The Hollywood years: Rebecca to Dial M for Murder

The British film industry’s loss was Hollywood’s gain, as Rebecca (1940) made abundantly clear. Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca was a property Selznick had acquired at great cost to follow his production of Gone with the Wind (1939), and the potentate bequeathed Hitchcock a star-filled cast: Laurence Olivier as the brooding Maxim de Winter, Joan Fontaine as his trembling bride, and Judith Anderson as the threatening Mrs. Danvers. The film was an enormous success both commercially and critically. It won the Academy Award for best picture, and Hitchcock earned his first Oscar nomination for best director.

Foreign Correspondent (1940) starred Joel McCrea as a newspaper reporter who becomes involved with assassinations, Nazis, and a kidnapped Dutch diplomat. The film is filled with stunning set pieces—such as an assassination in a crowd of umbrellas and a climactic plane crash.

The screwball comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) was Hitchcock’s first change of pace since coming to Hollywood. The film starred Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery as the eponymous bickerers who discover that their marriage is legally invalid. It was a box-office success but was Hitchcock’s last comedy without any suspense elements.

Suspicion (1941) seemed to promise a return to form. Fontaine played Lina, the timid wife of Johnnie (Cary Grant), a cad who may be trying to kill her. Hitchcock originally intended for the film to end with Lina’s suicide. However, suicide was discouraged under the strictures of Hollywood’s Production Code, which governed what could be depicted in movies, and the film ended with Lina’s suspicions about Johnnie’s character proving utterly groundless. The film made little sense without a legitimate payoff, and Hitchcock later admitted that he had not played fair with his audience.

In Saboteur (1942) Robert Cummings played a patriotic factory worker framed for murder and sabotage, and Priscilla Lane played the trusting woman who aids and abets his crosscountry flight. The film has its share of exciting moments, including a charity ball where the couple are trapped in a crowd and the climax on top of the Statue of Liberty.

The chilling Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was a darker and more psychologically complex work. Hitchcock worked out the script with Thornton Wilder. Joseph Cotten gave one of his most-noted performances as the charming, utterly psychopathic Uncle Charlie, who drops in to visit his relatives in quiet Santa Rosa after murdering a woman; Teresa Wright played his devoted niece (also named Charlie), who fights against her growing realization that her beloved uncle is a misogynistic serial killer of whom the entire country is terrified.

The claustrophobic Lifeboat (1944) was a heavily allegorical tale about eight survivors of a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat. The challenge of a film set entirely in a lifeboat attracted Hitchcock. The film alternates between suspense and philosophical debate; the story was written for the screen by John Steinbeck. Hitchcock received his second Academy Award nomination for best director.

Hitchcock went to England in 1944 to make two patriotic short films for the British Ministry of Information lauding the French Resistance, Bon voyage and Aventure malgache. They were intended for distribution in liberated France and its colonies but were little seen prior to their 1994 release on video. He then returned to Hollywood to make Spellbound (1945). A psychological (and psychiatric) mystery adapted by Ben Hecht from a Francis Beeding novel, it starred Ingrid Bergman as an analyst who finds herself falling in love with the new director of the asylum (Gregory Peck), whom she begins treating after realizing that he is suffering from amnesia apparently brought on by feelings of guilt over committing murder. The film also contains what was a highly publicized two-minute Salvador Dalí dream sequence, but it was actually filmed by William Cameron Menzies after the sequence Hitchcock and Dalí had planned proved too complex. Hitchcock was dissatisfied with the film, which he summarized as “just another manhunt story wrapped in pseudo-psychoanalysis.” He earned his third Oscar nomination for best director.

Notorious (1946) was much more polished. Written for the screen by Hecht, the espionage plot of Nazis in Rio de Janeiro and a hidden cache of uranium was secondary to the romance story. Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the dissolute daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, is recruited by American spy Devlin (Grant) to infiltrate a Nazi stronghold in Rio by seducing and marrying Nazi operative Sebastian (Claude Rains). Devlin loves Huberman passionately but does not interfere when she is asked to sacrifice herself on the altar of patriotism; she loves him passionately and despairs at his callousness.

The Paradine Case (1947) was Hitchcock’s last film for Selznick. A courtroom drama set in England, it starred Peck as a married barrister whose ethics are compromised when he falls in love with a defendant (Alida Valli).

Hitchcock formed his own production company, Transatlantic Pictures, which would make films in America and England. Its first film was also his first color film, Rope (1948), which was based on the sensational 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case. Jimmy Stewart starred as the vainglorious protagonist, a former professor whose dangerously amoral philosophizing has inspired two students (John Dall and Farley Granger) to strangle a friend just to experience the thrill of the kill; they then throw a cocktail party to gloat over his corpse, which has been stuffed into a trunk standing in plain view of the guests. Rope is best known for Hitchcock’s audacious attempt to make the picture look as if it had been shot in one continuous take. (A movie camera could only hold 10 minutes of film, so Rope’s 80 minutes is actually eight 10-minute takes, with the breaks cleverly disguised.)

Under Capricorn (1949) was one of Hitchcock’s least typical and least popular films at the box office. A melodrama set in 1830s Australia (though shot in England), it starred Bergman as an upper-crust Englishwoman who violates society’s taboos by eloping with her groom (Cotten) and following him to Australia after he is sentenced for the murder of her brother. The box-office failure of Under Capricorn ended Transatlantic Pictures.

Hitchcock signed a contract with Warner Brothers, and his first film there, the comic thriller Stage Fright (1950), was one of his lighter works. Marlene Dietrich played Charlotte Inwood, an actress who may have murdered her husband. Her young lover Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) is accused of the crime, and drama student Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) takes a job with Inwood in the hopes of clearing Cooper, her former boyfriend. The theatrical setting and Dietrich’s performance are regarded as highlights of this film.

Strangers on a Train (1951) was an engrossing thriller based on a Patricia Highsmith novel. Unhappily married tennis pro Guy Haines (Granger) has the bad fortune one day to be riding a train with charming psychopath Bruno Antony (Robert Walker). Bruno suggests that he and Guy “exchange” murders, so that neither can be traced to the crime. Guy humors Bruno and laughs off the proposal, little dreaming that Bruno will demonstrate his good faith by strangling Guy’s wife and then demanding that Guy complete the bargain by killing Bruno’s father. The homoerotic underpinnings and Walker’s performance contribute to the film’s great appeal.

Stranger’s mordant humor does not appear in I Confess (1953), in which Montgomery Clift played a priest in Quebec (where the picture was largely filmed) who is being blackmailed by a murderer whose confession, which the priest cannot reveal, shields him from exposure. Dial M for Murder (1954) was much more commercial. Originally shot in 3-D toward the end of that short-lived craze, the film is an adaptation of a Frederick Knott play that maintained the boundaries of the London flat presented onstage. Grace Kelly starred as a straying rich wife whose jealous husband (Ray Milland) first tries to have her killed and then attempts to frame her for stabbing her would-be assassin in self-defense.