Hitch (38 page)

And it is difficult not to notice a strange and hardly coincidental similarity between what James Stewart does to the second Kim Novak and what Hitch has done over and over again to his leading ladies. Given that there is this ‘head' that he finds constantly fascinating—the blond hair falling in a certain way over the ears, the bearing which implies cool, ladylike control and who knows what fires beneath—he has sometimes found stars who fitted naturally into the mould (quintessentially Grace Kelly) and more often,
especially in his later career, set about forcing unlikely material into it. Vera Miles was a case in which he did not succeed. Tippi Hedren, later, was a case in which he did. And Kim Novak, who was not really his type at all (despite a surprising similarity in some shots to the Joan Fontaine of
Suspicion
), comes amazingly close to it in the first half of
Vertigo
, thanks to his dictating what she should wear and how she should bear herself. It can hardly be insignificant that Madeleine (Kim Novak No. 1) is specifically brunette in the book, and has been transformed for the film into an icy, ethereal blonde—precisely the type that Hitch, alias Svengali/Pygmalion, has so often tried to produce before filming, in just the way that James Stewart does within the latter half of this film.
Vertigo
in that respect is alarmingly close to allegorized autobiography, a record of Hitch's obsessive pursuit of an ideal quite as much as a literal tale of love lost and found again.

And is Hitch aware of this element of submerged autobiography in his work, coming more and more nakedly to the surface in the sadistic manipulations of Kim Novak by James Stewart in
Vertigo
or of Tippi Hedren by Sean Connery in
Marnie
? Probably not. He always maintains that there is nothing more than an obvious dramatic interest of surprise and discrepancy in his consistent breaking up of his heroine's
soignée
exterior to reveal the passionate or whimpering animal within. And yet, even bearing in mind Wordsworth's enthusiastic judgement of Shakespeare's Sonnets, ‘With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart' and Browning's unceremonious rejoinder, ‘If he did, the less Shakespeare he!', it is hard to resist some lining-up of the attitudes embodied in Hitch's work and the attitudes of the man himself. If Buñuel, with his blond heroines who start all prim and frail and virginal and grow into monsters of brutal dominance, figures as the cinema's leading exponent of male masochism, Hitch seems on the contrary the great exponent of male sadism. As a private person he seems to get on with women better than with men, but as a film-maker he clearly suggests a broad streak of misogyny. Perhaps he feels he can afford not to examine his own hidden motivation in his films too closely because he knows perfectly well that he is in his life a model Catholic husband and father: a less correct and moral man would very likely have more hesitation in letting all his complexes hang out in his work. But then it is the combination of extreme sophistication in some areas and what appears to be extraordinary naïveté in others which goes to
form the fascinating ambiguity of what Hitch does on the screen. It does not matter whether he knows exactly what he is putting into his films—all that does matter is that it is there.

If Hitch felt an extraordinary, and to him perhaps not totally explicable, identification with
Vertigo
, his next film,
North by Northwest
, is an unmistakable
jeu d'esprit
, standing in much the same relation to
Vertigo
as Graham Greene's ‘entertainments' do to his novels. Some—mainly those who follow Hitch's own lead in regarding him as the great master of form without content—regard it as the peak of his achievement; to others it is immensely charming and entertaining, but finally lacks the resonance of his best work. Either way, there is no doubting its singular brilliance, the impression it gives of being all as easy as falling off a log. Naturally, this was far from being the case. It had actually been in the works, the subject of a lot of slow and sometimes agonizing labour, for at least eighteen months before it was ready to shoot. And 1958 had been in other respects a difficult year for Hitch, though few outsiders knew how difficult. He and Alma, for all the care they took, had actually always been in robust health: it was one of their biggest assets in life. But in 1958 Alma began to have some disturbing symptoms. She went into hospital, and the condition was diagnosed as cancer. The doctors decided to operate right away. As it happened, Hitch was that very week scheduled to direct one of the television shows, and a very light, comical one at that. Not wanting to worry Alma unduly, and needing something to keep himself occupied, he went right ahead with it. He went to the studio every day, regular as clockwork (the nearest he has ever come to a statement of his life's philosophy is ‘The day begins at 9 a.m.'), rehearsing and shooting with his usual humorous impassivity, so that no one there knew anything was wrong. Then he would drive straight to the hospital, weeping and shaking convulsively all the way, and on arrival would put on his cheerful face again and spend the evening talking with Alma as though this were the most usual thing in the world. The operation, as it turned out, was a complete success, and life went back to normal, but not without a severe shake-up to Hitch's nervous system—for the first time he had had to think seriously about the unthinkable, life without Alma.

Meanwhile, some months before he started shooting
Vertigo
, he had started work on his next project, which was a Hammond Innes novel called
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
. The book belonged to
MGM, a studio he had never worked for, and they had somehow interested Hitch in making it for them. One day Ernest Lehman, then under contract to MGM, got a mysteriously secretive call telling him that Hitch, whom he had met once before through Bernard Herrmann, had specially requested that he work on the script. He took the book home, read it, and gave a prompt refusal—he could see no way a movie might be extracted from the subject. All it had, he felt, was a powerful opening image of a ship drifting, deserted, in the English Channel; the rest was a boring courtroom drama in which it was painfully established in manifold flashbacks just how this state of affairs came about. MGM and his agent begged him to reconsider, he had lunch with Hitch at the Beverly Hills Hotel and was totally charmed by him, and, thinking to himself that Hitch must after all have some answer to the problem that he could not see, accepted. Thus began a period of daily visits to Hitch's home, where each morning they would talk about anything and everything but the project in hand. Hitch seemed, in fact, to get more and more leery of talking about it at all, until finally they went three days without even mentioning the
Mary Deare
. So after three weeks Lehman plucked up the courage to tell Hitch he did not know how to lick the subject into shape, and Hitch had better get himself another writer. Hitch took it very calmly: ‘Don't be silly. We get on very well. We'll do something else.' How about MGM? ‘Oh, we won't tell them.'

So the meetings continued, kicking around various ideas, including the story of Jack Shepherd, the eighteenth-century English escape artist, which Hitch had announced as a project back in 1948. But Lehman did not want to do a costume drama; if he was going to do a Hitchcock script he wanted it to be ‘the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures'. Still nothing more solid was emerging than a mountain of notes and detached ideas. Hitch seemed happy, but Lehman was getting more and more nervous as everyone at MGM kept asking him how the
Mary Deare
was going. By now Hitch was into pre-production on
Vertigo
and their morning meetings had shifted to Paramount. Somewhere in here Hitch remarked that he had always wanted to film a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore. Shortly afterwards he mentioned a notion he had had for a scene in which a delegate speaking at the United Nations gets very annoyed and says he will not continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up. They try to awaken him, and find of course that he
has been murdered, and the only clue is a doodle on his pad of a caribou head. Somehow these two notions came together into the idea of a sort of chase film starting at the United Nations in New York, taking in Mount Rushmore and ending (shades of the caribou) in Alaska. Since this was vaguely north-west they started to call the project
In a North-Westerly Direction
.

Along this frail thread sequences and ideas gradually gathered. At one point they tried to work in a sequence in Detroit using Hitch's old notion of a car being put together from scratch on an assembly line, and when it rolls off completed there is a dead body in the back. And then how about a Moral Rearmament conference at Lake Louise? But the problem remained, who was this happening to and why? Someone not used to this sort of adventure, James Stewart perhaps, who would somehow, like Hannay in
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, be caught up in it. Then Hitch mentioned a conversation he had had with a New York newspaperman who had offered him the idea, if he had any use for it, of the CIA inventing a man who did not exist as a decoy in some spy plot. This seemed to be the key they needed: Jimmy Stewart (or whoever) would be mistaken by the other side for this decoy who did not really exist at all. When it became clear that they were going to use this idea they cleared the rights to it with the newspaperman, who was only too delighted actually to have come up with something useful to the great Alfred Hitchcock, and started putting things into shape.

At which point Hitch suddenly observed to Lehman, ‘Well, you'd better tell MGM what we're doing.' Lehman had a fit: no way. So Hitch said lugubriously, ‘Oh well, if you want me to do your dirty work, I suppose I must,' and set up a meeting with the heads of Metro. Here he was brilliant. He told them that it was going to take so long for them to lick the scripting problems on the
Mary Deare
that he had decided to do another film for them before that—which delighted them because they thought they would get two films instead of one. It would be, he announced, an original thriller, and then with all his skill and charm told them the story up to where he and Lehman had got with it, at which point he suddenly pretended to remember another appointment, leaving them panting for more. So all was arranged, and when Hitch started shooting
Vertigo
Lehman was due back in his office at MGM to write. The project was still called
In a North-Westerly Direction
, but at one stage, in tribute to the Mount Rushmore sequence, it was called
The Man on
Lincoln's Nose
. One day Sammy Cahn came into Lehman's office and proceeded to sing him a love song he had composed using this as the title, which Lehman thought was going a little far. Eventually it was Kenneth McKenna, head of the MGM script department, who suggested that
North by Northwest
would be better than
In a North-Westerly Direction
, and though they kept meaning to change it the title stuck. (Any allusion to Hamlet's madness was entirely accidental.)

Before starting the script in earnest Lehman did a research trip covering more or less the route the film's protagonist would travel. He sat around in the United Nations building for a week, got a judge on Long Island to put him through all the stages of arrest for drunken driving, and hired a forest ranger to guide him up Mount Rushmore, until he got so scared he gave the ranger a Polaroid to complete the climb alone and photograph the top for him. (As a result they found the real top of Mount Rushmore was completely unusable—not that that mattered at all to Hitch.) Back in Hollywood he continued writing, and by the time Hitch had finished shooting
Vertigo
he had the first two-thirds of the story in shape. Hitch was delighted with what he had done. But Lehman had no ‘third act'—he had come to a complete block. After a couple of weeks blocked he went to Hitch and told him he wanted to leave the picture. Hitch was very reassuring: he said he would go to Metro, take all the blame, and they would get in a third mind, one of those best-selling woman thriller writers perhaps. Then suddenly Lehman had an inspiration—that the heroine should have to shoot the protagonist in order to clear her name for the other side of the double game she was playing—and the rest of the story fell into place.

By now Hitch was concentrating completely on
North by Northwest
, having got
Vertigo
out of the way. He worked into the script an idea he had toyed with for many years driving north from Los Angeles to the house in Scots Valley through the flat, featureless fields around Bakersfield, with the sinister presence of the crop-dusting planes overhead. What if the hero should be attacked by some faceless enemy in one of these planes, out in the open, in broad daylight? What could leave him more defenceless than that? Together Hitch and Lehman worked out the details, shot by shot—though Hitch sometimes resented Lehman's attempts to suggest camera placements and on one occasion, when Lehman was suggesting some changes in the Mount Rushmore scene, burst out quite uncharacteristically with ‘Why do you insist on trying to tell me
how to direct the picture?' But by and large they worked together very well, and when the script was completed and a starting date set Hitch wanted Lehman to get on right away with scripting the next project he had in mind, Henry Cecil's
No Bail for the Judge
, to be made in Britain with Audrey Hepburn and Laurence Harvey.

The actual shooting of
North by Northwest
was a complicated mixture of locations and studio work, sometimes within the same scene. There was a rule in force at the time that no fiction film could be shot in the United Nations building, and though they cheated on this a bit by shooting one little scene with Cary Grant (who had been cast as the lead when it became evident the subject was more of a Cary Grant subject than a James Stewart subject) by concealed camera, most of the United Nations stuff had to be reconstructed in the studio. They did do quite a lot of location shooting elsewhere in New York, however, notably in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, where Cary Grant had an apartment. Since there was not much room in the part of the lobby where they were shooting, and nowhere for Grant to sit in peace, he was not called down from his rooms until they were absolutely ready. One morning he came down, walked through the crowd, picked up a telephone and put it down (to match a studio close-up), then walked over to the camera and looked through the viewfinder to see what the outside line for his walk would be. Joe Hyams, who was there, was amazed and said to Hitch, ‘You haven't even said “Good morning” to Cary. How does he know what to do?' Hitch answered casually, ‘Oh, he's been walking across this lobby for years. I don't need to tell him how.'