Hitch (16 page)

After making these rather enclosed, theatrical pictures which did not permit him to wander very far from the studios, Hitch was beginning to feel the need for a change of pace. Also, he and Alma had not had much of a holiday for some time, so the idea of a film subject which would involve foreign travel, documenting and shooting in strange places, was immediately attractive.
Rich and Strange
(eventually called in America
East of Shanghai
) was therefore a project close to Hitch's heart, and the first of his films since
The Ring
to be based on a story originally conceived for the screen, by Hitch himself developing a ‘theme' by Dale Collins. The basic notion is that an ordinary surburban couple win a lot of money which changes their life, mostly for the worse, as they set off, two innocents abroad, to go round the world on a cruise.

As it happened, Hitch and Alma had themselves recently been
on a cruise, with Pat, now four. They decided it would make an agreeable winter holiday to head for the sun, on a cruise ship which went down the coast of West Africa, then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and back. Things went along quite smoothly and restfully until they got to Bathhurst, in Gambia. There, each member of the party was given a car and a driver for the day, mostly friendly volunteers happy to see new people. By chance Hitch and Alma were assigned the local priest, who took them out to his mission church in the jungle. As they arrived they saw a native family with a small son stark naked sitting outside. The father motioned to the boy to go inside and put something on; after a moment he reappeared wearing a shirt down to the navel and nothing else, which seemed to satisfy everyone that the proprieties were being observed. On the way back the priest suddenly said as they approached a crowd, ‘I can't come any further with you—this is a demonstration for tourists.' What it turned out to be was a very decorous dance, presumably originating in some fertility cult, involving two sheaves of corn from which a smaller sheaf eventually emerged—scarcely more exciting or indecorous than a harvest festival in the average English village church. The cruise probably had little specific effect on the conception
of Rich and Strange
, except, Hitch says darkly, that it gave him and Alma a vivid sense of how rapidly cruise members, decent people all, get to hate one another after being cooped up for a while on board ship.

Before starting work in earnest on
Rich and Strange
, Hitch and Alma (who was writing the screenplay with Val Valentine) went to Paris to do some research on the background. They were planning a scene in which the central couple of the film, Fred and Em, go to the Folies Bergère and are taken in the interval to see some genuine belly-dancing. So Hitch and Alma went along to the Folies Bergère and in the interval asked a young man in a dinner jacket where they could see belly-dancing. He took them into the street and called a taxi: when they seemed surprised he told them the dancing was in an annexe. This was obviously odd, so Hitch guessed there must be some mistake, and when they stopped in front of a shady, anonymous-looking house he said to Alma, ‘I bet this is a brothel.' In his innocent youth he had never been to such a place, and neither of course had she, so, greatly daring, they decided to go in anyway. The girls all came down and paraded in front of them, they carried off the situation as best they could by offering champagne for all, and
then the madam matter-of-factly inquired which of the girls best suited Hitch's tastes and how they might accommodate the lady. Taking refuge in an exaggeratedly shaky grasp of French, the two of them beat a hasty retreat and headed straight back to the theatre, only to discover that they had not been at the Folies Bergère at all, but at the Casino de Paris, and were obviously behaving about as naively in foreign parts as the principal characters in their story.

Back in England they completed the script, cast it, and Hitch sent a second unit off to shoot the location scenes with a small group of actors and a skeleton crew, all of whom went on an actual cruise from Marseilles through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean out to Colombo. Because of the unusual length of the shooting schedule enforced by all this location work, he could not afford important stars, but recruited capable character actors from the West End stage: the central couple were played by Henry Kendall and Joan Barry (finally showing her face in a Hitchcock film after lending her voice to Anny Ondra in
Blackmail
), while Betty Amann played the phoney princess who attracts the husband's attention on board ship, Percy Marmont the young man who courts her, and Elsie Randolph, a charming musical-comedy star on stage, was grotesquely dressed and made up to play the rather cruelly caricatured role of the inevitable old maid and cruise bore.

The little background scenes for an Arab market, riding around in a rickshaw in the Orient and so on, were all shot without mishap, and the unit came back to the studio, where sets had been constructed with miraculous fidelity to match the location material, for most of the film. The story they were shooting is curious, to say the least—oddly bitter and gloomy, an adventure story in which all the adventures turn out badly. One thing everyone would agree: it could not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as ‘typical Hitchcock', whatever that phrase might mean. It has been rediscovered and enthusiastically praised in recent years, probably because of all his English films it is the closest in its density and ambiguity to the great films of his Hollywood years. Despite this, and despite the fact that it is, as Hitch himself says, ‘full of ideas', it does not finally seem very satisfactory. As so often in such cases, Hitch blames himself for casting wrongly—in particular, for putting Henry Kendall, a sophisticated West End comic actor and fairly obvious homosexual, in the role of Fred, the quintessential ordinary suburban husband.

But even though not ideally cast, and endowed with a curiously primitive quality in parts because most of the location scenes had to be shot silent and pieced together with titles of almost silent-movie profusion,
Rich and Strange
does have an oddly haunting quality. The opening scene sets the tone, with Fred melodramatically demanding LIFE, and maintaining that as they are, the best thing for them is the gas oven—it is at once farcical and curiously convincing in its bitterness, and should prepare us for a black comedy. The comedy which ensues is not quite black, but it is certainly very grotesque. The misadventures of the innocents abroad begin harmlessly enough with a drunken evening in Paris, and the odd little gag in which each thinks the other is praying as they stagger incapably to bed. But soon they are not so innocent—snobbery rampant leads both of them into trying to appear much grander than they are, particularly Fred, who becomes enamoured of the obviously bogus princess. Much of the comedy on shipboard turns on social humiliation of various kinds, and it should not come as a complete surprise when things take a nasty turn.

Still, it does—probably because the turn they take is quite as nasty as it is. What has begun as romantic dalliance comes seriously to threaten the couple's marriage and ends in total humiliation for him after a very unpleasant scene of confrontation between the two of them. Then they are shipwrecked, and as they prepare themselves for death they come to a sort of reconciliation: ‘Do you mind very much?' ‘Not now—I did at first. I'm scared, Em.' Still the comedy persists here and there—on the deserted, waterlogged ship Em still worries with surburban refinement about whether it would be all right for her to use the Gents. But the turn towards harrowing drama has been made. Being rescued by Chinese on a junk brings further trials: they see sudden death accompanied by a total unconcern for human life, they see a cat tortured and later, when its skin is pinned up, realize that they have eaten it, and finally they observe a woman giving birth in the most primitive, animal conditions imaginable. Perhaps they have learned their lesson; at least they return with relief to a nice steak-and-kidney pudding, the daily papers, and a wireless with new batteries—all the once-despised paraphernalia of suburban existence. And end where they began, with a minor marital squabble.

Have they been ennobled by suffering? Is the whole thing a simple morality demonstrating that one should know one's place and
stick to it? What, finally, is Hitch's attitude to these silly but not totally despicable characters? These are not the sort of question which can usually be profitably asked about a Hitchcock movie, though the temptation remains strong, allied to the feeling that if Hitch is a dramatic thinker his dramas must contain something which can be isolated and defined as thought. As a rule his films, those perfectly tooled cinematic machines, contrive to fend off the speculations of those who seek a corpus of philosophy which can be independently articulated. But occasionally there are films which trail enough loose ends or set off resonances so intense and rationally unjustified—
Vertigo
is one,
Marnie
another, and in its own crude way
Rich and Strange
is another—as to set one wondering what they mean, or meant, to him. Today he is evasive, or forgetful: it was an eccentric adventure story, it had nice things in it, but it didn't come off. And that is that. Or is it? We are still left with an obscure sense that here Hitch is somehow wearing his heart on his sleeve, or at least showing his hand more than he intends. Misanthropy might be an explanation; rejection of a particular class, the class from which he comes, might be another. Something lies beyond the scene, but what?

If we can come to no certain conclusion now, in the light of our knowledge of his subsequent career, it is hardly surprising that no one seemed able to understand
Rich and Strange
at the time. Certainly no one seemed to like it, or to understand why Hitch had wanted to make it. It had little critical and no commercial success, and Hitch was again in some difficulty. To make matters worse, his relations with John Maxwell and the front office at British International Pictures in general were deteriorating. He was unpredictable, unreliable (he might insist on making something as odd and uncommercial as
Rich and Strange
) and he did have this nasty, sneaky habit of ingratiating himself with the film press, so that he had some real independent standing denied everyone else who worked for the company. Also, the fortunes of the company were on the decline, and they were trying to make pictures ever more cheaply, getting at times right down into the ‘quota quickie' category. Hitch felt that his days with the company were numbered, but he was under contract, and did his best to be obliging. He even undertook to produce, though not direct, two real quickies for them, though in the event he only got round to making the first,
Lord Camber's Ladies
, a rather silly story about a poisoning directed by its script-writer, Benn W. Levy,
and starring Hitch's old friend Gerald du Maurier in one of his few film roles, along with Gertrude Lawrence (improbably muted and suffering as the poisoned wife) and Hitch's one-time discovery Benita Hume. The film was the cause of a break in the friendship between Hitch and Benn Levy, when Hitch one day on set began to instruct the prop man and Levy interrupted with ‘Don't take any notice of him!' After that they hardly spoke for thirty years.

This was actually the last film Hitch made for British International, but before it he did direct one more,
Number Seventeen
, itself little better than a quota quickie based on a stage play by Jefferson Farjeon which the company had bought cheap. As it happened, there was a property in the studio at the time in which Hitch was really interested: John Van Druten's recently successful stage play
London Wall
. To help him in the scripting he took on a young recruit to the scenario department at Elstree, Rodney Ackland, whom he had encountered on the set of
The Skin Game
and co-opted as an extra. Ackland was already a playwright of modest note, but for the time being he was a beginner in films, trying to find a niche for himself, rather mistrusted by the studio because he possessed, horror of horrors, a higher education. Hitch and he got on well from the outset, and they worked together on an adaptation of
London Wall
until with characteristic divide-and-conquer perversity Maxwell assigned it to one of the studio's other directors, Thomas Bentley, and gave Hitch instead this wretched play
Number Seventeen
—which, for some unaccountable reason, Bentley actually hankered after.

Hitch accepted with bad grace—he did not have much choice in the matter—but he and Ackland, fortified by a plentiful supply of Hitch's drink speciality at the time, a particularly potent White Lady, decided to get their own back by tearing the play apart and piling nonsense on nonsense until no one could take it seriously. Most of the film takes place in one set, a deserted house into which all the characters wander, either by accident or in answer to a mysterious summons; then for the climax there is a wild race between a hijacked Green Line bus and a boat train to the coast, ending in a spectacular crash of the train into the waiting cross-Channel ferry (all done with models, but impressive not withstanding). The talky, stagy bit of the film, which accounts for most of its skimpy 64 minutes, is actually shot with some enterprise and imagination—long moving-camera shots, a lot of chiaroscuro, dark
shadows and flashing lights. Which all serves to high-light the general ludicrousness of the plot, where everybody is in the dark all the time, no one knows who are the good guys and who are the bad, and people keep saying things like ‘Just like the pictures, isn't it?' as one melodramatic absurdity is piled on another. Gleefully elaborating, Hitch and Ackland decided that since the heroine in such stories is always pretty dumb anyway, they would go one stage further and make this heroine completely, literally dumb. And when at the end she suddenly proves able to speak, obviously no explanation is necessary other than the hero's crisp dismissal of it as ‘some crook's trick'. Despite which, nobody it seemed noticed what Hitch was up to: the front office accepted the film as a routine thriller, no better or worse than most such, and no one else tumbled to the parodistic intent—a Hitchcock private joke which really remained private.