Authors: Patrick McGilligan
For Hitchcock, Stewart had already played mentor to a pair of killers in
Rope.
In the years ahead the folksy star would play even more dysfunctional roles. In
The Man Who Knew Too Much
he’d find himself at the mercy of an international conspiracy. In
Vertigo
he’d suffer a fear of heights, a nervous breakdown, and sexual obsession. Now, in
Rear Window
, he would be impotent in a plaster cast, with Grace Kelly almost sacrificing her life for him. Indeed,
Rear Window
could be “interpreted as a picture of impotency,” as Peter Bogdanovich suggested. “It could be, yes,” Hitchcock joked, “the impotency of plaster.”
But it’s easy to overlook that two of these films boast parts as romantic as any Stewart ever got to play. One of the most magical entrances in cinema is the shadow of Lisa (Grace Kelly) spreading over Jeff, as she silently enters his apartment and bends down to kiss him awake. Hitchcock made the kiss unique: a close-up lingering in seeming slow motion. “These are pulsations that I get by shaking the camera by hand,” Hitchcock explained to Truffaut, “or dolly backward and forward, or sometimes by doing both.”
Hitchcock finally found his American alter ego in Jimmy Stewart; while in Grace Kelly he discovered the perfect blonde to gaze upon rapturously—never murderously.
“Too talented, too beautiful, too sophisticated, too perfect,” Jeff complains about Lisa—and that was Grace Kelly. Perfect women were always perfectly dressed in a Hitchcock film, and just as the script started with the actress, the directing started with her look. Kelly probably looked perfect in dungarees, but for
Rear Window
Hitchcock told Edith Head she ought to evoke “a piece of Dresden china, something slightly untouchable.” Head would garner an Oscar nomination for her costuming of the film, including Kelly’s black-and-white dress, with beaded chiffon skirt, that she wears in her magical entrance; and the sheer peignoir she wore later (which Kelly herself thought made her look like a “peach parfait”).
Hitchcock even had ideas about the perfect bosom; aware that Kelly was on the flat-chested side, he decided that a pleat in her peignoir was contributing to that impression. “He was very sweet about it,” Kelly recalled. “He didn’t want to upset me, so he spoke quietly to Edith. And then everything had to stop.” Hitchcock thought perhaps she should don falsies, but alone with Head in her dressing room, Kelly cheated. “We quickly took it up here,” Kelly explained, “made some adjustments there, and I just did what I could and stood as straight as possible—without falsies. When I walked out onto the set Hitchcock looked at me and at Edith and said, ‘See what a difference they make?’ ”
Kelly could get away with almost anything with Hitchcock. His adoration of the actress was another thing he had in common with his leading man, his partner. “We were all so crazy about Grace Kelly,” James Stewart said. “Everybody just sat around and waited for her to come in the morning, so we could just look at her. She was kind to everybody, so considerate, just great, and so beautiful.” Assistant director Herbert Coleman concurred: “Every man who ever was lucky enough to work with Grace Kelly fell in love with her, me included. Even Hitchcock—although he only was in love with two people, and that was Alma and Pat.”
The affection the director had for his two stars was borne out in a filming experience that was carefree, and reflected in an ending to the actual film that is rare, if not unique, for Hitchcock.
After the killer Thorwald is caught, he is all but forgotten in
Rear Window
’s tidy coda, which is almost Capraesque in its feel-good optimism. The struggling composer is seen to have finally finished his pop song; the suicidal Miss Lonelyhearts has found a promising suitor; Miss Torso’s beau shows up (a good joke: he’s a too short nerd in army uniform); and the courtyard community springs back to life … even as Lisa, coyly turning the pages of a ladies’ magazine, watches over a dozing Jeff (with a new broken leg).
François Truffaut told Hitchcock that when he first watched
Rear Window
in his days as a critic, he found it “very gloomy, rather pessimistic and quite evil,” but after reseeing the film, in preparation for their talks, he found its vision “rather compassionate.” “What Stewart sees from his window,” said Truffaut, “is not horrible, but simply a display of human weaknesses and people in pursuit of happiness. Is that the way you look at it?”
“Definitely,” replied Hitchcock.
*
Always cunning, always operating on as many levels as he could plumb in a story, Hitchcock was at his most byzantine with
Rear Window.
Its obvious voyeurism was wrapped up with sympathetic humanism; its grisly crime story offered sharp-eyed character study and aching romance. Crafted entirely in the studio, claustrophobic in its staging,
Rear Window
was also Hitchcock’s greatest demonstration of Kuleshov’s theories of how editing affects perception—and by his own lights “my most cinematic” film. One of his simplest, “smallest” films, it is also among his most complex and universal.
Hitchcock’s rift with John Michael Hayes really began on their second film.
To Catch a Thief
was a 1952 novel by David Dodge, an American who wrote whimsical humor (
20,000 Leagues Behind the 8-Ball, How Lost Was My Weekend
), mystery adventure (
Plunder of the Sun, The Long Escape
), and volumes of travelogue. When Sidney Bernstein officially bowed out of future filmmaking, Transatlantic transferred the story rights—which had cost the company a mere $15,000—to Paramount, for $105,000.
The author lived part of the year on the Côte d’Azur, which gave the novel its setting. The first attraction for the director was undoubtedly France and the Riviera, among the Hitchcocks’ favorite places in the world, which they couldn’t visit often enough in film or in real life. Dodge’s book also touched on the internecine politics of the French Resistance, which had intrigued the director before, in
Bon Voyage
and
Aventure Malgache
(though treatment of the subject is light in the book—and even lighter in the film).
To Catch a Thief
tells the tale of a notorious cat burglar named John Robie, nicknamed Le Chat (the Cat), who during the war forsakes crime and becomes a Resistance hero, then retires to live comfortably on the French Riviera. A rash of high-society jewel thefts that imitate his honorable methods (“he was never known to employ violence or carry a weapon”) forces the Cat to seek the help of old comrades, stake out likely targets, and set traps in order to catch the copycat and clear himself with police.
In such a synopsis the novel sounds quite similar to Hitchcock’s film, but in fact the book and film are entirely dissimilar. As the author himself wryly admitted some years after the film was made, “All that survived [of the book] in the end were the title, the names of some of the characters and the copyright, which was mine.”
Once again Hayes had the luxury of writing for specific stars, and tailoring the characters to their personalities. And when Hitchcock learned that Hayes had never been to the Riviera, he sent the writer and his wife on a quick trip there while postproduction continued on
Rear Window.
The Hayeses stayed at the Carlton Hotel in Nice, familiarizing themselves with a primary setting of the story. By the time Hayes returned to Hollywood, Hitchcock was ready to “get involved in the script work every day, which had not been true of
Rear Window
,” as Hayes explained to Donald Spoto. “The work was a pleasure for most of the time. What made us a good team was that he had such brilliant technique and knowledge of the visual, and ego and conviction; and I think I was able to bring him a warmth of characterization.”
Robie (Cary Grant), the sexy Texas tourist Frances “Francie” Stevens (Grace Kelly), her world-weary mother (Jessie Royce Landis), the enigmatic French girl Danielle (Brigitte Auber), Robie’s ex-Resistance pal Bertani (Charles Vanel), and the insurance agent H. H. Huston (John Williams)—all these characters are present in David Dodge’s novel.
*
But Hitchcock would fiddle with them all, ratcheting up the romance between Robie and Francie, and injecting the plot with more suspense and comedy than Dodge had brought to the book.
Hitchcock and Hayes held almost daily script conferences through the late winter and early spring of 1954. Frequently these meetings were at Hitchcock’s house, where the director relaxed in a sweater, or an open shirt with no tie. Their lunch was prepared and served by the director’s German cook. One scene in
To Catch a Thief
takes place at Robie’s villa, where Robie (Cary Grant) and Huston (John Williams) share lunch and a humorous disquisition on quiche Lorraine, served by Robie’s cook. That scene was inspired by a quiche Lorraine lunch served at Bellagio Road.
The quiche scene, though, also spurred friction between the director and writer. Hitchcock was “preoccupied with strangulation,” according to Hayes, and he wanted the scene to end with the insurance man praising the delicate crust of the quiche, and the “exceedingly light touch” of Robie’s cook, who quietly serves it around. Robie concurs, adding, “She strangled a German general once, without a sound.”
Hayes objected to such morbid comedy, but Hitchcock said too bad; he was the boss, and the line stayed in. The scene was pure Hitchcock—and also served as one of several that expanded on the role of the insurance agent, which he had earmarked for a favorite actor.
**
Hitchcockian flavoring of a different kind was sprinkled over the scene where Robie escorts Francie down a hotel corridor. Though she has previously evinced little interest in him, when she stops at the door to her room
she suddenly turns and passionately kisses him. According to Hayes, Hitchcock insisted that one night in New York he was walking Grace Kelly back to her hotel room, when she kissed him in just such a fashion. That’s all—just a perfect kiss, and then the door closed. True, Joan Fontaine does much the same with Cary Grant at the doorstep in
Suspicion
; but apocryphal or not, the Hitchcock anecdote went into the script.
Hayes always insisted that Mrs. Hitchcock never sat in on a single one of their conferences, or ventured any suggestion in his presence; that the director never said anything that expressly reflected his wife’s opinion, except once: “Alma liked your script.” It was his highest compliment—though people didn’t always take it well.
Mrs. Hitchcock was busy these days being a grandmother; Pat Hitchcock had given birth to her first daughter, Mary Alma O’Connell, in 1953, followed by Teresa (called Tere) and Kathleen. Hitchcock’s letters didn’t often agonize about the reviews of his films, but he fretted consistently over Pat’s health during each of her pregnancies, and he doted on his grandchildren.
If Mrs. Hitchcock was no longer working openly on scripts, she was still quietly reading them, and offering advice on key scenes. According to Herbert Coleman, the Hitchcocks were very precise about settings they knew from experience, which they wanted for the backdrops in the south of France. It was Alma, the driver in their marriage, who took the lead on mapping out the Grand Corniche sequence, where Francie and Robie are pursued in her car by Sûreté nationale agents. Alma had the curves of the road memorized, according to Coleman, and told him where the second unit should perch on the perpendicular cliffs overlooking the small town of Eze.
The car-chase sequence excited Mrs. Hitchcock so much, according to Coleman, that she joined one of their Sunday afternoon meetings, outlining the action shot by shot. She suggested photographing much of the Grand Corniche chase from a helicopter flying over the two cars racing along the high road—an audacious idea in those days. Alma then brain-stormed the whole continuity: Francie driving wildly, Robie nervously clutching his knees, the screeching wheels, the sharp curves of the road, and the plunging precipices. The scene would reprise (even improve on) similar ones from
Suspicion
and
Notorious.
Hitchcock said less than usual, just sat there beaming at his wife.
The director came into the office the next Monday morning in an exultant mood. Mrs. Hitchcock, he told everybody, had diagrammed out the best scene in the picture. Later, when
To Catch a Thief was
released, an interviewer asked Hayes explicitly about the scene, and he commented innocently, “I got carsick writing it.” Recalled Doc Ericksen: “This pissed off Hitchcock pretty good.” The director walked around the office, shaking
his head. “Alma and I did that,” he protested. “We worked on it all Sunday afternoon.”
But the full script never achieved the same rounded feeling as
Rear Window.
In one sense, it was never really completed—for even after Hayes finished the draft they took to France, where there were endless alterations dictated by the budget, location, censorship, and the actors.
For example, Hayes’s script called for a wild chase through Nice, with Robie dodging police amid a carnival procession of floats, ultimately climbing inside the head of King Neptune. As he had done with the Lord Mayor’s Show for
Sabotage
, the director expected to film the actual annual carnival parade, and later re-create key incidents as inserts inside the studio. But after Paramount placed a $3 million ceiling on the budget, the carnival chase seemed too expensive; so in mid-April, on the eve of departure for France, Hitchcock simply deleted the sequence. The film’s flower-market chase was cheaper (and tamer).
And to no one’s great surprise, the Production Code had expressed repeated alarm over the script. The Code’s officials fretted over the beach-wear, Robie’s unapologetic criminal past, the persistent sexual innuendo in the dialogue, the scene where Robie drops a casino chip down the cleavage of a woman gambler, and the “pointed” symbolism of the fireworks exploding as Francie seduces Robie—which was deemed “totally unacceptable.” Down the line, Hitchcock promised, he’d resolve it all to the censors’ satisfaction.
In France, the script would have to adjust to the censorship concerns, the locale and climate, and the expected interpolations of an international cast—not to mention Cary Grant, who could be counted on to fool around with his lines.