Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Nearly all of
The 39 Steps
was shot within the confines of Lime Grove. One exception is the scene where Hannay escapes his pursuers by leaping out of a train speeding along what English audiences would have recognized as the main northeast rail line, stretching over the mile-and-a-half-long Forth Bridge, just north of Edinburgh. The day or two of location filming that scene required was all the budget could afford.
The Gaumont years were not luxurious, but undoubtedly they were Hitchcock’s happiest in a studio. Lime Grove hummed like a college campus with the brightest students and youngest professors. And the work was Hitchcock’s oxygen—he was always starting up his next film while finishing another. By the time
The 39 Steps
was showing in theaters, the script of his next project,
Secret Agent
, had made it through several false starts, and was nearly ready to go.
On the surface, the new film—based on a series of related Somerset Maugham short stories published as a book—was a third consecutive spy-saboteur story for Hitchcock. But the new one would take audiences down a different road. Success and stability in the director’s life had a way of driving him toward darkness and depth in his films.
“The Traitor” and “The Hairless Mexican” were among the stories collected in Maugham’s
Ashenden, or The British Agent.
Gaumont owned the rights to the book and also to an Ashenden play written by
Daily Telegraph
critic Campbell Dixon.
Again, Hitchcock would use the stories mainly as a springboard. He and Charles Bennett—still his chief constructionist—borrowed their two principal characters (Ashenden and the “hairless Mexican”), a locale (Switzerland,
conveniently one of Hitchcock’s favorite places), and the premise of “The Hairless Mexican” (that Ashenden, assigned to assassinate a foreign agent, kills the wrong man). Little else came directly from Maugham.
The writing was sometimes a struggle. Bennett wasn’t the first or last writer to notice that Hitchcock had a store of dissociative techniques that helped alleviate the tension when the team was stuck for ideas. He interrupted dry spells with irrelevant gossip or long schoolboy jokes. One time he insisted they adjourn and reconvene on the roof of Croydon Airport, another time on a train bound for the Riviera, once at a bullfight in Barcelona.
During the writing of
The 39 Steps
, Bennett recalled, Hitchcock authorized Joan Harrison to hire a steamer with an orchestra on board “just for the three of us.” The boat pushed out into the Thames, sailed to Greenwich and back, with just its three passengers. “This was supposed to be a story conference, but not a bit of it, not a bloody word was spoken about the story,” said Bennett. Still, they returned feeling refreshed.
Hitchcock and Bennett made a good marriage. For one thing, Bennett was always up for any sort of Hitchcockery. The two took long drives together, alert for “anything weird” along the way, for Hitchcock was “always fascinated by anything out of the ordinary,” in Bennett’s words. One time, passing over a railroad bridge, the two hopped out to descend stairs and explore a derelict railway station. Another time, they sneaked into the generations-closed Princess’s Theatre on Oxford Street, once the London base of the famous actor Charles Kean. They stood together on the stage of the vast auditorium, silently absorbing the spooky atmosphere. Bennett had no doubt that Hitchcock was storing it all up in his brain for some future use.
On another occasion, the collaborators drove and drove as they talked, and ultimately ended up at a pub somewhere in the depths of Cornwall, where they sat around drinking liberally and listening to Sophie Tucker, whose brassy voice emanated from the next room. They presumed it was a gramophone, but after a while realized it was the Red Hot Mama herself, sitting all alone at a piano and singing to herself. Any further work was out of the question. “Recognizing us,” Bennett recalled in his unpublished autobiography, “she continued to sing—a beautiful one-woman performance before an audience of two.”
More than once Hitchcock and his faithful writer checked into remote country hotels under pseudonyms. They booked rooms separated by a shared bath, and Bennett was amused and touched, mornings, when awakened by Hitchcock “dressed as a hotel servant as he infinitely politely announced, ‘Your bath is ready, sir.’” And it was. Hitchcock himself had drawn and prepared his bath to temperature.
Together, they went to the phony “All in Wrestling” shows (which
Hitchcock loved), the opera (which the director also loved, though he was capable of snoring in full dress through a masterly performance of Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
),
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and Center Court at Wimbledon. They even played some tennis during breaks, with Hitchcock and Joan Harrison squaring off against Mrs. Hitchcock and Bennett. “But I never once saw Hitch go after a ball,” recalled Bennett. “The tubby little man would just stand there and stolidly wait until the ball came directly to him. It never made for a very good game.”
Stumped during the writing of
Secret Agent
, Hitchcock and Bennett flew to Basel, Switzerland, where Ivor Montagu was vacationing, collecting Montagu in a resort town and proceeding to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, to roam around its woodlands and waterfalls. “Amusing days, searching for ideas and locations,” recalled Bennett.
After settling on their story’s big finish, Hitchcock continued alone by train from Switzerland toward the Balkans so he could ponder how to visualize the finale—absent in Maugham—in which Ashenden and the “hairless Mexican” finally corner their target on a train. One of Hitchcock’s wildest train rides, it ends in a splendid crash and explosion.
But the marriage to a writer was always a marriage of convenience, and after Bennett was done with his draft he was followed again, to his growing resentment, by fix-it writers who spruced up his pages. In this instance, two others were credited: the equable Ian Hay and Jesse Lasky Jr.—the son of the Paramount magnate, and a future writer for Cecil B. De Mille.
Photography was set to begin in October 1936. Hitchcock’s cameraman was still Bernard Knowles, now joined by Charles Frend as his editor. Frend had been a lowly cutting-room assistant for
Lord Camber’s Ladies
when Hitchcock (the producer) started grumbling over a poorly assembled sequence one day, saying he thought the bloody fool assistant could splice it better. Frend took up the gauntlet, and when Hitchcock moved on to
Waltzes from Vienna
, Frend got up the courage to phone and ask to be his editor. To his surprise, Hitchcock remembered the young cutter and invited him over to Cromwell Road for drinks.
“What makes you think you are experienced enough to cut a picture?” Hitchcock challenged Frend over cocktails.
“Well,” admitted Frend, “I’m not really.”
“You know what it’ll mean, don’t you? At the end of the day’s work, when I’m exhausted I shall have to come to the cutting room and show you how to do it.”
“Yes, Mr. Hitchcock.”
“Well,” grunted the director, after staring at the young pup for what seemed to Frend an awfully long time, “as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got the job.”
“Hitch could be very kind and thoughtful,” remembered Frend. “He liked enthusiasm and I was certainly full of enthusiasm.”
After
Waltzes from Vienna
was over, Hitchcock summoned Frend and asked if he had his next film job lined up. Frend said no. “You should stay here [with Gaumont],” Hitchcock advised. “You don’t want to go back to B.I.P. with your tail between your legs, do you?” Then he picked up the phone and made a show of calling Michael Balcon’s brother, S. C. “Chan” Balcon. “Chan,” burbled Hitchcock, “Stapleton of B.I.P. has just been on to Charlie Frend. He wants him back. You’re going to lose him if you’re not quick.”
Brother Chan was obliged to ask, “Charlie who?” He hadn’t the slightest idea who Frend was. “My editor, Charles Frend,” smoothly explained Hitchcock. “He’s going back to B.I.P. You’d better grab him quickly.” So friend Frend was fixed up with a solid contract at Gaumont, where he was immediately assigned to the next Jessie Matthews musical. Eventually Frend would edit three Hitchcock films:
Secret Agent
, then
Sabotage
, and
Young and Innocent.
He was another one of the informal club of “Hitch’s boys,” and after some years as an editor developed into a solid director at Ealing.
For the mistakenly targeted older couple, who turn out to be ordinary tourists, the director cast Percy Marmont (in his second Hitchcock film) and Florence Kahn, a.k.a. Lady Beerbohm—the wife of critic, caricaturist, and essayist Sir Max Beerbohm. Kahn, once famed as Richard Mansfield’s leading lady, had all but retired from the theater, but Hitchcock saw her in a revival of
Peer Gynt
at the Old Vic. He coaxed her into her only screen appearance in
Secret Agent.
(Hitchcock proudly told interviewers that the stage actress had not only never visited a film studio before, “she had never before seen a film in her life.”)
Robert Young was a curious choice for the German agent, but the versatile American actor had been imported at the behest of Michael Balcon, who hoped his name might help Gaumont push for wider U.S. bookings. (Young “is typical of the polished Hollywood actor,” said Hitchcock. “He is easy to handle because of his long training in films.”)
Peter Lorre was brought back from Hollywood, where he had settled after
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, brandishing his dementia in
Crime and Punishment
for Columbia and
Mad Love
for MGM. The Mexican General was the film’s choice role: as Maugham wrote, “He was repulsive
and ridiculous, but you could not take your eyes from him. There was a sinister fascination in his strangeness.” Hitchcock had earmarked the part for Lorre from the start, even referring to him as “Peter” in the working script.
Lorre wasn’t Mexican, however, so the script had to explain that away; nor was he hairless, so Hitchcock ordered a makeover. A makeup artist joined the actor on the boat train to London, oiling and curling his hair—adding a narcissistic aura to Lorre’s character.
Hitchcock also gave a nubile, slightly plump Lilli Palmer one of her first noticeable roles in
Secret Agent
, as a young woman (“Lilli”) who is picked up by the Mexican General; he drops a chocolate down her dress, and by next morning has her set up in a hotel room. Lilli is the link to Karl (Howard Marion Crawford), her boyfriend, who works at a chocolate factory—Hitchcock shorthand for Switzerland. The chocolate factory is also spy headquarters.
Secret Agent
featured a female agent who poses as Ashenden’s wife, then falls madly in love with him; she wasn’t in Maugham’s stories, but dated to the Campbell Dixon play. The film script would build up the part for the lady of the hour: Madeleine Carroll.
The director was intending to reunite the two stars of
The 39 Steps
, Carroll and Robert Donat, seeing Donat as a perfect Ashenden. But Donat had other obligations, so the director turned to John Gielgud, already a stage legend; the curtain had just rung down on his famed production of
Romeo and Juliet
, in which Gielgud directed Laurence Olivier as Romeo while he himself played Mercutio, and doubled as the Chorus.
Thus far Gielgud had registered only weakly in motion pictures. The medium gave him shivers: he hated the endless waiting around for lighting and camera setups, and the discontinuous filming of facial expressions and bits of dialogue. Film confused his performance and sapped his confidence. Hitchcock thought he could give Gielgud a confidence transfusion, and he wooed the stage actor with compliments—and by describing the Ashenden part as “another Hamlet, only in modern dress,” according to one Gielgud biographer, Ronald Hayman, “who cannot reconcile himself to the necessity of killing.”
The peerless Shakespearean said yes, and even got involved in the casting, recommending actors for parts. Still, Gielgud turned up at Lime Grove on the first day feeling uneasy. His trepidation only mounted, for many of his scenes were with Lorre, whose angelic comportment during rehearsals evaporated once the camera rolled. Then the devil came alive, tossing off asides and stage business (a cigarette stuck precariously between his lips as he slurred his lines) that stole attention from anyone unlucky enough to share the screen with him. Gielgud was thrown—for him, a man of the theater, the script was bible—and when he looked to Hitchcock he met an inscrutable stone face.
The stone face was far from pleased. Lorre’s morphine addiction, in check during
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, had spiraled sadly out of control. The actor had been hospitalized in the United States; now, in London, Gaumont was forced to help arrange his injections. And when they weren’t conveniently arranged, as happened more than once, Lorre sneaked away between setups to satisfy his habit.
Other books uphold the legend that Lorre rivaled Hitchcock at practical jokes, at one point supposedly avenging himself by having fifty singing canaries delivered to Cromwell Road. “As the versions multiplied,” Lorre biographer Stephen D. Youngkin wrote, “so did the flock of birds.” Lorre’s pranks and quirks had been amusing during
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, but his behavior on
Secret Agent
was self-destructive—worse, unprofessional. His increasingly bizarre antics “wore thin” with Hitchcock, Youngkin wrote. One day Lorre arrived at the studio wearing an “intricately woven waistcoat of many colors,” which he showed off to everyone. When the actor strutted up to Hitchcock, though, the exasperated director made no comment; he simply upturned his coffee and spilled it all over the waistcoat.
At least Hitchcock didn’t splash any hot coffee on Gielgud. But the stage legend was thoroughly discomfited by the director’s demands: Gielgud spent hours in front of Lake Como back-projection scenery, with smoke machines blowing fumes across his face, and hours more lying under girders and rubbish, posing for inserts for the train-wreck finale.
All of Gielgud’s cumulative wisdom seemed irrelevant to the task at hand, and Hitchcock’s standard advice, that Gielgud “rub out everything and start blank,” didn’t help in the slightest. “Be yourself” was no kind of advice for Gielgud, an actor who worked by transforming himself into another person entirely. “Hitchcock has often made me feel like a jelly,” Gielgud told interviewers at the time, “and I have been nearly sick with nervousness.”