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

important part: He wasn’t treated like a hack movie writer, at all. He was treated as he should have been.” Inadvertently, Hitchcock was admitting that he didn’t necessarily afford the same courtesy to all his writers.

Wilder had approached his work with Hitchcock with little ego or expectation—the best, perhaps the only, way to happily write for Hitchcock. Though he was delighted with Wilder’s contribution, Hitchcock still recruited another writer once Wilder had departed, to give the script bounce and sparkle. This was frequent practice with Hitchcock; he employed writers as though they were specialist tradesmen renovating a house. Some were used as constructionists, some as writers of dialogue, others to give “polish” to a final draft. He tried where possible to keep them separate, too, so the only beam running the whole length of a writing project was himself. Wilder never regraded Shadow of a Doubt as a true collaboration; he was investing his energies into a Hitchcock project, and it was the entity of Hitchcock that he had to channel, rather than trying to put his stamp on the Hitchcock brand, as Hayes and Hunter had attempted to do.

Thornton Wilder giving satisfaction to his employer, 1942.

This was not the case with the next great American writer with whom Hitchcock worked: John Steinbeck. A few months after the United States entered World War II, Steinbeck wrote a lengthy outline for Hitchcock’s idea for a film set entirely on a lifeboat in the aftermath of a German torpedo attack.¶ Presumably, Hitchcock had hoped that Steinbeck would prove as compliant as Wilder. It was a serious miscalculation. Steinbeck’s story is an ideological tract in which each character personifies a different constituency within American society: the working-class characters are good, honest, and heroic, while the politician and the captain of industry are superficial, deceitful, and irresponsible. Joe, the story’s one black character, is inserted by Steinbeck with the laudable intention of defying racist assumptions—yet he is so thoroughly good and admirable, in a way that no real person could be, that he is less a character than a polemical device. There are other unmistakably Steinbeckian flourishes, such as when a traumatized woman attempts to revive her dead baby by holding the child to her exposed breast.

The political invective was of no interest to Hitchcock, and it’s unsurprising that the characters and their relationships were changed substantially by Hitchcock and screenwriter Jo Swerling. The congresswoman—Steinbeck’s symbol of cynical ambition—was turned into a writer, played in the film by Tallulah Bankhead, transforming the political into the cultural, which was always surer territory for Hitchcock. Steinbeck was infuriated with the changes and was particularly aggrieved at what became of Joe, although Hitchcock’s—admittedly dull—character is more believable than the one drafted by Steinbeck. More important, Steinbeck delivered a template that told far more than it showed, featuring relatively little that Hitchcock could film; thoughts occur inside the narrator’s head, or are carried within dialogue, offering little potential for the camera. Yet one wonders what Hitchcock expected. Steinbeck was not a screenwriter, was hardly famed for his amenability, and there was nothing in his past work that might be described as Hitchcockian. He was enraged by what he deemed to be Hitchcock’s haughty dismissal of his work, branding him one of many “incredible English middle class snobs who really and truly despise working people,” perhaps unaware of Hitchcock’s unspectacular origins.

There was similar rancor a few years later when Raymond Chandler was engaged to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, about a psychopath who drags an innocent man into his deranged double murder plot. One biography of Chandler describes Hitchcock as “hard to work with,” though the description given of their relationship puts Chandler in a much worse light. He refused to work at the studio but resented it whenever Hitchcock visited him at home, threatened by what he thought of as Hitchcock’s encroachment on his territory, physically and metaphorically. He was also frustrated by the open-ended conversations with which Hitchcock began their conferences and hit out in strikingly unkind ways. Chandler became “sarcastic and disagreeable,” in the words of his biographer, and balked at ideas that Hitchcock threw into the mix. As Hitchcock emerged from his car before one of their meetings, Chandler mocked him as a “fat bastard,” not caring that Hitchcock was within earshot. Chandler finished his draft, but said his sanity had been tested by working within Hitchcock’s idiom—“trying to make a dream look as if it really happened”—a task he considered a waste of time.

Hitchcock had Czenzi Ormonde do a complete redraft. Ormonde recalled that in their first meeting, Hitchcock made a performance of holding his nose while dropping Chandler’s script in the trash. When he saw the finished film sometime later, Chandler was dismayed—and perhaps hurt that so little of his work had made it on screen. He thought the script consisted of “a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters,” and substandard dialogue. He also made a dig at Hitchcock for being a filmmaker who believes “camera angles, stage business, and interesting bits of byplay will make up for any amount of implausibility in a basic story.” He wasn’t the first or last writer to complain that Hitchcock lacked interest in character and narrative coherence, but this is too much. What he dismissed as visual gimmickry is the substance of Hitchcock’s skill as a visual artist whose primary objective was to express atmosphere and emotion through the gaze of a camera. Criticizing him on those grounds is rather like accusing Sergei Prokofiev of destroying the poetry of Romeo and Juliet because he removed all the words and replaced them with music.

In the end, Chandler concluded that it was pointless for any writer to work with Hitchcock, as “there must be nothing in a Hitchcock picture which Hitchcock himself might not have written.” In truth, a Hitchcock picture couldn’t be all Hitchcock; without collaborators, writers especially, his films wouldn’t have been made. But during his peak years