The First True Hitchcock

The Making of a Filmmaker

Henry K. Miller

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780520343566
• eBook ISBN: 9780520975033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Hitchcock’s previously untold origin story.

Alfred Hitchcock called The Lodger "the first true Hitchcock movie," the one that anticipated all the others. And yet the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, even by Hitchcock himself. The First True Hitchcock focuses on the twelve-month period that encompassed The Lodger's production in 1926 and release in 1927, presenting a new picture of this pivotal year in Hitchcock's life and in the wider film world. Using fresh archival discoveries, Henry K. Miller situates Hitchcock's formation as a director against the backdrop of a continent shattered by war and confronted with the looming presence of a new superpower, the United States, and its most visible export—film. The previously untold story of The Lodger's making in the London fog—and attempted remaking in the Los Angeles sun—is the story of how Hitchcock became Hitchcock.

1 The Embankment at Midnight

Earth had fairer things to show than the view from Westminster Bridge on the night of 24 February 1926. Wordsworth, at the start of the nineteenth century, could imagine the city asleep at dawn as one of nature’s spectacles, silent and still; twentieth-century London, even at midnight, was neither. The brightness in which the scene was steeped came not from any natural source, but from the beams of six massive arc lights, lined up along the parapet and directed toward the Victoria Embankment.

Down by the river’s edge, a film journalist, on meeting a casting agent, “severely criticised the unconvincing appearance of the large crowd that had assembled, but was told that they were not professional but the real thing.”¹ A. Jympson Harman, film critic of the Evening News, reported that police “were specially detailed, from midnight until six in the morning, to ‘keep a ring’ for the camera, and they even held up the trams while the cables were manipulated” for the lights.² Inside the ring was another crowd, this one of professional extras, and in the middle were actors: one playing a policeman, and one a reporter; one playing a witness, and another a corpse. The fog in which they were all enveloped, at the heart of a city synonymous with the stuff, had to be simulated.

Daily Graphic, 26 February 1926. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

“No one could have believed there was such a number of people with nothing to do at 2 a.m.,” wrote Walter Mycroft in the following weekend’s Sunday Herald, “but the director, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, who is expected to do big things, was imperturbable—tactful and commanding by turns amid the unexpected crowd.”³ It was the first day of production on the first film Hitchcock would make in England. Later he would recall that “the thing I wanted above all else was to do a night scene in London, preferably on the Embankment. I wanted to silhouette the mass of Charing Cross Bridge against the sky. I wanted to get away from the (at that time) inevitable shot of Piccadilly Circus with hand-painted lights.”⁴ As Iris Barry reported in the Daily Mail on the morning of the shoot, he had been “out daily with his camera man in search of coffee-stalls, bits of the Embankment, and street corners for the exterior scenes of this new London murder mystery,” The Lodger.⁵

Also behind the camera that night, though unmentioned in the press, was Hitchcock’s assistant director, Alma Reville, recently profiled in Picturegoer magazine as a “super-woman, whose eye is sharper than an eagle’s,” and the occupant of a “unique position in European films.”⁶ The article ended with “two deadly secrets,” one cryptic—“she possesses (but never wears) a pair of horn-rimmed glasses”—and one less so—“she has never had time to get married!” Around Christmas 1925, shortly after the article was published, during a rough crossing from Germany, where the pair of them had made two films almost back to back, and side by side, Hitchcock had proposed to her, and she, too seasick to speak, had made “an affirmative gesture.”⁷

Neither of the two German films, The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle, had been released when the couple began work on The Lodger, but the first of them had been shown privately to the film critic of the Express newspapers, G. A. Atkinson. “The technical skill revealed in this film is superior, I think, to that shown in any film yet made by a British producer,” he had written earlier in February.⁸ “It is improbable that Mr. Hitchcock chose this hectic story of his own accord,” Atkinson went on, “but the point is that he has produced it with remarkable power and imaginative resource.”

About the same time, Hitchcock was made the subject of his own Picturegoer profile, three months after his fiancée, in which “the world’s youngest film director”—he was twenty-six—was presented as “the man who starts on the bottom rung and achieves his aim purely by his own industry and enterprise.”⁹ At fifteen, wrote Cedric Belfrage, a studio publicist, “his education at an Art school was suddenly interrupted by the death of his father, and he was left alone—practically penniless.” The adolescent Hitchcock had joined an advertising firm as a clerk, Belfrage continued, his hard work ensuring that he was soon “laying out and writing copy.” Having gained a degree of financial security, he “began to take up the old dreams where they had been cut short years before—the old dreams of his old love, the kinema.” At twenty, he won a job writing and designing title-cards in the editorial department of what Belfrage simply called “Famous.”

Product of the merger in 1916 of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, “Famous” was Famous Players-Lasky, led by Zukor and increasingly known by the name and logo of its distribution arm, Paramount. By either name it was not merely a film studio, but a trust or combine, vertically integrated from where the cameras rolled to where the projectors whirred. Ten years after the merger, in the midst of a great scramble for possession of cinema chains, Paramount and a handful of rivals, chief among them Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, dominated the screens of the United States, and their ambitions did not end at the three-mile limit.

Famous Players-Lasky had opened a studio at Poole Street, on the border of Hoxton and Islington, in 1920, partly to be close, as Lasky said at the time, to “famous British authors” and “famous British players” from the West End stage, and to film British stories “in their original settings.”¹⁰ Less conveniently, the studio was also, as one British trade paper pointed out, “not only well within the London fog-belt, but on the very banks of a canal.”¹¹ Hitchcock would describe himself as American trained, and Belfrage pictured him seizing the opportunity “to stay down at the studio often for hours after his own work was finished for the day, to make himself familiar with the essentials of scenario writing and art direction,” but the apprenticeship was brief. In February 1922, just months after perfecting the plant’s fog-suppression apparatus, the Americans shipped out. Behind their decision was the realization that a film studio need not be anywhere in particular. In 1913, when Lasky’s “director-general” Cecil B. DeMille arrived in Hollywood, still “bowered in orange and pepper trees,” to shoot the longest film yet made there, he worked in the open air.¹² But in the month FP-L’s London unit came home, less than a decade later, Lasky could write that “Los Angeles’ sunshine is no longer a necessity; indeed many of our pictures in Hollywood are made entirely inside the Lasky studio by artificial light.”¹³

Los Angeles had become the center of world film production in the interim, and if its sunshine was no longer a necessity, it was certainly no deterrent. The novice screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, in California for the first time in February 1926, wrote to his wife, Sara, that it was “delightful beyond belief with its tropical vegetation and its mad, colored, pretty bungalows.”¹⁴ London—or Roman, or Russian—landmarks could be recreated on the Lasky lot, which by 1926 was spread over two city blocks bordered by Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street, now major thoroughfares in a Hollywood that had lost the scent of citrus. Writers more famous than Mankiewicz were prepared to come to it. Famous players, whether from the West End or Broadway, could be brought out too, but nor were they strictly a necessity. Rudolph Valentino, whose latest film The Eagle was playing all over London on the night of 24 February, had no such pedigree. And Hollywood was already attracting established talent from Europe—Ernst Lubitsch at Warner Brothers, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström at MGM. February 1926 saw the premiere of the first American film of their compatriot Greta Garbo, Torrent.

Though Paramount had abandoned its London studio, it had not abandoned London. On the morning of the 24th, journalists were shown around its new West End “shop window,” the two-thousand-seat Plaza cinema, within sight of Piccadilly Circus on Lower Regent Street. At the press lunch afterward, held in the Kit-Cat Club beneath the Capitol cinema, in nearby Haymarket, J. C. Graham, Paramount’s London chief, tried to impress upon his audience the venue’s Britishness. But as part of a chain that ran, in the evocative phrase of Paramount’s historian, “from Vienna to San Francisco,” the Plaza was inescapably an emblem of the American cinema’s global supremacy.¹⁵ Its foyer, reported the Star that evening, was filled with “handsome antique Italian furniture,” while its ceiling conjured up “memories of decorations in the Palace of Versailles and the Louvre.”¹⁶ The construction of this ostentatious gallimaufry had been overseen by Al Kaufman, Zukor’s brother-in-law and fixer since their days in the Chicago fur trade. Twenty years earlier, in the mid-1900s, Kaufman had managed Zukor’s first nickelodeon on Union Square, in the middle of immigrant Manhattan, and was on good terms with the neighborhood’s gangsters. Now he aimed to entice the carriage trade.

It was a development that Hitchcock regarded with ambivalence. When François Truffaut, in their famous interview, made his notorious remark on the “incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain,’ ” Hitchcock’s reply went into the question of cinema’s changing status in the 1920s.¹⁷ Whereas films had once been “held in contempt by the intellectuals,” and “No well-bred English person would be seen going into a cinema,” he recalled, in the mid-1920s the tide began to turn.¹⁸ The Plaza provided his example. “The management set up four rows of seats in the mezzanine which were very expensive, and they called that section ‘Millionaires’ Row.’ ” Indeed, as the Star reported, its 7s, 6d seats were “so spaciously arranged that the wearer of a crinoline skirt could move comfortably between the rows.” Readers of the New Yorker learned that “the most stirring event of the month is the appearance in The Times of an editorial on the opening of London’s new movie cathedral, the Plaza. What the editorial said is beside the point.”¹⁹

Poole Street, Britain’s best-equipped studio, had not lain fallow in the four years since the Americans’ departure, but had been leased, along with its complement of American-trained technicians, to a variety of British producers, most consistently Michael Balcon, who had been quick to notice Hitchcock’s promise and ambition. At twenty-three, as Belfrage recounted, Hitchcock was “scenarist, art director and general assistant” to Balcon’s chief director Graham Cutts, with Reville as second assistant and editor. Gainsborough Pictures, as their company was known from 1924, had done well to survive. British production was at a low ebb: of the 283 films offered for distribution—“trade-shown”—in the first half of 1926, 226 were American, 20 German, and 19 British; and those 19 had a slim chance of being seen widely or in the better and more profitable cinemas.²⁰ Many firms had gone under or were dormant.

Gainsborough, however, was flush with the success of Cutts’s The Rat, which had opened in London in December 1925, then nationally in February 1926, and was still playing on the 24th. Its star and coauthor was Ivor Novello, a player who had become famous as a songwriter during the Great War, and was supposedly drawn into the film world after the director Louis Mercanton saw his photograph. Having tried and failed to establish a serious stage career, Novello and his friend Constance Collier—later to appear in Rope—had come up with The Rat, a “good old-fashioned melodrama,” in his words, of the Parisian underworld.²¹ Heedless of the critics’ chortles, an audience of predominantly female film fans had flooded into theatreland to see it. Cutts’s adaptation had needed the insurance policy of an American costar, Mae Marsh.

At the end of January 1926, Iris Barry reported in the Daily Mail that although “tempting offers of film work have recently been made to this actor by American film companies, in whose eyes he is the ‘Latin Lover’ type so popular on the screen,” Novello had instead signed a contract with Gainsborough, the first fruit of which would be The Lodger.²² It would not occupy all his energies. On the night of 24 February, a West End theatergoer could have chosen between two future Hitchcock films, The Farmer’s Wife at the Court or Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock at the Royalty, a small theater in Soho; or gone to see Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, Tallulah Bankhead in Scotch Mist, a revival of J. M. Barrie’s Mary Ros...

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Map of London, 1926–1927
• 1. The Embankment at Midnight
• 2. The Reputation and the Myth
• 3. No Old Masters
• 4. The Autocrat of the Studio
• 5. To Catch a Thief
• 6. The First True Hitchcock
• 7. Stories of the Days to Come
• 8. Wilshire Palms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index