Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Secret Agent
fell behind schedule, and in November Gielgud and Olivier returned to the stage to reverse their
Romeo and Juliet
roles. Some nights, Gielgud left the theater and returned to the studio after midnight to shoot remaining scenes.
Hitchcock’s casting gambles were hardly infallible, and in the end Gielgud was neither the Hamlet nor the Romeo the film called for. His business with his “wife” (Carroll)—particularly the “morning after”—is amusing, but their scenes were never as romantic as intended (like Ivor Novello and Henry Kendall before him, Gielgud was miscast as a raging heterosexual). Disillusioned, Gielgud wouldn’t act in pictures again for twenty years.
But
Secret Agent
has marvelous flourishes that are treasured by Hitchcock fans: the folk ensemble singing mournfully as they roll coins around in a big wooden bowl; the wrong-man killing (eerily observed through a
telescope as it transpires on a distant, snowy ridgetop); and the train-wreck finale, all low-budget shrieking noise, smoke, and distorted angles. These were highlights, certainly—yet coming after the sparkling
The 39 Steps
, Hitchcock’s adaptation of Maugham was a letdown for audiences and critics alike.
Hitchcock, though, was the rare director who could stand to blame himself. In later years, he would admit on more than one occasion that he had committed mistakes, had never conquered the material. “I liked
Secret Agent
quite a bit,” Hitchcock said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t more of a success.”
The director never worked with greater efficiency than at Gaumont, aided by the tight-knit fellowship of artists and aides who lent his films a marked continuity of subject matter and style.
By the time
Secret Agent
was ready for theaters, Hitchcock and Charles Bennett had prepared their adaptation of
The Secret Agent
, a Joseph Conrad novel and another spy-saboteur suspense story in the mold of
The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps
, and
Secret Agent.
It was a natural choice for Hitchcock, though he knew from the start that Conrad’s coincidental title—and much of his story—would have to be scrapped.
Conrad’s cautionary tale about a ring of terrorists operating in London was first published in 1907, thus predating World War I, but Hitchcock saw immediately that, like John Buchan’s novel
The Thirty-nine Steps
, the story could easily be updated to 1935 England.
If
Ashenden, or The British Agent
was minor Maugham,
The Secret Agent
was major Conrad (“a work of depth and genius considered one of his greatest,” in the words of one literary critic). Even so, Hitchcock felt free to take his usual liberties with the material.
The film script did preserve three of Conrad’s main characters (Mr. and Mrs. Verloc, and Stevie, Mrs. Verloc’s young brother), but it dropped Mrs. Verloc’s mother, another figure who serves an important purpose in the book. The script also retained a key plot situation—the unintended bombing that kills Stevie and precipitates Mr. Verloc’s downfall—though in Conrad’s novel Stevie’s death comes from his stumbling against a tree, and is recounted by a chief inspector who brings the news. Hitchcock upped the status of the incident by putting Stevie on a crowded bus, and planning a piece of tour de force cinema.
Even before the script was finished, in fact, in November 1935 Hitchcock sent a second unit to photograph the Lord Mayor’s Show—the annual procession to the Law Courts for the lord mayor’s oath of office, which entails a parade and crowds. This newsreel-style footage would later be incorporated into the sequence that begins with Stevie running a seemingly innocent errand for Mr. Verloc, carrying the time bomb with him.
The settings, too, were more Hitchcock than Conrad. Long before
The Birds
the director showed a fondness for the winged creatures which crop up repeatedly in his films as harbingers of disaster. For his Conrad adaptation, Hitchcock envisioned a bomb-making headquarters masquerading as a pet shop specializing in birds; arriving there to pick up a timed explosive, as a ruse Verloc buys a pair of songbirds. “The birds will sing at 1:45!” the bomb maker merrily reminds him.
No such bird shop appears in the Conrad novel; nor in the book does Verloc meet with his terrorist contact in the unlikely public setting of the London Zoo Aquarium. In the film they hold a lengthy discussion in barely discernible tones, standing with their backs to the camera as they gaze upon giant sea creatures swimming around in a vast illuminated tank. After his contact departs, Mr. Verloc continues to stare at the water tank; Hitchcock dissolves from the fish to moving traffic in Piccadilly Circus, and then into a vision of the buildings crumbling and sinking as though from an imagined explosion.
Finally, nowhere in the book do we encounter an undercover agent named Ted, an impotent man of the law desperately in love with Mrs. Verloc. This was another Hitchcock invention, and a character written to attract a leading man such as Robert Donat, whom the director was still pursuing.
Mr. Verloc is one character who does originate with Conrad’s novel, but Hitchcock made a telling change in his occupation. Conrad’s Verloc owns a nondescript variety-goods shop; Hitchcock transplanted him to one of his Chinese boxes, making Verloc the proprietor of a movie theater in southeast London, which shows films that are a “bit too odd” (probably German expressionist). Like Lilian Hall-Davis in
The Ring
, Mrs. Verloc takes tickets out front. (The undercover policeman works next door to the movie theater at a greengrocer—“like a juxtaposition of Hitchcock’s own formative milieux,” in the words of Charles Barr.)
The movie theater setting prompts one of the film’s highlights: the sequence that begins after Mrs. Verloc learns of Stevie’s death and realizes the truth about her husband—that he is a saboteur who ineptly blows up innocent people, including her own brother. She stumbles into the aisles of the theater, just outside their living quarters, where a packed audience is rapturously watching a cartoon before the main feature. (The cartoon is a “Silly Symphony” by one of Hitchcock’s favorite filmmakers—Walt Disney. He often said that Disney had the best breed of actors because he could always rub them out if he didn’t like their performances.) Still in shock, Mrs. Verloc sits down among the crowd. Glancing up at the screen, she finds herself suddenly chuckling and laughing, a moment of giddiness that veers into darkness.
When the cartoon’s Cupid slays Cock Robin with an arrow, it triggers the
pointed musical refrain: “Who Killed Cock Robin?” Mrs. Verloc gives a start, and sets her jaw to return for a showdown with her husband. The result: another famous Hitchcockian scene in the “knife, knife, knife!” vein.
If progress on the script was fitful, it was because the three Hitchcocks couldn’t settle on a proper ending. Hitchcock agonized over his endings. There had to be a crescendo to top everything that came before, and then “closure”—a note of pointed ambiguity to round things off. Above all he wanted to avoid the kind of ending he called a “hat-grabber”: he wanted to catch audiences before they fled up the aisles.
The ending to Conrad’s novel features the despondent, guilt-ridden Mrs. Verloc committing suicide, throwing herself off a ferry bound for France. That was impossible, Hitchcock knew; the studio would never accept it, and for good reason—it would leave the audience without any hope. Someone came up with the idea of one of the bird-shop bombs destroying the theater, but how would they deal with the fact that Mrs. Verloc has already killed her husband?
When Hitchcock got stuck, he inevitably borrowed from his earlier work. (“Self-plagiarism is style,” he was known to observe wryly.) He borrowed, quite transparently in this instance, from
Blackmail.
In the final scenes of
Sabotage
, the policeman, Ted, tries desperately to dissuade Mrs. Verloc from giving herself up for the killing. He loves her too much to sacrifice her to the whims of justice. “What chance would you stand with a judge and jury?” he asks.
She rushes up to another officer, managing only to gasp “He’s dead!” before Ted cuts her off—just as another hopelessly enamored detective does in
Blackmail.
Then an explosion rocks the theater, burying Verloc and his bird-shop comrade. Afterward the second officer thinks over what she said, and muses, “She said it before—or was it after? I can’t remember.” And the blast has destroyed all the evidence—a nice touch.
When Bennett had completed his draft, Hitchcock called in the reinforcements: writers Ian Hay, Helen Simpson, and the multitalented E. V. H. “Ted” Emmett worked away polishing scenes as the autumn start of filming approached.
Before he met her, Hitchcock admired the American actress Sylvia Sidney, who was held in high regard for sensitive performances full of dignified suffering. He, in fact, had spoken with Charles Bennett about crafting an original story to showcase “the masochistic Sidney,” and before
Sabotage
(as the Conrad film was retitled) they spent time compiling notes for a “Sylvia Sidney Subject” that would exploit her ability to “suffer every torture, then react with arresting and explosive assertiveness,” according to Bennett. Their notes were tabled in favor of
Sabotage.
On one of his Hollywood trips, producer Michael Balcon managed to sign the petite brunet star, who had just finished
Fury
for Fritz Lang at MGM. Hitchcock was so excited about the casting that he made the exceptional gesture of phoning the actress aboard her ocean liner via two-way radio as Sidney made the journey across the Atlantic. (Hitchcock relished protracted, expensive overseas phone calls and lengthy telegrams.)
The character of Mrs. Verloc’s brother, Stevie, saw minor changes: around fourteen and “addled” in the novel, in Hitchcock’s film he is merely boyish. England’s leading boy actor, wavy-haired Desmond Tester, who looked younger than his seventeen years, got the part.
Peter Lorre would have been right for Mr. Verloc, if Hitchcock hadn’t washed his hands of him. But the director snapped up another refugee passing through London—Oscar Homolka, a veteran of stage and screen in Vienna and Berlin, who may have lacked Lorre’s sly, humorous quality, but at least evinced the same world-weariness.
Unquestionably, though, the greatest disappointment was the loss of Robert Donat. Donat had accepted the role of Ted and been announced for the film in the spring of 1936, but he suffered from chronic asthma, and when he came down with acute bronchitis, Hitchcock was forced by Sidney’s arrival and the pressing schedule to proceed without him.
Hitchcock bore the actor no grudge. While Donat was recuperating, the director sent him joke gifts at the hospital: kippers, to coax back his ailing sense of smell. Over the years the two stayed friends, keeping up a warm, kidding correspondence, which often centered around reuniting for another film. Unfortunate timing of the projects, as well as Donat’s chronic indecisiveness, managed to conspire against such a reunion.
At the eleventh hour, though, Hitchcock and his team were forced to rewrite the part for John Loder, a tall, dashing heartthrob under studio contract. Loder had film experience dating back to 1926, but he just wasn’t “suitable” as Ted, as Hitchcock later told François Truffaut. Loder lacked the nuance—the emotional dynamism—of Donat, and his casting pushed the film toward a more single-minded solemnity. But when it came to casting his leads, even at the height of his reputation in England Hitchcock often had to compromise.
Unsuitable actors didn’t bother Hitchcock as much as those who refused of their own accord to accommodate him—to do what he believed they were capable of doing. He couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about Sylvia Sidney, which is why her contrariness came as a surprise.
The real problem, according to Charles Bennett, was that when Hitchcock and the leading lady met, they didn’t hit it off. “Sylvia just wasn’t Hitchcock’s type,” recalled Bennett. It was a problem for Hitchcock if he
didn’t
like
an actress, particularly one who was going to be playing a deeply sympathetic character in one of his films.
Sidney’s problem with Hitchcock took an odd form: although she ought to have known better—she’d been appearing in pictures since 1929—she behaved like a female Gielgud, unable to fathom the process of filmmaking in preordained shots and angles. “She could not piece together in her mind what Hitchcock was after, the meaning of separate shots and how the scene could be constructed from them,” recalled Ivor Montagu. “She had always acted a scene right through, and she badly needed words, a single sentence or even a phrase, to start a mood off for her, as a singer needs a note to find the key.
“We were happy with her work. She felt uncertain and would not be reassured. As befits a great star, she had, in Hollywood fashion, been built a little tent on the [Shepherd’s] Bush studio floor so that she could rest between shots from inquisitive eyes. Many were the times I was called up from my office, in which emergency of course it is the AP’s [associate producer’s] duty to embrace and comfort her as best he can.”
It was almost a day-to-day struggle with Sidney. One of her most important scenes took place after the Disney-cartoon sequence—when, knowing that Verloc’s bomb has killed her brother, Stevie, she returns to their living quarters to serve him supper.
This was one sequence that Hitchcock had faithfully extracted from Conrad:
“Her right hand skimmed slightly the end of the table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish. Mr. Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor, and was content. He waited. Mrs. Verloc was coming. As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes. But Mr. Verloc did not see that. He was lying on his back and staring upward. He saw partly on the ceiling a clenched hand holding a carving knife.