Hitch (11 page)

From Paris, Hitch and Alma headed on to spend most of their honeymoon at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz. It was, and is, Hitch's favourite hotel in the world. Still in the hands of the family who owned and ran it when he and Alma first went there, it remains one of the very few luxury hotels unaffected in its appearance or its service by the passage of time and changing standards. Or so Hitch says—and he should know, since he and Alma have returned sentimentally to the scene of their honeymoon over the Christmas-New Year season every year they possibly could since 1926. Such a romantic gesture seems curiously at odds with the conventional image of Hitchcock the cynical joker and ruthless specialist in the macabre. Of course, Hitch does profess himself mystified by the way the people he meets persist in identifying him with the materials of his trade ('If they did but realize it, I'm more scared than they are
by things in real life'), but if this is really the case, like most scared people he goes to considerable lengths to disguise his own vulnerability. The fact remains that his marriage with Alma was unmistakably a love match from the start, and has been an exclusive dedication and devotion ever since, a personal and professional union on all possible levels.

Immediately on their return there were practical matters to be resolved. They were both due to go straight back to work on Hitch's next film,
Downhill
. But before that they had the job of moving into their new married home, a top-floor flat at 153 Cromwell Road, in West London. The flat was a maisonette, up ninety-odd stairs (no lift, needless to say). Since Hitch had himself been an art director, and now had many contacts in the studio art department, he designed the interior himself with furniture and fabrics from Liberty's and had technicians from the studio carry out his designs. It was the first time either he or Alma had lived away from their respective family homes—as unmarried children they had been expected to stay on at home, so all the time they had been working at Islington and courting Hitch and Alma had had to travel halfway across London, he from Leytonstone in the east, she from Twickenham in the west, to meet more or less in the middle. Now they had set up a comfortable, modest home in a conservative English style—solid, traditionally designed furniture, chintzes, polished wood and brass. It was from the first a charming, happy, lived-in home, cosy rather than imposing. The Hitchcocks entertained a lot, and remained happy in their first London home until they moved to America in 1939. By the mid-1930s Hitch was making a lot more money, and much in his life-style had changed. But though he had by then acquired an (also fairly modest) country home as well, he staunchly resisted all suggestions from Michael Balcon and others that he should move to fashionable Mayfair: ‘I never felt any desire to move out of my own class.'

As well as a new home, Hitch now had a reputation to keep up: that created by the phenomenal success of
The Lodger
, which had really confirmed his standing with the critics as the leading British film-maker. This, and the value of it, was something he understood very quickly: understood, indeed, better and more effectively than anyone else. At the time of
The Lodger
Hitch joined an informal club called the Hate Club, along with Ivor Montagu, Adrian Brunel, and various other people connected one way or another with films. The
idea was that they should get together from time to time to blow off steam, discuss (often in the most inflammatory terms) people and situations which displeased them. On one occasion the question at issue was, who did they make films for? Some said that it had to be for the public; others said the distributors or the exhibitors, for unless you pleased them first how could you hope ever to reach the public? Hitch alone held out in silence. Finally, someone asked him what he thought. Oh, he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, for the press, of course. The critics were the only ones who could give one freedom—direct the public what to see, hold a gun at the heads of the distributors and exhibitors. If you could keep in well with them, keep your name and work in the papers, and so the public eye, the rest was easy.

Apparently everyone present thought Hitch was crazy—or, worse, cynical, admitting openly his own opportunism. Of course, it is easy to say now that the years have proved him right, but the question is not so clear-cut as all that. Hitch's uniqueness resides not so much in his recognition thus early of the power and value of publicity, not even in his skill in exploiting it, but in his combination of this insight with the consistent power to deliver. There have been others who guessed the power of personal publicity and self-advertisement—Cecil B. de Mille and Orson Welles have been no sluggards in that regard—and there have been many highly talented artists who have never evinced any ability to sell themselves in the market-place. But no one apart from Hitch has been so consummate a master in these two complementary but not necessarily coexistent spheres of activity. The pattern was already beginning to form in the 1920s. But it could not yet be said that a clear image of Hitch, or the ‘typical' Hitchcock movie, had emerged.
The Lodger
was a distinctive achievement, and looking back at it now one can see all kinds of touches which seem to point the way towards things to come, beyond the thriller element—the suggestions of sexual perversity in the relations of the lodger and the girl, for example, in which Hitchcock first explores a sado-masochistic pattern which recurs often in films as light as
To Catch a Thief
and as intense as
Marnie
: the girl is drawn to the lodger, he suggests, partially because she half suspects he may be the crazed killer, rather than in spite of this. All of which seems surprisingly sophisticated, or at least knowing, in one who had not yet gone, virgin as he says, to his own marriage bed. And already Hitch was conscious of the sexual
overtones also in the situation of being handcuffed, the pleasures as well as the pains of bondage and humiliation, in the climactic scenes of the lodger's arrest, escape and pursuit. For the first time in his films, but by no means the last, he found a way of channelling, exploiting and maybe temporarily exorcising his own anxieties and terrors faced with authority in any shape or form.

More noticeable, naturally, to spectators at the time was the purely technical adventurousness of the film. The elaborate montage of the opening scenes in particular was an immediate attention-grabber, and the famous individual effects later in the film, like the glass ceiling and the mysterious, menacing descent of the lodger represented by just a gloved hand seen gliding closer and closer down the banister rail of the curving staircase, were all instantly seized on. If they were a little too showy in their context, at least Hitch knew what he was doing. When a shot was really just too farfetched, like the one he laboured long but in vain to perfect in
The Lodger
, where a police van with two small round windows in its rear doors would take on the appearance of a face with rolling eyes as a result of the swaying of its occupants seen through the windows, then he generally let it go—there was always method in his madness.

One other thing little remarked at the time—as how should it be?—which later became an important gimmick in his films was Hitch's own personal appearance. In a scene in a newspaper office he is to be glimpsed sitting with his back to the camera, but reasonably recognizable—he claims it was just because they needed another extra there and no one was to hand. It has also been said that he is part of the crowd by the railings at the end of the final chase, but having examined the sequence carefully I suspect that it is someone who, in the darkness, from certain angles, looks like him. The point is immaterial: this was the first of the famous personal appearances Hitch has made through the years as his trademark—another instance of his remarkable gift for publicity and catching the public's attention as a personality, a recognizable person, at a time when film directors were generally mysterious beings who stayed behind the camera and hardly impinged in any way on the awareness of the moviegoing public.

For the moment, though, Hitch was set to work on a much more routine project which did not particularly appeal to him but had certain practical advantages. It was
Downhill
, starring Ivor Novello,
and based like
The Rat
on a play Novello had written for himself in collaboration with the actress Constance Collier under the collective pseudonym of David Lestrange. It is not, one would gather, among the films Hitch feels particularly proud of nowadays—he is the first to make fun of titles such as (when the hero is about to be expelled from public school for supposedly getting a local shop-girl in trouble) ‘Does this mean I won't be able to play in the Old Boys' match, sir?' And the film undeniably does have its moments of absurdity (though the example cited is surely not as absurd as all that—not anyway if one takes the hero as the age he is supposed to be rather than the age Ivor Novello appears), as well as its naïve illustrative touches, like the literal setting out of the hero on the downward path after his father has turned him out by going down a ‘Down' escalator in the London Underground. (The shot in question was made late at night in Maida Vale station, Hitch coming straight on from the theatre to do it, incongruously dressed in white tie and tails.)

But seen today
Downhill
comes over as one of his liveliest and most joyously inventive silent films—possibly a lack of any great sympathy with the material (‘A poor play', Hitch says) made it easier to regard the film as an exercise in technique. His attitude to the public school in which the drama starts (a little grander than but not so different from Hitch's own boarding school of St. Ignatius) is, seemingly, not over-romantic—this is no starry-eyed
Goodbye Mr. Chips
view of upper-class youth at school from the viewpoint of the deprived
petit-bourgeois
. But, as so often, the real pleasures are all out of school: some hint of what Hitchcock can do comes right away in the scene at Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe where the hero, Roddy, and his best chum toy with the willing shop-girl's affections to a battery of Germanic lighting effects and a lot of play with the motion of a bead curtain (not to mention a little comic distraction of the kind Hitchcock was to use over and over again in suspense contexts, when a little boy comes into the shop with a penny and is served by one of the visitors).

Perhaps the most astonishing moment of all comes later on, in a shot which prefaces Roddy's sojourn in the ‘world of make-believe'. He has just been turned out of his own home by an irate father. Now we see him in close-up, looking reasonably cheerful, in evening dress. Then the camera pulls back and we realize that he is in fact a waiter. The couple he is waiting on then get up from the table and move on to the dance floor, where they seem to be performing with
slightly surprising abandon for a
thé-dansant
. And suddenly, while the camera continues to move out and round, the ‘waiter' joins in the dance also, and we are able now to see that this is all taking place on a stage, before an audience as part of a musical comedy—it is a sort of Chinese box of illusion within illusion. The first time it works by surprise and suddenly making us conscious that the filmmaker's art and ingenuity are being applied; on further viewing it continues to work, but with the added interest of our being able simultaneously to see exactly how it does work. And at the time
Downhill
was made absolutely no one else in the British cinema was working with this kind of cinematic imagination, telling a film story with this mind-grabbing command of the medium's possibilities—which, one senses, Hitch was incapable of not doing, even with a subject not at all to his taste.

The shooting of the film did not go off entirely without incident. For one thing, Hitch had a quarrel over a rather strange matter of principle with Ivor Montagu, who had helped him change the apparent disaster of
The Lodger
into a triumph and was now working on the scripting and editing of
Downhill
. Montagu, as befitted a young intellectual invader of the cinema, had all sorts of principles about what could and couldn't, or should and shouldn't, be done in films. He objected particularly to shots which seemed to contain a built-in impossibility, or to be cheating in some way. He himself admits to a measure of inconsistency: he introduced into
The Lodger
a shot of a hand switching off an electric light a split second before the light actually goes out—a practical impossibility which nevertheless had to be put up with if the gesture was going to be read on screen. But a shot Hitch was determined to include in
Downhill
stuck in Montagu's gullet. It was a scene in a taxi with the knees of the hero, his new love and her older protector all touching in a rather equivocal manner, photographed from directly above. Montagu complained that the shot was from an impossible viewpoint—not even a fly on the ceiling of the taxi could see things that way, unless the taxi was ten feet tall. Hitch, characteristically, didn't care: the shot showed what he wanted it to show, and that was that. Montagu was irritated at his inability to put over his point, and though he remained quite friendly with Hitch he departed after preliminary work on
Easy Virtue
, and he and Hitch did not work together again until seven years later, when fate and Michael Balcon reunited them on the first
Man Who Knew Too Much
.

Ivor Novello was very different to work with. Six years older than Hitch, he had become known first as a song-writer, then as an actor and dramatist, and with the original stage production of
The Rat
in 1924 had got well on the way to being the great matinée idol of his generation. He was a romantic star in the classic manner, eventually to be associated mainly with a long series of sentimental operattas in which he himself usually starred, beautiful and lovelorn, dutiful and sad. His private personality was very different—funny and charming, homosexual in a somewhat swishy way, and a toughly practical businessman. Different as they were, he and Hitch became quite friendly during the two films they made together, and
Downhill
is really the only film Novello appeared in which suggests something of his sense of mischief and fun. Originally it suggested even more of this. Hitch shot a scene in which Novello and Ian Hunter, rivals for the affections of the same woman, have a knockdown fight which starts quite seriously with them formally dressed, Hunter in morning coat and striped trousers. Then they start throwing things which get bigger and bigger until they are each wrestling with pedestals almost as large as themselves which end by knocking them both down. But the studio took a dim view of this farcical turn of events—it was, they said, no way to present a romantic idol, and out the scene had to come.