Hitch (7 page)

Hitch did not always find himself waiting downstairs in the car. On at least one occasion he discovered that Weimar Germany featured some diversions undreamed of in Leytonstone (as far as he knew, anyway). One evening he and Cutts were invited out by the family of one of their UFA bosses. To their surprise, after dinner they were taken to a night-club where men danced with men and women with women. Eventually, two German girls in the party, one
of them still in her teens, the other thirtyish, offered to drive them back to their lodgings. But there was a little diversion: on the way they stopped at a hotel and the two Englishmen and their party were dragged in. In the room the girls made various propositions, which perhaps fortunately the terrified Hitch did not understand too exactly; he thought the safest thing to do was to keep saying ‘
Nein, nein
' until they got discouraged. At this point, perhaps suspecting that the Englishmen were united by some special interest of their own, the two girls got into bed together. Hitch was surprised but fairly uncomprehending. Not so the other young girl of the party, a student daughter of the UFA director: she sat down comfortably and put on her glasses to be sure of not missing anything. It seems unlikely that this interesting and exotic experience had any very deep effect on Hitch, though he admits to an abiding interest in abnormal psychology and sees the bedroom scene between the two showgirls in his first independent film,
The Pleasure Garden
, which has a faint lesbian overtone, as a reflection of this scene. Meanwhile, he tended in off-duty moments to stick even closer to Alma.

Professionally, working at Neubabelsberg was an enormously productive experience for Hitch. Up to then he had worked entirely in the one small British studio, making his own mistakes and finding his own way without much reference to the techniques of other filmmakers. Now suddenly he was dropped in the middle of the most innovative area of film-making at that epoch. On neighbouring sets the great F. W. Murnau was making his most famous movie,
The Last Laugh
, which was designed to be the last word in visual story-telling, showing audiences every stage in the decline and fall of the grandly uniformed hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) without a single explanatory title. Hitch watched fascinated whenever he had the chance, and was particularly impressed by the art of Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, Murnau's art directors. There seemed to be no trick in the book that they did not know and exploit: one day Hitch watched Murnau setting up and shooting a short scene on the platform of a railway station where a train has just come in. The carriage nearest the camera was the real thing, with passengers getting on and off. Then the next few carriages were constructed in forced perspective to give the impression of receding into the distance in a very small space. But such was Murnau's concern for detail that to give life to the background he had placed another full-size railway carriage in the far distance across the lot, with
passengers getting in and out of it, in such a way that when photographed the foreshortened fake carriages would neatly join up the two far-separated real carriages. What you can see on the set does not matter, explained Murnau—the only truth that counts is what you see on the screen. It was a lesson Hitch was never to forget.

But his opportunities for visiting other sets were not so extensive. Once they started shooting he had more than enough problems of his own. Cutts's behaviour was becoming more erratic and unpredictable, and he left more and more decisions up to Hitch while in pursuit of his Estonian dancer and on the run from his wife. Hitch was used to handling little incidental scenes, odd shots with extras and the other details that an assistant director might normally be left to take care of. But now for whole sequences he was left to his own devices. The principal thing Alma recalls of Hitch at this time is how very impressed she was (even though she would rather have died than admit it) at the way nothing seemed to faze him: in the midst of all the frenzy he was a still centre of calm and confidence, acting for all the world as though he had behind him a lifetime's experience of big studios, foreign parts, and ordering around artists and technicians of considerable seniority and distinction. On at least one occasion he had to use all the authority he could muster. One of the sequences he was to shoot all by himself was a dream in which the violinist sees himself ascending to heaven accompanied by the hosannas of welcoming angel hosts. There was in Neubabelsberg a stage which would be perfect for this, as it was already fitted with a solidly constructed, unevenly sloping floor, as for a hillside forest glade. The trouble was, that was precisely what it had last been used for—the giant trees constructed by Fritz Lang's set-designers for the forest scenes in his legendary epic
Siegfried
, recently completed, were still there, the pride and joy of the studio. And now this young Englishman came in and wantonly demanded they be destroyed. The studio begged and pleaded, but he was adamant—this was the stage he needed and he was determined to use it.

He got his way; usually, even then, he got his way. Tearfully, the art department moved in, demolished Lang's forest, and built in its place fancy tiers of narrow platforms disguised with rather solid cut-out clouds, through which the violinist would wend his way by a winding path, playing away the while, to heaven's door. But now there was another problem: how to convey the idea of an infinite host of angels in the generous but still limited space of the studio.
Hitch decided to use the human equivalent of forced perspective, and sent his minions out to hire the tallest players they could find, and the shortest children and midgets. (The search for enough midgets involved further plunges into the odder kinds of Berlin night life, which Hitch was, with some relief, able to depute to his German assistants.) Having got them all dressed up in suitably angelic white shifts, Hitch then proceeded to arrange them on the tiers in order of size, starting with the giants at the front, then normal-sized extras, children and midgets, so that the scene appeared to be populated by an infinite number of uniformly sized angels stretching away into the far distance. Right at the top, at the back, he carried the process to its logical conclusion with dressed dolls. The only movement all the figures, live and stuffed, had to make, was a raising of their right arms in greeting, and to get the dolls to do this too Hitch devised an ingenious system whereby each doll's arm was attached at its base to a cord which dangled down through the sloping floor of the set and at the other end was tied to a long timber, which in its turn stood on a set of trestles. The arrangement was repeated for each row of doll-angels. At a given signal the scene-shifters would push the logs off the trestles, they would fall to the ground, and the sudden jerk in the cords would make all the doll arms pop up at the same time. The only remaining difficulty was that the set was so solidly constructed, there seemed to be no way the director on the outside could communicate instantly with the scene-shifters on the inside. Finally, the problem was resolved by cueing to a gun shot, and visitors to the set were somewhat taken aback to see the usually mild, peaceable Hitch running up and down apparently threatening his angels with a pistol and getting them to jump to his orders with a plentiful expenditure of blanks.

Despite the expertise of the UFA studio, all the learning does not seem to have been on the part of the Britishers. Hitch had been familiar, for instance, with the use of certain process shots, such as the Hall process, an ancestor of the Schufftan process, which enabled the cameraman to combine a painted area with an actual set in the camera; it had been brought over to Islington by the Americans he first worked with. On one occasion he used it in
The Blackguard
for a scene in Milan Cathedral which required tourists to pass through looking around and pointing out features of interest which were present only on the painted section. Hitch had to get a British set-painter to paint it, and UFA was so interested in what he was doing,
as they had never seen anything like it, that they wanted to set up another camera to photograph it. Hitch had to explain gently that it would not make the slightest sense visually except from exactly the angle his camera would take—but he did promise to hand on his know-how before he left, enjoying to the full the odd situation of being deferred to by the experts of UFA.

Towards the end of shooting things were getting altogether too complicated for Cutts, and one day he just vanished with his girlfriend, leaving Hitch and Alma to finish the film and make their way home as best they might. The next anyone heard of Cutts he had settled in Calais with the Estonian, gazing eagerly but in vain across the English Channel. It appeared that the girl was a stateless person and could not enter Britain on the papers she had. Cutts was frantic and kept firing off telegrams to Balcon and other persons of influence threatening suicide or, alternatively, that he would go off with his girl-friend to South America and become a professional tango dancer if they did not do something about entry papers and a work permit for his beloved.

Unaware of what was going on back home, Hitch had been reaching a momentous decision of his own. He and Alma were returning from Germany on the overnight boat from Kiel, and a very stormy night it was. Alma was lying down in her cabin, not feeling at all well, when Hitch suddenly appeared and, after making a couple of practical remarks about the job in hand, quite out of the blue asked her to marry him. He says, perhaps with hindsight, that he had chosen the moment because the journey was one of the few chances they had to be alone and also because he felt that Alma's resistance would be low at this point and she would be least likely to turn him down.

So when Hitch arrived back in Islington he was engaged. It was more doubtful whether he had a job. Cutts was still fuming and fretting at Calais, and nobody knew how the next film planned would be made, if it was to be made. There was a project, though; Gainsborough had acquired the rights to a play by Rudolph Besier, later of
Barretts of Wimpole Street
fame, called
The Prude's Fall
, and Hitch was as usual assigned to shape it into a script. He worked on it alone; it was mailed to Calais, came back with alterations, was revised and sent again to Cutts, until finally, at this distance, it was completed and ready to go. There was some urgency in the matter since Jane Novak had been brought over on a two-picture deal, and
the faster
The Prude's Fall
followed
The Blackguard
the better and cheaper for Gainsborough.

As Cutts would not come back to England the rest of the production team had to go to him. Hitch and one of Balcon's assistants set off to go with Cutts on a location-finding tour, since the film required shooting in various glamorous parts of western Europe. They met Cutts in Calais, but he seemed very happy there and sent them on to Paris. In Paris after a couple of days they were joined by Cutts and his girl-friend. She liked it in Paris, so Cutts decided they would stay on there while Hitch and his associate went on to St. Moritz. After a week Cutts and the girl-friend arrived in St. Moritz. She liked it there too, so Hitch was sent on to Venice to pick further locations and meet the cast and the rest of the crew. Which was all very well, until Cutts arrived with his girl-friend. She didn't like Venice—all that water was unhealthy and lugubrious. So the whole group upped stakes and went on to Lake Como. The day they arrived, there was a storm on the lake, and she didn't like it. Well, obviously she's right, said Cutts, the weather is impossible here. So on they all moved to St. Moritz. Or towards St. Moritz: an hour away by train they discovered that the line had been blocked by an avalanche. Well, that's it, said Cutts: let's go back to England. Which they did, having trailed the whole cast and crew around Europe at great expense and shot not a single foot of film.

The script had to be revamped to let all the exotic locations originally envisaged be substituted for in the studio: the result, inevitably, was rather half-hearted and nobody liked it. Moreover, Cutts never did manage to get the Estonian into England, so he was not happy on any score. And by now Hitch had really become conscious of a certain underlying hostility in Cutts's attitude towards him. There were just too many slighting references to the ‘wonder boy', and malicious ones in the studio were all too ready to stoke up the fires of Cutts's resentment by suggesting that Hitch was getting too much credit for the over-all effect of Cutts's films—after all, his name appeared all over them. In particular the cameraman Hal Young, a tough and cynical character noted for his habit of reading the racing reports while he cranked the camera with his free hand, had taken against Hitch for whatever reason and delighted to poison Cutts's mind against him.

Of course, Cutts himself was not in such a strong position, with a pretty steady decline in the critical and commercial standing of his
films since
Woman to Woman
. But he was a partner, and could not just be dumped, however eccentric his behaviour. Nor, really, did Gainsborough have anyone in mind to replace him as their star director. Balcon had no ambition to direct, and neither at this point did Saville, though he was later on to become one of Britain's leading directors. Nor, despite some talk already, and a little experience in that area, did the ‘wonder boy'—incredible as it seems in relation to what came after, Hitch claims that he never thought of becoming a film director, being perfectly happy doing what he was doing. It came as a complete surprise to him when one day Balcon came to tell him that Cutts was set to direct a film version of the very successful stage melodrama,
The Rat
, featuring its brilliant young author-star Ivor Novello, and did not want Hitch to work on it.

Hitch accepted this with outward stoicism, but could not help worrying what he would do next—especially seeing that the British cinema was going through one of its periodic crises, and work was not so easy to find. But again it was Balcon who came up unexpectedly with the solution. A couple of weeks later he suddenly asked how Hitch would like to direct a film himself. It was a new idea, but he might have been systematically preparing himself for just this moment, learning every detail of the craft through scripting, designing and assisting Cutts on all aspects of his films. He knew he could do it, and had no hesitation in answering with perfect nonchalance, ‘All right. When do we start?'