Hitchcock at the Source

The Auteur as Adapter

R. Barton Palmer, David Boyd, R. Barton Palmer, David Boyd

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781438437484, 9781438437491
• eBook ISBN: 9781438437507
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The adaptation of literary works to the screen has been the subject of increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, critical and scholarly attention in recent years, but most studies of the subject have continued to privilege literature over film by taking the literary sources as their starting point. Rather than examining the processes by which a particular author has been adapted into a diversity of films by different filmmakers, the contributors in Hitchcock at the Source consider the processes by which a varied range of literary sources have been transformed by one filmmaker into an impressive body of work. Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock transformed a variety of literary sources—novels, plays, short stories—into what is arguably the most coherent and distinctive (narratively, stylistically, and thematically) of all directorial oeuvres. After an introduction surveying the nature and diversity of Hitchcock's sources and locating the current volume in the context of theoretical work on adaptation, nineteen original essays range across the entirety of Hitchcock's career, from the silent period through to the 1970s. In addition to addressing the process of adaptation in particular films in terms of plot and character, the contributors also consider less obvious matters of tone, technique, and ideology; Hitchcock's manipulation of the conventions of literary and dramatic genres such as spy fiction and romantic comedy; and more general problems, such as Hitchcock's shift from plays to novels as his major sources in the course of the 1930s.

1

THOMAS LEITCH

Hitchcock from Stage to Page

THE PLEASURE GARDEN (1925), THE FIRST feature Alfred Hitchcock directed at Gainsborough Pictures, was based on a novel. So was his third film, The Lodger (1926), and his ninth, The Manxman (1929). In the context of Hitchcock's early work, however, these three films are anomalies. Although The Mountain Eagle (1926), The Ring (1927), and Champagne (1928) were produced from original screenplays, all the other silent films Hitchcock directed at Gainsborough or British International Pictures—Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmer's Wife (1928), Blackmail (1929)—were based on theatrical plays rather than novels. Once Hitchcock began making films with synchronized soundtracks at British International, only Murder! (1930), its German-language version Mary (1930), and Rich and Strange (1931) were based on novels. All the others—the synch-sound version of Blackmail (1929), along with Juno and the Paycock (1930), The Skin Game (1931), Number Seventeen (1932), and Waltzes from Vienna (1933), produced by Tom Arnold for Gaumont-British Pictures—were adaptations of plays. All told, eight of the first sixteen films Hitchcock directed (counting the two versions of Blackmail and the two versions of Murder! as one film each) were based on theatrical sources.

There is nothing unusual about these proportions. Hitchcock grew up only a few miles from the greatest theatrical district in the world, and he was an avid playgoer from his youth. When he came to direct films, he undoubtedly found that plays offered source material more readily adaptable to the cinema than novels, since they were already conceived as an evening's entertainment whose characters and plots were dramatized by conventionally coded external action. It might seem odd that theatrical adaptations would play so large a role in Hitchcock's silent filmography, where spoken language was replaced with more sparing intertitles. But they had played an equally prominent role in the earlier films on which Hitchcock had worked as a designer of intertitles, art director, scenarist, assistant director, or codirector. Two of these earlier films were based on short stories, seven on plays, seven on novels, and two on theatrical adaptations of novels. Contemporaneous films such as Ernst Lubitsch's Lady Windermere's Fan (1925) and F. W. Murnau's Last Laugh (1927) showed, after all, that silent films could dispense with the sparkling dialogue of their theatrical originals, in Lubitsch's case, or with any dialogue at all, in Murnau's. Small wonder, then, that Hitchcock's early work “draws from novel and theatre in equal measure” (Barr 14).

The wonder is what happened afterward, beginning with the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was based on an original screenplay by Charles Bennett and D. B. Wyndham Lewis, who took as their inspiration the Bulldog Drummond stories of H. C. McNeile. The film's highly episodic structure marked a break with the more tightly woven theatrical models of Easy Virtue, The Farmer's Wife, Juno and the Paycock, and The Skin Game. And this break became decisive with The 39 Steps (1935), based on an already picaresque espionage novel that became in the hands of Hitchcock and his scenarists Charles Bennett, Alma Reville, and Ian Hay even more episodic. Every one of the remaining films Hitchcock directed in England—Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1937), Young and Innocent (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Jamaica Inn (1939)—was based on a novel rather than a play. The only partial exceptions are Sabotage, which drew its inspiration from both Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel and his 1923 play of the same title, and Secret Agent, whose credits identify it as “From the play by Campbell Dixon, based on the novel Ashenden [1928] by W. Somerset Maugham.” Hitchcock elaborated the relationship in an interview Film Weekly published on 30 May 1936: “Secret Agent consisted of two of the Ashenden stories, ‘The Traitor’ and ‘The Hairless Mexican,’ and also a play written by Campbell Dixon. We switched the two stories round, made Caypor the innocent victim, turned the Greek into an American, introduced a train smash for dramatic purposes, and obtained the love interest from the play” (qtd. in Barr 236). Even though Dixon's play may never have been published or produced, Secret Agent, together with The Lodger, Sabotage, and The Manxman, which was based on Pete, Hall Caine's 1908 theatrical adaptation of his 1894 novel, is notable as one of four Hitchcock films based on novels, or in Maugham's case cycles of stories, that were dramatized for the stage before they were adapted to the cinema.

Once Hitchcock had begun to rely mainly on novels rather than plays as source material for his films, he never looked back. Only three of the films Hitchcock directed after Secret Agent—Rope (1948), I Confess (1952), and Dial M for Murder (1953)—are based on plays. Of the remaining films, Foreign Correspondent (1940) is based loosely on a memoir; The Wrong Man (1957) on a magazine article; Rear Window (1954) and The Birds (1963) on short stories; Saboteur (1942), Aventure Malgache (1944), Notorious (1946), North by Northwest (1959), and Torn Curtain (1966) on original screenplays; Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), and Bon Voyage (1944) on stories written directly for the screen; and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), though once again crediting a story by Bennett and Wyndham Lewis, on an original screenplay drawing primarily on Hitchcock's 1934 film. All the others—fifteen of the thirty-two films Hitchcock directed after coming to America in 1939—were based on novels, five times as many as were based on plays.

This move from theatrical to novelistic adaptations is even more pronounced if it is defined as a move from adapting works from the stage to adapting works on the page (novels, short stories, stories written directly for film studios without going through an earlier theatrical incarnation). Not only does Hitchcock shift from depending primarily on theatrical sources to depending primarily on prose fiction, but that shift corresponds precisely with his identification in the later 1930s with the thriller as his chosen medium. Of the four thrillers Hitchcock directed before the 1934 Man Who Knew Too Much, two (The Lodger and Murder!) were based on novels and two (Blackmail and Number Seventeen) on plays. But most of Hitchcock's early theatrical adaptations are forgotten except by Hitchcock scholars. In committing himself to adapting novels and stories rather than plays, Hitchcock seems to have found the creative voice he maintained had eluded him in the adaptations of Juno and the Paycock and Waltzes from Vienna. Although all the three later films he based on theatrical sources—Rope, I Confess, and Dial M for Murder—are highly characteristic, none of them is among his most highly regarded. In a fundamental sense, the Hitchcock acknowledged around the world as the Master of Suspense is also a master of novelistic adaptation.

Hitchcock's increasing dependence on novels as source material for his films is not surprising, especially after his move to America. Although the United States offered a theatrical culture nearly as rich in its way as England's, that culture was based in New York, three thousand miles from the Hitchcocks' home in California. By his own account, the director rarely attended the theater once he had settled in America. His contact with Broadway was mostly limited to the paternal eye he cast over his daughter Patricia's theatrical training and his affinity for writers familiar with the theater, from playwright Samuel Taylor, who worked on the screenplays for Vertigo (1958) and Topaz (1969), to critic John Russell Taylor, who became Hitchcock's authorized biographer. At the same time, Hollywood showed an increasing interest after 1940 in adapting novels that had not yet been adapted to the theater. Hitchcock's shift from stage to page in search of material for his films could doubtless be paralleled among many other American-based filmmakers once the demand for theatrical material and theatrically trained writers ushered in by the arrival of synchronized sound had crested. What remains surprising is Hitchcock's continued fondness for source material for whose customary strengths he had so little use, material that offered enduring challenges for filmmakers in general and Hitchcock in particular.

An obvious advantage novels are commonly observed to have over plays, for example, is their more generous scope. Antony and Cleopatra and The Skin of Our Teeth apart, most novels feature larger casts of characters developing over longer periods of time in a broader range of locations than most plays, offering filmmakers a wider range of photogenic backgrounds. But although Hitchcock films from The Manxman to To Catch a Thief (1955) attest to the director's interest in eye-catching location shots and films from Foreign Correspondent to North by Northwest to his ability to handle large casts, most of his films focus on small groups of characters in circumscribed locations. The contrast between North by Northwest and Torn Curtain, on the one hand, and the series of James Bond adaptations starring Sean Connery that they bookend, on the other, is instructive. Compared to the Bond films, these two spy films, neither of them based on a novel, take place in a much more restricted set of locations and shun pictorial effects. When Hitchcock adapts the plays Rope's End (1929) and Dial “M” for Murder (1952), he does not open them out in the fashion prescribed by adaptation textbooks, but rather emphasizes their sense of claustrophobic enclosure by confining the action to a single set, imposing in the case of Rope the additional discipline of shooting only in long takes that generally imply a single, unbroken, eighty-minute shot. If Hitchcock's increasing reliance on novelistic sources reflects a special affinity his films have with novels, then it is not the obvious sort of affinity that depends on the pictorialism of John Ford or the epic scale of Cecil B. DeMille. Indeed, the fact that Hitchcock developed two other one-set films from nontheatrical sources, Lifeboat from an original screen story and Rear Window from Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story “It Had to Be Murder,” suggests that he was less attracted to prose fiction by the freedom it provided than by the challenges it offered.

Many of these challenges have been catalogued in general studies of adaptation. Novels are longer than movies, so adapting novels to the screen requires extensive pruning of subsidiary characters, subplots, and long speeches. Novels are normally more discursive than plays, so adapting them to the movies involves imposing tighter structural constraints than the form of the novel demands. Novels abound in generalizations, accounts of habitual actions, and descriptive passages that must be either lost or translated into the very different expositional strategies of cinema. Novels are designed to be absorbed discontinuously, at each reader's own speed; they are free to weave dense webs of signification through which readers can move at their leisure, free to ponder or ignore specific implications. Novels and movies mark tone and style in ways that are often parallel but never quite congruent. Novels can draw on an extensive variety of verb tenses; movies are restricted to the present tense. The verbal signifiers in novels communicate to their readers by means of concepts that require abstract thinking to assimilate, the visual signifiers in movies by percepts that require no such abstract thought. Hence even the visual and auditory images in novels that might seem to make them most cinematic operate differently in novels than in movies, in which every picture and sound is a potential locus of meaning. Novels tell, and movies show.

Some of these differences are truisms of adaptation theory; some are canards that have been repeatedly debunked (e.g., by Cardwell, Leitch, and Hutcheon); some contradict each other. Instead of using Hitchcock's adaptations to test these general principles in general terms, I wish to consider a narrower range of challenges the adaptation of novels, and short stories as well, posed to Hitchcock in particular. Hitchcock unfailingly presented himself as unintimidated by his literary sources, partly no doubt because they were so often subliterary. François Truffaut, interviewing Hitchcock, observed that “[y]our own works include a great many adaptations, but mostly they are popular or light entertainment novels, which are so freely refashioned in your own manner that they ultimately become a Hitchcock creation.” When he suggested that “many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment,” Hitchcock tartly responded, “I'll have no part of that!” and explained that he had no desire to join “Hollywood directors [who] distort literary masterpieces,” and added that he paid little attention to his alleged sources anyway: “What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema” (70–71).

Most Hitchcock scholars, echoing authors such as Robert Bloch, have greeted the last of these claims with skepticism, and with good reason. Murder! borrows much of its dialogue nearly verbatim from Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson's novel Enter Sir John (1928). Thanks in large part to David O. Selznick's intervention, Rebecca (1940) is equally faithful to Daphne du Maurier's novel. Even Spellbound (1945), whose source novel, Francis Beeding's House of Dr. Edwardes (1928), Hitchcock dismissed as “melodramatic and quite weird” (Truffaut 163), takes from Beeding two central ideas: the criminal who disposes of the director of a mental asylum (by abduction in Beeding, by murder in Hitchcock) and takes over the position himself, and the hero rescued by the love of a female therapist. It is clearly true, however, that once he saw himself as having graduated from close stage adaptations like those of Juno and the Paycock and The Skin Game, Hitchcock treated his sources with increasing freedom. He lightened the tone of John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) when he filmed The 39 Steps, Conrad's The Secret Agent when he filmed Sabotage, and Victor Canning's Rainbird Pattern (1972) when he filmed Family Plot. He changed both the proportions and the ending of David Dodge's To Catch a Thief (1952) when he filmed it in 1955, extending both the opening and the closing scenes into major sequences and having his hero turn the real thief over to the authorities instead of covering up for her. He introduced new murderers into Josephine Tey's Shilling for Candles (1936) when he adapted it as Young and Innocent—Tey's murderer does not even appear in the film—and Selwyn Jepson's Outrun the Constable (1948) when he filmed it as Stage Fright (1950). He added romantic subplots to each of the adaptations he made between 1935 and 1939: The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, The Lady Vanishes, Jamaica Inn. His adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 1952 story “The Birds,” perhaps the only Hitchcock adaptation fairly described by the procedure he indicated to Truffaut, borrows only the story's central idea—a series of apparently unmotivated but apocalyptic attacks by masses of birds against humans—while changing its characters, setting, scope, duration, and tone.

Readers skeptical of Hitchcock's claims to have forgotten all about the book so that he can start to create cinema will rightly be suspicious of many of the claims of my previous paragraph as well, for its repeatedly active singular verbs (“Hitchcock treated … he lightened … he changed … he introduced … he added”) ascribes a decisive agency to Hitchcock that is more properly shared among many of his collaborators. The Lady Vanishes, the film whose mixture of humor and suspense brought Hitchcock to Selznick's attention, is perhaps the most influential of all his English films on both the course of his own career and his distinctive contribution to the thriller. Yet Frank Launder claimed that he had written the screenplay together with Sidney Gilliat substantially as it was eventually filmed “not [for] Hitchcock at all but Roy William Neill” (Brown 89) before Hitchcock expressed an interest in the adaptation after the original production was abandoned. It seems likely that early and late in his career, the screenwriters Hitchcock acknowledged as his closest collaborators did much of the work of shaping adaptations for which he was increasingly ready to take credit.

Charles Barr has done a great deal not only to illuminate the contributions specific screenwriters made to the films Hitchcock directed in England but to provide a useful way of framing the distinctive nature of the problem of authorship in Hitchcock. He quotes a representative assessment of the problem by David Sterritt: “Although [Hitchcock] never wrote his own screenplays … he exercised great care in shaping the screenplays that others wrote for him. He was able to do this because of the extraordinary degree of personal power he gained in the film industry … As much as any major filmmaker ever has, he channeled the talent of his collaborators and the temper of his times into coherent narrative/aesthetic patterns dictated by his own deepest instincts” (2).

Acknowledging the force of this assessment, Barr adds an important disclaimer: “It deals with the phenomenon that Hitchcock became. I deal here with the En...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction: Recontextualizing Hitchcock's Authorship
• 1. Hitchcock from Stage to Page
• 2. Hitchcock and the Three Pleasure Gardens
• 3. Hitchcock and The Manxman: A Victorian Bestseller on the Silent Screen
• 4. Blackmail: Charles Bennett and the Decisive Turn
• 5. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934): Alfred Hitchcock, John Buchan, and the Thrill of the Chase
• 6. Secret Agent: Coming in from the Cold Maugham Style
• 7. The Lady Vanishes, but She Won't Go Away
• 8. The Trouble with Rebecca
• 9. Depth Psychology on the Surface: Hitchcock's Spellbound
• 10. Unrecognizable Origins: “The Song of the Dragon” and Notorious
• 11. Morbid Psychologies and So Forth: The Fine Art of Rope
• 12. Under a Distemperate Star: Under Capricorn
• 13. Bruno's Game, or the Case of the Sardonic Psychopath
• 14. Alfred Hitchcock Presents Dial M for Murder: The Submerged Televisuality of a Stage-to-Screen Adaptation
• 15. The Author of This Claptrap: Cornell Woolrich, Alfred Hitchcock, and Rear Window
• 16. To Catch a Thief: Light Reading on a Dark Topic
• 17. Woman as Death: Vertigo as Source
• 18. Psycho: Trust the Tale
• 19. Thirteen Ways of Looking at The Birds
• 20. A Brief Anatomy of Family Plot
• Appendix: Hitchcock's Films and Their Sources
• Contributors