Hitch (25 page)

For the principal role he wanted a big star like Gary Cooper. Cooper was approached, but feeling that the script was, after all, ‘only a thriller', and therefore beneath his dignity, refused. (Later he told Hitch he thought he had made quite a bad mistake in doing so.) Instead Hitch got Joel McCrea, with Laraine Day as his leading lady, supported by an excellent cast of character players, among them Herbert Marshall, another of Hollywood's English colony, as the sauve English undercover-agent for the Nazis, George Sanders, with whom Hitch had just been working in
Rebecca
, as the hero's spruce English sidekick, the distinguished German refugee actor Albert Bassermann as the Dutch diplomat, and Edmund Gwenn, whom Hitch had worked with in England back in the days of
The Skin Game
and
Waltzes from Vienna
, as a vicious but not too efficient killer. He even managed to find a small place in the film for the star of
The Blackguard
, Jane Novak, now, fifteen years later, a busy Hollywood bit player, like Betty Compson, of
Woman to Woman
,
whom he was similarly to work into his next film,
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
. Hitch's memory in such matters was proverbial—and proverbially generous. He even knew when not to remember: while looking for suitable locations for
Notorious
, he found himself humbly being offered something by an assistant of an assistant in the location department, whom he recognized as the man in Famous Players who had looked at his sketches and given him his first job back in 1919. Then he thought it kinder to give no sign, but when there was anything practical he could do unobtrusively to help old friends (or even old enemies like Jack Cutts) who had fallen on hard times, he invariably did it.

In his book on Hitchcock, François Truffaut refers to
Foreign Correspondent
as something of a come-down for Hitch after
Rebecca
, ‘definitely in the “B” category.' Hitch politely does not contradict him, but in fact this is far from the truth. Despite its lack of big star names, it was an ambitious and expensive picture, and finally cost over $1.5 million, as against
Rebecca
's $1 million. The reason for this is evident if one looks closely at the film. In addition to costly second-unit shooting in London and Amsterdam, which had to be done again because the first time the ship in which the cameraman went over was torpedoed and all his stock and equipment lost, the sets that had to be built in Hollywood were numerous and in some cases enormous. The square in Amsterdam in which the feigned murder takes place took a month to build, with three crews working round the clock, sported an elaborate drainage system because the whole sequence, with its hundreds of umbrellas, takes place in torrential rain, and covered some ten acres. There were also a strip of Dutch countryside, with windmills, several parts of London, and a large plane, interior and exterior, the latter also requiring the use of a giant studio tank for the spectacular air-crash sequence. To achieve vividness, authenticity and artistic quality in all of these Hitch was pleased to be working with William Cameron Menzies, who had just completed a mammoth job as production designer for Selznick on
Gone With the Wind
and was the man primarily responsible for its visual consistency and sumptuous appearance through all the chopping and changing that chequered production underwent.

After the enclosed psychological drama of
Rebecca
, Hitch was back with
Foreign Correspondent
in his own chosen territory, the action-packed thriller. And having his largest budget ever to play with (though little of it came his way: he was maddened to discover
he was getting $2,500 a week from Selznick, while Wanger was paying Selznick $7,500 for his services), he was able to have a ball with the virtuoso passages like the murder in Amsterdam, the attempted murder in London (by precipitation from the top of the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral tower, an incidental detail with which religiously minded commentators have had a field day) and the crashing of the transatlantic airliner into the sea. For this latter sequence he devised some of his most mystifying effects. The crash itself is done in one continuous shot over the pilot and copilot's shoulders, showing the water getting nearer and nearer and finally, on impact, pouring through the windscreen and drowning them and the camera. The procedure, actually, is relatively simple once you know how. Hitch shot a back-projection from a plane zooming towards the water. He then had it projected on to a tissue-paper screen the other side of the cockpit from the camera. And beyond the screen he had a body of water which was released at the moment the plane appeared to hit the sea, breaking through the screen and surging into the cockpit so fast that it was impossible to see the paper tearing under its impact. For the following scene, with the survivors struggling in the water, he wanted to show a wing breaking from the body of the plane and veering away, and to do this he had an elaborate pattern of rails and branch lines built under the surface of the water in the studio tank, so that the pieces of the plane could be manoeuvred exactly on the hidden equivalent of a giant child's toy train set.

He was a lot happier with
Foreign Correspondent
than he had been with
Rebecca
. This, at least, was an unmistakable ‘Hitchcock picture' and was greeted as such. It also did something he very much wanted to do: as the
Herald Tribune
said, it ‘blends escapist entertainment with challenging propaganda in film terms.' When it opened on 16 August 1940 the United States was still eighteen months away from resigning its neutrality and entering the war, but Hitch's anti-Nazi, pro-Britain message came over loud and clear. When asked about the conclusion now he is liable to back away from it, saying that it was all the doing of Walter Wanger and Ben Hecht, but it is hard to believe that, in those very emotional days, he did not endorse it and find in it something very close to his own sentiments, even if left to himself he would have hesitated to wear his heart so flagrantly on his sleeve.

After completing the picture, he got involved in a minor, incidental
way in two other films which were then in the works. First, as a favour to Walter Wanger, whom he had enjoyed working with (he at least, unlike Selznick, would leave well enough alone) he shot some additional scenes for the Archie Mayo film
The House Across the Bay
, sequences involving Walter Pidgeon, Lloyd Nolan and Joan Bennett in a plane, a setting he was felt to be expert at following
Foreign Correspondent
. Then he was roped into a more wholehearted, single- (or simple-) minded piece of British flag-waving than
Foreign Correspondent
, an episodic tribute to the English spirit called
Forever and a Day
, to which most of the British colony in Hollywood, along with many sympathetic Americans, donated their services. Among the others concerned were Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle, Jessie Matthews, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Laughton and Ida Lupino. Hitch prepared and was about to direct the sequence in which Ida Lupino, a little cockney maid, runs up and down behind a crowd trying to see over. But then his schedule did not permit him to make it, so René Clair, a recently arrived refugee from the German invasion of France, took over and directed it instead, from Hitch's script.

On the domestic front, the Hitchcocks were rapidly settling in. After a few months of apartment living at the Wilshire Palms, they found themselves hankering for a house, and rented a suitable one, an English-style cottage, once Carol Lombard's, in St. Cloud Road, Bel Air. Socially, Hitch was extending and amplifying his reputation as a harmless eccentric. There was his habit of sleeping in public. Once at a social evening he was deep in conversation with Thomas Mann and Louis Bromfield one minute; the next he was fast asleep, while they continued to talk fascinatingly over him. On another occasion he took Loretta Young and Carol Lombard to Chasens' and in the middle of dinner fell sound asleep between two of the most glamorous women in Hollywood. Once he went to sleep at a dinner party and continued to sleep until all the other guests had tiptoed away. At last Alma ventured to wake him and suggest that they might perhaps think of going. ‘Wouldn't it be rude to leave so soon?' asked Hitch hazily.

No one was ever quite sure how far these naps were genuine and how far he staged them impishly to test other people's reactions. Certainly he continued with his practical jokes. One of the most famous took place at Chasens' one evening. He arranged a dinner party to celebrate Alma's birthday, in the back garden, or yard as
they called it, where there were two or three table-tennis tables, a small semi-circular bar, and one table for about fourteen people. And at the head of the table he sat a very grand-looking old lady, beautifully dressed and groomed, grey-haired and evidently very distinguished (actually a dress extra he had hired for the occasion). When guests started to arrive and gathered for drinks at the bar they all began asking
sotto voce
, ‘Who's the old lady?' And Hitch, with extreme embarrassment, muttered that he didn't know, she must be at the wrong table, but he didn't like to say anything. Dave Chasen, who was in on the joke, was nowhere in evidence until the dinner was about to begin, then he went over at Hitch's instructions to the table and bent down to exchange a few words with the old lady, then came back and reported, ‘She says she's with Mr. Hitchcock's party.'

Well, there seemed to be nothing much to be done, and so everyone sat down with the old lady and had a good if slightly surrealistic dinner, people occasionally trying to engage her in conversation and subtly place her, but all being foiled by her well-bred vagueness and apparent deafness from making any sense of the situation. Among the guests was the producer Collier Young, then in the Myron Selznick story department, and his very attractive wife. At the last moment they had called to ask if they could bring along their house guest, and though Hitch did not like having a stranger introduced in this way to what was ostensibly a family occasion, he agreed. At dinner he was intrigued to notice that the house guest was very evidently making a play for Young's wife, just to add to the drama of the situation. And one invited guest, Harry Hand, from Myron Selznick's London office, was late, so everyone concluded that the old lady must be with him. But when he arrived and went round the table shaking hands with everyone, including the old lady, he of course denied all knowledge too. At last, when the meal was nearly over, Charles Bennett, who knew Hitch's ways of old, suddenly slapped his hand on the table and cried, ‘I've got it—it's a gag. I know it's a gag.' Then he gazed round the table, his eyes lighted on the other stranger, the Collier Youngs' house guest, and pointing an accusing finger at him he added, ‘And you're a gag too!'

After completing
Foreign Correspondent
and his other bits and pieces, Hitch was able at last to make his first trip home to England since he had settled in Los Angeles in a world still precariously at
peace. It was not all that simple a matter to get to Britain from America at that time. Hitch had to go to the East Coast and wait around through various delays and disappointments until finally he was able to get on a ship travelling in convoy across the Atlantic. Even then, conditions were no picnic: passengers had to sleep in great dormitories, thirty to a room, and there was a shortage of bathrooms, so that all one's most intimate functions had to be carried out virtually in public. This was sheer torture for Hitch, always reticent and puritanical about his own body, painfully shy, and quite compulsive when it came to cleanliness and tidiness. But there was no help for it, and he put up with everything cheerfully enough, so that none but those who knew him really well could guess what he was going through on this and other similar voyages during the war. In England Hitch resettled his mother at Shamley Green—where she was shortly to be joined by his brother William, bombed out of his South London fish shop in the blitz—and visited Joan Harrison's mother, who toasted his arrival, to his rather mixed feelings, with warm champagne. He also acquired a rather bizarre gift for Pat—an empty incendiary bomb case, which for years she kept by her bed as a memento.

Back in Los Angeles, he did not have any new production immediately in view, though he was discussing making the Francis Iles novel
Before the Fact
for RKO. A happy chance, thought Carole Lombard, with whom Hitch and Alma had become very friendly, and she asked him to direct also her new movie at RKO, a belated screwball comedy called
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
. This was quite unlike anything he had done before, or was to do subsequently, and if
Rebecca
could not be regarded in his terms as a ‘Hitchcock picture', this certainly could not. But as a favour to Carole Lombard he was willing to undertake it; in any case, the challenge amused him, and it was approaching the problem of his first completely American movie from a very unexpected direction. Rapidly it was agreed by RKO that they should borrow Hitch's services from Selznick for the two films to be made one immediately after the other, at a payment to Selznick of a little over $100,000 apiece. Originally it was envisioned that each would take 16 weeks, making 32 consecutive weeks in all, but in the event they took more than a year, until the end of June 1941.

In
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
, the first to be made, Lombard's sense of humour and Hitch's meshed perfectly. Things began the way they
were going to go on the very first day of shooting. Hitch, of course, had once given an interview in which he made the notorious statement that actors are cattle (curiously enough, since this is Hitch's most quoted quote of all, no one, not even he, knows when and where he first said it), and Lombard picked up on this. There on the set, the first day, was a small corral with three stalls, each containing a calf. All of them had tags round their necks, tied with ribbon: they read ‘Carole Lombard', ‘Robert Montgomery' and ‘Gene Raymond', the three stars of the film.