Alfred Hitchcock (67 page)

Lifeboat
opened in American theaters in January 1944, while Hitchcock was still in England. His most controversial film up to that time, it divided reviewers—even against themselves.

New York Herald Tribune
columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote a piece conceding that
Lifeboat
was “from the point of direction and entertainment, brilliant,” while condemning the Hitchcock film as a work which “translated into German, could be presented in Berlin as a morale builder for the Nazis’ war, with only minor changes.” (Did Thompson notice that she was the prototype for Tallulah Bankhead’s character? She didn’t say.)

Manny Farber of the
New Republic
wrote that
Lifeboat
“both irritates and holds you effortlessly to its exposition.” James Agee wondered in the
Nation
if Hitchcock had lost “some of his sensitiveness to the purely human aspects of what he is doing,” and then speculated that the film’s insensitivities resulted from
Lifeboat
’s being “more of a Steinbeck picture than a Hitchcock.” Bosley Crowther, who was just beginning his quarter-century reign as lead critic for the
New York Times
, found the Hitchcock film “a consistently exciting and technically brilliant drama of the sea,” which nonetheless repelled him by its injudicious—perhaps, he thought, inadvertent—elevation of the superman ideal.

After his initial review, Crowther’s opinion hardened; he wrote two Sunday articles reiterating the “appalling folly,” the “shocking political aspect,” the “insidious” nature of
Lifeboat
; and the
New York Times
also devoted a section to pro-and-con letters (including one from the producer Kenneth MacGowan patiently explaining the film’s theme). While at first Crowther had attempted to divide the responsibility for the film equally between Hitchcock and Steinbeck, he got hold of the novelette, and in his second Sunday piece noted that the film was a “radical departure” from the Steinbeck story. It was now his opinion that Hitchcock had “preempted” the “conscientious” writer. Steinbeck was responsible for all that was good about
Lifeboat
; the director was to blame for all the bad.

Steinbeck, alarmed by the controversy, had authorized his agent, Annie Laurie Williams, to send the unpublished novelette to Crowther. Steinbeck had also received a letter from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) complaining that Joe, the Negro character, was a stereotype. Although Joe was Steinbeck’s creation, the author was concerned about the appearance of racial prejudice, and after seeing
Lifeboat
, he wrote to his agent that he agreed with the civil rights group. Hitchcock had taken his dignified race representative and turned him into “a stock comedy Negro,” in his words, or “the usual colored travesty.”

As Steinbeck later attested in depositions, Joe is “a colored man, not religious—a very proud man” in his novelette, “and in no way wanting not to do anything with decisions. In fact he makes many decisions. It is quite an opposite character [from the film’s].” Steinbeck’s Joe not only heroically tries to save the mother and baby when the two are floundering in the water, but also tries to save Willie after the German is pushed overboard. And Joe is an accomplished flautist who moonlights in a chamber orchestra.

He plays the flute in the film, too—but it’s more of a recorder, and the music he plays is equally humble. In this and other ways, Hitchcock stripped Joe down: the Negro character makes only a single rescue (the mother and child), his musical talent is modest (he’s no chamber musician), and he has a pickpocket past (the element that really inflamed the civil rights organization). The film also makes Joe deeply religious, a change Steinbeck hated because he saw it as stereotypical. (Joe is the only passenger who, praying for the soul of the dead baby, can recite the Bible from memory: “He leadeth me beside still waters …”)

Hitchcock could never be mistaken for a civil rights pioneer. Black characters are few and far between in his films, which take place in the Anglo-Saxon world where he felt most comfortable. Before
Lifeboat
one has to go back to 1927’s
The Ring
, the last Hitchcock film based on the director’s own original story, to find another prominent black character—an appealing
trainer who is a friend of the hero. But the script credited solely to Hitchcock also includes a title card referring to a “nigger” boxer.
^*

The man never mentioned publicly in the Steinbeck-Hitchcock debate was Jo Swerling. Yet it was Swerling who took the lead in reshaping Joe as a character, according to legal documents—Swerling, who was as liberal politically as Steinbeck. And under Swerling, although Joe became a less idealized Negro—he lost his job as a chamber musician and added ex-pickpocket to his résumé—the character acquired other symbolic value. When the anti-German storm finally bursts, for example, it is Joe alone who refuses to join the mob bloodletting—and his decency, his disgust at what the others have done, provides a sharp allusion to Negro lynching that was especially pointed in the 1940s. Hitchcock’s Joe is a character who looks better and better over time.

The newspaper articles were just the tip of the controversy. Behind the scenes, individuals and organized groups complained to Twentieth Century-Fox about the film’s pro-Nazi propaganda value. And almost from the premiere Darryl Zanuck was pressured to withdraw advertising and support. After a good blastoff at the box office,
Lifeboat
began sinking—and that, along with Hitchcock’s anger that Zanuck had taken nicks out of the film behind his back, ended any lingering hopes that he might direct a second film for the studio.

Zanuck had been right about one thing:
Lifeboat
did attract awards at the end of the year, and Tallulah Bankhead was a front-runner when the New York Film Critics assembled to name the year’s Best Actress. Still, it took six ballots for her to obtain the majority of votes and defeat Ingrid Bergman, for the less controversial
Gaslight.
Hitchcock didn’t receive a single Best Director vote for
Lifeboat.

Lifeboat
did better with Academy voters in Hollywood, where making the sea ordeal believable on a soundstage was recognized as a remarkable achievement. Hitchcock’s direction was Oscar-nominated, along with the original story (Steinbeck), and the black-and-white photography (Glen MacWilliams). Hitchcock lost to Leo McCarey, who was the big winner that year, having also been named Best Director in New York. (McCarey won two Oscars for
Going My Way
, for the story and directing, while Joseph LaShelle’s camera work won for
Laura.
) Bankhead, the Best Actress in New York, did worse in Hollywood, where she wasn’t even nominated.
^**

Yet hers is a magnificent performance—and,
Lifeboat
remains underrated. “Wow!” Connie Porter exclaims when a German ship bears down on the lifeboat in Hitchcock’s crescendo, narrowly cutting across its bow—a thrilling, mesmerizing process shot. The entire film is as dazzling as that one moment. Fluid and symphonic in its pacing,
Lifeboat
is as original and searching as any picture made in Hollywood during World War II. Hitchcock made only tough, visceral films about the war—and with his toughest films he braced himself for second-guessing. He deliberately pushed his audiences, and courted critical rejection. “They all thought it was pro-German,” he shrugged in an interview two decades later, “which was idiotic.” But the fate of
Lifeboat
scarcely affected his momentum.

Returning from England through New York City in mid-March 1944, Hitchcock was a subdued man. He told friends that although he felt patriotic about England, he no longer felt quite like an Englishman. Yet the bombing of London, the food shortages, and the terror he’d experienced firsthand—all these humbled him, and put his troubles with the Selznicks in perspective. Without further protest he accepted Dan O’Shea’s definition of his absence as a suspension, meaning he would still owe those twelve weeks to Selznick International. In London he had begun discussions with Sidney Bernstein about a new venture, a partnership to produce films after the war. And now he felt hopeful about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

The death of Myron Selznick on March 23 was another sign of changing times. Myron had tried many “cures” for his alcoholism, but his drinking finally caused an abdominal hemorrhage that sent him into a fatal coma. His brother David was at his bedside when Myron passed away in a Santa Monica hospital. Once the most powerful agent in Hollywood, he was only forty-six.

Yet Hitchcock didn’t rush back to California to attend the funeral. In truth, he had grown to despise Myron, and to blame him for all his contract problems. After Myron’s death, he informed the agency that he felt under no future obligation to it; he would fulfill his responsibilities to Selznick International, and pay the agency its commissions on that contract; but in the future he would handle his own business, and he reiterated his refusal to pay any percentages on past bonuses, or on future income outside of Selznick productions.

The Selznick Agency threatened to sue over the bonuses and outside income, and for the first time Hitchcock consulted independent attorneys. He wasn’t alone in fighting the agency at this time; under erratic leadership, the agency had fallen into disrepute. Some clients sued to void their contracts; others simply walked away. Hitchcock’s dispute with the agency wasn’t settled for several years, and he never did pay the contested monies.

On his “word of honor,” Hitchcock assured DOS that he would direct
the two pictures that remained on his Selznick International contract—if the number
was
two, that is. The contract had been amended and extended so often that its patchwork was mystifying. But nobody in Hollywood would dare employ Hitchcock until it was cleared with DOS, so the director had little choice but to meet his obligations while counting down to freedom.

The first of the two pictures would be
The House of Dr. Edwardes.
As previously agreed, Hitchcock lingered at the St. Regis in New York, working on a first draft of the script with writer Ben Hecht, who was then living in nearby Nyack. David O. Selznick trusted Hecht to craft “a well-constructed emotional story on which to hang all of Hitchcock’s wonderful gags,” but the director trusted Hecht for his own reasons.

Hecht had bailed Hitchcock out with the coda for
Foreign Correspondent
; some sources believe he also consulted on
Lifeboat.
The director and writer were two of a kind. At the top in their fields, both shared a jaundiced view of Hollywood and the world. They knew Hollywood preferred box office to art, and they didn’t kid themselves: in order to satisfy Selznick,
The House of Dr. Edwardes
would have to strike a plausible psychiatric pose—a pose that both recognized as, in Hitchcock’s phrase, “pseudo-psychoanalysis”—but the bottom line was creating a mystery with a pair of sexy stars that would clean up at the box office.

With DOS safely at arm’s length on the West Coast, Hitchcock and Hecht began, as Hitchcock preferred, by touring the reality that would seed the fiction. They went trawling for verisimilitude in mental hospitals and psychiatric wards in Connecticut and New York before settling down to revise and expand the Hitchcock-MacPhail treatment. They were under no obligation to follow the book, hardly a memorable best-seller, and one Selznick may never have read; they even knew who their two stars were going to be.

At least they thought they knew. With a virtual lock on Ingrid Bergman, who was under contract to Selznick, they began tailoring for her the role of psychoanalyst Constance Petersen, who falls in love with the new superintendent of the mental institution, Anthony Edwardes. The writing team incorporated in-jokes to please Bergman when she read the script: when the troubled Dr. Edwardes starts to act strangely, and he and Petersen decide to seek the advice of Dr. Brulov, her psychiatric mentor, they travel to Rochester, New York—where Bergman would have felt at home, having lived there between films with her husband, Petter Lindstrom, as he studied for his medical degree.

For the character of Edwardes—eventually revealed by psychoanalysis to be an impostor suffering from amnesia, tormented by a dark secret in his past—Hitchcock was hoping for Cary Grant, as he often did. Alan Osbiston, editor of the MOI films, visited from London to consult with
Hitchcock, and observed one session with Hecht. “I spent all my time sitting with them watching them,” recalled Osbiston. “It was a staggering experience. Hecht would come in with a few pages of script and read it to Hitchcock and then Hitch would read it back to him, then they’d act the parts. Hitch would say, ‘OK, you’re the girl. I’m Grant. Now, we move from here to there.’ And they’d move all around the hotel suite acting and playing their lines. Hitch would say, ‘I’ll come from over here … no, that doesn’t work because, you see, our camera is over here. I want that dialogue to come over here. Ben, you’ve got to pull that line up to here so that I can play it in front of the camera here.’ The whole thing was worked out in the most minute detail.”

With Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in prospect, the love story was paramount. Hecht, who had undergone analysis, came up with psychiatric explanations for the plot twists as well as suggestions for actual imagery—a corridor of doors swinging open when the two first kiss, for instance, “symbol for the beginning of love between two people,” in Hitchcock’s words.

Although Hitchcock and Hecht swapped roles back and forth while rehearsing the script, the director was really more like Edwardes, who in the film declares, “I don’t believe in dreams. That Freud stuff is a lot of hooey.” The director wasn’t unfamiliar with Freud’s writings, having first browsed them in the 1920s, when Freud cast a shadow over all art and literature; and he was more than capable of expounding, for example, on symbols (preferably sexual) and artifacts. Hitchcock even enjoyed regaling friends with his own dreams—which ranged from prosaic to vivid, sometimes vividly erotic—soliciting their interpretations. But he didn’t take the subconscious too seriously, and in his private life studiously avoided doctors of the mind.