Authors: Patrick McGilligan
For Hitchcock the storyteller, the means would always be as important as the end. The director didn’t mind if a scene didn’t quite work, if the tricks were worth trying. “It should be fun!” people remember him saying in his days as a boy wonder. “Fun!”
As long as it was fun.
The tricks could be internalized, Hitchcock knew, and the techniques streamlined for reuse in better films later on. Experimentation was the inevitable by-product of the director’s constantly spinning mind.
Hitchcock was working at a restless clip. By the last week of March 1927 he was already in Nice and the Riviera for location work on his next Gainsborough picture, an adaptation of Noel Coward’s
Easy Virtue.
In France he would shoot backgrounds and exteriors for the new project while polishing off final shots of
Downhill
, with Ivor Novello emoting in front of English backdrops on the rooftop of a French hotel.
A Noel Coward play was automatically an undertaking of higher quality and prestige than a work by “David L’Estrange.” Coward, already among the royalty of show business, stopped by Islington to confer with Hitchcock during the making of
Downhill;
their subsequent friendship was more professional than personal, but would last for years. Yet Coward had little or nothing to do with the Hitchcock film. Once again Eliot Stannard adapted the 1925 play, with editorial input from Ivor Montagu and Angus MacPhail.
Four of the main players carried over from
Downhill:
Isabel Jeans as the persecuted victim of social hypocrisy who twice makes headlines in divorce proceedings; Ian Hunter as a lawyer; and Robin Irvine and Violet Farebrother as an upper-crust suitor and his mother.
Hitchcock could certainly feel comfortable with the play’s theme, which indicted blind justice and conventional attitudes toward divorce. Yet as a silent picture,
Easy Virtue
limited Coward’s brittle dialogue to the occasional intertitle—and the upshot was a thin shadow of the original.
Again, though, Hitchcock’s touches kept it from being a terrible film. The director told François Truffaut that it contained the worst intertitle he ever wrote: Isabel Jeans, scarred from her treatment by the yellow press, cringes in terror every time she spots a newsman lurking with a camera. Her last line to picture snatchers covering the second divorce: “Shoot. There’s nothing left to kill.” (Again, Hitchcock’s sly mention of it ensured that it wouldn’t be forgotten.)
With Hitchcock, games involving lenses could be murderous, or simply
games. Another Hitchcockian highlight in
Easy Virtue
is the vignette of a divorce court judge peering at the plaintiff’s counsel through his monocle—an ocular image followed seamlessly by a cut to a matching close-up. In those early days, that was an impossible special effect to achieve. “I had to make the monocle oversized so it would be in focus at close range,” Hitchcock explained later. “Then I put a mirror in it instead of clear glass, and put the attorney character behind the camera, with a double for him in the long shot. And so when the monocle came up to the camera, you saw the man in close-up, without a cut.”
Hitchcock not only dreamed up such unusual camera stunts, he took delight in figuring out how to execute them before the specialists did. He was like a brilliant symphony conductor who prides himself on knowing how to play every instrument in the orchestra.
Already, Hitchcock could boast more technical know-how than most directors accumulated in a lifetime. When Claude McDonnell took ill during the making of
Easy Virtue
, he gleefully took over, supervising his own lighting and camera setups. England’s boy wonder was also a workhorse who filled in behind the lens more than once, in the silent era, when one of his cameramen took sick. He never lost a day on that score.
Easy Virtue
, which was completed in May, would be Hitchcock’s last film for Gainsborough. In June the director joined the newly reorganized, and renamed, British International Pictures, and undertook his third film in the first six months of the productive year 1927.
After its near financial collapse, British National had been forced to welcome a savior in the person of John Maxwell. A former solicitor from Scotland, Maxwell had been in film exhibition since 1912, heading up an expanding circuit of halls. Branching into rentals, he had built up Wardour Films as a rival to C. M. Woolf’s empire. After J. D. Williams was ousted from the British National directorate, Maxwell effected a merger with Wardour, becoming chairman of the new company, British International Pictures, or B.I.P.
The
I
was important. In the year-end issue of the
Bioscope
, Michael Balcon, retrenching at Gainsborough, contributed an article entitled “Cutting Down Production Costs”; in the same issue, Maxwell wrote on “The International Film.” Balcon was every bit the internationalist, but Maxwell had the fresh swagger and ambition to carve a niche out of foreign markets. Before the year was out B.I.P. would purchase a former Emelka chain as a foothold in Germany, make a deal with Sascha Films of Austria for distribution in eastern Europe, and sign with Pathé for France. Then came the announcement that B.I.P. films would be distributed by a new firm in the United States, headed by none other than J. D. Williams.
B.I.P. was initially willing to gamble more money on production, and Maxwell promised his directors creative freedom. At Borehamwood, near Elstree Station, the new B.I.P. studio boasted up-to-date facilities, including two enormous interior stages. All of this, as much as his salary increase, lured Hitchcock away from Michael Balcon and Gainsborough.
“Selling angle,” one trade paper trumpeted as early as
Downhill
, “the name of Hitchcock.”
His sixth film as director—and the first British International Pictures movie by any director—was first mentioned in the trades in April 1927, when the director told the
Bioscope
about
The Ring
, a grand-scale boxing drama he was planning. By then a draft of the script had already been completed. Eliot Stannard was reported as the writer, and Stannard’s name was cited again as late as one week before photography commenced. But when Hitchcock and Stannard had a falling-out, Walter Mycroft, the newspaperman associated with the
Evening Standard
(and another stalwart of the Film Society), was brought in for touch-ups, and technical advice on the boxing sequences. The director also knew boxing; he could discourse knowledgeably on both the rules and the fighters, and routinely attended soccer and tennis as well as boxing matches.
*
Boxing, like everything else, was grist. Hitchcock stored up observations and references like an academic. In 1937’s
Young and Innocent
, Erica (Nova Pilbeam) employs rough first-aid measures that she explains (without elaborating) she learned in a boxer’s dressing room. Forty years after
The Ring
, directing the final sequence of
Marnie
—an emotionally exhausting scene in which Marnie and her mother revisit the past—Hitchcock told Tippi Hedren the feeling was like two boxers who have fought to a draw. “He was pulling things out of his memory all the time,” Hedren recalled.
Hitchcock’s eventual credit as sole author of the original story and script—a credit unique in his career—underlines his proprietary feeling for
The Ring
, the picture he left Gainsborough to make.
The first act of
The Ring
takes place against the backdrop of a fairground, where One-Round Jack, an amateur pugilist, takes on all comers. A nattily dressed stranger flirts with Mabel, a comely ticket taker, and then decides to fight Jack. Mabel roots for Jack, who is her boyfriend, but Jack is beaten by the natty newcomer. The winner is revealed as the Australian heavyweight champion, Bob Corby. With one eye on Mabel, Bob invites Jack to take a job with him as his sparring partner, and train professionally.
The story then shifts to Hitchcock’s own East End. After winning his
first professional match, Jack marries Mabel, and his fortunes rise. But his pride is dampened when he sees Bob aggressively wooing his wife at wild parties. Jack’s jealousy leads to friction with Bob, and a violent confrontation with Mabel. Just as he and Bob finally are matched for a championship bout, Mabel leaves Jack. On the night of the showdown, Mabel is among the crowd. The audience must wait to see who will triumph.
Starting out at the new studio, Hitchcock had more leverage with the casting. He handpicked his lead actress, Lilian Hall-Davis, whom Hitchcock had admired as far back as
The Passionate Adventure.
(“An amazing girl,” he once said of her. “On the set she suffered from an acute self-consciousness,” but in private life “she possessed a terrific personality and amazing vivacity.”) The actress was against type in his canon, a brunette playing a goodhearted, salt-of-the-earth character.
As One-Round Jack, the director cast Carl Brisson, a former Danish middleweight champion turned musical comedy entertainer. Brisson’s only previous appearance on the screen had been in an obscure Danish picture; Hitchcock could thus claim to have launched Brisson into film, and this would be the more appealing of two leads Brisson would play for him.
Ian Hunter, from
Downhill
and
Easy Virtue
, was chosen to play Bob Corby, the Australian heavyweight, while Gordon Harker, who had begun his long career as a stage prompter in 1902, turned up as Jack’s trainer and friend to the last. The son of Joseph C. Harker, a well-known stage scenic artist, Harker was a true Cockney—born, as they say, within the sound of Bow Bells.
*
He had played cheeky Cockneys in Edgar Wallace plays, and would supply similar comedy in several Hitchcock-B.I.P. films.
It may or may not be true that Claude McDonnell was slated to photograph
The Ring
, before illness felled him, or that McDonnell bucked about his salary and quit the production at the eleventh hour. Certainly it is not true, no matter what the director told Peter Bogdanovich, that Hitchcock “taught” photography to the eleventh-hour replacement—John Jaffray Cox, known as “Jack”—or that before
The Ring
Cox was any kind of “second” cameraman.
Jack Cox had worked in pictures since 1913, logging five years in the early 1920s as chief cameraman for Maurice Elvey, during which time, according to Duncan Petrie in
The British Cinematographer
, he had already demonstrated his promise as “one of the first important British cameramen.” Alma would have known Cox from her stint with Elvey; he might have been another of her recommendations. In any case, when Cox succeeded Baron Ventimiglia and Claude McDonnell, it marked a clear division in the camera department between the Hitchcock films made at Gainsborough and those made at B.I.P.
Cox was an “effects” cameraman—an expert in “blurred images, overlays, dissolves and double exposures,” in the words of Petrie. (His longstanding advertisement in the trade papers read: “Thoroughly experienced in Trick Work, etc.”) That was more important to Hitchcock than framing or lighting genius. Hitchcock really didn’t need compositional advice; his staging within the frame was always strongly in his mind, and annotated in the script. What Hitchcock wanted was a cameraman who would take a dare. And even veterans like Cox were sometimes taken aback by Hitchcock’s taunts and demands.
For the film’s first fight scene, which takes place under a fairgrounds tent, Hitchcock insisted that Cox remove the usual array of kliegs and shoot the bout from a distance, with the only lighting a solitary bulb dangling over the ring. Not only that, he wanted the camera’s point of view—Mabel’s subjective point of view from outside a gap in the tent—heavily obstructed. In the foreground, shadowed figures in the crowd watch the fight, and like Mabel the movie audience is forced to peer at the action as if through a long-lens keyhole.
Hitchcock didn’t teach Cox photography, but he did teach the old dog new tricks. Cameramen learned to trust Hitchcock’s instincts; he not only stipulated the setups, but, with his art training, would whip out a sketchpad, draw the image, and specify the focus.
“Hitchcock would draw it so wonderfully,” recalled Bryan Langley, then an assistant to Cox, “that he could say, ‘I want you to use a 50 mm lens’ or a 35 mm lens or three-inch lens. He had drawn the perspective in, so the background was correct in relation to the foreground. I’ve never seen anyone else who can even approach doing that. Hitchcock was marvelous in being able to draw what the camera could see. And it was like he was saying to the cameraman, ‘If you get that, then I don’t have to look through the camera.’
“There have been many stories [about Hitchcock] down the years. There was one cameraman, later on, who supposedly was given such a drawing, and he got the frame and foreground correct, but used a different lens [from the one specified], so the background was twice as large, or half the size. I heard that cameraman made a rapid exit.”
Starting with
The Ring
, Cox would photograph all ten of Hitchcock’s B.I.P. films during the prolific years between 1927 and 1932. Then, after an interval of several years, they would reunite on
The Lady Vanishes.
Eleven Hitchcock pictures: only Robert Burks, another virtuoso cameraman, whom Hitchcock found at Warner Bros. in America, would work with him more.
The filming took place in July and August 1927. The ample budget enabled a spectacular set, a full-scale fairgrounds built on the Elstree lot for the
film’s establishing sequence. Hundreds of extras were hired. Hitchcock created a dream of a carnival glimpsed in twirling rides, common folk gorging themselves, games of chance and skill. The Germanic images go by in a Soviet whirl. Now and then there are odd close-ups of people and objects, images sometimes so extreme and distorted that they become modernist abstractions. (He would use this technique throughout his career: think of the lingering close-up of a ladder rung at the beginning of
Vertigo.
)
The boy wonder himself moved in a blur in these years. Colleagues and coworkers were struck by Hitchcock’s perpetual motion, his boundless energy, his zest for the job. Michael Powell recalled the director vaulting up flights of stairs, ahead of everybody else. “It is amazing,” wrote one journalist who stopped by to watch him stage the climax of
The Ring
, “how he manages to maintain his energy and keenness, considering that since the beginning of the year he has been on the [studio] floor, working practically every day.”