Hitch (31 page)

Notorious
is one of Hitch's most romantic, most simple, most secret films. It has bravura pieces of technique like the famous crane shot which begins at the top of a flight of stairs, taking in a whole crowded party scene, and closes in gradually to an enormous close-up of the one significant detail in the scene, the key held tightly in Ingrid Bergman's hand at the bottom of the stairs, right at the other end of the set. But more importantly it is a model of plotting, and creates its own rather nightmarish, doom-laden atmosphere with such intense conviction it leaves one wondering whether those critics who insist on the importance of Hitch's Catholic education may not have a point. Certainly the story does seem to turn so significantly on the avowal, the clear verbal admission of love between the two principal characters, that it is hard to find this entirely coincidental. Also it is quite deliberately an exercise in moral ambiguity: ultimately the villain (Claude Rains) is a much more likeable and sympathetic character then the hero (Cary Grant), and the audience is in a strange way pushed into rooting for him, even though they know him to be a Nazi and a cold-blooded killer, because his love for the Bergman character, ruthlessly exploitive as it is, is in many ways deeper and more genuine than the hero's.

From here Hitch would have liked to go on to make more films which would combine this very personal exploration of the dark sides of human personality and passion with the wide popular appeal
Notorious
achieved. But instead, much to his resentment, he had to
go back to Selznick and make for him the final film under his contract,
The Paradine Case
. He was very unhappy. He did not care for the subject, a novel by Robert Hichens turning on the trial of a mysterious
femme fatale
for the murder of her husband. It had been kicking around Hollywood for years and no writer had managed to lick it into satisfactory dramatic shape. (Selznick himself had tried unsuccessfully to sell Garbo on the idea back at MGM in the early 1930s.) Now Selznick, who was paying Hitch $5,000 a week for doing nothing, remembered the property, bought it from MGM, and decreed that it had to be done immediately. To make matters worse, he insisted on writing the script himself. Hitch and Alma had done the first adaptation, which Selznick needed for budgeting, and then had wanted James Bridie to work on the script with them. Bridie was brought over by Selznick, but when he was not met off the plane in New York took the first flight back, and tried to write the script in Britain—a not very satisfactory arrangement. Old faithful Ben Hecht was then called in, but left for another job with the script still very incomplete; and Selznick, with some show of reluctance (though this was what he had wanted all along), took over. And even though he confided to one of his aides a couple of weeks before the film was to go into production, in December 1946, that he did not have the time and feared that the film would ‘not be what it should be, and may even be dangerous at its present cost', economic necessity forced him and Hitch on with it, all unprepared as they were.

Also, Selznick was compelled, and therefore compelled Hitch, to cast the film as far as possible from his own contract players. Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier, or possibly Ronald Colman, as the very straight English lawyer hopelessly in love with the woman he has to defend; instead he got Gregory Peck, who was then big box-office but whom he thought totally wrong. As the woman herself, the mysterious Mrs. Paradine, he wanted Garbo, but Garbo was still dead set against the subject and instead he got Alida Valli, a new European discovery of Selznick's whom he hoped to make into a second Bergman now that his contract with the original was terminating. That was not so bad—she had the right mixture of passion and frigidity, and Hitch liked her personally, to such an extent that when, years later, he visited Italy again she was the only person there he specifically requested to see. But the third piece of imposed casting was the real disaster. As the story turns out, Mrs. Paradine
did actually murder her husband, because she is hopelessly in the sexual power of her husband's groom, a rough brute of a man smelling of manure who satisfyingly degrades her and enlivens her overcivilized senses. To make sense, Hitch thought, the role should be played by someone like Robert Newton—thus, at least, the relationship would be powerfully perverse, something which would interest him dramatically. But instead he was forced to use another Selznick contract artist, the sleek continental charmer Louis Jourdan, who could hardly have been further from what the part required.

Hitch therefore went into the film in a very contrary mood, hopeless from the outset, for one of the very few times in his professional life, of being able to make anything of the project he had been assigned. Oddly enough, almost like a bird of ill-omen, there in the cast, in the supporting role of the lecherous judge, was Charles Laughton, who had been in the last film he had felt this way about,
Jamaica Inn
. Actually on this occasion Laughton and Hitch got along very well—they were able to inject into the role of the hanging judge, mercilessly mistreating his own wife (Ethel Barrymore) and drooling over the lawyer's beautiful young wife (Ann Todd), a lot of the strangeness and perversity which was so signally lacking from the main intrigue. Right from the start, though, Hitch and Selznick were constantly at loggerheads. Selznick was endlessly writing and rewriting against the clock, sending down new scenes on the very morning they were due to be shot. Hitch complained to an old friend, ‘What am I to do? I can't take it any more—he comes down every day, he rewrites the scene, I can't shoot it, it's so bad.' He also berated Selznick for the absurdity of going into such a picture with technical equipment, he claimed, twenty years behind the times. Selznick for his part accused Hitch of deliberately going slow and disregarding spiralling costs, out of some obscure kind of revenge. ‘This I can assure you,' he told his aides; ‘you will see an entirely different result when he starts on his own picture; and you can also be sure that he will attribute this to efficiency in his own operation, against the gross inefficiency with which he charges us.'

Probably both parties were right to an extent in sensing ill will on the other's part. Hitch, certainly, had come to the end of that period in his career when he could cheerfully and philosophically brook the constant interference of a creative producer, however well-intentioned, and he was surely correct in feeling that Selznick's natural tendency to dominate his productions had taken a neurotically
authoritarian turn. It is quite possible, on the other hand, that Selznick, who was no fool, was also on to something when he found Hitch's slowing-down ‘unaccountable'. The later 1940s, though externally a period of advance for Hitch, in which he would become his own master, his own producer and as near as might be the complete creator of his own films, were also a strange period of dissatisfaction and lack of direction for him. He would not, of course, be the first man who has undergone some kind of change of life in his later forties, and it does seem that at this period, though generally in remarkable health, as he has always been, he was subject to all kinds of minor ailments, probably of nervous or psychosomatic origin, and that the hypochondria he has remarked on as an hereditary trait in his family had him for the moment particularly in its power.

This may explain the curious aridity many sense in his films of this time—
The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, Stage Fright
. Again and again the most vivid interest he can seem to summon up in them is that of playing games with himself, setting himself purely technical challenges which he then sets out with the utmost ingenuity to solve. In
The Paradine Case
he found distraction from his woes with Selznick by shooting the courtroom scenes in an entirely new way for him: instead of set-up by set-up, he placed four cameras, each with its own crew, in different parts of his expensive Hollywood reproduction of the Old Bailey, each trained on a different character or group of characters, then let them run, recording the continuous scenes from all these angles, to edit together the most telling parts in the cutting room. In his next two films he approached the problem of the continuous scene from the opposite direction, by cutting down the role of editing dramatically and introducing the controversial ‘ten-minute take'.

Once
The Paradine Case
finally went into release in December 1947 he felt an exhilarating sense of freedom. It was the end of an era, for him, for Selznick and for Hollywood. For Selznick,
The Paradine Case
meant the drastic winding-down of his independent releasing organization, his last challenge to the major Hollywood studios. The picture had cost an astronomical $4 million, and did not come anywhere near repaying the investment. And the organization proved uneconomical: he could not keep up a sufficient flow of product to occupy his employees all the year round, and from now on he had to admit defeat and retreated more and more into the dependent position of a producer or co-producer releasing his films through the
major distributing organizations. The end was also in sight, though no one then fully appreciated it, for the old Hollywood studio system of factory-style production, contract artists and technicians, and tycoon heads of production ultimately in charge of it all. Though Hitch, ever cautious, felt a certain trepidation in launching out on his own as a complete independent, without a contract to fall back on or a producer to blame if things went wrong, he had certainly chosen the psychological moment to make the change.

But now he had the freedom, where should he go and what should he do with it? Ironically, the most attractive offer came from Britain. During his wartime visit to London in 1944 Hitch and his producer Sidney Bernstein had discussed a long-standing project of Bernstein's, the very sober, simple filming of stage plays. At that point Bernstein had been particularly interested in it as part of the war effort, a way of recording an important part of British culture and selling it to other nations. Hitch had not seemed too interested—this sort of canned theatre, rather like what was subsequently done by the American Film Theatre, was far indeed from his own preoccupations in the cinema. But now Hitch was free and eager to work, Bernstein offered him a production set-up of his own, something to be called Transatlantic Pictures which would enable him to make films in Britain or America, co-produce them with Bernstein, and have complete control of subjects, casting and budgets. Hitch was delighted: he said, ‘The only thing that matters is who I work with day-to-day.' By this time he was fairly well settled into the American manner of film-making, was respected and encouraged in the States, while in the frivolous and, curiously, more cynical atmosphere of Britain his fanaticism for films was a problem. But obviously on his own terms he could work anywhere.

And at this point, to Bernstein's surprise, Hitch reverted to the subject of the filmed stage play. How if, for their first production, they were to return to his old project
Rope
, which by now dated back at least ten years in his mind? He said he would like to make a play on film, ‘but not Shakespeare', and thought Patrick Hamilton's thriller, loosely based on the Leopold-Loeb case in which two young Chicagoans murdered a third boy for kicks and to prove that they had super-intelligences, would do perfectly. He saw it as being a very inexpensive film, with a very short shooting schedule, and planned to put into operation this old idea of doing it as nearly as possible in one take—actually in takes of ten minutes' (one reel's)
duration which would run imperceptibly into each other on screen.

This sounded like a slightly odd idea to Bernstein, but if that was what Hitch wanted to do, that was what he wanted to do, and his enthusiasm for the whole project was a good sign. Hitch wanted to make the film in America, planned on shifting the locale of the story back to America, and wanted James Stewart, recently returned from the war, in the lead role of the professor who taught the two murderers philosophy and now unmasks their crime. During his absence from the screen on war service Stewart had dropped a bit from public view, and was now not considered a big enough name for the financiers, but he was tentatively offered $100,000 to play the role. He replied that he would play it free for a percentage of the profits, if any, but finally they settled on a fee of $300,000, a significant slice of the $1.5 million the film eventually cost. Hitch worked on the adaptation with his actor friend Hume Cronyn, who had appeared in
Lifeboat
for him, and the final screenplay was written by the American dramatist Arthur Laurents. In May 1948 Hitch assembled his cast around him on a stage in the Warner Brothers Studios, Burbank, and embarked on this new adventure.

Here, for ten days, they rehearsed very much as they would a play on stage. They were all word-perfect for the whole script, as they would be in the theatre, and Hitch occupied himself mainly with working out the intricate camera moves that would be necessary to shoot the whole thing continuously in actual time. By design, all the actors were very competent, with some stage experience, so that they could be more or less left to look after themselves, evolving a collective reading under Hitch's watchful eye. Even so, the most seasoned professional of them all, Constance Collier, was absolutely terrified to go to the studio when they were actually shooting—the long takes not only required theatrical feats of memory, but also imposed the added tension of worrying, if you made some slip, about the tremendous expense of reshooting, and the whole idea that this performance was about to be recorded, once for all, definitively on film even as you were giving it, with no possibility of manipulation and correction in the cutting room. James Stewart took the whole thing with his usual calm—though he did once inquire of Hitch why he was bothering to film it at all: why not just put up bleachers in the studio and sell tickets to live audiences?