The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

into his mind: a sniper’s bullet smashing into a gravestone; a man dressed as a woman entering a San Francisco nightclub; a character on the run, clinging to the roof of a moving train. At one point, he muses that perhaps they should read The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to see whether anything could be pilfered from it. “My God, how can we,” protests Lehman at the prospect of stealing from a fellow writer, “it’s still on the bestseller lists.” Hitchcock was unfazed. To him, almost all ideas, no matter their origin, would become Hitchcockian when placed before the eye of his camera.

It was Lehman’s job to wrangle Hitchcock’s parade of unconnected scenes into some coherent narrative shape. The same was true for most of the writers Hitchcock worked with. To concede this is not to minimize the achievements of those writers; writing in the voice and style of another person is a rare and valuable skill. Charles Barr, a chief authority on Hitchcock’s early career, dug into the work of Eliot Stannard, the writer who took official writing credit on seven of Hitchcock’s first nine films. Barr analyzed Writing Screen Plays, Stannard’s slim how-to guide in which he identifies the chief problem with silent-era screenwriting in Britain: “too many scripts are a series of exciting incidents and nothing else; melodramatic, improbable and often impossible situations followed each other in bewildering rapidity, but I sought in vain for any central motive or theme.” As Barr points out, that sounds much like the experience of every writer who ever worked on a Hitchcock script. In 1986, sixty-six years after Stannard’s book was published, Samuel Taylor said Hitchcock was “the master of the situation, the master of the vignette, the master of the small moment. He always knew what he wanted to do with those. He did not have so much of an overall view of the story he was going to tell . . . it was like a mosaic. . . . Now, if he didn’t have a good writer, there were going to be pieces missing.”

After Stannard, Charles Bennett was the next writer who had a decisive impact on Hitchcock’s work. Bennett had written the play on which Hitchcock’s first talkie, Blackmail, had been based, and he shared writing credits on the run of five movies—from The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 to Young and Innocent in 1937—that made Hitchcock synonymous with witty, picaresque spy thrillers. Theirs was an immensely productive relationship; Bennett and Joan Harrison were nominated for an Oscar for their work on the script for Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). But Bennett was bitter about the lack of praise Hitchcock afforded him over the years for what he says was the crucial part he played in creating the very thing that Ernest Lehman identified as “a Hitchcock picture.”

Writing in his memoirs, unpublished until 2014, Bennett accused his former partner of being “completely vain,” though he acknowledged that Hitchcock was “brilliant, very brilliant—as a director.” It rankled Bennett that Hitchcock had fostered an idea of himself as a creative antenna whose films flowed directly from his own imagination without passing through the filter of other creative artists. Bennett’s grievance also reminds us that the distinctive one-man brand of Hitchcock’s Hollywood heyday didn’t spring from the soil fully formed. Especially as a young director, he learned from the highly accomplished people he worked alongside, primarily Balcon, Stannard, and Bennett. “We were a writer-director partnership,” stated Bennett, “but his vanity could not credit me. He credited no one but himself.” As Herbert Coleman, one of Hitchcock’s most devoted employees, bluntly put it, “ ‘Thank you’ was not part of Hitch’s vocabulary.”

Hitchcock might have countered that this was all so much sour grapes. Bennett had a lacerating tongue and a sizable ego himself; “I’m not being conceited,” he wrote in his memoirs, “but I was awfully bloody good.” However, Bennett expresses sentiments voiced by many of Hitchcock’s other collaborators. So often the work would begin amiably, the writers overjoyed to be working with Hitchcock and beguiled by the free-roaming conversations that would commence their collaboration. Evan Hunter was unimpressed by Hollywood when he relocated there to write The Birds, but felt the “cheerful side is that working with Hitch is an exhilarating, thoroughly professional, New York style experience,” by which he meant perfecting the work for its own sake, rather than the commercial dividends that might follow. But once his draft was finished, Hunter balked when Hitchcock wrote him a lengthy letter explaining that “the script has also been read by a number of other people . . . probably not more than 8 or 9 in total.” Some of those were important figures working on the film, but others were writers such as Hitchcock’s friend Hume Cronyn, and V. S. Pritchett, whom Hitchcock would later task with refreshing portions of the script’s dialogue. There was nothing intentionally cruel in this, and unquestionably Hitchcock’s only goal was to improve the script. Yet he either failed to grasp—or simply didn’t care—that a writer was likely to take exception at having their work passed around like a bag of potato chips. Hunter felt as though each of those given the script had “stuck his finger in the concept and his foot in the whorehouse door.”

John Michael Hayes had similar frustrations. He was recruited by Hitchcock to write a script for Rear Window, based on the short story “It Had to Be Murder” by Cornell Woolrich and a treatment by Joshua Logan. Having mapped out the essential design of the film together—in which a man confined to his apartment with a broken leg begins to spy on his neighbors and sets out to prove that one of them is a murderer—Hitchcock left Hayes to get on with building character and crafting dialogue. Hayes couldn’t have been happier: “He essentially left you, the writer, alone to do your work . . . he didn’t bother you constantly for pages in order