Alfred Hitchcock (58 page)

Ironically, “the U.S. Navy was incensed at the
Normandie
shots and demanded that they be removed,” wrote film historian George Turner, and the sabotage implication was omitted until the 1948 reissue.
^**

Even as principal photography began, a week before Christmas 1941, the director returned to the script. Peter Viertel came back on the job, conferring with Hitchcock “every evening, while he was shooting, lunching with him on weekends and spending Sundays together working out the scenes and trying to make them better under his tutelage,” according to Viertel.

Hitchcock’s life at the time, the writer recalled, was “very spartan—work, the cutting room, home.” There were no vacations, or open-door parties of the sort that had characterized his life in London. Sunday was the only day he wasn’t at the studio, and on that day Viertel visited St. Cloud Road for script sessions, followed by lunch. Mrs. Hitchcock had grown alarmed over her husband’s weight, and he was again dieting. Yet Viertel was convinced that, except when striking a pose for publicity, Hitchcock wasn’t really given to stuffing himself. Viertel was not the only close associate to believe Hitchcock may have had a glandular condition that caused him to retain weight. Hitchcock believed so himself, and kept regular appointments with his Beverly Hills physician, Dr. Ralph M. Tandowsky, for diuretic (and B-vitamin) shots.

The director owned a book of famous menus from which he liked to read aloud, sighing ruefully, for example, over a glorious repast served to King George on a state visit to Paris in 1914. “The menu was full of succulent delights,” recalled Viertel, “and Hitch would get his kicks just out of reading it, but then lunch would be spartan, maybe a salad with a side of lamb. Hitch ate, but not an astonishing amount. He didn’t really drink that much, and you never saw him drunk.”

In spite of budget constraints and casting disappointments, Hitchcock seemed positively ebullient now that he was on his own at Universal, far away in miles and spirit from the Selznick penitentiary. He had collected a new team, including a young art director, Robert Boyle, whose abilities as a sketch and design artist recommended him to Hitchcock for the future. His cameraman was the highest paid on the lot: Joseph Valentine, who filmed the slapstick comedies and Deanna Durbin musicals that were Universal’s bread and butter. (Valentine had also shot
The Wolf Man
, an atmospheric horror picture Hitchcock particularly admired.)

His stars may have been compromise choices, but he didn’t mind so very much. He saw them as bargains. “All that stuff about him saying, ‘Actors are cattle’—I’m sure that was just publicity,” recalled Priscilla Lane. “He was very exacting—unswervable in getting you to do exactly what he wanted. But he was always pulling little gags to keep the set a happy place.”

Hitchcock didn’t speak to the actors very much about acting anyway, according to Viertel—except in the case of Otto Kruger, who just couldn’t
please him. Kruger never fit his picture of the villain, no matter how hard Hitchcock prodded him. (“I think you should do it a little more
pointedly
, Otto.”) In general, Hitchcock “worked with actors against the Stanislavsky or Group Theater method,” said Viertel. “He let them, very much like John Huston, do the scene in a rehearsal, and then most any direction he gave had to do with timing.” The director believed he could solve any acting problem with camera work, and his solutions were often ingenious—as when he filmed the villain’s lengthy soliloquy with Kruger seated on a sofa and the camera fixed an eerie distance from the actor across the room.

Universal grew “alarmed at the 50-odd sets Hitchcock ordered,” reported George Turner, “especially a vast Stage 12 desert, a reconstruction of a part of the turbulent Kern River including a waterfall, and the grand ballroom of a Park Avenue mansion.” Hitchcock assured Skirball that he would cut some corners, though, and Skirball in turn reassured the studio. Hitchcock budgets were like Hitchcock’s weight: he might prefer to gorge himself, but he was a genius at shedding pounds—a master of scrimping, happy to film only a
corner
of a building set to avoid having to construct the entire facade. Strapped for cash, Hitchcock would all the more resort to mattes, miniatures, and background plates, blended masterfully by the effects wizards.

The film’s mansion set was built onto a stairway left over from a Deanna Durbin vehicle. A back-lot storage building (“an old scene dock with big sliding doors that happened to be there,” in Boyle’s words) was easily transformed into an aircraft factory. When the doors opened and a crowd of workers poured out, the audience would glimpse a vast dark interior with rows of airplanes under construction—actually a scenic backing. Hitchcock knew “the chances that almost any shot will not hold longer than five seconds,” according to art director Boyle, “and that a matte in particular is going to be on for no more than five seconds. Then the audience doesn’t have time to find the problems.”

For the actual sabotage, the film needed some kind of impressive explosion—and even that Hitchcock managed to pull off on the cheap. He visualized it as a simple, eerily effective shot, with black smoke gradually billowing under the sliding doors of the factory, followed by a tremendous bang and roar. “Hitch made a drawing,” Boyle remembered, “in which he drew just the big doors and then he did a big scribble. He said, ‘There will be an explosion.’ And I thought that scribble was more illuminating than the finest drawing you could make.”

Scene after scene stimulated his creativity. The night sequence involving the circus caravan gave Hitchcock the opportunity to quote from F. W. Murnau, creating a variation on the lesson he had learned on the set of
The Last Laugh
in 1925. “We had a shot from the back of this long train
in which we had a full-size truck, and then a smaller truck,” Boyle recalled. “After that we began to get into miniatures, and finally, as we got way off in the distance, we got into just cutouts. Now the problem was the people, because the police were searching the whole train, which meant we needed people all the way back. We had full-size people in the foreground truck, smaller people behind, and still smaller people behind that. For the first three trucks we used people of regular heights, from six-footers down to five-footers. After that we went into midgets. Then way in the background were small, articulated, cutout figures whose arms could be worked like puppets, and we had tiny flashlights on their hands. I don’t know many directors nowadays that would stand still for that; they’re afraid of it. Hitchcock was never afraid to try anything, and if it didn’t work exactly as he wished it didn’t bother him that much, as long as he got the sensation correct.”

Rarely in his career did Hitchcock enjoy the luxury of an unrestricted budget. Yet if
Saboteur
was hurried and inexpensive; if the script was flawed (“I would say that the script lacks discipline,” Hitchcock, again his own harshest critic, told Truffaut, and “the whole thing should have been pruned and tightly edited long before the actual shooting”); if the stars were bland—well, none of it mattered. Audiences were dazzled. Edited and released quickly in the spring of 1942,
Saboteur
soared at the box office. While today it may not have the same electrifying immediacy, the film is still full of vigor and panache. Then as now, critics regarded it as minor Hitchcock, but in 1942 Hollywood saw it differently.
Saboteur
was the first film by the English director that truly looked American.

Although
Saboteur
ultimately inched over budget (by roughly three thousand dollars), Skirball fought for Hitchcock’s bonus anyway—and ended up deducting the extra money from his own profit share. Hitchcock received an extra fifteen thousand dollars, directly from the producer. It was a victory all around.

As usually happened, while making
Saboteur
the director was already preoccupied with finding a subject for his second film under the Universal deal. “During that period,” said Peter Viertel, “he was always starting on another one right away.”

Once again Hitchcock harked back to John Buchan, proposing yet again to adapt
Greenmantle
, this time with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in mind. His backup choice was
No Other Tiger
by A. E. W Mason, the author of
Four Feathers
, an adventure that begins during an Indian tiger hunt before shifting to British high society. “Hitch enthused particularly,” Selznick story editor Margaret McDonell reported, “about the climax where the beautiful dancer is found hanging from the chandelier.”

But rights to the Buchan novel were as elusive as ever, so he returned to another persistent idea. Though stymied from remaking
The Lodger
, he thought about crafting a Hitchcock original about a more modern serial killer. Steeped in crime lore since boyhood, Hitchcock had well-honed reflexes when fashioning such a film. These stories were so deeply rooted within him, so instinctual, that he gave them a name: “run-for-cover” films.

“Whenever you feel yourself entering an area of doubt or vagueness,” he once said, “whether it be in respect to the writer, the subject matter, or whatever it is, you’ve got to run for cover. When you feel you’re at a loss, you must go for the tried and true.”

Margaret McDonell was married to the British-born author Gordon McDonell, whose adventure stories and crime novels, influenced by James M. Cain, were often sold as film material. When McDonell told her husband that Hitchcock was anxious to find a run-for-cover crime story, McDonell reminded his wife of a yarn he had dreamed up in 1938, when their car broke down and they were stranded in Hanford, south of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, waiting for repairs. Hitchcock agreed to hear the story over lunch at the Brown Derby.

In the first week of May 1942, Hitchcock first heard the bare bones of the story McDonell was calling “Uncle Charlie.” It concerned a “handsome, successful, debonair” man, in McDonell’s words, who arrives in a California town to visit his sister’s family. The family—middle-aged parents, a nineteen-year-old son, and an eighteen-year-old daughter—haven’t seen Uncle Charlie for ten years. The daughter is Charlotte, young Charlie, named in her uncle’s honor—his favored niece, and a young woman with “great potentialities of charm.” But young Charlie begins to suspect—rightly—that Uncle Charlie is a serial murderer on the run from police; when he realizes she knows the truth, he decides to kill her to protect his secret. McDonell’s original story concluded at a country picnic, where, lunging at his niece, Uncle Charlie topples off a cliff.

A debonair serial killer in small-town America: this was pure run-for-cover. Years later the director told crime historian Jay Robert Nash that “Uncle Charlie” instantly reminded him of the notorious 1920s trial of Earle Leonard Nelson, who traveled from coast to coast in America, slaying matronly types. Another time he said it evoked the case of mass murderer Henri Landru, a Parisian confidence man and killer who murdered at least ten women and a boy between 1915 and 1919, and whose trial was held in 1921. (Landru’s case later inspired Chaplin’s
Monsieur Verdoux.
) The more real-life echoes a crime story had for Hitchcock, the bigger his pool of references, the greater his enthusiasm.

Before he could start on “Uncle Charlie,” though, Hitchcock had to patch together a new agreement with Selznick International. He couldn’t make “Uncle Charlie” for Universal fast enough to finish filming inside of
the one-year time frame of his contract, and thus he would be unable to fulfill his obligation to Selznick of two pictures per year. This was the constant subtext in his dealings with Selznick; over time it had proven the most troublesome clause in his contract. At Hitchcock’s urging Myron Selznick even consulted outside lawyers to see if he could get around the problem, but the lawyers weren’t confident, and Dan O’Shea refused to budge.

Once again the labyrinthine, patched-over Selznick contract prevailed, and on May 7, after meeting with Gordon McDonell, Skirball approved a memorandum specifying “Uncle Charlie” as the second picture of the Universal contract—in conjunction with Selznick, extending Hitchcock’s availability to the studio into the late fall of 1942. McDonell supplied a six-page synopsis of his story. Although Hitchcock asked him for a lengthier treatment, the author didn’t want to interrupt the novel he was writing, and never augmented the six pages.

It was up to Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock to brainstorm the initial “Notes on Possible Development of Uncle Charlie Story for Screen Play,” which they did on May 11, 1942, outlining the director’s formative vision for the film. Although McDonell had posited “a typical small American town” with “little people, leading unimportant little lives,” Hitchcock was worried about that word “typical,” wary that it suggested a cast of stock figures. So he and his wife modified the town into a place invaded by modern evils (“movies, radio, juke boxes, etc.; in other words, as it were, life in a small town lit by neon signs”), with a sympathetic, individualized family whose members would lend themselves to plenty of comedy—especially “from the characters ‘not in the know.’ ”