Authors: Patrick McGilligan
“It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely.”
In the novel Verloc is reclining on a sofa; the director restaged it, putting Verloc at a table waiting for his evening meal. Mrs. Verloc brings a plate of food to him and begins to serve the roast. The knife she is carrying appears to act “as a magnet,” in Hitchcock’s description. “It’s almost as if her hand, against her will, is compelled to grab it. The camera frames her hand, then her eyes, moving back and forth between the two until suddenly her look makes it clear that she’s become aware of the potential meaning of the knife.”
The sequence was pure Hitchcock—“closeups and inserts, eyes, expressions,
forks, potatoes, cabbages,” in Montagu’s words. Yet the scene required not a word of dialogue from Sidney, and it wasn’t long before the exasperated actress, feeling irrelevant, broke into tears, threatening to quit. “Would you give us a few more hours,” Montagu pleaded, “until you see the rough cut?”
The sequence was pulled together in a hurry, and Hitchcock, Montagu, and editor Charles Frend joined Sidney in the screening room. The actress couldn’t help but be impressed by the rough cut—it was a powerful montage, destined to become one of the most famous sequences in Hitchcock’s oeuvre. The actress emerged from the projection room, shaken. “Hollywood must hear of this!” she declared, appeased.
Yet the truce was only temporary. Sidney took offense at Hitchcock’s sense of humor, his way of summoning young Desmond Tester to the set: “Where’s the testicle?”
*
The director teased Tester for general “amusement of the cast and crew,” Sidney said later, to the “total mortification of the kid.” Perhaps—Hitchcock wasn’t above mortifying a “kid” if he was in the mood. But this kid was also seventeen years old, and the character he was playing was the buffoon of the film. Tester himself insisted in subsequent interviews that he enjoyed working for Hitchcock “because he was funny” and played “lovely practical jokes.”
The truce finally collapsed when Hitchcock called for retakes in the carving-knife scene. He needed more close-ups of Sidney’s hands. She asked for rehearsal. Calmly, Hitchcock assured Sidney, “You don’t need any rehearsal in this shot, darling, you’ve already killed him!” But she couldn’t be mollified, and tried to pull rank. After all, she was the star, and making a higher salary than the director (or so she insisted, in later interviews). “I went right to Lord so-and-so [Balcon] who was the producer and told him, ‘This man is impossible. I can’t do a scene when we haven’t come to that part in that scene. I can’t look down, terrified, when there is nothing to be terrified about. And he just wanted to shoot my hands. Lord so-and-so listened patiently and then said, ‘Sylvie … you have to trust him … he knows what he is doing.’ And no matter how much money I was making, neither Hitchcock nor the producer could be moved, and I ended up looking down with my hands out in front of me.”
Sidney lived to a ripe age, and gave other interviews that sniped at Hitchcock, helping to stoke the myth of a man who regarded actors as cattle.
And the director, for his part, returned the favor. Hitchcock claimed that even Sidney’s hands were disappointing, that he cheated with close-ups of another actress’s. He found it difficult to get “any shading” into her
face. (He wasn’t the only director with such complaints; Fritz Lang, who used Sidney in three films, once fired off a gun near the actress without warning, so desperate was he to disrupt her customary placid expression.) “On the other hand,” Hitchcock conceded to François Truffaut, “she had nice understatement.”
No matter what day-to-day problems he might have endured, Hitchcock had been shielded for several years by Ivor Montagu and Michael Balcon. All the sadder, then, that a disagreement with the two producers caused friction during the filming of
Sabotage
, and that because of this—and a mounting studio crisis—Hitchcock never again worked with either man.
The director had asked to build a facsimile tram for the scene where Stevie is crammed on a slow-moving public transport, unwittingly carrying Mr. Verloc’s time bomb. Citing the deteriorating financial situation at Gaumont, Montagu said no. Building a tram and laying tracks would drive up the budget, and the footage was expected to consume less than a minute of screen time. Montagu thought that a simple bus would do as well.
Hitchcock insisted that a tram would communicate “London” to American audiences in a way that a mere bus would not. He tried going over Montagu’s head, but Balcon backed Montagu. Regardless, Montagu asked to be released from Hitchcock’s unit, feeling he had lost the director’s respect over the issue. Years later Montagu insisted he carried no grudge, and added, in retrospect, that Hitchcock had probably been right about the tram.
But Montagu was right about the financial emergency. Just after photography on
Sabotage
was completed, in December 1936, Isidore Ostrer arrived at Lime Grove with a list of cost-saving dictates, including people to be fired—starting with well-paid executives like Montagu and Balcon. Balcon had been feuding with the Ostrers, and Montagu was merely expendable. The Ostrers announced drastic cutbacks in production, and Gaumont was reorganized under Balcon’s former assistant, Edward “Ted” Black.
Hitchcock remained intermittently cordial with Balcon over the years, and he saw Montagu at least once more, after World War II, when he was making a film in England. Montagu and Angus MacPhail joined the director for dinner in his Claridge’s suite. “He was as humorous, amiable and affable as ever,” recalled Montagu. “A splendid evening.”
Although today
Sabotage
is considered a near masterwork, the Joseph Conrad adaptation upset some critics in 1936, with its bleak vision of misguided politics.
C. A. Lejeune, the reviewer for the
Observer
, felt betrayed, angrily confronting the director after the premiere (“with clenched fists held in the air,” according to Hitchcock) and reproaching him for callously blowing up the boy, Stevie, in full view of the audience. As Lejeune later reported in one of her columns, they had “a very acid talk on that occasion, and for quite twenty-four hours we didn’t think well of each other.”
Hitchcock had a sophisticated attitude about critics. He thought they had a job to do, and sometimes they wrote foolish things, but he prided himself on never having written “a letter of protest over a bad review to a paper or magazine in my whole lifetime.” Sometimes, too, they wrote well, and what they wrote stayed with him. Lejeune was a friend and frequent visitor to Cromwell Road. “As a family man” he took her comments personally, and “apparently brooded,” said Lejeune. “I have his own word for that, and his wife’s, and his secretary’s.”
“Aside from a few scenes” he could take pride in,
Sabotage
turned out “a little messy,” Hitchcock reflected in later interviews. He often said that if he’d had it to do all over again he would stage Stevie’s death differently, going for gradations of suspense rather than a shock effect. Probably, he allowed, Stevie’s death should have taken place offscreen.
Ironically, in the United States, where the gloomy social context was less threatening—and where
Sabotage
was retitled
The Woman Alone
–the film found more appreciative critics. After years of having his work weakly distributed, snipped by censors, or underrated by reviewers, Hitchcock was finally making an impression in the States. Though his films were still shown mainly in houses that catered to foreign-language or “art” films (indeed, the
New Yorker
, assessing the vogue for Hitchcock films, declared it was “mainly a local phenomenon” confined to Manhattan),
The Woman Alone
—following
The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps
, and
Secret Agent
—solidified the director’s growing reputation, becoming his fourth Gaumont film to rack up critical praise.
The
New York Times
had written that if
The 39 Steps
had “any single rival as the most original, literate and entertaining melodrama of 1935, then it must be
The Man Who Knew Too Much
,” released in the United States the same year. “A master of shock and suspense, of cold horror and slyly incongruous wit,” wrote Andre Sennwald in the nation’s most important newspaper, “he [Hitchcock] uses his camera the way a painter uses his brush, stylizing his story and giving it values which the scenarists could hardly have supposed.”
One of the most thoughtful American critics, Otis Ferguson of the
New Republic
, declared that
Secret Agent
elevated the Englishman to “among the best” directors in the world. Now, reviewing
The Woman Alone
for the
Nation
, Mark Van Doren agreed with that opinion, extolling Hitchcock as “the best film director now flourishing” in the English language,
“a master” with “the simplest, the deepest, and the most accurate imagination.”
As troubling to English audiences as it was to English critics,
Sabotage
was one Hitchcock film to which the English public never warmed. The Ostrers watched its failure with a jaundiced eye. The director had survived the Christmas massacre at Gaumont, but only because he still owed the studio two pictures. Already in the hopper—and now under the stewardship of Ted Black—was Hitchcock’s adaptation of
A Shilling for Candles
, a 1936 mystery by Scottish writer Josephine Tey (pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh).
The man who replaced Michael Balcon, fortunately, turned out to be—surprisingly, to some in the trade—every bit a first-rate producer. Less well known than his older brother George, who ran a string of music halls including the London Palladium, Ted Black had served as a theater circuit owner and manager until 1930, when he switched over to the film production side. He started out by managing the studios at Islington and Lime Grove for Balcon.
If Balcon was the very image of a producer, Black was more the working ideal. Nowadays relatively unsung (he died prematurely in 1948), Black was “one of the very best producers I ever worked for,” recalled Val Guest, who started out as a contract writer under Black at Gainsborough and Gaumont. “Ted Black was a solid, hardworking producer. You could go to Michael Balcon with a problem and Michael would put you on to somebody else to solve the problem. Ted would solve it.”
If Balcon hobnobbed with the elite, Black was more a regular fellow—“one of the gang,” according to Guest, “whereas you could never call Mickey Balcon one of the gang.” Balcon reveled in the glamour and publicity, while the down-to-earth Black was notorious for skipping the parties and galas, eschewing the press, and giving intellectuals wide berth.
If Balcon prided himself on being cosmopolitan, Black was as English as they come, and he made no bones about it. He had a mandate from the Ostrers to make English films for English audiences, and “like his brother George at the London Palladium,” according to Robert Murphy in
Gainsborough Pictures
, “Ted had an almost superstitious faith in his ability to divine popular taste and was wary of involving himself with anything that might dilute it.”
Rather than pining after Hollywood names, Black placed his bets on English personalities. Rather than cobbling together star vehicles, he promoted a solid script as the basis of a well-made film. The script was for Black “the be-all and the end-all,” in Frank Launder’s words. Unlike Balcon, Black delighted in script conferences and went in for them “whole-sale,”
according to Launder, joining in the general critique and tossing out ideas without his ego running rampant.
Best of all, Black was an unabashed Hitchcock fan. He and his brother were both longtime acquaintances of the director; now Black made it his business to be helpful, clearing all obstacles from Hitchcock’s path and stretching the budget wherever possible. He took over as Hitchcock’s buffer with the Ostrers. The two films Hitchcock made with Black as his producer are among his most enjoyable. Indeed, having gotten brooding out of his system with
Sabotage
, now he came up with his most happy-go-lucky story.
The script for
A Shilling for Candles
had benefited from input from Ivor Montagu before he left the studio, and from initial construction by Charles Bennett. The Hitchcocks, Bennett, and Joan Harrison vacationed at St. Moritz at Christmas 1936, interspersing brainstorming with skiing. (Well, Bennett, Joan Harrison, and Alma went skiing; the director simply stuffed himself into skiwear and sat on the veranda, reading.) When a telegram from Myron Selznick arrived, offering Bennett a contract with Universal in Hollywood, Bennett decided to leave the project. Hitchcock threw the bon voyage party.
The script was far from finished, however, and somehow Hitchcock had to compensate for the loss of the world’s finest stooge. He did so in characteristic fashion, melding drafts and contributions from a slew of other stooges, including his friend Edwin Greenwood, the
Punch
humorist Anthony Armstrong, and rising young playwright Gerald Savory. Loosely presiding over the procession of scribes was Hitchcock’s friend and story editor Angus MacPhail, still at Gaumont. Counting Montagu, Bennett, Harrison, and both Hitchcocks, that added up to eight or nine writers on this script—a not atypical number over the course of his career.
Tey’s novel starts with the discovery of a woman’s body washed up on a beach. The victim is a famous actress; the only clue to her murder is a button entangled in her hair. Suspicion is directed at a young man, acquainted with the deceased, who cannot account for a missing button on his mackintosh. Protesting his arrest, he escapes the police and sets out to clear himself, aided by a detective’s daughter who believes in his innocence.
Hitchcock kept the dead body on the beach (with gulls circling overhead in brief, haunting slow motion), the young man on the run (his profession changed, amusingly, from “unemployed waiter” to unproduced screenwriter), and the policeman’s daughter (who becomes much more important than Tey’s series detective, Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, whom Hitchcock eliminated). The film thus opened up what was a straight-ahead murder mystery into a blend of chase, comedy, and romance, rendering the initial crime almost irrelevant.