Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Finally, in the late spring of 1941, the director decided to set
The Lodger
aside for the time being and move on. DOS was chimerical, and at the moment neither Selznick seemed serious about producing. Jack Skirball, on the other hand, was eager to let Hitchcock try almost anything.
Skirball had been urging the director to switch gears and turn his attention to what they had always referred to as “Hitchcock #2.” This would be a Hitchcock original: a wrong-man chase, like
The 39 Steps
, but set in America. The wrong man would be another John Doe American, mistaken for a saboteur. Hearing about this, DOS agreed to let Hitchcock develop “Hitchcock #2” under Houseman; DOS could monitor the script progress, and then decide later whether to produce the film himself or sell it for easy profit.
DOS placated Hitchcock by raising his salary to $3,000 weekly, beginning in July 1941; the director would now be making $120,000 yearly. Myron also tried to placate his client by hiring Alma for $10,000 to write a first treatment for
The Lodger
remake. But since Hitchcock was a half partner in the rights, he had to vouch for half of Alma’s salary out of any future earnings on the property. (The agreement Hitchcock signed with Myron also obliged him to direct the remake, unless incapacitated.)
The annual raise and script commission were a salve to his pride, but the director balked at Myron’s request to re-sign with the agency for another seven years. His first contract with the Selznick Agency was coming up for renewal—but by now Hitchcock blamed Myron even more than his brother for the maze he was in.
Though DOS was still pretending he might eventually produce the saboteur project, Hitchcock assured Skirball that the film would end up at Universal. Even before the contract details were resolved, then, the Hitchcocks and Joan Harrison went to work on the story, moonlighting at
night, on weekends, even on the set of
Suspicion.
By midsummer, with
Suspicion
in postproduction, Hitchcock was holding his first meetings with John Houseman.
The war and filmmaking went hand in hand. In August 1941 Hitchcock made a quick trip to New York to consult with Sidney Bernstein, who had flown to the United States aboard a Liberator bomber. On behalf of the Ministry of Information, Bernstein was en route to Hollywood, where he hoped to establish a cooperative relationship with studio executives.
Returning ahead of Bernstein, Hitchcock and Victor Saville helped arrange his appointments. While meeting with studio moguls Harry Warner and Louis B. Mayer, among others, Bernstein stayed with Hitchcock at St. Cloud Road. Bernstein’s goal was to convince the studios to attach various MOI wartime short subjects to their major releases, and incorporate into their future programs features that celebrated British history and heritage.
This activity still ran counter to the Neutrality Act. Pro-British activity in Hollywood was under scrutiny by American intelligence operatives, as well as by pro-German elements in the film industry. Although many U.S. citizens wanted to do everything possible to side with England, the government’s official policy was to do nothing, so America Firsters had law enforcement on their side.
Foreign Correspondent
—and now the saboteur project—were precisely the type of “message pictures” that isolationist Senators Burton K. Wheeler (D., Montana) and Gerald P. Nye, (R., North Dakota) inveighed against in widely publicized speeches, denouncing “alien” influences in Hollywood.
Indeed, in the fall of 1941, Saville was among those publicly branded a British agent in Senate Interstate Commerce Committee hearings led by Wheeler and Nye, with testimony alleging that in Hollywood, Saville entertained “lavishly and that each of his guests is served a full course of British propaganda.”
Foreign Correspondent
somehow escaped the list of Hollywood pictures targeted by the committee (Hitchcock’s propaganda was that slippery), and anyway, the hearings were brief—the investigation was cut off by the events of December 7.
Pearl Harbor suddenly freed Hitchcock to be more explicit with his subject matter in the new film—now called
Saboteur.
Although work on the story had been ongoing since the early summer, a series of crucial revisions would occur after America went to war.
John Houseman had taken DOS’s place supervising Hitchcock, though neither Houseman nor anyone else operated under the illusion that
Saboteur
would end up a Selznick production. “Early in the proceedings, he [DOS] said, ‘I’m not going to make it anyway,’” wrote David Thomson.
Born Jacques Haussmann in Bucharest to an Alsatian father and an English mother, Houseman was educated in England; transplanted to New York by the early 1930s, he produced the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson avant-garde opera
Four Saints in Three Acts
before joining forces with Orson Welles in a tempestuous partnership that spawned the Negro Theater Project, the Classical Theater Project, and the stage and radio productions of the Mercury Theater. When Welles moved to Hollywood, Houseman went with him as the unofficial supervisor of
Citizen Kane
, but endless friction with his partner led him to accept a contract with Selznick.
DOS hoped to leverage Houseman’s British background, “as well as my cultivation and charm,” in Houseman’s words, “to establish good personal relationships with Hitch and to cajole and encourage him into conceiving and preparing an original screenplay.”
“I had heard of him as a fat man given to scabrous jokes,” Houseman wrote later, “a gourmet and an ostentatious connoisseur of fine wines. What I was unprepared for was a man of exaggeratedly delicate sensibilities, marked by a harsh Catholic education and the scars from a social system against which he was in perpetual revolt and which had left him suspicious and vulnerable, alternatively docile and defiant.”
Though they had met before, Houseman got his first close-up of Hitchcock on this project, and according to film historian Leonard Leff, he found himself “mesmerized.”
“His passion was for his work, which he approached with an intelligence and almost scientific clarity to which I was unaccustomed,” Houseman recalled. “Working with Hitch really meant listening to him talk—anecdotes, situations, characters, revelations and reversals, which he would think up at night and try out on us during the day and … the surviving elements were finally strung together into some sort of story in accordance with carefully calculated and elaborately plotted rhythms.”
The first three Hitchcocks did most of the initial scutwork at St. Cloud Road. One day, a visiting reporter observed Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison “rushing into different rooms with typewriters and manuscripts, taking over tables, chairs and lounges and at once starting to work feverishly, paying no attention to anybody but themselves.” The progress was punctuated, the reporter observed, by delivery of “huge goblets of Strawberries Romanoff, a concoction of ice cream, fruit and liqueurs,” upon which Hitchcock gorged, “then dozed off as the frenetic activity continued around him.”
After making crucial contributions to the story, Harrison decided to leave the project to strike out on her own in Hollywood. While Hitchcock had expected her to leave eventually—indeed, in interviews, predicting her eventual success away from him—he panicked at losing Harrison at
this juncture, and tried to extract extra money from DOS to entice her to stay. When Selznick refused, Hitchcock stormed out of the office. Houseman the diplomat quelled the emergency; then, after things settled down and Harrison had vacated, a young man named Peter Viertel came to the rescue.
As a junior writer under contract to Selznick, Viertel would keep the first-draft costs down. Barely twenty-one, Viertel had received glowing reviews for his first novel but as yet had no screen credits (nor, for that matter, did Houseman). But as the son of two illustrious figures—the Viennese poet, playwright, and film director Berthold Viertel, and the Polish-born actress Salka Viertel, well known as Greta Garbo’s confidante and scenarist—he came with a pedigree. Hitchcock liked mixing precocious writers with famous ones, and the well-bred Viertel was his sort of eager beaver.
At their first meeting, Viertel confessed he didn’t really know how to write a script. “I’ll teach you, my dear boy,” Hitchcock cooed, “in about twenty minutes.” The director then launched into an elaborate explanation of the difference between establishing shots and close-ups; using musical terms, he said that long establishing shots were like long overtures (not always necessary) and close-ups were like cymbal crashes used for dramatic effect. He urged Viertel not to worry about writing lengthy descriptions or too much dialogue (“no speeches, please”). “The main thing,” Hitchcock said, “is to get a script together to get the whole project moving.”
The second shift of three Hitchcocks took over—Viertel, Houseman, and the director. Mrs. Hitchcock absented herself, accompanying Pat to New York for rehearsals and performances of the John Van Druten play
Solitaire.
(Dudley Digges had replaced Auriol Lee as director, after Lee was killed in a car accident heading back east after
Suspicion.
) Pat would earn unqualified praise from theater critics; but the play opened just a few days after Pearl Harbor, and lasted only three weeks before closing. Immersed in
Saboteur
, her father never saw her Broadway debut.
The new three Hitchcocks did their best to keep abreast of the headlines throughout that fall of 1941. The saboteur script raced ahead of widespread fears that Nazi-sympathizing fifth columnists might try to sabotage U.S. heavy industry. The hero became a California munitions worker, falsely accused of sabotage, who eludes arrest and flees cross-country, trying to prove his innocence. Dragged along with him on this “double chase” is a blond billboard model (a tweaking of Hitchcock’s friend, the model and beauty consultant Anita Colby). One of Hitchcock’s ideas, which dated from the earliest days of work on the story, was the climax—with the real saboteur, cornered by his pursuers, falling from the upraised torch of the Statue of Liberty.
Nobody pretended the latest Hitchcock film was going to be anything
but a pastiche of old ones, mixing scraps of John Buchan with
Foreign Correspondent
(itself a pastiche). But there was one big difference: “
Saboteur
was the first picture he was to make in America about America using America as a background,” in Viertel’s words. (Hitchcock himself was already describing it as an “American picaresque.”) Besides the Statue of Liberty, the film would visit Hoover Dam, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There would even be side trips to a western ranch and ghost town.
Hitchcock was comfortable recycling himself—too comfortable, sometimes. In one session with Viertel, he said he thought the fifth-column leader might bear a physical flaw: an eye twitch, or missing finger, perhaps. Dreaming up the New York scene in which the heavy mingles with guests in the ballroom of a grand mansion, the director instructed Viertel to write a long dolly shot past the waiters and people in dinner jackets and all the beautiful women, coming to rest on a close-up of a hand lacking one digit. Viertel said, “I think you used the missing finger in
The 39 Steps
, Hitch, and the long dolly shot in
Young and Innocent.
” “Hmmm,” purred Hitchcock, “well, I’ll think of something else.” (He eventually dropped both ideas.)
Or maybe that was a little test. Was Viertel up on his Hitchcock studies? Writers were expected to know his films; if they didn’t, he’d order up screenings for them.
With Houseman adding his two cents, Viertel cranked out pages and pages. The director acted “supremely confident that he would make many more films and that an occasional failure would do little harm to his reputation,” recalled Viertel. “With the possible exception of
Rebecca
, he seemed to know that his films would inevitably be labeled ‘Hitchcock movies,’ so his vanity was never involved in our exchange of ideas.”
As usual, gaps and implausibilities barely broke his stride. In one instance Viertel painted himself into a corner, locking the John Doe character in a storeroom. How could he be sprung? Hitchcock suggested he might hold a lighted match to a sprinkler alarm system, followed by a quick cut to him standing outside the building, watching a fire brigade arrive. But wouldn’t the audience scratch their heads, Viertel wondered, trying to piece together how he managed to get out? “They’ll never ask!” Hitchcock crowed.
Especially after Pearl Harbor, with the script overtaken by the war,
Saboteur
couldn’t help but evolve into a “message picture.” Regardless, Hitchcock shied away from dead-on dialogue. “Too on the nose” was his harshest criticism. As a man with one foot always in the silent era, he preferred not to articulate every last meaning with words.
When, however, Viertel broke the “no speeches” rule and wrote what he thought was a rather explicit fascist monologue, to be delivered by the
leader of the fifth columnists—who sneeringly refers to “the great masses … the moron millions”—Hitchcock said nothing. He read the speech, and allowed it to stay in the script. Later, after one of those studio previews the director hated, with their idiotic audience response cards, he walked out with Viertel. “The great masses,” Hitchcock muttered, linking his appreciation for Viertel’s dead-on dialogue with the irksome preview cards, “the moron millions.”
These three Hitchcocks had camaraderie; what they lacked was time and money. DOS wanted a quick script to save on costs, and Hitchcock wanted a quick script to get out from under DOS. When Viertel finished his “rough first draft,” the young writer regarded it with chagrin. “It wasn’t very good, as you can well imagine,” Viertel recalled. But after reading it, Hitchcock chortled, “It’s no worse than a lot of others and it’ll get me away from Selznick!”
Though the Universal deal was pending, Hitchcock and Houseman were obliged to troop around town, pitching the package to other studios—all part of the grand scheme to tout the Selznick name, and drive up the eventual price. Hitchcock felt “like a pimp, divided between humiliation over these performances and the pleasure he always felt at trying out his gimmicks on a new audience,” a sympathetic Houseman observed. Selznick’s asking price for Hitchcock and the script augured a profit of roughly 300 percent. “This grievance over what he quite rightly regarded as the exploitation of his talent became so deep that it finally affected the quality of the picture,” reflected Houseman.