Hitch (33 page)

Obviously, the two men could not communicate very well. Chandler was, unlike the other notable literary figures Hitch had worked with, a long-time southern California resident, living with his much older and now semi-invalid wife at La Jolla, near Los Angeles. He had built up a routine (which included a considerable amount of drinking) and did not like to have it disturbed; he preferred to work at home rather than at the studio, felt Hitch's visits there were an intrusion (one day as Hitch was getting out of his limousine Chandler remarked loudly to his secretary, ‘Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car,' and when she remonstrated that he could probably be heard snapped back, ‘What do I care?') and at the same time objected rather pettishly that Hitch did not spend enough time with him, but breezed in every so often, threw off a mass of unrelated ideas, good, bad and indifferent, and vanished again leaving him to cope with all kinds of mutually contradictory or sometimes just plain impossible instructions. Hitch, for his part, felt that Chandler was behaving in too
prima donna
a fashion, which he did not have the time or the patience to cope with. Chandler made it clear that, as with all his film-writing assignments, he was in this largely for the money, and to retain his standing in Hollywood, but then could not prevent his artistic scruples (or his personal neurosis depending which way you look at it) from breaking in.

Hitch found him fascinating as a psychological study, but intensely irritating as a collaborator. Chandler's communications with his agents and friends on the subject of Hitch grew more and more frantic, mystified and despairing. At the beginning of the job he noted that one reason for it was that he thought he might like Hitch (‘which I do'). A few weeks later he wrote to Ray Stark:

Hitchcock seems to be a very considerate and polite man, but he is full of little suggestions and ideas, which have a cramping effect on a writer's initiative. You are in a position of a fighter who can't get set because he is continuously being kept off balance by short jabs. I don't complain about this at all. Hitchcock is a rather special kind of director. He is always ready to sacrifice dramatic logic (in so far as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect or a mood effect. He is aware of this and accepts the handicap. He knows that in almost all his pictures there is some point where the story ceases to make any sense whatever and becomes a chase, but he doesn't mind. This is very hard on a writer, especially on a writer who has any ideas of his own, because the writer not only has to make sense out of the foolish plot, if he can, but he has to do that and at the same time do it in such a way that any kind of camera shot or background shot that comes into Hitchcock's mind can be incorporated into it.

After he had delivered the last pages of the final screenplay (and got himself involved in an argument with Warners over one day's pay) he wrote indignantly to Finlay McDermid, head of Warners' story department:

Are you aware that this screenplay was written without one single consultation with Mr. Hitchcock after the writing of the screenplay began? Not even a phone call. Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence then and since. You are much too clever a man to believe that any writer will do his best in conditions like this. There are always things that need to be discussed. There are always places where a writer goes wrong, not being himself a master of the camera. There are always difficult little points which require the meeting of minds, the accommodation of points of view. I had none of this. I find it rather strange. I find it rather ruthless. I find it almost incomparably rude.

When Hitch realized that he had to start shooting in Washington by the beginning of October, before the leaves turned, it became evident that he and Chandler would have to part company. Hitch was left with a draft screenplay strong on atmosphere but weak on construction and dialogue (in Chandler's novels most is conveyed by atmospheric description, very little by dialogue as such). What he needed at this stage was a brisk professional job of tightening and sharpening. He would have liked Ben Hecht to do it, but
Hecht was otherwise occupied. However, he did get one of Hecht's assistants, Czenzi Ormonde, to work with him on the final script. Despite the disappointments of the collaboration with Chandler, the time does not seem to have been altogether wasted. There are very Chandlerish elements in the film as made, notably in the scene with the murderer's mother, who turns out to be as crazy as her son—a typical Chandler situation. But for the most part Hitch managed, correctly from his own point of view, to crystallize the psychological drama of the novel into a series of action highlights—the stalking and killing of Guy's trampy wife in an amusement park (climaxing in the famously baroque shot of the killing reflected in the lens of her dropped spectacles); the party Bruno menacingly crashes and then nearly commits another murder at; the tennis match Guy has to win against the clock in order to get away and prevent Bruno from incriminating him; the final fight on the runaway merry-go-round ending in Bruno's death. The linking material is not all that brilliant, but serves its function, like the toast in a club sandwich, which is just what Hitch, always economical of effect, wanted.

As usual, Hitch was not entirely happy with the casting, having to take a couple of Warner Brothers contract stars, Ruth Roman and Farley Granger, in order to have his own way with other roles, notably the insane killer Bruno, as whom he cast the hitherto sensitive all-American boy Robert Walker, to dazzling effect. As it happens, Farley Granger, with whom Hitch had worked before on
Rope
, turned out pretty well as the tennis player Guy, though Hitch had conceived the character ideally as a stronger, William Holden type. The shooting, though technically complicated, went off without any major setbacks, though Hitch claims still occasionally to have nightmares about the little man who had to crawl under the out-of-control merry-go-round in the final sequence, since this was actually as dangerous as it appeared to be and if he had raised his head just an inch or two he would certainly have been killed. And the film did bring him two small personal satisfactions. It began his collaboration with the cameraman Robert Burks, who became a close personal friend and photographed all except one of Hitch's later films until his tragic death in a domestic fire shortly after the completion of
Marnie
. And it gave Hitch another chance to work with his daughter Pat, who plays Ruth Roman's sister in the film.

Immediately after
Strangers on a Train
was completed, Pat headed eastward again to appear in her third Broadway play,
The High Ground
, with Marguerite Webster and Leueen McGrath. Yet again the play opened to mixed notices and closed after three weeks—Pat came to regard herself as the queen of the three-week run, since that was the duration of all her appearances on Broadway. Naturally disappointed that the play had not been more successful, she decided to take advantage of the occasion to buy herself a cheap car and take a few weeks' holiday driving up and down the eastern coast of the States, which she had never had any real chance to experience before. But Hitch, for the third time too late to see her on Broadway, said that he and Alma would be in New York shortly, so why did they not all get on the Italian Line, go to Europe together, and drive around there instead for a family holiday? Pat cheerfully agreed, not realizing that this change of plan was to have a decisive effect on her life. For the second night out on the voyage to Europe she met a young man called Joseph E. O'Connell Jr., a businessman from Watertown, Massachusetts, of a good Catholic family (Cardinal O'Connell of Boston was his great-uncle). It was love at first sight, and somehow, providentially, he managed to turn up at each of the Hitchcocks' major stopping-places in Europe, so that Hitch and Alma quickly caught on to the idea that this might be serious. And indeed, he could hardly have been a more suitable match, save only that he had no connection whatever with show business, and precious little interest in it. To Pat this was tonic, to Hitch, with his total dedication to the cinema, rather disturbing. But he and Alma really liked the young man, Pat clearly loved him and he her, so without too much ado they gave their blessing, and on 13 September 1951 the engagement was announced.

Pat had rather imagined a quiet wedding. But no way. As soon as Hitch had reconciled himself to the idea that his little girl was going to get married, with his flair for the dramatic he threw himself into organizing a big wedding in New York for 17 January 1952. The opening of
Strangers on a Train
in June 1951 had put him back on the top of the heap, critically and commercially, and the world was waiting to see what film he would make next, but he decided to take his time, keep them waiting, and see his daughter married and settled down first. In a vague attempt to get his son-in-law involved in the film business he encouraged him to take a job in the studio mailroom (where he was working alongside another son of a
notable father, Danny Selznick), to learn the business from the bottom up. But Joe, though willing enough to give it a try, really wanted to go it alone, and after a few months got out and into the trucking business, where he has stayed ever since. This caused a certain amount of head-shaking from Hitch, but, he reckoned, as long as Pat's happy … And so she clearly was. For the moment she gave up acting, finding herself pregnant with the first of the three granddaughters she was to give Hitch in rapid succession. This, at least, delighted him. He was to prove as attentive and capricious a grandfather as he had a father, though, Pat felt, much more inclined to be indulgent with her daughters than he had been with her.

In
Strangers on a Train
Hitch had managed, by instinct rather than conscious thought, to find a deeply disturbing subject—that of an exchange of guilt—which could be satisfactorily externalized in thriller form. The film satisfied all the expectations the name Hitchcock attached to a film instantly conjured up—the superficial thrills and show-pieces of cross-cut suspense were close to the centre of what the public chose to think of as ‘typical Hitchcock'—while at the same time having deeper resonances which interested and involved Hitch the thinking, feeling man and gave a depth and subtlety to the subject which Hitch had come in his middle years increasingly to need if he was to be artistically turned on. In
Rope
and
Under Capricorn
he had tried to break with the obvious thriller formula his public forced upon him, and had failed. Now, instead of trying head-on to contradict their notions of what to expect from him, he had found a way to creep up on them unawares, sugar the pill of what really interested him in a subject by dressing it up as a thriller and leaving audiences to take it on whatever level they would. This was to be the method of all his great films of the 1950s.

And now, after an unusually long holiday from film-making following
Strangers on a Train
, he finally felt ready to tackle a subject which had always haunted him, ever since he had first come across Paul Anthelme's play
Nos deux consciences (Our Two Consciences
) in the early 1930s. The play itself dated back to 1902, and concerned a subject very real to someone of Hitch's Catholic upbringing—if, he had to admit, slightly specialized to anyone else: the unbreakable secrecy of the confessional, and the situation of a priest implicated in a murder of which he can clear himself only by breaking this seal. But Hitch felt the time was ripe, and he could see a way to plot the film so as to make it make sense and hold suspense even for non-Catholics.
The film as finally shot had the advantage of unfamiliar locations, in Quebec, and a star in the role of the tormented priest, Montgomery Clift, who, though Hitch found difficulty in relating to him because of his Method background and personal neuroticism, was able powerfully to project the torment of the character and to make his dilemma comprehensible in human terms rather than merely as a theological puzzle.

Otherwise, things did not go so well with
I Confess
, as the picture came to be called. For the role of the woman in the case, a Quebec society woman who had had an affair with the priest in the days before he was a priest (hence the somewhat flimsy grounds for blackmail), Hitch wanted to import someone unknown to American audiences, with some kind of European accent. He signed up the Swedish actress Anita Björk, famous on the art-house circuit at that time as Miss Julie in Alf Sjöberg's film of the Strindberg play. Unfortunately when she arrived in America, two weeks from the start of shooting, she had a lover in tow, and an illegitimate baby. In 1953 Hollywood was still plagued by bodies like the Catholic Legion of Decency, the gossip columnists took a high moral tone, and film stars just did not do things like that—or at least, not openly. Warner Brothers had fits when they heard, and insisted Miss Bjórk be sent packing immediately. A substitute had to be found, and Hitch settled, none too happily, for Anne Baxter, who was neither unknown nor equipped with a European accent. And the rather awkwardly constructed screenplay by George Tabori and William Archibald did not finally come up with a solution to the problem of what meaning, if any, the subject would have for non-Catholic audiences. When the film failed at the box office Hitch had to admit that he had allowed his long attachment to the subject and his specialized knowledge as a Catholic to get the better of his judgement as a film-maker.

In consequence, he is perhaps a little hard on the film. It has wonderful things in it, and the public's difficulties with it seem now to have been less because of its specialized plot material than because it was far from the stereotypical Hitchcock thriller formula as it then existed in the mind of critics and public. The slow-burning intensity of the film, its doom-laden atmosphere, are much easier to take now than they were then, and it seems to have been more than anything another example of Hitch being ahead of his time. Certainly he took a great deal of care with it, meticulously filling every corner with
telling detail—even to the point of taking an extra in the hostile crowd outside the courtroom where the priest has just been grudgingly acquitted of a murder charge and directing her just exactly how to eat an apple so as to convey callous unconcern and fierce greed.