Think Thin

I have two obvious entry points into talking about NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and they come from very different sources and angles.

The nostalgic angle: for this film, you see, was my parents’ first date movie. It was sufficiently enjoyable that their relationship survived the stumbling block of their second date movie, Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING, which is not really a great romantic night out.

The subtextual angle: David Wingrove points out the delicious ironies of the very camp Martin landau character, united with his boss, James Mason, who brings even more Siamese cat purr to his purr-formance than usual, and who seems quite close to Landau 9whose very jealous of Eva Marie Saint) pursuing Cary Grant across America. While many have commented on Landau’s salaciously sinister homosexual characterisation, nobody, perhaps, has taken things quite as far as Mr Wingrove — I’m eager to watch the thing again and see how it all plays out.

MADISON AVENUE

Before the movie begins, two deleted sequences. From Ernest Lehman’s screenplay, this prologue —

“Would it not be strange, in a city of seven million people, is one man were never mistaken for another… if, with seven million pair of feet wandering through the canyons and corridors of the city, one pair of feet never by chance strayed into the wrong footsteps?

(a pause)

Strange, indeed.”

Not however, that despite this opening VO’s absence, the canyons and corridors of NYC are nicely evoked by the opening shot that emerges from Saul Bass’s title graphics. Hitch’s fave colour — GREEN.

But those graphics were themselves a cost-saving alternative to Hitch’s preferred opening, cited by Bill Krohn in Hitchcock at Work. We would have moved through Cary Grant’s advertising office in Madison Avenue, scanning a series of layouts for glossy magazine ads — these layouts would have covertly contained the film’s credits. And this would have emphasized Cary’s job a lot more, which seems to have thematic significance. As Cary will state a couple of minutes in —

“In the world of advertising there’s no such thing a lie, Maggie, there’s only the Expedient Exaggeration.”

This sets the movie up as being about the worlds of illusion, advertising and espionage, where appearances matter more than substance. Even Cary Grant’s diet plan — “Think thin” — has more to do with perception than reality. There’s a poetic justice to this character getting caught up in an unnamed government department’s scheme to deceive an enemy spy with a fictional agent. The phantom initial — the “O” in Roger O Thornhill stands for “Nothing” — like the MacGuffin, like the “O” in David O Selznick — marks him down as a semi-fictitious character to begin with.

(We never see Thornhill either at work or at home, although we can deduce the presence of a gi-normous sun-lamp in his pad.)

None of which is to suggest that NORTH BY NORTHWEST is particularly serious about its subject. While a very Hitchcockian morality runs through the story — sex is good, sexual infidelity is bad but human, killing people is wrong — and Cary often finds himself on the wrong side of his own government, hinting at Hitch’s discomfiture with his adoptive homeland’s conduct in the Cold War, the plot gets going with almost indecent haste — Cary is kidnapped just six minutes in — and from then on thematic elements are shuffled rapidly to keep up with a furiously meandering storyline, one which was written under the title IN A NORTHWESTERLY DIRECTION, suggesting that geographic logic supplants thematic unity in this case.

Hitch has been praised for splitting up his villain into three parts, but it’s more complicated than that. The logic goes that an action movie bad guy must be a mastermind, a sadist and a thug. Hitch gives us James Mason as Vandamm, Martin Landau as Leonard, and Adam Williams as Valerian. But Valerian, the thug/gardener, is initially partnered by Licht, who dies offscreen in the crop-duster, and he also has his wife, the housekeeper. There’s also the fake Mrs Townsend, who turns out to be someone’s sister, as if we cared (touchingly, the film tidies up a few loose ends long after we’ve forgotten about them — Lehman reported Hitch to be surprisingly concerned with story logic).

Cary Grant’s Roger O Thornhill, by contrast, is a gent. He only throws a single punch in the film (during the auction house ruckus) and otherwise shoves one bad guy from a moving car and another off Mount Rushmore. James Bond does more than that in a trip to the dentists. Those opening few minutes set up his lifestyle, his marital history, his cheek (lots of cabs get stolen in this film) and his mother.

I fairly often use the first confrontation between Thornhill and Vandamm in teaching. Students often have great ideas for visuals but stop thinking when it comes to dialogue and just shoot coverage. In classic Hitchcock, the dialogue scenes are not about the dialogue — the overall meaning of the scene dictates everything, and the changes in shot size, camera moves and edits all advance our understanding of the scene. Here, Mason and Grant stalk each other round the toom, Mason switches on lamps, pauses in front of one, backlit in sinister fashion (You’d never catch Grant doing that — paranoid about his protuberant ears, he would frustrate DP Chris Challis on THE GRASS IS GREENER by banning all backlight: Challis took to fading up the light as soon as Grant turned his back on it… “The biggest old woman I ever worked with…”).

The idea of a fictional spy, invented to divert attention from real ones, is a lovely notion, and one that supposedly saw service in the war. How exactly the Unnamed Government Bureau (UGB) are moving the imaginary Mr Kaplan’s belongings around, lovingly sprinkling dandruff on his hairbrush, and attracting the attention of Vandamm without tipping him off — that’s need-to-know information, and we don’t need to know.

There’s also the promising idea of Thornhill being mistaken for Kaplan (“a much shorter man”) through a stupid henchman mistake, and then being Kafkaesquely unable to convince anybody of his true identity — and then being forced to progressively ASSUME Kaplan’s identity in order to investigate the situation.

In a tradition since honored by time, Vandamm elects to dispose of his nemesis in an elaborate scheme full of potential pitfalls: though not quite Dr Evil’s shark-mounted laser beams, the idea of getting Roger plastered and setting him behind the wheel of a hot car is one of Gavin Elsterish complexity and fallibility. It’s nice that ultimately the scheme fails because Roger is NOT a clean-living federal agent, but a Madison Avenue exec “with several bartenders dependent on me,” so the vast libation (“THIS much”) forcibly inserted by Martin Landau doesn’t knock him out, and he’s able to blearily steer his way through the shifting weave of process photography and into the path of a police car.

Although NBNW is clearly modeled on the 39 STEPS (Eva Marie Saint inhabits room 3901 on the train), what follows is a variation on THE LADY VANISHES, as Roger tries to convince everybody there’s a conspiracy afoot, only to find all the evidence disappeared. Enter Jessie Royce Landis as his contemptuously skeptical mother — and exit Jessie Royce Landis, regrettably, shortly afterwards, because to keep her around would undercut the heroics just a little too much.

The “invisible weaver” appears across JRL’s butt, making it look like she’s wearing a phantom nappy.

“Maybe he has his suits mended by invisible weavers,” scoffs Landis, and seconds later an invisible weaver APPEARS — or rather, a phantasmal figure — in fact a crewmember in a white shirt reflected in the hotel’s glass doors. How this one got past Hitchcock’s quality control (he regularly reshot things he wasn’t happy with) I’, not sure. In frame-grab it’s just a white smear, but in the movie it moves, in an unmistakably shirt-like way.

The elevator gag – -“You men aren’t really trying to kill my son are you?” doesn’t totally work for me — maybe because people laughing is rarely funny. But it reminds me of Hitch’s favourite elevator gag: leaning over and in a deafening stage whisper, remarking to a friend, “Who’d have thought the old man would have so much blood in him?” Which in turn reminds me of Terry Southern’s novel Blue Movie, where the vulgarian movie producer’s elevator gag is to turn to his fellow passengers and say, “I expect you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here.” And his taxi gag: getting into a cab and saying, “Ah, what the hell: let’s go to your place.”

TRAIN

Although it’s understandable that Rog flees the UN after being photographed holding the dagger recently used to dispatch a delegate (and with such a guilty look on his face), in reality he’s probably in the clear as soon as he starts talking to the cops. The police met Mrs Townsend at the Townsend retreat, but the real Mrs Townsend has been dead for years — there’s your conspiracy right there. But the SURFACE LOGIC is pretty strong at this point. I could never work out if there was anything beyond the most fatuous coincidence behind Thornhill catching the same train as Vandamm, though. Hitch gets away with that by revealing his plot points in a particular order — we don’t learn that Vandamm and Leonard, cosy together in a shared cabin, are on the train, until we learn that Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is in cahoots, as they say, with the bad boys. So hopefully we’re too astonished to question what they’re actually doing there.

I was too busy questioning Eve’s blatant seduction of Grant, a fugitive murderer, the first time I saw the film as a kid. I guess it figures that Grant, playing a male heterosexual, is too dumb to question why Eve is so into him. Men never ask. That’s why, when wives hire attractive female detectives to test their partner’s fidelity, the partners always fail the test. “They never, ever ask ‘Why me?'” says one sextective. So his error is just about believable. But as an audience, are we just meant to go with it because he’s Cary Grant, and because “There’s always a girl in the picture,” and this one’s overdue?

Then too, I do wonder exactly what James Mason thinks is going on. Why does “Kaplan” pretend he’s on the run from the police? He is, after all, a government agent. Why does he become jealous of Eve, after presumably ordering her to seduce Grant? I guess because of the suggestion that she’s enjoyed her work too much. It’s all slightly woolly, but the bits that matter hang together and propel us forward. The love affair starts as a professional seduction and somehow becomes real, the way Kaplan starts as a figment and acquires flesh and blood.

What a monochromatic film this is! After the seething greens of VERTIGO, we spend a lot of time with our man in a gray flannel suit (recently voted the movie’s best ever bit of men’s fashion, although I find the gray tie a bit samey, and it’s a relief to get Cary into black slacks and a white shirt for the climax) in brown or gray rooms. Eve turns up in black and white, although when Grant sees her in the hotel after his cropduster dust-up, she’s wearing a dress apparently cut from the wallpaper at Ernie’s (see VERTIGO) — the Scarlet Woman.

PRAIRIE STOP

The cropduster sequence — Hitchcock originally suggested, with touching naivety, that Vandamm somehow send a tornado to persecute his foe — is so celebrated and so obviously effective that I quail at the prospect of having to discuss it. Obviously it’s very exciting. The situation is clear and simple — that vast landscape of nothing around Prairie Stop 41 is like the ultimate expression of the film’s desaturated colour scheme — and Hitchcock lavishes countless VistaVision frames on setting up the sequence (with a high angle filmed from a specially-built derrick). That slow, pedantic plod: look left — nothing. Look right — nothing. The taciturn man! “Can’t say it is ’cause it ain’t.”

The nightmare of terror from a clear blue sky is a very Hitchcock idea — he often expressed his ideal of happiness as being a clear sky without even the tiniest cloud. Here, danger descends from just such a sky. You’re never safe. Bernard Herrmann’s great fandango is put on hold for the duration, allowing the sequence to benefit from the actual sounds of aeroplane and machine gun. Geography is slightly abstracted — the cornfield in which Grant shelters is not visible in the establishing shot, existing in some out-of-frame limbo until required. Does the plane crashing into the oil tanker make sense? What was the pilot thinking? Hitch somehow sells it.

As an action thriller, NBNW is actually very concerned with characterisation — not as much as NOTORIOUS, certainly, but it partakes of some of the same dynamic. Espionage is always a dirty business in Hitchcock, and love is perverted by being around it. Though the string of action climaxes approach may have influenced the James Bond movies, the emotional throughline of Hitchcock’s caper is far more twisted and tortured than anything Sean Connery got up to — until MARNIE.

Hitchcock regular — he’s in more films than Cary Grant or James Stewart — Leo G Carroll (The Man from UNCLE) turns up in a Basil Exposition role, as an unnamed Professor from the Unnamed Government Bureau. He’s a pretty ruthless customer, underneath his professorial air of kindliness, happy to sacrifice innocents for the cause of winning the Cold War.

(Listen — I remember reading a secondhand Man From UNCLE annual as a kid — crappy comic strips inspired by the show — and there’s this tour of UNCLE and we see a THRUSH agent strapped to a kind of hi-tech ducking stool, being dunked in a swimming pool until he confesses — effectively waterboarding — “Unpleasant, of course, but our methods are far more humane than our opponents’,” explains Uncle Leo.)

RAPID CITY

So now Cary is mad at Eva and gets her in trouble with James, necessitating the fake shooting which fails to lift suspicion. Lovesick hero escapes the clutches of his own state’s secret police — fairly easily — and arrives at Vandamm’s modern architecture masterpiece in time to discover that his love has been rumbled and does need rescuing after all. Cunningly, Hitch and Lehman have arranged things so that by interfering, their hero is not going to jeopardise national security after all, he’s going to protect it. But for a while there, we were rooting for him to grab the girl and the hell with America, which is an interesting position to find ourselves in.

Great business with the ROT matchbook, established earlier, and double use of the blank-firing gun — every object in a story has its own character arc, y’see. Objects are people too.

Cary is now wearing a bright white shirt, like the invisible weaver earlier, which is the wrong thing to wear when attempting to elude pursuers in the rustic Dakotan darkness, and Eva has an orange dress, also not ideal. (Read Eva on her clothing for this film and Hitch’s perfect fashion sense, over at Kim Morgan’s place.) The Mt Rushmore climax used to be my least favourite action scene in this film, dependent as it is on process shots and matte paintings and fakery, but I love it for those very things now. And Herrmann’s music is a triumph here.

Lehman wrote a page of “possible ad libs” (how can they be ad libs if they’re written?) for this sequence, none of which were used. I thought they were pretty dreadful first time I read them, but thinking about it, Cary Grant could make this stuff funny —

THORNHILL: You’re wearing too much. Take something off.

EVE: Like what?

THORNHILL: Your shoes! Get rid of the jacket! (pointing to her handbag) And that valise!

EVE: Mind if I keep my girdle?

***

EVE: Oh darn — there goes my stocking.

THORNHILL: C’mon. This is no time to darn stockings.

***

EVE (after Thornhill stumbles precariously): Your slip is showing.

THORNHILL (sourly): Laugh? I thought I’d die.

***
EVE: We should ahve taken the escalator down.

***

THORNHILL (laboring for breath): My mis-spent youth is catching up with me.

EVE (looking back): That isn’t all that’s catching up with you.

***

THORNHILL (staring at the president’s faces): That reminds me – -I forgot to register.

***

But I’m still glad they didn’t use them. I chuckled delightedly at nearly every line, plot turn, facial expression and camera angle in this movie, but I think very often I was responding to Mason or Landau or Grant or Landis’s delivery, more than the specific lines. It’s a witty script, but maybe not quite on the order of John Michael Hayes’s dialogue.

I really like Grant’s call for help when he’s dangling and trying to save Eva — Landau’s the only one around, so he asks him for help. That’s because he’s a nice guy. Landau would cynically ask for help, presuming on his enemy’s humanity. Grant desperately hopes for some humanity in his opponent, even though he has no reason to suspect the existence of any. This typifies a different era in which protags were very much better people than antags. Now, I like anti-heroes and moral complexity, but it’s been a long time since I saw a thriller where the hero was genuinely nice.

It’s William Goldman, I believe, who pointed out the incredible economy of the ending Hitch unveils the MacGuffin (his most misty and meaningless yet), kills Landau, apprehends Mason and friends, rescues the girl, marries her to the hero, and sends them off on their honeymoon in about twenty seconds. And throws in a memorable dirty joke with the last image.

TRAIN (2)

Note the overdubbed dialogue looped in to establish clearly that this couple are MARRIED. The tunnel shot was a last minute addition, a revenge, suggests Bill Krohn, on the niggling censor’s demands for marital sanctification. Although the question of whether Rog and Eve have already slept together on this train, on their outward journey, has never been 100% clear to me — the film seems to confirm this, then deny it. I guess if they had, by the moral law of movies then, Eve would have had to DIE. At least James Bond destroyed that rule — it’s only the first girl he sleeps with who has to die.

The coming of Bond would vex Hitch slightly — he felt they’d trespassed on his territory somewhat — and TORN CURTAIN, TOPAZ and the unmade THE SHORT NIGHT were all attempts to fashion a “serious Bond,” a project successfully completed already, I would argue, by THE IPCRESS FILE and THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Oh well. In a way, NORTH BY NORTHWEST sews the seeds of some of Hitchcock’s less satisfying work, but in itself it’s one of his most delightful entertainments. Not empty, but still lighter than air.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Charlie

“Are they?”

Maybe Hitchcock’s first perfect film? Maybe his most perfect, too? Oh yeah, you can’t have degrees of perfection, can you? But maybe Hitchcock can. Absolutes become relative…

SHADOW OF A DOUBT begins with the Universal globe, since like SABOTEUR this is a project made on loan-out to the free and easy Jack Skirball from the rigorous Selznick, and its brilliance should be enough to gainsay the suggestion that Hitchcock needed Selznick’s supervision to make mature films. In its light-hearted way, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT is just as mature as REBECCA, and this one goes much, much deeper than either.

The Merry Widow Waltz — the return of the musical plot point — which was lightly touched upon in SABOTEUR, actually, but is much more fully developed here. The music and images of waltzing couples, slowly dissolving to skid row docklands in Newark, a striking incongruity that sets things in motion with a kind of lopsided unease.

Joseph Cotten, as Uncle Charlie, is introduced as one of those serial killers who lie in bed and brood — see also David Wayne in Losey’s M. It’s the ’40s equivalent of the  trophy gallery, where news cuttings and other, weirder images attest to the resident’s disturbed state — see THE HOWLING for what Fiona reckons is the earliest version of this, and ANTICHRIST for the latest. I like Constance Purdy as the sympathetic landlady: one of these bit-part players who eked out a living playing landladies, society ladies, fat ladies.

Dream logic: two detectives have appeared at Cotten’s building, asking for an interview, yet when he leaves, rather than simply approaching him, they let him walk right past, then start following him. Why? Genre conventions seem to excuse this quite adequately. Cutting to high-angle “God shots,” Hitch seems to show us the whole chase, from a privileged position, but then Charlie vanishes behind a building, the cops emerge, looking baffled, and we pan around and discover Charlie watching from on high, right here with us, enjoying a triumphant cigar.

Charlie sends a telegram to his family, and when he mentions the address (Santa Rosa, California, not so far from the Bodega Bay of THE BIRDS) the next dissolve obligingly takes us there. Now we meet the Newtons, starting with little Ann, Edna May Wonacott, a sort of Pat Hitchcock substitute, and one of Hitchcock’s many fine local discoveries (Another is the heroine’s best friend Cath, played by Estelle Jewell in a wonderful one-note characterisation of quasi-lustful grinning). I adore everything about the family characters in this film, often credited to screenwriter Thornton Wilder (whose participation is loudly trumpeted in the opening titles) but also partly the work of Hitch, Alma, and especially Sally Benson and an uncredited Patricia Collinge, who plays Mom.

Collinge’s Emma Newton is the most loving portrait of a mother in all Hitchcock’s work. He’s often accused of focussing exclusively on negative maternal figures, and while there are certainly plenty of these in his work, one could point to SHADOW as a refutation of all the charges of misogyny. Hitch’s own mother was called Emma. She was dying during the shoot. It’s a testimony to Collinge that she makes Emma more than a series of dopey/endearing characteristics — the character successfully stands for something far greater than that. And somehow we accept Emma’s vulnerability, so that when people start saying “This would kill your mother,” we totally accept it, even though there’s really nothing to hint at ill health in the script or performance. Collinge just has that quality of emotional fragility. It seems to be tied up with Emma’s desire for everything to be nice — if something shattered her cosy picture of the world, where would she be left? See also THE LITTLE FOXES for Teresa Wright and Patricia Collinge together again. Collinge is devastating.

Charles Bates, as little Roger, is the least heavily featured Newton, but he’s very good, and an interesting contrast with Ann. Both are rather intellectual kids, but Roger is more into statistics and hard facts: Ann has a romantic side in her literary choices, and insists that her books are “all true.” Hitch I think is slightly less interested in little boys, but he does craft a memorable little nutcase in THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, the chronologically-challenged Arnie.

Henry Travers, as Mr Newton, is an endearing sort of stick, sufficiently mundane and simple to be baffled by his eldest daughter’s moods (which is important for keeping him in the dark later, when the plot thickens), but enlivened by his non-practicing enthusiasm for the murderous arts. And my God, Hume Cronyn is a joy as his best friend Herbie Hawkins, with whom he shares his half-baked plots. The shot of Herbie entering as the family have dinner always cracks me up:

Proof that Hitchcock, like Keaton, could enlist the space around an actor for comic effect.

This homicidal hobby serves several purposes: it adds a believable quirk to the staid banker father, it’s a connection with Hitch himself, whom one can imagine having similar conversations at the dinner table, and it’s another way of building pressure on daughter Charlie, once she learns that there’s a real-life murderer in their midst.

Ah, Charlie. Had the great pleasure of seeing Teresa Wright talk about her work at the Edinburgh Film Festival one year. A fine lady. She was quite defensive of Hitch, whom she found charming and well-mannered. She assumed any later bad behaviour on his part must have been down to age and ill-health.

We first meet young Charlie lying in bed brooding — exactly like her Uncle. It’s one of numerous connections drawn between them, and it’s fascinating to consider the similarities and differences in their characters. Also the telepathic link they seem to share, which hovers just below the level of narrative reality, tantalisingly refusing to declare itself as either real or imaginary: just like most real-life instances of “mental telepathy.”

Like her uncle, Charlie is intelligent, strong-willed, and restless — dissatisfied with her immediate circumstances, and yearning for something greater. Unlike him, she has a strong moral compass, not just by being well brought up, but also by having an inherent inner goodness. When she’s torn between helping Charlie and turning him in to the police, it’s two sides of her good nature that are at war within her, the desire to protect society versus the desire to protect her mother and a natural repugnance at the idea of betraying a family member. Charlie is a rare example of a fascinating character who is almost wholly good.

Uncle Charlie, by contrast, is one of the screen’s most convincing psychopaths. Hitch’s research allows for a portrait of a serial killer which is extremely accurate, without delving into spurious psychological portraiture. All of Charlie’s mistakes — and for an intelligent man he makes almost nothing but mistakes — can be put down to his psychopathic condition. Putting $40,000 into Mr Newton’s bank is rather a foolish move, since if he comes under suspicion he won’t be able to get at it, but it’s typical grandiloquence. Giving Charlie a ring with a previous victim’s initials etched in it is a bad blunder, but consistent with the true serial killer’s habit of trophy-taking. (The fact that the victim was a retired music-hall artiste makes me think of LADIES IN RETIREMENT.) And an incident from Uncle Charlie’s history is rich in suggestion: his bicycle crash, which nearly killed him, and resulted in a change of personality. Possible brain damage is a characteristic of many psychopathic case histories, but one of the film’s strengths is that it doesn’t seek to explain Uncle Charlie. It’s possible that his near-death experience simply changed his philosophy of life, rather than damaging him neurologically. For Charles Oakley is certainly a philosopher.

The opening montage of Santa Rosa seems like the most obvious source for the opening of BLUE VELVET. And in this sleazy bar, we find an element of TWIN PEAKS, with an excellent Janet Shaw as waitress Louise Finch, the Ronette Pulawski of her day: “Yes sir, I’d just about die for a ring like that…”

Like his niece, Charlie has a good deal of family feeling, but unlike her, his only goes so deep: when the chips are down, he’s quite willing to sacrifice Charlie, the one person he cares about most in the world, in order to protect Number One. He kids himself when he suggests that only unimportant, useless people have anything to fear from him. His view of the world as a cesspit fully justifies his own ghastly behaviour in his eyes, but while Charlie is disgusted by the low dive he drags her to (Santa Rosa is part Bedford Falls, part Pottertown, and all Lumberton), there’s no indication that she’s going to be seduced by his view of the world.

Another bit of telepathy: Charlie discovers he’s no longer suspected by the police, and bounds up the stairs. But then he senses something that makes him stop. He turns and sees —

The one person who knows his guilt.

I’m neglecting a character, and it’s one I always neglect: MacDonald Carey as detective Jack Graham. As a deliberately undeveloped potential romantic interest, he doesn’t really have any chance to flower into anything interesting, and Carey isn’t the most interesting actor, although he’s perfectly competent. It might help if he were pretty. But what really works about this figure is that he’s effectively the antagonist — Hitchcock’s much-vaunted fear of policemen neatly coincides with the thrust of the plot. Uncle Charlie isn’t, under normal circumstances, a threat to his family, and while the town does boast a flirtatious “merry widow” whom he may have his eye on, nothing is done to push this subplot forward to the point where we have to imminently fear for her life. No, it’s the presence of the police that creates jeopardy, and what young Charlie most fears is that her uncle will be caught and exposed and her mother will be destroyed.

Bill Krohn, in Hitchcock at Work, devotes an extra-large section to consideration if this film, and apart from his invaluable historical and contextual analysis (including the fact that wartime restrictions on set construction influenced Hitchcock’s decision to shoot on location, giving the film an unusual air of outward realism), he provides a fascinating reading of the film as political allegory. Since, of all the wartime Hitchcocks, SHADOW OF A DOUBT features the least propagandistic elements, apart from SUSPICION (which at one time in its development was going to have a flag-waving ending), this may seem perverse, but Krohn argues his case persuasively, and by the time we reach the film’s last lines, about the world “You have to watch it. It seems to go crazy sometimes, like your Uncle Charlie,” it seems inescapably right. To avoid dating the film, Hitchcock avoided overt references to the war, but Santa Rosa is full of soldiers, the bank is full of ads for war bonds, and the movie shares so much with Welles’s later film THE STRANGER that some of Welles’s anti-fascism seems to seep back in time into the Hitchcock.

Krohn is very strong on the Welles influence on Hitchcock here, suggesting that, since Welles had absorbed the same Germanic principles as Hitchcock, he was the perfect influence to guide Hitch towards making his first truly American movies. He gives several examples of the connections, from those Ambersonian waltzers, to the film’s use of overlapping dialogue, to the sentences which fade out in mid-stream. One powerful example of the last, which Krohn doesn’t cite, is when Patricia Collinge is sitting in the back of a car puzzling over the two accidents her daughter has recently suffered. Before she can reach any conclusion, the car bears her away. In some odd way, this seems to me terribly reminiscent of Major Amberson’s musings about the nature of life and afterlife, which are similarly interrupted by the intervention of a fade-out.

Krohn is also very good on the film’s relationship with Dracula… which sounds surprising when you first hear it, but believe me, he sells the idea. The vampire, of course, cannot enter your home unless invited…

“You don’t look too well either.” Possibly the only Hitchcock cameo where another character addresses him with a spoken line? Hitch may not have a winning hand in this scene, but he’s holding aces with SHADOW OF A DOUBT.

Side-note: unhappy with his weight (“My ankles hung over my socks,” — possible water retention?), Hitch started dieting around this time, with results which can be seen in his next movie, LIFEBOAT.

“You have a saboteur’s disposition.”

So says Priscilla Lane to Robert Cummings in SABOTEUR, another retread of the 39 STEPS idea, complete with handcuffs, disbelieving blonde, embarrassment versus peril at a social gathering, and adding in the climax on a monument idea which Hitchcock had first developed, aided by the young Michael Powell, in BLACKMAIL.

Digression: watching THE BEAST OF THE CITY, a great pre-code cops and gangsters drama with Walter Huston, we got fascinated by Huston’s family. This being an MGM movie, it dispenses somewhat with the hard-edged proletarian qualities of Warners gangster films, instead endorsing shady and brutal police methods with fascistic relish, and part of the strategy is to celebrate the police chief’s family and home life. First off, a foetal Mickey Rooney plays Huston’s youngest kid, which is distracting enough, but when his twin daughters enter, side by side and carrying a single platter between them, and talking in unison, we wondered for a moment if they weren’t the Hilton sisters, the conjoined twins who appeared in FREAKS (and one other movie, CHAINED BOUND FOR LIFE). But then they exited separately, which pretty much proved that they weren’t. No doubt we were influenced by the fact that it was an MGM movie, like FREAKS, and Huston’s younger brother was played by the guy who played Phroso the clown in that Tod Browning masterpiece.

Another thin man.

This pointless anecdote connects to the fact that SABOTEUR also features Siamese twins, but these are fake (real twins, though), and that it’s also the source of a similar case of mistaken identity. When I first saw SABOTEUR as a teenager, I formed the mistaken impression that the actor playing the living skeleton in the same freakshow scene was John Carradine. That mistake stayed in my memory, and I was surprised to find out I was wrong (it’s Pedro de Cordoba, who has a similar seedy elegance and Shakespearian delivery), just as I was about Mel Blanc being in MR AND MRS SMITH. De Cordoba is very good, but I’m still disappointed he’s not Carradine and he’s not a real living skeleton (what, was Miles Mander unavailable?)

Movie begins with the silhouette of the saboteur (Norman Lloyd, later Hitch’s TV producer) leaving the scene of his crime, an image echoed at the end with his tiny figure silhouetted against a movie screen at Radio City Music Hall, smoke from his gun mirroring the black cloud that issues earlier from his act of arson.

The opening scenes are fairly sombre, as Cummings’ pal (a crewmember recruited by Hitchcock for his blue-collar appearance) is killed in the fire. Cummings, a popular whipping-boy among classic film fans, is actually pretty good at the emotional scenes after the death (although it seems to me that it’s this film, and not FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, that’s undercast in its star roles — I’ll take McCrea over Cummings any day. According to Bill Krohn, Hitchcock originally envisaged Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck for this one, but was forced to accept Cummings and Priscilla Lane who had been paired for another project that collapsed).  But the script (Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison and Dorothy Parker) surprisingly squanders a few opportunities for suspense as Cummings is suspected of the crime and forced to go on the run.

They drive by night.

The film repeatedly pulls off a neat trick though, sending Cummings from one scrape or dead end to another, and always managing to provide some slight clue to motivate the next part of the chase. And through the episodic narrative, a romance is nurtured and several themes develop.

One theme connects to Cummings proletarian side: a factory worker, he often finds himself disadvantaged by his lowly social status, although he receives the help of a truck driver who recognises him as a brother, and a blind hermit who seems to have wandered in from THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, spouting philosophy like Rock Hudson’s pal in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION. Cummings’ greatest enemies are the rancher Toban (a wonderfully oily Otto Kruger) and society lady Mrs Sutton (Alma Kruger, no relation).

Another motif is the presentation of the bad guys: Hitchcock gives Tobin a cute little granddaughter, has another speak of his long-haired baby son (a genuinely weird scene — what are they saying here?), while another talks about taking his kid sister out. And a whole coterie of thugs sings Tonight We Love while taking Cummings for a ride. All of which, perversely, doesn’t humanize them in any positive way, it makes their evil all the more chilling. Observing that the enemy love their families too does not mean we shouldn’t hate them: the ability to feel love for a child and then commit acts of murder against strangers is a particularly insidious kind of evil, Hitch seems to be saying.

Hitchcock’s reaction to an air raid warden’s announcement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor — “Why was he wearing that funny hat?” — does not suggest a man particularly attuned to world affairs, yet such was the script’s topicality that the declaration of war did not substantially alter it. Perhaps the freakshow scene, in which a bunch of typically atypical Americans have to decide whether to get involved, would have played out more urgently if America were still sitting on the fence, but it’s still an intriguing scene, even if the little fascist is the only guy in it who could have made a living in a real sideshow.

Film.

“What do they have in America?” seems to have been the question asked as Cummings and lane traverse the nation, taking in the Hoover Dam, deserts, a ghost town, Radio City and finally the Empire State Building, a fairly wide range of US signifiers. Krohn calls this the first American Hitchcock to take place in America, which is true if we discount MR AND MRS SMITH (but should we?) — so Hitch is busy trying to make the landscape his own. It’s essential preparation for SHADOW OF A DOUBT, a real masterpiece and possibly Hitchcock’s most American film of all.

Script: Joan Harrison turned Hitch’s ideas into a long outline, what we’d call a “scriptment” today, with Viertel (whose father had collaborated with Alma Reville on THE PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK) filling that out into a first draft and Dorothy Parker providing dialogue sparkle. Parker’s work really enlivens the truck driver scenes, the blind philosopher, the sideshow artists scene and those colourful bad guys. Arguably the construction is even more artificial than usual, with Cummings escaping from a locked room simply by setting off a fire alarm. Panic ensues throughout the building — cut to Cummings outside, an all-too-typical smug look on his face. “How did he get out?” wondered Viertel. “They’ll never ask,” smiled Hitchcock.

That interlude within the swank Manhattan hotel is probably the weakest part. The explanation of why Cummings can’t simply walk out isn’t too compelling, and his attempts to enlist the help of party guests lack conviction too. the whole scene is a series of partial escapes from no clearly defined peril: simply exposing Cummings to the bad guys and cutting to him locked in the cupboard would have saved a lot of time (which might have been expended on a more interesting escape) and cost the film little in the way of real suspense. But I do like the way Lane keeps saying “This is like a nightmare!” and “It all seems so unreal!” She’s not wrong. And maybe this is another scene with a pre-war undercurrent, the serene society people waltzing away with the city about to explode around them.

There are two more problematic bits: the Radio City scene has an audience laughing uproariously at a film which doesn’t seem to be even trying to be funny. This can also be chalked up to the dreamlike atmosphere, I guess. Hitch also indulges in his propensity for killing innocent bystanders (see the unfortunate Dutch cyclist of FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT), which I always find a little upsetting.

Then, the grand finale atop Lady Liberty (and I like the synchronicity of the statue being reopened to the public this week to coincide with my posting this). Ben Hecht reportedly watched the scene where Norman Lloyd’s sleeve ripped off and he falls to his death and dryly remarked, “Should’ve gone to a better tailor.” I suspect this anecdote inspired the scene in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY where Paul Newman dangles from a skyscraper, his fate decided by a series of flashbacks exploring the strength of the stitching in his jacket. “My sleeve…”

Of course, if Norman Lloyd had grabbed the cuff before his arm slid free, he’d have been fine. He seems to have had plenty of time to do so.

I also like the cops shouting “Get a rope!” I’d like to see a short about the cop who runs all the way downstairs and scours Liberty Island for a good length of hemp, finds it, desperately negotiates its purchase, then runs all the way back up to find everybody gone.

But the problem here, as Hitchcock described it, is that it’s the villain who’s in jeopardy, not the hero. Paul Schrader uses the same ending in AMERICAN GIGOLO, in a way, but boosts the drama by having the suspended bad guy be essential to clear the hero. Hitchcock makes a faint stab at this, but Cummings has effectively already been cleared, so it doesn’t really amp up the tension. However, the sequence is so brilliantly put together, including some of the best special effects of the period (by INVISIBLE MAN genius John P Fulton), that considerable suspense, and even terror, is created.

Norman Lloyd’s death fall was photographed from above by a rising crane, with the actor spinning on a rotating saddle.

I always enjoy SABOTEUR, but I prefer FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, which has George Sanders and Herbert Marshall and a giant budget. But this later film shows tons of creativity, especially as it was achieved at much lower cost, necessitating many cost-saving devices. Here, Hitchcock’s meticulous preparation was essential, and assistant art director Robert Boyle, who storyboarded the movie, would become an important collaborator on future projects. Hitch was starting to build his team.