It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (29 page)

“
The Trouble with Harry
was taken from an English book by Jack Trevor, and for some reason, I moved it to
New
England. My approach remained typically English, and it didn’t travel well. The English have always had a fascination for crime as such, and this was a story about a dead body. In truth, it didn’t do all that well in England either. I should have paid more attention to Alma, who didn’t find it amusing.

“The exhibitors—those people who distribute films and run the cinemas, my natural enemies—didn’t find it amusing either, and they didn’t think the public would. Then they made it true by not publicizing the picture and opening it in a few small theaters. It’s easy to make the negative come true.”

In Alma’s presence, Hitchcock had told me that one of the few things they didn’t share was a similar sense of humor. “I had to curb his sense of humor,” she told me, but in
The Trouble with Harry
she had let her husband go his own way, without her usual restraint.

Shirley MacLaine, who made her screen debut in this film, was discovered for the part of Jennifer by accident,
because
of an accident, while she was an understudy in
Pajama Game.

“We were still looking for someone to play Jennifer, the young mother,” Herbert Coleman, whom Hitchcock had promoted to co-producer, told me. Then, on a Broadway stage, I saw our Jennifer. She was playing the lead. As soon as the curtain came down, I told Doc [Erickson] we’d found our girl, Carol Haney.

“He opened up his program to show me Carol Haney had been replaced by Shirley MacLaine, who was in the chorus, and the understudy. Miss Haney had had an accident and Shirley was playing her part.

“She’d already caught the eye of Hal Wallis, who tested her. Hitch got hold of the test, then signed her.”

In the stage-trained cast were Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock, Royal Dano, and John Forsythe.

Forsythe’s first meeting with Hitchcock was a tense one for him. Coleman recalled: “Hitch and I met John at ‘21.’ Beforehand, John had explained to me that he would have to leave early because he had an appointment at two o’clock. Hitch took his usual care ordering the wine, then he got around to telling us how he wanted the dead body in
Harry
dressed. As always, he was pretty specific about how his characters should dress.

“‘I want a dark blue blazer with silver buttons,’ he said, ‘a striped shirt with French cuffs and large silver cuff links, a wide hand-painted silk tie from Sulka, light blue trousers, blue and white plaid wool socks, and black shoes with tassels.’

“As the meal went on, I noticed that John seemed upset. He didn’t leave early. He was still sitting there when Hitch and I left.

“Later, I asked him why, and he said, ‘I couldn’t get up from the table. I was dressed
exactly
like the dead body Mr. Hitchcock was telling you how to dress.’ John didn’t know that this was a joke, typical of Hitch’s sense of humor.”

When shooting began in Vermont, MacLaine had trouble understanding Hitchcock. Once, she thought she heard him say, “Dog’s feet.”

“I turned to Johnny Forsythe, and whispered, ‘Dog’s feet?’

“Johnny whispered back, ‘He means pause.’” MacLaine was not yet acquainted with Hitchcock’s fondness for cockney rhyming slang. “Dog’s feet” were paws, so “dog’s feet” meant pause. “Don’t come a pig’s tail” translated meant “Don’t come twirly,” which was “Don’t come too early.”

While doing music for
To Catch a Thief,
composer Lyn Murray recommended his friend, Bernard Herrmann, for Hitchcock’s next film. Herrmann scored
The Trouble with Harry
and would make an extraordinary contribution to the next eight Hitchcock films as well as to many of the
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
television programs.

Hitchcock’s own favorite line in
The Trouble with Harry
occurs when Edmund Gwenn is pulling the body by the legs as though he’s pulling a wheelbarrow, and the spinster lady happens along and says, “What happens to be the trouble, Captain?” Hitchcock liked understatement.

D
URING THE FILMING
of his next picture,
The Man Who Knew Too Much,
Hitchcock became an American citizen. Alma had become a citizen in 1950, but Hitchcock waited until 1955.

“I drove Hitch to the federal court building,” Herbert Coleman told me. “He was nervous. He especially hated being in a crowd.

“Alma had often told me how much she wished he would become an American citizen. As we were driving, Hitch explained why he hadn’t done it sooner.

“‘The Hitchcock name is almost as old as the British Empire. It isn’t easy for me to give all that up, so much British history and tradition. But Alma would never forgive me if I didn’t go through with this.’”

During the post-production of
The Trouble with Harry,
Hitchcock decided to bring
The Man Who Knew Too Much
up to date. To help John Michael Hayes with the screenplay, he brought in Angus MacPhail, who had contributed, though uncredited, to the first
Man Who Knew Too Much,
and whom he had known for a long time.

Arthur Benjamin lengthened his “Storm Cloud Cantata” for the remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
by adding an orchestral prologue. Thus the Albert Hall musical sequence is twice as long as it was in 1934.

The second
Man Who Knew Too Much
was intended by Hitchcock as a remake by a mature artist of an effort from his youth. “I was an amateur when I did the first
Man Who Knew Too Much
,” he told me, “but a talented one. I thought as a fully matured professional, I could make a better picture, but the second picture took on a life of its own.”

“Some of it was better the second time, but some of it was better the first time. The only answer is, I suppose I’ll have to make it a third time.”

James Stewart as the hero gave Hitchcock exactly what he wanted, but those who have seen the first version cannot easily forget Peter Lorre’s sinister geniality.

Stewart said, “I remember once I asked some question about my character, even though I knew that kind of question was a no-no for Hitch.

“I was sorry as soon as I said it. He shot me one of those pained, ‘Oh, how-could-you, I-thought-better-of-you’ looks of his. I’d seen others get that look, and I’d promised myself I was never going to put myself in the position of being at the receiving end of it. Enunciating not just the words, but each syllable, the way he did when he felt you’d played the fool and given a pretty good performance of being one, he said simply, only it wasn’t really simple, and nothing Hitch ever said was a waste of words, ‘Just be yourself.’

“Well, that’s the toughest thing anyone could ever ask me to do. No cover. Go out there naked as James Stewart. I mean, what do you do with your hands?

“I remember when we were doing that scene in London’s Albert Hall, and I was chasing Doris Day up the stairs while the London Symphony was playing, loud. It was a long speech which sort of cleared up a lot of the story. I’d worked hard on those words, and I was talking my head off while I chased after Doris.

“After we did the scene, Hitch said, ‘Let’s do it again. You were talking so loud, I couldn’t hear the London Symphony. As a matter of fact, let’s just cut the whole speech. Just follow Doris up the stairs and look tense.

“Well, I considered the speech very important, but when you’re working with Hitch, you don’t try to do a scene two ways. You do it just one way. His. Hitch was always open to listening to an idea, if you had one. People say Hitch wasn’t spontaneous, but he was. It’s just that all of his spontaneity occurred on paper before he got to the set.

“Well, over the years I’ve watched that movie quite a few times, and every time, I’ve tried to remember that talky speech on the stairs I thought was so key. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what it was I was talking about.”

Not all of the Albert Hall sequence was actually shot there. As art director Henry Bumstead explained: “A lot of Albert Hall, the boxes and things, I had to do back here in Los Angeles, so that was a matter of measurements and photos, and I remember many nights I would be out making measurements and getting color samples.”

The Man Who Knew Too Much
was shot on location in London and French Morocco, and at the Paramount studios in Hollywood. “Down in Marrakech,” Bumstead continued, “you’d come out of your hotel room in the morning, and you could hardly breathe, it was so hot. It was not only hot, but I’ll tell you, it was scary.

“We had a bombing there. Hitch was directing out in the crowd from an old automobile. He sat in the front seat, with the driver, with the air-conditioning on, and it’s the only time in all the time I worked with Hitch I saw him in a polo shirt. With short sleeves. It wasn’t loose at the collar, it was buttoned, but no tie.

“I was riding in a jeep with a French officer, and I saw all these black carcasses hanging there in a meat market. He said, ‘Watch this,’ and he honked the horn. Then, all of a sudden, there’s all this red meat. It was covered with flies.

“I remember going out to a restaurant with Doris Day and eating couscous. You know, you use so many fingers. But Hitch never did that. Doris Day wouldn’t do it, either. She wouldn’t eat anything people had their hands in.

“She had her husband and her little boy there. One day her husband, Marty Melcher, was photographing the set with a movie camera that was making noises. Hitch gave him a look, and we never saw that camera again.”

Ray Evans told me how he and Jay Livingston came to write the Oscar–winning “Que Será Será.”

“We were called in to meet with Alfred Hitchcock. He said, “Gentlemen, Doris Day is in the movie, and I need a song for her. I don’t know what kind of song I want, but if it has a foreign title, that would be relevant, and it should be a song a mother would sing to a child.