Hitch (22 page)

The whole film was made on an extremely modest budget, and in very cramped conditions back at Islington, entirely on one stage only 90 feet long. Though there were big budgets in those days for British films, they were mainly dispensed by the lavish-minded Korda, by now the most spectacular producer in Britain through his London Films company, but always treading a fine line between triumph and disaster. Hitch had never regretted his decision to
escape his contract with Korda; the more modest circumstances in which he operated with Gaumont-British and Gainsborough suited his purposes admirably and never really placed any serious limitation on his doing what he wanted to do, while Korda's temperament, his shaky finances, and his periodic passion for interfering placed a sore strain on the directors who worked for him. Hitch knew him socially, and was amused by his exotic temperament, but felt that working for him would be quite a different matter.

However, he was beginning to feel just a trifle restless. He had perfected his form, and had made an unbroken series of triumphs from
The Man Who Knew Too Much
on; even
The Secret Agent
was only relatively less successful, and there were many, including Hitch himself, who really liked it. With
The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent
and
The Lady Vanishes
all made within a mere four years, he was at the peak of his reputation, and seemed to be in an ideal position. But maybe too ideal. By now critics and public alike knew, or thought they knew, much too exactly what a Hitchcock film would and should be. It had to be a thriller working within certain very strict limitations; it had to be funny and cynical and action-packed and decidedly light-weight; it could have little truck with deeper emotions of any sort. Hitch had gone about as far as he could hope in Britain, along his own line. He was in danger of becoming the prisoner of his own success, and he knew it.

There had been approaches from America, which up to now had all been turned down because of contractual obligations Hitch could not escape or because the projects offered were not so tempting as those he was already working on in England. But now Hitch had completed his contract with Gaumont-British (or with Gainsborough), and he was restless, open possibly to suggestion. David O. Selznick had already a year or so before put out feelers as to the availability of Hitch and what sort of salary he might require. The inquiry had come through Hitch's London agents, who happened to be Joyce-Selznick, the Selznick in question being David's brother Myron, a friend of Hitch's right back to the 1920s. No doubt this did no harm to Hitch's chances, or Selznick's, but Myron was not going to give David any easy bargain, and the question was deferred while he explored other American possibilities for Hitch. He sounded out Paramount. Hitch discussed the possibility of doing
The Saint in New York
for RKO. And at one point there were negotiations
with MGM, but they broke down over Hitch's asking price of $35,000 per picture. Now in May 1938, while Hitch was in the middle of shooting
The Lady Vanishes
, David O. Selznick put forward a concrete proposal: he would like Hitch to come over to Hollywood forthwith to start work on a production based on the sinking of the
Titanic
, Hitch was not so unguarded as to leap immediately into the project, but he did at least decide to go and look the situation over for himself. He had made a brief visit, just to New York, in 1937, but in July 1938 he decided to do America properly, flying to New York and continuing from there by train to Los Angeles. Even in 1937 he had been surprised and pleased to find himself already a celebrity in the States—when he and Alma went on their arrival in New York to see
Babes in Arms
, he found people waiting at the theatre with 8 × 10 pictures for him to autograph—and amused to discover that with his book-learning on the subject of New York topography he could instantly give natives directions. The second time in New York he was even more feted, profiled in magazines and interviewed on the radio; in one interview with Otis Ferguson on WNYC he held forth about the possibilities of enterprising B-features as a field for experiment, using offbeat stories by writers such as O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe—a curious anticipation of what he was going to do with his television series years later.

In Hollywood he met David O. Selznick for the first time, and was impressed—sufficiently so to agree in principle to a contract such as Selznick offered, which was a very advantageous-seeming one for four pictures, at about $40,000 a picture, more than the figure MGM had recently declined to pay, and with the advantage that he got paid whether he was working or not. He was also intrigued to discover that Selznick was even then negotiating for the rights of a book he had himself contemplated buying in England, but whose price he had found too steep. It was Daphne du Maurier's novel
Rebecca
, just published and about to build into a major bestseller. (Hitch had, of course, some personal acquaintance with Daphne du Maurier, as the daughter of his old friend Sir Gerald.) As an additional carrot, Selznick held out the possibility
oí Rebecca
as Hitch's second Hollywood film, after
Titanic
. Hitch returned to Britain with a lot to think about.

The
Titanic
project, meanwhile, was hanging fire somewhat. Selznick's attempts to buy the
Leviathan
as the
Titanic's
stand-in in the picture had been foiled, and he was having trouble finding a
suitable substitute. Hitch did not make things easier by allowing his English whimsy to play round the idea of the movie in a way that rather alarmed Selznick, who did not yet really know his man. Hitch proffered this nightmare vision of the whole thing being set up off the coast of California, the sinking arranged with clockwork precision, and then after the liner had sunk grandly and completely beneath the waves a technician coming over and saying, ‘I'm sorry, we had an electrical failure and didn't get the shot. Can we have a retake?' He imagined a Selznick agent going into a ticket office in New York and asking how much the
Leviathan
was, and this leading into a lengthy cross-talk act before it finally emerged he wanted to buy the whole ship, not merely a ticket on it. And he assured the startled Selznick that he knew just how the film should start: with an enormous close-up of one rivet, which would then pull out further and further and further until it showed the whole ship. Selznick wondered if Hitch was really crazy, or merely English and therefore a little strange.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the heat was off for the moment.
Titanic
, which Selznick had wanted to start in August 1938, was further delayed, then shelved, and so Hitch would not be needed in Hollywood till well into 1939. And
Rebecca
would definitely be his first assignment. So he settled to editing
The Lady Vanishes
, which when it opened turned out to be his biggest triumph yet and won, among other plaudits, the New York Critics' Award as the best film of 1938, a little something which did his standing in America no harm at all. But this delay in his removal to America did leave a gap in his schedule, and he looked round for something else to do in England while waiting. By a curious coincidence, what he was offered was another book by Daphne du Maurier—
Jamaica Inn
, her romantic period piece about wreckers on the remote Cornish coast in the early nineteenth century. The rights had been acquired by a new company, Mayflower Pictures, which consisted principally of the German producer Erich Pommer, with whom Hitch had worked at Neubabelsberg back in 1926, on
The Blackguard
, and Charles Laughton, now turned co-producer of his own vehicles. Hitch had never liked Pommer, and the feeling was returned. But Laughton he had known on and off since the 1920s, and got along with quite well.
Jamaica Inn
was to be their third production, and when Hitch was offered the idea he thought he could do something with it, signed the contract, and accepted an advance of several thousand pounds. As
soon as he got a look at the first script by Clemence Dane, he decided he was mistaken, and begged and pleaded to refund the money he had been paid and be released from his obligation. He even got so desperate that he planned to sell his house in order to repay the advance, but to no avail. Pommer was adamant: a contract was a contract. And Laughton wheedled and cajoled and tried a bit of emotional blackmail by suggesting that if Hitch withdrew the production would fall through and then he would be personally responsible for putting a poor helpless German refugee (Pommer) on the streets. With ill grace Hitch bowed to the inevitable and did the best job he could with the project. He and Alma worked on a new adaptation. Sidney Gilliatt and Joan Harrison were responsible for the final screenplay. But they were all constantly kept guessing, principally by Laughton. Personally Hitch had no quarrel with Laughton—they were much of an age, they had their Catholicism, their English middle-class background and their girth in common, but their life-styles were entirely at variance, Laughton the flamboyant bisexual favouring bohemian patterns of behaviour while Hitch remained the devout bourgeois family man. They did come together in one thing, though: a shared passion for good music, and one of Hitch's most vivid recollections of the flat in Cromwell Road is one day when he took Laughton back to hear his new hi-fi record player and eventually crept away leaving Laughton completely rapt, leaning back in his chair as he let the music flood over him.

Professionally, though, Hitch had little patience with Laughton, whom he regarded as childish, self-indulgent and undisciplined. To begin with, the idea was that Laughton should play one of the sympathetic characters in the story, the heroine's uncle who keeps the inn at Pengallan, where men live in fear and mysterious things happen in the night. That was fine—it would be casting interestingly against type. But then suddenly Laughton determined—which as producer as well as star he could do—that he would cast Leslie Banks in this role and himself play the role of the two-faced preacher who thunders against wrecking by day and lures ships on to the rocks by night. Which, as Hitch remarked, is rather like trying to make a whodunit with Laughton playing the butler and not expecting everyone somehow to guess that the butler did it. Consequently, lots of changes had to be made in the script to accommodate this new stroke of casting. Then the producers realized belatedly that for American distribution they would certainly have trouble with the
Hays office and its Production Code, since lecherous preachers were more or less taboo. So the script had to be reworked again, turning the character into the local squire and justice of the peace. And as Laughton still wanted the role beefed up, he brought in J. B. Priestley to write additional dialogue for him. The two approaches to the script did not jell, and Hitch was even more unhappy.

At long last they were ready to go into production, with a strong cast including many familiar Hitchcock players, such as Leslie Banks, Basil Radford and even Clare Greet, whose association with Hitchcock dated right back to his very first film of all, the unfinished
Number Thirteen
in 1922. There were also newcomers, including Robert Newton and a young and completely inexperienced discovery of Laughton's, very soon to become a star in her own right, Maureen O'Hara. All seemed set fair, but then, to add insult to injury as Hitch saw it, Laughton started making difficulties. Having insisted on playing the role, he now insisted that he did not ‘feel' it. For days he was in despair, brooding picturesquely while Hitch grimly shot round him and the rest of the cast clucked with genuine or simulated sympathy. What, asked Hitch in desperation, is there to
feel
? It is a nonsense role in a shameless melodrama—all you have to do is do it. Ah, said Laughton, but I haven't found the right physical presence, the right walk. And Hitch continued to shoot close-ups only while he thought on, until at last, ten days later, he came up triumphantly with the necessary key—a little German waltz to the beat of which, in his mind, he waddled around with a fearsome, menacing coquettishness.
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le cinéma
, thought Hitch bitterly, only praying to get through the picture without a crisis or a confrontation. This modest goal he did more or less achieve. There was one sticky moment though when Laughton had to play a scene with Maureen O'Hara in which, as the wicked squire, he had to tie her up. He had all sorts of fancy ideas of his own on how to play the scene, but Hitch was really not satisfied. They did it over and over again until finally Laughton walked off the set and sat fuming in a corner. Hitch tried to talk him round, but nothing worked. And then suddenly Laughton bounced back: again, he had found the ‘key'. ‘I know,' he cried, ‘I'm going to feel like a boy often who's just wet his pants!'

Finally, the picture was finished, and released. It got a fair drubbing from the critics, but it was a box-office success, no doubt on the strength of Hitch's name and Laughton's, and because though
foolish it was fun, and the forerunner of the taste which ran rampant in Britain during the 1940s for costume tushery and Regency romances of all sorts. With a sigh of relief to have escaped so lightly, Hitch packed his bags, sublet the flat in Cromwell Road, and headed with Alma, Pat, the faithful Joan Harrison and a maid and a cook for the fresh fields of southern California.

Did he mean to stay? Did he ever imagine he would stay? Hard to say at this distance of time; and probably just as hard, for different reasons, to say then. When they moved to Los Angeles he and Alma had spent only a few days there as visitors before. They might have hated it; their maid did and went back to England almost immediately, while their cook, infected by a wildness in the southern California air, went off to become a chiropractor. The first movie might have been a disaster, in which case possibly Selznick would not have picked up his expensive option on Hitch's services. If the war had not come along for Britain in September 1939—and though the situation looked menacing earlier that year, who could prophesy for certain?—the way back, should they have wanted to take it, might certainly have been easier. They left options open—the flat, the house at Shamley Green; they did not for a couple of years move into a permanent home in Los Angeles. Hitch loved England, he would continue to love it—even after he had become an American citizen he would remain defiantly the most absurdly English American in the world. But he had outgrown the British cinema. And the cinema was his life: he must go wherever it took him. At this point, all roads led to Hollywood.