Hitch (20 page)

In the case of
The Secret Agent
, as the new project came to be called, what had happened was that Campbell Dixon, the film critic of the
Daily Telegraph
, had written a play based on ‘The Hairless Mexican', one of Somerset Maugham's stories about a secret agent called Ashenden (which, in turn, were inspired by Maugham's own experiences in the secret service during the First World War). Balcon had thought it sensible, and not too suspect, to buy the rights of the play and commission Dixon to write a brief film scenario derived from it. And this was what he now wanted Hitch and Ivor Montagu to use in their next film. Montagu was very uncomfortable about this—it reminded him of his unfortunate experiences working with Eisenstein in Hollywood, when they had been shunted by studio politics from one property to another and never managed to bring any of them to fruition. But this time Hitch talked sense to him: once they got started elaborating the script, they could throw Dixon's outline out of the window and no one would notice or care—and at least Dixon could play, if he so wished, the one-upmanship game of telling people, ‘Oh, I'm working on the new Hitchcock film, you know.'

What Montagu specifically did not like was the basic idea of the script—that an agent has to kill the wrong man and then go right on to kill the right man next. He felt the audience's sympathies would not stand the strain of this, and therefore that the second killing had to be accidental and even the first killing should not be done by the agent's own hand, even if he had some over-all responsibility for it. Also, Montagu thought he saw in the story a chance to convey some kind of political message disguised as entertainment—something about the folly of power politics, and the
responsibilities of the individual. He now admits that he was wrong here, in that he was trying to go against the grain of Hitch's totally apolitical temperament, and that these undertones do confuse what should be the clear thriller outline of the plot. Hitch, more practically, looked from the outset for ideas that would keep the film lively from scene to scene, those famous Hitchcock touches. The first questions he asked were ‘Where does it take place? Switzerland. Right. What do they have in Switzerland?' The answer was mountains, lakes, chocolate and village dances, so each of these should be worked into the screen-play and made to play a positive role.

With these notions in mind Hitch and Charles Bennett began to hammer out a scenario. They went back to the original Maugham story and another in the Ashenden series, ‘The Traitor', for their central intrigue, and added the love interest which Campbell Dixon had devised for his play. Hitch decreed that the Alps were there in order that someone should fall into a crevasse, and the chocolate factories were there so that one could be used as an innocent-seeming cover for the crooks' headquarters. But despite many work sessions round the table in Cromwell Road, somehow the whole thing just would not jell. Finally in desperation Bennett was sent off to sketch out the entire treatment overnight, and the following morning he and Hitch flew out to Switzerland. There they went first to pick up Ivor Montagu at Kandersteh, where he was holidaying, then the three of them drove on into the Lauterbrunnen valley and stayed there, talking the story over day and night, until somehow they worked out what they should do with it. From here Bennett went home and Hitch took a quick trip into the Balkans, mainly to research himself the background for the final train journey in the draft script. He was mistrustful of the over-characterful costuming usual in those days for films set in exotic locations, remembering a classic
Punch
cartoon which compared different nationalities as we expect them to be (all in picturesque local costumes) and how they really are (all indistinguishable in standard modern clothes). And sure enough, he found in the Balkans that everyone dressed either completely conventionally or half-and-half, partly native, partly pure chain-store.

Back in England he set about the serious business of finalizing the script, casting and shooting the film. To keep up the American interest established with
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, he used two Hollywood stars, Madeleine Carroll again and Robert Young, who
normally played romantic and light comedy roles, as the villain of the piece. For the picturesque Mexican ‘general' who rather unreliably helps the hero in his task, Hitch again called on Peter Lorre. And for the hero, Ashenden, he looked, as so often in his British period, towards the London theatre and hit on John Gielgud. Gielgud at this time had been having enormous success in Shakespeare, particularly with his Hamlet and in a famous production of
Romeo and Juliet
in which he and Laurence Olivier alternated Romeo and Mercutio to Peggy Ashcroft's Juliet. He had made one or two films before, including a silent film,
Daniel
, in which he could not resist the bizarre proposition of playing a role written for Sarah Bernhardt, and Victor Saville's version of
The Good Companions
, which had made Jessie Matthews into a star but had not done so much for him. Consequently, he was not too keen on
The Secret Agent
, but Hitch seduced him into it by persuading him it was a sort of modern-day
Hamlet
about a man who could not make up his mind to carry out what he believed to be his duty.

If those possibilities were in the story as Hitch told it to him, Gielgud felt disappointedly that the script did not live up to them—it was just another thriller. However, even just another thriller, if it happened to be a Hitchcock thriller, could not be that bad, and he set to with a will. He persuaded Hitch to cast Lady Tree, the widow of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and a couple of other actors he had just been working with on stage in small roles, and he found old familiar faces at the studio in the shape of Ivor Montagu and the writer Angus McPhail, with both of whom he had been at school. But in general he became increasingly uncomfortable. Hitch was amiable but distant with him, and he felt that Hitch could have little confidence in him as a leading man if he had to fill out the cast with other stars like Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young and Peter Lorre—worries which Hitch did little or nothing to dispel.

Gielgud was also disturbed that his character, whose motivation seemed in principle the most interesting and complex, had been reduced to little more than a cipher; he was frightened of Madeleine Carroll, whom Hitch obviously adored and tended, he felt, to favour in the shooting; he was unnerved by Peter Lorre's cunning scene-stealing, not to mention his unpredictable absences hiding somewhere in the studio rafters to inject himself with the morphine to which he had become addicted. In short, the shooting was a nightmare for him, and he was glad to escape back to the relative calm
and sanity of the theatre. All the same, he ended with a grudging respect, and even affection, for Hitch, recognizing that he was an artist with an obsession—he was going to make his films in his own way, to his own standards, and even though he was always open to suggestion and positively welcomed improvisation, finally he used everything for his own purposes and did not leave much room for anyone else's creative satisfaction. Which was no doubt right for him and right for the films—they were, after all, first, last and always Hitchcock films—but could be dismaying for others involved.

Hitch himself was reasonably happy about the film. He liked what they had finally done with the given subject, and he had enjoyed a lot of the more fanciful details. But he still felt that something was wrong, though he could not quite put his finger on what it was. At the first preview the film aroused some incomprehension and hostility, mainly it seemed on account of a fancy device Hitch and Ivor Montagu had thought up to dramatize the train wreck at the end. To give a feeling of the complete, rending break this represented in the characters' lives, they had commissioned the abstract film-maker Len Lye to make a brief insert of coloured film which would look just as though the film itself had caught fire in the projector, shrivelled up and broken. The first audience thought this had actually happened, even though the film went on again as normal almost immediately, and the front office felt there was a danger of panic in the cinemas, so out it had to come. Montagu was for making a stand, but Hitch cut the offending passage without demur—he had liked the idea, but it did anyway look a little self-conscious and distracting, he thought, and he was willing to bow to pressure.

When it opened, the film got slightly more mixed reviews than its two predecessors in what Hitch already recognized as his ‘spy trilogy', and was not quite so popular, though popular enough still to pay its way. On reflection Hitch decided this was because of a problem inherent in the subject: audiences want to identify with a hero who wants to do something and eventually succeeds in doing it (whether they would morally endorse his actions or not), and
The Secret Agent
was instead about a hero who does not want to do something (kill a man for political reasons), muffs it the first time, and has fate take the matter out of his hands at the second chance. Consequently audiences just did not care about the hero—certainly not in a thriller context, anyway—while the possibility of capturing their attention in another way by going into his moral dilemma (the
whole
Hamlet
side of it) had been carefully ignored as inimical to the thriller form. To that extent Gielgud was right, and so in another way was Ivor Montagu—there was either not enough of the
Hamlet
or too much, depending which way you looked at it.

But at least Hitch had managed in it to try out some of his more provocative ideas and had got away with them, in particular the idea he had long been toying with that villains did not need necessarily to look like villains. Indeed, the more charming and presentable and reassuring their appearance and manner were, the more chilling their villainy would be, once revealed. In
The Secret Agent
Hitch deliberately made the villain, Robert Young, more charming and amusing and attractive than the rather moody, indecisive hero, and audiences loved it; he became, like so many subsequent Hitchcock heavies, the man you hate to love, but find irresistibly attractive anyway—a pattern repeated, with variations, right up to
Frenzy
. For the French critics this tends to signify moral ambiguity and complexity, deriving in part from Hitch's Catholic upbringing. But maybe it is no more than the born tease's instinctive grasp of how to string an audience along, or the timid man's joyful realization that people can be manipulated to accept almost anything you want them to accept.

In his next film,
Sabotage
, Hitch was to string his audiences along even further, and in one sequence to pull a bluff-and-counter-bluff trick so outrageous that its reputation still haunts him; he is even inclined nowadays to suggest that it was a mistake. This is the notorious sequence in which the back-room anarchist sends his wife's young brother to deliver a time-bomb; the boy is distracted and delayed for so long that the hour of detonation comes and goes and then, just when the audience is breathing a sigh of relief that the worst is not after all going to happen (of course, we always
knew
it wouldn't), the bomb does go off and the boy is killed. At the press show this episode upset one of the senior members of the British press so much that she had to be restrained from attacking Hitch bodily for his cruelty. Which would seem, actually, to be a measure of his success in involving his audience and motivating his heroine so satisfactorily that she can kill her husband with a carving knife and not in any way lose audience sympathy. The sequence is also, incidentally, a textbook example of Hitch's famous definition of suspense versus shock. If you show a group of people playing cards round a table and then suddenly there is an explosion, you achieve
merely a very dull scene terminated by a shock. If, on the other hand, you show exactly the same scene but preface it by showing a time-bomb sitting under the table before ever the card game starts, then you have suspense and an involved audience. Hitch claims to believe today that after setting up such a scene you should never let the bomb actually go off, because then the audience feels cheated and angry. But his practice in several spectacular instances (
Psycho
for one) contradicts this, and it would be hard to agree with him that his decision in
Sabotage
was all that wrong. Of course, he may have been wrong to twist the knife by showing a cute little dog on the bus as well as the boy, and also presumably blown up—that, for the animal-loving British, could just be the last straw.…

In any case, the matter does not seem to have given him any sleepless nights at the time. He himself selected the Conrad novel entitled
The Secret Agent
(confusingly enough, so the title had to be changed for the film), and scripted it in his usual fashion by starting round the dining-room table in Cromwell Road, then flying with Charles Bennett to Basel, and motoring from there to the Jungfrau, where he acquired his aforementioned taste for cheap Swiss cider. Oddly, given his frequently expressed qualms about adapting any literary classic to the screen, Hitch felt no hesitation about working from a near-classic novel in this case and freely reshaping its story to his own thriller requirements. Partly this was because Conrad had not yet been canonized by the academic critics as a great novelist; Hitch felt reasonably enough that one of Conrad's important talents was as a spellbinding teller of tales, not so different from John Buchan, and there at least his work was not sacrosanct.

All the same, Hitch did feel that the whole subject was a bit messy and confused, lacking the clear lines of his favourite films. And he ran into some problems in the shooting. To begin with, he had cast Robert Donat in the important role of the plain-clothes policeman who is set to watch the anarchist Verloc (Oscar Homolka) while pretending to work at the near-by greengrocers. Donat had the kind of easy charm and humanity which would round out the rather sketchy outlines of the character and make audiences warm to him. But then at the last moment Korda, who had Donat under contract, refused to release him, and Hitch had to make do with the rather stolid John Loder. This entailed a lot of rewriting during the actual shooting—something which never makes the orderly Hitch happy—and left the character still rather unattractive and negative. Then
Hitch had trouble with one of the two Hollywood stars, Sylvia Sidney. She had had stage training, had never appeared in silent films, and found it very difficult to act without the support of words. Also, she was used to the Hollywood style of shooting, in which scenes would be played right through, photographed continuously from first one angle, then another, and cut together afterwards. She found Hitch's manner of shooting in tiny little sections according to the editing scheme in his mind unnerving, as she felt deprived of all control over what she was doing. She finally got quite hysterical over Oscar Homolka's death scene, in which, half accidentally, she had to stab him with a carving knife and say virtually nothing: she was certain it was terrible and she was terrible. Hitch had to calm her by asking her please to wait and see how it would look when cut together. When she finally saw it she was delighted and amazed, and left the screening room grandly observing, ‘Hollywood must hear of this!'