The movie Alfred Hitchcock only made as a favour to a friend: “In a weak moment, I accepted”
When a director gains enough traction in their career, they acquire the ability to pull strings, call in favours, or do them for someone else. Alfred Hitchcock doesn’t jump out as a filmmaker who’d be willing to do a solid for a friend, and that’s probably because he regretted the one time he did.
Since the beginning of cinema, back-scratching has always been an integral part of the industry, for better or worse. Actors make movies they don’t necessarily want to in exchange for being allowed to star in the ones they do, while filmmakers regularly adopt a ‘one for them, one for me’ policy that sees them helm a picture for the studio’s sake in return for being granted permission to shoot a passion project after.
Hitchcock always seemed too strong-headed to indulge in such nepotistic transactions once he’d freed himself from the shackles of his overbearing paymasters and become a name unto himself. Once he was the ‘Master of Suspense’ and a marketing tool in his own right, favours for others didn’t come easily.
With that in mind, it makes sense that he was fresh off the boat and virtually brand new to Hollywood when he agreed to lend a helping hand. Before he’d even left the United Kingdom behind to embark on his latest adventure, Hitchcock had already told the world that Carole Lombard was someone he was keen to work with on the other side of the pond.
Sure enough, four months after his first American picture, Rebecca, was released, production began on 1941’s Mr & Mrs Smith, which starred Lombard in the leading role. It would turn out to be the penultimate film of the screwball comedy icon’s career before she was killed in a plane crash in January 1942 at the age of 33, which wasn’t enough to have the director wear the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia.
“That picture was done as a friendly gesture to Carole Lombard,” Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut. “At the time, she was married to Clark Gable, and she asked whether I’d do a picture with her. In a weak moment, I accepted, and I more or less followed Norman Krasna’s screenplay.”
They’d met, become acquainted, formed a friendship, and then Lombard asked him to direct her in a movie. He agreed because it felt like the nice thing to do, but by following the existing script almost to the letter without imprinting it with his signature style, flair, or visual flourishes, it didn’t feel like a Hitchcock flick at all.
“Since I didn’t really understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was photograph the scenes as written,” he clarified, of how much of his filmic personality he injected into the project that remained an outlier for the remainder of his career as the one and only straightforward comic caper the ‘Master of Suspense’ ever directed in America.
Mr & Mrs Smith is Hitchcock on autopilot, which was inevitable when his heart was never in it and he only made the film as a favour to Lombard.
