It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (14 page)

Sidney loved dogs, so she was particularly offended by what she considered “the unnecessary death of the darling dog.” She told Hitchcock so and was unsatisfied then and through the years by his reply: “It’s only a movie, Sylvia.”

“I think Hitchcock made a terrible mistake when he had the people in the bus, my young brother, and that adorable little dog blown up,” Sidney continued.

When Sidney died, she left her white bulldog to New York City’s Players Club, a favorite place of hers, where he became their mascot.

Hitchcock, however, was well aware that he had broken a prime rule of his own by killing Stevie. “Once you have established the heroes and heroines, you must rescue them at the last second,” he told me. “That’s because you have transferred the feelings of danger facing your characters to the audience. The only way they can enjoy the sensation of the hero and heroine facing death is knowing they will be saved. If you don’t do this, you have betrayed this unspoken agreement with your audience.”

Sabotage
was not shot on location. An entire city block was built for it on a field near Harrow in order to avoid the pitfalls and inconveniences imposed by shooting on the streets of London. “But there was one I couldn’t avoid, the English weather. We were held up for the same reason we would have been held up in the West End. Rain.”

W
HEN
Y
OUNG AND
I
NNOCENT
was released in early 1938, it was widely anticipated not only as a new Hitchcock thriller, but also as Nova Pilbeam’s first adult role. She was fourteen when she played the girl who is kidnapped in
The Man Who Knew Too Much,
and eighteen for
Young and Innocent.

“I felt she had great appeal for women,” Hitchcock said. “I believed she had a brilliant future, and I was planning to use her for the part Margaret Lockwood eventually played in
The Lady Vanishes.

“She was fresh and natural-looking. Hollywood makeup people would have put a mask on her, but she didn’t care a bit about Hollywood. I didn’t, at the time, know why. The reason was love.”

In 1939, she married Penrose Tennyson, whom she had known since 1934 when he was an assistant director on
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Tennyson became a director for Michael Balcon after
Young and Innocent
and made three films for Ealing before he joined the navy at the outbreak of World War II. He was killed in a plane crash in 1941, at the age of twenty-nine.

Pilbeam returned to films after his death, acting in twelve pictures until she retired from the screen in 1948.

Young and Innocent
is best remembered for the wide overhead traveling shot in the hotel ballroom which finishes on a close-up of the twitching eye of the blackfaced drummer. Hitchcock used this shot memorably in
Notorious,
and again in
Marnie,
each time to point up something small in a large setting that is really the most important element of the scene.

To accomplish this in one take, Hitchcock asked the studio’s camera workshop to design and construct a variable focal-length, zoom-type lens that, when used with a specially built elevator dolly, would allow the camera to move from a high overhead view of the ballroom to a close-up of the drummer’s twitching eye.

Bryan Langley recalled Hitchcock’s expert knowledge of camera lenses: “He could draw a setup with background, larger or smaller, according to the focal length of the lens, which no one else I’ve ever seen was able to do or even understood that it’s necessary.”

Young and Innocent
was based on a novel by Josephine Tey, with the screenplay by Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood, Anthony Armstrong and Alma Reville, who was uncredited.

Hitchcock appears onscreen in a scene outside the courthouse, wearing a cap and holding a small camera, annoyed because people are blocking his view, and he can’t get his picture. “My cameo appearances,” Hitchcock told me, “were a deliberate move away from realism, reminding the audience, ‘It’s only a movie.’”

I
N
A
UGUST OF
1937, the Hitchcocks made a trip to America on the
Queen Mary.
Hitchcock and Alma had talked about a possible move to Hollywood, and they were anxious to explore the possibilities firsthand.

Very privately, he had employed an American publicist to be certain the press knew of his arrival. He already was represented by the brother of David O. Selznick, agent Myron Selznick, who lived and worked in England.

The trip did not produce anything in the way of offers, but a personal relationship was established with David Selznick’s representative in New York. The Hitchcocks returned to England in September 1938, where he completed the editing of
Young and Innocent.
They had made no American commitment, nor did they have in mind their next British film.
The Wheel Spins,
a 1936 novel by Ethel Lina White, who specialized in mysteries about young women on journeys, was considered. It developed into
The Lady Vanishes.

A screenplay had been prepared at Gainsborough for the Hollywood director Roy William Neill, later known for his Universal Sherlock Holmes films. Neill, however, dropped out of the project, so it was given to Hitchcock. He was struck by the resemblance of the story to one he had wanted to do, one that had inspired a German film of 1938 (Veit Harlan’s
Verwehte Spuren
) and later
So Long at the Fair,
a 1950 British film with Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde directed by Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough. It is based on the true story of a woman who disappears without a trace at the Paris Exposition of 1890 because she has contracted the plague.

“Our vanishing lady disappears because of a different plague coming on the scene—World War II,” Hitchcock said. “The heroine is supposed to be imagining things because of a bit of a bump on the head she has had.”

I met Sir Michael Redgrave at his last birthday party, in New York. We had the opportunity to speak about what it was like working with Hitchcock during the director’s late British period.

Redgrave remembered it as “life-changing, my first film,” though he had appeared briefly in
Secret Agent.
At the time, he thought of himself as “of the theater, one of the theater folk” who scoffed at acting in films.

“I was appearing on the stage,” Redgrave said, “but I didn’t have a next part coming up that I really liked, so I decided to try a film. My fellow actors were discouraging, but that only made me feel more determined to do it.” John Gielgud advised him to give it a try for the experience, but Peggy Ashcroft, who had worked in
The 39 Steps,
advised him to “stick to the stage.”

“I loved to go to the cinema, but I approached it with trepidation as an actor.” Redgrave took the screen test and was offered the lead in
The Lady Vanishes.

“I was more or less the right type for the part. I was sufficiently trained to be able to memorize and rattle off my lines, and though I was more of a Redgrave than a Redford, I was not especially self-conscious in front of a camera.

“I wasn’t vain because I really didn’t have anything to be vain about. I didn’t think about camera angles or which was my best side. I didn’t think I
had
a best profile, or if I did, I couldn’t find it.

“The first thing I did after signing was to regret it. It was like so many decisions we all make, where one immediately has second thoughts. But I was curious to see what picture making was all about, and I assumed I’d learn something.”

The first words of wisdom he heard from the most famous of British film directors were: “Learn your lines, hit your marks, and don’t worry too much.”

“I don’t think Hitchcock thought much of me as an actor. But he didn’t seem worried because I believe he thought he would get a performance from me in the cutting room through his skill. I thought I’d been chosen because I photographed well.

“I can say definitely that Hitchcock said, quote, ‘Actors are cattle,’ unquote, because he said it in my presence. I never knew if it was aimed specifically at me or if he had already had the thought.”

Hitchcock told me, “You don’t have time to massage actors’ egos. If you do, it has been my experience that the appetite grows with the eating. It can be a full-time job for an octopus, holding all those hands.”

In the theater, Redgrave had never enjoyed “hitting chalk marks.”

“I was a stage actor accustomed to being expansive. I believed that there must be a great deal of improvisation in acting, and that the part should be developing continuously.”

Redgrave had some ideas he thought quite clever business, and he thought Hitchcock would be pleased by what he had brought to the character. Quite the contrary. He was allowed to finish his small addition. Then, an extremely serious Hitchcock said, “You can’t do that. It won’t match the other shots.”

Redgrave felt mortified by the rebuke in front of the cast and crew. “I did not like Hitchcock. I particularly didn’t like his sense of humor.

“I was bored. I’d never been bored in the theater. Not for one minute. I was certain I would never agree to make another film, even if anyone wanted me to, which I was certain they never would after this. I expected to writhe in shame when the picture was released.

“Being in the theater at night and getting up early for the film, I was always tired. I had a terrible time waking up in the morning and I was sleepwalking all day. We had a lot of time to talk since most screen acting is waiting around.

“One day, that fine actor, Paul Lukas, who was in the film, told me he had seen me the night before in
The Three Sisters.
‘You’re a
real
actor,’ he said. ‘But here, you hardly seem to be trying at all.’

“I agreed with him. I not only found it boring, but I was really exhausted, putting all my energy into my nightly performances in the theater.

“‘But, my dear boy,’ he told me, ‘it’s all going into the can, forever. After the director has called, ‘Print!’ it’s too late for you to do it better next time. There
is
no next time. It’s all there in the can.’

“There is a scene in
The Lady Vanishes
in which a foreign agent mentions that his perfect command of English is due to his having been educated at Oxford. My character picks up a chair and hits the agent over the head.

“‘Why did you do that?’ I’m asked.

“I say, ‘I was at Cambridge.’ I found this an utterly terrible line to say. Embarrassing. I considered asking Hitchcock to cut it, but to do so might have been disruptive to our relationship.

“When the film opened and as long as it played, everywhere my line, the one I would have wished to have taken out, got the biggest laugh of the film.

“Well, here we are, so long afterwards. The audiences that watched me as a young man are as old as I am and some of them are gone, taking their memories with them. The film screen has a much longer memory. I understand now that when I am gone, I shall probably be remembered best for
The Lady Vanishes,
about which I was at the time flippant and nonchalant. I had occasion to see the film not long ago, and I felt gratitude to Paul Lukas for helping me gain perspective. I felt gratitude to Mr. Hitchcock for casting me. I came to admire Mr. Hitchcock very much, but never his sense of humor.

“At the time I made the film, I had so little confidence in the way my face would look blown up big on a screen. Seeing the film just a little while ago, I noticed how young I look, and that is forever.”