It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (26 page)

“Montgomery Clift didn’t go anywhere without his acting coach, a woman named Mira Rostova. After every scene, he didn’t look at Hitchcock for a reaction. He looked at Rostova. Hitchcock just hated that.”

Clift prepared for the part by actually spending a week in a monastery, his friend, publicist John Springer, told me. The actor observed that because of the robes the clerics wore, they had a distinctive walk, pushing the fabric of their habits forward with their hands.

Karl Malden talked with me about his experience in
I Confess.

“I got the part of Inspector Larrue by one of those lucky chances in my life. In the early 1950s, I was in New York City and ran into Monty Clift. Everybody knew he was going to be a big star, but it hadn’t quite happened yet. Anyway, he was starting a new picture, being directed by Alfred Hitchcock. ‘You lucky bastard,’ I told him. Then, he said there might be a part in it that’s just right for me. He didn’t need to say more.

“Well, I got the part of Inspector Larrue, and I got to work with Hitchcock. It was everything I hoped it would be; more, but different from what I expected.

“I would describe Hitchcock as the ideal English gentleman. Every day he came to the set in a suit and a tie. I never once saw him take his jacket off or loosen his tie.

“He was the calmest director I ever saw, never ruffled, never any sign of being worried, never shouted, always in control. There was no unnecessary noise or talking or shouting on his set. It was a quiet set, because that’s the way he wanted it.

“Hitchcock and his wife had dinner every night at the great hotel in Quebec, the Château Frontenac. He had a table for eight, so every night six of us would be invited to have dinner with them. I was pretty nervous at first, but I would have been a hell of a lot more nervous if they hadn’t invited me.

“Hitchcock knew everything there was to know about food and wine, and he made the meal greater than if you ate in the same restaurant on your own. The food and company were great, and there wasn’t any shoptalk. He never talked about
I Confess
at dinner. It was as if it didn’t exist.

“Hitchcock was the director for the dining room, too. Those six places were rotated every night, and all of us who were lucky enough to be included in the group looked forward to our turn.

“One night I got pretty relaxed. After dessert I felt confident enough to ask him the question I’d been thinking about. I said, ‘You never tell us what you want. I know the blocking and the lines, but what I don’t know is what you expect from me.’

“He never missed a beat. Very evenly, calmly, he said, ‘You’re a professional, and I’m a professional. I simply expect you to do your job.’

“Nothing else was ever said about it.

“I have this image in my mind of Alfred Hitchcock putting together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle and knowing where each piece goes. There wasn’t anything he didn’t understand about making film. His camera was always exactly where it should be. He was an intuitive genius.

“Hitchcock didn’t like Method actors, but even when Monty had to stand and look out of the window while he found his character, Hitchcock didn’t raise his voice or show emotions.

“I remember my own experience one night, taking Monty home when he was really drunk. My car didn’t get over the experience for weeks, but I always remembered it was Monty who let me know about the film.

“I was looking forward to learning something from Alfred Hitchcock, but I really can’t remember
anything
he said to me. The way I knew Hitchcock liked what I did was when I saw the picture and I saw how much he had favored me with screen time—angles, cutting, everything. And it sure wasn’t because I was more beautiful than Monty.”

“You had to like him,”
I Confess
publicist Gary Stevens remembered. “He was doing the same thing in life as in those mini-cameos he did in the movies. He injected himself into situations which gave him an opportunity for a mini-cameo in life. He created himself his own way, and he got a big kick out of being Alfred Hitchcock.”

“S
OMEDAY
,” Hitchcock told me, “there will be three-dimensional wall video screens, and
Dial M for Murder
will come into its own. But at the time I was making that picture, I worried that 3-D might be a fad that would fade and that
Dial M
would go out as a ‘flattie.’

“If one is going to make a 3-D movie, the most convenient medium to adapt it from is the stage. A play is seen in 3-D normally, and within the confines of a stage set it’s much easier to control the added complications of shooting in 3-D. When I made
Dial M,
I was running for cover while waiting for the muse. A play is a safety net picture.”

The actress he chose to star in his new film was the young Grace Kelly before her great fame, to which he would contribute. She was the perfect Hitchcockian heroine, the cool, elegant blonde with, as Hitchcock said, “fire seething within.”

Edith Head told me that of all of the beautiful stars for whom she had designed clothes, Grace Kelly had the most perfect figure. “Grace had nothing to hide. She was perfect in her clothes because what was underneath was perfect.”

Head said that most of her job was “hiding work,” covering figure faults. “Even the beautiful stars who had to look perfect onscreen, they all had something to cover, all but Grace.”

Jack Cardiff had recommended
Dial M for Murder
to Hitchcock. “I called Hitch to tell him I’d seen a play in London on television that I knew would make a great movie for him. I phoned a friend who was a producer and urged him to switch on his set and watch it. He agreed it would make an excellent film, but when he tried to buy the screen rights, it was too late. Alexander Korda had already bought them. Korda sold them, and
Dial M for Murder
was made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.”

The play, introduced on BBC television, had a long stage run in London’s West End, followed by a success in America. Frederick Knott, who wrote the play, also wrote the screenplay.

The 3-D process required a much larger camera, essentially two synchronized cameras with two lenses and two strips of film. The larger camera unit made moving shots more difficult, almost returning to the immobile camera booths of early sound.

Special Polaroid glasses had to be passed out to each member of the audience for every showing of the film, and two projectors were needed to run simultaneously, in synchronization. Since most theaters
had
only two projectors, they either had to install two more or have intermissions between reels. The other option was to show the film in conventional format, which was usually the fate of
Dial M for Murder
after it left first-run theaters.

For 3-D, scenes were inserted specifically to exploit the illusion of depth. In the 3-D film
Man in the Dark,
an eye operation is seen from the viewpoint of the patient who has declined anesthesia, and scalpels seem to be poking the eyes of the screaming, empathetic audience. In
House of Wax,
a carnival barker bounces an elastic paddleball into the audience, and in
Kiss Me Kate,
a dancer seems to swing out over the audience.

Hitchcock’s use of 3-D is restrained, with depth effects being reserved for important moments, such as when Margot reaches back for the scissors or when Inspector Hubbard holds out the incriminating key in 3-D close-up.

For the credits, Hitchcock wanted a close-up of a telephone dial. It wasn’t possible to go in close enough on a real telephone dial using the 3-D process, so Hitchcock had an oversized prop telephone dial made. Later, when Ray Milland dials Grace Kelly from the club, the large dial is used with an oversized prop finger.

“3-D wasn’t anything new,” Hitchcock said. “They had it back in the ’20s as a novelty, using red-and-green glasses. Skeletons threw their skulls at the audience, or bats filled the theater.

“Since I couldn’t imagine Ray Milland or Grace Kelly behaving that way, I decided to redo the killing in
Blackmail,
when Anny Ondra reaches back to grab a bread knife to kill Cyril Ritchard. This time I would have Grace Kelly reaching back toward camera for something to defend herself, grabbing a pair of scissors. In 3-D, the scissors are in the foreground, and her hand seems to come back into the audience to grab them and kill the would-be strangler, who is in the background.”

At the beginning of the film, before a word is spoken, the relationship between the three main characters is clearly established when Grace Kelly dutifully kisses her husband, Ray Milland, and then passionately kisses her lover, Robert Cummings. This is an example of what Hitchcock described as “pure cinema.” This scene was not in the play, nor was the scene in which Ray Milland calls his wife from his club during the attempted murder.

Grace Kelly told me that when she was standing on the set of
Dial M for Murder,
a visitor was being introduced to Hitchcock by Ray Milland. She heard Hitchcock say to the man, “Call me Hitch, without a cock.”

Milland and his friend laughed. Then, Hitchcock looked over in her direction. “He was obviously embarrassed,” Kelly said, “fearing that I had heard.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘I heard that.’

“Hitch started to apologize, but I stopped him.

“Don’t worry. I went to a Catholic girls school, and by the time I was thirteen, I’d heard everything.” Kelly added, “And most of the information was wrong.”

Hitchcock, many years later, told me, “Grace Kelly had a wonderful sense of humor, if a bit bawdy.”

Hitchcock said that he wanted Miss Kelly to be wearing as little as possible when she is attacked, but he wasn’t quite certain how he should ask her to do this. He made a plan for her to wear a heavy red robe. He hoped that at the last moment he could prevail upon her to come out in “a nightgown that preserved some modesty, but not flannel with a ruffle.”

“When I mentioned the robe, she protested. ‘Oh, no. My character, alone in her home at night, wouldn’t stop to put on a heavy robe. It would be silly.’

“I said, ‘What do you suggest?’

“She said, ‘I have to come out in my nightgown.’

“Thus, it was Miss Kelly who chose that particularly flimsy nightgown, saying it was the style she, herself, would wear—if she wore one at all.”

W
HILE
H
ITCHCOCK WAS
working on
Dial M for Murder,
Lew Wasserman, was arranging a multi-picture deal for him with Paramount. Wasserman had been his agent since Myron Selznick died in 1944. Hitchcock would produce and direct five pictures that would eventually revert to him and four more pictures that would be Paramount’s. The first picture of this deal was to be
Rear Window,
for which Hitchcock felt he had to have Grace Kelly.

When Hitchcock offered Grace Kelly the part of Lisa Fremont in
Rear Window,
she already had planned to accept the lead opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s
On the Waterfront.

Then she heard from her agent that Hitchcock wanted her to be in Los Angeles for wardrobe fittings. “It was a big surprise,” she said, “because I was just ready to accept another role in a major film. I read the script, and I knew that
Rear Window
was for me.”

Rear Window
was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich, with a screenplay by John Michael Hayes; but there was a contributor not listed in the credits: Joshua Logan.

I was introduced to Joshua Logan by one of his closest friends, Henry Fonda. Logan, who lived at New York City’s River House, was a collector of automatons, Swiss music boxes with performing French dolls.

After I was announced by the downstairs reception, Logan wound every music box and dimmed the lights. When I entered his living room, every doll would be performing—the magician doing magic tricks, the ballerina performing a pirouette, the fortune-teller proffering a fortune, the clown doing acrobatics, all competing for attention. My favorite was a small French doll with pouty closed lips who sat at her vanity, powdering her face.