Authors: Patrick McGilligan
MacPhail came to Hollywood shortly after Christmas, staying at a hotel near the Hitchcocks on Wilshire Boulevard. Hitchcock and his old friend and story editor then took the lead in revamping the 1934 film for James Stewart, whose involvement gave the project momentum. Stewart had agreed to star in the remake, and he had set aside a block of time in the summer of 1955. Leslie Banks had been excellent as the “man who knows too much” in the original version, but Banks was hardly magnetic, and that film was more of an ensemble piece. The new script had to create more of a star part for Stewart—Hitchcock’s partner.
As Stewart was only credible as an American, Hitchcock decided to incorporate the star’s familiar persona and turn the British tourist couple of the original into the McKennas, an “old married couple” from the Midwest. Knowing already that he wanted to shoot scenes in Marrakech, Hitchcock and MacPhail made Ben McKenna (Stewart) a physician fresh
from a medical conference in Paris, who takes his family along on a sentimental side trip to North Africa, where he served during World War II. Just as in the original, the McKennas witness the murder of a spy, a Frenchman who has befriended them; their child is kidnapped, and they are propelled into an international conspiracy and a race against time.
The first
Man Who Knew Too Much
had capitalized on the headlines and tensions of the early 1930s, especially the rise of Hitler and Nazism. For the remake, it made sense for Hitchcock to draw on the political fissures of the 1950s. Germany was fast being rehabilitated, and the Soviet Union loomed as the new totalitarian evil in the world. Although he disapproved of the excesses of the Cold War, Hitchcock felt increasingly at home in Eisenhower’s America, and the second
Man Who Knew Too Much
marked his continuing shift toward anti-Communism.
Hitchcock had devoured the news of Klaus Fuchs’s confessions of espionage in 1951, which was followed by the disappearance of Fuchs’s collegue—Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo—and Pontecorvo’s presumed defection to Russia. Pontecorvo was a naturalized British citizen and admitted Communist sympathizer: it was his example that inspired Hitchcock and MacPhail to substitute British Communists for the implicitly German ring of kidnappers and assassins of the original film.
MacPhail—who, though basically apolitical, scorned British Communists—reinforced this drift. His notes from January and February 1955 indicate that the shaping of the remake was also influenced by the crisis in Hungary. Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who rose to power in 1953, replacing a Stalinist, was behaving in unexpectedly liberal fashion, introducing nationalist policies that alarmed his Soviet sponsors. Out of this Hitchcock and MacPhail developed the idea that a Nagy-type prime minister might be targeted for death by the Russians during a trip to London, with the deed manipulated to look as though it had been ordered by the Americans. Once again the assassination attempt would occur during a symphony performance at the Albert Hall; once again it would be foiled by the mother’s scream—a sequence from the original that Hitchcock felt he couldn’t improve upon. (Among the attractions of the remake, for Hitchcock, was not only the chance to shoot on location in Marrakech, but to remake the orchestra climax, in color and with hundreds of extras, in the actual Albert Hall—two impossibilities in the parsimonious Gaumont era.)
In February, the two friends hammered out other key plot points. This included the new opening in Marrakech, where, on a bus, the McKennas’ son, eight-year-old Hank, accidentally yanks off a Muslim woman’s veil, nearly provoking a riot among the passengers. The riot is forestalled by a mysterious stranger, Louis Bernard—a secret agent who has mistaken the McKennas for the British Communist couple he is trying to trace.
As early as February, Hitchcock anticipated that Doris Day would be
playing Jo McKenna, Stewart’s wife—and already the notion had emerged to make Jo a retired, world-famous vocalist. MacPhail actually wrote the first version of the scene that replaced the shoot-out in the original, with Jo rescuing Hank in the (implicitly Soviet-bloc) embassy by singing a song she has taught him. Hank reveals his hiding place by whistling the melody back in reply—an idea Hitchcock and MacPhail consciously borrowed from a Richard the Lionheart legend.
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Together, Hitchcock and MacPhail also came up with an alternative to the quasi-comic sequence in the original where Leslie Banks and Hugh Wakefield visit a sinister dentist looking for clues, and wind up at a sun worshipers’ temple—a blind for the gang’s hideout. They sketched out a scene that would send Ben McKenna in search of “Ambrose Chappell,” a name whispered by the dying Louis Bernard. Alone and paranoid on London streets, Ben hears the sound of menacing footsteps, but it’s a false alarm—and so is “Ambrose Chappell,” who turns out to be a taxidermist without the slightest inkling of spies.
Meanwhile, an agitated Jo is stuck in a hotel room with old show-business cronies when she suddenly realizes that “Ambrose Chapel” is a London church (more Protestant than in the original film), where the British couple holding her boy hostage are posing as clergy. And off she rushes to the rescue. … All this was in the greenhouse by the time John Michael Hayes, who had been kept busy on another Paramount project, joined the script in late February. Hayes stated in later interviews that he never even saw the original film. However, to bring Hayes “up to speed on the story,” reported film scholar Bill Krohn, “Hitchcock rented a 16 mm copy of the first
Man Who Knew Too Much
and screened it for him.”
Whether or not Hayes ever saw the original, Hitchcock certainly sat him down for one of his patented walk-throughs, spieling out the new Americanized version, including all the ideas he and MacPhail had incorporated so far. Hayes claimed in later interviews that he never read anything MacPhail had written down—one of the reasons he believed MacPhail “never did any writing.” It was a misunderstanding that would fester over time.
Hayes’s draft—though incomplete, and breaking off after the Ambrose Chapel sequence—was ready for Hitchcock’s perusal inside of a month. “To say that Hayes fleshed out the characters would be to slight his contribution,” Krohn noted. “Up until this point there were no characters, only an increasingly refined structure for provoking suspense worked out
by a couple of veteran plot wizards. Hayes brought Ben, Jo and Hank to life, although Hitchcock was less satisfied with his handling of Louis Bernard, the Draytons, the very English Secret Service man and other details of the film’s foreign locales.”
According to Krohn, Hayes’s treatment of the McKennas’ marriage was perhaps “his most important contribution” to the script. Hayes had Jo yearning to return to the stage now that Hank was growing up, with the couple (“so secure that they can afford to quarrel,” according to MacPhail’s original description) bickering about an offer she has received for a comeback. Contradictorily, Jo also hints that she wouldn’t mind having another child. Hitchcock, however, found the conflict between career and home life “old hat,” and urged Hayes to make the marriage, wherever possible, “satirical and comic.”
Hitchcock kept trying to insert comedy into the remake. He wasn’t satisfied with the soap-opera quality of certain scenes either, and judiciously edited a key scene in the script that Krohn attributed to Hayes: Ben tricking Jo into taking a sedative before telling her about Hank’s kidnapping. “In Hayes’s first draft,” Krohn wrote, “Jo tells off Ben in no uncertain terms for drugging his own wife, sobbing as she loses consciousness that she hates him with all her heart for what he has done. When filming, Hitchcock did away with all the hand-wringing, rightly judging it to be ‘melodramatic,’ but kept the heart of the scene.”
The director was a genius at dividing his attention, but he was extremely busy in the spring of 1955, and the script wasn’t yet completed by the time he left for London in late April. Hitchcock left behind notes “often very specific, indicating the need to change a single word, an entire speech, a description of action, or a camera direction,” according to Steven DeRosa.
But on April 20, 1955, before Hitchcock went to London, there was a significant interruption in his daily routine. Mrs. Hitchcock was already an American citizen, and more unabashed than her husband in her enthusiasm for America. In the 1950s, along with many Americans, she switched to the Republican Party and voted for Dwight Eisenhower for president. Hitchcock also admired the former general, although there is no evidence he ever voted, and in the 1960s, associates say, he switched back to admiring Democrats—Kennedy and Johnson.
Sidney Bernstein hosted a dinner in London in 1955, with Hitchcock and Charles Chaplin, in which the conversation turned on the subject of patriotism. Chaplin, also a native Englishman, had been hounded out of Hollywood by anti-Communists and morality crusaders; while traveling to London for the premiere of
Limelight
in 1952, the gentleman tramp had
had his passport voided by the attorney general. Chaplin now said he was glad he had never adopted U.S. citizenship; involuntarily exiled, he considered himself a citizen of the world. Hitchcock said that although he didn’t condone what had happened to Chaplin, if a person was going to live and work in a country, he ought to accept the full responsibility of citizenship.
Lew Wasserman had been urging Hitchcock to become an American citizen—after all, there were tax benefits; and over the years Mrs. Hitchcock also had repeatedly tried to convince her husband to take the plunge. Everyone recognized that it was a sensitive issue with him; whenever he was pressed on the issue, he begged off with the halfhearted excuse that he couldn’t find the time on his crowded schedule. “If only we could get a judge to come to the studio and swear me in,” Hitchcock would say.
On April 20, however, Herbert Coleman drove him downtown to take the oath. Hitchcock and his assistant producer usually amused themselves while driving with word games, giving the director a chance to show off his Cockney rhyming slang. Today, though, Hitchcock gazed out the window somberly, saying nothing. “Hitch, are you having second thoughts?” Coleman asked. “No, Herbie,” he replied, “but the Hitchcock name goes back almost to the beginning of the British Empire and you can imagine what a serious thing it is for me to break away.”
In downtown Los Angeles the courtroom was thronged with prospective Americans, and Hitchcock held up his hand and gave his pledge of allegiance while standing among a crowd of immigrants. One of the director’s MCA agents, Arthur Park, was one of Hitchcock’s two official witnesses; the other was longtime friend Joseph Cotten.
“You’re like an American character in an English movie,” Grace Kelly tells Cary Grant in
To Catch a Thief
, mocking his composite nationality. In England in his youth, Hitchcock had thought of himself as an “Americophile,” but nowadays he was like an English character in a Hollywood movie. He was proud to be American, yet English at his core.
The name Alfred Hitchcock was already famous by 1955, especially in England and America, where his face was easily recognized. But now the seeds of even greater fame were being planted—a wider recognition that would make Hitchcock, like Chaplin, a citizen of the world, and the director who surpassed all others as the real star of his films.
One of these seeds had been sown during the filming of
To Catch a Thief.
The south of France is where the influential cineastes of Paris first flocked to make the director’s acquaintance. Paramount had enterprising publicists in Paris, as it happened, and they encouraged the French to meet and study the man as they studied his films.
The formidable Jean-Luc Godard had written, of
Strangers on a Train
, that it was imbued with “lofty ambition,” and classed Hitchcock with Lang and Murnau—hailing him as “the most German of transatlantic directors.”
Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, two enthusiasts with dreams of becoming filmmakers themselves, attended a press gathering for the director in a Paris hotel room in 1954, and then later visited the studio at St. Maurice, where Hitchcock was supervising the postsynchronization of
To Catch a Thief.
Chabrol and Truffaut interviewed the director for
Cahiers du Cinéma
, an important new film journal; so did André Bazin, an influential critic and author of a book about Orson Welles, who journeyed from Paris to Nice to watch Hitchcock direct the flower-market scene with Cary Grant and John Williams. In the summer of 1956, Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, included a dozen of the rarest Hitchcock titles (including several silents) in a monthlong retrospective of British cinema. In September of that year,
Cahiers du Cinéma
would accord Hitchcock the rare honor of devoting an entire issue to him.
Initially, it must be said, Hitchcock took a bemused attitude toward his “intense” French acolytes, who primarily focused on the underappreciated artistry of his Hollywood films. The director was flattered, but not overwhelmed. Of course he knew as well as anyone that there were subtleties and levels to his films. But Hitchcock was truly astonished by “every last morsel of meaning,” in the words of Bazin, that the French had managed to wring out of his work. “Sometimes I wonder if they are talking about me” at all, he liked to say with a wink.
Truffaut, for example, insisted that the snakelike bracelet Lilian Hall-Davis wears as a gift from her secret admirer in
The Ring
must be a reference to original sin. Perhaps, Hitchcock shrugged. When Truffaut insisted that
The Trouble with Harry
was shot in the fall, the season of decay, for symbolic reasons, Hitchcock had to agree. “I couldn’t very well disillusion him, could I?”
No matter how much Bazin probed, he had to concede that Hitchcock’s bemusement and astonishment seemed sincere. Bazin, in between setups that day in Nice, desperately tried to persuade the director to discuss the “constant and profound message” that French cineastes had detected in his life’s work. Hitchcock preferred to talk about technical means and methods. Bazin wanted to talk about art; Hitchcock replied, in Bazin’s words, that “it was easy to make an ‘artistic’ film, but the real difficulty lay in making a good commercial film.”