It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (20 page)

On the original prints of the film, the firing of the gun aimed at the camera, from Dr. Murchison’s point of view, is in color. “Audiences weren’t expecting it,” Hitchcock said, “and I was rather disappointed when people didn’t seem to notice it. I hope they noticed subliminally. That would be best of all.” The red color has been restored on new prints.

Before the gun is fired, Ingrid Bergman is seen in the background from Murchison’s point of view. Hitchcock asked camera director George Barnes to temporarily abandon his low diffuse lighting on female stars in order to increase the camera’s depth of field. He wanted both the gun and Bergman to be in focus, so the lighting had to be increased. “Ingrid didn’t need any help from the lighting,” Hitchcock said.

For the musical score, Miklos Rozsa won an Oscar. His music featured an electronic instrument known as the theremin. Selznick was furious when he learned that Rozsa had also used it in Billy Wilder’s
Lost Weekend
. That score was also nominated.

“I knew Hitch liked working with me,” Ingrid Bergman told me. “I could feel it, and I felt that way about him. He was a wonderful director, so sensitive. There were actors who said he wasn’t a good actor’s director, but something was wrong with them. He was so sympathetic. He never seemed bored by my concerns, professional or private. He always listened. Hitch was someone I could tell just about anything.

“He had a delicious sense of humor, and he could be a little shocking. It wasn’t so much
what
he said, but
when
he said it, always at some inappropriate moment when one wasn’t expecting it. Hitch could talk me out of being nervous and uncertain, which I always was, and he could make me giggle.”

Gregory Peck found a different side of Hitchcock.

“Hitch didn’t seem to like to be personally involved,” Peck told me, “and I got the impression that what he was saying was that he wanted
me
not to be involved. That was the message I got. Now, maybe it wasn’t the right one, but it was what I understood and what I acted on. I asked him how he wanted me to play a certain scene where I would be in close-up. ‘Blankly,’ he said. I wondered if he was making fun of me. I didn’t know how to do blank.”

While in school, Peck had thought of becoming a doctor, but then he discovered acting.
Spellbound
gave him an opportunity to live out his early dream. He said it was one of the great advantages of being an actor. “You can live all different sorts of lives. And then, best of all, you can leave them behind on the set and go home to your own life.

“Ingrid was warm and wonderful. She was very young, and she had a fresh quality, but she had more confidence than I did. No wonder. She was beautiful, more beautiful in person than on the screen.

“She was always very encouraging to me, if I felt neglected. Hitch gave Ingrid much more attention than he did anyone else, including me. Especially me. Well, I don’t blame him. The most important thing she understood right away, I didn’t understand. She told me, ‘Hitch will tell you if you aren’t doing it right. It’s a great compliment if he
doesn’t
speak to you.’ I wanted to believe her. Now, I know it was true. I wish I could say, ‘Thank you, Hitch,’ but I don’t have the number up there.

“He was a very reserved man on the outside. Perhaps on the inside, too. I wouldn’t know about that. Personally, I always felt he was having a very good time working, and that he had great warmth.

“The Hitchcock movies seem so new. It’s hard to believe he isn’t making them now.”

At Hitchcock’s suggestion, surrealist painter Salvador Dali was brought in to help design the dream sequence, which was to be directed by the legendary production designer, William Cameron Menzies. Very little of what Hitchcock and Dali planned was used in the film, and Menzies declined credit for his work on the sequence. Peck remembered parts of the dream sequence that were cut.

“Selznick agreed to make my nightmare an unforgettable visual, as Hitchcock wanted. He went to Dali with the commission. As I would be lying there, the audience would share my nightmare.

“There were four hundred human eyes which looked down at me from the heavy black drapes. Meanwhile a giant pair of pliers, many times my size, would appear and then I was supposed to chase him or it, the pliers, up the side of a pyramid where I would find a plaster cast of Ingrid. Her plaster head would crack and streams of ants would pour out of her face. Ugh. Well, the ants ended up on the cutting room floor.

“I asked Hitch about why I was having a greatly curtailed nightmare. He said, ‘The ants’ contract was canceled. We couldn’t get enough trained ants, and Central Casting said all of their fleas were already gainfully employed. Aside from that,’ he added, ‘David [Selznick] decided it would make audiences laugh.’”

I
WAS SITTING BETWEEN
Kim Hunter and Elia Kazan at the Players Club in New York during the memorial tribute for playwright Sidney Kingsley, as Hunter told us about her experience with Hitchcock.

“I was under contract to Selznick at the time and not working, so I was put to work as a stand-in for Ingrid while Hitchcock auditioned a group of actors trying out for the part John Emery finally got [Dr. Fleurot]. He’s the psychiatrist who’s trying to seduce Ingrid.

“Anyway, Hitch gave an expansive, articulate description of the character, who he was, what he wanted, and then the story of the whole film in wonderful detail. I didn’t need to see it anymore.

“After he’d done this, he turned to me and quietly said, ‘Have I left anything out, Miss Hunter?’ I blushed and stammered something inane, but I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to put the other actors at ease at my expense. I was kind of embarrassed, like suddenly being called on in school when you aren’t prepared. But what he did didn’t work. They were all even more nervous. They thought he would do it to them.”

Spellbound
was nominated by the Motion Picture Academy for best picture, best director, best supporting actor, best cinematography, best special effects, and best musical score. Only music won. The picture was an enormous critical and popular success.

A
FTER
S
PELLBOUND
,
Selznick once again became enthusiastic about making movies with Hitchcock. Hitchcock had in mind a story somewhat like
Vertigo.
A woman is coached to participate in a confidence scheme in which she might marry the victim. From Selznick’s story department came a 1921 magazine short story called “The Song of the Dragon,” and
Notorious
was begun.

Writer Ben Hecht and Hitchcock took so long developing the story and writing drafts, Selznick grew impatient. He was especially unhappy with the MacGuffin they finally decided on, uranium ore, which he considered implausible, so he sold the property to RKO—a few months before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Bergman’s dresses were designed by Edith Head.
Notorious
was the first of many Edith Head credits on Hitchcock films.

Pat Hitchcock told me that
Notorious
was her favorite of her father’s films. “What a perfect film! The more I see
Notorious
, the more I like it. It has a wonderful cast, too. My mother’s favorite was
Shadow of a Doubt
, and
Notorious
, too. My second favorite is
Rebecca
.”

A celebrated scene in
Notorious
is the long kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Hitchcock defeated the Production Code limitation on the time a kiss could last—only a few seconds—by breaking up their long kiss into many short ones, as they discuss dinner. “My father rather enjoyed getting away with something,” Pat Hitchcock told me.

The actor who played the genial Dr. Anderson, Reinhold Schünzel, was the writer-director of
Viktor und Viktoria
, one of the most popular German films ever made, which has been remade several times, the most famous version being with Julie Andrews playing Victor and Victoria. Schünzel is said to have been Hitler’s favorite director until it was discovered he was one-quarter Jewish. Afterward, he went to Hollywood, where he was chiefly an actor.

Although Leopoldine Konstantin entered films in 1913, she made only this one Hollywood film. She was primarily a star of the German stage, appearing in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater from 1908 until 1937. Her husband was Constantine Shayne, who played Pop Leibel, the loquacious bookstore owner in
Vertigo
. She was recommended for the part of Mrs. Sebastian by Schünzel after Ethel Barrymore turned it down. Madame Konstantin, as she is listed in the credits, played a part similar to that of the disapproving mother in
Easy Virtue
who also descends an imposing staircase to meet her son’s choice of a wife. Another memorable shot from Hitchcock’s silent era recurs in
Notorious
when, from her position in bed, Ingrid Bergman sees Cary Grant upside-down.

H
ITCHCOCK HAD
one year left on his Selznick contract, and one more film, but he was already making plans for the pictures he would be filming with Sidney Bernstein at Transatlantic Pictures, the new production company they were starting. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant had told Hitchcock they would love to make a film for him at Transatlantic. There was even some talk of a Cary Grant
Hamlet
in modern dress.

Hitchcock told me that if he hadn’t been a director, the career he would have liked was that of a criminal lawyer. “I have always been interested in the law as well as in food, you might say, torts and tortes.” With a hint of mirth, he added, “I would like to have been a hangin’ judge.”

The Paradine Case
was the last picture Hitchcock made on his seven-year Selznick contract, though Selznick did not want him to leave. Selznick had already offered him a new seven-year, nonexclusive contract, with more generous financial terms. Hitchcock would receive $100,000 for one picture each year of the contract with a percentage of the gross receipts, and he would be free to make films with other producers. Hitchcock’s heart, however, was in his project with his friend Sidney Bernstein, Transatlantic Pictures, so he turned Selznick down and started work on the final film of his contract.

The Paradine Case
was adapted from a 1932 novel by Robert Hichens, based on a real court case that Selznick had long wanted to make into a film.