Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock by John Russell Taylor

Author:John Russell Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780306806773
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1978-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

So here, at the beginning of 1941, we have what seems to be a typical picture of the Englishman abroad. Settled, like some tea-planter in the sub-tropics, far from home but still preserving the amenities of English life as closely as possible—living in an English-style cottage (or what passed locally for one), reading English papers, even if they were sometimes weeks out of date, surrounded by his family and of course, very important, his dogs, which rejoiced in such names as Philip of Magnesia and Edward IX (after the abdication, naturally), wearing invariably English, invariably formal clothes, in defiance of the climate and that noonday sun to which only mad dogs and Englishmen are impervious.

And yet, this was no colonialist set down among the simple natives in some remote part of that empire on which the sun still, in those far-off days, never set. He had come from what was, in cinema terms, very much a backwater—hardly better, itself, than an American colony—and conquered the most sophisticated centre of his craft in the world. His first American film had established him, in the only terms absolutely everyone there understood, as a leading director in Hollywood because a leading box-office director. From then on he might have his ups and downs, his more or less commercially and critically successful films, but his commanding stature was never again to be seriously challenged. He could certainly, had he wished to, have gone home—not, perhaps, immediately, but as soon as things had normalized a little in Britain, as soon, possibly, as America had entered the war. But he developed a taste for the life in southern California, and if at the outset he sometimes talked and dreamed of going back to Britain, it gradually became a remote fantasy, like that of many colonials who paid lip-service to the idea of retirement in the old country from which in practice they became with the passing years increasingly distant and estranged. Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but a number of the émigré film-makers populating Hollywood in the war years proved him satisfyingly wrong—the French like Renoir and Clair went back to even greater triumphs in France after the war; Herbert Wilcox was back in England as soon as possible and only the Germans for the most part stayed put in Hollywood. Hitch, obviously, enjoyed playing the Englishman abroad. He also enjoyed working with the resources of the American film industry, and soon developed an abiding love of America and the Americans, however much he might choose to hide it behind his true-born Englishman disguise.

All the same, he continued to do his bit, not only for beleaguered England but also, as he saw it, for the land of his adoption. He had another anti-Nazi thriller in the offing, and from time to time received visits from old friends in England now prominently involved with the war effort. Sidney Bernstein came over on one such trip, and Hitch has a vivid recollection of Bernstein

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