Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Yet bankruptcies in the English film industry often yielded unexpected fruit. Scrambling to organize new backing, Balcon regrouped under a different directorship. He founded Gainsborough Productions, named for the eighteenth-century English portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough. Under Balcon, the smiling “Gainsborough Lady” in ruffled eighteen-century garb and feathered hat would become one of the film industry’s glorious trademarks, signifying good taste and refined entertainment in English cinema.
The first Gainsborough production was announced in the spring of 1924:
The Passionate Adventure.
Graham Cutts was back as director, and Hitchcock returned as art director, coscenarist, and assistant director. This time the source was a novel by Frank Stayton, which had previously been produced as a play. Again, Michael Morton was Hitchcock’s collaborator.
Clive Brook played the main character, an upper-class Londoner who sheds his stuffy straitjacket on weekends, abandoning his mansion and wife to pursue a mysterious double life in the East End tenements. The rebel gentleman attracts both friends (Lilian Hall-Davis) and enemies (Victor McLaglen) among the slum dwellers, and his double life arouses the suspicions of a high official of Scotland Yard (John Hamilton).
The Passionate Adventure
was quickly shot and edited for a July 1924 premiere. Along with
Always Tell Your Wife
, it is the earliest quasi-Hitchcock film to survive, if only in archives. The art direction is impressive (Hitchcock re-created evocative canal settings on Islington stages), but the endangered woman and wrong-man intrigue of the script are even more distinctly Hitchcockian. So is the climax.
“Vicky screamed,” Stayton wrote in the original novel. “Then, scarcely knowing what she was doing, she threw herself on Harris, plunging the knife beneath his left shoulder-blade. His fingers relaxed; he coughed, then fell backward on the floor between the table and the bed.”
Hitchcock was already beginning to develop his storytelling philosophy, again with a language all his own. He looked for a “springboard situation” in a story source, and for any number of “dynamic situations” that might lend themselves to visual emphasis—that might be “ocularly interesting.” He liked to start a film with an allegro or andante sequence, he said, something in a “leisurely tempo”; then he would give the audience a sudden jolt, followed by a series of jolts building to a “crescendo,” or “high spot”—ending the story, perhaps, with a gentle, ambiguous coda.
This earliest Hitchcock film to survive contains the first known instance of the type of sensational crescendo he pursued throughout his career. During a violent struggle, a gleaming knife finds its way into the grip of tenement good girl Lilian Hall-Davis, and the endangered heroine plunges the blade into Victor McLaglen, saving the hero. This quintessential Hitchcock image came straight from the novel
and
the play; as good a reader as he was a watcher, Hitchcock always plucked out the dramatic elements that spoke to him, that best served his compulsion to tell his uniquely gripping stories. Then he found ways to stage these dynamic situations that would magnify their emotional impact.
For Hitchcock, his Islington apprenticeship confirmed the power of technique. But it also established the ideas, inspirations, and obsessions of a fifty-year career remarkable for its persistence of vision.
Two lesser members of the
Passionate Adventure
cast came from America. One was the understated actress Alice Joyce, who played the rich man’s spouse; the other was winsome Marjorie Daw, playing her best friend. Daw, who had been featured in Douglas Fairbanks pictures, was still married to Hollywood director A. Edward Sutherland. But she was being heavily courted by Myron Selznick, who was scrambling to preserve his connections in Europe after his father’s bankruptcy. Myron had promoted Daw for the part, and accompanied her to London for the filming, traveling on the
Berengaria.
Myron was a short, barrel-chested man, a chronic drinker who over
time would become an oppressive drunk. But like all the Selznicks, he had willpower and drive and a magnetic personality. Myron knew how to make things happen, and on the set of
The Passionate Adventure
he began forging a chummy relationship with Hitchcock.
Michael Balcon, meanwhile, continued to lust after markets outside England. He made an optimistic deal with Germany’s largest studio, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft in Berlin, known as Ufa. The Ufa-Gainsborough coproductions, according to the agreement Balcon hammered out, would be owned and distributed by Balcon for English-speaking territories, with the German and European rights retained by Ufa.
Shortly after the premiere of
The Passionate Adventure
, Myron Selznick and Marjorie Daw accompanied Balcon to Berlin to smooth the way for Ufa-Gainsborough cooperation. Graham Cutts and Hitchcock, along with Alma Reville and a second assistant, arrived in September to prepare the first film under the new partnership. Cutts got busy with casting, while Hitchcock concentrated on the art direction and his first solo script, based on Raymond Paton’s novel
The Blackguard.
Set in Paris and Russia, the story revolved around the career of an abused boy befriended by a philanthropic artist. The boy becomes a violin prodigy and falls in love with a princess, whom he saves from a revolution led by his former music teacher.
The first Gainsborough-Ufa coproduction would be more Ufa than Gainsborough—a “superproduction,” boasting grandiose set pieces, including Parisian sights (already a recurring feature of Hitchcock films); symphony auditorium scenes; and, intriguingly, a dream sequence in heaven. This was all created on the stages of the vast, world-famous Neubabelsberg studio, which sprawled over forested acres on the outskirts of Berlin.
Hitchcock worked closely with Ufa cameraman Theodor Sparkhul, whom he later said resembled Harpo Marx. A onetime associate of Ernst Lubitsch, Sparkuhl knew as little English as Hitchcock knew German, so they communicated mainly via sketches and sign language.
Erich Pommer, Germany’s preeminent producer, was acting as the production’s nominal supervisor. German actor Walter Rilla was cast as the violinist, while Hollywood actress Jane Novak, a delicate blonde who had starred with William S. Hart and Harold Lloyd, was imported to play the Russian princess.
Others in the cast included England’s Frank Stanmore as the philanthropist, and German character actor Bernhard Goetzke as the music teacher. Hitchcock had admired Goetzke’s role as Death in Fritz Lang’s
Der müde Tod
, and as the archdetective pursuing archcriminal Mabuse in Lang’s epic two-part
Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler
, so he made a point of seeking out the formidable Goetzke and forging a connection with him.
The fall of 1924 was the glorious high-water mark of the German silent
era. In London it wasn’t always easy to see foreign films, which rarely received widespread exhibition. But Hitchcock had gone out of his way to catch the early masterpieces of Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, G. W. Pabst, and E. A. Dupont. He was swept away by the controlling style and pictorial mood of German expressionism. Now he wandered around Ufa’s famed Neubabelsberg lot, marveling at the magnificent sets for Lang’s two-part film of
Die Nibelungen.
(With shooting just completed, Lang himself was away on his first trip to America.) Indeed, Hitchcock’s design for one scene of
The Blackguard
called for demolition of the giant trees constructed for
Siegfried
(part 1 of
Die Nibelungen
). When Hitchcock insisted, the Ufa art department obeyed “tearfully,” according to John Russell Taylor.
Hitchcock was able to observe Murnau, one of Germany’s supreme masters, shoot an intricately arranged composition for a scene in
Der letzte Mann
(a.k.a.
The Last Laugh
), which starred Emil Jannings. The shot involved a complicated depth of field. A railway station platform had been set up with a real train carriage, behind which mock carriages receded in the distance; far away across the lot, barely visible, another real carriage could be seen, with actual passengers stepping on and off. The controlled illusion, with its forced perspective, impressed the Englishman. According to conflicting sources, Hitchcock either engaged Murnau in conversation, or overheard him tell others: “What you see on the set does not matter. All that matters is what you see on the screen.”
Hitchcock never missed an opportunity to quote this remark, which became a cornerstone of his own approach: The reality didn’t matter if the illusion was effective. He then emulated Murnau by hiring a slew of dwarves to stand far from the camera in
The Blackguard
, creating an artificial perspective for a crowd scene.
The writer of
Der letzte Mann
, Carl Mayer, was “one of the best film writers” ever, according to Hitchcock—because Mayer wrote pictures, not words, to accommodate the visual genius of Murnau.
Der letzte Mann
virtually dispensed with intertitles; it was “the prime example of expressing a story idea” as “told visually from beginning to end.”
To Hitchcock’s American indoctrination could now be added the visual influence of the Germans. German cinema was more architectural, more painstakingly designed, more concerned with atmosphere. The Germans shot the set, not the stars, and when they shot the stars they anatomized them into eyes and mouths and hands. The Germans loved shadows and glare, bizarre angles, extreme close-ups, and mobile camera work; the “floating camera” that became a Hitchcock trademark was first Murnau’s. German directors were notorious for manipulating actors as though they were puppets, choreographing the action down to the last twitch. There was zero improvisation in a Fritz Lang film; F. W Murnau didn’t permit surprises.
Hitchcock could be maddening on the subject of other films and film-makers.
Publicly, he claimed never to have watched another director at work.
*
(Privately he complained that other directors never came to watch him.) He sometimes dodged questions about other directors and films. But his records prove that he diligently kept up with the best. Indeed, no director was a greater devotee; he saw as many films as time allowed, from the earliest animated photographs to daily screenings in the final months leading up to his death.
Although he could be evasive about his influences, when pressed Hitchcock would mention
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, Murnau, Lang, even Lubitsch. And when asked in general about stylistic mentors, his reply was unflinching. “The Germans. The Germans.”
Germany in 1924 was a nation at odds with itself, divided in elections and factionalized in street fighting, by political arguments at taverns and dinner tables. Nazism was still in the future. Hitler sat in a Munich jail, dictating
Mein Kampf
to Rudolf Hess. And Berlin was the center of luxury and squalor, decadence and vice.
Berlin was thrilling. As always when he traveled, Hitchcock mixed business and pleasure. When he wasn’t working he was sightseeing, which was also work—for he was always taking mental notes. He attended the cabaret, concerts, plays, museum shows, and art gallery exhibits. He dined at the best restaurants. He made a point of meeting writers and actors with intriguing reputations, and made the rounds of agents and producers. When he wasn’t sightseeing with Alma, he chummed around with Eddie Polo, an American serial action star making pictures in Berlin at the twilight of his career, and with Jane Novak, the second Hitchcock blonde. He remained friends with Polo until the actor’s death in 1961, and was devoted to Novak: fifty years later he was still logging her birthday in his datebooks.
Some who knew Hitchcock think he was a man at war with himself over his sexuality: prurient by nature and instinct, repressed in his behavior. But purely as a watcher, not a doer, he was clever about logging kinky experiences wherever he went—including Berlin. Throughout his life he demonstrated such uncommon luck blundering into these experiences that his luck should truly be considered connivance.
One Berlin night, Hitchcock recalled, he was dragooned into accompanying Graham Cutts and an Ufa representative to a nightclub popularized
by homosexuals. There they encountered two women, who volunteered to take the Englishmen to a private party that promised titillation. They stopped at a hotel and went upstairs to a room. Cognac was passed around. The women made “various propositions,” in the words of John Russell Taylor, “which perhaps fortunately the terrified Hitch did not understand too exactly.” He refused the offers, Hitchcock told François Truffaut, repeating,
“Nein, nein.”
The two women then slipped into bed and launched into lovemaking in front of the others. “Hitch was surprised but fairly uncomprehending,” wrote Taylor. Another member of the retinue, the young daughter of an Ufa executive, donned her eyeglasses in order to see better. “It was a
gemütlich
German family soiree,” Hitchcock dryly informed Truffaut.
Although Taylor surmised that “it seems unlikely that this interesting and exotic experience had any very deep effect,” he underrates the incident, not to mention Hitchcock’s feigned innocence. Hitchcock films evince more than a passing curiosity in all manner of sexuality—straight, homosexual, and anything in between. (He once told Taylor that he himself might have become a “poof” if he hadn’t met Alma.) The Jesuit in him was attracted by taboos and fascinated by sin—and sex ranked high in the Catholic pantheon of sins.
Sapphic overtones can be detected right from the first film Hitchcock directed,
The Pleasure Garden
, which, as Truffaut noted, features a scene of two girlfriends “who really suggest a couple, the one dressed in pajamas, the other wearing a nightgown.” (Yes, Hitchcock told Truffaut, that scene was “inspired” by the Berlin incident.) The lesbian feeling between Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers was the boldest conceit of his first Hollywood foray—and trousered ladies turn up regularly in other Hitchcock films.
For all its enticements, though, Hitchcock’s trip to Berlin wasn’t completely blissful. Until now Hitchcock and Graham Cutts had been friendly enough; they vacationed together, played the occasional game of tennis. But now friction arose between the director and his all-purpose assistant.