Alfred Hitchcock (66 page)

For Hitchcock, the best time for a London trip was after
Lifeboat
, and before he launched another project. He tried to convince Dan O’Shea to let him go to England for twelve weeks, even agreeing to accept this as his annual layoff period—provided he could subtract the twelve weeks from future time owed to DOS. But O’Shea refused, preferring to categorize the time as a “suspension” so that Hitchcock would still owe the time to DOS, carrying the obligation over to the next contract cycle.

DOS, as usual, was torn. He resisted the idea of Hitchcock’s going to England and doing war films with Bernstein, who looked to him like another potential rival becoming too friendly with his ace director. Indeed, DOS took every opportunity to belittle Hitchcock’s friend. When Bernstein showed one of his proudest Ministry of Information films to Selznick, the producer expended five pages of criticism in a telegram, blasting its unsuitability for U.S. exhibition.

As a way out of this impasse, Hitchcock had begun tempting Selznick with a book by Francis Beeding (pseudonym of Hilary Aidan St. George Saunders and John Leslie Palmer) called
The House of Dr. Edwardes
,
which concerned a madman taking over an insane asylum during the superintendent’s absence. Hitchcock said the obscure 1927 novel would offer the pretext for a powerful thriller dramatizing the mystery and dangers of psychiatric investigation. He himself had optioned the rights inexpensively, and offered it to Selznick International at a bargain rate. He improvised a starring role for Ingrid Bergman, and ventured that he could develop a treatment during his layoff in England—working with his old friend Angus MacPhail, who was going to produce the war films.

He guessed correctly that the story’s psychiatric milieu would appeal to DOS, still deep in the throes of his midlife crisis (obsessed with Jennifer Jones, he had broken up with his wife). The producer was in regular analysis, and could talk about nothing but. DOS okayed the project—but said the layoff was a technicality under O’Shea’s jurisdiction.

O’Shea refused to budge, though—and Myron Selznick was proving an increasingly useless go-between. The director’s contempt for his agent had poisoned their relationship, and Hitchcock still stubbornly refused to remit any commissions on non-Selznick bonuses paid to him directly; he also refused to repay the ten thousand dollars Myron had paid Alma for her draft of
The Lodger.
(To Myron’s annoyance, the draft never materialized.)

The diplomat of the agency, Sig Marcus, visited Hitchcock on the
Lifeboat
set in October to wave a white flag and parley. He told the director that Myron was hurt by rumors that Hitchcock was shopping around for a new agent, meeting with Dan Winkler over at the Feldman-Blum offices. The director’s agreement with the Selznick Agency had expired in June of 1943, and he had refused all entreaties to re-sign with Myron.

Marcus reported back: Hitchcock insisted he respected Myron and was going to stick with the agency, at least through the end of his Selznick International contract. But he would not sign another contract with the agency, and again he refused point-blank to give the Selznicks any percentages of his Universal bonuses, no matter how “patiently” Marcus explained to him that this was standard operating procedure throughout Hollywood.

“The entire conversation was so friendly,” said Marcus, that the agent feared Myron would think he was “carried away by Hitchcock’s charm.” After all, Marcus had failed to get any straightforward answer from the director, never mind any actual commitments or concessions.

Hitchcock had made up his mind. He had no choice but to accept O’Shea’s definition of the layoff period. Visitors to his office at Twentieth Century–Fox were told he was preparing a three-month business trip, and his secretary dodged questions. When Hitchcock left for London after Thanksgiving, his future at the studio, and his status with the agency, were up in the air.

Mrs. Hitchcock, who stayed behind, was delegated by her husband to oversee postproduction on
Lifeboat
, including working with composer Alfred Newman. Hitchcock was always wary of traditional studio scores, and, as he would do later with
The Birds
, he envisioned a unique sound track composed almost entirely of naturalistic sounds. He approved only sparse music to run under the opening credits and the end title cards.

Zanuck, who had been stewing over his various defeats during filming—not to mention his failure to re-sign Hitchcock—proposed tender music for the romantic Hume Cronyn-Mary Anderson scenes. Hitchcock, through Alma, stood firm: no music. But Zanuck had his revenge, making minor cuts in these and other scenes wherever he could—and then rushing prints east for the release before Hitchcock returned from England.

“I knew that if I did nothing [to aid England] I’d regret it for the rest of my life,” Hitchcock said later. “It was important for me to do something and also to get right into the atmosphere of the war.”

In August 1943 Angus MacPhail left Ealing to join the Ministry of Information, and planning for the Hitchcock films began in earnest, with MacPhail as producer and “story saboteur,” in his words. “I’m going to suck up to you by evolving a story which begins with a Senegalese falling dead from the gallery of St. Paul’s,” his old crony wrote to Hitchcock in Hollywood.

Sidney Bernstein hadn’t wanted Hitchcock dealing with issues pertaining expressly to wartime England, a subject reserved for resident English directors such as Anthony Asquith and Michael Powell. But Hitchcock would be perfect for two projects paying tribute to the French Resistance—to be shot in French and subtitled in English. For Hitchcock, who started out his career with location forays to the Continent, the war was really about the places he knew firsthand. Germany and France were personal; Japan and the Pacific theater were conspicuously absent from mention in all his films, wartime or otherwise.

By November, the ministry had received budget and story approval for two three-reelers to be shown to the general population in the free territories of France.

The first was
Bon Voyage
, which involved a downed British pilot whose escape from France has been aided by the Resistance. This story had an initial treatment by writer V. S. Pritchett, but MacPhail stalled the final draft. “I’ve already warned Sidney about the dubious value of confronting A. Hitchcock with completed scripts,” MacPhail wrote the director.

The second was
Aventure Malgache
, which concerned the internal affairs of Vichy-controlled French Madagascar. Both films were going to entail “a lot to do in the way of settling the political line, clearing [it] through Security or any Government Departments involved,” according to Ministry of Information memos. That is another reason Hitchcock was chosen
for these subjects: Bernstein felt he could trust the director’s political sophistication.

Flying across the Atlantic from New York to London, which remained under intermittent aerial bombardment, was still not a simple matter in late 1943. In the best of situations, it meant fourteen hours of nerve-racking discomfort in the air. “I flew over in a bomber, sitting on the floor,” Hitchcock later recalled, “and when we got halfway across the Atlantic, the plane had to turn back. I took another one two days later.”

He arrived on December 3, 1943. Though he was earning only a token salary, Hitchcock took a suite at Claridge’s, his favorite London hotel, and met there with writers. In the case of
Bon Voyage
, the scenarist was Arthur Calder-Marshall, a biographer and fiction writer who had worked briefly in Hollywood under contract to MGM.
Aventure Malgache
would be written by J. O. C. Orton, a veteran of British films. MacPhail assisted on both scripts, and a number of French Resistance members and show business exiles living in London consulted on matters of authenticity.

“The slightest error, they feared, might hold the picture up to ridicule,” Hitchcock recalled in a contemporaneous interview. “I couldn’t show a scene where cigarette butts are lying around. French audiences would simply laugh off such a preposterous sight. You must remember that where people are limited to four cigarettes a day, as they are in France now, there is no such thing as an unclaimed cigarette butt. People take a few puffs on a cigarette and stuff the butt into a match box, taking it out later for another puff.”

In another scene, he continued, “I showed a restaurant. Ordinarily you would never think about the look of a table where a meal has been finished. But in representing a French restaurant of today, you do. There are no crusts of bread left on the table. If I permitted anything like that, it would simply mean to future French audiences that the people who made the picture didn’t know what they were doing.”

Both scripts acquired intricate flashback structures and last-minute story twists under Hitchcock’s care. In
Bon Voyage
, a Polish prisoner appears to have aided the downed RAF pilot during his escape from France; but a Free French colonel, debriefing the pilot in London, retells the adventure from a different point of view, revealing (by clever restaging of events) that the Pole was actually a Gestapo agent trying to flush out the Resistance.

Aventure Malgache
became the more controversial of the two stories, largely because Hitchcock noticed political bickering among the French consultants, and incorporated these tensions into the film. “We realized that the Free French were very divided against one another,” he said, “and these inner conflicts became the subject.”

Aventure Malgache
begins in Chinese-box fashion with a troupe of actors slowly donning their makeup before a show. Ex-Resistance fighters
who have escaped to London from the French territory of Madagascar, they now carry on the struggle by performing patriotic plays. The actors recall events in Madagascar, including political differences and incidents of craven collaboration with the enemy. At the end of the film, the island’s turncoat police chief, hastily preparing for the arrival of the British navy, hides away his bottle of Vichy water and photograph of Pétain, substituting Scotch and a wall portrait of Queen Victoria.

MacPhail had warned Hitchcock back in October that his budget would be bargain-basement, but the director lined up composer Benjamin Frankel, who often worked with Noel Coward, and former Murnau cameraman Günther Krampf, who had worked in England since 1931. For the ensemble of
Aventure Malgache
Hitchcock hired the Molière Players, an ad hoc troupe of exiled French actors, some of whom also appeared in
Bon Voyage.

By January 20, Hitchcock was fast at work at the venerable Welwyn Studios in Hertfordshire, now part of British International Pictures and used principally for the production overflow from Elstree. The three-reelers were shot and edited quickly; Hitchcock was done by February 25, and booked to return to America on March 2.

Only a short time later in 1944, the twenty-six-minute
Bon Voyage
was distributed in liberated France and Belgium. But the thirty-one-minute
Aventure Malgache
, originally planned to salute the heroism of French re-sisters, had grown under Hitchcock into an exposé of domestic traitors—and so it was held back. The fact that the two films received such limited circulation is another reason Hitchcock’s war work seemed invisible.

Still, the director took considerable pride in
Bon Voyage
and
Aventure Malgache.
He was fond enough of the former that he later explored expanding it into a feature film, rescreening it as late as 1958 while under contract at Paramount.

In the early 1990s, when the MOI films were unearthed and released on video, they were seen as supplying a vital link in the director’s career. Both were revealed as “very Hitchcockian,” as Philip Kemp wrote in
Sight and Sound
—surprisingly complicated narratives with expressive camera work, characteristic levels of humor and irony, and strong themes.

While ensconced at Claridge’s, Hitchcock and Angus MacPhail found time to discuss the adaptation of
The House of Dr. Edwardes
; together they cranked out a solid treatment. According to Leonard Leff, David O. Selznick had asked for a theme about “the healing potential of psychiatry.” This was a leap, since the novel was almost a country-house mystery; but if ever Hitchcock threw a book out the window, this one flew far, far away.

Even Leff, often skeptical of Hitchcock, concluded that the treatment
neatly gutted the novel, while establishing “the structure and several of the major incidents for the film eventually called
Spellbound.
” It strayed so far from the book—but was of such intriguing quality—that DOS wondered privately if Mrs. Hitchcock had helped out, “ghosting” from Hollywood.

During the brief time he spent in London, Hitchcock hosted get-togethers with Ivor Montagu, Alexander Korda, and other old friends. Several times he visited his sister, Nellie, who was living at Shamley Green with other family members. His relationship with Sidney Bernstein deepened, and they talked about going into business together after the war.

He experienced the rationing, the drills, the blackouts. The worst of the blitz was over, but there was a flurry of bombings—a “baby blitz,” as some called it. Hitchcock was vastly amused when, while he was dining with his spinster cousins at Claridge’s, German planes flew over, provoking a noisy antiaircraft barrage, and his cousins virtually ignored it all—except for one remarking to the other, “You know, my dear, the guns sound different here than they do at our house, don’t they?” But the threat of incendiaries and parachute mines dropping from the skies was real, and the war darkened his mood.

Especially late at night, when Hitchcock found himself stranded at the hotel, he felt helpless. “I used to be alone at Claridge’s Hotel,” Hitchcock wrote to Alma, “and the bombs would fall, and the guns, and I was alone and didn’t know what to do.”