On occasion there were columns or articles with Hitchcock's name in the byline, and sometimes they'd touch upon his earliest film work as in the following:
It seems a fairly trivial item, and to say little that is new to anyone studying Hitchcock. His love of certain foods, his ability to sketch, his having designed art titles for Famous Players-Lasky British Producers (FPLBP), his desire to carefully plan things prior to their execution: there's no surprises there. The way they all come together, however, is of note in relation to a scene in one of those early films on which he worked.The Lyons Den (Leonard Lyons is on vacation. His guest columnist today is the noted film director, Alfred Hitchcock.) —
I’m going to use this opportunity to take a vacation myself. I am going to take a vacation from being a steak-and-ice-cream-eating legend and try to tell your readers, if they don’t mind, what sort of a chap I really am—I want to dispel the legendary Hitchcock and introduce the man. [...]
[A Hitchcock story] which at first glance seems to be mythical, is the one that I draw pictures of my food for the waiters and cooks in restaurants. Well, I do now and then, if I order a cut of meat and there seems to be some misunderstanding about it.
* * * *
I am something of a graphic artist (one of my first screen jobs was drawing illustrated titles for silent films) so I take a pencil and sketch a picture of the steer, or whatever the game may be, for the waiter and indicate the section I want cut and cooked. It may seem a bit fabulous, but it’s just in the interest of exactness. But the other story about my timing my scenes with a stop watch as I shoot them, as though they were a track meet or something…. My word!
(Distributed by McNaught Syndicate, Inc.)
Montgomery Advertiser [AL]. August 25, 1943: 4 cols 4-5.
Charles Barr and Alain Kerzoncuf for their 2015 book Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films had been able to view the then-only known surviving FPLBP film, a print of The Man from Home (1922) with Dutch intertitles (thus, sadly, lacking Hitchcock's illustrated ones). In one scene, the title character while abroad in Italy sketches for a waiter the food he desired to eat: "Ham - en - eieren!" ("Ham - and - eggs!"). When even the drawing caused some misunderstanding, he went into the kitchen to prepare the food himself.
Barr and Kerzoncuf had reasonably speculated that Hitchcock might have been responsible for overseeing the closeup shot of hands, the drawing of the hen and the egg, because he’d “later spoke of having graduated quickly to this sort of work, directing a variety of inserts and pick-up shots—and this film is one of the final pair of FPLB productions." In 2018 the Eye Filmmuseum had digitized and published the film on YouTube, from which the below screen capture and clip have been made:
Barr and Kerzoncuf noted that the hands were not those of the actor, since the left little finger in closeup bore a pinky ring that the character in medium shot did not. By the time of The Man from Home, Hitchcock had people working under his direction; it could have been any one of them.
Two special rooms in the laboratory have been set apart for the titling department and equipped with the latest title outfit. The titles used in the Famous Players Lasky British Productions are prepared by a special staff of artists working under the supervision of A. J. Hitchcock, studio title designer. Sixteen film vaults are located about twenty yards from the main building."Famous Opens Laboratory; London Plant, Costing £50,000, Is Built on Modern American Lines." Motion Picture News. July 23, 1921. 564.
The scene of the food ordering is rooted in the Booth Tarkington & Harry Leon Wilson play and the Wilson novel, though the act of drawing is not to be found there:
VASILI [apparently oblivious to her remark, to Mariano). My American friend wishes his own national dish.MARIANO [deferentially, and serving VASILI to caviar). Yes, Herr von Gröllerhagen, he will have the eggs on but one of both sides and the hams fried. So he go to cook it himself.
[Loud shouts and wild laughter from the street. HORACE, ALMERIC, and Lady CREECH set their papers down in their laps and turn toward the door.]MARIANO. Ha! He return from the kitchen with those national dish.
ETHEL (glancing in the doorway]. How horrid!
Tarkington, Booth, and Harry L. Wilson. The Man from Home. NY: Harper & Bros., 1908. 47.
“My American friend, it seems, desired his own national dish,” he affably confided to Mariano. “Ah, yes, Herr von Grollerhagen.” The atrocious tale had been borne to Mariano. “He greatly criticize that national dish as it have been prepared for him in the hotel at Napoli. He say the Italians know not the true American method. He himself go to the kitchen to make sure. But he have confuse us—he have confuse everyone with that national dish of his. He will have the hams fried and the eggs cooked but on one of two sides, as if an egg shall have sides like another object more square—yet that is how he say it. Ha! He have done it. He come, Herr von Grollerhagen.”The drawing of the hen and the egg would thus seem to have been an invention in the script for the FPLBP film. It's at least possible, though, that it could have originated as a bit in Cecil B. Demille's 1914 film The Man From Home. The Library of Congress has a print of that earlier film, so one would need to check it to compare the ham & eggs scene (if the film had one) and see if it may have featured the drawing. For that matter, comparing the two films from beginning to end could be enlightening in any number of ways.Wilson, Harry L. The Man from Home: A Novel. NY: D. Appleton & Co, 1915. 102-103.
Supposing, however, that it was a unique bit in the FPLBP film. It had been scripted by Ouida Bergère, the wife of the director George Fitzmaurice. What, then, can one make of the 1943 article in which Hitchcock described himself doing in his own life the same sort of thing that was done in the 1922 film?
Was it already something Hitchcock did by 1922 such that he might have contributed the idea to Bergère at the script stage? I've yet to see any mention of him claiming to have had a hand in the synopses or scenarios of films prior to director Graham Cutts' Woman to Woman (1923), though it seems reasonable that he might have done so on occasion. If, instead, it was Bergère's own idea, was the drawing of food something Hitchcock himself began doing in a sort of imitation of the bit from the film? Or was the 1943 item an invention, something he never did but just a bit of self-mythologizing - but again, still borrowing the idea from the bit in the film?
Christopher K. Philippo
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