Hitch (14 page)

Nowadays Hitch tends to be critical of the way he used the dialogue: it does not flow; it sounds like spoken titles rather than having an independent life of its own. (Actors in early talkies used actually to refer to the process as ‘speaking their titles'.) To an extent this is true. But the film, made before the talkie medium had hardened into convention, also enjoys the freedom of the early sound film to use dialogue only as and when it seems positively useful. Soon afterwards, the idea of the 100-per-cent talkie became just that, and
film-makers had to fight in order to retain the basics of visual storytelling in their films. But despite some inevitable technical crudities in the recording,
Blackmail
is for most of its length remarkably assured. And this even despite the awkward necessity of using someone else's voice for Anny Ondra, whose heavily accented English would sound rather strange coming from the mouth of a London shop-keeper's daughter. At this time, naturally, such refinements as dubbing and post-synchronization in a recording studio were unheard of: all the speech had to be recorded directly at the time of shooting. So Hitch devised for himself a method whereby another actress, Joan Barry, stood off-camera speaking Anny Ondra's lines while she mouthed them as closely synchronized as she could manage—to highly convincing effect, be it said.

Since Hitch already had shot for the silent version the strongly visual opening montage, the killing when the heroine knifes her would-be seducer in his studio apartment, and the final chase through the British Museum, he felt he could afford to experiment a bit elsewhere with the conspicuous use of sound, instead of just adding dialogue. And at this point he invented the scene which figures in every textbook and impressed critics and public alike as much as the glass ceiling with Ivor Novello's feet pacing had in
The Lodger
, This occurs just after the killing. The heroine has managed to sneak home unobserved, and is trying to pretend that everything is as usual. Her mother rouses her from the bed she has just got into, fully clothed, and she comes down to breakfast. There the conversation is all about this mysterious stabbing the night before, and gradually we hear what is being said as though through her hypersensitive ears: ‘What a terrible way to kill a man,' says the chattering neighbour. ‘With a
knife
in his back. Now I would have used a brick maybe, but I'd never use a
knife
. A
knife
is a terrible thing. A
knife
is so messy and dreadful …,' and so on, as the words become an almost indistinguishable litany with just the word ‘knife' stabbing out with full volume and clarity. This kind of subjective distortion was a complete novelty at the time, and if today it seems perhaps a little too obtrusive and self-conscious (like the ceiling shot in
The Lodger
), it was a sensation in 1929.

The film has another point of similarity with
The Lodger
: in it Hitch was not allowed to use the ending he had originally intended, but was forced to settle for a more conventional happy ending. What he originally intended was to bring back at the end the same sequence
of events in the arrest and imprisonment of a suspect as he had used at the beginning, only this time the suspect would be the heroine. Again the arresting officer would be her boy-friend, but there would be no sign between them—he would just mechanically do his job, and at the end, after she has been led away, the other policeman would ask him, as before, ‘Well, what are you doing tonight, going out with your girl?' He would answer without apparent emotion, ‘No, not tonight,' and walk out. Obviously this would be an ironically effective conclusion; equally obviously it would be distressingly downbeat for an audience which has been suffering along with the heroine and empathizing with her attempts to get away with it. In the process, of course, the audience has been persuaded to lay aside or suspend judgement on the question of her guilt, which, when you look at it dispassionately, is more than a little problematic. After all, the victim had only taken her up to his apartment (willingly enough on her part) and made a fairly violent pass at her—it would be difficult even to maintain that she killed him while resisting rape. So she would seem to be guilty of at least an unpremeditated panic killing, worse than manslaughter. The script obligingly switches our attention from this to the red herring of the blackmailer, both to gain sympathy for the heroine as the victim of such a low, sneaky criminal and to convince us, by dramatic sleight-of-hand, that his detection and pursuit are a parallel to the discovery of the real murderer in
The Lodger
which let the unjustly suspected hero off the hook. Some commentators eager to find the deep-laid Christian morality they argue is present in all of Hitchcock, read into the end of the film as it stands a strong suggestion that though the heroine does escape prosecution she and her policeman fiancé will be unable to escape the agony of a shared secret guilt for the rest of their lives. It is hardly likely, however, that Hitch intended anything so deep (or so trite, depending which way you look at it): for him the ending was and remains a ‘happy ending' forced on him as a compromise, and amusing mainly because it was a successful early exercise in wilfully warping an audience's moral perceptions to such a point that they would cheerfully applaud the spectacle of a murderer getting away scot-free.

The film has a number of other incidental whimsical touches which show Hitch privately enjoying himself. There is, for example, the characterization of the would-be seducer, who is not really in any important sense a villain, and is in fact played by Cyril Ritchard,
later famous in America as the king of light comedy and musicals. His talents in the musical direction are even employed in
Blackmail
by having him do a musical number at the piano before he is knifed. But he is, after all, out to lead the girl astray, which whimsically suggested to Hitch the moustachioed villain of melodrama. Actually he is clean-shaven, but in one shot Hitch arranged the lighting so that a shadow from a wrought-iron chandelier fell across his face in precisely the shape of a twirlable moustache. ‘My farewell to silent pictures,' he calls it.

A lot of the technique Hitch used in
Blackmail
was far more sophisticated than that, though—in particular the near-final chase through the British Museum, none of which could actually be shot in the British Museum, on account mainly of the poor light there. But Hitch, with his developing penchant for locating his action sequences in curious and visually striking places, had set his heart on the British Museum. So it all had to be done in the studio—with the aid of some quite complicated examples of the Schufftan process. Hitch had long-exposure photographs taken from the nine viewpoints from which he would have chosen to shoot in the Museum, made transparencies of them so that they could be back-lit to give the desired clarity and luminosity, then had the parts of the slides corresponding to the places where he wanted to put the live actors scraped away. The slide was then placed close to the camera and only the parts of the original setting immediately surrounding the actors built full-size so that when photographed the slide and the set fused together. All one might see, therefore, on the stage was a man by a door frame looking intently at nothing: the rooms on either side of the door frame and the cases of exhibits into which he appeared to be gazing were all on the slide.

All this had to be done in great secrecy, because Maxwell was worried about how long the film was taking to shoot and no one in the studio management knew much about the Schufftan process except that they mistrusted it as a new-fangled contraption which might well go wrong. As a cover, Hitch set up a second camera on the sidelines apparently photographing a letter for an insert. A lookout was posted, and if anybody from the front office was sighted approaching they would all drop what they were doing and suddenly be very intent on the letter until the danger was past. So successful was the stratagem that when the rough cut of the film was shown to Maxwell and his staff everybody wanted to know exactly
when and how Hitch had found time to shoot this whole elaborate chase sequence on location in the British Museum. Indeed, even today it is hard to tell what was shot in the studio and what, if any, on the spot—even the shot of the blackmailer being chased across the roof of the Reading Room was done in the studio with a miniature combined in the camera with a skeleton ramp.

Blackmail
is also a first in another respect—inessential, perhaps, but immediately noticeable: it is the first film in which Hitch makes one of his cameo appearances. Admittedly he is visible, just, in
The Lodger
, but in
Blackmail
he makes a characteristic gag appearance which more or less requires him to be recognized. There he sits on the London Underground, a portly figure in a pork-pie hat, quietly reading a book, while a horrible little boy leans over the back of the next seat to torment him and receives a sharp but ineffectual jab for his pains. It is the precursor of and model for many other such moments, and it somehow symbolizes Hitch's emergence as a public figure—a position unique among British film-makers and ultimately to make him one of the most familiar faces and figures in the world.

The immediate effect of the film was very gratifying too. It was a considerable commercial success, and moreover was received with universal delight by the critics.
The Lodger
had encouraged the notion that perhaps, just possibly, there might be such a thing as a British film which could seriously be held up to comparison with the best that foreign film-makers could produce. Since then, British critics had been hopefully looking for something more to support this idea. True, Hitch's films—or some of them—had been pretty good, good enough to make the critics feel that their confidence was not misplaced. At the same time there were a lot of excuses and back-handed praise, a lot of head-shaking about the quality of the story material he had to work with. But now, with a communal sigh of relief, the film press could discover a worthy successor—and a film, moreover, which seemed to advance the medium itself, to put Hitchcock and the British cinema in the forefront of world development in the tricky new medium of the talkie. Even the usually superior
Close-Up
, though it deprecated the way the ‘knife … knife … knife' sequence had been ‘glorified in the English press', did still admit that it gave one ‘a clear idea of the potentialities of the medium' and concluded that in consequence ‘some of us are already beginning to say that talkies are an art.'

Among such might well have been Alfred Hitchcock, though, then and since, he was chary of striking any too pretentious a public pose on the subject of his private convictions: he would make the movies, and let the art take care of itself. And indeed his next assignment had precious little to do with art of any kind. Nearly all the major Hollywood companies had greeted the arrival of sound with some kind of spectacular revue film which would show off the talking (and singing) abilities of as many as possible of their stars in the most economical and easy-to-take form. Warners had
The Show of Shows
, with everyone from John Barrymore and Loretta Young to Bea Lillie and Rin Tin Tin; MGM offered
The Hollywood Revue of 1929
, with Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Jack Benny and many more; from Paramount there was
Glorifying the American Girl
, put together by Florenz Ziegfeld, and from Universal there was
The King of Jazz
, glorifying Paul Whiteman among others. So what more natural than that Elstree Studios should come out quickly with their own home-made counterpart,
Elstree Calling
?

Alas, there is many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, or the script and the screen.
Elstree Calling
is a truly dreadful compendium of terrible stage variety acts, mostly shot in as near theatrical conditions as possible by an array of cinematically inexperienced directors, including Jack Hulbert and André Chariot, under the general supervision of Adrian Brunel. Some of the songs were by Hitch's old collaborator Ivor Novello, and among the performers unhappily involved were Anna May Wong and the hero-to-be of British wartime radio, Tommy Handley. Hitch would seem to have had nothing at all to do with most of this: his contribution was the framing device which has a working-class family, not totally unlike those in
The Lodger
and
Blackmail
, trying frantically to tune in to the show on their new television set (which in early 1930 was more science fiction than science fact) and being constantly frustrated by the incompetence and irascibility of the father and the gleeful descriptions of what their more fortunate next-door neighbours have seen. The only point of interest now (and quite possibly to Hitch at the time) is that the father is played by the English comic Gordon Harker, who had already played substantial roles for Hitch in
The Ring, The Farmer's Wife
and
Champagne
. But otherwise Hitch's sequences (which cannot have taken more than a day or two to shoot), though they are the only bearable parts of the film, can hardly be said to occupy a meaningful place in the canon or in his life.

Indeed,
Elstree Calling
was only a strange interlude while he was preparing his next film, a far more imposing project and his first to be conceived from the start as a fully fledged talkie. Altogether too much of a talkie from Hitch's point of view, in fact, for nowadays he tends to dismiss
Juno and the Paycock
as just a photograph of the stage play. This is not actually fair—it is, if anything, rather less so than
Dial M for Murder
or
Rope
, but one can see what he means and he seems to have little love for either of those later movies either. And
Juno and the Paycock
(like
Rope
, unlike
Dial M for Murder
) was something which he specifically wanted to do. He had seen Sean O'Casey's original play set during the Irish Troubles several times, and been immensely impressed by it and by the acting of the Abbey Theatre company from Dublin. He particularly liked their simplicity and directness of effect, as opposed to the elaboration of C. B. Cochran's then recent production of O'Casey's
The Silver Tassie
, which he felt was too ‘gussied up', and was very struck by the last scene, which pushed humour to the point where it became deliberately sickening. He had mentioned this enthusiasm to Ivor Montagu, still a friend although they had gone separate ways professionally, and one day Montagu engineered a meeting between Hitch and the playwright on the set of
Blackmail
. O'Casey, who had never set foot in a film studio before, arrived exotically dressed in a tweed knickerbocker suit, and after looking around uncomprehendingly for a few moments, delivered himself of the rather surprising observation: ‘There's no education like the education of life'—a curious reaction, Hitch thought, to this world of illusion. His only comment on the idea of filming
Juno
was ‘Why do you want to do the bloody thing?' However, Hitch and O'Casey immediately hit it off, and the deal to bring
Juno and the Paycock
to the screen with some of the original Abbey Theatre cast, notably Sara Allgood as Juno, was soon finalized.