Hitch (39 page)

And indeed by this time Hitch and Grant had worked together so long there was a great deal of mutual trust and respect between them. Hitch would even take suggestions from Grant with good grace. In one scene in
North by Northwest
Grant checked a detail and then said to Hitch, ‘If you'll get Bob to move the camera over a few inches you'll catch me going down the corridor through the hinge of the door'—a suggestion Hitch immediately accepted. Back in the studio Grant wandered over from the shooting one day to look at the next set they would be using, the Pullman car. He found it had been thrown together very quickly and casually and went back to tell Hitch, ‘This won't work—you can't shoot in that set the way it stands.' Without further question Hitch ordered the set to be revamped and repainted, not even bothering to go and look at it himself, so far did he trust Grant's professional judgement.

Things did not go altogether smoothly between them on the picture, though. Grant was not happy with the way Hitch had shot the scene with his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) and the two heavies in the elevator. He remarked to someone that he was not sure of Hitch's touch in light comedy, and the remark got back to Hitch, who was furiously offended. Meanwhile, Ernest Lehman had had second thoughts about
No Bail for the Judge
and told Hitch he did not want to do it, so Hitch was annoyed with him, and not speaking. All this while they were shooting the crop-duster sequence on location at Bakersfield. But since Hitch avoids and forbids confrontations, Grant and Lehman found themselves quarrelling with one another, with Grant claiming it was really a David Niven script and it was lousy anyway because he didn't understand what was going on and he doubted if anyone else would. They were both aware, of course, that they were taking out their worries on each other because they could not manage to quarrel directly with Hitch, who was the party most vitally involved. But, as these things do, it all blew over and by the end of shooting they parted the best of friends.

The main problem in casting
North by Northwest
was the role of the heroine, once it became clear, about halfway through the scripting, that the hero had to be Cary Grant. Other parts were filled with actors like Leo G. Carroll and Jessie Royce Landis with whom Hitch had worked happily before (indeed Leo G. Carroll, with six appearances in Hitchcock films to his credit, qualifies numerically as Hitch's favourite actor). Hitch overcame the old problem of avoiding melodrama in the villain by splitting his villain into three, the vicious side-kick, the strong-arm man, and the villain-in-chief, who can then be smooth and charming as only James Mason could make him. But who could Hitch get for his cool, elegant, inevitably blond heroine, the woman of mystery who is playing a double game rather like that of Ingrid Bergman in
Notorious
? MGM wanted Cyd Charisse, but Hitch did not feel she would be quite right. Surprisingly, his choice fell on Eva Marie Saint, who had won an Oscar for her role in
On the Waterfront
and had not up to then been associated in any way on screen with glamour, sophistication or sexiness. He set immediately about refashioning the outer woman. Before
North by Northwest
she was due to do a comedy with Bob Hope,
That Certain Feeling
, and Hitch laid it down that in that she should wear no colours, only black, white and grey. For
North by Northwest
he had a wardrobe specially designed for her at MGM, but then did not like
it, and ended up taking her to Bergdorf Goodman in New York and personally selecting her wardrobe off the peg. Given her Method background he expected some repetition of his problems with Montgomery Clift on
I Confess
, but in the event found her a warm, humorous, eminently practical person. He felt that the only thing needed to complete her transformation into a Hitchcock woman was to lower her voice register a little, and he found she was very amenable to this. To avoid obviously directing her in front of the cast and crew (something he has always regarded as demeaning for the actor and the director) he worked out a whole repertoire of signs and code words which immediately conveyed to her that she should lower her voice, speak up or whatever, and from then on everything went as smoothly as could be imagined.

When the film was finished it ran a surprising 136 minutes, easily his longest film to date. MGM were nervous, and begged him to cut it. In particular they wanted shortened or removed the scene between Gary Grant and Eva Marie Saint after he has finally discovered what her role in the drama is. For Metro this was a hold-up in the flow of thriller-type action; for Hitch it was essential to the development of the characters in the story. Metro looked like insisting, but Hitch checked on his contract, drawn up for him by MGA, and discovered that without his asking for it they had given him complete rights over the final cut. MGM had no powers in the matter, and for once he could and did say a polite but decided no. And in the long run his judgement was proved right, as the film turned out to be one of his biggest money-makers ever, and one of his biggest successes with critics who had found that in
Vertigo
he was straying too far for their taste from what they still persisted in expecting of him. This time, thank God, he was back with a classic thriller formula, and all was right with the world.

If they thought he had returned to the straight and narrow, and had no more surprises in store for them, they were quite wrong. He was in fact mulling over his biggest surprise yet—a film the ripples from which have not yet completely died down.

Psycho
really began with a professional challenge. Hitch made it his business to be closely aware of what was going on in the industry, what was making money and what was not. And he noticed that a lot of trashy horror films from companies like American-International were being produced for peanuts and making giant profits.
Most people who regarded themselves as representatives of serious, responsible Hollywood shook their heads a little at the awfulness of public taste, shrugged, and passed by. But Hitch believed that all evidence on what the public wanted should be heeded. And what, he wondered, if he were to make a cheap horror film but do it superlatively well? Could he do as well or better with a quality product? As it happened, he had a property in mind, a pulp novel by a prolific writer of such called Robert Bloch. The story of a middle-aged, mother-dominated murderer in a motel, it had little to recommend it, but there was the germ of something there, something Hitch thought he could work on.

What he very much needed was the right writer. He saw the film as a ruthless black comedy, and it had to be written by someone who shared his own rather sadistic sense of the humour in the subject. But he was stumped on who it should be. At this time his own agents, MCA, were pressing him at least to meet a writer from New York, an ex-songwriter called Joseph Stefano. He had written one film before,
The Black Orchid
, a family drama of Italians in America which Hitch did not like at all, and one prize-winning television play. Hitch was loath to see him, because he always hated having to say no: he did not want to risk the embarrassment of having to tell someone they were not right for his purposes. (He often avoids seeing films by people who ask his opinion, just because of this, and one of the actresses he had under personal contract was put there because he could not bear to disappoint her after making all the tests.) But MCA said, Meet him anyway, what have you got to lose? And finally he did just that—a short fifteen- or twenty-minute interview in his office at Paramount.

For a wonder, everything turned out very well. Stefano had been inactive for nine months because he felt he had come too far too fast, and really needed to work with a director who could help him learn his craft from the bottom up. Hitch would be perfect, and so when he heard that Hitch was planning on
Psycho
he rushed to read the book. He was very disappointed: why should Hitch possibly want to make this film? So that was the first thing he asked Hitch on meeting him. Hitch was amused, and started to tell him. He said two things which immediately made sense to Stefano and fired his enthusiasm: that the murderer should become an attractive, clean-cut young man, say, Anthony Perkins; and that he wanted to start the picture with the girl. Hitch and Stefano had a brief but relaxed conversation,
then Stefano's agent came out and told him Hitch liked him and would try him on the script. The only thing was, Hitch did not want to make a flat deal for him to write the picture; instead he would take him on week-to-week, paying him a weekly salary as long as he was working on the script. Stefano's agent was not too happy, but Stefano leapt at the chance, and began work right away.

As with Hitch's other writers, this was a daily process of discussion. Stefano would arrive at the studio at 11.00 each morning (Hitch would have liked it earlier, but Stefano was in analysis at the time and could not manage it), they would talk, have lunch, and talk through the afternoon—about everything on earth, it seemed, except the movie. Usually not more than ten or fifteen minutes would be directly concerned with
Psycho
. But in that time Stefano or Hitch would make suggestions, notes would be taken, and things moved steadily forward. Stefano's first suggestion was that we should meet the girl during a lunchtime assignation (the book begins with her arrival at the motel), and he also suggested the opening with a helicopter shot over the city taking us into the cheap hotel window. After a couple of weeks Hitch had to go out of town on a business trip, and he suggested casually that while he was away Stefano should go ahead with writing the first scene. Obviously this was in the nature of an audition, since it was so contrary to Hitch's usual practice. Many writers might have been insulted at the idea, but Stefano saw no reason to be, and went ahead. He tried to make the girl human and touching, so that the audience would care about and sympathize with her. When Hitch returned he read the scene and was clearly very pleased, though all he would say directly to Stefano was ‘Alma liked the scene very much.'

From then on Stefano did not write another word until they had laid out the whole script verbally, scene by scene. This took about six weeks' conversation, followed by four or five weeks during which Stefano went off and wrote. It was his first draft that Hitch shot, with only one scene rewritten—that in which a cop talks to the girl on the road, which was originally written with the cop being flirtatious, and changed at Hitch's suggestion to his being quite neutral, only menacing in her guilty imagination. Hitch asked for one more change: could Stefano use another word than ‘lurid' of the love letters? Stefano asked why. Hitch said he didn't care for the word ‘lurid'. Was this, Stefano asked, just a personal feeling? Hitch admitted it was. Oh well, said Stefano, I can't change a word in a
script for no other reason than that you personally don't like it. And so the word remained. Stefano took the finished script up to Hitch's house in Bel Air one morning, and they had champagne on the rocks to celebrate, Hitch saying Stefano must tell no one such a terrible solecism had been committed in his home, merely because they had no champagne properly chilled.

This had been one of the smoothest and fastest scripting jobs ever for Hitch. He and Stefano saw eye to eye on practically everything. They discussed, for instance, the possibility of showing the reactions back in the office after Marion has left with the stolen money, but decided that it would be a fatal distraction. Instead Stefano wrote the scenes as though they would be shown, then they were done as voices over while Marion drives, as her imaginings, so that this tells us more about her too. In the book the explanations of Norman's strange behaviour and impersonation of his dead mother are all speculations on the part of Marion's boy-friend and her sister. Stefano suggested instead that they have an old-fashioned expository scene, like in the movies of his childhood, where an expert would move in with a set explanation. Hitch liked the idea, though he feared it might be a ‘hat-grabber', and into the script it went.

Fortunately, for when it came to clearing the script with the Production Code, the first thing they objected to and wanted removed was the word ‘transvestite'. Stefano was able to defend this by pointing out that it was a technical word used by a doctor in the film, and anyway he was not calling Norman a transvestite but saying very clearly that properly speaking he was not. They were worried by the idea of the audience seeing the mummified face of the mother, but accepted it when reassured that the maquette had been passed as accurate by doctors at UCLA. They also raised objections to the scene in which Marion tears up her notes and flushes them down the toilet. The very sight of a toilet, they said, was offensive. Here too Stefano did battle and won—since the very intention Hitch and he had with that scene was to be offensive. They reckoned that, innocent though the idea was, if you actually showed a toilet on screen and a close-up of something being flushed down it, you would already have knocked the underpinnings out from under 90 per cent of an American audience, so deeply did the neuroses of toilet-training go, and you would have them just where you wanted them.

When it came to the shooting, Hitch followed out to the letter his
plan of making the film as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Though it was for Paramount he financed it completely himself, and made it in much the same circumstances as his television shows, at Universal with his television crew and cameraman, John L. Russell. The famous ‘
Psycho
house' now proudly shown off on Universal tours was a standing set, and only the row of motel rooms in front had to be built—Hitch fought Stefano over a shot from the house showing Marion's sister approaching because it necessitated building a back wall to the motel proper, but gave in to Stefano's feeling that the exact geography was important here. As for the casting, Hitch was able to get Anthony Perkins very cheaply because he owed Paramount one film on an old contract—otherwise he would have been much too expensive. Vera Miles was under contract to Hitch anyway, and most of the other roles were small in terms of days of shooting required. He wanted as big a star as he could get for the role of Marion to make the shock of her death in the middle of the film as great as possible, and settled on Janet Leigh as the best possible compromise between the ideal and the affordable. On the principle of keeping things in the family, he recruited Pat to play a character role in the opening scenes.