Hitchcock and the Spy Film

James Chapman

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786723079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Film historian James Chapman has mined Hitchcock's own papers to investigate fully for the first time the spy thrillers of the world's most famous filmmaker. Hitchcock made his name as director of the spy movie. He returned repeatedly to the genre from the British classics of the 1930s, including The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, through wartime Hollywood films Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur to the Cold War tracts North by Northwest, Torn Curtain and his unmade film The Short Night. Chapman's close reading of these films demonstrates the development of Hitchcock's own style as well as how the spy genre as a whole responded to changing political and cultural contexts from the threat of Nazism in the 1930s and 40s to the atom spies and double agents of the post-war world

PART I

BRITAIN

1

HITCHCOCK AND BRITISH CINEMA

Although Alfred Hitchcock directed 23 British films between The Pleasure Garden in 1926 and Jamaica Inn in 1939, his reputation rests largely on the cycle of six thrillers he made for the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation between 1934 and 1938: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent and The Lady Vanishes.¹ It was through this cycle of films – which Raymond Durgnat labelled ‘the classic thriller sextet’ – that Hitchcock affirmed his reputation as Britain’s foremost movie director and came to the attention of Hollywood.² These films established many of the characteristic ‘Hitchcockian’ motifs that were to recur throughout his work, including the fast-paced narrative of pursuit and suspense, the innocent protagonist plunged headlong into a world of chaos and anarchy, and the heterosexual couple whose relationship develops from initial antagonism to romantic union. As well as consolidating key elements of Hitchcock the auteur, however, the classic thriller sextet also laid the foundations of the spy film in popular cinema. David Freeman, a future Hitchcock collaborator as writer of his final, unrealised film, The Short Night, averred that The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes ‘are surely the glory of Hitch’s and England’s thirties. So great is their forming influence on all the subsequent international intrigue pictures – including his own North by Northwest (1959) – that no one can see, let alone make, a spy picture without, knowingly or not, building on Hitch’s foundation.’³

Hitchcock’s ‘classic thriller sextet’ is by any measure a remarkable corpus that fully deserves the reputation it has garnered. At the same time, however, these films were not in themselves representative of Hitchcock’s British career: only in hindsight have they been seen as marking the emergence of the ‘Hitchcockian’ thriller. Indeed Hitchcock was not regarded primarily as a thriller director before making The Man Who Knew Too Much. Only two of the sixteen films he directed before 1934, The Lodger and Blackmail, fit easily into the retrospective critical construction of Hitchcock as an auteur, while another two, Murder! and Number Seventeen, although both containing ‘Hitchcockian’ elements, have generally been regarded as minor works. If Hitchcock was associated with a particular type of film before The Man Who Knew Too Much it was the theatrical or literary adaptation. Yet these films – including adaptations of plays by Noël Coward (Easy Virtue), Eden Phillpots (The Farmer’s Wife), Sean O’Casey (Juno and the Paycock) and John Galsworthy (The Skin Game) – remain marginal texts in Hitchcock scholarship because they do not conform to the later pattern. As Tom Ryall observes, ‘the run of middlebrow theatrical adaptations that Hitchcock directed for Gainsborough and British International Pictures seem out of character and difficult to relate to the authorial profile of subsequent criticism’.⁴

Hitchcock’s initiation into film-making had been at Gainsborough Pictures in the mid-1920s where he worked in various capacities, including as screenwriter and assistant director, before directing his first films, The Pleasure Garden (1926) and The Mountain Eagle (1926) – the latter now the only ‘lost’ Hitchcock film – at the UFA studios in Munich under a co-production arrangement between Gainsborough and the German producer Erich Pommer.⁵ Hitchcock was greatly influenced by the visual style of German silent cinema with its fluid camera movement and expressionist mise-en-scène: he would always maintain that ‘silent pictures were the purest form of cinema’.⁶ His breakthrough came with his third film, and first in Britain, The Lodger (1926), a psychological crime drama notable for its expressionist style which came to be seen (in his own words) as ‘the first true “Hitchcock movie”’.⁷ At a time when many British films were static theatrical or literary adaptations, The Lodger, while based on a novel (by Marie Belloc Lowndes), stood out for its expressionist visual style and bold, artistic flourishes. Indeed The Lodger was deemed ‘too highbrow’ by distributor C. M. Woolf and Hitchcock was obliged to recut it before release.⁸ Following The Lodger, Hitchcock directed two theatrical adaptations, Downhill (1927) and Easy Virtue (1927), before leaving Gainsborough for the larger British International Pictures.

British International Pictures (BIP) was one of two vertically integrated combines that emerged in the late 1920s (the other was the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation) when a congruence of factors – including the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 and the advent of talking pictures – created the conditions for the structural reorganisation of the British film industry. The Cinematograph Films Act (popularly known as the Quota Act) was a response to the decline of the British production sector in the 1920s and the fact that American movies dominated British screens. It was a protectionist measure that mandated a minimum quota of British films for both distributors (initially set at 7.5 per cent rising to 20 per cent by 1936) and exhibitors (5 per cent rising to 20 per cent).⁹ The institution of the quota was a factor in the process of vertical integration as small and medium-sized companies with interests in one of the three sectors of the film industry – production, distribution, exhibition – merged. Another driver in this process was the cost of converting studios and cinemas to sound: larger companies were better able to attract capital investment from the City of London. Under its managing-director John Maxwell, a former solicitor who entered the industry as an exhibitor, and its head of production Walter Mycroft, BIP was a conservative studio both economically and culturally. It squeezed production costs in order that its films might return a profit from the home market alone and its strategy was based on the adaptation of theatrical and literary properties that were already familiar to audiences. In her definitive study of the British film industry in the 1930s, Rachael Low observes that BIP ‘operated a policy of cut-price window dressing, trying to make cheap films which looked like expensive ones’.¹⁰

Hitchcock’s five years at BIP have been described as his period of ‘Elstree blues’.¹¹ Although there were some highlights, notably directing the first British full-talking picture in 1929 (Blackmail), Hitchcock found that BIP was rather less receptive to his ambitions than the more creative environment he had experienced at the smaller Gainsborough Pictures. His own retrospective assessment of this period was that it marked the ‘lowest ebb’ of his career. Other than The Ring (1927) – a boxing drama which he directed from his own screenplay – and Blackmail, Hitchcock was disparaging in the extreme of his films for BIP. He told François Truffaut that Champagne (1928) ‘was probably the lowest ebb in my output’, while The Manxman (1929) ‘was a very banal picture’.¹² He evidently disliked BIP’s strategy of theatrical adaptation and averred that he did not choose these films. He claimed that he did not want to make Juno and the Paycock (1929): ‘I must say that I didn’t feel like making the picture because, although I read the play over and over again, I could see no way of narrating it in cinematic form’. He even confessed that he was ‘ashamed’ of the finished film ‘because it had nothing to do with cinema’.¹³ All he would say of The Skin Game (1931) was: ‘I didn’t make it by choice, and there isn’t much to be said about it.’¹⁴ It was an indication of Hitchcock’s declining fortunes at BIP in the early 1930s that his last film for the studio was a low-budget affair. Number Seventeen (1932) has sometimes been labelled a ‘quota quickie’ – one of the cheaply made films churned out to exploit the guaranteed market for British product that was an unintended consequence of the Cinematograph Films Act. ‘A disaster!’ was Hitchcock’s verdict: he later sought to distance himself from the film, saying that the property ‘was bought by the studio and they assigned me to the picture’.¹⁵

Hitchcock’s critical reputation at this time was best summed up in John Grierson’s description of him as ‘no more than the world’s best director of unimportant pictures’.¹⁶ On the one hand his films were admired for their technical skill and for the stylistic flourishes that – even at this early stage of his career – marked out Hitchcock’s directorial signature. He was one of only two British directors – the other was his near-contemporary Anthony Asquith – whom critics felt understood film as a medium in its own right rather than as an adjunct to the novel or the stage. On the other hand Hitchcock was thought to have wasted his talent on trivial subject matter: his films were characterised by a level of surface realism and detail in their mise-en-scène but he was not interested in representing the lives and experiences of ordinary people on the screen. This was what Grierson meant when he expressed the hope that one day Hitchcock would ‘give us a film of the Potteries or of Manchester or of Middlesborough – with the personals in their proper places and the life of a community rather than a benighted lady at stake’.¹⁷ Hitchcock, however, professed not to be interested in filming a ‘slice of life’: ‘I don’t want to film a “slice of life” because people can get that at home, in the street, or even in front of the movie theatre. They don’t have to pay money to see a slice of life.’¹⁸ This view was consistent with the prevailing attitude in the British film industry at the time that audiences preferred escapism to social realism. As Michael Balcon – the co-founder of Gainsborough Pictures who, following its merger into the Gaumont-British combine, served the parent company as head of production between 1931 and 1936 – later remarked: ‘We were in the business of giving the public what it seemed to want in entertainment. We did not talk about art or social significance.’¹⁹

Hitchcock always acknowledged Balcon’s influence on his early career. It was Balcon who had facilitated Hitchcock’s entry into direction at Gainsborough in the mid-1920s and Balcon who helped to revive his career following the period of ‘Elstree blues’. Hitchcock’s biographers have typically presented this as being due to an entirely serendipitous moment.²⁰ Following the end of his BIP contract, Hitchcock made one film as a freelance director: Waltzes from Vienna (1933) for independent producer Tom Arnold. Waltzes from Vienna was a vehicle for music hall star Jessie Matthews: Hitchcock called it ‘a musical without music, made very cheaply. It had no relation to my usual work.’²¹ However, Waltzes from Vienna was shot at the Gaumont-British studios at Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush, where Hitchcock renewed his friendship with Balcon, who happened to be visiting the set one day. Apparently Balcon asked Hitchcock what he was doing next and Hitchcock mentioned a thriller he had started working on for BIP. Balcon agreed to buy the property from BIP: this was the origin of the film that became The Man Who Knew Too Much.

It is a good story that conforms to the ‘happy accident’ narrative of film history. Yet even without this fortuitous meeting on set there is good reason to believe that Hitchcock and Balcon would sooner or later have come back into each other’s orbits in any event. There were clear advantages for both parties. For Hitchcock, Gaumont-British represented a more ambitious studio than BIP which allowed him access to higher budgets and bigger stars. He would work with some of the major British stars of the day, including Leslie Banks (The Man Who Knew Too Much), Robert Donat (The 39 Steps) and Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps, Secret Agent), as well as Hollywood stars Robert Young (Secret Agent) and Sylvia Sidney (Sabotage). And from the studio’s perspective, Hitchcock was a ‘name’ director who, despite some recent misfires, brought a well-earned reputation for technical excellence and popular appeal. In particular Balcon had set his sights on establishing a presence in the American market. Hitchcock’s films would be an important part of this international strategy: the US trade press recognised him as ‘a director with an American sense of box-office values’.²² To this extent Hitchcock’s move to Gaumont-British was perhaps less an instance of serendipity and more an outcome of converging trajectories in the mid-1930s.

Gaumont-British was the largest British producer-distributor-exhibitor of the 1930s: its holdings included two film studios (Lime Grove and Islington), over 300 cinemas, film printing works and subsidary companies producing newsreels (Gaumont-British News) and documentary films (GB Instructional). Its production strategy was based around popular genres and stars. Hitchcock’s thrillers were one strand of a balanced production programme that also included the musicals of Jessie Matthews (Evergreen, First A Girl, It’s Love Again, Gangway), star vehicles for George Arliss (The Iron Duke, East Meets West, His Lordship), a triptych of British Empire adventures (Rhodes of Africa, The Great Barrier, King Solomon’s Mines), the comedies of Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge (The Ghost Train, Jack’s the Boy, Happy Ever After, Falling for You), and a series of films based on the Aldwych farces of Ben Travers (A Night Like This, Turkey Time, Cuckoo in the Nest). The studio aimed to produce around 20 medium-budget films a year: it left ‘quota quickies’ to others but nor did it go in for the expensively budgeted extravaganzas of a producer such as Alexander Korda. Its strategy was evidently successful: it has been estimated that Gaumont-British’s films had a share of around 7 per cent of the domestic market, which made it the leading British producer with only Hollywood giants such as MGM and Paramount ahead of it.²³

It is clear that Hitchcock found the working environment at Gaumont-British more to his liking than at BIP. Balcon’s regime was evidently quite liberal: he encouraged initiative and allowed directors to develop their own projects. According to Ivor Montagu, who worked in various capacities at Gaumont-British as a writer and associate producer:

Mick would be inclined to make pictures that his contract directors wanted to make. They would ask to do a thing and he would say no or yes but they would be expected to make suggestions … Hitch could choose his own picture and we were choosing t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Authorship, Genre, National Cinema
• Part I Britain
• Part II Hollywood
• Conclusion: Hitchcock and the Spy Film
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography