Authors: Patrick McGilligan
That night the director and writer shared a long, lavish dinner at the Savoy, with Hitchcock insisting they order two expensive bottles of a rare vintage, Schloss Johannisberger and Fürst von Metternich. The evening restored Hitchcock’s “benign humor,” and the daytime conferences resumed in a more optimistic mode. “The trouble was,” wrote Cronyn, “I had the awful, nagging suspicion that Hitch’s premonition was accurate.”
In the second week of June, Hitchcock returned to Hollywood for a week to approve the postproduction of
Rope
and help fashion the trailer for its fall release. He was still in good spirits, and all he could talk about were his high ambitions for
Under Capricorn.
He was going to take the innovative single-take method of
Rope
one step further—shooting on multilevel sets and even some exteriors. The fluid camera had become a bug with him; this time, though, the bug would prove fatal.
Rope
may have been a forgivable indulgence, he said later, but filming
Under Capricorn
that way was patently stupid.
But there was a hidden agenda behind Hitchcock’s enthusiasm for the fluid camera. He was desperately trying to cast a spell over Ingrid Bergman. He wanted his leading lady to be as excited as he was, to visualize along with him how seamlessly the camera would weave through every scene of
Under Capricorn.
Flush with overconfidence, the director ran
Rope
for the actress and Whitfield Cook in a Warner Bros. screening room. “I liked it,” Cook wrote in his journal. “She didn’t much.”
Neither did executives of Warner Bros. Behind the scenes the management
recoiled in horror—not at the long takes, but at what
Rope
was really “about.” The homosexual subtext was suddenly transparent, though somehow until now it had eluded all the studio officials and censors. Hitchcock had pulled it off: with all his talk about technique, he’d distracted them all long enough to make the film
his
way, right under their noses.
The ears of Barney Balaban, the New York-based president of Paramount, pricked up when he heard about
Rope
, and he wrote privately to Jack Warner, urging him to divorce Warner Bros. from the unsavory Hitchcock film. Balaban warned Warner that the film too closely evoked the Leopold-Loeb case, with its portrait of two killers clearly homosexual and, worse, Jewish.
“I have talked to Alfred Hitchcock,” the head of Warner’s swiftly (and privately) replied, “and he emphatically told me that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Loeb-Leopold case. Furthermore, the action takes place in New York and no Jewish characters are portrayed in the picture.” Warner added, “Very confidentially, Barney, had you or someone else called my attention to the resemblance between the case and this picture before the picture was made, Warner Bros. would not have made any deal to release the picture. … I also want to impress upon you that it is not our property and that we only have a small financial interest in it and are chiefly concerned with the picture’s distribution.”
Letters echoing Balaban’s came pouring in from the Anti-Defamation League, film betterment councils, and other citizen organizations. In cities and states across the country the Hitchcock film was forbidden, or passed by local censorship boards only after “eliminations” in certain scenes—often including the strangling scene that opens the film. The National Board of Review consigned
Rope
to “mature” audiences—over the age of twenty-one—the kiss of death for wide commercial prospects.
By the time
Rope
was released in September, its box-office fate was sealed by both the internal reaction of the studio and the external pressure of censorship groups. Warner’s, quite capable of mounting vigorous campaigns on behalf of its own productions, advertised and distributed the Transatlantic picture with scant enthusiasm. Although
Rope
made an initial box-office splash in New York, receipts quickly dwindled across the nation. And there was no consolation overseas: in Canada the film was snipped; in England the Americanization was met with puzzlement (“it is hard to understand let alone justify the violence he has done to the text,” wrote the
Times
) or pillory (Lindsay Anderson said it was the “worst” of Hitchcock’s career); in France and Italy
Rope
was banned outright.
American critics split their verdict between superlatives and pejoratives. While Howard Barnes hailed
Rope
as “the work of a master” in the
New York Herald Tribune
, Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
called it “possibly one of the dullest pictures ever made.”
Ironically, Hitchcock had employed his single-take technique so smoothly, so imperceptibly, that it proved a negligible factor in reviews. The technique was a success, the film a failure. Yet in the end
Rope
succeeded on Hitchcock’s own terms, as one of those pictures in which he challenged everybody, including himself. It was, he foresaw, a film for posterity, which has marked it with an asterisk.
Rope
is a near masterwork, not without flaws, not for all tastes, but the singular experiment of a ceaselessly questing artist.
The fate of the first Transatlantic film, however, would spell trouble for the future of the fledgling company, and Hitchcock had to fight his sinking feelings about
Under Capricorn.
For the part of Sam Flusky, a former Irish stablehand the novel describes as a coarsely spoken “flabby bulk” of a man, Hitchcock sought Burt Lancaster, who he thought might credibly play a “horny, manure-smelling stable hand” locked into a fatal chemistry with Ingrid Bergman. But Lancaster cost too much, and for the moment he was booked up anyway—and Hitchcock knew that if Transatlantic’s schedule fell behind, the banks would start calling in their loans.
Enter Joseph Cotten. Hitchcock’s friend, he was available (“by arrangement with David O. Selznick”) for the part, though as a southern gentleman he didn’t smell much like manure, and he was leery of the Irish accent. Cotten would do his best, but he was “wrong” for the part, Hitchcock conceded later, and asking audiences to accept him as a former farmhand feared by civilized Sydney as a “violent brute” was asking too much.
The director needed at least one English star for a film purporting to be “Transatlantic” in appeal, so he went to lengths to woo Michael Wilding for the third-billed Adare, the newly arrived Irishman who falls in love with Mrs. Flusky. Wilding was a name only in England, where he’d served as a lightweight leading man opposite Anna Neagle. (“A British version of [Jimmy] Stewart” was how Marlene Dietrich thought of him.)
The English actor had his first meeting with Hitchcock in New York earlier in the spring. “Do you know New York well?” Hitchcock asked after they shook hands and ordered drinks in his St. Regis suite. When Wilding said it was his first visit, Hitchcock exclaimed, “Oh, we must remedy that.” With the director as guide they launched a three-day tour, from Harlem to the Empire State Building. The whirlwind ended with a ferry trip from Staten Island to the Statue of Liberty; Hitchcock gazed up at the national shrine that had starred in
Saboteur
, then handed over his field glasses to Wilding and remarked, “Take a look at the lady’s anatomy. Can’t you guess that a Frenchman had a hand in constructing those bosoms?”
Wilding enjoyed the sightseeing, but began to wonder when Hitchcock
would mention
Under Capricorn
, “or, even more important open up about his attitudes to filmmaking. But he did let one remark slip about his approach to directing: ‘The secret of suspense in a film,’ he told me, ‘is never to begin a scene at the beginning and never let it go on to the end.’ ”
At last Hitchcock did bring up the pending job, and Wilding got the part. Alone among the principals, Wilding would maintain enough good humor throughout filming to preserve their rapport. Like the character he played, the actor didn’t take himself too seriously. There wasn’t “enough humor” in
Under Capricorn
, Hitchcock ruefully told François Truffaut, but what little there was—on- and off-camera—came from Wilding.
The remaining cast and crew openings were filled out by English personnel. Margaret Leighton, prominent on the stage in the reborn Old Vic, was cast as Milly, the psychopathic maid who plies Mrs. Flusky with drugged drink; Jack Watling was Flusky’s secretary (a character more prominent in the book); Cecil Parker, ignoble in
The Lady Vanishes
, was the Governor.
As his cameraman Hitchcock secured one of England’s finest: Jack Cardiff, who’d served as an operator on
The Skin Game.
Cardiff had a reputation for his sensual color photography of Michael Powell films, and earlier in the year had picked up an Oscar for
Black Narcissus.
Hitchcock beamed as he screened
Rope
for Cardiff. The cameraman couldn’t help but admire the vision, and gamely accepted the “daunting challenge” of shooting
Under Capricorn
in single takes—all the while thinking it was “rather crazy.”
Ingrid Bergman’s salary was not the only drain on the budget, which would eventually soar above $2 million. Set design and construction costs rose beyond all estimates. The Flusky mansion boasted two floors and a half dozen rooms, and had to be built in sections that could slide open electronically to allow giant camera cranes to float through doorways and walls. It covered the largest Elstree stage.
Hitchcock’s cast was ready for action by mid-June, but construction lagged behind, and then a wildcat technicians’ strike forced an additional delay. The strike cost not only money but goodwill; when Ingrid Bergman first visited the set, she was stunned by the “hostile feeling” emanating from the crew.
The script also lagged, and it never jelled into a satisfying whole. Cronyn was inexperienced, and although James Bridie wrote for Hitchcock several times, he “was a semi-intellectual playwright and not in my opinion a very thorough craftsman,” the director reflected years later. The ending of
Under Capricorn
remained anticlimactic—a rare failure for Hitchcock. “On thinking it over later on,” said the director, “I realized that he [Bridie] always had very good first and second acts, but he never succeeded in ending his plays.”
July 1 arrived. The leads grew restless. Bergman, whose inflated (financial and script) importance had already thrown Hitchcock off stride, had time to kill. She ate, drank, gained weight—and she stewed. The Irish lilt required by Lady Flusky worried her. Characteristically, the director told Bergman not to worry, but to her, Hitchcock seemed worried about everything—the script, the set, the elaborate camera work—
except
her.
Bergman was in a personal and professional muddle. Her marriage, weakened by her love affairs, was falling apart. She had grown to loathe Hollywood’s factory-line production system, and was anxious to move in a new direction and reinvigorate her career. After seeing
Open City
and
Paisan
, she found herself swept away by the truthfulness of Italian neorealism. In April, she wrote a letter to filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, declaring her eagerness to break away during
Under Capricorn
and meet him and discuss the possibility of working with him in the future. These plans did not escape Hitchcock’s notice.
Joseph Cotten dined nightly with the Hitchcocks and Bergman. To him, Hitchcock seemed on edge, complaining about the rationing that was still in effect in England—and, it seemed, “all things British.”
Not until July 19 did Hitchcock call the first take of
Under Capricorn:
In-grid Bergman’s introductory scene—where Lady Flusky enters the dining room, barefoot, drunk, and disheveled, to meet her husband’s guests and exchanges meaningful dialogue with Michael Wilding about their common Irish past. Bergman sailed through, Irish accent and all. When Hitchcock called “Cut!” there was relieved applause.
Bowing to Bergman’s nervousness, Hitchcock shot the actress’s first scene without resorting to a maximum-length take. Bowing to Sidney Bernstein’s, the director had already modified his vision and started breaking up a few scenes for planned cuts and camera angles. But the very resistance Hitchcock had encountered while touting his fluid camera ideas had also hardened his resolve to shoot the key scenes in long takes.
The long takes were a “technical nightmare,” according to cameraman Jack Cardiff. As with
Rope
, all the actors’ movements had to be chalked on the floor, amid the miles of cable that lay underfoot. As the cast spoke their lines, the camera had to move and the walls disappear; electricians had to rush lamps on dollies into place, then scramble out of view. Hitchcock was kept busy shouting to the cast and crew “like the captain of a fishing fleet exhorting his crew to pull in the nets,” according to Michael Wilding.
Prolonged rehearsal was again necessary, once more testing his stars’ rusty memory skills. The extraordinary physical effort required by Hitchcock’s technique also taxed the crew’s patience, and technical glitches ruined
take after take. When the actors finally got a scene right, they had to perform it all over again, sans camera, to record the dialogue.
They would rehearse one day and shoot the next, recalled Cardiff. “Good recorded sound was impossible: the noise was indescribable. The electric crane lumbered through sets like a tank at Sebastopol, whole walls cracked open, furniture was whisked away by panting prop men and then frantically replaced in position as the crane made a return trip. The sound department did exceptionally well just to get a ‘guide track’ (picking up dialogue above the din so that the correct soundtrack could be matched to it later). When we had made a successful ten-minute ‘take,’ everyone had to leave the studio except the sound people, Hitch, the script girl, and the cast, who would then go through the motions with dialogue without the camera. Amazingly, by sliding the sound tape backwards and forwards it all came together.”
Under the circumstances, Hitchcock had to violate his own principles and pay more attention to the words than to the pictures—to the
sound
of the acting rather than the acting itself.