Hitch (36 page)

But the television shows were only the beginning of what was to turn into a whole industry. They spawned a lengthy series of short-story anthologies with titles like
Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV
and
Tales My Mother Never Told Me
, collections of the kind of funny/macabre story made familiar and permanently associated with Hitch's name as a result of the television show. And then there was the
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
, which was sold largely on the strength of the show (though it still continues today, long after the show ceased production) and also provided a useful source of material. Pat Hitchcock came back to work on the magazine, and also ran something called the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Fan Club, for which she had to write four circulars a year to feed the tremendous interest engendered in Hitch as a personality—a task she found rather difficult, since he was so busy actually making films that he did not
do
much that was sufficiently colourful to provide circular copy. And there were records, there were games, there were toys—all the usual spin-offs of a successful television show.

Hitch was not only famous beyond his wildest dreams; he was also rich, or rapidly becoming so. The television shows themselves were immensely profitable, and so were all the ancillary activities.
Some years later, while touring Europe on a promotional trip, Hitch noticed a display of the German editions of the books in a Zurich bookshop window, stepped in, as he had never seen them before, was mobbed and spent more than an hour talking to customers, autographing books and so on. His companion remarked afterwards on his generosity in doing that at such a busy time. ‘Well,' replied Hitch, ‘I thought it was the least I could do, seeing that the foreign-language versions of the books alone bring in about a $100,000 a year!' Which, since they have been translated into dozens of languages all over the world, one can well believe. In 1962, when the series ended production, MCA was forced by application of the anti-trust laws to choose between being an artists' agency and being a producer, so it unloaded its agency interests and Herman Citron left to set up independently as an agent—notably, Alfred Hitchcock's agent. But his links with MCA remained close, for in 1964 he sold his interests in the television show to MCA in return for stock in the company—a deal which made him the fifth (or some say the third) largest stockholder in MCA and therefore in Universal, among other companies. Both parties did well: Hitch's stock rapidly quadrupled in value, and the shows, put into syndication in 1965, have been on the screens of the world in re-run ever since.

So, Hitch's television adventure made him independently wealthy—probably the wealthiest director in Hollywood today. From a financial point of view, he would never need to work again, and the major pay-off came, as it happens, at sixty-five, the age many consider that of retirement. But of course anyone who knew Hitch could no more imagine him retiring than flying over the roofs of Universal City. And in 1955, when it all started, he was absolutely at his peak of energy and creativity. The films flowed out of him in a seemingly endless stream; he had got back his confidence, and even a small set-back like the commercial disappointment of
The Trouble with Harry
could not deter him. Though never a gambler, he knew when he had a winning hand, and was determined to play it, all the way.

Exactly why Hitch, who had always made a point of not repeating himself, wanted to remake
The Man Who Knew Too Much
remains a mystery. Sometimes he shrugs it off by saying that he wanted a new vehicle for James Stewart quickly, and the property was there lying to hand, so he used it. He also said at the time that the original version had never been shown in America, or hardly—which is as it happens quite untrue. We know that he had seriously considered a remake some years previously, so this was not a sudden decision. He has often listed the original version as one of his own favourites among his films, which one might think constituted a good case for not tampering again with the subject; there would be more reason if he had some nagging dissatisfaction with the way he did it first time round. To Truffaut he said simply, ‘Let's say that the first version was the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.'

At any rate it does not seem to have been a case of ‘running for cover', since it was quite an expensive and elaborate film to set up, with extensive locations in Morocco and London as well as major shooting in Hollywood. And it was, incidentally if not primarily, a way of being kind to his old friend and colleague Angus McPhail, who had fallen on hard times since they had last worked together on the Ministry of Information films during the war, and who benefited enormously from Hitch's solicitude in bringing him out to work in Hollywood on two scripts,
The Man Who Knew Too Much
and his subsequent film,
The Wrong Man
. The script of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, written on this occasion by Angus McPhail and John Michael Hayes, followed the first in general outline, though changing the opening sequence completely, relocating it in Morocco instead of Switzerland, altering the ending to a sequence in which Doris Day sings at an embassy to track down her kidnapped boy
(where Edna Best had to practise her marksmanship to get back her kidnapped girl) and substituting a feeble red-herring sequence in a taxidermist's around the middle of the film for the original terrifying encounter of the hero with a villainous dentist. Over-all the treatment was much more expansive, so that the second version, at 106 minutes, runs twenty-two minutes longer than the first.

This was perhaps in line with a new mellowness in Hitch's work, a consistent tendency, ever since
Strangers on a Train
, to move away from the straight thriller such as audiences thought they expected of him. That they could now get on television every week in
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, so in his theatrical films he was freed for other things—precisely for ‘stories they wouldn't let me do on TV.' The films of the 1950s clearly mirror his own happiness, health and confidence—the confidence to do what he wanted, develop the aspects he found interesting, and to look for more than the mechanical thrills of his early British masterpieces. Those had been the products in their time of a similar happiness and professional confidence (Hitch underestimates his younger self when he calls him ‘a talented amateur'), but now the mature Hitch is more at ease with emotion, more eager to explore atmosphere, psychology and, at times, the darker areas of neurotic and obsessive behaviour which he had skimmed over before. The films are still springes to catch woodcocks, machines to play on the audience's responses—it was not for nothing that during a tipsy moment on
North by Northwest
he actually fantasized about a time when it might not even be necessary to make the movies, but simply to wire up the audience with electrodes to produce the desired responses and play on them as on a giant organ console.

The results of this new attitude include some of his finest films—
Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie
—but only when the material is right for the weight of the treatment it is given.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, despite the ingenious working-over it has been given, is not. An enchanting diversion has become weighed down with gloss and the sort of psychological elaboration it cannot really bear. The only occasion when he actually, verbally directed Doris Day, playing the distraught mother, is a case in point. In one of her big scenes she suddenly burst into convulsive sobs, which had not been specified in the script. Hitch stopped and asked her why she was doing that. ‘Well,' she said, ‘my child has been kidnapped, I don't know if I'll ever see him alive again, and I have to go through
all this pretence meanwhile. Of course I'm crying.' Hitch had to admit she was right and give her her head. But this indicates the intrusion of a sort of psychological realism alien to his earlier method and to this material—as soon as it was admitted, the tight plotting of the story as a series of emotional directions to the audience went by the board: they were left watching emotions rather than experiencing them.

Still, the casting of Doris Day proved in general a happy (if for Hitch improbable) inspiration. Back in 1959 Hitch had one evening met her in a corner where they had both taken refuge from some vast and noisy Hollywood party. Impulsively, he had introduced himself, told her how good he thought she was in
Storm Warning
, up to then her only dramatic role, and promised one day to cast her in a picture of his own. Now he took up that promise, casting her to star with James Stewart. She was frankly terrified of the travel involved, never before having left the United States, but by the time she arrived in Marrakesh after stopovers in London and Paris (for costume fittings) she was sufficiently confident to put her foot down about the treatment of any animals featured in the filming and to get them specially fed. Hitch was not too happy about the heat of Marrakesh, but still chose to vary little from his normal formal attire for filming. James Stewart retains a vivid image of Hitch shooting one of the big scenes in the main square in Marrakesh. They had hired a lot of extras, and a rumour had somehow spread that if they weren't able to see the camera they wouldn't get paid. So here were Doris Day and hundreds of extras, all backed up behind the action and staring fixedly at the camera. Things were getting ugly, the police had to be called in, and there was nearly a riot. And there, in the middle of it all, in temperature of well over 100°, sat Hitch, under a big umbrella, dressed in his ritual dark suit, white shirt, tie, calmly waiting for it all to be sorted out as though this was the most normal, restful situation in the world.

For Doris Day he was all too unrufflable. She was rattled by the strange food and lack of hygiene, and even more worried because Hitch never said anything to her. Oh, he was polite and friendly enough, and perfectly charming over the dinners which he often had flown in specially from Paris or London. But never a word about her performance. The same when they moved back to London for further location scenes. She became convinced that he was deeply unhappy with her, and demanded a serious meeting as soon as they
returned to Hollywood. Hitch was amazed. He explained gently that the reason he had said nothing was that she had been perfect in everything she had done; if he had wanted her any different he would certainly have told her. He also confided to her that he was quite as nervous as she was—he was nervous every time he walked into the Paramount commissary. She was totally reassured and finished the taxing studio scenes without any problem.

James Stewart, of course, was very used to Hitch's working methods and by now had complete confidence in him. But even he was taken somewhat by surprise when they were rehearsing and shooting the climactic sequence of the film, in which Doris Day foils an attempted assassination during a concert at the Albert Hall. The plot called for a reunion of husband and wife in the passage running round the outside of the auditorium, and, since they have been functioning separately for some time, a quick exchange of information between them. The shot was intricately set up, with a lot of swirling camera-movement up and down the corridor and a lot of explanatory dialogue for Stewart to speak. They rehearsed it that way, and then Hitch suddenly said, ‘I'm not hearing the London Symphony.' Stewart said, ‘What?' And Hitch repeated, ‘I'm not hearing the London Symphony. You're talking far too much. Why don't you cut the dialogue and let us hear the music?' They thought he was crazy, but after all it was his movie. And sure enough the scene was far more effective with the audience left to imagine the dialogue, while all they hear is the music.

Hitch was not long in London—the time he could afford to spend there was strictly limited by the British tax regulations—but he managed to do some research of his own on a nice point of casting. Knowing the British film industry of old, he was not surprised that in the casting of small parts they were lazy and convention-bound. When he asked to see actors for the small but visually important role of the ambassador he was sent dozens of small bearded men, all of whom had made a career out of playing politicians and diplomats. Out of curiosity, Hitch got hold of pictures of all the ambassadors in London at that time from a newspaper office, and found that not one was a small man with a beard. So instead he cast a big, smooth, bald man, a prominent stage actor in Copenhagen. So much for the inspirations of the casting department.

Back in Hollywood Hitch had to catch up with the television series and immediately got involved in a very unlikely theatrical
film project—the most unlikely he had undertaken for some years. He had completed the work required of him under his contract with Warners before he moved over to Paramount to make
Rear Window
, but he was not satisfied that he had given them full value for money. In addition, they, along with other companies in Hollywood, were in something of a crisis in 1957, and so Hitch undertook to make them a movie for no fee. As it happened, they had at that time a property which interested him—a real-life story of wrongful arrest which he had first read in
Life
some five years before. A musician called Manny Balestrero had been arrested and charged with armed robbery. All the circumstantial evidence was against him, he was imprisoned, brought to trial (or mistrial, as it was declared, since one of the jurors showed himself too convinced of the accused's guilt before the proceedings were completed), and meanwhile his wife went mad before the real culprit, an astonishing near-double, was accidentally discovered. Hitch decided to make this story as
The Wrong Man
.

It is easy enough to see what in it would have appealed to him. It reflected his long-standing neurotic fear of the police, and Balestrero's predicament could be some Kafkaesque nightmare of his own. What was less predictable was the way he chose to film it. He decided—he, the master of fantasy and film-for-film's-sake—to film it in a semi-documentary fashion, following the real course of events exactly. The script, by Angus McPhail and the distinguished playwright Maxwell Anderson, took an absolute minimum of dramatic licence, and though Hitch did originally shoot one of his usual cameo appearances in it he decided to suppress that in the interests of total credibility, and instead appeared himself on camera in a prologue telling us that everything we are about to see actually happened. Later on he came to see that that is an insufficient defence for dramatic weaknesses. Life, we always say, is stranger than fiction; but how do you convince an audience of that in a dramatized story? The dialogue people utter in life tends to be banal, prolix and stereotyped, a pale reflection often of something they have heard in the movies. Is that any excuse for putting it back into the movies unedited? In life someone may just go mad, as Balestrero's wife did, suddenly giving way under a strain. But will that be acceptable in a dramatization of these same facts?