[Basically what is printed here are several entries from "Editor's Day", from May 2003 onwards. Note that they complement KM's review of a monograph on The 39 Steps written by Mark Glancy and published by I.B. Taurus, London and New York - and of course the monograph itself. (To first read the review, located on Latrobe University's 'Screening the Past' website, click here.) The synopsis of The 39 Steps below is taken from KM's 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' (UK edition, 1999). An additional item below is a script-extract from the screenplay of The 39 Steps describing a scene that was cut. The script-extract is then juxtaposed with a comment by Hitchcock about Charles Chaplin. KM]
Production company: Gaumont-British
Running time: 81 minutes
Release date: September 1935
[In a London music-hall, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a Canadian,
catches the act of Mr Memory (Wylie Watson) until the moment when mysterious
gunshots stampede the audience to the exits. Outside, an attractive
foreigner calling herself Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) asks Hannay
if she may accompany him home. But in Hannay’s flat, intruders murder
Annabella. She had indicated that an espionage ring is based in Scotland,
and Hannay now knows that he must go there - if only to clear himself of
the murder. The upshot is that he finds himself on the Scottish moors
handcuffed to a young woman, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), fleeing from some
phoney policemen sent after them by the spy chief, Professor Jordan (Godfrey
Tearle), because they know too much. At an inn, Pamela overhears
their pursuers say that the Professor is meeting someone at the London
Palladium - Mr Memory. Onstage at the Palladium, Mr Memory seems
about to expose the spies when the Professor shoots him. The Professor
tries to flee across the stage but is caught. Pamela and Hannay (with
handcuffs still dangling from one wrist) hear Mr Memory’s dying words.]
The following notes, slightly edited, originally appeared in "Editor's Day" on our News & Comment page. By the nature of "Editor's Day", the notes have a certain informality at times ...
May 20 If you thought that Hitchcock was being original in having the hunt scene in Marnie (1964) embody in literal fashion his well-known description of his 'chase' films - that they allow the audience to both hunt with the hounds and run with the fox (or hare) - then 'think again' (as Strutt says). I have just been reading (or re-reading, but I'll come to that) John Buchan's historical 'thriller', 'Midwinter' (1923). In Chapter VII, the novel's young Jacobite hero, Alastair Maclean, is tricked into riding slap-bang into danger, represented by one Squire Thicknesse, and then immediately finds himself caught up in a cross-country hunt in which both he and the Squire are participants. The chapter is cleverly titled "How a Man May Hunt with the Hounds and yet Run with the Hare", meaning that Alastair suddenly finds himself the object of the Squire's wrath which threatens to jeopardise his mission in England. (As a Jacobite, Alastair is secretly trying to organise English support for the planned invasion by Bonnie Prince Charlie. The novel is both splendidly written and constantly exciting - as I remember from long ago, for they taught it to us at my grammar school when I was about 10! It was my introduction to Buchan.) Naturally, Mark Glancy, the author of a new monograph on Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, doesn't fail to notice such a Buchanesque formula informing one of Hitchcock's biggest crowd-pleasers. Indeed, he notes the passage in the novel 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915) in which 'Hannay himself admits to enjoying the "schoolboy game of hare and hounds" in which he at times finds himself in the position of the hare'. (p. 14) Now here's something I noticed earlier tonight when I ran a DVD of the film. Somewhat notoriously (the reviewer for the 'New Statesman' was just one of several reviewers who objected to the 'tricksiness' involved), the opening of the film avoids showing us Hannay's face as he buys a ticket to a music hall, enters the auditorium, and finds himself a seat in the stalls. Nonetheless, Hitchcock thought sufficiently well of the montage he used here to virtually repeat it, doubled, at the start of Strangers on a Train (1951) where neither Guy's nor Bruno's face is seen until they have entered the railway station and taken their respective seats opposite one another on the train. In turn, such an effect seems related to the line of dialogue given to Hannay (Robert Donat) when he takes Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) home to his apartment: 'I'm nobody', he tells her. (In Torn Curtain [1966] one of Michael and Sarah's East German helpers tells Sarah, 'I'm nobody, ma'am.') Perhaps inspired by the character of Mr Pooter in the popular comic novel 'The Diary of a Nobody' (1892), the initially 'faceless' or identity-less Hannay is effectively being challenged by the film to turn himself into a 'somebody'.1 More tomorrow.
May 21 The 39 Steps, as I wrote in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', is about a 'quickening' process. I meant that both literally and figuratively. Right at the start, Annabella warns Hannay about the spies, 'These men move quickly'. Now notice something else about the start of the film. The film's name - matching that of the spies' oganisation - is printed in a dynamic and three-dimensional lettering; on the other hand, the opening of the film proper consists of a lateral, effectively two-dimensional tracking shot along a row of lights spelling out the words 'music hall'. It's as if the film's name, associated with the spies, represents a substantial goal which Hannay's 'theatrical' adventures will lead him to. The electric lights of the music hall (and of the city generally) give but an illusion of 'life' - though the 'trick' may be to combine that theatrical illusion with the active pursuit of one's goal! At the end of the film we may finally sense just what is involved. I must quote from my book: 'The film's climax occurs in a theatre [the London Palladium] where everything is at once circumscribed yet life-invoking. Mr Memory has rather cut himself off from life's flow through his unimaginative use of memory [he is concerned only with 'facts']. But Hannay has been exposed to a quickening process in every sense, epitomised by his impromptu speech at a political rally. As he and Pamela respectfully attend to Mr Memory's dying words, the chorus-line in the background kicks up its legs to the tune of "Tinkle, Tinkle, Tinkle" from the suitably named Victor Saville film Evergreen (1934).'2 In other words, life goes on - must go on - but the film's audience have by now been given sufficient 'clues' to feel, or intuit, the full truth of the matter. As I suggested in my book, that truth is a 'Bergsonian' one. Henri Bergson (1859-1941), along with Friedrich Nietsche (1844-1900), had just become hugely fashionable with British intellectuals. Nietzsche's opinion that 'most people are dead' was widely quoted and believed. It was a time of considerable snobbery of the upper and middle classes towards their social 'inferiors'. Alfred Hitchcock was not immune from these influences, though to his credit he always retained an ambivalence concerning Nietsche's concept of 'the Superman' which he shared with his mentor John Buchan (cf 'The Power-House' [1912]). But to a considerable degree he was indeed a Bergsonian. In particular he seems to have accepted Bergson's teaching that 'real time' must be grasped intuitively. As Robert C. Solomon puts the matter, Bergson was a 'vitalist' philosopher who believed in a 'knowledge that does not yield easily to concepts; one knows it rather by living it, through intuition (remember that Kant called time a "form of intuition", not a concept)'. ('Continental Philosophy Since 1750' [1988], p. 107) Quite simply, in The 39 Steps, Hannay, with Pamela's help, changes from a 'nobody' into a more fully rounded and alive individual. His equivalent in North by Northwest (1959) is Roger O. Thornhill, initially a cipher of a man, who even gets mistaken for a non-existent secret agent named 'George Kaplan', but who finally is heard to say, near the film's climax, 'I never felt more alive!' To be continued.
May 26 Let's return to my reading of The 39 Steps whereby Hannay and Pamela undergo a 'quickening' process and finally come 'alive' in a truly Bergsonian sense. The then (i.e., 1930s) highly fashionable Henri Bergson saw 'intuition' as a means of grasping the nature of time. In 'Creative Evolution' (1911) he had brilliantly likened mental impressions to the cinema's flow of images, pointing out that the trick was to interpret the impressions meaningfully - in effect, to make a movie out of many separate pieces of information.3 In other words, he was saying: act as if life were a movie that you 'intuit' as you go along. Don't stop to examine individual 'frames' but rather 'go with the flow' - while always keeping your wits about you! Be both intuitive and intelligent! Such a theory would naturally have appealed to Alfred Hitchcock! Here, very likely, the notion of 'pure cinema' was born. (Cf. also Walter Pater's dictum, 'All art tends to the condition of music'.) For what is that notion but a canny extension of Bergson's idea, whereby the filmmaker himself is the one who manipulates images in order to 'direct' what the audience shall 'intuit'? (Hitchcock, you would have to say, was being deliciously artless when he once defined 'pure cinema' as 'like notes of music make a melody'.) But there was also a corollary to Bergson's thinking. As I wrote in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' (UK edition, p. 131), he taught that things like intuition and creativity - in effect, heightened life - can give us direct experience of 'freedom'. This was actually an old idea (underlying, for example, Poe's 'Ligeia'). But note the paradox - or clash. Given the filmmaker's 'guiding' role in the film process, the audience's experience of 'freedom' is likely to be only partial. An illusion of 'freedom'. Here, I would argue, Hitchcock can't help but critique Bergson's 'optimism'. (Marshall McLuhan wrote of Bergson's theory: 'Just at the extreme point of mechanization represented by the factory, the film, and the press, men seemed by the stream of consciousness, or interior film to obtain release into a world of spontaneity, of dreams, and of unique personal experience. Dickens perhaps began it all with his Mr Jingle in "Pickwick Papers".' ['Understanding Media', Chapter 29.] But of course Dickens's novels grew increasingly 'darker' thereafter as his experience of the world - inner and outer - deepened.) So, coming back to The 39 Steps, here's my thought for today. In making The Professor and his spies the exemplars of the 'quickening' process that may finally offer Hannay and Pamela a taste of 'freedom', Hitchcock was already exercising his principle of making his villains almost his heroes. More tomorrow.
May 27 What I said yesterday about Hitchcock's villains being his near-heroes (or heroes for a time) made me think of Somerset Maugham's adage, 'Only the artist, and maybe the criminal, can make his own life.' From such a world-view, first posited by Hitchcock in The 39 Steps, might emerge a film like Rear Window (1954). It will be instructive to look at that for a moment. The film's villain is Thorwald (Raymond Burr) who does indeed take steps to make his own life, going so far as to murder his ball-and-chain (or pair of handcuffs!) of an invalid, nagging wife. He is thus a hero in the sense that Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train (1951) is a 'hero', taking steps to do what the rest of us are too 'cowardly' to do. Significantly, Bruno boasts of having driven a car at 150 miles-per-hour, and similar feats. (He is also bold enough to utter the unshackled thought, 'What's a life or two, Guy?') Whether you believe him, or take him seriously, isn't the point. In their respective films, these villains enact what has entered the unconscious, or conscious, minds of the rest of us, perhaps many times. On the other hand, their actions hardly translate into a practical general principle for the rest of us to follow! So this is where the-artist-as-hero comes in. In Hitchcock's case, he actually once said that though Somerset Maugham travelled to the South Seas, and James Jones to Hawaii, he didn't need to do that: 'Once my front door is closed, I can be anywhere. It's imagination, it's supposin'.' In effect, he was aligning himself with Schopenhauer's notion of the (great) artist who can attain a freedom of sorts, and afford a glimpse of freedom to the rest of us, too, by applied imagination, especially imagination that is disinterested. (Cf. Paul Klee's phrase, 'that Romanticism which is one with the universe'.) This is a huge topic, but I'll simply note here how Schopenhauer believed that the disinterested artist, i..e., one who loses for a time his subjective, wilful concerns, penetrates the veil of Maya (illusion) and discerns 'the timeless reality of [Platonic] Ideas'. (Cf. Christopher Janaway, 'Schopenhauer, 1994, p. 61.) Let's return to Rear Window. Hitchcock, who plays a clock-winder in that film (a nice touch), and who is seen chatting to The Composer (ditto), constructed a small microcosm of humanity across the courtyard for the hero Jeff (James Stewart) and us to gaze at. In the various, separated apartments (cf. Bergson's 'frames', mentioned yesterday) live representative specimens of suffering humankind, conforming exactly to the human condition as Schopenhauer described it (no doubt a Platonic Idea ...). Now here's something else I wrote in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story': 'In the film's coda, as we listen to the [finally completed] song "Lisa", freedom seems almost palpable for a moment, though the song's lyrics hint that it may be just a dream. Significantly, the moment coincides with the meeting of Miss Lonely Hearts (Judith Evelyn) and The Composer (Ross Bagdasarian), the first time we've seen any such neighbourly interaction.' (p. 131) For a moment, at least, the Many seems One. The suffering we saw earlier has been assuaged. And hero and heroine (the latter named Lisa and played by Grace Kelly) have seemingly been reconciled, with a hint of marriage in the air. It would be nice to think that the artist, Hitchcock, has indeed applied his art - and his intuition - to show us how we can make our own lives. Well, has he? I'll try and answer that tomorrow!
May 28 Just for starters today, here's an indication that I was on the right track when I spoke of the 'quickness' idea informing The 39 Steps. My point was that the film is saying, with Bergson, 'Look, to be fully alive, you have to exercise all of your faculties - including intuition.' And I spoke of how, finally, Hannay and Pamela spontaneously hold hands. (In their true combining, rather than being merely yoked together mechanically, by handcuffs, lies freedom.) Well, the word that the film's script uses isn't 'spontaneously' but 'instinctively' as it describes the film's last shot, thus: 'The CAMERA pulls back as Hannay and Pamela rise from [the dying Mr Memory's] side and become silhouettes in the foreground. Their hands instinctively come together as the music swells ...' Almost exactly, that's what I had in mind! At last our romantic couple are doing what comes naturally, rather than suppressing it, or engaging in hostility and distrust! Now, again, let's return for a moment to Rear Window. The word 'intuition' is explicitly used there and made gender-specific: Lisa speaks of 'my women's intuition'. But still the idea is the couple's need to merge their resources to become an effective unit, one that is fully alive. And once again, I would argue, it is the couple who correspond to Hitchcock's, the artist's, God-like wholeness, and have his true sympathy. (Note: Peter Ackroyd has remarked of author Charles Dickens that he had 'an almost feminine sensibility' - and several commentators have said the same of Hitchcock. I'll come back to this.) Now, I've previously quoted Paul Klee's phrase, 'that Romanticism which is one with the universe', referring to an artist's privileged moments of total empathy with how the world goes. By contrast, Hitchcock's villains finally find themselves cut off from the flow of life, as when the curtain is rung down on them, trapping them, in The 39 Steps and Stage Fright (1950). (By the same token, the theatrical setting is used, in Shakespearean or Pirandellian fashion, to imply that life's all a dream anyway, and to that extent villains and heroes are one. In a truer perspective, where what Schopenhauer called 'eternal justice' would prevail, things might be different. So in Notorious [1946] even the Nazi is allowed a reference to 'next time', and of course Van Damm in North by Northwest [1959] has a point when he asks sardonically, 'Games? Must we?') In North by Northwest, Leonard's remark about his 'feminine intuition' is very telling as it indicates how 'resourceful' the spies are in that film. Leonard's boss, the smooth and bisexual Van Damm, is a near-relative not only of The Professor in The 39 Steps and the smarmy, cunning Tobin in Saboteur (1942), but also of the female 'Superman' of Rebecca (1940), i.e., the bisexual (or polymorphous-perverse) Rebecca herself. Also, Van Damm is related to Alex Sebastian in Notorious, of whom I noted in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' that his empathy for Alicia's feelings resembles how a good filmmaker must frequently enter 'into his various characters' states of mind' (UK edition, p. 100). So we seem to have come full-circle in our observations. What, then, was Hitchcock's attitude to all of this? Staying in the circle, I can only repeat (having said it often) how closely Hitchcock's attitude to his villains resembles that of the hero Leithen in John Buchan's 'The Power-House' (1912). Addressing that novel's would-be 'Superman' villain, named Pavia, Leithen says: 'As I read your character [...] you are an artist in crime. [...] You love power, hidden power. You flatter your vanity by despising mankind and making them your tools. You scorn the smattering of inaccuracies which passes for human knowledge, and I will not venture to say that you are wrong. Therefore, you use your brains to frustrate it. Unhappily the life of millions is built on that smattering, so you are a foe to society.' More tomorrow.
May 29 Like John Buchan, then, Hitchcock may empathise with his fellow 'artists in crime', his villains, yet basically side with 'the moron millions' (as he once broadly characterised his audience), seeking through his art to raise us from our 'sluggish and jellified' condition. Of course, it's only natural that Hitchcock's villains are initially more 'alive' than the typically bored or jaded heroes (e.g., Richard Hannay) because the former must dwell constantly on 'the dangerous edge of things'. (Screenwriter Gavin Lambert once used that phrase of Robert Browning's for the title of a study of thriller authors, including Hitchcock.) Mark Glancy's monograph on The 39 Steps refers to how Buchan's Hannay is linked to the spies in things like their common resort to disguises, assumed identities (p. 12). But Glancy doesn't apply this observation to a study of the film's 'theatricality'. I would make a couple of points here. First, we have noted Hitchcock's sympathy with the central couple, Hannay and Pamela, to the point where he implies a parallel between his own heightened consciousness as filmmaker and that of the couple as they fight their way to 'freedom'. Hitchcock's films are consistently about the overcoming of isolation, and in Vertigo (1958) Madeleine even says explicitly that living alone is 'wrong'. On the other hand, the scene in The 39 Steps with the crofter and his wife exists to remind us that, in adverse circumstances, a couple may be as far removed from 'life' (one of whose symbols in the film is the bright lights of the city) as anyone. The puritanical, mean-minded crofter is a predecessor, in this respect, of the puritanical (and divorced) deputy-sheriff Calvin Wiggs in The Trouble With Harry (1955). And while it was unfeeling of me in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' (UK edition, p. 49) to suggest that a lesson of the crofter's scene is that of the poet Robert Frost, who wrote that freedom is 'feeling easy in one's harness', I do think that Hitchcock ends up saying, in effect, that 'life' - as symbolised by bright lights - isn't everything! So that's my second point. Accepting that 'only the artist, and maybe the criminal, can make his own life', Hitchcock concludes many of his films with a nod to the possibility of 'conditional freedom'. Both The 39 Steps and Rear Window are like that, I think. And in my book I commented: 'Like The Farmer's Wife [1928] ..., The 39 Steps is a film that invites its audience to share a secret knowledge - for which the papers sought by the spies are a mere MacGuffin.' (p. 49) I also hear in my head, at this point, Francie (Grace Kelly) in To Catch a Thief (1955) saying to John (Cary Grant), 'I can't tell you. It's no good unless you discover it for yourself!' Meanwhile, I just hope that Margaret and John, the crofter couple in The 39 Steps, either got religion together or that she ran off with a visiting agricultural-machinery salesman. Tomorrow: some final comments on Glancy's monograph.
May 30 Have been trying
all this week to fit in some full-on discussion of Mark Glancy's monograph
on The 39 Steps to complement the review of it elsewhere on this
site. I liked this description by Glancy of the film: 'At nearly
every stop on Hannay's cross-country journey we find complacency and venality.
It is a vision of a country without confidence, unity or purpose.' (p.
18) Actually, that sounds like how I characterised Saboteur
(1942) in my book - I'd say that the latter film's 'vision' of disunity,
etc., is even more pronounced. As for my emphasis here in recent
days on the 'quickening' motif of The 39 Steps, here's some evidence
for that in Glancy's description of the police hunt for Hannay on the train:
'[Hannay] now seems nothing like the lethargic man we saw in London. [...]
His resourcefulness and speed, as well as our own belief in his abilities,
are now an established part of the story's dramatic logic.' (p. 56)
In my book I noted how the film itself speeds up the narrative whenever
possible but also, on occasions, and paradoxically, takes its own good
time over some scenes. An instance of the former is the famous moment
when Hannay's landlady finds the murdered woman's body, then screams -
and the film cuts to Hannay's train speeding north. (Something interesting
about the genesis of this bridge-effect, not noted by Glancy, is how it
combines a similar effect from Hitchcock's Blackmail [1929] with
another such bridge in a then-recent GPO documentary - Hitchcock may have
read of the latter in an article by John Grierson that had just appeared
in 'Sight and Sound'.) And an instance of the seeming opposite effect,
where the film allows a scene to play itself out in its own good time,
is the 'long-take', lasting about a minute and a half, during which we
first meet the guests at the Professor's house, who have just come from
Sunday service, then watch them leave. By filming the scene in this
way, Hitchcock achieves an effect of unhurried progression of events that
seem to take much longer (as they would have in actuality, undoubtedly).
Actually, the take does have one cut-in shot that interrupts it - when
the Professsor leads Hannay to the window - but this shouldn't hide the
fact that the scene is a foreshadowing of the long-takes of Rope
(1948). The whole sequence in the Professor's house is actually a
tour-de-force. Glancy notes some of its details and is silent about
others. He doesn't note, for instance, how the maid appears to be
privy to the Professor's clandestine business - she lies like a veteran
when the Sheriff's men turn up at the front door looking for Hannay - and
he is vague about how much, exactly, Mrs Jordan knows of her husband's
doings. (But at least Glancy doesn't get wrong the Jordans' relationship
- which seems to me to be quite close and loving - which is more than I
can say of William Rothman's analysis in 'Alfred Hitchcock - the Murderous
Gaze' [1982] where we read that Mrs Jordan is 'a cold, overbearing woman,
a nightmarish mother figure' [p. 146]. That is simply nonsense!)
Glancy concludes his book by noting that the film provides a good example
of Hitchcock's liking for 'under-statement of highly dramatic ideas' (p.
103). I agree!
---------
Next, here's a scene that was cut from The
39 Steps, followed by a remark of Hitchcock's to an interviewer about
Chaplin's film The Pilgrim (1923) ...
First, a cut scene from The 39 Steps:
179. EXT. HIGHLAND COTTAGE. BACK DOOR. DAY. S.L.S.
The music continues
from the last impressionistic scene
over a short
scene of a Scottish peasant, who is just in
the act of examining
a pair of patent shoes, while alter-
natively looking
for his own boots which are obviously
missing. He calls
up to his wife at a higher window.
PEASANT: Where are my shoes, Maggie?
WIFE: Are those no them?
PEASANT: Are you daft, woman? Where are my ain?
LAP DISSOLVE TO:
180. INT. FARMHOUSE BEDROOM. DAY. S.C.U.
An elderly farmer
type standing in his pants holding up a
pair of well-cut
trousers, which he has apparently just
picked off a
chair by an open window. The wind is gently
blowing the curtains
in.
LAP DISSOLVE TO:
181. EXT. HIGHLAND FIELD. DAY. S.C.U.
A stone wall by
a meadow in a glen. A farmworker comes to
the wall by a
gate to take up his coat. He is in his
shirtsleeves.
He picks up a strange garment which obviously
does not belong
to him. It is, of course, Hannay’s coat.
FADE OUT.
And here's Hitchcock talking about telling a story visually:
ALFRED HITCHCOCK: I think one of
the biggest problems that we have in our business is the inability of people
to visualize. [...] The visual, to me, is a vital element in this
work. I don't think it is studied enough. Go back to the early
days. Go back to Chaplin. He once made a short film called
The
Pilgrim. The opening shot was the outside of a prison gate.
A guard came out and posted a wanted notice. Next cut: a very tall,
thin man coming out of a river, having had a swim. He finds that
his clothes are missing and have been replaced with a convict's uniform.
Next cut: a railroad station, and there coming towards the camera dressed
as a parson with the pants too long is Chaplin. Now, there are three
pieces of film and look at the amount of story they told ...
--------
Next, 'Sapper' vs Buchan!
In "Editor's Day", June -July 2004, I went so
far as to claim that The 39 Steps may be as much 'Sapper' (H.C.
McNeile) as Buchan! Here are some of the relevant entries:
June 29 More tonight about the huge influence of the Bulldog Drummond novels, stage adaptations, and films on several Hitchcock movies - about which I'm prepared to claim that they may owe as much to 'Sapper' (creator of Bulldog Drummond) as to John Buchan (yes, even in the case of Hitchcock's film of Buchan's 'The Thirty-Nine Steps'). The simplest and best way to look at the matter may be to remember that Hitchcock, as I've always said, was a Romantic-eclectic filmmaker. (The eclectic side of Hitchcock is still hugely under-appreciated - for example, by Patrick McGilligan's recent biography of Hitchcock!) You could certainly say that several Hitchcock films are about a Buchan versus Sapper outlook - where 'Buchan' stands for a civilised and responsible social order that must finally be acceded to, and 'Sapper' stands for what remains subversive of that order, even at the end of the picture. As an Australian, I would say that 'Buchan' is on the side of the (traditionally upper-class and landed) authorities, while 'Sapper' is almost what Australians call a larrikin-figure - a working-class and lower-middle-class type (cf. Peter Weir's film of Australia's involvement in the First World War, Gallipoli [1981]). Of course, the rhetorician Hitchcock has a bit both ways - that's why I stressed just now his Romantic-eclectic stance - but I believe that the Cockney in him secretly sides with the larrikin. Here's another parallel. We know (thanks to Bill Krohn and others) that Hitchcock had a huge admiration for the work of the famous Cockney caricaturist William Hogarth (1697-1764), and owned several original works by him. However, it's reported of Hogarth that he could never desist, even in his most 'serious' paintings, from inserting details that showed his uninhibited, fun-loving, mocking side - something that got him into trouble with the art Establishment of his time, who never fully accepted him or took him seriously. Such, I believe, was also the case with Hitchcock, whose 'Sapper' side sometimes threatened to erupt and 'mar' the more responsible, 'Buchanesque' style of his work (North by Northwest still has detractors for that reason!). Personally, such 'compromise' doesn't bother me in the slightest - I'm a Dickens fan, remember! Dickens still has his detractors for making too many concessions to popular taste ... Tomorrow: more on Sapper's influence on Hitchcock (and the influence of the First World War on Sapper).
June 30 I can't stress enough the popularity of the Bulldog Drummond books, the stage play, and, in particular, the 1929 film Bulldog Drummond starring Ronald Colman and Joan Bennett. Film historian William K. Everson wrote: 'While, in retrospect, Rouben Mamoulian's Applause [...] can be seen to have been 1929's most significant movie, and academically its best, Bulldog Drummond is in many ways almost its equal.' In "Editor's Day" for 19 November, 2002, I noted several tell-tale signs in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) of the Bulldog Drummond influence. (That is, besides the well-known fact that Hitchcock and screenwriter Charles Bennett had originally asked themselves: what if Drummond became a father and then his baby were kidnapped? The idea for Drummond's having a baby came from a passing reference in the Drummond novel 'Temple Tower' [1929] - which quite startled Drummond fans, especially as the baby was hardly ever mentioned again! As for the idea of its being kidnapped, remember that the Lindbergh baby kidnapping was, in 1932, currently making headlines around the world.) First, Drummond and his bumbling, monacled pal Algy are detectably the predecessors of Bob Lawrence (Leslie Banks) and Uncle Clive (Hugh Wakefield). By the same token, Drummond's opponents, who aren't averse to a spot of kidnapping, are roughly the equivalent of the gang in Hitchcock's film. True, another influence was Buchan's 'The Three Hostages' (1924), especially for the idea of the gang's use of hypnotism to try and extract information. (As we've seen, Drummond's villains favour torture - a method which Hitchcock had to wait until he got to America to incorporate in a thriller, Foreign Correspondent, scripted of course by Charles Bennett.) But consider this telling correspondence. Drummond's principal opponent is Carl Peterson, and Peterson's female offsider, Irma, passes as his 'sister' - when it's clear that the pair are in fact lovers. Here, perhaps, is one source for the quirky, even kinky, relationship in The Man Who Knew Too Much between the principal villain Abbot (Peter Lorre) and his supposed 'nurse', Agnes (Cicely Oates) - when the latter seems to be in fact either Abbot's sister or his lover or both! (She also has a 'motherly' side, let's notice!) Yet complicating matters still further - did someone mention Hitchcock's 'eclecticism'? - is the clear influence on The Man Who Knew Too Much of the American film Scarface (1932), directed by Howard Hawks. Not only does Abbot in Hitchcock's film have his own prominent scar - that is, he is another 'scarface' - but in his possibly incestuous relationship with Agnes, he is again only taking after his Hawksian predecessor (I'm referring of course to the relationship in Scarface between the Paul Muni and Ann Dvorak characters). (The shoot-out climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much itself represents a merging of the climax of Scarface with the real-life incident known as the Siege of Sydney Street. For more on the Hawksian connection, see 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story.) Okay. I've run out of space tonight to mention my feeling that much of the atmosphere of the Bulldog Drummond books - typically full of nocturnal scenes (which the film versions readily copied, if only for reasons of economy) - seems to me to be related to the tension-filled atmosphere of the First World War trenches. (The word 'sapper', after all, which the author of the Drummond books took as his pen-name, refers to the military 'engineers' whose job it was to dig trenches under enemy positions and lay mines.) More tomorrow.
July 1 Let me start with a clarification. When I called Bulldog Drummond 'almost ... a larrikin-figure' and 'a working-class [or] lower-middle-class type' (June 29, above), I didn't mean the last part literally - Captain Hugh Drummond is anything but working-class in terms of income. (The same goes for his monacled pal, Algy, of course.) Nonetheless, he is perhaps more a man of the people, and uninhibited when it comes to having 'fun' (almost as Howard Hawks used that word), than Richard Hannay in the novels of Buchan. (Hannay and his pals move pretty much exclusively in the highest echelons of society, and in particular the landed gentry, whose essential values they staunchly uphold; Drummond, by contrast, is basically a city dweller, isn't much interested in class and class-values, and would probably subvert some of those values if he could be bothered to identify just what they were. In general, he is simply against whatever is stuffy and moribund. And Drummond's 'larrikin' escapades thus had more of an appeal than Hannay's adventures to ordinary working-class and middle-class readers. If I'm not mistaken, Buchan's regular publisher was Methuen, while Sapper's was Hodder and Staughton - which should tell us something.) Another point is this. Sapper's hero is often described as a bit of a xenophobe and a thug, but let's not overlook that Buchan's early novels - like 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915) - contain their blatant anti-Semitic and homophobic elements (which Hitchcock's film version understandably jettisoned). I actually find a certain pathos in the atmosphere of the Drummond novels which, as I mentioned yesterday, read like an extension of the nocturnal trips into no-man's-land, or the perilous tunnelling beneath enemy positions, that Sapper and a select band of stout-hearted fellows must have regularly undertaken during the War. Consider also that reference to the 'shell-shocked' (actually tortured) old man in the 'Bulldog Drummond' novel (see June 28, above): in that description there's an element of compassion, albeit sublimated by pragmatics, that bespeaks Sapper's experience of the wartime trenches in all their stark reality - and which contemporary readers would have respected. But I wanted to pass next to Sapper's influence on Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935). I will say two things. First, and this contravenes usual opinion, by the time that Hitchcock and Charles Bennett were through, there was really very little of Buchan left in the film - not much more in fact than there is of Daphne du Maurier left in Hitchcock's (and Evan Hunter's) The Birds (1963)! On the other hand, there is rather more of Sapper in the film than is generally recognised. As I pointed out here on November 20, 2002, some of the business with Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) throwing herself at Hannay (Robert Donat) at the start, is neither from Buchan nor is it an ex nihilo invention of Bennett and Hitchcock. I wrote: 'Take a look at the scene in Bulldog Drummond [F. Richard Jones, 1929] in which a young blonde named Phyllis throws herself on the manly Drummond and pleads with him to save her father who is being held prisoner by Carl Peterson [...] She bursts into Drummond's room at an inn [...] and immediately crosses to the window where she closes the curtains and peers down, terrified, into the courtyard below. The episode not only anticipates how Hannay in The 39 Steps is suddenly accosted in the street outside a music hall and asked by a blonde woman, Annabella, to be taken home by him - where she promptly requests him to draw the curtains and [check] the street below - but the element of male gratification is the same and [evidently] shows the influence of one scene on the other.' More tomorrow.
July 2 I want to further modify
what I said about Sapper's Bulldog Drummond being perhaps more a man of
the people than Buchan's Richard Hannay! It is precisely the friendly,
gentlemanly aspect of Hannay that Robert Donat gets so right in Hitchcock's
film! In the chapter of Buchan's novel called "The Radical Candidate"
- the basis of the memorable scene of the impromptu political speech in
the film - Hannay meets up with a man named Sir Harry on his way to give
a speech, and is invited to fill in for a second speaker who has gone missing.
(Sir Harry's consternation may remind you of the White Rabbit muttering
distractedly to himself in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice In Wonderland'!)
As soon as Sir Harry starts speaking, Hannay realises how inept a speaker
he is. 'Yet', Hannay tells the reader, 'in a queer way I liked the
speech. You could see the niceness of the chap shining out behind the muck
with which he had been spoon-fed.' (Chapter IV) You don't get
that sort of friendly appreciation from Drummond - perhaps because there
simply isn't time! But that brings me to my next point. The
outlandishness
of
many scenes in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps
is a Drummond sort
of thing. For example, in the novel, Hannay's own speech at the political
meeting is just a matter of regaling his audience with memories of his
trip to Australia. ('I simply told them all I could remember about
Australia, praying there should be no Australian there ...') The
nonsensical - but deeply felt - speech in the film, however, provides an
instance of Hitchcock's inspired cheekiness that I equate with some of
Sapper! Now consider this. The two Ronald Colman films of Drummond
novels - the second was called Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934)
and was described by William K. Everson as 'that rarity, a sequel superior
to its original' - both seem to me obvious precursors of The 39 Steps.
Everson writes of the second Drummond film: 'The script delighted in dumping
Drummond into the most inextricable of situations, have him admit the near
impossibility of escape, and then proceed to effect that escape in a manner
both absurd yet somehow logical.' How Hitchcockian! Next, the
addition of a love-interest to The 39 Steps, and a certain risquéness
about the whole business, is like a combining of elements from the Drummond
films (something already touched on here in yesterday's item) with the
chapter called "Adventures of a Pair of Handcuffs" from a comedy-adventure
novel by Anthony Berkeley, 'Mr Priestley's Problem' (1927) - which I've
described elsewhere. About the inn scene, in particular, and in addition
to a risqué story involving a pie which Hitchcock cited to Truffaut
as one source, I think of the scenes at the Green Bay Inn in the 1929
Bulldog
Drummond and also the inn scene in a 1934 Tom Walls vehicle called
Lady
In Danger: what Hitchcock and screenwriter Charles Bennett appear to
have done is change the prying pair of innkeepers in that film to the far
more agreeable elderly couple in the 1935 film. At all events, Buchan
is the least of inspirations here! Even the fact that the pursuers
of Hannay and Pamela on the moors are, in one extended sequence, spies
disguised as policemen, is a rather Bulldog Drummond sort of situation:
at the end of Bulldog Drummond, Carl Peterson and his whole gang
elude Drummond by impersonating police officers!
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Notes for this page:
1. In Hitchcock's Murder! (1930), the character of the feeble-minded juryman who can hardly say anything but 'That's right!' is based on Mr Padge in 'Diary of a Nobody' (by comedian George Grossmith and his younger brother Weedon).
2. The effect that Hitchcock was aiming for here seems to have been inspired by his viewings of the German film Varieté (E.A. Dupont, 1925) - which was also a major influence on Hitchcock's The Ring (1927). At one point in Dupont's film, the cuckolded trapeze-artist 'Boss' (Emil Jannings) suddenly feels old. Wanting to sneak back to his dressing-room unnoticed, he tip-toes through the theatre wings. In doing so, he must pass a chorus-line of high-kicking girls performing onstage behind him. Their vivacity and camaraderie serve to emphasise how decrepit he feels.
3. Richard Allen reminds me that I need to be careful with the cinema reference in 'Creative Evolution'! 'After all,' he writes, 'Bergson argued that the cinema, in the way it cut up and reassembled an image of movement rather than movement itself, was akin to the superficial process of representation or thought which fails to capture the essence of the thing represented. Of course you can argue that this (Bergson's) is a very restricted vision of what cinema is and that on the contrary in cinema we don't simply get a representation but the thing itself or a fusion of thought and object.'
