.

But Hitchcock’s most notorious monster-mothers—in
Psycho
and
Marnie
—come straight from the books. And at the same time his parade of winning or ultimately sympathetic mothers never really ceased, as
Stage Fright, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest
, and
The Birds
attest.

Darryl Zanuck was still pursuing Hitchcock. Although the head of Twentieth Century–Fox was eager to bring the director into his fold, Hitchcock wasn’t keen on any of the studio’s properties. Nor, immersed as he was in
Shadow of a Doubt
, had he found time to develop new projects of his own.

Another draw on his time was his continuing ambition to host a radio series. In September and October Hitchcock met with representatives of an advertising agency, trying to package a new
Suspense-style
series, with Arch Oboler as writer and producer. Hitchcock met and got along well
with Oboler, one of the wizards of the airwaves. This time, Hitchcock insisted, he himself would emcee (not some actor portraying him); to allay concerns of sponsors and underwriters, he even agreed to submit to a “voice audition.”

A pilot program was produced at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Theater in early September, but Hitchcock was still busy shooting
Shadow of a Doubt
, so he could only drop in after hours to observe portions of the taping. An actor stood in for him during the original taping; the director then made his own tape to be spliced into the final recording. Everyone was impressed. “His voice came over well and with a great deal more authority and charm than the actor that was used in the original audition,” reported producer Joe Donohoe.

If the series received the go-ahead, Hitchcock would stand to gain an additional $1,500 weekly for use of his name and for his host duties. Yet both Selznicks insisted on their share of the sum, still furious that Jack Skirball had managed to hand-deliver Hitchcock a direct bonus for
Saboteur
without a penny going through Selznick hands. They weren’t about to see the same thing happen again with a radio contract.

After
Shadow of a Doubt
wrapped, Dan O’Shea delivered a threat: Selznick International would lay Hitchcock off for twelve weeks unless he took Zanuck’s offer to come to Twentieth Century–Fox. That ultimatum, plus the fact that Zanuck had vacated the studio to make government war films, finally persuaded Hitchcock. He took a one-picture deal with Twentieth Century–Fox—with a second-picture option—that put the kibosh on the radio series.

On November 19, 1942, Hitchcock moved from Universal to his new offices at Twentieth Century–Fox. Nobody knew when Zanuck was expected back. After lobbying for an appointment as a colonel in the Signal Corps, the producer had been posted to Gibraltar, where he was waiting to fly to Algiers for the Allied invasion of North Africa. William Goetz had been left temporarily in charge of production, and he immediately placed Hitchcock under the aegis of staff producer Kenneth MacGowan. And now, with Zanuck gone, Hitchcock was primed to act.

It was some time during the spring of 1942 that Hitchcock first had the idea for a “lifeboat film,” which would take up where the sea-ditching climax of
Foreign Correspondent
had left off. If he would never get the chance to make a film about the vast scope of life in a great metropolis, or one day in a park from dusk to dawn, or a doomed ocean liner carrying a cross-section of humanity, at least he could study a small group in a lifeboat: the world adrift, in microcosm.

That spring newspapers and magazines were filled with articles about
lifeboat rescues. Production designer Robert Boyle recalled Hitchcock brandishing one such clipping during the making of
Shadow of a Doubt
, and teasing him with the idea: “It’s a small space, like a closet, isn’t it?” Cramped spaces were a visual and technical challenge, and while crossing the Atlantic by boat and plane he had often thought about the fate of people stranded at sea.

He had mentioned the lifeboat idea to Jack Skirball before they settled on “Uncle Charlie.” Skirball wasn’t enthusiastic; he thought the subject fell outside the director’s customary forte, and anticipated (correctly) that it would require prolonged scriptwork.
^*
Hitchcock also tried the idea on David O. Selznick, but the producer wouldn’t nibble. He deliberately hadn’t mentioned the idea to Zanuck, but on his first day at the new studio he had it on the tip of his tongue for William Goetz. He pitched a story concerning a handful of survivors of a torpedoed freighter.
Lifeboat
, as Hitchcock was already calling the proposed film, would be “laid entirely in and around” the boat, with the most provocative notion being that “to provide dramatic action and suspense, the last person picked up should be the captain of the German U-boat that had sunk the vessel to which the lifeboat and its people belonged,” according to MacGowan.

On that first day at Twentieth Century–Fox, Hitchcock made it clear that
Lifeboat
would be an allegorical story. It would be shaped by his love-hate relationship with the German nation. As a young man in London he had been deeply affected by Germany’s role as aggressor in World War I; then early in his career, he had found surprising happiness in Berlin and Munich, working for Ufa and Emelka. He had been vitally influenced by German expressionism. And now, the world was experiencing the horrors of Hitler. The German U-boat captain of the story would represent the Germany of yesterday and tomorrow, Hitchcock told William Goetz: both a leader and a traitor of humanity.

Within half an hour of speaking to Goetz, Hitchcock was turned over to MacGowan, with Goetz’s endorsement. Harvard-educated, a onetime drama critic, MacGowan had been Eugene O’Neill’s partner at the famed Provincetown Playhouse in the 1920s. In Hollywood since 1932, he had supervised noteworthy pictures by Rouben Mamoulian, Fritz Lang, and John Ford. A producer with artistic ambitions, MacGowan liked Hitchcock and identified with his aspirations. At one of their first meetings the two fell to discussing the Swiss painter Paul Klee, whom they both revered.
One of Hollywood’s noted art collectors, MacGowan would go on to help Hitchcock build his growing art collection, including abstracts by Klee.

Having started out in Hollywood as a story editor, MacGowan was also helpful in devising the story’s initial characters and situations in collaboration with Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock—the latter working “on a voluntary basis in these preliminary stages,” in MacGowan’s words. As Alma herself later recalled for the studio legal department, these first conferences among the latest three Hitchcocks were “general in nature, tossing the story idea around between us, and discussions as to possible writers, the development of characters—the same kind of conversations we have had for years about every story in which Mr. Hitchcock was interested.”