Hitch (43 page)

This was the last role he seriously considered Tippi Hedren for. In 1966 she was lent out to another Universal production, curiously enough directed by the other great British survivor from silent days, Charles Chaplin. But after
The Countess from Hong Kong
her connection with Hitch terminated, coolly but quite amicably. And Hitch's other two projects at this time had nothing to do with her.

For a while he worked on adapting the John Buchan novel
The Three Hostages
, another story featuring Richard Hannay, the hero of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. It is a complicated story about three children of important people kidnapped by enemies of the British Empire, and Hannay's roundabout pursuit and rescue of them. Finally Hitch decided he could not escape the basic problem of a plot based on hypnotism (the main villain is supposed to be a hypnotist of incredible power), which never seemed to work out convincingly on screen. And then, for even longer, Hitch worked on
R.R.R.R.R
. an idea which, like the two others, went back originally in his experience to before the war and his arrival in America. It was then that he had developed, particularly at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz, a lifelong fascination with the mechanics of a major hotel, the details of its day-to-day running. Now he thought he saw a way to get this into a film, with a story about an Italian immigrant hotelier who has worked his way up from the bottom and now decides to share his success with his family; they turn out to be a gang of thieves and have in various ways to be prevented from stealing the jewels of a rich woman staying at the hotel. To write the script Hitch brought over the Italian writing team of Age and Scarpelli, who had not long before had a big success with a kindred subject in the Monicelli film
Big Deal on Madonna Street
, about a group of amateurish crooks trying to rob a department store. But language problems were almost insuperable, and Hitch discovered to his distress that discipline and construction were not exactly the strong suit of the Italians. He continued to play with the idea for a couple of years, but finally despaired of getting it into satisfactory shape, and abandoned it after a final attempt when he had completed
Torn Curtain
.

Difficulties seemed to be inescapable at this period in Hitch's life. Not that everything had always gone that smoothly before. There
was always a certain amount of wastage, in the shape of properties worked on which never somehow reached the screen—though even there Hitch was persistent, as with
Rope
and
I Confess
. And the seeming casualness and simplicity of a film like
North by Northwest
was often the end product of a lot of anguish and hard work. Occasionally something would actually go very smoothly—the films written by John Michael Hayes,
Psycho
—but these were the exceptions rather than the rule. Happily the exceptions had predominated during the 1950s; but in the 1960s the rule was reasserting itself, with a vengeance.

Torn Curtain
was certainly no exception. The germ of the idea had come to Hitch back in 1951, when two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected to Russia amid a great deal of publicity. What intrigued Hitch was the figure least considered: Mrs. Maclean. How did she feel? What, if anything, had she known or suspected? And if it came as a complete shock, how did she cope with it? That was the starting-point of a story about defection, told from the woman's point of view. Truth to tell, this is not very clear from the film—something evidently got lost along the way. Again various writers played around with the idea, under Hitch's direction. Eventually the Ulster novelist Brian Moore came up with a treatment that seemed to hold water, and a screenplay based on that treatment. But still Hitch was not satisfied: in particular he was unhappy with the dialogue and brought in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, authors of the big stage success
Billy Liar
, who seemed at that time to be writing practically every film made in Britain, to do a rewrite job on it. Their contribution to the screenplay was considerable enough for Hitch to feel strongly that they should receive screen credit. But Brian Moore disputed this, and an adjudication by the Screen Writers Guild gave him sole credit, to Hitch's irritation.

Then there was the question of casting. Hitch now admits to major miscalculations where the two principals, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, were concerned. Why? Well, pressure from Universal and his other advisers. Julie Andrews had just become about the biggest thing in films with
The Sound of Music
and
Mary Poppins
, a fact which was hardly lost on Hitch, however much he might torment Ernest Lehman (who wrote
The Sound of Music
) with the assertion that it became the biggest money-maker ever only because most of the people who saw it thought they were seeing
Mary Poppins
. In principle it did seem that Julie Andrews might have the makings of
a Hitchcock woman—cool, crisply in command of things, able to be elegant, able to be blond, and perhaps able to produce the requisite sizzle of understated sexiness. To emphasize the ‘you've never seen Julie Andrews like this' aspect, the film opens with a scene in which she is seen (or rather, considering the amount of covering, understood to be) in bed with her fiancé
before
they are married. Well, it might have worked, but it did not. No one seems to know why. Hitch speaks politely of her; she speaks politely of him. But obviously there was no spark of communication between them.

Paul Newman was something else again. Hitch's impatience with the affectations of the Method actors was well known, but he had managed to do wonders with Eva Marie Saint, whom he liked, and Montgomery Clift, whom he didn't. And there was no reason why he should not be able to use Paul Newman equally well as a star rather than an actor—an almost equally conservative director, Mark Robson, had done so with encouraging results a couple of years before in
The Prize
, a thriller with many obvious echoes of
North by Northwest
, also written by Ernest Lehman. But the first real social encounter between Hitch and Newman got them off on the wrong foot. Hitch invited Newman home to a small dinner party. The first thing Newman did was to take off his jacket at table and drape it over the back of his chair. Then he refused Hitch's carefully chosen vintage wine and asked for beer instead. And to make matters worse, he insisted on going and getting it himself out of the refrigerator in the kitchen and drinking it from the can. With someone who would behave like that—who would feel it necessary to behave like that to make some point of showing he was not intimidated—Hitch could clearly not relate, and the whole of the shooting was overshadowed by the judgements reached that evening.

To make matters worse, the two stars were expensive: so expensive the budget was tight in other respects. Hitch was not too devoted to location shooting anyway, and would no doubt have regarded Universal City, Long Beach, the campus of the University of Southern California and a farm in Camarillo as just as good as the German locations they are made to represent, even if the money had not been tight. But he did regret he could not send an American camera team to Germany to shoot material for back-projections, but had to rely on the, as it proved, inferior work of a German team. All the same, the film commits a cardinal error, and a very unusual one for Hitch: it is for the most part flat and dull. The real emotional
drama of the woman's angle gets lost, the stars seem un-involved, and there is remarkably little suspense at any point, not because invention and construction have failed, but because we just do not care about anyone in the story.

There is, however, one exception—the sequence which in the final script seems to have been the only one that really turned Hitch on. Watching other people's films, and observing ‘how they do it in the movies', Hitch had always been struck by the unnatural ease with which people killed one another. A slight tap on the head or a desultory squeeze of the throat was apparently infallible, and a rank amateur who had never handled a gun before could still be relied on to shoot to kill first time. How different things were in life: what he observed from the famous trials he loved to read was, over and over, the extreme difficulty of actually killing anybody. And he wanted to show that in a film.
Torn Curtain
gave him a chance in the sequence where Paul Newman's status as an undercover agent is discovered by a police spy who has followed him to an isolated farm, and the only thing he can do, inexperienced intellectual that he is, is to kill the man. The scene is the most successful in the film as an example of Hitch's attempt to get entirely natural-looking lighting through the use of diffusion and gauzes, but what makes it memorable is its completely justified nastiness. It has to be a silent killing, as another Communist agent is just outside, and it has to be accomplished with the weapons to hand in an ordinary farm kitchen. And slowly, horrifyingly, the man refuses to die—he is battered, stabbed, nearly strangled, and finally, in desperation, has his head thrust into a gas oven. After seeing this, no one could ever think again that killing is simple for the amateur.

Unfortunately, this is the only sequence in the film which really lights up, and in general the shooting was an unhappy experience for Hitch. Perhaps the worst experience came when the shooting was over. Universal signified to Hitch that they did not want Bernard Herrmann to write the score—they would like something less ‘old-fashioned', more obviously saleable in the form of a soundtrack album. Hitch stood up for Herrmann, and went out on a limb for him. But he made clear to Herrmann, as usual, exactly what he wanted: nothing too heavy, not obvious thriller music, and particularly so in the rather light-hearted opening. Herrmann played him sketches, which he felt were a bit on the heavy side. But Herrmann said he could fix it. Came the day of the recording, at
Goldwyn Studios. Hitch was there, hearing the completed score for the first time. The credit music was played and recorded heavy with menace. Hitch was unhappy, but Herrmann said, ‘Wait till you hear the next cut', and began to conduct that. Whatever its virtues as music, it was just what Hitch had said he did not want. Hitch was furious. He felt he had been betrayed, and after the second cut told Herrmann that it was not according to their agreement, he did not want to hear any more, and left the recording, shaking and silent. He was driven back to the studio, was let off at the gate and went straight to the head of the music department to accept responsibility and offer to pay off Herrmann himself. A new score was commissioned from John Addison, whose most notable film score up to then was for
Tom Jones
. The break between the old collaborators was decisive, with each feeling that the other had deliberately let him down. In fact both were under a strain at the time: Hitch had had a more than usually gruelling period of shooting with
Torn Curtain
, and Herrmann was in the middle of a marital break-up. Later tempers cooled a bit, and Herrmann, who shortly afterwards moved to London, did drop into Hitch's office happily with his new wife the next time he was in Hollywood. But Hitch avoided seeing him, and they never worked together on a film again.

Torn Curtain
was almost universally slated by the critics, and the public was lukewarm. After
Marnie
, this was a real reverse, and Hitch, despite his big holding of MCA stock, was in the rockiest position he had been for many years. Films were getting ever more expensive to make, and the moderate success hardly existed any more—commercially films were either a triumph or a disaster, and no director, however distinguished, could expect to be staked by a production company to many disasters in a row. Of course, Hitch did have a contract with Universal, but they had to agree to the projects under consideration—certainly if they were going to cost more than $3 million. After
Torn Curtain
Hitch was looking for a new property that excited him and would also be acceptable to Universal.
Mary Rose
was out of the question, though he was still talking about it as a possibility (or a hope) after
Frenzy
in 1972. He gave up the battle over
R.R.R.R.R
. himself. He returned to the first version of
Frenzy
, but could still not overcome the problem of the ‘third act'.

At least at this period of his life Hitch had some greater opportunity for social life, and for some small adventures outside the charmed circle of the movies. In January 1965, before starting work
on
Torn Curtain
, he and Alma went with the Wassermans to President Johnson's inauguration in Washington. They parked in the area where the Justices parked, so there were only eight or ten other cars there. Alma got very cold during the outdoor ceremony, so they rushed away immediately it was over to head back to the hotel. Making a quick getaway from the car park they turned out into Pennsylvania Avenue, only to discover that they were heading the wrong way, right in front of the President's cavalcade. There was nothing they could do except continue, the Wassermans and Alma slumped down in the back hissing to Hitch, who whenever possible sits in the front, ‘For heaven's sake wave.' Which he did, thoroughly relishing the situation, and that way they travelled in style all the way. Strangely enough, it never occurred to anyone to question his right to be there: Alfred Hitchcock head of the inaugural parade? Well, why not, after all?

After
Torn Curtain
he had to attend to some of his investments. Among them were many head of cattle, out on the range somewhere hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. They had been bought on the advice of his investment counsellor, and Hitch would probably never have seen them except that it proved necessary to establish legally that there were so many specific head of cattle and that the owner did have a more than merely nominal connection with them. So off Hitch went in his usual business suit to meet and be photographed with his herd. He was fascinated to observe that all the cowboys were mechanized, with no horses in sight except for show, and they rounded up the few token head of Hitch's cattle in Land-rovers. He found the hospitality of the cowboys overwhelming—in particular, the giant steaks they ate for breakfast were rather too much for him—and he loved to observe the exotic details of life on the range as it really was, rather than as they did it in the movies. He was particularly curious about the rather 1984ish compound in which they lived, all fenced off and surrounded by a wide area brightly illuminated all night by floodlights. Were the cattle, he wondered, his mind running alone the lines of
The Birds
, seriously expected to attack?