Authors: Patrick McGilligan
The producer’s memos grumbled that he was getting “less cut film per day” than he expected from “a man who shoots twice as many angles” as other Hollywood directors. Hitchcock was shooting only what he intended to use. Checkmate: whenever the producer made a suggestion that the director was forced to adopt, whenever he ordered retakes, even then Selznick found himself subverted. “Rather than minimize Selznick’s additions,” wrote Leonard Leff, “Hitchcock actually enhanced them.”
When, for example, Selznick insisted that a dinner-table scene between Olivier and Fontaine be reshot because Fontaine seemed “more self-conscious in this scene than in most others,” Hitchcock complied. He re-filmed, incorporating Selznick’s dialogue changes faithfully. Yet he also restaged the scene, obliterating the dialogue by having his camera sweep back dramatically away from the couple at the table. “In the act of withdrawal, a movement duplicated elsewhere in the film,” in Leonard Leff’s words, “the camera contributes to the young bride’s feelings of unworthiness and abandonment.”
Toward the end of
Rebecca
—when Rebecca’s body is discovered, and questions arise about why de Winter earlier misidentified his wife’s corpse—an inquest ensues. This is followed by a visit to Rebecca’s London doctor, who reveals her cancer diagnosis. De Winter is cleared—and the film ends with the crescendo scene from du Maurier’s novel, in which, rather than accept her new mistress, Mrs. Danvers burns Manderley (and herself) to the ground.
The battle between producer and director extended even down to the film’s final image. DOS wanted the flames to form the letter R. “Imagine!” Hitchcock sniffed in later interviews. They argued about it throughout the
filming, until Hitchcock finally prevailed with his own variation: the camera pushing slowly into the burning bedroom to show flames licking at Rebecca’s initialed pillow.
DOS won the script and lost the filming. After the last take in December, the director, already looking ahead to his next, more Hitchcockian film, left
Rebecca
in the hands of the producer, who did his best to reassert his authority and apply “the Selznick touch.” DOS had Fontaine extensively rerecorded; he supervised remedial retakes; he fooled with the editing. He also supervised the score, adding music to underline nearly every scene.
The film’s running time indicates that the producer utilized every available scrap of footage, arriving at 130 hand-wringing minutes, the longest Hitchcock film to date. Hitchcock’s films did expand in length in Hollywood, but in his body of work that time is exceeded only by another Selznick collaboration,
The Paradine Case
(132 minutes), and by
North by Northwest
(136 minutes).
The length was one of Selznick’s small victories. “The lesson of working with Hitchcock,” David Thomson wrote, “was that no matter how much the producer involved himself, there were secrets of craft, nuance, and meaning that only a director controlled. It was a war from which David [Selznick] emerged not just beaten, but demoralized.”
Even with everything Selznick could think to do to “improve”
Rebecca
, the film was ready for a sneak preview on the day after Christmas. The audience reacted with “great acclaim,” wrote Thomson, and
Rebecca
was slated to open in U.S. theaters in March 1940.
The Hitchcocks celebrated their first American Christmas at their leased St. Cloud Road home, opening presents and sharing egg nog with former tenants Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, who regaled them with tales of the Atlanta premiere of
Gone With the Wind.
By Christmas, the Hitchcocks and Joan Harrison had fashioned a fresh approach to
Personal History
, incorporating their nationality and politics. Vincent Sheean’s memoir lacked a linear plot; the events of the book took place entirely in the 1920s, with long chapters set in Chicago, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Tangier, Tehran, Moscow, and Shanghai. The first thing the three Hitchcocks did was narrow the focus to London, barely glimpsed in the Sheean book. London, the Hitchcocks’ home, became the film’s home.
Although in England the director had been routinely praised for his “gentleman adventurers,” for his first Hollywood original Hitchcock would consciously replace this hero with an American John Doe—“the man in the street,” as he sometimes put it. The foreign correspondent
would even boast a generic name, Johnny Jones.
*
A street-savvy New York newspaper reporter, Jones is described as having a reputation for toughness (he once beat up a policeman in the line of duty). At the beginning of the story the reporter is posted overseas because the other foreign correspondents are viewed as too namby-pamby to expose certain European leaders as the gangsters they really are. The fact that England was at war with Germany was very much on everyone’s minds, so upon his arrival in London, the naïve American would be thrust into the middle of a global conspiracy intended to force England into war.
Although the hero was a marked change, the treatment, penned by Alma and Joan Harrison, was generously sprinkled with ingredients “in line with my earlier films,” in Hitchcock’s words: spies and traitors, a kidnapping and attempted assassination, a love story mingled with wrong-man comedy—all climaxed by the downing of a transatlantic airliner and its crash into the ocean. Since Hitchcock had been rereading
Greenmantle
, the script also borrowed at least one item from that novel—the involvement of a faux peace organization, echoing Buchan’s bogus League of Democrats Against Aggression.
The politics of the film would have been even more explicit if not for the Neutrality Act and the Hollywood censors. Unwilling to write off the German-speaking market (in or outside of Germany), the Hays Office objected, for example, to the villains speaking identifiable German. Borrowing a note from
The Lady Vanishes
then, Hitchcock converted the language of the villains to a made-up vernacular. The enemy, for whom the main villain is spying, is offhandedly identified as “Borovian”—another country on Hitchcock’s fictitious map of Europe, bordering, one suspects, on Bandrieka.
The proposed storyline was audacious, going so far as to make the Neutrality Act part of its message, placing the legislation squarely in opposition to the Bill of Rights. At the very end of the film, the American captain of the ship that rescues the airliner’s passengers would cite neutrality in refusing to allow the foreign correspondent to report the disaster from sea. But this violates freedom of the press, the reporter argues (and then tricks the captain by shouting his argument—and the news—into a transatlantic phone call).
Walter Wanger heartily endorsed the three Hitchcocks’ bold approach. Wanger was more laissez-faire than Selznick, and didn’t constantly second-guess his directors. From the outset of the project, the director and his new producer got along like co-conspirators.
The contrast with DOS was thrown into relief when Wanger schemed
with Hitchcock
against
Selznick International. A naïf financially, Hitchcock had lived reasonably well from film to film, but the move from England had been costly. Hitchcock had no investments, his savings were modest. His reserves were still in London banks, and the new British Defence Finance Regulations barred transfers of currency out of the country. (Not until well after the war would Hitchcock get his hands on his London savings.)
The director’s financial problems were behind his peripheral involvement in a minor Walter Wanger production,
The House Across the Bay
, in January 1940. George Raft, the star, was unhappy with the climactic scenes, and wanted someone other than Archie Mayo, who had guided the rest of the film, to direct an alternative ending. Wanger called in Alfred Hitchcock, who dazzled Raft by outlining a pepped-up crescendo, with brief scenes that he himself would write and supervise. Wanger phoned DOS on the spot to get approval for Hitchcock to interrupt progress on
Personal History
and devote a few days to retakes.
Wanger then bestowed a small sum of money on Hitchcock, and Dan Winkler of the Selznick Agency approached DOS and argued that, having come up with a “story twist” everyone endorsed, Hitchcock deserved a bonus. But DOS thought otherwise; any Hitchcock income, he claimed, was owed directly to Selznick International.
After the creative tug-of-war over
Rebecca
, here was another taste of how tight the Selznick straitjacket would be. Hitchcock was upset about turning his bonus over to DOS, but Myron said he could do nothing about it. Fed up with this and other frustrations, Winkler quit the agency and took an associate producer’s post at RKO.
In February, at Hitchcock’s behest, Walter Wanger engaged Charles Bennett at one thousand dollars a week for four weeks—the amount of time Hitchcock thought he would need to transform the treatment into a decent script. Old misunderstandings between Hitchcock and his once and favorite stooge were set aside as Bennett, the capable constructionist who had worked with the director on seven of his best-known films in England, bent to the task of organizing the elements and ideas into coherent suspense. Recreating their past formula, the two worked in as genial and leisurely a manner as possible. “If we got stuck on the plot,” recalled Bennett, “we’d take a drive to Palm Springs or somewhere.”
Bennett was a security blanket for Hitchcock. The director had enlisted him partly for auld lang syne, partly because the revamped
Personal History
needed his English background, and partly because Bennett could be counted on to reinforce the antineutrality
politique
that was at the story’s core.
Shortly after the war broke out, a small group of British expatriates in Hollywood began to meet to devise ways to confront American neutrality and promote England’s cause. Congregating regularly at the office of Cecil B. De Mille, this group felt obliged to keep its existence secret, not only because the Neutrality Act made prowar agitation illegal, but because of political tensions within the film industry. Hollywood mirrored America with its split between citizens anxious to join the fight against Hitler and those—a peculiar alliance of America Firsters and Communists abiding by the Hitler-Stalin pact—who preached isolationism.
For two years, this small expatriate group would operate as a virtual cell of British intelligence, with the goal of nudging America toward involvement in the war. Its key figures included actors Boris Karloff (whose brother John Pratt was in the London office of MI6) and Reginald Gardiner, directors Robert Stevenson and Victor Saville, and Charles Bennett. Either Bennett or Saville, the group’s informal leader, brought Hitchcock to meetings.
The new Hitchcock project was developed in the midst of this stealth campaign on England’s behalf, and indeed in March 1940—the month that Bennett handed in his draft—the Hollywood cell group set in motion another quasi-Hitchcock film: an unusual charity production designed to glorify England. Hitchcock joined Saville, Cedric Hardwicke, and Herbert Wilcox in sending out a general call to British natives in Hollywood. Actors, writers, and directors were asked to show their patriotism by donating their services to an anthology picture whose earnings would be pledged to war-related causes.
Pledges of support were quickly received from Ronald Colman, Errol Flynn, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Herbert Marshall, Ray Milland, Basil Rathbone, George Sanders, Merle Oberon, and many others. Hitchcock was named to the Board of Governors of Charitable Productions producing the anthology film and distributing its proceeds. He also agreed to direct one of its five segments. The proposed story of
Forever and a Day
, as the picture was to be called, would follow two families, masters and servants, living in a London house over the course of thirty years (1899–1929).
Hitchcock also volunteered to cochair, with Dame May Whitty in London, a drive to raise funds to evacuate children from the Actors’ Orphanage in England, to safe havens in Canada and the United States.
What was true in England still obtained in Hollywood: after Charles Bennett completed his four weeks, Hitchcock went looking for other writers to shore up the script. This time, however, when Bennett left Hitchcock’s employ he left it forever. The two stayed cordial, meeting over the years
for lunch or drinks. But the fact that Hitchcock never again called on him as a writer puzzled and hurt Bennett; he lived to the age of ninety-five, granting interviews about Hitchcock that reflected his wounded pride.
It may have been that Hitchcock, over time, needed a constructionist less. Or it may have been that Bennett was coming increasingly under the influence of the politically conservative Cecil B. De Mille in the 1940s, eventually developing into an anti-Communist zealot, which offended Hitchcock’s mild brand of socialism. Just as likely, it was that the films of De Mille, once one of Hitchcock’s idols, began to decline in quality around the time Bennett joined his staff; the De Mille films written by Bennett—
Reap the Wild Wind, The Story of Dr. Wassell, Unconquered
—were the object of private ridicule in Hitchcock’s camp.
After Bennett left the fold, a slew of credited and uncredited writers joined Hitchcock and Joan Harrison in the script relays. Another fellow Englishman, James Hilton, the best-selling author of
Lost Horizon
and
Goodbye Mr. Chips
(and screenwriter of such quality films as George Cukor’s
Camille
) put in the longest stint, and was undoubtedly the highest paid.
The humorist Robert Benchley was also among the writing platoon. A Myron Selznick client, and the second
New Yorker
and Algonquin writer to be drawn into collaboration with Hitchcock, Benchley had appeared mainly in acclaimed comedy shorts, and Hitchcock guaranteed him a part in the film: from the earliest drafts, one of Johnny Jones’s colleagues, a dipsomaniacal American reporter stationed in London, was dubbed “Benchley.”
“My part is still very nebulous and quite unnecessary,” Benchley wrote his wife in a March 27, 1940, letter, “and right now the picture itself seems to be in pretty sloppy shape.” The script would almost certainly have to “rely on the Hitchcock touch,” he added, with what must have been an audible Benchley sigh. “The story has absolutely nothing to do with the book and never did have. We are now trying to think up a new title. It is an out-and-out melodrama like
The Lady Vanishes
or
39 Steps
, only not so good.”