Young and Innocent: Becoming Joanie and Hitchy

The 1937 film Young and Innocent has been given far less consideration than Alfred Hitchcock’s more frequently discussed British romantic thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Yet the jaunty romp taken by an unemployed screenwriter unjustly accused of murder and the young Constable’s daughter who joins him on the lam uniquely captures the director’s deep affection for the British countryside. And it features one of his all-time favorite female leads, Nova Pilbeam, admirably taking her first turn in a mature role at the age of eighteen, several years after playing the precocious adolescent kidnapped in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Indeed, Hitchcock notably referenced Young and Innocent as his personal favorite among his twenty-three British films.¹

If Young and Innocent, chonologically at the center of Hitchcock’s British golden run, begs deeper examination, so too does the career of the Hitchcock collaborator just then beginning to come into her own. Joan Harrison joined Hitchcock’s Gaumont Studios production office as a secretary in Fall 1933, and within months was providing the director with story editing, script development, and producing assistance. I examine Harrison’s career at length in the full-length biography Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (2020), and devote a section to the film’s production and themes. In this essay, I will delve deeper into the film’s importance to Harrison’s career and how it illuminates the long-term collaboration between Harrison and Hitchcock. Young and Innocent was a turning point for Harrison, who later named it as the first Hitchcock film on which she had major impact—the first that she considered hers, in a creative sense.²

Prior to 1936, Harrison’s role in Hitchcock’s circle had been limited. Though Hitchcock had recognized that the literary-minded Oxford graduate should be added to his storytelling team within just a few weeks of hiring her, Harrison needed on-the-job training. The earliest films in which she participated (e.g., The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent [1936], and Sabotage [1936]) offered opportunities for her to shape story, character, and central ideas, but there were writers in the room, particular Charles Bennett and Ian Hay, who consistently dominated.³

Bennett, for reasons that may have had to do with professional jealousy, misogyny, or a combination of the two, apparently posed a specific problem for Harrison.⁴ Hitchcock had relied heavily on Bennett to provide the essential architecture for four of the director’s most successful films to date, and he tended to give him center stage. As Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan puts it, “Bennett boiled with ideas. And he fought for them too, which the young, feisty Hitchcock liked—up to a point.”⁵ In the early stages of scripting Young and Innocent, however—and while on vacation in St. Moritz, Switzerland, with Hitchcock, his wife Alma Reville, and Harrison—the screenwriter received a telegram inviting him to join Universal Pictures in Hollywood.⁶ With Bennett gone, Harrison began to enjoy unprecedented creative freedom at an opportune time.

Harrison and Hitchcock were hitting a collaborative stride. Having worked together for three-and-a-half years and on four films, they were growing closer, collaboratively and otherwise, even calling each other “Joanie” and “Hitchy.”⁷ Harrison had adopted the Hitchcocks as a second family, spending holidays and vacations with them, and fitting easily into the coterie of writers, producers, actors, journalists, and artists who regularly swept through the Hitchcocks’ Kensington residence at 153 Cromwell Road (fig. 1).

Figure 1.

More important, Reville and Hitchcock had entrusted Harrison with supervising the distinctive system of film preparation that the couple had together developed early on. This was a private set of codes that translated ideas into script format and then to the screen. Hitchcock described the process as a “working on the script that is the real making of the film” in his 1937 Sight & Sound essay...