Authors: Patrick McGilligan
But Skirball kept the faith, and
Saboteur
was inevitably delivered to Universal as the first of a two-picture contract with Hitchcock. For the script alone, which Selznick could and did advertise as a “Hitchcock original,” the studio was forced to pay the remarkable sum of $120,000—$70,000 upon signing, plus $50,000 after the picture had grossed more than $500,000. DOS would earn 10 percent of the gross receipts, provided (as per contract) that Hitchcock didn’t exceed the $750,000 production budget.
The steep terms were “onerous” to
Saboteur
coproducer Frank Lloyd, David Thomson wrote in
Showman.
And besides the budget ceiling, there were especially taxing rush clauses. The second Universal film—“Hitchcock#1”—had to be completed before June 1942 in order to inaugurate the next cycle of the Selznick contract.
Whatever the conditions may have been, though, the Universal films are more Hitchcockian than those he made for RKO—in part because he was allowed to create his own stories, in part because he was making strides in adapting to America, and in part because of his uniquely benign producer.
Jack Skirball was a rare commodity in Hollywood: both a producer and an ordained rabbi. Born in Pennsylvania, Skirball had attended the University of Chicago before becoming a rabbi in Cleveland, Ohio, and Evansville, Indiana, in the 1920s. He drifted into film exhibition and started producing educational films, including a documentary called
Birth of a Baby
that stirred national controversy in 1938. In Hollywood since the late 1930s, he first served as an officer of the flea-budgeted Grand National and Arcadia Pictures. Teaming up with Frank Lloyd in 1940, he earned his first A credit:
The Howards of Virginia
, a Cary Grant vehicle.
Skirball was a “pleasant, non-aggressive producer, who was a fan of Hitch’s,” recalled Peter Viertel. “He was of slight build, wore glasses, and did not interfere with the creative efforts of Hitch and any of the writers.” And right away, Skirball, like Walter Wanger before him, understood the depth of Hitchcock’s bitterness over how he was being treated by the Selznicks; even before filming began, Skirball went out on a limb to contrive a voluntary bonus for Hitchcock of 10 percent of all gross receipts for
Saboteur
after “170% of negative cost.” Hitchcock insisted that this bonus, Skirball’s own extracontract gesture, was his and his alone. This infuriated both Selznicks. If the director got paid separately, neither Myron nor David received their percentages. (Later, thinking the low rate DOS had been paying Viertel was equally “outrageous,” Skirball bonused Viertel, too.)
Right away, Skirball authorized spending more of the precious budget on the best writer money could buy: Dorothy Parker, the third member of the
New Yorker
and Algonquin Round Table to be recruited for a Hitchcock script. The celebrated short-story writer and humorist honed a number of scenes before the approaching start date in December.
Parker, for example, fixed up the scene where Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) hitches a ride with a truck driver, turning it into a satire on fashionable proletarian melodramas like
They Drive by Night.
The driver’s a gum-chewing lumpen who keeps up a running monologue about his wife driving him crazy, always buying hats and going to movies—hats, movies, hats, movies. Kane is idly whistling Beethoven. “Hey,” says the truck driver, “catchy tune.” (Typical of Hitchcock, the truck driver returns, strategically, later in the story.)
Parker also wrote the exquisite scene with the billboard model’s blind uncle, an idealist reminiscent of the elderly diplomat in
Foreign Correspondent.
The uncle, who lives in a mountain cabin, shelters the fleeing wronged man from police, and provides a peaceful interlude when he plays a snatch of “Summer Night on the River” on the piano. (The English composer of the piece, the uncle notes, was Delius—also a blind man.)
Another Parker contribution supplied a witty microcosm of the world in turmoil: While fleeing police, Kane and Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane) leap inside a painted wagon trundling along the road. Inside dwell a troupe of
circus freaks: a truculent midget, a gentle-hearted bearded lady, Siamese twins who disagree sharply, an ambivalent fat lady, and the group leader, the skeletal Bones. When police search the caravan, the troupe argue heatedly over whether to turn the refugees over to the law, or to heed their consciences. The democratic-minded Bones successfully insists on putting the issue to a vote. Parker wrote the scene as a hilarious “parallel to the present world predicament,” as Bones himself overtly comments. The midget, of course, represented Hitler; Bones was FDR. The other freaks were internally divided European nations. The scene encapsulated the plight of refugees from war and fascism. “Some of her [Parker’s] touches, I’m afraid were missed altogether,” Hitchcock lamented in his interview with François Truffaut. “They were too subtle.”
Hitchcock paid Parker the ultimate compliment: he shared his cameo with her. The writer appeared in the first version of the scene, in which a car drives past the wronged man and the billboard model on a desert highway. Hitchcock drove (a play on his claim that he never drove), with Parker beside him in the passenger seat. When they spotted Kane grappling with the billboard model, trying to muffle her cries for help, the car slowed down. “My,” went the quip Parker wrote for herself, “they must be terribly in love.”
After watching the dailies, however, Hitchcock decided the cameo was too intrusive, and so the brief scene was refilmed with professional actors. The director tried another cameo, later in the film, as a deaf-mute outside a drugstore in the New York scenes (standing next to his secretary, Carol Stevens). But Universal thought this might offend people—so, ever practical, he cut his usual walk-on to an eyeblink.
Although Jack Skirball’s avowed goal was to let Hitchcock make a Hitchcock film, Universal was the Woolworth of Hollywood studios—arguably the least endowed, the least prestigious of the major production companies, a studio without A budgets or stars. All the glamorous people were under contract elsewhere, and any big names Hitchcock might hope to borrow were booked months in advance. By the time
Saboteur
landed at Universal, only a few weeks were left for preproduction and casting before the start date.
The Peter Viertel draft had been rushed over to Barbara Stanwyck and Margaret Sullavan, two leading ladies Hitchcock courted repeatedly over the years. He met personally with both, pouring his charm over the weaknesses of the script. Either would have pleased him as Pat, the billboard model, who is forced to aid and abet the wronged man.
Barry Kane was really the central character, and Hitchcock chased Henry Fonda—John Ford’s Tom Joad—to play his first all-American
wronged man.
*
The director met with Bill Goetz and Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century–Fox, and also with Eddie Mannix at MGM, trying to persuade these executives to disrupt their hallowed schedules by loaning out Fonda, or an equivalent star.
Quite apart from the scheduling problems, Hitchcock’s star quest was undercut by budget strictures. Universal couldn’t squeeze top dollar from a budget that had already absorbed high payments to Selznick. So the director shifted to the B list.
He met with Joel McCrea, who was happy to appear in another Hitchcock film, even at the modest salary offered by Universal. But McCrea wasn’t available right away either, so Hitchcock turned to Robert Cummings, a genial actor better known for airy romance and bumbling comedy (though he had just appeared in the serious
Kings Row
). Hitchcock would later tell Truffaut that Cummings was merely a “competent performer” who belonged to “the light-comedy class of actors,” listing, among his failings, the fact that “his features don’t convey an anguish.” But at the time he privately preferred him over McCrea—and later he would cast Cummings again, in
Dial M for Murder.
Perhaps it was Cummings’s stage training that won over Hitchcock—but then again, it may have been that the two enjoyed each other’s company off-camera.
Casting Cummings killed any slim hopes of securing Stanwyck or Sullavan, though, “because they will not support an actor of lesser importance than themselves, in a role of greater importance than their own,” as a Selznick Agency memo observed. So in mid-November, within a few days of engaging Cummings, Hitchcock also accepted an equivalent leading lady: Priscilla Lane, the youngest of three sisters who had appeared as siblings in
Four Daughters.
The blue-eyed blonde, a former big-band vocalist, was getting a star buildup from Warner Bros., and the terms of her loan-out guaranteed that she would be billed over Cummings. Though she was given the impression that Hitchcock had personally requested her, the director told others that Lane was “imposed” on him by coproducer Frank Lloyd from a list of lesser, affordable actresses. Cute and sweet, “she simply wasn’t the right type for a Hitchcock picture,” he said later.
The villain of
Saboteur
, the leader of the fifth columnists, was an important role. The script showed a sophisticated understanding of the pro-Nazi camp in America, “who called themselves America Firsters and who were, in fact, American Fascists,” as the director noted in later interviews. Now Hitchcock sought an actor who wouldn’t imply “sinister, slinking, foreign-looking men,” but someone “outwardly clean and patriotic in appearance.”
He tried for a hundred-percent American: Harry Carey, often a decent, though not saintly, figure in John Ford films. Someone like Carey would act as a “counterpoint element” and give audiences a jolt, Hitchcock thought. When he asked Carey to play the out-and-out traitor, though, the actor was offended (and his wife indignant); Carey joined the burgeoning club of actors who turned up their noses at a Hitchcock film.
The director also approached the suave John Halliday, who had semi-retired from the screen after playing Katharine Hepburn’s father in
The Philadelphia Story.
But Halliday was living in Hawaii, and after Pearl Harbor he was hemmed in by travel restrictions. Finally, because of the timetable and studio pressures, the director was forced to accept Otto Kruger, a suave, capable contract player, but nonetheless an oily “conventional heavy,” in Hitchcock’s words, who would spring no surprises on the audience.
Hitchcock tested a whole slew of actors before casting Vaughan Glaser as the blind uncle. Short, soft-spoken Alan Baxter would lend an epicene quality to the fascist functionary who drives Cummings cross-country (“When I was a child, I had long golden curls.”). Onetime leading lady of the stage Alma Kruger—best known as the head nurse of the Dr. Kildare and Dr. Gillespie series—was a counterpoint choice as the pro-Nazi high-society dowager.
The saboteur—the Macguffin personified—afforded a small but choice part for a newcomer. In New York for the premiere of
Suspicion
in December, Hitchcock tested several stage actors, including a young Canadian named Hume Cronyn. John Houseman suggested that he should meet with Norman Lloyd, who had been sensational in Shakespeare productions for the Mercury Theater. Lloyd visited Hitchcock at the St. Regis.
“It impressed me, as I came into his presence,” recalled Lloyd in
Stages
, “that he was the definition, in one’s imagination, of an international motion picture director. I don’t mean in the cliché Hollywood style, or as in a George S. Kaufman comedy, but in the sense of a director one felt to be a major figure in the contemporary entertainment world. He told me what he had in mind and said that he would have me tested; he didn’t do the tests, because he had to go back to Los Angeles. I was to select a scene with a character who was like the character in the film, which he described to me.”
Lloyd got the part, and even before he came to Hollywood he went to work with Hitchcock’s second unit. A crew led by special-effects cameraman John Fulton came East to photograph Radio City Music Hall (for the sequence where a chase and gunfight fells an innocent in the audience, laughing hysterically at the comedy on-screen), the launching of a liberty ship in New Jersey, and the Statue of Liberty. Following strict instructions from Hitchcock, Fulton shot still plates and action from a portfolio of sketches.
Lloyd and several dozen extras, including a stand-in for Priscilla Lane, were photographed at the Statue of Liberty’s ferry ticket office, ascending the gangplank, on the deck of the ferry, and then arriving on Bedloe (now Liberty) Island in New York Harbor. The statue’s upraised hand, the giant torch, and the ledge under the torch were also photographed, and then later re-created to scale on Universal stages. The mock-up doubled for the national monument, and stuntmen doubled for Lloyd when, at the end of the film, the saboteur trips over the side and is caught by Robert Cummings, one hand clutching his unraveling sleeve. For his “fall,” Lloyd actually spun on a wire in front of a black cloth inside the studio; the background was matted in, with the actor miming his plummeting as the camera pulled away. It was a spectacular effect achieved by meticulous planning over months—one of Hitchcock’s most famous dangling-man sequences. Scant dialogue; no music; only natural sound—the wind gusting, the coat ripping, a woman’s scream.
Hitchcock, Lloyd recalled, had an amazing instinct for turning the freshest headlines to his advantage. After the French ocean liner
Normandie
was swept by fire in the second week of February 1942, the director swiftly dispatched a Universal newsreel unit to film the ship, which was lying keeled over in New York Harbor.
*
He told the crew to photograph the beached liner as though from the window of a speeding car, and then to get some additional footage of a taxi hurtling down the West Side Highway, the elevated road that runs along the west side of Manhattan. In Hollywood, meanwhile, Hitchcock positioned Lloyd in the backseat of a mock-up taxi and told him, “When I cue you, look to your right as if you see the
Normandie.
”
In real life, initial suspicions that the
Normandie
was sabotaged were later ruled out. But audiences of the time, watching Hitchcock’s crafty composite of newsreel and staged fiction, experienced the intended frisson. This “shows a man [Hitchcock],” reflected Lloyd years later, “who was really on his toes and aware of any opportunity to create something for his film: to take history at the moment and incorporate it into a script—in character, story and action.”