Hitch (6 page)

And, for all his bravado, remarkably inexperienced in life. As Michael Balcon and Victor Saville rapidly found out. Though they were little older than he was (three and two years respectively) they felt and behaved a lot older. They had both seen service in the First
World War; they both came from much less solidly bourgeois homes—struggling Jewish families in the industrial midlands of England, which had perforce protected them much less than Hitch's family had protected him—and had both been making their own way in the world at an age when Hitch was still at school, still comfortably if not lavishly financed from home. The gap between them and him in worldliness seemed enormous. But they liked him; he amused them and made himself immensely useful to them. They determined to take his education in hand.

First, the smoking and drinking. Here there was an obvious way past his defences: he loved to eat. Already when he was working as a clerk in the City he had taken to dressing up in a city suit and going off by himself to eat in restaurants like Simpson's in the Strand, the haunt of businessmen who appreciated its fine cuts of meat served from giant joints on trolleys. There, always alone and equipped with the day's
Times
, he would eat in solitary splendour, sketching out for himself one of the roles he hoped to play in life. He saw himself, in his fantasies, as a connoisseur of the good things in life, and the good things in life obviously included, according to the traditional image, fine wines with fine food, and brandy and cigars to follow. Not that fine wines and old brandy played much part immediately in the routine at Islington—beer and sandwiches at a local pub were more likely. But at least it was a start, and Balcon and Saville were soon satisfied with the aptness of their new pupil.

Girls were something else again. Neither of his two chief mentors was particularly experienced there either, though they still had a very fair start on the virginal Hitch. Matters were quite different with the other principal figure of the company, their star director Jack Cutts. And he was the one Hitch principally had to do with, since he was working in various capacities on a succession of five films directed by Cutts. Cutts was older than the rest, already pushing forty, and had quite a reputation as a womanizer. He always managed to keep attractive young women around him, playing small parts in his films or hoping to do so, and was famed for such feats as having two sisters in his dressing room in the course of one lunch break. He was generally in the midst of some tempestuous affair, sometimes several at a time, which had to be more or less effectually concealed from his wife (who was not even in fact his wife). He was by all accounts not much of a director (none of his films from this period seems to have survived), but he was a shrewd
packager, a fast talker and a good chap to have a good time with. He had energy and stamina, and was perfectly happy to party all night and turn up, more often than not, bright and fresh for work the next morning. Eventually drink would take its toll, and some years later Hitch was embarrassed to be approached on behalf of Cutts, his first boss, with an urgent request for some work, anything, on Hitch's latest film,
The Thirty-Nine Steps
(he managed to find Cutts one day's work shooting a couple of close-ups of Robert Donat and even that, which Hitch felt ashamed to offer him, he accepted with gratitude). But right now Cutts was the most successful director making films in Britain: a colourful figure, somewhat histrionic in manner, thoroughly at home with those important actors Hitch had been up to now worshipping almost entirely from afar, and ready to throw a fit of temperament at the slightest excuse or no excuse at all. Even if Hitch kept his own counsel, and cast a cool, mistrustful eye on Cutts, it was all the same inevitable that Cutts should have some influence on him.

And so, probably, Cutts did: in particular Hitch would seem to have picked up from him some hints on dealing with actors, on and off stage. But in his obvious area of expertise, the wonderful world of girls, Cutts seems to have had no influence at all. Hitch was by no means uninterested, but he had already, secretively, formed a very specific interest of his own, Alma. One result of his recruiting her as continuity girl on
Woman to Woman
was that, as assistant director, he was on the set every hour of the working day, right next to her. Whatever else he might learn from Balcon, Saville and Cutts, he was not interested in anything they might teach him about seeing girls.

Which was no doubt just as well, considering that the connection with Cutts was to lead him into some rather bizarre situations. For the moment, though, things went on calmly enough.
Woman to Woman
started production in June 1923 and was finished by August. It was, Hitch thinks, the best of the Cutts films, and it was certainly the most successful. By the standards of the time it was both lavish and sophisticated: the script Hitch and Cutts had devised from a successful play of the previous season concerned an Englishman fighting in France during the First World War. He has an affair with a dancer at the Moulin Rouge who bears his child, then goes back to the trenches, is wounded and becomes amnesiac, and back in England marries another girl, completely unaware of his unfinished business in France. The grand finale has the girl from the Moulin
Rouge, now known as ‘the English Dancer', come to dance at his mansion, in an elaborate routine which begins with her being borne in by four ‘Nubian' slaves—actually the McLaglen brothers in black-face, this being one of Victor McLaglen's more unlikely early appearances in films. Hitch confidently elaborated the character of the fallen woman as though he was intimately familiar with the breed, and to his relief no one questioned what he wrote.

The settings too involved unknown territory, since he was required to design several elaborate Parisian scenes, including a complete reconstruction of the Moulin Rouge, without ever having set foot outside England. He dispatched someone to France to do research for the décor, but then decided that he didn't really trust the researcher, and suddenly told Alma that she would have to keep an eye on things for a couple of days, as he was taking the night ferry to France himself. On this first trip, one might expect he would try acquainting himself with some of the fine food and drink for which the French capital was famed. But no; this was business. And the first thing Hitch did, arriving off the boat train at 7 a.m. was to go to early mass at the Madeleine. Sharp firsthand observation and native intelligence covered for lack of practical experience, and Hitch suddenly found that as ‘art director' of the film he could just calmly state as a fact that the set had to be shot from this angle, in this way, and people would listen. Though he did not know it at the time, he was taking the first steps towards assuming complete control of a film.

An important part of the film's success with the public, apart from a story which had been sure-fire in one form or another since
Enoch Arden
, was the presence in it of a big Hollywood star. Realizing how important it had been to Cutts's previous films to have Mae Marsh in them as a selling-point for America, Victor Saville had been dispatched to Hollywood to sign up an American star for the company's first venture, and had the good luck to find Betty Compson momentarily at a loose end, haying just refused to sign a new contact with Famous Players because they would not pay her enough money for the drawing-power she had achieved with them in the previous two years. He offered her
£
1,000 a week—a very generous amount for British films at that time—and she accepted, on condition that the contract should be for two films made back-to-back. Which proved to be a big mistake for the British company, since they had no property ready to exploit their expensive star and had to
rush into production with another film,
The White Shadow
, advertised hopefully as ‘The same Star, Producer, Author, Hero, Cameraman, Scenic Artist, Staff, Studio, Renting Company as
Woman to Woman
'. Unfortunately the same formula (or almost the same—this time the script was written by Michael Morton, author of the stage play on which
Woman to Woman
was based) did not have the same results, and the film was a box-office disaster. But for the moment the Balcon-Saville-Freedman company was riding high on the enormous success of
Woman to Woman
all over Europe and in the United States too, where Lewis J. Selznick put it into every Paramount theatre and it made a big profit for practically everybody concerned—except its makers, who had had to sign away most of their rights in order to get a foot in the door of their desired markets.

Hitch was known as a good fellow, full of ideas and always good for a laugh. The veteran film-maker George Pearson recalled that while filming at Islington in 1923, he used regularly to adjourn to Hitch's office to gamble for pennies on a toy race game he had invented. But for Hitch the most enjoyable personal experience of working on the two Cutts films was his meeting with Betty Compson, a jolly, effervescent and yet firmly practical young woman who put on no airs and graces as the visiting star and was very kind and friendly towards the fledgling designer. Hitch never forgot this, and years later, when Betty Compson was no longer a star but a hardworking utility actress in Hollywood, he repaid his debt with a nice little role for her as a ‘good-time girl' in his screwball comedy
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
. But something in the long run much more influential on his future was to result from
Woman to Woman
. Balcon went to the States with the film, to find that the Selznick company, its distributors there, were in a temporary state of financial embarrassment and in the hands of the receivers, and both Lewis J.'s sons, David and Myron, were jobless. When Balcon returned to England, Myron came with him; he married in England, settled down and founded the Joyce-Selznick agency in London. Very rapidly, Hitch and Myron were to become firm friends, this being Hitch's first connection with the Selznicks and so finally a contributory factor to his coming to Hollywood under contract to David O. Selznick some fifteen years later.

Meanwhile, though, all question of long-term career planning was far from Hitch's mind. The success of
Woman to Woman
was good,
but it was instantly cancelled out by the abject failure of
The White Shadow
. C. M. Woolf, the film renter who handled their product, had lost confidence and would not give the company a distribution advance. It looked as though Balcon-Saville-Freedman in its present form would have to be dissolved. But Balcon, as so often in his long career, pulled a surprise out of the hat. One morning he came into Hitch's office and announced casually that he had decided to set up a new company. It would be called Gainsborough Pictures, and had a capital of
£
100. Why Gainsborough? Because there was a particular Gainsborough portrait Balcon had always liked, and he thought it would make a good trademark, suggestive of art and gentility and class. He had worked out an arrangement with one of the leading distribution companies, Gaumont, for a new film, made on the same lines as the first two, with the same production team.
The Passionate Adventure
, ready for showing in August 1924, was a reasonably adroit mixture of glamorous high life and picturesque low life, scripted by Hitch and Michael Morton from a popular novel by Frank Stayton about a frustrated husband-in-name-only who found escape in visits to the East End slums disguised as a derelict. Clive Brook starred in it with another American import, Alice Joyce, and playing a featured role, this time his own colour, was Victor McLaglen. Hitch had to design and build a complete stretch of canal with houses beside it all on a 90-foot stage for this film, but such professional problems were just grist to his mill. The film was a much more modest production than its predecessors, but as such it was a safe beginning for the new company, and the first of a long line of pictures which were going to make Gainsborough and its nodding lady one of the most familiar features of the British cinema for some thirty years.

For the moment, however, it was scratching around for finance and facilities. In the parlous state of British films it was scarcely possible to plan more than one picture at a time. And for his next production for Gainsborough Balcon looked across the Channel to set up a co-production deal: to Germany, where the giant UFA organization had become one of the most powerful and successful production companies in the world. They agreed to try out a new pattern of production with an adaptation (by Hitch, of course) of
The Blackguard
, a novel by Raymond Paton about a violinist's tempestuous career. It would be made in Berlin at the Neubabelsberg Studios with a largely German cast and an American female
star, Jane Novak; UFA provided the financing, the British side undertook to distribute the film throughout the English-speaking world, and of course brought in the services of Balcon as producer (with Erich Pommer, a figure who was to cross Hitch's path again in Britain years later, as his associate), Cutts as director, and Hitch as writer, designer, assistant director and general odd-job man.

At first the English contingent in Berlin, strangers in a strange land, had to stick together. Hitch, faced with the problems of communicating with his German draughtsman, found that they had both been title-designers and could make some sense to each other by sketching out their messages. But he soon got fed up with the limitations of this method and began learning German in earnest. He began learning a number of other things in earnest too. Cutts was in the midst of another affair, with an Estonian dancer. When his ‘wife' arrived in Berlin he found himself in something of a dilemma, and recruited Hitch and Alma as cover. They were asked to stay with the Cuttses in a flat they had taken, Alma having a small bedroom of her own and Hitch sleeping on a sofa in the living room. Cutts then suddenly found himself surprisingly often ‘working late at the studio'—which meant that Hitch and Alma had to meet Cutts and his girl-friend and the cameraman and his girl-friend and go round to a famous café called the Barbarina, where they would sit drinking and eating sandwiches until it was time for them to drive home via Cutts's girl-friend's place in the Dorotheenstrasse, behind the Reichstag. There Cutts would disappear upstairs for a while; Hitch and Alma would sit in the car and watch as the light went off and in due course was switched on again. Then Cutts would reappear and carry them off home, very late, to a heavy English meal prepared by Mrs. Cutts (steak-and-kidney pudding and such)—which of course they could not refuse without arousing suspicion, so that Hitch got to the point of regularly excusing himself from table to run out, throw up and return for the rest of the ordeal.