Alfred Hitchcock (89 page)

Although the publicity tropes had originated in an earlier time, Hitchcock’s image was cemented during this era. Warner Bros. publicity incorporated all the now familiar Hitchcock anecdotes: a man afraid of police because of his boyhood brush with them; a dictator of actors who regarded them practically as cattle (“Of course there are some very nice cattle,” he often quipped; or sometimes he’d protest, “I didn’t say they were cattle, I said they should be
treated
like cattle”); a typecast director growingly concerned about his typecasting (“If I should make a film of another sort, people would come out asking, ‘Well, where was the suspense?’ ”).

Hitchcock cheerfully abetted his publicity, which he knew added to his value to a studio. There was always some truth in the published clichés. In making his point about being typecast, for example, he publicly complained that Hitchcock pictures were prejudged by critics—and this was indeed a source of real and growing resentment, privately. When
I Confess
was released in England, Hitchcock read over a batch of reviews he’d received in the mail from Bernstein. “Not bad on the whole,” he commented.
But he added, “By God, I am typed though, what with the label ‘thriller’ and the search for ‘suspense.’ ”

The U.S. notices were not good, but also “not bad on the whole,” when
I Confess
was released in March 1953—premiering in New York during Holy Week. (“A nice Lenten date!” the director joked in one letter.) And the third Hitchcock-Warner Bros. film also swiftly turned a profit.

Though the Legion of Decency slapped it with a rating of “Morally Objectionable for Adults,” the film’s Catholicism was not really controversial—the watered-down script and appreciative reviews in the Catholic press took care of that (“an enormously interesting film,” wrote Robert Kass in
Catholic World
, “thoughtful, adult drama”). But as the director later conceded, one unanticipated weakness of
I Confess
was that non-Catholics did not feel very strongly involved in the fundamental premise: that priests have a sacred obligation to keep secret the revelations of the confessional.

The final surprise of the censorship saga occurred in Canada. In Quebec, at a cocktail party preceding the world premiere, Hitchcock seemed to be in an upbeat mood; but afterward, at the reception, the director was furious. That is because an obscure member of the government Censor Bureau had insisted on cutting out Anne Baxter’s explicit declaration of love for Montgomery Clift, and that part of the flashback where it is made clear they spent the night together: almost three minutes of footage. After taking pains with the archdiocese, and being forced to give in to the studio, the insult left him livid. “There will be one version for the province of Quebec,” he told a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewer angrily, “and one version for the rest of the world.”

But as confirmed by his letters, he paid more attention to box office than to censors or critics, and in spite of its drawbacks
I Confess
was a success for Hitchcock and Warner Bros.

In the winter of 1952, the director plunged back into developing
The Bramble Bush.
He felt he squandered too much time with George Tabori, who came back to Hollywood, met with the director, then went away and wrote a version that was completely different from what Hitchcock expected. In his late-1952 and early-1953 letters, Hitchcock expressed outrage over the “disgraceful” behavior of the independent-minded Tabori, which threw the project off stride, and off schedule. Hitchcock had to wait weeks for William Archibald to become available as Tabori’s replacement, and then to restart the script.

Although he felt more compatible with Archibald (“a good worker [with] sound views of character, etc.”), he faced pressure from Warner’s, which was chagrined by the start-and-stop progress of the project. The
studio wanted to have its next Hitchcock film within a year of
I Confess.
And the director faced growing internal doubts about whether he could give
The Bramble Bush
“a distinction beyond an ordinary chase story.” Writing to Sidney Bernstein, Hitchcock said he was being urged to speed up, though the script still needed “many weeks” of revising. “It is even quite possible for me to have to tell Warner’s,” Hitchcock wrote in January 1953, “that I cannot lick it and ask them to accept another subject.”

Meanwhile, he asked Bernstein to engage an English writer to launch a treatment of
To Catch a Thief
“so that I can have something to work from” as soon as he finished
The Bramble Bush.
“I have been losing a lot of time waiting to complete one film entirely, before starting to think about another,” Hitchcock explained. “This I would like to correct. I could easily have some preliminary discussions with a writer (unless of course one runs into a Tabori who ignores everyone’s ideas) and then he could go to work on a first draft even while I am still shooting another picture. Huston and other Independents have been doing this.”

That is when the Cornell Woolrich project popped up again. James Stewart agreed to star in the film, but only if it could be produced later in 1953, and only if Hitchcock would direct. Hitchcock was inclined to say yes, “assuming I was able to do it [
Rear Window
] after
Thief
,” in his words. He awaited Bernstein’s opinion.

Not the least important of several events that occurred in early 1953, Bernstein had departed on a monthlong Far East trip, a dream vacation announced as an ostensible “fact-finding trip” for future Transatlantic productions. But in truth the vacation spelled the demise of Transatlantic; when he returned from his vacation, Bernstein realized that he simply didn’t want to produce motion pictures. Transatlantic was mired in debt, and Hitchcock’s partner was tired of the risks and pressures of the business. Bernstein was constantly on call to Hollywood, but he felt more at home in London. Anxious to simplify his life, he decided to resign from the company.

There was no Transatlantic without Bernstein. But Hitchcock took the news calmly; he had half expected it, and he accepted the decision as temporary. Yet Bernstein’s retreat led directly to Hitchcock’s. He soberly reevaluated
The Bramble Bush
, which had begun as a Transatlantic project. Its story opened in Mexico, but most of the film was to be set near San Francisco, making for an expensive and challenging production. And if Bernstein bowed out,
The Bramble Bush
would have to become a Warner Bros. film, with Hitchcock wondering “whether it will make an important enough picture for these doldrum days.”

Warner Bros. didn’t care much about
The Bramble Bush.
The studio was in a frenzy over 3-D, the stereoscopic photography that simulated a three-dimensional effect. The studio’s 3-D
House of Wax
was drawing
crowds and setting box-office records across America. Jack Warner wanted Hitchcock to try the new format. Though initially dubious, the director believed Warner’s had short-shrifted
I Confess
in its advertising and publicity. All the support had gone to the “new toy,” in his words—the studio’s new 3-D pictures. Warner Bros. would take a different attitude toward a 3-D Hitchcock, and
The Bramble Bush
was too political for 3-D; the Mexican and San Francisco locations would be impossible in 3-D.

Better to hit the soundstage. In early April, Hitchcock asked the studio’s permission to drop
The Bramble Bush
and switch to the stage play
Dial M for Murder
, which he thought could be quickly and cleverly filmed in 3-D. Hitchcock told Bernstein he intended to shoot
Dial M for Murder
as a Warner Bros. film at Elstree in late summer and fall, then direct
Rear Window
for Paramount, following that with
To Catch a Thief
for Transatlantic in the spring of 1954. Cary Grant was still attached to
To Catch a Thief
and Hitchcock left the door open for Bernstein to change his mind and return to producing. Otherwise he would carry on alone.

Dial M for Murder
was a story about an English marriage gone stale. The caddish husband, discovering his wife’s affair with a visiting American, decides to stage her perfect murder in order to speed up his inheritance. Everything goes wrong; the wife, lured to the phone where a hired killer awaits her, fights back. She stabs the intruder to death (a famous scissors-stabbing scene in the play, which Hitchcock intended to turn into the best 3-D flourish of the film). The husband must frantically cover his tracks and organize the clues to fool the police and frame his wife. Only the American lover and a dogged police official refuse to believe the evidence, which is enough to convict her.

The play had originally opened in London in June 1952. Hitchcock did not see the show there, but Sidney Bernstein did so right away and gave it a good report. Hitchcock attended the Broadway production shortly after completing
I Confess
, and returned at least once after deciding to make a film version. Producer Alexander Korda, who had snapped up the rights to the play, profited by reselling them to Warner Bros.

Dial M for Murder
was a decidedly run-for-cover play, right down to its London setting. Indeed, Hitchcock hoped to shoot as much of the film as possible at Elstree, integrating second-unit footage from around London, but Jack Warner quickly vetoed that idea. Warner claimed he didn’t want to send the studio’s only 3-D cameras overseas, but “I personally think the real reason is that he will create a bad impression by making a picture abroad when the studio is virtually at a standstill,” Hitchcock told Bernstein.

The modest budget and tight schedule dictated Hitchcock’s expeditious filming decisions. Unlike with
Rope
, the only other play he adapted in Hollywood, Hitchcock had little time to rewrite
Dial M for Murder
, so the
film’s setting would remain London, its characters all British. The script-work for
Rope
had proven how long Americanization could take.

The film’s script was really “not a great problem,” Hitchcock wrote Bernstein, because the playwright, Frederick Knott (“quite a bright boy”), closely cooperated with Hitchcock. The film “will have to follow the play very closely,” the director explained, “because if any attempt is made to open it up the ‘holes’ will show, so I am treating it in a modified
Rope
style. After all, its great success as a play has been its speed and ‘tightness.’ ”

Of course one reason Hitchcock had hoped to shoot the film in London was to minimize Warner Bros. intrusions. “One cannot show modern London exteriors on the back lot,” Hitchcock informed Bernstein, yet “the [Warner’s] front office could see no difference between the Brownstone N.Y. street and Randolph Crescent, Maida Vale!” The story’s single, recyclable set was attractive to Warner’s, but even on interiors Hitchcock had to be on faux-English alert. His first fight, he reported to Bernstein, was over the “shocking taste of the set dresser” (adding, he’s “a contract man, so he’s a must”).

Although
Dial M for Murder
was planned for 3-D, Hitchcock didn’t foresee any outrageous effects. “No spears or chairs to throw at the audience,” he assured Bernstein. He would stage it all quite simply, letting his camera glide fluidly around the furniture to add subtle depth of field. A good thing too, for—just as Hitchcock had anticipated—by the time
Dial M for Murder
went before the special cameras in August, the 3-D fad had faded. During filming it became common knowledge that, as Hitchcock informed Bernstein, “it is quite possible that
Dial M for Murder
may even go out as a flattie.”
^*

One of Hitchcock’s secret motives for switching to
Dial M for Murder
was that, at his urging, Cary Grant had seen the play, and was “very, very keen to play the lead”—at last fulfilling his ambitions to play a wife killer for Hitchcock. But Jack Warner vetoed that idea, too, saying he did not think it was “possible to overcome [the] public being used to Cary as a light comedy type,” in Hitchcock’s words. Privately, the director thought the real reason was that Grant had asked too high a salary, as well as a percentage of the gross; with
House of Wax
a smash hit in theaters during the negotiations, Warner believed any 3-D Hitchcock stood to earn a “big gross and he obviously thinks that Cary’s ten percent of the gross is too much to pay.”
^**

So instead Hitchcock engaged Ray Milland, an Oscar winner for
The
Lost Weekend
(and Best Actor at Cannes that year, beating Cary Grant in
Notorious
). Milland was a hardworking actor, but without Grant’s charisma. “Cost,” Hitchcock dryly informed Bernstein, “$125,000.”

The cast of the Broadway show yielded two actors for the film who needed little rehearsal in reprising their roles. John Williams had played the Inspector and Anthony Dawson was Lesgate, the crooked ex-classmate blackmailed into handling the murder. Hitchcock had tried to promote the countercasting of suave Louis Hayward as Lesgate—the part he was still calling, in silent-film parlance, the “heavy.” But Hayward asked for $10,000, which taxed the studio’s bargain budget of $805,000 (before overhead), a ceiling already burdened by the $150,000 and percentages passed to Korda for the screen rights. Dawson, a Scot, was less of a name to American moviegoers, and he also required less of a salary, earning a mere $8,000 for his role. Savings to the budget: $2,000.

Robert Cummings seemed the best man available for the second lead, the American crime writer Mark Halliday. Hitchcock had a soft spot for the self-effacing star of
Saboteur
, a periodic guest at Bellagio Road. Besides, Cummings took a low salary of $25,000.

For Margo, the victim of her husband’s jealousy and greed—and the only lady in the cast—Hitchcock couldn’t afford a top star. But here he turned his limitations to advantage.

The budget needed an unknown, or at least an actress who wouldn’t demand an inordinate salary. Hitchcock remembered a discarded Twentieth Century–Fox screen test, in which he had seen a young hopeful portray an Irish immigrant girl. Her accent was wrong, but the actress was irresistibly photogenic. John Ford’s
Mogambo
was being shown around Hollywood, and Hitchcock was able to watch the young actress in her latest film—the breakthrough role for this twenty-four-year-old, whose electric charm and sensuality were not so evident in her first two films. Still a relative newcomer in the spring of 1953, Grace Kelly was not yet in demand. MGM, which owned her contract, was willing to loan her out for only $14,000.