Free Hitch by John Russell Taylor

cabin, not feeling at all well, when Hitch suddenly appeared and, after making a couple of practical remarks about the job in hand, quite out of the blue asked her to marry him. He says, perhaps with hindsight, that he had chosen the moment because the journey was one of the few chances they had to be alone and also because he felt that Alma’s resistance would be low at this point and she would be least likely to turn him down.
    So when Hitch arrived back in Islington he was engaged. It was more doubtful whether he had a job. Cutts was still fuming and fretting at Calais, and nobody knew how the next film planned would be made, if it was to be made. There was a project, though; Gainsborough had acquired the rights to a play by Rudolph Besier, later of
Barretts of Wimpole Street
fame, called
The Prude’s Fall
, and Hitch was as usual assigned to shape it into a script. He worked on it alone; it was mailed to Calais, came back with alterations, was revised and sent again to Cutts, until finally, at this distance, it was completed and ready to go. There was some urgency in the matter since Jane Novak had been brought over on a two-picture deal, andthe faster
The Prude’s Fall
followed
The Blackguard
the better and cheaper for Gainsborough.
    As Cutts would not come back to England the rest of the production team had to go to him. Hitch and one of Balcon’s assistants set off to go with Cutts on a location-finding tour, since the film required shooting in various glamorous parts of western Europe. They met Cutts in Calais, but he seemed very happy there and sent them on to Paris. In Paris after a couple of days they were joined by Cutts and his girl-friend. She liked it in Paris, so Cutts decided they would stay on there while Hitch and his associate went on to St. Moritz. After a week Cutts and the girl-friend arrived in St. Moritz. She liked it there too, so Hitch was sent on to Venice to pick further locations and meet the cast and the rest of the crew. Which was all very well, until Cutts arrived with his girl-friend. She didn’t like Venice—all that water was unhealthy and lugubrious. So the whole group upped stakes and went on to Lake Como. The day they arrived, there was a storm on the lake, and she didn’t like it. Well, obviously she’s right, said Cutts, the weather is impossible here. So on they all moved to St. Moritz. Or towards St. Moritz: an hour away by train they discovered that the line had been blocked by an avalanche. Well, that’s it, said Cutts: let’s go back to England. Which they did, having trailed the whole cast and crew around Europe at great expense and shot not a single foot of film.
    The script had to be revamped to let all the exotic locations originally envisaged be substituted for in the studio: the result, inevitably, was rather half-hearted and nobody liked it. Moreover, Cutts never did manage to get the Estonian into England, so he was not happy on any score. And by now Hitch had really become conscious of a certain underlying hostility in Cutts’s attitude towards him. There were just too many slighting references to the ‘wonder boy’, and malicious ones in the studio were all too ready to stoke up the fires of Cutts’s resentment by suggesting that Hitch was getting too much credit for the over-all effect of Cutts’s films—after all, his name appeared all over them. In particular the cameraman Hal Young, a tough and cynical character noted for his habit of reading the racing reports while he cranked the camera with his free hand, had taken against Hitch for whatever reason and delighted to poison Cutts’s mind against him.
    Of course, Cutts himself was not in such a strong position, with a pretty steady decline in the critical and commercial standing of hisfilms since
Woman to Woman
. But he was a partner, and could not just be dumped, however eccentric his behaviour. Nor, really, did Gainsborough have anyone in mind to