Alfred Hitchcock (15 page)

Montagu, the son of the banker Lord Swaythling, was the translator of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and typical of the affluent, literate people spearheading the organization—the type of Cambridge- or Oxford-educated Englishmen Hitchcock preferred to associate with personally and professionally. (The nearest Hitchcock got to Cambridge was cropping his face into an alumni reunion photograph in
Dial M for Murder
—one of his best cameo chuckles.)

Hitchcock would benefit from collaboration with Montagu, and with Angus MacPhail, a red-haired Scot who briefly succeeded Montagu as film critic of the
Observer.
“Tall and thin and shortsighted,” in the words of T. E. B. Clarke, MacPhail had such “a scholarly air, he might have been taken for a don.” MacPhail desperately wanted to join the film trade; he would begin by hanging out on the set of
The Lodger
—and remain by Hitchcock’s side, off and on, for three decades. The handsome, dapper Bernstein was another lifelong ally; Hitchcock would also work, with differing degrees of intimacy, with Mycroft and Brunel. They were all part of a small circle Hitchcock joined, who convened at Brunel’s flat after screenings, holding what they dubbed “Hate Parties” to dissect what they had just seen.

Another Film Society and Hate Party regular was the somewhat older
writer Eliot Stannard. Born in 1888, Stannard was the son of novelist Henrietta Winter (who wrote as John Strange Winter); Winter’s children’s book
Bootle’s Baby
accounted for Stannard’s cuddly nickname: “Bootles.” Whether Stannard was a onetime man of the theater or a former Fleet Street journalist is uncertain. Michael Powell described him as “a dark, wildly handsome, untidy man”; another Hitchcock collaborator, Sidney Gilliat, painted him with the “lantern-haggard, long-haired look of an unsuccessful touring actor.”

This much is known: Stannard entered film in 1915 as the scenarist of
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
, and between 1915 and 1922, when he turned up at Islington as the author of
Paddy the Next Best Thing
—a Graham Cutts picture sandwiched between the British Famous Players-Lasky dissolution and
Woman to Woman
—Stannard wrote roughly two dozen features. These included high-minded adaptations of plays and fiction by John Galsworthy, Arthur Wing Piñero, Henry Fielding, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as many original potboilers. Stannard boasted a lengthy association with director Maurice Elvey; indeed, Alma Reville worked with Stannard on the Elvey productions, and may have recommended him to Hitchcock and Michael Balcon.

Steeped in literature and theater, Stannard knew most of the novels and plays that film producers were buying, in an era when best-selling books and West End hits were considered sure box-office bets. Known for his equable temperament, his admirable detachment from ego, and his perpetual air of resignation, Stannard was also recognized for his willingness to take on multiple assignments, turning them out with speed. “His method,” in the words of Ivor Montagu, was “to sit down and tap it straight out on the typewriter as he thought of it, without change or erasure.” Even more important to Hitchcock, he was just as proficient a talker. Stannard “could talk like an angel and forever,” recalled Michael Powell.

Stannard was well established by the time he was partnered with Hitchcock on
The Pleasure Garden
, and, like W A. Moore at Henley’s or Michael Morton before him, he offered Hitchcock the wisdom of an elder. In addition to the two Emelka pictures, Stannard would work on the scenarios of seven other silent Hitchcock features; he would, in fact, write at least a part of every silent Hitchcock film. After him, no other scenarist would last as long with the director, who grew to be—to say the least—demanding of his writers.

Hitchcock liked to get close to his writing partners. He needed to feel an affinity with his closest creative collaborators, and in a sense he and a
given writer got “married” for the duration of a given project, spending all day, and then evenings and weekends, together. But the writer he trusted most from the start, the collaborator for whom he felt the greatest affinity, was the woman he would marry: Alma Reville. She was a constant, if somewhat mysterious, presence in the writing sessions—sometimes saying very little, though whatever she said counted. Hitchcock felt that it helped everyone to have a billiards-like “triangulated” discussion, to have “three Hitchcocks” in the room.

In later interviews Hitchcock said that
The Lodger
was the first property that he himself chose from the studio’s available properties. (That was a proviso he often invoked when discussing his story choices—that he’d made the best choice possible “from the available properties.”) But
The Lodger
was also a novel Hitchcock professed to love. The story of a psycho killer stalking London, it was the kind of material that struck a deep chord with him. And though in his later work he would often drastically change the novels he filmed, revising their stories to meet his own needs, in this first important instance he tried to be faithful.

Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel, published in 1913, concerns a mysterious lodger suspected by his landlords of being the Avenger, a Jack the Ripper-style killer responsible for a series of “curious and brutal murders” in London. The novel had been a best-seller, and was followed by a well-received stage version, seen by Hitchcock, in 1916. The play was quite different from the book, tinged with comedy; it introduced the idea of the lodger wandering about at night in search of homeless people, presenting them with buns concealing gold pieces—an activity that is misinterpreted by Scotland Yard.

The film had its own reasons to depart from the book. For as keen as the director was on the novel, from the outset the three Hitchcocks were faced with two issues that dictated the singularities and peculiarities of the final script. Both involved their prospective star, Ivor Novello, a British boy wonder who had risen to the fore as a composer of popular wartime songs.

Michael Balcon had scored a coup by signing the Welsh matinee idol to a Gainsborough contract. Novello had made only a few films, including an American picture for D. W. Griffith, and he was principally a musical comedy performer. With his boyish grin and brilliantined hair, it is tempting to see Novello as Hitchcock’s initial foray into “countercasting,” or casting against type—the director’s first golden opportunity to exploit a familiar persona to play off audience expectations. Novello might become the first dashing Hitchcock killer.

Yet Hitchcock was undermined, not for the last time, by a front-office decision: Novello had to be cleared, by the end of the film, of any wrongdoing. It was probably the dreaded C. M. Woolf who insisted that the success of
The Lodger
depended on Novello’s female fans, who might be
repulsed if he proved to be the bloodthirsty Avenger. “It would never have done for Ivor’s many fans to think him capable of villainy,” wrote Novello biographer James Harding.

This went directly against the book Hitchcock prized, in which the lodger is revealed almost undoubtedly as the killer, a lunatic who is suffering from acute religious mania. At the end of Mrs. Lowndes’s novel, the lodger even manages to elude police, who—in true Hitchcockian fashion—have been slow to evince “the slightest interest” in him as the obvious culprit. Then, just like Jack the Ripper, the Avenger disappears from public view, his ultimate fate unknown.

Hitchcock often said that if he hadn’t become a film director, he might have become a lawyer. He was a master negotiator, and spent his career picking his way through minefields of casting, censorship, and front-office resistance to achieve ingenious compromises in his filmmaking. The way he solved the Ivor Novello problem in
The Lodger
became a reliable—though not perfect—blueprint for much of the rest of his career.

First, the three Hitchcocks made the telling decision to build up the part of young Daisy Bunting, the landlady’s daughter. Daisy doesn’t even
meet
the lodger until three-quarters of the way into Mrs. Lowndes’s novel; there the story is viewed almost entirely through Mrs. Bunting’s eyes. In Hitchcock’s film, Daisy would become an equal lead character.

Just as telling: Daisy is described in the book as fair-haired, but in the film her character would become a “curly blonde”—a more specific detail that links her closely to the suspense, for curly blondes are said to arouse bloodlust in the Avenger. The book has an assortment of victims, but in the film all the Avenger’s victims would be “curly blondes.” It was the first instance of blonde fixation in a Hitchcock film—and an invention entirely his own.

Although hardly an icy, elegant Hitchcock blonde—in fact she’s rather sweet and down-to-earth—Daisy has a charged sexuality that heightens her vulnerability. In one scene, Hitchcock has Daisy’s boyfriend, the hapless policeman Joe, jokingly clap her in painful handcuffs—a prank intended to hint at “fetishism,” as Hitchcock admitted to François Truffaut. He leaped at the chance to point out the obvious “sexual connotation” of handcuffs to his French colleague. “When I visited the Vice Museum in Paris,” Hitchcock explained, “I noticed there was considerable evidence of sexual aberrations through restraint. You should try to go there sometime. Of course they also have knives, the guillotine, and all sorts of information.”

The handcuffs aren’t in Mrs. Lowndes’s version; nor is another scene showing Daisy undressing for her bath, her pale skin glowing as though irradiated. (Hitchcock’s beautiful women are never so beautiful as when they strip to their undergarments, unaware of being observed.)

As Daisy luxuriates amid the soap bubbles, the steam rising outside her
bath window is noticed by the lodger, lulling in his above-stairs flat. Aroused by the thought of Daisy (surely, the audience thinks, he is longing to clutch her by the neck and stroke those golden curls), the lodger creeps downstairs and stealthily tries the door handle of the bathroom. It’s a remarkable scene that anticipates by thirty years Janet Leigh’s stepping into the shower in
Psycho.
Up to this point the audience has been led to believe the lodger is the Avenger, and if Hitchcock had his druthers Novello might well have opened that door. But, no, in 1926 the door must be locked.

The three Hitchcocks had to make many changes from the book. Mrs. Lowndes had included a long scene toward the end of the novel in which Mrs. Bunting attends an inquest investigating one of the murders, and another involving a chance encounter between police and the lodger at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. They were scenes the director might have enjoyed filming; he incorporated both inquests and famous museums into other films.

But the crucial chore was exonerating Novello, whose role was transformed into the first of Hitchcock’s many wrong-man leads. The ending the writers came up with involved a mob pursuing the lodger and nearly lynching him; the lodger tries to climb down from a bridge, but is caught and beaten, dangling there when his handcuffs catch on a pike.
^*
When the police arrive to save him (realizing that the real Avenger has struck elsewhere in the meantime), there has to be an explanation for the lodger’s suspicious behavior throughout the story and it’s a silly one: he has styled himself a good “avenger,” stalking the evil one. The real Avenger, flashbacks reveal, has murdered the lodger’s sister, one of the first curly blonde victims.

With the director whispering in his ear, Eliot Stannard wrote the script over the first two months of 1926; then Hitchcock went back over it one last time, breaking it down into several hundred master scenes, making notes and little sketches to guide each camera setup, “each one specifying the exact grouping and action of the characters and the placing of the camera,” in his words. The script was always written with the flow of pictures in mind, but storyboarding was the final revision. Stannard was encouraged to suggest visual ideas, but again the more important contributor was the expert in continuity and cutting: Alma.

The script satisfied front-office concerns that Novello’s character be proved innocent. But that left the second issue: Novello was a stiff, mannered actor, whose technique leaned heavily on his repertoire of tedious “handsome” poses. That was a challenge to be addressed in the directing, but one Hitchcock had already anticipated, incorporating into the shooting script a brooding visual design to eclipse Novello’s flaws.

In March 1926,
The Pleasure Garden
, which Hitchcock had finished filming seven months earlier, was previewed—and greeted, in the words of the
Daily Express
, as “an outstanding film.” Even today, Hitchcock’s directing debut remains impressive.

The very first sequence had showgirls gliding down a spiral staircase onto the stage of the Pleasure Garden theater, ogled by elderly men slouching in the front row, glued to their opera glasses. There it all was in the opening shots: show business and voyeurism, the sly Hitchcock mix.

The Pleasure Garden
also boasted Hitchcock’s first provocatively staged murder. Miles Mander has a mistress who has outlived her usefulness.
^*
They go wading in the sea, he tips her head back as if to baptize her, then he strangles and drowns her.