Good evening.
Tonight's programme is about Alfred Hitchcock's British films.
The first films of his career.
Before he became the master of suspense, he made all kinds of
movies, learning his profession and honing his technique.
His later, much loved American pictures,
are full of visual sequences which owe a huge debt to his early days as a silent film director.
Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899 in Leytonstone.
He died in 1980.
In between, he became the most famous film director in the history of the motion picture.
But why put up with a mediocre impersonation, when we have the great man himself.
Mr Hitchcock, would you say that your films were more or less sensational than real life?
Life is more sensational.
I would say that, how does one describe drama?
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
Alfred Hitchcock is a very well documented film maker but his
British period before he went to Hollywood is often overlooked.
He made 23 films here before going to America.
But let's not run ahead of ourselves.
When Alfred was six years old, the family
moved to Limehouse in the East End of London, just a stone's throw from
where Jack the Ripper carried out a series of brutal killings
only 11 years before Alfred was born.
His parents were Catholic - that's Alfred Hitchcock's not Jack the Ripper's -
and being a Catholic in those days was a minority religion in Protestant England.
I was brought up in a Catholic household and sometimes it does
lead to the feeling of being a bit of an outsider.
A schoolboy contemporary of the young Alfred, Ambrose King,
described the young Hitchcock as, "a big boy who sat in the corner.
"He said little and was not easily engaged in conversation.
"He stank of fish."
Perhaps there is a whiff of autobiography about this on-screen cameo in Blackmail.
Here, Alfred is being bothered by a child.
Another incident in Alfred Hitchcock's childhood has attained legendry status.
The story that he relied on,
as the all-purpose explanation of his interest in crime
and his fear of figures of authority and so on was that once, his father,
who seems to have been quite firm and intimidating in himself, I think,
and once Hitch had done something he didn't approve of, and so
he wrote a little note and sent him down to the police station,
where the sergeant was a mate of his.
The note apparently said, "Can you put him in a cell for five minutes?"
Then, when he was released, the policeman said, "That's what happens to naughty boys."
Alfred Hitchcock's fear of the police would have
made an identity parade an absolute nightmare for him.
If you think Alfred Hitchcock's head on a penguin
makes him look like a Jesuit priest then there's a good reason for this.
He was educated by Jesuits.
Mr Hitchcock, what influence would you say your Jesuit training had on your film-making?
'I think it taught me some aspects of fear.
'I think the Jesuits are pretty, I hate to use the word hard-boiled educators but,
'as far as I can remember, I was pretty scared when I was there.'
This is a ferula.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, I too went to a Jesuit school, so I'm more than familiar with this.
The cruel psychological aspects of the ferula was that you were allowed
to choose your own time of your punishment, be it mid-morning, lunchtime or after school.
So you'd try and find out which teacher was administering
the punishment at those particular times.
I was once ordered six of these, three on each hand for forgetting my maths homework.
I left it at home, having worked all night on it and forgot to bring it in with me the next day.
Despite this small but deep trauma,
I offer a fair and balanced view of the world of the Jesuit.
MUSIC: "Carmina Burana" by Carl Orff
Alfred escaped the miseries of school with regular trips to the theatre.
CHARLESTON MUSIC PLAYS
In 1914, three momentous events occurred in Alfred Hitchcock's life.
Firstly, the First World War started, then Alfred left school
and joined the engineering firm Henley's, and then his father died.
There is no connection between these three events.
At Henley's, the young Alfred came into his own, he'd been a bit of a loner as a boy but
at the engineering firm, he joined in all the social events and, in fact,
here's a rare glimpse of a young Alfred, enjoying a river trip on this very river.
This photograph was taken in 1919.
His boss later said of Alfred, that he was a natural humorist and clown.
He had a sparkling wit, but it was not only the
things he said but the spontaneous and the unexpected things he did.
Mr Hitchcock, were you a keen moviegoer at this time?
I was a very keen moviegoer, and I heard that an American company were coming
to London to open a studio, so I applied for the job of
designing their titles because those were the silent days.
And, er, titles were an important part of the picture.
He went to get a job of drawing the titles, like in the sunset,
and he would draw the sun setting and so on and so forth.
He went over there and my mother said she saw this young man come in with his big portfolio.
But she didn't speak to him because he didn't have a job,
and in those days, a gentleman didn't talk to a lady, especially if she had a better job than he did.
So, that's where they met - in the studio.
Alma Reville, born a day after Alfred - in the same year,
had entered the film business in 1915 at the age of 16.
Alma was already a bit further up the rungs of the film ladder.
She was a film editor.
In those days, they called it a script girl.
But, what the script girl did was not only record what was shot
but also put the films physically together.
Alfred swiftly progressed from title card designer to art director.
Michael Balcon, a man fresh to film production, opened up a studio called Gainsborough in 1923.
He was so impressed by the young Alfred Hitchcock, he made him
assistant director on Gainsborough's first film, Woman To Woman.
Finally promoted to a position of some power, Alfred Hitchcock
surprised a colleague with the offer of editing the film.
The colleague's name was Alma Reville.
She also worked as a screenwriter.
Her knowledge and experience in film proved invaluable to Alfred.
He quickly learnt to rely on her judgement and expertise.
In 1924, Michael Balcon had signed a deal with UFA, the prestigious German film company.
Alfred was sent to Berlin with the director, Graham Cutts, to film The Blackguard.
In many respect, German silent cinema was far in advance of Hollywood.
There was greater experimentation with lighting, and also expressionistic sets.
'I have acquired a strong German influence by working
'at the UFA studios, Berlin, in their heyday.
'Tremendous technical achievements.
'They were doing Janning's...'
They were working on Janning's Last Laugh while I was there.
The director of The Last Laugh, FW Murnau, was a keen advocate of the moving camera.
This wasn't easy at a time when cameras were so heavy.
Here he puts a camera in a lift.
Murnau once said that what you saw on the set did not matter -
what counted was what you saw on the screen.
These cars in the background are miniatures, designed to create a
false perspective of a massive street scene.
Before the invention of the zoom lens, there was only one way to get this shot.
The move back from the street musician was actually achieved by
mounting the camera on a purpose-built cable car.
Alfred Hitchcock would be influenced by the visual inventiveness of
German silent cinema throughout the rest of his career.
Having returned from Berlin, relations between Hitchcock and
his director, Graham Cutts, became very strained.
Mr Hitchcock, perhaps another reason for the tension was that you were
working as an Assistant Director and Art Director.
Did you break into Graham Cutts's territory?
Oh, I not only broke into his territory, I gave him his shots and where they should be taken.
I built the set in such a way he couldn't take it from any other angle.
Hitchcock designed this stairway to heaven set for The Blackguard.
Balcon had recently brokered a deal with a Munich-based firm called Emelka,
and Hitchcock got the job of directing their first co-production, The Pleasure Garden.
This was the first of ten silent films that Alfred Hitchcock would direct.
Immediately it shows two of his enduring themes -
voyeurism...
and a love of theatre.
Alma Reville was hired as assistant director and editor.
She was also an invaluable support.
After every take, Alfred would turn to her and say, "Was it all right?"
My mother and father had a marvellous relationship because they worked together as well.
He never - even to the end - he never made a move without her.
He would...find a story, bring it home, have her read it.
If she thought it would make a picture, he'd go ahead.
If she said, "No, it won't," he didn't even touch it.
She had an unerring judgement.
He went right along with her judgement and that was from the very beginning.
The Pleasure Garden opened to rave reviews.
The Daily Express headline described him as the young man with a master mind.
The film also benefited from a screen play by the hugely
experienced writer, Eliot Stannard,
who would co-write the majority of Hitch's silent films.
Hitchcock's second film, The Mountain Eagle, is now lost.
But his third film, The Lodger, was a huge success.
The Lodger was based on a very popular novel by Mrs Belloc-Lowndes.
Hitch was a big fan of the book, which was about the true life horror of Jack The Ripper.
Ivor Novello plays a mysterious stranger, whose odd behaviour throws suspicion upon him.
'That's the visual interpretation of the missing sound of those days.'
In other words, a man is pacing a room up and down. Today,
we'd do it by sound and you will see the chandelier shaking.
The substitute for that was a visual impression of the room above
and you saw the soles of his shoes
and the full length of his body and the ceiling of the room beyond
as he paced up and down.
I did it by having a floor made of one inch thick glass.
Shots inspired by German expressionism severely
worried the money men, who thought the film was too arty.
'When I had finished The Lodger, the director I had been working for,'
was looking at the rushes and reported to the producer.
He said, "I don't know what the devil he's shooting.
"I don't understand a word of it."
And finally, came an afternoon when the big shot was coming down
to verify his menial's verdict on the picture
and I remember my wife and I walked out of the studio, um, and went for two hours.
We found ourselves at Tower Bridge.
I said, "It must be over by now. Let's go back."
Hoping, of course, this is the most suspenseful moment I've ever had,
to go back and find smiling faces, it's all right, he likes it.
But not a bit of it. He confirmed it and they put the film on the shelf.
It stayed on the shelf for about two or three months.
They said, "Well we have in investment in this.
"We'll take a look at it again and then finally agreed to show it."
Then it was acquired as the greatest British film made for that period.
So, there you see the fine line between failure and success.
Although the film was successful, there is a problem with the title role.
Ivor Novello is no one's idea of a vicious, serial killer.
In The Lodger, with his back to the camera, Hitchcock makes the first of his cameo appearances.
Alma herself makes a brief appearance too.
Her first and last in a Hitchcock film.
On December 2nd 1926, Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville
celebrated a Roman Catholic wedding at Brompton Oratory.
They honeymooned in Paris, Lake Como and St Moritz.
They would visit the same places virtually every Christmas for the rest of their lives.
Alfred's next film was another Ivor Novello vehicle called Downhill.
If Hitch was worried about the 34-year-old Novello playing a teenager,
he must have had kittens at the sight of the supporting cast.
The opening of Hitch's 1927 film, The Ring, is a marvellous montage
of fairground images which creates a very modern sense of movement and atmosphere.
Montage was a Russian theory of film making that was very much admired by Hitchcock.
Montage means the assembly of pieces of film,
which moved in rapid succession before the eye to create an idea.
Here is an extreme example of Russian montage from the film, Man with a Movie Camera.
Secondly, montage could also be used to illustrate the passing of time.
As the boxer climbs up the bill, notice how the seasons change.
Now, the third way is the assembly of film to create a different idea.
Have a close-up.
Never show what he sees. Let's assume
he saw a woman holding a baby in her arms.
Now we cut back -
to his reaction to what he sees.
He smiles.
What is he as a character?
He's a kindly man.
He's sympathetic.
Now, let's take the middle piece of film away -
the woman with the child - but leave his two pieces of film as they were.
Now we'll put in...
a piece of film of a girl in a bikini.
He looks.
The girl in a bikini.
He smiles.
What is he now?
A dirty old man.
He's no longer the benign gentleman
who loves babies.
That's what film can do for you.
For The Ring, Alfred Hitchcock teamed up with cameraman Jack Cox
who specialised in all kinds of trick photography.
Here we see what a drunk sees.
In his 1928 film Champagne, Alfred Hitchcock experimented
with a camera lens placed in a giant champagne glass.
At the end of filming, Alfred had a genuine cause for celebration.
Patricia Alma Hitchcock was born.
Across the Atlantic, Hollywood was also giving birth...to talkies.
The huge success of Warner Brothers' film The Jazz Singer, which featured
Al Jolson singing and ad-libbing some dialogue, spelt death to the silent film.
Did the coming of sound bother you in any way?
No, it didn't bother me at all. I just...just took to it like a...
I won't say a duck takes to the water.
I will say as a duck takes to a quack.
Alfred Hitchcock was in the middle of making Blackmail, he faced a major dilemma with his female star.
Anny Ondra spoke with a thick Czechoslovakian accent, mainly because she was Czechoslovakian.
Hitchcock arranged a voice test at the studio to see how her voice recorded.
Now, Miss Ondra,
you asked me to let you hear your voice on the talking picture.
Hitch, you mustn't do that. Why not?
Because I can speak well.
Do you realise the squad van will be here any moment?
No, really? My God, I'm terribly frightened.
Why, have you been a bad woman or something? Not just bad, but...
But you've slept with men.
Oh, no!
You have not? Come here, stand in your place,
otherwise it will not come out right, as the girl said to the soldier.
That's enough!
This brief glimpse illustrates the studio atmosphere that was common during a Hitchcock picture.
Blackmail began as a silent film, but Hitchcock was clearly ahead of the game.
He'd already planned to put talking sequences into Blackmail.
The main problem concerned the fact that I had a Czech film star,
playing the part of an English girl.
And there the problem cropped up.
How do we get around the problem of Miss Ondra speaking with a heavy foreign accent?
In those days, we couldn't substitute voices with the ease which we do today.
So I had a young actress, Joan Barry, sitting on the side with her own microphone,
while Miss Ondra, on the set playing her scene, just mouthed her words.
So the girl on the side had to follow her very closely.
You and your Scotland Yard.
If it weren't for Edgar Wallace, nobody'd have ever have heard of it.
Funny, aren't you?
Anyway, what's the hurry? We're only going to the pictures.
We've got all evening.
Oh, I don't think I want to go to the pictures.
Why not?
I've seen everything worth seeing.
This is a very difficult thing to pull off.
WOMAN'S VOICE: For example, here I am miming to somebody else's voice.
The effect can be surprisingly convincing.
PHONE RINGS Oh, hello, Jo.
No!
No! She didn't!
I can't talk now.
I'll be home around eight or sooner if this idiot gets it right.
Yeah, yeah...love you.
Although sound was inevitable, Hitch was not about to abandon the visual style he had so carefully honed.
Blackmail stages a climax in a landmark location,
in this case the British Museum.
This was soon to become a Hitchcock trademark.
If we think of the Royal Albert Hall and The Man Who Knew Too Much,
the London Palladium and The Thirty-Nine Steps,
North By Northwest and Mount Rushmore, and the fruit and veg market in Covent Garden in Frenzy.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
Blackmail was based on the stage play of the same name by Charles Bennett.
But Alfred Hitchcock felt the third act was weak.
It was the young Michael Powell, himself a few years away from becoming a noted
film director in his own right, who came up with the idea of staging the final chase in this very room.
MUSIC SPEEDS UP
I say, it's not me you want, it's him.
Ask him! By his own...
GLASS SMASHES
Blackmail was a huge hit.
Its combination of visuals and dialogue made it Britain's first successful sound film.
With the advent of sound, the camera suddenly stopped moving.
It now had to be placed in a soundproof booth so that
the noise of the camera wouldn't be picked up by the new microphones.
And also, the lights had to be changed.
The old lights in silent days made a humming noise.
The new lights were much hotter, so you can imagine the working
conditions for a cameraman inside one of these booths.
It was probably akin to...
And when you add the difficulty of recording live music...
VIOLIN SCREECHES
Let's hope he didn't bring a piano.
What were the working conditions like in those booths? Awful.
They were full of earwigs, and people
used to break wind for fun.
God! And laugh when they got out, and cheer, and you'd be dead.
They were pretty awful, really.
And you'd shoot 14,000 feet of film in one day. I mean,
it was only tuppence ha'penny a foot.
But... And there were a lot of mistakes with sound.
Awful lot. So there were a lot of retakes.
When you say mistakes, were people bumping into microphones and
generally not used to sound equipment being there?
And shadows.
Shadows of lights and microphones.
Which they hadn't had to worry about before?
Never had to worry about.
Can you give us an example of the difficulties of working with early sound?
Um, I had a scene in the following film after Blackmail, which was
Juno And The Paycock, with the Irish Players.
And the family had come into the room.
They brought a phonograph, and they were playing a record, If You're Irish, Come Into The Parlour.
And then there was a choir.
They stopped the records.
The dialogue indicates there's a funeral procession going by,
and singing these Catholic hymns.
And it was a close-up of the son, the guilty son, who had betrayed his friend.
For God's sakes, shut that row.
< What's wrong with you?
Listen.
Now, they couldn't find a record of If You're Irish, Come Into The Parlour,
so in one corner of this tiny studio, we had an orchestra with no bass,
to get the tinny effect.
The prop man sang the song by holding his nose to get, again, the thin voice.
The rest of the characters played their dialogue.
Then in another corner of the studio was a choir,
for singing in the procession.
And there was more room taken up by the effects
than there was by the camera and the individual being photographed.
A very young John Laurie here at the beginning of his film career.
HYMNAL SINGING IN BACKGROUND
In the 1930 picture Murder, Alfred Hitchcock employs a theatre technique new to film.
Here, he records Herbert Marshall's internal monologue, an ingenious use of sound.
'Save her soul.
'Save her.
'If I'd stood up longer, I might have worn them down...
'Why couldn't they see the girl as I did?
'The rest of the fellows on the journey...'
Unusually for Hitchcock, who was a master of the special effect,
there is one disastrous moment in the film.
He wants to show a character walking through a deep plush carpet, but instead we get this.
Watching Murder is sometimes murder.
The slow pacing typical of very early talkies makes for difficult viewing.
Watch how long it takes this actor to leave the room.
The two actors by the door have very little to do and lots of time to do it in.
Murder is unique, because it is Alfred Hitchcock's only whodunnit.
I've never made a whodunnit since.
Very simple reason.
The whodunnit contains no emotion.
The audience are wondering.
They're not emoting, they're not apprehensive for anyone.
When the film is finished and the revelation comes,
you get two or three minutes of "Ah, I told you so"
or "I thought so" or "Fancy that".
Another problem for the early talkies was the rather...
IN STAGE ACCENT: measured and artificial sounding delivery of many stage-trained actors.
In The Skin Game, Jill Esmond, the first Mrs Laurence Olivier, is very difficult to listen to.
And notice the non-moving camera.
Mr Hornblower ought never to have found that up in the woods.
That's rather dog in the manger-ish.
Like so many early sound films adapted from stage plays,
The Skin Game is overburdened with long, static dialogue scenes.
But in the auction room scene, Hitch remains true to the idea of the moving camera.
AUCTIONEER: Now then, now then. What shall I say?
Think of all the possibilities.
What shall I say? 2,000.
That won't hurt you, Mr Spicer. Why, it's worth that to overlook the duke.
For 2,000. For 2,000.
2,500, thank you, sir. 2,500.
Come, come. Mr Sandy, don't scratch your head over it.
3,000. 3,000.
For this desirable property, you'd think it wasn't desirable!
Come, a little spirit, gentlemen, a little spirit!
3,500.
Hitchcock's film Number Seventeen was based on a stage play from the mid-1920s.
The star from the original production, an eccentric
character actor called Leon M Lion, does appear in the film version.
He plays a Cockney type that no longer really exists.
Quite sure you don't know anything about that?
What, me? Gawn!
Number Seventeen is a bizarre film, and at times Hitchcock
is clearly having great fun at the expense of the original play.
In this film, fist fighting goes on for ever.
The most effective part of the film is the final chase.
These shots of a model bus and train are made with far greater care than the rest of the film put together.
When you saw Number Seventeen again recently,
what did you think of the film? I thought it was magic.
We had these eight miles of track.
And I remember, my last shot, I was tied off, ankle to ankle.
So my top was a camera.
And we were going a bit too fast.
We weren't slowing down. I thought, "Where's the next low bridge?
"Cos I'm on the top here, and I'm tied off".
So I shouted down below to the kids, my assistants.
I said "Will you pull the...cord?"
I said "I don't know where we're going".
And Jack Cox was on the footbrake.
So he went and pulled the cord, and the train stopped.
And he stopped about...
300 yards from a low bridge which would have cut me in half. Wow.
Waltzes From Vienna is just about the worst film that Alfred Hitchcock ever made.
HITCHCOCK: At this period of time, my reputation wasn't very good.
A film about The Blue Danube starring popular musical actress
Jessie Matthews was unlikely to bring out the best in Hitchcock.
But by 1934, what was the best of Alfred Hitchcock?
Blackmail, his first big hit of the sound era, had been nearly five years before in 1929.
And since then, he'd made a series of talking pictures which were
more or less adaptations of popular stage plays of the day.
His cinematic art had barely developed at all, if we discount
the marvellous chase sequence at the end of Number Seventeen.
And with his film in 1934 Waltzes From Vienna, it could be argued that
his cinematic technique was going backwards.
Alfred Hitchcock's career was in crisis.
But then the Hitchcocks began a new collaboration with the writer Charles Bennett.
The resulting screenplay, The Man Who Knew Too Much, also benefited
from discussions with other like-minded professionals at the Hitchcocks' flat in Cromwell Road.
The master of suspense was born.
DANCE MUSIC PLAYS
Peter Lorre, star of Fritz Lang's controversial film about a
child killer, M, was imaginatively cast as the villain of the piece.
The early Germanic and Russian influences are integrated into one
coherent style, and the Hitchcock movie as we know it has arrived.
SINGING
An assassination is about to take place in The Albert Hall.
This climactic scene is played without dialogue.
HITCHCOCK: When you choose a location,
it must not be a background.
The goings-on in that location must be involved in the story.
For example, in the assassination which is about to take place,
when the cymbals crash, that's the time for the shot to go off.
SHE SCREAMS
GUNSHOT
Sounds as if it went off all right.
I hope so, for all our sakes.
The leaps and bounds that separated The Man Who Knew Too Much from its
immediate predecessors was carried on with the release of The 39 Steps.
Charles Bennett, Alfred and Alma fashioned an incredible screenplay.
Richard Hannay is on the run from both the police and foreign spies.
She was killed by a foreign agent who was interested too.
She tell you what the foreign agent looked like? There wasn't time.
There was one thing. Part of his little finger was missing. Which one?
This one, I think.
Sure it wasn't this one?
As well as dramatically improving his screenplays, Hitchcock also paid
meticulous attention to how each shot would look.
These drawings by Hitchcock show how closely the set designer followed his instructions.
Here! Why did you pull the communication cords? To stop the train, you old fool!
It's against all the regulations to stop the train on the bridge. But a man jumped out...
The film is one long pursuit.
Action sequences take place in iconic locations.
Jumping off a train on the Forth Bridge.
Solving the mystery of the 39 Steps at the London Palladium.
And the cast is superb. Even small roles are impeccably handled.
The milkman is played by Frederick Piper...
It's quite true. They're spies, foreigners.
They've murdered a woman in my flat, and now they're waiting for me.
Oh, come off it. Funny jokes at 5 o'clock in the morning. All right.
I'll tell you the truth...
You married? Yes, but don't rub it in.
On the first day of filming, Hitch handcuffed the two stars, Madeleine Carroll
and Robert Donat, together, and then pretended to lose the key.
This was a practical joke enabling his actors to experience the
difficulty of being handcuffed to a near stranger.
I can't stand it. I'm telling them the whole story. You want to hang me for a murder I never committed?
As long as they hang you, I don't care if you committed it.
Let me go! Do you think I'll spend the night with you in this room?
What else can you do? KNOCK AT DOOR
Can I come in, sir?
Come in.
Oh, we were just getting warm before the fire.
I can see that. I thought maybe you'd like this in your bed.
Thank you. She'd like a hot water bottle, wouldn't you, my sweet?
(Say "Yes, darling".) Yes, darling.
This man is to be questioned by the sheriff principal...
At one point, there is a lovely camera effect that you hardly notice.
This scene is shot in the studio, showing passengers
inside a supposedly moving car with back projection.
Hitch then uses the black canvas of the car to cut to an exterior shot of the Scottish Highlands.
Do London ladies look beautiful?
They do, but they wouldn't if you were beside them.
You ought not to say that. What ought he not to say?
Richard Hannay seeks refuge in an isolated cottage.
The wife is played by Peggy Ashcroft, the husband by John Laurie.
I was just saying to your wife that I prefer living in the town than the country.
God made the country.
Is the supper ready, woman?
Mind if I look at your papers?
No, I don't mind. Thank you.
Hitch develops the scene in purely visual terms.
You didn't tell me your name.
Oh, Hammond.
Well, Mr Hammond, if you'll pit doon that paper, I'll say a blessing.
Yes, of course.
Sanctify these bounteous mercies to us miserable sinners.
Oh, Lord, make us truly thankful for them and for all thy manifold blessings,
and continually turn our hearts from wickedness,
and from worldly things,
unto thee.
Amen.
Repeating the success of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock stages
another tense finale in a well known London landmark, the Palladium.
You Richard Hannay? There's something you ought to know.
Come along quietly. But look...
Look here, old man, you don't want to cause trouble and spoil people's entertainment...
SHOUTS: What are the 39 Steps?
Come on, answer up! What are the 39 Steps?
The 39 Steps is an organisation of spies, collecting information on behalf of the Foreign Office of...
GUNSHOT, SCREAMS
In his next picture, Secret Agent, Hitch was reunited with the actor Peter Lorre,
who since they'd last worked together, had developed an addiction to morphine.
Can you spot it in his acting?
Ooh! This is terrible!
This is too much! Really, too much!
For you, beautiful woman. And what for me? What for me?
Nothing! Nobody, nothing! No, this...
Caramba!
The actor is not doing a very good job.
And Hitchcock is said to have turned to the unit and said
"I bought him in the shop, put him on the floor, wound him up, and he doesn't go".
PAUL MERTON LAUGHS
Peter Lorre, like Alfred Hitchcock was a great practical joker.
During the course of the filming, he sent the director 50 canaries.
Unfortunately, relationships soured between them,
and at one point Alfred threw a cup of coffee over Peter Lorre.
On other, happier, occasions Hitch was rather fond of the practical joke.
He would throw his cup and saucer into the air to signify the end of the tea break.
In Sabotage, Hitchcock made a dreadful mistake that would haunt him for decades.
A boy is carrying a bomb on a bus, but doesn't know it.
Neither does the puppy.
HITCHCOCK: I once committed a grave error in having a bomb,
from which I extracted a great deal of suspense.
And I had the thing go off, which I should never have done,
because they needed the relief from their suspense.
Clock going, the time for the bomb to go off at such and such a time.
And I drew this thing out and attenuated the whole business.
Then somebody should have said "Oh, my goodness, there's a bomb!"
Pick up, throw it out of the window, bang!
But everybody's relieved.
But I made the mistake.
I let the bomb go off and kill someone.
Bad technique.
Despite this rare error, there are many flourishes that are typical of the former silent film director.
When Sylvia Sidney realises her husband is responsible for the bomb
that killed her brother, no dialogue is needed.
SHE SCREAMS Don't...
Actress Sylvia Sidney was originally disturbed by the lack of dialogue in this crucial scene.
However, when she saw the completed sequence, she said, with great admiration,
"Hollywood must hear of this".
Hitch was indeed keen on a move to Hollywood.
He wanted his films to be seen on the world stage.
His next picture, Young And Innocent,
was full of imaginative and confident use of the moving camera.
We ought to order tea if we're going to stay here long.
I'd sooner have beer.
HITCHCOCK: In this situation, you have a young girl with a hobo, a tramp, you see.
And he's the only man who could identify this murderer.
And all they know is that he has Saint Vitus' dance in the eyes.
Haven't you seen anyone with a twitch yet?
HITCHCOCK: Then the old boy said "This is idiotic.
"Big room like this, trying to find a man who has twitching eyes".
At that moment, I take the camera high up into the lobby of the hotel
and do the longest dolly shot through the lobby,
through the ballroom, through the dancers...
# I'm right here to tell you, sister No-one can like the drummer man
# Every man who plays in the band is wonderful too...
# I've got to give credit
# Where credit is due
# But when it comes to make that music hot
# Make you give it all it's got
# I'm right here to tell you, mister... #
HITCHCOCK: ..Through a minstrel black-faced band,
right through the band to the drummer, to his head
and right to his eyes...
This is another variation of letting the audience in on something.
Hitchcock's following picture is among his best remembered,
The Lady Vanishes, although he had very little to do with the excellent screenplay,
which was written by the celebrated team, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.
Hitch was reunited with the cameraman Jack Cox, as these trick shots indicate.
The film director Roy Ward Baker worked on The Lady Vanishes,
and remembers observing Hitchcock on the set.
His method of work was so...
carefully...worked out
that everybody was well-informed.
This was one of his great gifts which I took to heart.
When you're giving instructions to people, which a director is doing
all the time, then you must know what you want, which is the first step.
A lot of them don't!
They say "I wonder what we should do here?", and that sort of thing.
That wouldn't do for the likes of Mr Hitchcock.
But he wasn't overbearing or in any way rude.
He was always very courteous, in fact, and scrupulous.
The Lady Vanishes was filmed in a tiny studio, but it feels far bigger.
Hitch achieved this effect with back-projection and beautifully constructed model shots.
The other trick thing that he got up to,
was over a glass of wine.
There's a scene in the restaurant,
and he wanted to get a shot
with the glass of wine very strong in the foreground.
But there was some problem in those days of carrying focus between the two,
with a blurred glass...
Or a blurred actress.
So anyway, he thought up the idea that the problem was the size of the glass,
which was a normal wine glass.
He thought, "If we make one which is twice the size..." Which he did.
Somebody rang up and got some glass manufactured as a duplicate, except twice the size.
And he stood that in the foreground,
and then it gave him the dramatic impact that he wanted.
The Lady Vanishes enhanced his reputation in America.
It wasn't long before the Hitchcock family moved to the states.
Everything he had learnt as a British filmmaker was to help him conquer Hollywood.
Here at the banquet for the 1940 Academy Awards,
Alfred Hitchcock deliberately places his head in front of Joan Fontaine,
making Alma roar with laughter.
Throughout his Hollywood years, Hitch would remain loyal to the
visual image always taking precedence over dialogue.
HE SCREAMS
In 1971, towards the end of his career,
Alfred Hitchcock returned to London to make one last British picture.
Alfred Hitchcock by this time was in his early seventies,
and he relished the chance of coming back to make another film in London.
Frenzy begins with the discovery of a dead body beside the Thames,
just as The Lodger had begun nearly 50 years before.
What's that round her neck?
She's been strangled.
Looks like a tie.
Yes, it's a tie, all right.
Another necktie murder.
Frenzy was shot here in Covent Garden.
Then, it was London's premier fruit and vegetable market.
Entirely appropriate for Alfred Hitchcock to make a film here.
After all, his father had been a greengrocer.
The building behind me, the one with the dark brick, that's where the murderer lived.
Some terrible things happened in there.
To create tension in one scene with actress Anna Massey, Hitchcock completely kills the sound...
SILENCE
Got a place to stay?
Oh, it's you, Bob. Yeah.
I think the scene where you first come out of the pub, and of course,
unbeknown, you're following Barry Foster to your doom
and you go up the stairs and through the door... It's chilling.
I don't know if you know, Babs, but you're my type of woman.
I just love the beauty of the camera then coming away from the door,
because we've seen the horrendous scene earlier, so we don't need to see any more horrors.
No.
At the entrance to the street, Hitch employs an elaborate camera trick.
Could you explain how it was done?
We had the man in the...
carrying a potato sack in Covent Garden in situ.
And we had him brought back to the studio where the staircase was rebuilt.
And he decided to put this scene in.
It was not scripted in the original script.
And it took a whole day to do.
And it comes back, right down onto the pavement, where you have
the man with the potato sack in the studio, and you also have him in Covent Garden.
He did the cut there.
Because Alfred Hitchcock specialised in films filled with suspense,
he has sometimes been portrayed as a sadistic man
who had a strange obsession with the darker side of life.
Like all of us, he was light and shade, but he always believed that
film-making should be fun, and he was a very funny man.
Shall we invite some questions from the audience?
Yes, let's do that.
Um...take the first one down there, sir?
Mr Hitchcock, in your latter career, you've concentrated more on thrillers.
Do you hanker to make other types of film?
Well, no, it's not for me. It's...
it's the public, you see.
If I made, for example, a musical...
LAUGHTER ..the public would wonder
"When will the moment come when one..." LAUGHTER
"when one of the chorus girls will drop dead?"
In the trailer for Frenzy, Hitchcock is characteristically macabre.
Here, what's wrong?
Look, she's wearing my tie.
How do you like my tie?
How do you like it?
My God! The tie!
SHE SCREAMS
Mr Hitchcock, as we are coming to the end of our
documentary, would you care to make a random vowel sound?
Boo.
Mr Hitchcock, thank you for taking part in this documentary. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Delighted.
Alfred Hitchcock used these vast, expansive areas to create a large...let me do it again.
In the British Museum, Alfred Hitchcock used these vast,
rich locations to create a huge, dramatic backdrop,
but how did he manage to light the huge rooms at night? Well, he didn't.
He used exactly the same technique for the Albert Hall sequences in The Ring,
and The Man Who Knew Too Much.
GROANING
That was beautifully put.
In fact, after hearing that, there's nothing more I wish to add.