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| Suspicion (1941) |
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The correct ending of Suspicion -- which was never shot but which I wanted to do--was that Fontaine writes a letter to her mother, saying that she is in love with her husband, but she feels he is a murderer. She doesn't want to live anymore and she's willing to die by his hand. But she thinks society should be protected from him. He comes up with the fatal glass of milk, gives it to her. Before she drinks, she says, "Will you mail this letter to mother for me?" And she drinks the milk and dies. Fade out. Fade in on one short shot: a cheerful, whistling Cary Grant coming to the mail box and popping the letter in. Finish. But, you see, Cary Grant couldn't be a murderer. It was the same problem as I had with Novello in The Lodger. |
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| Saboteur (1942) |
Saboteur was not successful to my mind because I don't think Cummings was right. He was too undramatic, he had what I call a "comedy face," and half the time you don't believe the situations. Think of the difference between that and Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps. From an audience point-of-view, I should have reversed the positions of Cummings and Lloyd on the Statue of Liberty at the end of the picture. The audience would have been much more anxious if the hero had been in danger, not the villain. The picture was overloaded with too many ideas. But what annoyed me most was the casting of the heavy, Otto Kruger. I had a concept: fascists in those days were middle-westerners, America-Firsters, and I wanted Harry Carey, western style, a rich rancher. His wife came to see me and she said, I couldn't let my husband play a role like that, when all the youth in America look up to him. So I couldn't get him, and Kruger was all wrong. I also tried to get Barbara Stanwyck, but I had to take Priscilla Lane. I wasted Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper to lift the picture up. |
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Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Teresa Wright makes a lot out of the fact that she and her uncle are similar, and yet she is the most eager to suspect him of the worst.
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Only because her attention is drawn to him more than anybody else. You look at your adoring uncle long enough, and you find something.
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Shadow of a Doubt. 1943 |
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| Isn't Cotten rather sympathetic in the film? |
There is sympathy for any murderer, or let's call it compassion. You hear of murderers who feel they've been sent to destroy. Maybe those women deserved what they got, but it wasn't his job to do it. There is a moral judgment--he is destroyed at the end, isn't he? The girl unwittingly kills her own uncle. She is the instrument by which he falls in front of the train. It comes under the heading that all villains are not black and all heroes are not white. There are grays everywhere.
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| Does Cotten really love Wright in the film? |
I don't really think so. Not as much as she loves him. And yet she destroys him. She has to. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said, "You destroy the thing you love?" Shadow of a Doubt was a most satisfying picture for me--one of my favorite films--because for once there was time to get characters into it. It was the blending of character and thriller at the same time. That's very hard to do.
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| Lifeboat (1944)
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In this film I wanted to prove that most pictures are shot in close-ups. It was really a film without scenery. I made it for the challenge. And it was topical. There were screams because I appeared to make the Nazi stronger than anyone else. I had two reasons for that: a) the Nazi was a submarine commander and knew something about navigation, more than the others did; b) in the analogy of war, he was the victor at the time. The others, representing the democracies, hadn't gotten together yet, hadn't summoned their strength. Even John Hodiak, playing the communist, wasn't sure. It took a coalition of them to finally gang up on that guy and get rid of him. Did you know that Tallulah really hated Slezak? She really used the boot on him. She used to sit across from him in the boat and say, "You God-damn Nazi!" Poor fellow, he really wasn't, you know.
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| Why didn't the Negro join in when they attacked the Nazi?
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I wouldn't let him. He was rather a religious figure, he did recite the 23rd Psalm, and I felt he was a gentle character and had feeling. It would have been out of character.
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Spellbound (1945)
What did the doors opening at their first embrace signify?
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I asked Ben Hecht to find out for me the psychiatric symbol for the beginning of love between two people, and he came back with the doors.
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| Why did you go to Dali for the dream sequence? |
Selznick thought I only wanted Dali for publicity purposes. That wasn't true. I felt that if I was going to have dream sequences, they should be vivid. I didn't think that we should resort to the old-fashioned blurry effect that they got by putting vaseline around the lens. What I really wanted to do, and they wouldn't do it because of the expense, was to have the dream sequences shot on the back lot in bright sunshine, so they would have to stop-down the camera to such a degree that the pictures would have been needle-sharp, as contrast to the rest of the picture, which was slightly diffused because that was the cameraman's particular style. But I used Dali for his draftmanship and the infinity which he introduces into his subject.
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| Notorious (1946) |
This is the old love-and-duty theme. Grant's job is to get Bergman in bed with Rains, the other man. It's ironic, really, and Grant is a bitter man all the way through. Rains was sympathetic because he's the victim of a confidence trick and we always have sympathy for the victim, no matter how foolish he is. Also I would think Rains' love for Bergman was very much stronger than Grant's.
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| How did that long tracking shot for the famous balcony love scene develop? |
I felt that they should remain in an embrace and that we should join them. So when they go to the phone the camera follows them, never leaving the close-up all the way, right up to the phone and over to the door--continuous shot. The whole idea was based on not breaking the romantic moment. I didn't want to cut it up. It was an emotional thing, the movement of that camera. The idea came to me many, many years ago when I was on a train going from Boulogne to Paris. It was a Sunday afternoon and the train goes slowly through a town called Ataples, which is just outside Boulogne. There's a big, old, red brick factory, and ta one end of the factory was this huge, high brick wall. There were two little figures at the bottom of the wall--very small--a boy and a girl. The boy was urinating against the wall, but the girl had a hold of his arm and she never let go. She'd look down at what he was doing, and then look around at the scenery, and down again to see how far he'd got on. And that was what gave me the idea. She couldn't let go. Romance must not be interrupted, even by urinating.
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| How did the idea develop for that remarkable crane-shot, down to the key? |
That's again using the visual. That's a statement which says, "In this crowded atmosphere there is a very vital item, the crux of everything." So taking that sentence as it is, in this crowded atmosphere, you go to the widest possible expression of that phrase and then you come down to the most vital thing--a tiny little key in the hand. That's merely the visual expression to say, "Everybody is having a good time, but they don't realize there is a big drama going on here." And that big drama epitomizes itself in a little key.
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| The Paradine Case (1947) |
For me, the casting screwed up all the values and the whole basic situation. Any beautiful woman is a compromise for evil--sometimes the externals of evil can obscure the real woman. Valli's character was pretty low in the original story. She was fine, but they had Louis Jourdan under contract and he could never have played that part. His real character, which reflected the woman's immorality, should have been a manure-smelling stable-hand and should have been played by Robert Newton or somebody like that. Peck wasn't right for the lead. It should have been Ronald Colman or Olivier, someone more dignified and less earthy. The point is, Peck degrades himself by falling for a woman who can take any man--even a groom. Obviously the woman must have been a nymphomaniac. But for Peck to give up an elegant wife for this woman, he must be obsessed by her.
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