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ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK - 1
Why Hides the Sun in Shame?:
Ambrose Chapel
and The Man Who Knew
Too Much
by Murray Pomerance
[Editor's note. Murray Pomerance is the author of 'An Eye for
Hitchcock' (Rutgers, 2004) and professor in the Department of
Sociology at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Here, in
exemplary scholarly fashion, he investigates the hymn scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956
version) and asks why the text of the original hymn, from the Magdalen
Chapel hymn book of 1791, was subtly changed.]
[Still: Vicary Street,
Brixton. St Saviour's church hall as Ambrose Chapel. Jo
waits on right.]
THE SETTINGS IN HITCHCOCK films
range from the ridiculous (Abraham Lincoln’s cheek) to the
sublime (Muir Woods/Big Basin State Park), but surely the bleakest of
them, the most hollow and forbidding, is Ambrose Chapel. Here Ben
and Jo McKenna (James Stewart, Doris Day) venture on a British Monday
afternoon, desperate to find their kidnapped son Hank in the bustling
labyrinth of London. They have been cued to this place - or, as
fans of The Man Who Knew Too Much
will remember, to the sound
of the
name of this place - by a dying voice in Morocco, and have been led
something of a wild animal chase getting here. The little street
in which they find themselves - supposedly Ambrose Street - is
empty. Vague sounds of choral singing waft from the tiny chapel
across the way. They walk toward it and gingerly enter, only to
find quite another world.
The chapel is high and wooden,
shabby, set up with folding chairs, with steel support poles running up
here and there from floor to vault. Edward and Lucy Drayton
(Bernard Miles, Brenda de Banzie) are running a service, not a little
to our surprise, since we encountered them in Marrakech as a pair of
chummy British middle-class tourists vacationing from a life in
agriculture. It is Ben and Jo’s realization that they have
finally found the elusive Draytons that gives them hope their missing
son is nearby, since they have concluded already (and correctly) that
these are the people who kidnapped him. The room is filled with
rather elderly, and by no means wealthy, worshippers, timid of posture,
weak of voice. Edward is on the dais, ready at some point to
sermonize. Lucy is passing through the congregation as they sing,
with a collection plate held modestly in her hands. During the
hymn, as she moves up the aisle close to Ben and Jo, they prepare
themselves to encounter her eye to eye. Suddenly she discovers
them. Her face goes white and she quickly retreats to the front
of the room, where try as she might she cannot make Edward catch her
silent warning. He begins to speak - about, of all things,
adversity - and suddenly, in mid-phrase, as Jo too obtrusively sneaks
out to call the police, he sees. There, in fact, is the father of
the child he has tucked away upstairs, waiting to confront him.
He excuses his flock, who file out exactly like so many sheep, and
confronts Ben directly. The end of this scene is succinct:
Ben calls out to Hank, who answers from far off. As Ben tries to
get past Drayton, he is coshed by a thug and left unconscious while
Drayton and his associates take the child and escape. Some time
later, Ben climbs a rope into the belfry and by ringing the bell
attracts a crowd and is freed.
I want to briefly discuss two
particular aspects of this scene, the hymn that is sung and the
location of the building itself, hopefully showing something of how the
Ambrose Chapel scene is important for understanding this picture and
the way Hitchcock worked in general.
[Still: falseness.
Drayton preaching.]
Staging
a Chapel
Pure and authentic a haven as it
may sometimes seem, a chapel has all the characteristics of any
theatrical space: raised stage, special lighting, performers who
operate according to something of a script and wear special costumes,
thus becoming “characters.” People “dress
up” for church, especially those who are running the show
there. Indeed, a chapel is a kind of sanctum of role-playing and
disguise, and this may be one of the reasons Hitchcock’s story
places the perfidious and false Draytons there to work. As Edward
Drayton is dressing in his pastor’s dickie, the apparent
contradiction between the invocation of the Church in his garb and the
moral darkness in his dialogue as he rehearses the Assassin stun us
with the thought that he is, as the Assassin wickedly puns, “a
wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But by including Ambrose
Chapel explicitly in the film, Hitchcock jokes that it is the perfect
lair for such wolves in general. Given all of this, we might
conclude that nothing is going on in the Ambrose Chapel scene but
performance: in short, Drayton is not really a minister, and the
very fact that he looks like one is virtual evidence that he is
anything but.
However, I think it possible
Hitchcock is suggesting something quite different about Edward Drayton,
something even darker. When we consider that the feeble members
of this congregation - whom we see quite clearly in medium close-ups -
are comfortable with him; and when we see the dutiful way they listen
to his words, and leave when he asks them to; we can only conclude that
they have been coming to worship under his guidance for some
time. He is, in short, the actual pastor of this chapel, and
there is no theatricality involved in his posture tonight at all.
The evil man is not hiding underneath
a beatific religious cloak; more
shockingly, the religious man himself is evil. Just as earlier
Hitchcock had set up other social institutions for critique, parody,
and dismantling - the market, the family, the police, high society -
and was about to do the same for high culture, he here dismantles the
Church. Drayton is fulfilling not a calling but an
occupation. Nor is there anything to suggest that earlier in life
he might not, quite honestly, have been a man who did agricultural
research, just as Lucy said. In the scene in the chapel, then, no
one is hiding at all. To be villainous, one need not lie.
Aside from his normal penchant for
pictorial realism, Hitchcock needed this setting to be believable as a
place in which worship would actually be happening on a Monday
afternoon. The concert in the Albert Hall, happening on the same
day as the chapel scene, takes place on the evening of Monday 6 June,
1955. This fact alone almost certainly positions the chapel as
appropriate to non-Anglican, probably dissenting, non-denominational
Christianity. Drayton’s garb is congruent with this
reading, as is the general nature of his congregation: slightly
shabby, working-class, downtrodden folk aspiring to be
“saved.” As Bill Krohn describes them, “This is
what people who believe in pre-destination look and sound like”
(178). In this setting it was vital that faith, adversity,
anxiety, spirituality, and propriety might be invoked, yet also
mocked. And here, quintessentially here, a certain kind of hymn
could believably have been sung.
Lieutenant Commander Foster Kemp,
of Paramount British Productions Limited, had made arrangements for an
exact London location. Mr G. G. Hartwright of Milles Day and Co
Solicitors, 5, Little College Street Westminster SW1 wrote on 13 May
1955 to the Reverend J. F. Balley at St. Saviour’s Hall, 3, St.
Saviour’s Road, Brixton Hill to say that he had made an agreement
with Paramount whereby “they are to use the Hall in connection
with the making of a new film.” He pronounced himself
satisfied with the temporary alterations Paramount’s
“architect” would be making to the belfry and considered,
indeed, that Paramount would leave St. Saviour’s in better
condition than it found it. Work was to commence the following
day. For use of the Hall in filming the exteriors of Ambrose
Chapel, St. Saviour’s was paid £75, a sum Hartwright
earlier called “a good payment since the filming … will
only last for two or three days.” On June 16 the filming
was completed, and the architects and surveyors Trehearne & Norman,
Preston & Partners were concerned to learn from Balley whether he
had made private arrangements with Paramount British to have the roof
repaired and the belfry removed. About the middle of August, just
over £71 was paid to J. Kidd & Son Builders and Contractors
for repair of the floorboards, windows, and wall; but the belfry was
left alone. The bell, which could be removed and sold off - as
Balley had learned on 17 May from Hartwright - only with approval from
the Bishop of Kingston, was not estimated to be of any value as such,
but might do as scrap if it contained not less than 20% tin. It
was bought and receipted 8 December by Gillett & Johnston Ltd of
Croydon in the sum of £5 9s 3d. But notwithstanding all of
these meticulous arrangements made on his behalf, Hitchcock did not
shoot inside the Hall.
According to the daily production
reports, the company finished at the Marrakech location May 23, 1955
and removed to London, commencing there on the 28th. St.
Saviour’s was photographed only on June 16, and only, as the
sheet says, for exteriors. The call box in which Jo frantically
attempts to raise Inspector Buchanan but finds Woburn instead, was shot
in Blenheim Gardens, a few blocks away, on the same day. On June
25 a second unit worked in dull, “not ideal” weather to
make transparency plates in the street for rear projection.
It should be noted, though, that
there was a company call for
the 16th at the Hall, and that it was
rather extensive. (Strangely, it even included Daniel
Gélin, though his character had died in Marrakech.)
Nonetheless, in the end no interiors were shot there. The Ambrose
Chapel interiors were all shot on sets built by Henry Bumstead at
Paramount. Stage 5 was used for the main chapel interior, the
filming taking up July 8, 9, 11, 12 (with direct recording of the
hymn), July 18 (with playback of the hymn), and July 19.
Forty-two extras were called with the full principal cast, which again
included Daniel Gélin (not used, though) and Christopher Olsen
(heard off-camera only). The scene in Drayton’s study
upstairs was set on Stage 4, and filmed the 23 and 25 July.
Why, we may reasonably ask, when a
viable location had been found in London, and when all of the necessary
cast members were not only in the city but on call, was a decision made
to repair to Hollywood for the chapel interiors? In general,
Hitch always preferred to do his interiors on the sound stage, where
much more meticulous control could be achieved and where he knew he
could obtain from Bumstead the most verisimilitudinous look - a look
often “realer” than what he would find in reality.
(For all the preparations in the real belfry, for example, it was
reconstructed by Bumstead on Matte Stage 1 at Paramount and the
bell-ringing scene shot with a rear projection plate on August
20.) What precise look was it that Hitchcock needed here, what
precise action did he need to shape and frame, that was so
important? As good a retrospective analysis as one will find is
Krohn's: “the Chapel, hideous as it is, is the place where
Ben and Jo find Hank again, and the intricate criss-crossing paths of
which it is the centre lead them to the Albert Hall, where Jo saves a
man’s life, and then to the Embassy, where they are reunited with
Hank” (178). Yes, Ambrose Chapel is the center of
criss-crossing paths; but Hitchcock has arranged that it should
be. Why, of all places, this one, and at a time when the
parishioners are singing - or trying to sing - that particular hymn?
[Still: composite matte shot of
rear of Ambrose Chapel. Jo waits in street.]
A
Shameful Song
It is vital in appreciating
Hitchcock to recognize that every aspect of every scene is meticulously
shaped to fit the story he is telling, and that there are no decorative
flourishes. While most people watching The Man Who Knew Too Much
take the Ambrose Chapel hymn scene as an opportunity to watch Ben and
Jo secretively plotting against Edward and Lucy Drayton, in fact it is
worthwhile to consider the hymn that we are hearing - the somewhat
tedious hymn, indeed - while this is going on.
Hymn tunes and hymn lyrics are
identified separately by churchmen and worshippers. The tune in
this case is called “Burford.” It is a traditional
melody - probably originally Welsh - which can be found arranged with
various sets of lyrics throughout the long history of its use which
goes back at least to the late eighteenth century. It is to be
found in hymn books as far back as 1791, where it is set to a text by
Samuel Wesley Jr. (1691-1739, the nephew of the founder of Methodism),
and it has appeared under various titles and with subtle changes of
wording several times since. However, the lyrics that are sung in
Hitchcock’s film appear with this hymn only in the Magdalen hymn
book. What was that book?
Magdalen [pron. maud’-lin]
Hospital dates from the year 1758, a time when the dominant culture as
a whole had turned to a rationalist approach to human affairs, what
might be seen as analogous to Ben McKenna’s practical way of
looking at the world. In the Methodist and non-conformist
chapels, however, attention was devoted feverishly to the salvage of
the human soul (Temperley 1994). The climate outside was
intensively industrialist: man’s relation to his world was
through things, and the organization of men was by means of the
organization of things. The human was fragmented into operative
parts, so human relations were partial and technical rather than
holistic and spiritual. The mundane world was thus open to errant
behavior, a decline in the Puritan ethic; and in cities like London
sexual unconventionality, in particular, flourished. According to
Nicholas Temperley, Magdalen House “became a remand home, which
finally closed in 1966.” (Hence Magdalen House was a remand
home when, in 1955, Hitchcock and his team prepared their film.
At that time the girls of the home sang their hymns from behind
theatrical screens to guard the public from seeing them.)
Crucially, though, it’s the
Magdalen Chapel hymn book of 1791 that was the source of the hymn
available in the Paramount Music Library and thus, indubitably, the
basis of the hymn heard in the film. That version of the
hymn is without title, appearing in a section called “On the
Passion.” Its lyric - the one that would most easily have
been available to Bernard Herrmann - is this:
From whence these dire
Portents
around,
That Earth & Heav’n amaze?
Wherefore do Earthquakes cleave the
Ground?
Why hides the Sun his rays?
. . .
Let Sin no more my Soul enslave;
Break, Lord, the Tyrant’s
Chain:
O save me, whom thou cam’st
to save;
Nor bleed, nor die in vain.
- and is, further, a lyric
that has
changed much through church history. There is no absolute, exact,
precise meaning of the hymn itself, no particular version that is
better or more accurate in general than any other version. If
Hitchcock had merely wanted to decorate his church scene with a typical
and believable hymn, the version in the Paramount library would have
been quite as suitable as any other version anyone could have found.
But in the version actually
“sung” in The Man Who
Knew Too Much the lyrics are
changed. Some additional
work was performed on this musical text
before filming could take place - this in the case of a text frequently
taken in Hitchcockian criticism to be insignificant to the meaning of
the film (since it is very often not mentioned). One
exception is
Krohn’s brief interpretation that “The person uttering
those words, who is present at the Crucifixion, knows that the
earthquakes and darkness are portents of his salvation. In the
second verse, he prays to the dying Christ to free him from the tyrant,
Original Sin” (178).
But the lyrical alteration produced
before filming deeply modifies the meaning of the scene. The
presumption must therefore be that it was Hitchcock, or Herrmann, or
one of the production people associated with the actual sound
recording, who called for the first stanza’s last line to be
sung: “Why hides the sun
in shame?”
Both times this first stanza of the
hymn is presented, the camera realizes images that reflect and magnify
these changed words, suggesting not that the sun hides his rays but
that the sun hides in shame.
The first time, Ben and Jo are
sneaking into the chapel. As we hear “Why hides the sun in
shame?” Ben and Jo hide themselves against the shame of being
caught out spying. And then, with the very source of all light
being “shameful,” shame becomes the emotional key of the
scene. To obtain the very precise quality of lighting that could
match this reconstructed lyric, and to stage the action in such a way
as to hint at, and reflect, shame, Hitchcock needed to shoot on a
soundstage, not on location in Brixton.
[Still: Ben and Jo
“hide” in the chapel.]
Consider what we see and hear -
“You have to listen closely,” writes Krohn (178) - when the
hymn is repeated. We have seen that (i) Lucy Drayton is making
her way relentlessly down the aisle; and (ii) Ben and Jo have seen,
too. But also (iii) Lucy does not
know that Ben and Jo are here,
and so she is literally innocent of a trap that is being set for her by
the McKennas. This is crucial, because we must be brought to a
position of some sympathy for her. As the worshippers are
intoning about dire portents around that heaven and earth amaze, Lucy
is surrounded, as we well know, by portents that are about to amaze her
quite radically. The elements of the cosmos, in other words, have
conspired against Lucy, and so she is pathetic and worthy of our
concern.
Now, significantly, we cut to a
reverse shot to see Lucy move, and we are aware that the ground on
which she steps will shortly quake:
Wherefore do earthquakes
cleave the
ground
Why hides the sun - Lucy pulls back
and moves right, as we pan, until she is directly in front of us, her
head down. - in . . . - She steps forward and opens her
eyes directly into the camera in a CS. - shame?
[Still: Lucy Drayton.
“Why hides the sun in shame?”]
Lucy is now the sun, the central
element in this planetary system which includes the McKennas, the
Draytons, kidnapped Hank, Louis Bernard, Buchanan. Around her
consciousness, and her activity, the plot’s many subtle threads
now wind. As we hear the vital words, “in shame” she
is opening her eyes directly into the camera. Her eyes flicker
perceptibly. She draws back. It is the turning of the
kidnapping story: the moment when we have the first inkling that Hank
will be found and saved, and that his captors will be vanquished.
*
Hitchcock thus interceded twice
before shooting Ambrose Chapel. While a location had been
prepared in London at some expense and trouble, he used it only for
exteriors and shot the sequence at Paramount instead, where more time
was available for a meticulous choreography around the hymn tune and a
precise evocation of the shameful mood of the place. As regards
the hymn tune: while Steven DeRosa is quite correct when he suggests
that “Although the lyrics of the hymn can only be faintly
understood, Hitchcock’s selection of them is, of course, not an
instance of sheer chance” (277), his casual comment that the
lyric about the sun hiding in shame foreshadows the Albert Hall misses
the fact that Hitchcock took a perfectly acceptable lyric that was
already available at the studio and changed it (or had Herrmann change
it) to throw a particular shadow upon his characters and his
story. The hymn is not a foreshadowing at all, but a direct
portrait, of Edward, profoundly of Lucy, and even of Ben and Jo.
They, too, are riddled with shame inside this chapel, hiding from the
people who have stolen their son, hiding from worshippers who do not
even know them, hiding, to the sound of a bleak hymn in this bleak
place of falseness, even from themselves.
References
used:
DeRosa, Steven. Writing with
Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael
Hayes. New York: Faber and Faber, 2001.
Krohn, Bill. Hitchcock at
Work. London: Phaidon, 2000.
Routley, Eric. “Hymns
by Accident,” Bulletin of the
Hymn Society (October 1982).
Temperley, Nicholas.
“The Hymn Books of the Foundling and Magdalen Hospital
Chapels,” in David Hunted, ed., Music
Publishing and Collecting:
Essays in Honor of Donald W. Krummel, Urbana-Champaign: Graduate
School
of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, 1994.
•
I am especially grateful to Henry
Bumstead, Steven DeRosa, Joseph Herl, Dr. Mai H. Kelton, Ken Mogg,
William J. Reynolds, Nicholas Temperley, Eldridge Walker, and the
Greater London Record Office. MP
ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK - 2 (Richard Allen on Vertigo)
ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK - 3 (Theodore Price on Marnie)
.
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