Hitch (27 page)

Meanwhile, Hitch was already deep into a new project,
Saboteur
. If
Suspicion
was paying his dues to Britain in one way, by making another film in the
Rebecca
mould, as nearly as possible a British film made in America,
Saboteur
was a companion piece to
Foreign Correspondent
, a strongly anti-Nazi film made at a time when US sympathies were still in the balance, before in December 1941 Pearl Harbor decided matters once and for all. With
Saboteur
Hitch was at
the outset back home with Selznick, though as usual at this period in Selznick's career the whole package was sold off before it actually went into production. The original story of the film is credited to Hitch himself—a rarity for one who usually prefers to keep his scripting involvement out of the credits. Hitch compares it to the picaresque structure of some of his British films, such as
The Thirty-Nine Steps
and
Young and Innocent
—a series of rather bizarre incidents befalling the hero after he is (mistakenly, of course) supposed to have been responsible for a bit of industrial sabotage.

Hitch had worked on the original treatment with Joan Harrison and Michael Hogan, a writer whom he had first encountered on
Rebecca
. But the faithful Joan was beginning to feel professionally a little restless. She had now been with Hitch in one capacity or another for some seven years, and in that time she had learnt an enormous amount about film writing and film production. On the other hand, it was a very protected position: how could she ever know how good she was if she stayed always in the shadow of the master? Hitch regretted her going, but understood completely, and gave her his blessing on her first venture as an independent producer,
The Phantom Lady
. A low-budget thriller with Franchot Tone directed by Robert Siodmak, it became a critical and commercial ‘sleeper', thus vindicating Hitch's training and his one piece of advice to her, which was that for her villain she should cast off the norm, against the conventional image. Joan and Hitch remained friends, and their mutual trust and familiarity with each other's working methods were to be invaluable some years later when they came together again to work on the
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
television series.

For the moment, though, Joan Harrison's departure left Hitch with a treatment but no script on this new story. Selznick seems to have had no intention of producing it himself, but he was eager to have a completed script as part of the package when he got round to selling it—that way he could ask more for Hitch's services. At this time he had under contract Peter Viertel, a young writer, quite inexperienced, about twenty-one years old. Viertel was assigned to the picture by Selznick, and went along with considerable trepidation to see Hitch. To his delight, Hitch was very charming and fatherly. ‘I'll teach you to write a screenplay,' he said, and proceeded to explain that there was nothing to it: just start a scene with an establishing shot, and when you want to emphasize something write ‘close-up'—nobody follows the screenplay anyway.

With this optimistic advice in mind and the original treatment in his hands, Viertel went off and wrote a screenplay in two weeks. It was not very good, and extremely incomplete, but at least there was enough there to sell and start shooting. Hitch was of course not too happy with this state of affairs, so different from his usual orderly practice. Especially since he had been baulked again of Gary Cooper, his first choice to play the hero, and been landed with Robert Cummings, a pleasant enough fellow but ineradicably comic in his physical appearance and unlikely, Hitch felt, to excite the sort of audience sympathy the role needed. Moreover he had had Priscilla Lane forced on him without consultation by Universal, the film's new owners, after they had specifically agreed as part of the deal that he should have his say in the casting. Even the lesser roles were not in general cast to his taste: Otto Kruger he felt too close to type as the Nazi heavy—he wanted Harry Carey, the western star, as much closer to his concept of an America-First home-bred fascist, but Mrs. Carey put a stop to that with her outrage at the idea of her husband, since the death of Will Rogers the number one idol of the American boy (so she said), being cast in any such unsympathetic role.

So things were not any too happy when Hitch started shooting over at Universal. He comforted himself by bringing in Dorothy Parker to do some work on the script—her contribution is mainly visible in some of the more outrageous and bizarre details of the circus the hero takes refuge in, with its squabbling Siamese twins, its bearded lady in curlers. And he did meet in Norman Lloyd, who plays one of the lesser heavies (he who plummets from the top of the Statue of Liberty at the end), someone who was to become a long and valued associate and, like Joan Harrison, to play a key role in the television series of the later 1950s. After a week or so of shooting Hitch gave Viertel a call and said, ‘You'd better come over here and clear up the mess you've started,' so from then on he was the writer on the picture, on set every day, working alongside Hitch.

Viertel found Hitch kind and helpful, and totally unflappable. One day they had the Robert Cummings character trapped in a file room. How were they to get him out? Viertel couldn't think of anything. Then Hitch said, ‘Why don't we have him hold a lighted match to the automatic fire extinguisher, and then cut to him in the crowd outside watching the fire brigade at work?' But, objected Viertel, how did he get there? ‘How do I know?' beamed Hitch.
‘But they'll never ask!' Viertel also found Hitch quite uninterested in the details of dialogue. While he was worrying over the big speeches for the confrontation of hero and villain, which were meant to make the political message clear (‘Everyone read Clifford Odets then'), Hitch was interested only in setting up a long moving-camera shot, stolen he told Viertel from
Young and Innocent
crossed with
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, which went right across a ballroom to end with a close-up showing that the heavy had one finger missing. Hitch was in general impassive with actors and writers, but Viertel noticed that you had to watch out when he started a sentence with ‘You know, old boy …' It could be a blast; it was never a bouquet.

One phrase which Viertel wrote into the script of
Saboteur
, and which was much remarked on at the time, he took straight from Hitch's conversation. It was the Nazi's reference to ‘the moron masses', a pet term of Hitch's to describe his audience, which Viertel felt he tended to despise. When they went together to the first preview of the film, when the audience proved less than enthusiastic, Hitch took him by the arm afterwards and murmured, ‘The moron masses, old boy, the moron masses.' In general Viertel found the experience of working with Hitch a priceless education in film-writing craft, and Hitch seems to have liked working with Viertel too, though he subsequently went on record as blaming a certain lack of discipline in the script for his own over-all dissatisfaction with the film—too many ideas, insufficiently pruned and refined before shooting began. But this, after all, was his fault, and the fault of Selznick's rush to sell the package rather than that of the inexperienced Viertel, and Hitch was eager enough to work with him again. While they were making
Saboteur
he was already discussing the possibility of remaking
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, still one of his favourites among his British films; he also raised an old project, a notion he had been toying with since the mid-1930s of filming Patrick Hamilton's play
Rope
, suggesting that perhaps Viertel might direct it with him standing behind, and do it all in one take. Viertel would have been happy to make his début as a film director in such circumstances, but he did not warm very much to this specific project, and after
Saboteur
his and Hitch's careers carried them apart, though leaving both with an agreeable memory of a happy collaboration.

Saboteur
is a film which everyone remembers for striking individual moments rather than as a whole. It comes in Hitch's work right
between
The Thirty-Nine Steps
and
North by Northwest
; all three of them can be seen as variations on the same subject and the same structure. In
Saboteur
and
North by Northwest
Hitch set out consciously to give a feeling of the sheer spread of America, much as he had done for Britain in
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, covering a lot of ground with a lot of different locations. Though naturally the climactic setting of the Statue of Liberty was recreated in the studio, for much the same reasons as Mount Rushmore was in
North by Northwest
, Hitch did in fact take his cast and crew on location in New York, and spent a lot of money building exactly what he wanted for the Park Avenue mansion and the desert setting when he could not find it in its natural habitat. He also experimented with shooting at extremely long distance, sometimes upwards of a mile, in his New York locations, to capture the natural quality of the street scenes with a telephoto lens in a way that would have been impossible if the camera crew had been visibly present and the streets cordoned off. One of his on-the-spot inspirations led to some trouble with the Navy afterwards. As the real saboteur (Norman Lloyd) is in a taxi on the way to the Statue of Liberty, he looks out and we cut away to a shot of the burnt-out hulk of the French liner
Normandie
lying on her side in New York harbour, then back to Lloyd with a faint smile of satisfaction on his face. The Navy felt this was a reflection on them by implying that the burning of the
Normandie
had something to do with Nazi sabotage, and they managed to get the offending shots removed from some prints of the film.

Apart from the shoulder seam on the suspended saboteur's coat tearing stitch by stitch (of which Hitch dryly observes that the audience would have cared more if it had been the hero dangling instead of the villain), the scene which sticks in most memories from the film is that in which the hero and heroine find themselves trapped in the most public of places, on the dance floor at a big charity ball which is actually a cover for Nazi spy activity. They are safe (like Hannay at the election meeting, like the hero of
North by Northwest
at the auction) as long as they stay in the public eye. But as soon as they leave the dance floor they will be lost—and of course no one would believe their plight, it seems so unlikely. This kind of scene recurs so frequently in Hitch's work it is hard not to suppose that it has some special horror for him—the idea that terror lurks not only in the dark shadows or in solitude, but that sometimes we can be most alone, most threatened, furthest beyond help, in the
middle of a crowd of normal, friendly people. Again, anxiety is the point, the mathematical closing-in of danger, the feeling of complete helplessness. On its first release the film was actually subtitled in its advertising ‘The Man Behind Your Back'—a worrying enough image of unlocalized menace to suggest a timeless Hitchcock preoccupation as well as playing upon the more immediate worries of espionage-conscious Americans.

During the shooting of
Saboteur
there was one small, slightly untoward incident. One Sunday in December, when the rest of the studio was deserted, Hitch was working with his art director, Robert Boyle, on story-boarding some sequences for the following week. Suddenly in burst one of the studio guards, clearly surprised to find anyone on the lot. He was wearing the air-raid warden's outfit that had already, just to be on the safe side, been widely issued. ‘Haven't you heard, the Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!' he blurted out, and vanished as quickly as he had come. There was a short silence. ‘Hm,' said Hitch; ‘curious hat the fellow was wearing …' and went right on with what he was doing.

This meant, of course, that by the time
Saboteur
was ready for release, in April 1942, America had entered the war, and the Hitchcocks had decided on another step which was likely to make them feel more permanently settled in America: they were going to buy a house. Hitch had begun to feel that it was rather silly for them to keep on paying rent when they might just as well have a house of their own which they could invest in and improve upon as they thought fit. They had been very comfortable in the ex-Lombard house, liked the neighbourhood of Bel Air, not just because it was convenient to Pat's school, and determined to look around locally for something they could buy. Alma did most of the looking while Hitch tidied up the last details of
Saboteur
, and in June she found just what she had been looking for—a small, easily accessible but secluded-seeming house on Bellagio Road, just the other side of the golf course from their present rented home. She dragged Hitch to look at it, and was rather distressed when he responded lukewarmly: it was
nice
, of course, but really expensive and a bit small.… Glumly Alma started looking again, but did not succeed in coming up with anything she liked half as well. Then on 14 August she received her birthday presents from Hitch. Among them was a very attractive evening bag. Urged on by him she looked inside, to find a small purse. And inside that, a gold key—to the house on Bellagio.
Her response, characteristically, was delight mixed with irritation: ‘And what,' she inquired, ‘if I had found a house I liked a lot better in the meantime? Where would you have been then?'

Despite which, it was an important and entirely successful putting-down of new roots. The house became permanently home to them, even after they had completed occupation of their week-end place near Santa Cruz, in northern California: Alma continued, eccentrically by Hollywood standards, to do all the cooking and keep house entirely by herself, aided by a cleaning woman who came in twice a week, and the house did after all prove big enough for their needs—when they expanded it in the 1960s it was, typically, just the kitchen wing that was enlarged, with Hitch, equally typically, noting that the cost of the new kitchen was more than the original cost of the whole house. Here, though they were never part of the big Hollywood party set, Hitch and Alma could entertain, give little, exquisite but unpretentious dinners to the chosen few, and if you were specially favoured you actually got to eat
en famille
in the kitchen and inspect Hitch's walk-in freezer and wine cellar, the pride of his gastronomic life.