Hitch (29 page)

So far, so good. But the writing up of the project offered many problems which were never satisfactorily resolved. The subject was first assigned to another major literary figure, John Steinbeck, but at the end of some weeks' work all he turned in was a very incomplete scenario. Hitch then hired the poet and novelist MacKin-lay Kantor (later known as the author of
The Best Tears of Our Lives
), but did not like what he did and paid him off after two weeks. The third writer on the project was Jo Swerling, an old Hollywood professional who soon licked the disparate materials into some sort of shape, though still too loose and shapeless for Hitch, who went through it again before shooting, ruthlessly cutting and tightening to give it some dramatic cohesion. Finally, the script is well enough crafted. The trouble is that, despite all Hitch's attempts to make it otherwise, it remains naively didactic in its tone and dialogue—the characters never really transcend their basic roles in the structure of ideas—the ruthless Nazi, the communist, the pacific religious black, the millionaire and so on. The message—of the free world's need to sink its differences and unite in the face of fascism, lest the fascist's single-minded sense of purpose defeat the muddle and impotence of all right-thinking men when it comes to cooperation—is presented loud and clear. But finally too loud and clear:
Lifeboat
is the only one of Hitch's films that ever gives us the uncomfortable feeling that we are being preached to, that makes us too aware of being manipulated for the manipulation really to come off.

The one exception to these strictures is Tallulah Bankhead in the leading role of the shipwrecked fashion writer. The casting is wilfully bizarre in the best Hitchcock manner—who, he asked himself, would be the last person one would expect to meet, immaculately groomed, on a lifeboat adrift in the middle of the Atlantic? Tallulah was a sufficiently unfamiliar face to the cinema audiences of the world, having made very few films, and anyway Hitch liked her. They had a tough, no-nonsense relationship during the shooting,
and off screen became great friends—Hitch enjoyed wandering round the galleries of Beverly Hills with her, respected her taste and bought one of his larger modern paintings, a Milton Avery, at her encouragement. He found her cheerful unreasonableness amusing—she took a violent dislike to Walter Slezak, the firmly anti-Nazi German actor who played the Nazi in the film, and persistently kicked him around growling ‘You God-damn Nazi' and other insults whenever the mood took her. Hitch also enjoyed and shared her often bawdy sense of humour. Once on set a rather delicate (or indelicate) problem came up. Tallulah, it was fairly well known, disliked wearing underclothes, and in a scene involving a lot of rough water in the studio tank it became evident to the onlookers that she was wearing no panties. As word spread more and more visitors from other films in production kept appearing, and finally the chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, heard about it. After checking for himself he had Hitch called aside and told he must clearly do something about this, as it was disrupting the work of the whole studio. ‘Willingly,' replied Hitch blandly, ‘but of course it will have to go through the correct channels. And I don't know which to go through—make-up, wardrobe or hairdressing!'

There was one other small difficulty connected with the film. How, in the limited compass of the lifeboat and its occupants, was Hitch to make his by now traditional brief guest appearance? He could hardly be quietly swimming by disguised as a dolphin. He considered being a dead body floating in the water. Then a thought occurred to him. He had just been on one of his periodic diets, by far the strictest and most effective of his life, fining himself down from over 20 stone to a much more reasonable 13 stone. So he took ‘before' and ‘after' pictures of himself, and had them made up into an advertisement for an imaginary product called Reduco. This is prominently placed in an old newspaper lying around in the boat, which William Bendix reads at one point. The audience response, Hitch says, was gratifying—he received hundreds of requests for information about Reduco and where it might be obtained.

The film had a very mixed reception, much of the hostile response being for the rather naïve reason that the Nazi character was made more competent and more determined than any of the representatives of democracy: what was intended as a warning note was seen, incredibly, as an attack on the Allied cause. Still, such criticism
did not seem to worry Hitch himself very much. He was already planning his next film, which would once again be made directly for Selznick: it was to be an adaptation of a novel by Francis Beeding called
The House of Doctor Edwardes
, about a lunatic who takes over the running of an asylum. Pure escapism, nothing to do with the war. But before he did that he had for his own peace of mind to do something even more direct for Britain and the war effort. He was too old and too much overweight to be called up for military service, but he felt if he did not get right into the atmosphere of the war and make some kind of self-denying contribution he would always regret it and feel guilty.

So before starting on
The House of Doctor Edwardes
he took some months off and flew back to England, arriving in London in spring 1944. Already the atmosphere was a lot more hopeful than on his earlier visits—the tide of war seemed at last to be turning, and the idea of invading the French coast again was very much in the air—D-Day actually came early in June, while Hitch was still there. And what should Hitch do in England? Well, make films presumably. And sure enough his old friend Sidney Bernstein, who was then head of the film division of the Ministry of Information, asked him if he would help out by making two short French-language films for them, as tributes to the work of the French Resistance. He had already worked in German, and his French was more than passable, so he met with the Molière Players, a group of French refugees in England, and began to work out scripts for the two films with his old friend Angus McPhail. While in England he settled at Claridge's and for a few weeks his room was constantly crowded with Free French officers, actors and so on, all of them contributing their conflicting views on what the first film should be about and what it ought to be saying.

Bon Voyage
was based on a story idea by Arthur Calder-Marshall; Hitch wrote it with Angus McPhail and J. O. C. Orton, and the actor Claude Dauphin helped them with the French dialogue. It was intended to be shown in newly liberated areas of France to help re-indoctrinate the French in the role the Resistance had been playing. It turns on a simple but ingenious change of viewpoint. First an RAF man is questioned by the Free French in London on the details of his escape from France with the aid of the Maquis. He tells his story, then he and we are told that his ‘Polish' escort was really a German spy. Now we see the whole thing again, but filling in the
details he had not noticed and reinterpreting what he did see in the light of this new information.

In the course of elaborating
Bon Voyage
Hitch became very conscious of just how divided a house the Free French were—always quarrelling with one another and sometimes it seemed more bitter towards their supposed allies than towards their undoubted enemies. Indeed, it was the situation of
Lifeboat
all over again. Consequently, he had the notion of dramatizing these differences and divisions for his second French-language film,
Aventure Malgache
. This all takes place on Madagascar, where the situation between the Vichy French and the Free French hung for some time in the balance—it is the true story of a lawyer now turned actor with the Molière Players, called Clarousse, who had proved such a thorn in the side of everyone he knew in Madagascar that he was as likely to be imprisoned by the Free French as by Vichy. The film has typical Hitchcock ambiguities and some brilliantly expressive uses of composition, as in the long-held shot in which the boy's fiancée is told (against orders) of the new mission and the telephone peeping significantly into frame already hints to us that she is immediately going to use it to inform on him. But clearly the film's subtleties and contradictions did not suit the French liberation forces, who would have preferred something far more uncomplicatedly heroic and upbeat, so it seems never to have got shown.

In all, Hitch spent some eight months in England during the summer and autumn of 1944, his salary when working on the MOI films being the modest standard
£
10 a week. The two films were made in Associated British Studios at Welwyn Garden City, whither he travelled each day from Claridge's. He also had time to look up family and old friends, make his peace with Michael Balcon if any rancour still persisted from Balcon's hasty words of criticism in the first days of the war, and take stock of his situation in relation to England. He had made a satisfying new life for himself in America. And now his links with England were breaking one by one. His mother was beginning to fail, and would die before the war was over. His brother William, with whom he had never been very close anyway, seemed to have been shattered by his wartime experiences, and did not outlive the war either. With his mother and brother both gone, Shamley Green would be empty and impossible to keep that way in the intense post-war housing shortage, so Hitch foresaw another link about to be unavoidably broken.

It is always difficult and uncomfortable to make a clean break with places and people that embody happy memories, and he would remain inescapably the perfect English bourgeois to the end of his days. But to an astonishing degree, though an unmistakable product of his time, his place, his class, he was his own man, an intensely private person who carried his own world around with him and made his own home anywhere that he and Alma and Pat could be gathered together. Typically, the ultimate proof of his Englishness was his ability to reject England, to escape from it. Wherever he was was a bit of England; the England of the others he really did not need.

As work drew to an end on the two shorts there was some desultory discussion of his staying on to make a new feature in England, on the subject of prison camps. But nothing definite came of it, and instead he began working with Angus McPhail on the first draft script of
The House of Doctor Edwardes
, in anticipation of his return to Hollywood. The subject was pretty weird, and he was not satisfied that he and McPhail had managed to make sense of it. He longed for Hollywood polish, Hollywood know-how. He even longed, loath though he was to admit it, for the sounding-board of David O. Selznick. As the year moved into autumn he packed up and returned to America, not really conscious even of having made a decision. Life, as so often, had done that for him.

Spellbound
, as
The House of Doctor Edwardes
came to be called, was in the event the first of Hitch's post-war films, and the one that marked in some mysterious way his definitive absorption into the American cinema. It is hard to put one's finger on the difference. But up to this point Hitch had either been making English films in America, or films in which he was consciously a propagandist trying to sell the American public on something which might not seem natural to them. Even in
Shadow of a Doubt
a lot of the film's extraordinary perceptiveness about small-town America seems to come, as in other films by foreigners such as Renoir's
Swamp Water
or Schlesinger's
Midnight Cowboy
or Forman's
Taking Off
, from the very fact that there is a different angle of vision, that many things which would be taken for granted by an American are seen as exciting and exotic. From
Spellbound
on that all changes—Hitch has become, quite simply, an American film-maker.

Not that
Spellbound
is, in anyone's opinion as far as I know, one of Hitchcock's better films. Disarmingly, he calls it ‘just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis'. In the process of scripting, with Hitch, Ben Hecht and the inevitable Selznick working over the original idea, almost nothing of the novel is left except, remotely, the idea of the villain turning out to be the asylum director, who is of course mad. The new story line sorts itself out as a straightforward vehicle for Selznick's two biggest new stars at that time, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Ingrid Bergman, playing a psychiatrist who falls in love with her new boss before discovering that he is an amnesiac who is substituting for and has possibly murdered the real Doctor Edwardes, fits in very well with the Hitchcock world. Gregory Peck, who plays the amnesiac in question, does not. Hitch and Bergman took to one another right away, and she obviously conforms to his developing stereotype of the cool
blonde with fire underneath, going through very much the classic Hitchcock development in
Spellbound
as she melts, under the influence of love, from a brisk, businesslike doctor into a soft, passionate woman. Between Hitch and Peck there seems to have been little communication—Peck speaks rather cooly of Hitch's tremendous technical skill; Hitch makes it clear that Peck was cast in a second of his films,
The Paradine Case
, against his wishes, simply because he was under contract to Selznick at the time.

The most significant thing about
Spellbound
in general was that in it Hitch, with his usual flair for catching ideas in the wind at the time, had happened to hit on what was to become a major preoccupation of American cinema in the next few years—the subject of psychoanalysis as popularly, over-simply understood. Glamorous psychiatrists (or villainous psychiatrists, successors of many generations of crazed scientists) became staple characters in American films, somewhat to Hitch's amusement. He himself did not take it all too seriously, seeing it mainly as a new twist on an old theme. In
Spellbound
he benefited to the maximum from the superior production values Selznick could bring to the film (benefited too much, some might say, since the film is after all rather ponderous and tends to get bogged down in its own gloss), and mercifully, once shooting had begun, was very little interfered with by Selznick's active on-set supervision.