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“Hitch” - The German Influences
In September 1924 Hitchcock traveled to Germany as assistant director to Graham Cutts. Gainsborough Productions had recently made a deal with Universum Film AG (Ufa, pron. OOH-fa) for several Anglo-German joint productions. Hitchcock was part of the team that would film The Blackguard (Die Prinzessin und der Geiger) using Ufa's vast facilities just outside Berlin near Potsdam.
Traveling with Hitchcock and Cutts was editor/production assistant Alma Reville (1899-1983), who would become Hitchcock's wife in 1926. The British team from Gainsborough Productions arrived in Berlin at a time when Germany was a world power in film production and distribution. Gainsborough's founder and boss, Michael Balcon, had signed a contract for several Ufa-Gainsborough coproductions to be filmed at Ufa's studio complex in Neubabelsberg. Gainsborough would own the British rights for these jointly produced pictures, while Ufa had the German and European rights. Unfortunately, the deal would fall apart soon after the completion of The Blackguard, but for now it offered Hitchcock a unique opportunity to gain experience by working at Europe's most important film studio and learning first-hand from the German cinematic masters he so admired.
Ufa and Neubabelsberg
In London, longtime film fan Alfred Hitchcock had often made an effort to see foreign films, including those by the German and Austrian masters. He was familiar with the cinematic works of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, and E.A. Dupont. Now he was working in the very studio where some of those directors' films had been made. And he was about to observe Murnau himself at work in a nearby studio. Murnau was directing scenes for Der letzte Mann with the famous German actor Emil Jannings.
Years later, Hitchcock was fond of quoting some advice he got from Murnau while in Berlin: “What you see on the set does not matter. All that matters is what you see on the screen.” He also borrowed some of the perspective tricks he observed Murnau using while filming Der letzte Mann (English title: The Last Laugh). From the Germans Hitchcock also learned one of his most notable traits as a director: the careful, minute planning of every detail of a picture long before filming began. Some also claim it was the Germans who taught Hitchcock another of his trademark traits: the careful, sometimes dictatorial manipulation of actors down to the last detail. His infamous remark about actors being “cattle” may reflect such an attitude, but Hitchcock also had lasting friendships with many of the actors with whom he worked over the years. (Hitchcock liked to correct those who mentioned his “cattle” remark by saying: “I never said all actors are cattle. What I said was, actors should be treated like cattle.”)
Another characteristic of the Hitchcockian directorial style may also have come from his German experiences. Hitchcock never enjoyed shooting on location because it failed to offer the same degree of control he had on a studio set. In Germany he saw how Murnau and other German craftsmen used the movie studio to create a world of illusion that was difficult to duplicate in the real world. Later Hitchcock would comment on his Ufa experiences: “Those were the great days of the German pictures... The studio where I worked was tremendous, bigger than Universal today. They had a complete railroad station built on the back lot. For a version of Siegfried they built the whole forest of the Nibelungenlied.”*
But Hitchcock learned much more than cinematic lessons while he was in Berlin. The German capital in the 1920s was a wild place. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGillian mentions an incident in which Hitchcock and Graham Cutts encountered two women who invited them to a “private party” at a Berlin hotel. After the women's offer of sexual favors had been declined (“Nein, nein!”), the two proceeded to make lesbian love to each other in front of Hitchcock and the others in the room. Hitchcock has said that this Berlin incident was the inspiration for the thinly veiled lesbian relationship seen in the first film that Hitchcock directed in Germany, The Pleasure Garden (German title: Irrgarten der Leidenschaft).
Friedrich Murnau, who had made the classic Nosferatu vampire film in 1922, was openly homosexual; he must have made the rather prudish Hitchcock somewhat uncomfortable. The tall, thin Murnau standing next to the short, fat Hitchcock must have been an interesting sight to see, but the two men had their craft in common. One afternoon at Ufa, Murnau shared with his British colleague some of the tricks of his trade, among others, describing how a railroad set had been designed and built with a foreshortened perspective that created the illusion that everything was much larger than it actually was.
In fact, Hitchcock used some of his newly learned Ufa/Murnau tips while still filming in Germany, and later in some of his other films. “I picked up a great deal of insight into the techniques of set building and perspective of every kind. In The Blackguard I had a scene against the doorway entrance to Milan Cathedral... I would never have been able to build the entrance... the doors are probably a hundred feet high.” Hitchcock describes how he built a full-size replica of just part of the entrance, with a large column, a few steps, and the lines of the set leading off into the distance. He even borrowed a few pigeons from a zoo to lend an added touch of realism. “...but the point was to do a little piece of the building accurately and well rather than to do a sort of cheaply built whole structure.”*
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