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Hitchcock: The Early Years (1999) - transcript

Transcript for the documentary Hitchcock: The Early Years (1999), based on the subtitle track from a DVD.

The following people appear in the transcript:

Transcript

Teddy Joseph

He was, I think, one of the greatest directors of our time.

Hugh Stewart

As far as he was concerned, the audience was the thing. He was making a film for audiences.

John Kennedy Melling

He made them see and feel and understand what he wanted them to see and feel and understand.

David Bond

Hitchcock was perhaps the most famous director ever. His name will always be associated with such timeless films as "Vertigo", "Psycho" and "North by Northwest". But before he arrived in Hollywood, Hitchcock had already left a legacy of ground-breaking British films.

John Kennedy Melling

He was born in Leytonstone on the eastern side of London to rather... not exactly lower middle class, but fairly straightened circumstances. His father was a wholesale poulterer and greengrocer.

Charles Barr

Hitchcock always liked to tell people about an event which he may have made up, he may have embroidered, but it's the official start of the Hitchcock biography... autobiography. His father sent him with a note one day to the police station - he was only five or six - and he handed over the note and he was then put behind bars - only for five minutes - They said, "That's what we do to naughty boys." And he said that that affected him for life.

David Bond

After leaving school, Hitchcock got his first job at the WT Henley Telegraphic Company. It was an unlikely apprenticeship for the master of suspense. But his artistic talent was already beginning to show.

John Kennedy Melling

A chap who who worked at Henley's said, "Hitchcock, I remember him - "the boy we sacked for drawing stage sets on the blotter all the time." Then he found that Famous Players Lasky were operating in England and he had a natural gift, his penmanship, for doing credit cards. That's how he first got in.

David Bond

Alfred Hitchcock had entered the British film industry when it was in its infancy. When the American film company, Famous Players Lasky, closed in England, their production base in Islington became the site of Gainsborough Studios. It was here that Hitchcock learned about all aspects of film-making.

Charles Barr

When he went to work for Michael Balcon, the most dynamic of the young producers of that period, he was the right man in the right place at the right time.

David Bond

At the age of 27, Hitchcock directed his first feature film, "The Pleasure Garden", a morality tale set in the theatre world, it already showed some themes that featured in much of Hitch's later work.

Charles Barr

Hitchcock's first film opens with a scene of pure voyeurism, of the woman going on to the stage and a series of men in the audience looking at this close-up view of the women. The man even gets out opera glasses and looks at the woman's legs. It's interesting that that begins Hitchcock's career, because it sets out the scene of male-female tension and oppression of the woman by the man, which goes right through Hitchcock's work.

David Bond

It is believed that all prints of Hitchcock's second film, "The Mountain Eagle", have been lost forever. Hitchcock himself would later dismiss it as a very bad movie. He favoured his third film, "The Lodger".

Charles Barr

Hitchcock said "The Lodger" was the first real Hitchcock movie. Certainly, "The Lodger" has that sense of crime. Crime and sex mixed up together.

David Bond

Set in a dark and foggy London, "The Lodger" begins with the discovery of a body, the latest victim of a serial killer know as The Avenger. This coincides with the arrival of a mysterious stranger played by Ivor Novello. A remote and secretive figure, the lodger is soon suspected in the hunt for the killer.

John Kennedy Melling

When Hitchcock made the film, Ivor Novello was a popular actor and playwright, parallel with Coward and he was what we used to call a matinee idol. It was tactfully pointed out to Hitchcock that he cannot be the villain - he must be proved innocent. Hitchcock's two themes are there - the man on the run, the mistaken killer, and he melded them together beautifully.

Charles Barr

There's a lot of play of shadow and also scenes like the use of the transparent ceiling. This was noticed by the critics. It showed that he was a thoughtful, imaginative director.

David Bond

A huge success, "The Lodger" was the first film to bring Hitchcock's name to a wider audience. It was also the first film to see the director make a brief cameo appearance.

Charles Barr

He didn't immediately use that as a trademark. Apparently, somebody was late, so he played the part himself. It was a small part. Back to camera. He's the editor of a newspaper.

John Kennedy Melling

It's a clever piece of publicity. I loved his remark that he always appeared in the first ten minutes so viewers didn't spend the rest of the film looking for him.

Roy Ward Baker

At that time directors were looked upon as being very highly paid technicians. Hitchcock altered that, at least in this country. When he went to America, it blew up even bigger. So his name on the picture was as big as the star, practically.

David Bond

Hitchcock was reunited with Ivor Novello for his next film, "Downhill". But before filming began, he married Alma Reville. An editor and continuity girl, she shared his passion for cinema, having entered the British film industry at the age of 16. On returning from their honeymoon they moved into a modest flat in Cromwell Road, West London.
After the success of "The Lodger", Hitchcock became dissatisfied with the work he was being offered and left Gainsborough for a contract with British International Pictures. For his 1929 film, "Blackmail", Hitchcock re-shot several sequences to incorporate what some saw as a passing fad - synchronised sound.
Britain's first feature-length talking picture, it was another triumph, but one that proved to be short-lived.

Charles Barr

He had taken a contract with a firm, which seemed to be more ambitious than Gainsborough but it turned out that their plans were not as lavish and successful as he'd expected them to be.

David Bond

For Hitchcock the most important thing was always control. As those fortunate enough to interview him found out.

John Kennedy Melling

Hitchcock was a superb person to interview. He had everything at his fingertips, but when the programme was over, the producer said to me, "I told you not to let him beat you." I said, "He didn't beat me." He said, Hitchcock forced you into his voice-rhythm. It was part of his element of control. He was saying, "You are interviewing me at my speed."

David Bond

Frustrated by the projects he was offered, Hitchcock even contemplated giving up directing to produce. But success was around the corner when he returned to Gainsborough Studios for "The Man Who Knew Too Much".

Charles Barr

This is, after all, 1934, Hitler has become Chancellor in Germany in 1933. And suddenly, it becomes very topical. One reason the films retain their power is that we know how prophetic they were.

David Bond

For the role of a sinister foreign spy, Hitchcock brought over an actor who had made a memorable impact on German cinema.

Roy Ward Baker

Peter Lorre had come over from Germany, where he'd made a film called "M" about the child murders of Dusseldorf, where he was a psychopathic child-murderer. Peter certainly wasn't acting. He had a lovely little rubicund face with a giggle. I liked him very much. But he had a peculiar way of dropping his eyelids and looking immensely sinister.

David Bond

Hitchcock always planned every aspect of his films in meticulous detail.

Hugh Stewart

When he came on stage for the first day of shooting, he put the script down and said, "Right, another one in the bag." Not that he had any disrespect for the making of the film, but as far as he was concerned, he knew the film so well, it was already in his mind. The Albert Hall sequence was the major example of it.

John Kennedy Melling

The tension, of course... Hitchcock's beautiful sense of editing. I think that made it a superb piece of film.

David Bond

Hitchcock insisted on discipline from the cast and crew. But the director had already acquired some strange habits. When working on the set, Hitchcock often enjoyed the odd cup of tea. When he'd finished, he often threw the cup over his shoulder, letting it smash wherever it landed.

Teddy Joseph

You'd probably like to know about Hitchcock and his fun and games. Every day at 10 o'clock he got the barber. The barber did the whole of the business in the centre of the set because Hitchcock always wanted everything to go on around him.

David Bond

The black humour of his films was reflected off-camera, as the cast and crew fell victim to a series of practical jokes.

Hugh Stewart

He got me along to his famous flat in Cromwell Road. He put on some outrageous music and with his bulldog-like face he pretended to be a woman stripped down to her waist, with enormous bosoms which he was tossing over his shoulder. Peter Lorre was killing himself laughing. Hitch not moving a muscle. Then he took me on one side and said, "All these people are drinking hard liquor and I've got some orange juice set aside for you." So I said, "Thank you, that's very kind." So I lashed into this, not realising he'd laced it and he then took me along to the Savoy and it began to creep up on me. How I finished the meal, how I got home, I shall never know.

David Bond

Teddy Joseph worked as third assistant director on Hitchcock's 1936 film, "Sabotage". He too fell for a Hitchcock prank. One which mirrored the film's most famous sequence.

Teddy Joseph

He gave me a parcel. A very large parcel and said, "Teddy, will you take it to the cutting rooms? "Be absolutely sure that it won't be broken. It could blow up." So, being 16 and very new, I said, "OK, Guv." And I went off and the lift-man said, "I'm afraid I can't." '"That's explosive. I'm afraid you'll have to walk." When I got up to the top, the editor said, "No, you'd better go back, because Hitchcock will be very angry with this parcel."
Anyway, I took it back to Hitch and said, "I'm sorry, I've been all the way up the stairs and they say it's got to be brought back to you." So Hitch got a hammer from the carpenter and said, "Don't worry." Bash! Like that. And the thing blew up. And I... That was one of his jokes.

Charles Barr

He had a suspense sequence, which ends, not with the release of suspense when the bomb doesn't go off, but he actually exploded a very sympathetic character, who was playing with a dog on a bus and simply got blown up.

David Bond

Before Hitchcock shocked audiences with "Sabotage", he adapted John Buchan's novel "The 39 Steps". The lead went to Robert Donat. His performance as the suave Richard Hannay proved to be the definitive Hitchcock hero.

Charles Barr

"The 39 Steps" was used pretty explicitly as a template for "North by Northwest" by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to make the most Hitchcock film he could. He perceived "The 39 Steps" and Robert Donat as being absolutely quintessential to his sense of Hitchcock.

John Kennedy Melling

The whole idea of a man on the run, being handcuffed, shackled to the girl... I understand that was one of Hitchcock's jokes. He used to put handcuffs... I believe he did it to Donat and pretended he'd lost the key. Also, the idea of a chase, going up to Scotland, which he thought was a remote area, and having one of his early polished villains in Godfrey Tearle. He had all the things that I think he later made such a success and he was able to put them together in one boiling pot.

David Bond

"The 39 Steps" also features a classic example of something Hitchcock referred to as the McGuffin.

John Kennedy Melling

The story that Hitchcock told was of two men travelling to Scotland. One said, "That's a peculiarly shaped parcel in the rack." He said, "That's a McGuffin." "What's that," he said? "That's when you're shooting lions and tigers in Scotland." "But there aren't any lions and tigers in Scotland." "Well, there's no McGuffin then."

Charles Barr

The McGuffin seems simply to refer to an object or device which is the motor of the plot. But it's not important in itself. In "The 39 Steps", there's a secret - the specification of a new aeroplane. We never wonder what it is, it is just something, which the characters are seeking.

David Bond

The 39 Steps brought Hitchcock's unique style to the attention of several producers in Hollywood. For his next film, "The Secret Agent", he shrewdly gave a major role to Hollywood star Robert Young.
In the 1937 film "Young and Innocent", Hitchcock left behind the world of espionage. This time, Derrick de Marney is the innocent man falsely accused of murder. The identity of the real killer is revealed in one of Hitchcock's most ambitious technical triumphs.

Teddy Joseph

The crane shot was unique. First of all, it was in a ballroom, and the crane arm with a camera had to start right from the base of the ballroom and go about 100 feet right the way through the dancers and going right across to a drummer. This crane went on and on and on, right up to the eyes of the drummer. And then the drummer started to squint. Just a flash. Flash, flash. Wonderful shot. It took the whole day.

David Bond

With a witty script by the celebrated Launder and Gilliat, "The Lady Vanishes" is one of Hitch's most polished comedy thrillers.

Charles Barr

I think what makes The Lady Vanishes so successful - at the time as well as since - is partly its very precise engineering of the plot and its irresistible momentum of mystery and romance, but also the take that it has on Englishness.

David Bond

Like several of Hitchcock's thrillers, The Lady Vanishes acknowledged the possibility of conflict in Europe.

Roy Ward Baker

It was a perfect prediction of what the future would hold. There you had the attitudes of Charters and Caldicott, the two men so mad about cricket, they don't bother, yet in the end they turn up trumps and it's they who defeat the villains.

Charles Barr

There's also the judge played by Cecil Parker, who has his own selfish reasons for denying the existence of the woman. He becomes a very sinister figure. He becomes identified with appeasement.

David Bond

It was while filming "The Lady Vanishes" that Hitchcock was offered a four-picture deal with one of Hollywood's most powerful producers, David O Selznick. It was an offer Hitch couldn't refuse.

John Kennedy Melling

I think it was Orson Welles who said, "A film studio is the biggest train set any small boy can have." When he went to America and found these studios had these fantastic, almost unlimited sets, costumes, staff, budgets, he knew then that he could expand and he did.

David Bond

"The Lady Vanishes" would have made a suitable swan-song to his career in England, but before he left for America, Hitchcock agreed to direct an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's "Jamaica Inn". By now, Hitchcock had become a household name.

Roy Ward Baker

When you have developed this prestige and reputation actors and stars want to be in a Hitchcock picture, just as they wanted to be in a David Lean picture. They knew it would be hell, but nevertheless, they knew it would be good.

David Bond

Hitchcock had little time for self-indulgent actors. When filming began on "Jamaica Inn", he soon ran into difficulties with his leading man.

Charles Barr

He couldn't control it. Laughton was in control. He wasn't used to having actors control him. He'd been hired by Laughton's production company and it was a vehicle for Charles Laughton and his performance is very over the top.

David Bond

For a director once quoted as saying actors should be treated as cattle, the completion of "Jamaica Inn" could not come soon enough. His contractual obligations fulfilled, Hitchcock left for America in 1939. He would work there for the next three decades, yet always remained and Englishman abroad.

Charles Barr

Hitchcock is an English director and almost all of the technical and thematic elements which make his Hollywood films so important are there, quite successfully, developed in the English films.

John Kennedy Melling

He always got the best out of his actors. He had the ability to use all the technical devices at his disposal. He also had, I think, a great sense of humour. Those things made him, quite rightly, in my opinion, one of the greatest directors in the world.

David Bond

Hitchcock brought to the screen a mixture of suspense, sexuality and pitch black humour often imitated but never equalled. The first chapter of his career had come to an end, but this was only the beginning.
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