Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Collins probably accompanied the Hitchcocks on the winter cruise they took in early 1931 to unwind after
The Skin Game.
The director liked his writers to augment the family and come along on working vacations, the better for brainstorming. With four-year-old Pat, the Hitchcocks sailed down the coast of West Africa, then across the Atlantic to the nearest islands of the West Indies. Then it was back to England, stopping off in Bathurst, Gambia, where their local guide, a priest, gave them a tour of a mission church in the jungle. Hitchcock told John Russell Taylor that the journey helped give him “a vivid sense of how rapidly cruise members, decent people all, get to hate one another after being cooped up a while on board ship” (a striking conceit, though it doesn’t really figure in the film).
The Hitchcocks made a separate excursion to Paris, where they enjoyed
sneaking away on the slightest pretext. The director was planning to feature Parisian nightspots in the new film, and he was eager to refresh his researches. While attending the Folies Bergere, he inquired where he and Alma might go to observe some authentic belly dancing. He had the idea of showing “the heroine looking at a navel that goes round and round and finally dissolves to a spirallike spinning motion,” he told François Truffaut. (“Like the main title of
Vertigo?
” asked Truffaut. “Yes, that’s it,” Hitchcock replied.)
The couple were borne by taxi to a strange place on a dark street. It wasn’t until they were inside the building, according to Hitchcock, that they realized they had arrived at a brothel.
“We were sort of put in the position of the couple in the film,” Hitchcock told the BBC years later. “We were two innocents abroad.” After treating everyone to a round of champagne, they were escorted into a room and shown “a demonstration of two girls copulating.” Afterward, the Hitchcocks bolted.
Rich and Strange
incorporates a tamer version of this anecdote, with the young married couple starting off their trip aghast at Parisian decadence.
Fortified by such personal adventures, Hitchcock made good progress on the script. But it wasn’t good enough to satisfy the studio, so in the spring Hitchcock armed a skeleton-crew second unit with instructions and dispatched them, along with a few bit players and stand-ins, to capture local color on a voyage from Marseilles to the Red Sea, and then onward to the Indian Ocean.
The second-unit work was largely intended to reassure B.I.P.; come April the director still wasn’t ready to launch principal photography, still wasn’t satisfied with the script, which was being touted as a departure from everything he had done before.
Maxwell and Mycroft were convinced that Hitchcock was just procrastinating. The talkie revolution had nearly crippled the studio, and Hitchcock boasted the largest director’s salary on the lot. Even as the trade papers were reporting that the script was “almost finished,” Mycroft was reviewing the latest draft, demanding trims and deletions. Hitchcock made concessions, and even before the cameras rolled
Rich and Strange
was under attack.
By May, the casting was finalized. Joan Barry, Anny Ondra’s “voice double” for
Blackmail
, was rewarded with the role of the young wife. She had just made a splash in Harry Lachman’s
The Outsider
, which was coscripted by none other than Mrs. Hitchcock. Henry Kendall, a West End leading man considered lightweight but charming, was picked to play her husband. The veteran Percy Marmont, often cast as a typical English gentleman, earned the first of his three Hitchcock roles as the passenger who woos Barry during the sea voyage, while Betty Amann was set to portray
the faux princess who flirts with Kendall. Music hall entertainer Elsie Randolph rounded out the main cast as the ship’s busybody.
By June, Hitchcock had chalked up six months of scriptwork and planning.
Although Hitchcock had already mounted his share of chases and adventures in previous films,
Rich and Strange
was the first true antecedent of
The 39 Steps
and
North by Northwest.
Its title came from
The Tempest:
“Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” The story concerns Emily and Fred, a humdrum suburban couple, who splurge their inheritance on a world tour. First they head to Paris, after which they board a luxury ship in Marseilles. Fred promptly becomes seasick. Emily embarks on a platonic affair with a Commander Gordon, while Fred, once recovered from his illness, is smitten with a princess.
Their ship travels from the Mediterranean to Port Said, from the Suez Canal to Colombo, the chief port of Ceylon. Under the strain of their flirtations Fred and Emily’s marriage begins to fall apart, but in Singapore the two come to their senses. Emily abandons Commander Gordon and returns to Fred, who has learned that his crush is not a princess, but a shop owner’s daughter from Berlin, who absconds with all their cash.
Now without funds, the couple must hitch a ride home on a steamer. The vessel crashes, or explodes, one night (in the first disaster at sea in a Hitchcock film). Trapped inside their cabin, they cling to each other in terror as the vessel sinks. They fall asleep entwined, but awaken in the morning still alive, and afloat on their upended boat. They are rescued by Chinese pirates, who expose them to a brutal life before finally dropping them off at a port, from which they wend their way back home to London. There, with a sigh of relief, they resume their steak-and-kidney-pie lives.
From the beginning Hitchcock had hoped to sail with cast and crew to film in nearby ports, or at least steal a few highlights in Paris. He hadn’t filmed outside England since
Champagne
, and he was tired of painted scenery and Schüfftan-style composites. But the director had miscalculated his leverage; Walter Mycroft refused to approve travel expenditures, and throughout pre-production he chipped away at the scope of Hitchcock’s plans.
In the end the budget spared only one day on location—at Clacton-on-Sea, a cut-rate resort in Essex for Londoners on holiday. “This involved a bathing scene which was supposed to take place at Suez,” recalled leading man Henry Kendall. The bathing scene in question was shot on a “bitterly cold” morning, the actor remembered, “when I was shivering in my bathing trunks and almost blue with cold, and the result was so obviously not a bit like a gay dip in the Red Sea that it was cut from the film.”
Kendall suffered a mysterious illness in the summer of 1931 that exacerbated
the filming. The illness was serious enough to be reported in the press—a case of “blood poisoning” that resulted in several operations and a prolonged recovery in a convalescent center. (In his autobiography Kendall says it was “carbuncles.”) For almost two months, Hitchcock photographed everything he could think of that didn’t involve the presence of the leading man. By the time Kendall returned, Barry and Marmont had been called away on prior engagements, and Hitchcock was forced to shoot Kendall solo for the last takes. The production finally petered out at the end of August.
It had taken the director fully nine months to concoct and shoot this Hitchcock original, time that B.I.P. would have preferred he invest in adapting an established play. Postproduction also dragged on while Hitchcock tried to figure out how to fill out the film with as much second-unit footage as possible.
Rich and Strange
was finally released in December 1931, to a critical response that could be summed up in one word: “interesting.” Hitchcock—often his own harshest critic—later said he wasn’t sure it was even all that interesting.
It was an only intermittently engaging film that never quite transcended its flaws. The stars, Hitchcock later complained, had negligible chemistry. Joan Barry was vivacious, but Kendall came off as flat; later, the director (uncharitably) blamed Kendall for being a “fairly obvious homosexual,” in John Russell Taylor’s words, who lacked any sexual charge with women.
Some of the most intriguing scenes were cut. Hitchcock told François Truffaut about a sequence he shot in a tank, in which Henry Kendall is swimming with Joan Barry, and she stands with her legs astride, daring him to swim between her legs. He dives, “and when he is about to pass between her legs, she suddenly locks his head between her legs and you see the bubble rising from his mouth. Finally she releases him, and as he comes up, gasping for air, he sputters out, ‘You almost killed me that time,’ and she answers, ‘Wouldn’t that have been a beautiful death?’”
Deleted—for reasons of length or censorship. And Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich about “an amusing sequence” at the end of the film. “Their cargo ship is wrecked and abandoned in the South China Sea, and they are rescued by some looters on a Chinese junk. Then, after it’s all over, they meet me in the lounge. This is my most devastating appearance in a picture. They tell their story and I say, ‘No, I don’t think it’ll make a movie.’ And it didn’t.”
This “amusing sequence,” Hitchcock’s flash appearance, had its origins in Dale Collins’s novel, where the “little fat man” the couple meet at the end of the story is actually the author. The cameo became another eleventh-hour deletion; falling prey to the mysterious jinx that surrounded
Rich and Strange
, the director left his own face on the cutting-room floor.
Contemporary critics have sparked a movement to reevaluate the film. Donald Spoto labeled
Rich and Strange
a fascinating “encoded autobiography,”
while British film historian Roy Armes has hailed it as a “major work” that underlines “the complexity of Hitchcock’s vision of his fellow men.”
But Hitchcock encoded everything with elements of autobiography, and compared to later, classic films that learned from its lessons,
Rich and Strange
looks pinched and lackluster.
Walter Mycroft had to be obeyed, deceived, or defied—or maybe, as only Hitchcock could, all three combined. By 1931, Mycroft was widely detested as a tinpot dictator, according to contract writer Val Guest.
One day the head of production decreed a repainting of the Elstree lavatories. Afterward, these words were found scratched onto the newly painted wall of the men’s room:
MYCROFT IS A SHIT.
People always suspected the culprit was Hitchcock, but years later he swore to Guest that it wasn’t him or any of his confederates. (“Not that we didn’t agree with the message,” Hitchcock added.)
As
Rich and Strange
was being edited, Mycroft ordered Hitchcock to start work on a new project. He and Rodney Ackland, a young playwright, were assigned to adapt John Van Druten’s
London Wall
, a white-collar love story that had been a West End success. When Hitchcock showed apparent interest in the change-of-pace material, Mycroft decided to take his insubordinate employee down a further notch. He shuffled
London Wall
off to another B.I.P. director, Thomas Bentley (who filmed the Van Druten play as
After Office Hours
), and reassigned Hitchcock to
Number Seventeen.
“There is also the possibility,” noted Frank Launder, a B.I.P. contract writer (and later the cowriter of
The Lady Vanishes
), “that Hitch preferred
Number Seventeen
and merely said he wanted to make
After Office Hours
in order to fool Mycroft into giving him
Number Seventeen.
”
The J. Jefferson Farjeon play was more in the Hitchcock vein, at least on the surface. A comic thriller set in an abandoned house with “No. 17” stamped over the front door, the play, though generally drubbed by critics, had proved to be one of the miracle hits of the 1925 season.
Number Seventeen
had spurred several revivals, a series of related novels, and, like
The Skin Game
, a European silent-film version, directed by Geza Von Bolvary in Germany in 1928.
The thin plot followed a series of mysterious figures who enter No. 17 at cross-purposes. One of the leads is a Cockney named Ben, a shamelessly hammy character played onstage and even in the German silent by Leon M. Lion, whom Hitchcock had suffered as his intermediary with John Galsworthy. If the play wasn’t a bitter pill to Hitchcock, the detested Lion was. As producer and star of the original stage production, though, Lion was so identified with the play and role that he came umbilically attached
to the project. Hitchcock thought Lion an “awful old man.” He claimed in later interviews that he had no special affection for the play, either.
But then again, maybe that was the appeal for Hitchcock—subverting Leon M. Lion and Walter Mycroft. Now he launched a scheme for “teasing the bosses,” according to writer Rodney Ackland, who also switched over to
Number Seventeen.
Hitchcock, Ackland recalled, deliberately set out to turn the popular Farjeon play into “a burlesque of all the thrillers of which it was a pretty good sample—and do it so subtly that nobody at Elstree would realize the subject was being guyed.”
All the coincidences and contrivances of the original, Hitchcock saw, could be wildly exaggerated. A dim-witted heroine would become literally dumb: a mute. And “as the climax of a thriller was invariably a chase (generally between a car and a train, at this period),” recalled Ackland, “
Number Seventeen
’s climax must be a chase-to-end-all-chases—its details so preposterous that excitement would give way to gales of laughter.”
The “hilarious” script conferences retreated to Cromwell Road, “the atmosphere of which was considerably more stimulating than that of the studio,” Ackland remembered. Evening sessions usually began with a round of the Hitchcocks’ favorite cocktail, which seemed to change from film to film. For
Number Seventeen
it was the delicious white lady, a concoction of gin, egg whites, light cream, and superfine sugar. Day or night, white lady-inspired ideas for how to tweak the clichés arose “moment to moment,” Ackland recalled.
Considering the dismal bind he was in at Elstree, it’s no wonder that Hitchcock began to proclaim that all of the really hard work and most of the genuine fun of making pictures was in the writing—which, for him, optimally took place at home, with companionable writers and his beloved wife. No wonder Hitchcock began to adopt the attitude, exaggerated in his many interviews, that once the script was done, the directing was a chore, even a bore.