Hitch (12 page)

Hitch was intrigued to note Novello's skill in managing publicity. When the rest of
Downhill
was completed they still had a couple of necessary close-up shots left to do of Novello staggering through the East End of London on his return to England. Hitch had already begun work on his next film,
Easy Virtue
, and was on location on the Riviera. Novello came down very grandly, checked into the Hotel de Paris in Nice for one night, gave a lot of interviews there in his suite, and then, having got that out of the way, vanished to a very humble pension for the rest of his time on location. The shots were done on the flat roof of the pension, with a couple of men holding a painted backdrop of the London docks while Novello walked on the spot in front of it in the bright Mediterranean sunlight and the natives looked on incredulously, speculating as to what on earth these crazy Englishmen could be doing.

The second of the straight assignments Hitch found himself working on in 1927 (started, as will be gathered, so hot on the heels of
Downhill
he had not even finished the one before he was well into the other) was on an even more unlikely subject. At least the play of
Downhill
was episodic and featured a variety of locales. But Noël Coward's play
Easy Virtue
was almost completely dialogue-bound, a deliberate evocation of the kind of problem drama about women with pasts and families with principles which had been enormously popular some thirty years earlier. A perverse subject to make into a silent movie, evidently, but Hitch was not to be easily beaten by it. The story is spread out to include locations in the South of France and the English countryside, and framed by two sessions in court to establish the hapless Larita's shady background and unfortunate fate. (As she leaves the court for the second time she says to the photographers outside, in what Hitch calls the worst title he ever wrote, ‘Shoot—there's nothing left to kill'). Everything which is explained in the play about Larita's guilty secret and her wooing by an idealistic young man who knows nothing of it is shown in the film—in fact the play as written by Coward does not begin till about halfway through the film.

Hitch never actually worked directly with Noël Coward on the film—he scripted it himself with Eliot Stannard and, to start with, Ivor Montagu. It is curious to speculate on how Coward and Hitchcock would have got on at this stage in their respective careers: they were almost exact contemporaries and came from very similar backgrounds, but had gone in very different directions right from their professional beginnings. Coward was already Novello's chief rival as a theatrical idol, though while Novello's was the traditional romantic image, Coward's was that of the sophisticated, cynical, bright-young-thing generation, whose most publicized representative he had become with the phenomenal success of his play
The Vortex
in 1924. Coincidentally,
The Vortex
had been filmed almost at the same time as
Easy Virtue
by Adrian Brunel, fellow member of the Hate Club, and starring none other than Ivor Novello—not too successfully, since that film just plodded along in the wake of the play, loaded with dialogue titles, where Hitch's film took off gleefully on its own.

Easy Virtue
contains some great Hitchcock ideas and a few out-and-out Hitchcock tricks—the kind of thing he took pleasure in doing as much as anything because no one could guess how he did it. There is a classic instance of this near the beginning of the film when he makes the judge in the divorce court look at the attorney through a spyglass. He wanted to match this gesture with a close-up of the attorney from the judge's point of view, but for technical
reasons it was impossible to change the focus quickly enough to achieve the effect directly. So instead Hitch had a giant plaster hand and a huge spyglass made, to look, when photographed, like the judge's hand and glass close to the camera. He then used a double of the actor playing the attorney in the long shot which is instantly obscured by the raising of the spyglass, put the real actor behind camera in the same pose reversed, and had the giant pseudo-spyglass fitted with a mirror, so that when it was raised into shot the apparently magnified image through the spyglass was actually a natural-sized image reflected in the mirror.

Such intricate exercises in mechanical ingenuity do not make up the whole of the film's inventiveness, though. One of its most charming scenes turns on a very functional story-telling idea, and a little personal discovery. Larita (played by Isabel Jeans) is being courted by a respectable, idealistic young man who does not know about her past. Finally he asks her to marry him, and she, torn between fear and desire, tells him to telephone her that evening for her answer. He does so, and the whole of the ensuing scene is played not on either of the principals, but on the switchboard operator. She hooks them up, pays little attention to their conversation for a moment, then starts to listen in, and we see the to-and-fro of their discussion on her face, concluding with a triumphant smile as Larita finally says yes. By doing it this way Hitch saved the cost of two sets, found a witty visual way of getting over what would otherwise be a boring exchange of dialogue—and gave a first chance to a new girl he had noticed on stage, who went on to be an important star and a lifelong friend, Benita Hume.

By the time
Easy Virtue
was completed and released there was already a cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, on the horizon of world cinema. On 6 October 1927
The Jazz Singer
, the first part-talkie feature had its New York première and the days of the silent movie, whether many people then realized it or not, were numbered. For the moment, though, the news had relatively little effect in Britain. No British film producers could afford to invest in all the new equipment required for a still-experimental process, which might well prove to be just a flash in the pan. And anyway at this time they were having their work cut out for them, as usual, just to keep functioning even on the much more modest level normal in Britain. So much so that the generally apathetic Government was persuaded late in 1927 to pass the Cinematograph Films Act,
which set up a quota of British films required to be booked into British cinemas. Though there was some violent opposition to the act from those who saw in it a danger that the cinemas would be flooded with poor-quality British films taking advantage of their protected situation, at least it was a shot in the arm for the industry—even while the bill was passing slowly through Parliament (May-December 1927) finance became a lot easier.

One incidental result of this period of optimism and expansion was the setting up of a new company called British International Pictures, headed by John Maxwell, a solicitor from Glasgow who had been involved in film exhibition and distribution since 1912. The company rapidly gathered assets—a couple of distributing companies, cinemas, subsidiary production companies, and Elstree film studios. It also signed up as much talent as it could to back up its claims to eminence in the newly secure-seeming British film industry. Most importantly, it acquired Alfred Hitchcock, who was prized away from Michael Balcon and Gainsborough with promises of new freedom, bigger and better budgets—a considerable inducement since Gainsborough's finances were painfully modest and Hitch had not been too happy with either of his assignments since
The Lodger
.

At least the first film he made for BIP was a subject of his own choice, an original script by himself and Eliot Stannard (whom he had brought with him from Gainsborough) set in the world of boxing and entitled
The Ring
. Hitch had never felt any great interest in boxing, any more than any other sport, but he used to go quite often to the Albert Hall for the big fights, as much as anything to observe the curious rituals: the smart audience all dressed up in black tie to sit around the ring; the habit of pouring a whole bottle of champagne over a fighter to revive him at the thirteenth round. All of which contributed to the later stages of the film. The tawdry side-shows among which the early scenes are set represented another aspect of that seamy underside of show business which had always fascinated Hitch, and did give him the chance to show with vivid location reality a whole spectrum of lower-class English life which at that time had rarely if ever been seen on the screen. Since meticulous realism is seldom an end in itself in Hitchcock films (even in
The Wrong Man
, which makes a big point of telling a real-life story just as it happened) it has not been too much noticed as one of the effects he has at his disposal. But many of the
most memorable parts of
The Ring
are these incidental scenes of almost documentary material in the fairground and later in the fight crowds. And some of the details Hitch was most proud of at the time were the little realistic notations which few if any in his audience would consciously notice—like the contrast between the very battered, worn card indicating the first round in the fights of ‘One Round Jack' against all challengers and the brand-new, unused card they have to get out when one challenger unexpectedly manages to hold out till round two.

The story of
The Ring
is none too subtle: a side-show fighter (played by the Danish actor Carl Brisson) is discovered and taken up by a professional promoter and the reigning champion (Ian Hunter). His discovery enables him to marry his girl-friend from the fun-fair, even though she is undecided which she is more interested in, him or the champion, and after her marriage she continues to wear the snake bracelet the champion gave her and to go out with him in spite of her husband's understandable jealousy. The title refers to the boxing ring, the wedding ring and possibly also the bracelet, and there are some strong visual effects (of the kind Hitch was later to label naïve) emphasizing these symbolic identifications, such as the shot of the heroine's hand as the wedding ring is put on her finger and simultaneously the bracelet falls down over her wrist from where it has been concealed under her sleeve. And there is a lot of rather Germanic play with mirrors, usually returning deceptive images, as when it looks as though the heroine and the champion are flirting at a party because of the angle from which the husband is observing their reflection. Compared with the intricacy of some of these effects, there are moments which at the time do indeed seem naïve, like the passage of time being indicated by the champagne at the boxer's celebration party going flat as they all wait for his wife to come home, or his professional progress marked by his name moving further and further up a billboard while round about the seasons change (snow is succeeded by blossom and so on).

Still, noticed such effects were. The critic of the
Bioscope
announced enthusiastically that it was ‘the most magnificent British film ever made', and most of the other critics were inclined to agree that it was pretty good. Admittedly Hugh Castle, in the highbrow magazine
Close-Up
, said that ‘Hitchcock just missed great things in
The Ring
', but then he rarely praised British films anyway. The film did not do very well commercially, but it helped to forward
Hitch's career, gave him the satisfaction of receiving a round of applause at the première for an elaborate montage in which the hero fantasizes a kiss between his wife and his rival to a welter of distortions, with a piano keyboard twisted into abstract patterns, and constituted in his estimation the second real Hitchcock film. He certainly felt, and feels, much happier about it than about any of the next three films he made for British International. His assessment of these films is arguable, and probably influenced by various adverse circumstances associated with their production at the time. Also, maybe, by their failure to make much mark either critically or commercially. Two of them,
The Farmer's Wife
and
The Manxman
, were derived from works in other media which had already had considerable success in their own right, with the consequent limitations on what a film-maker could hope to do with them. The third,
Champagne
, which came in between, was at least based on an original story in which Hitch had some hand, but he was absolutely prevented from shooting the story he wanted, so that was not too pleasing an experience either.

There were compensations. While Hitch was preparing and shooting
The Farmer's Wife
, Alma was working on a script for someone else: Adrian Brunel's version of Margaret Kennedy's romantic best-seller
The Constant Nymph
, featuring two familiar figures in the Hitchcocks' lives, Ivor Novello and Benita Hume. Alma was among friends, and she did not have to go on location with
The Farmer's Wife
—a relief for the best of all possible reasons: she was pregnant. On 7 July 1928 she gave birth to a daughter, christened Patricia, the Hitchcocks' first and as it turned out their only child.

While Alma was pregnant the Hitchcocks had acquired, for the then fairly substantial sum of
£
2,500, another home, a small Tudor cottage in Shamley Green, a village just outside Guildford, about thirty miles south-west of London. It was a modest enough farmworker's house in its own large garden and with its own private strip of woodland right behind. In the middle of the woodland was a concrete septic tank, from which the agent drew a glass of water and held it up in front of a newspaper to show it was so clear you could read through it; the demonstration would have been more convincing if he had drunk the water, Hitch reflected. Almost at once he set about expanding and remodelling the house. He found a derelict Tudor barn up the road and suggested they should buy and re-use the timbers. But his architect, Woodward, was outraged:
everything had to be done in the original fashion, with new oak cut with an adze, naturally seasoned and secured with wooden pegs. All of which seemed to take an age, with the architect occasionally looking in to point out ecstatically how he had carefully used irregular timbers for the ridge of the roof, to give it a picturesque built-in sag. He also tried to insist that the interior heating be kept down to 60° in the rooms, 50° in the halls, so as to avoid shrinkage of the wood. But here Hitch was adamant: at any cost he and his new family were going to be comfortable, so up went the temperature to 70° and 60°, even though he noted that this had the effect of aging the new wing a hundred years in just one winter. At this time some restorations were being carried out to the exterior of Pugin's Victorian Gothic Houses of Parliament, and Hitch acquired some carved stones from among those being replaced which bore the letters A and H: the signature was proudly incorporated in the façade of the new building as a finishing flourish.