Shortly after completing work on Psycho Joseph Stefano invited the Hitchcocks to a party. Nothing, one might think, very remarkable about that. Except that Stefano had been suitably terrorized, like most of Hitch’s short-term professional associates, by Hitch’s tales of the inefficiencies and solecisms committed by those who had invited him to drinks or dinner—people like the up-and-coming executive who had a waiter serve wine in a napkin when it was not even chilled. Hitch had so scared others, like Ernest Lehman, that they never dared invite him to their homes, no matter how well they knew him. And then he wondered why he was so seldom asked anywhere. But anyway, Stefano was made of sterner stuff, and though the party was to be a big, very mixed one such as he knew Hitch particularly disliked, he thought he might as well invite him all the same. To his surprise Hitch accepted; to his even greater surprise Hitch and Alma came early and, instead of making a token appearance, stayed all evening. Alma, as usual, darted round talking to everyone, and had a great time. Hitch found an equally characteristic solution. The main room of Stefano’s house was L-shaped, with a grand piano at the angle, the only place it would fit, and therefore in full view of the entrance. Here, in the bow of the piano, like Helen Morgan, Hitch placed himself and held court—more precisely, he stood there all evening, the first thing one saw on arrival, and little by little everyone circulated enough to speak to him.
It was an unusually expansive moment. In general Hitch, who had always kept himself to himself in Hollywood, dedicated to his work and his family, was becoming increasingly isolated from the world around him. Professionally, he liked to be surrounded by people he knew and had worked with—new people brought risks and uncertainties, and there were those in the world who might not understand or share Hitch’s hatred of confrontations. By now he had assembled his own little group, which included his cinematographer Robert Burks, his camera operator Leonard J. South, his television cameraman John L. Russell, his editor George Tomasini, his composer Bernard Herrmann, his personal assistant Peggy Robertson, his costume designer Edith Head, and a number of actors with whom he felt thoroughly at home. Inevitably the actors changed depending on the nature of the project and on various outside factors—Grace Kelly had married and retired; Hitch was not to work again with Cary Grant or James Stewart—and he seemed to have a high wastage rate of writers, but in general he was surrounded by a charmed circle of the tried and true. Within it he was able to command extraordinary personal loyalty and understanding; he did not have to worry too much about the world outside.
Which is just as well. For Hitch, by his own admission as well as the observation of others, is and always has been a frightened man: frightened of the police and authority, frightened of other people, frightened of his professional and financial position, frightened of his own emotions. His ivory tower has been built as a necessary protection for himself. Even so he has retained his sense of terror, beleaguered within it. When pressed from the outside to do this or that in his films, especially to cast in a certain way, he has always had the greatest difficulty in saying no, and has had to find all kinds of devious ways of doing it—if he succeeded in doing it at all. Often the people he worked with have asked him what he is frightened of, what can ‘they’ do to one in his position. His answer is always a variation of ‘You don’t know. They can do terrible things.’ The most terrible being, presumably, that they could somehow stop him working.
Joseph Stefano has another image of Hitch—the perfect symbolic image of a frightened man. One day during the shooting of Psycho Hitch asked Stefano, who lived not far away from him, for a lift home. Or, more precisely, to the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was directly on Stefano’s route—from there he could get a cab home to Bel Air. Stefano remonstrated that it was hardly out of his way to run Hitch right home, only maybe another ten minutes, but Hitch would not hear of it. So they drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and as they approached there was a cab waiting at the taxi rank outside. Stefano dropped Hitch at the front, and as he pulled away he noticed that the cab had been taken and gone before Hitch could get to it. And there, in the rear-view mirror, he saw a picture of complete terror. Alfred Hitchcock standing on a corner, looking for a cab. Evidently this was the sort of thing that just did not happen to him, ever. And now it had he looked totally lost, like a child who has mislaid his parents and does not know what to do to find them again. Stefano was so worried and guilty he drove round the block to make sure Hitch was all right and if necessary to insist on driving him home. Fortunately, when he arrived back Hitch had gone—that crisis was over. But his life was full of little crises, bouts of neurotic anxiety, irrational (or sometimes admittedly not so irrational) fears, which life and experience and success did little or nothing to abate.
And yet a long-time associate observes, completely without irony, that Hitch’s great quality is his almost total satisfaction with himself. He is an intensely complicated person, but he never seems to have looked for the answer to his own conundrum. One can no more imagine his turning to psychoanalysis, at any stage in his life, than flying: quite correctly he supposes that he does not need it. Even his little self-explanatory anecdotes, like the one about his being locked up in a police cell at the age of six or so, often seem to have been suggested to him as revealing by other people: he has read commentaries on them, and now presents them like a visiting card, without any inner conviction that the explanations they offer are true, or that, if true, they really matter. He chooses to believe that he is incapable of anger, and so, as far as he is concerned, he is—he does not care or bother to examine himself further and find out what happens to the angry impulses he largely suppresses. Throughout his life he has been a model of sexual rectitude, and he is absolutely not interested in what effect, if any, his less avowable impulses may have subconsciously on his behaviour—his tendency, say, to be in certain cases unreasonably possessive and domineering. Indeed, the whole fantasy aspect of his life seems to be beautifully, totally taken care of by film, to the extent that he hardly needs any other outlet.
This means, of course, that he, and his profession, have to be more than ever shielded and protected, and fear of things going wrong through some outside force never leaves him. After the tremendous, unexpected success oí Psycho he was in a stronger position than ever before—which he proceeded to consolidate by moving his centre of operations yet again, ultimately to Universal, which belonged to MCA, his agents until 1962 when they had to give up their agency interests, and headed by one of his very few close friends, Lew Wasserman. Before that happened, though, he did consider various other possibilities. For one thing, he was suddenly finding it difficult to decide on a project to follow up Psycho. No Bail for the Judge was still in his plans, despite the defection of Ernest Lehman from writing the script, but it was put off for Psycho, then put off again for two more properties to be developed first, Village of Stars and Trap for a Solitary Man, then finally, quietly dropped, as no satisfactory script could be got out of it. The other two projects also came to nothing. Village of Stars, which he was going to make for Paramount, was about the plight of a pilot with a bomb designed to detonate below a certain altitude when the defusing device fails to work; Trap for a Solitary Man, which was to have been for Twentieth Century-Fox, started as a successful stage thriller by Robert Thomas about a man whose wife disappears and then apparently reappears, except that only he insists she is not the right woman at all. Both straightforward thriller subjects, neither able to be scripted to Hitch’s entire satisfaction, probably because they were so straightforward and mechanical. After Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho he needed to do something different, something more.
More interesting seemed to be an idea which came to Ernest Lehman at this time. Disneyland had been open for four or five years, and was receiving an enormous amount of publicity. One day Lehman visited it, and the bank hold-up they were staging then had somehow fused with another idea he had, that of a man blind from birth who is given sight by some sort of eye transplant only to discover that the donor, supposedly killed in an accident, was really murdered and has transmitted to him through his eyes a visual memory of the murderer. Perhaps while visiting Disneyland the hero (call him Jimmy Stewart for the sake of argument) finds himself ‘recognizing’ someone he could never have seen, then have a recollection set off by the fake gun fight. Perhaps the whole movie could be made in Disneyland. Hitchcock in Disneyland! Hitch was at this time in Copenhagen with Alma on their post-Psycho holiday, but Lehman told Peggy Robertson, she was excited enough to tell Hitch about it on the phone, and Hitch was sufficiently excited to talk to Lehman himself. When Hitch got back he and Lehman began working on the idea as they had worked on North by Northwest, and for a while everything went swimmingly. Then something appeared in the trade papers about the project, Walt Disney read it, and promptly made a statement that in no circumstances would Hitchcock, maker of that disgusting movie Psycho, be allowed to shoot a foot of film in Disneyland. Hitch and Lehman began to change things around again, this time placing the action on a round-the-world cruise (Hitch had a sudden, disconnected vision of a chase in Carcassonne), but turn it as they might, they never seemed able to lick the problem of too many coincidences, or find a natural-seeming way of getting all the characters in the right place at the right time.
Hitch’s next project took up even more of his time, to no satisfactory outcome. For almost a year he worked with various writers on a story entitled Frenzy—no connection with the film of that name which he made ten years later except that both of them concern psychotic killers of young women. The initiation of the project brought about a curious reunion. Hitch had scarcely seen the British playwright Benn Levy since 1932, when they had had their falling-out over Lord Camber’s Ladies. Now, thirty years later, he invited Levy out to work on this new script. Hitch himself went to New York and spent three months researching locations: there was to be a murder in Central Park, another action scene in Shay Stadium (where Hitch undertook, improbably, to explain the mechanics of baseball to Peggy Robertson), and a pursuit across the mothball fleet. Somehow the action seemed to keep coming back always to water in one form or another. ‘Don’t you think there’s rather a lot of water in this story?’ Hitch asked Levy at one point. Levy said he should use his old principle of making a virtue of necessity: emphasize it and call the film Waters of Forgetfulness or something of the sort. After Levy had spent several months in America working on the script, he returned to Britain, and Hitch proceeded to go through a lot of other writers, bizarrely assorted, including Howard Fast and Hugh Wheeler. But though there were great sequences in the story as worked out, they just could not get over the ‘third act’ problem—however it was developed, it always ended in the cliché of the policewoman decoy to capture the killer. ‘No, no,’ said Hitch, ‘that’s the way they do it in the movies!’ There seemed no more to be said, and the project was shelved, like the other four.
On a more personal level, Hitch was also active, though to little ultimate effect, in the years following Psycho. The television series was still going strong, and for the one season, 1961-2, it expanded from half an hour to an hour’s length, and was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. By this time, though, his connection with it was largely formal. After Psycho he directed three half-hours and one hour show, the last featuring, some way down the cast list, one of his new discoveries, Claire Griswold. His disappointing experience with trying to turn Vera Miles into a Hitchcock woman had not deterred him. In the early 1960s he put three young women in succession under personal contract. The first was Joanna Moore, a pretty girl but an improbable choice anyway, one would think. Certainly no one could have been less co-operative in the required making-over process: she did not like the clothes, she did not like the hair styles, and she did not seem to like anyone she came into contact with at the studio. Finally, Hitch gave up, and instead contracted Claire Griswold—largely it would seem because after putting her through the grooming process and shooting extensive tests of her in scenes from To Catch a Thief and others of his movies, he did not like to disappoint her. Not, probably, that she would have been very disappointed: she seemed to have little professional ambition, and was quite content being what she was, Mrs. Sydney Pollack.
The third actress put under contract worked out a lot better. Early in 1962 Hitch and Alma were watching television and were much struck by the cool elegance and style of one of the models in a commercial. What particularly drew Hitch’s attention in what he saw was one reaction: the commercial was for a dietary drink called Sego, and in it the girl was required to turn and respond when an eight-year-old boy whistled at her in the street. Inquiry established that she was an aspiring New York actress called Tippi Hedren (or ‘Tippi’, with single quotes, as Hitch was to insist she always be billed). Through MCA she was contacted—she turned out to have moved recently to Los Angeles—and she was asked to come round to the agents with any photographs and film she had of herself. Her first appointment was on Friday the thirteenth. No one told her who exactly was interested, though the office was full of pictures of Hitchcock. On the Monday she went back and was shunted from person to person, still with no information. On the Tuesday she met another agent, Herman Citron, who told her that the producer interested in her was Alfred Hitchcock, and that he wanted to put her under a personal contract. If she and her agent were agreeable to the terms of the contract they would go over and meet him. The contract was more than fair, and was accepted at once. What a considerate way, Tippi Hedren thought, to approach the matter: if she had known it was Hitch, she would have been terribly nervous and over-eager to say and do the right thing, while as it was she had no way of knowing whether anything of any importance depended on this series of apparently routine interviews, so she could just comfortably be herself, without exaggerated hopes or fears.
When they did finally meet, Hitch and Tippi did not talk at all about films—they talked about travel, about food, about clothes, almost everything but. She found him very charming and easy to get along with. He brought in Edith Head immediately to design a wardrobe for her, and then they went into making three days of colour tests—scenes from To Catch a Thief, Notorious, Rebecca—some of which had to be destroyed right away after screening, as Hitch did not have the rights to the material. Martin Balsam was flown in specially from New York to act with her, and no expense was spared to have everything just right. No particular property was mentioned for her debut, and it came as a complete surprise when, a few weeks later, Hitch and Alma invited her to dinner at Chasens’. There at her place was a small package, beautifully wrapped, which contained a pin of three seagulls in flight, made of gold and seed pearls, and Hitch said, ‘We want you to play Melanie in The Birds.’
The Birds was one of the two films Hitch had definitely in the works at this time. The other was to be based on Winston Graham’s novel Marnie, which he had bought and got Joseph Stefano to write a treatment of with Grace Kelly in mind for the title role of the compulsive thief. At this time Grace Kelly had been married to Prince Rainier of Monaco for six years, had two children, and was apparently willing to consider the possibility of a return to acting. Having informally sounded her out on the question, Hitch offered her Marnie, and the idea of working with him again was too much to resist. But then unfortunately some busybody went to the trouble of actually reading the book. And all at once a big controversy was cooked up about whether it was proper for a princess to be playing a criminal on screen, even for the great Alfred Hitchcock. The upshot of this was that a referendum of the princess’s subjects was called for, and by a considerable majority they voted against her returning to the screen. Regretfully, she bowed to this show of public disapproval. Hitch was annoyed, and upset, and promptly put Marnie away, apparently for keeps, to concentrate all his attention on The Birds.
The original short story by Daphne du Maurier came from a collection published in 1952, which had been brought to Hitch’s attention as a possibility for adaptation as a half-hour television show, and included in one of his anthologies. The story, as so often with Hitch, provided no more than a nugget, the germ of an idea about a sudden, inexplicable, unmotivated attack by the birds of the world on humans. This appealed to Hitch’s constant idea of finding menace in the bright sunlight, in the most unlikely circumstances. We might accept the possibility of attack from a giant squid, or mutated ants the size of houses, but who would think that the little feathery creatures we see around us all the time could constitute a serious threat to civilization as we know it? From that one thought the whole screenplay by Evan Hunter (author of The Blackboard Jungle) was elaborated. In the process it acquired a location in Bodega Bay, a small fishing village north of San Francisco, and what appears until some way into the film to be an innocent, light-comedy love story between a spoilt San Francisco socialite and a somewhat unresponsive lawyer.
And this was where Tippi Hedren came in. Though Hitch admitted, ideally he would rather have had bigger stars than Tippi and Rod Taylor—say, Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant—to ensure immediate audience identification, the very long shooting schedule required for all the special effects and trick photography in the film would make them far too expensive. And anyway, he felt that his new discovery was ready for the role—or would be by the time he was ready to shoot. With this end in view he began to prepare her with unparalleled intensity and thoroughness. Strangely for him, with his reputation of never having much to say to actors, never going into psychological explanations, he took a great deal of trouble to involve her in every stage of the film’s preparation. She sat in on script conferences, meetings with set designers, the director of photography, the music supervisor, and had explained to her the colour planning of the film, the motivation of the characters and the structure and purpose of the whole picture, its periods of intensity and of relaxation, in the most minute detail before they ever started shooting. Hitch gave her an education in film-making it would otherwise have taken her fifteen years to acquire, always supposing she could have acquired it any other way.
Even during the shooting he never hesitated to help her along, to discuss all aspects of her role with her. On only one occasion did he put his foot down. She wanted to know, reasonably, what ever possessed her character, Melanie, to venture out of her room at night and up to the attic when she must be certain something terrible was waiting there. Of course, there was no reasonable answer except, ‘Because I told you to.’ And that, she felt, was for once in a picture fair enough. Though she would certainly rather have avoided what was waiting for her at the top of the stairs: an attack by birds which had to be shot with live instead of mechanical birds, as originally intended. The trouble with mechanical birds was that they just did not look lifelike. So for a whole week she had to suffer daily having live seagulls thrown at her in very narrow confines, and then later to lie on the floor with frantic birds tied with elastic bands and nylon threads to her arms and legs. It was, she says, the worst week of her life, but she went through it without complaint, and only became hysterical when a bird nearly clawed out one eye.
For a film of such extraordinary technical complexity, the shooting of The Birds went remarkably smoothly. It contains some 1,400 shots, about twice as many as the average Hitchcock film, 371 of them trick shots of one sort or another, mostly in the latter half, when the birds have begun to attack. Many of them had to be worked over and over with superimpositions and optical combinations to give the desired effect: the very last shot in the picture, in which the human characters seem to leave the world to the birds, combines no fewer than thirty-two different pieces of film. The secret, as usual, was all in Hitch’s meticulous pre-planning. From the earliest stage in the film’s preparation he had working with him not only his usual cinematographer Robert Burks, but Ub Iwerks, for years Walt Disney’s right-hand man, as special photographic adviser, Lawrence A. Hampton on special effects, Ray Berwick as trainer of the birds and his old friend and associate Al Whitlock, the accredited genius of matte work, as provider of ‘pictorial designs’. (Whitlock turns up in various capacities on the credits of a number of Hitch’s films, and some years later, when Hitch found that Universal, who had him under contract, were hiring him out at enormous profit to other companies in need of a matte-shot expert, he offered to finance him in the setting up of his own independent studio, well aware that this threat would persuade Universal to come up with a fairer remuneration for the relatively unbusinesslike Whitlock’s services.) This time the preparation went, of necessity, much farther than Hitch’s usual set of sketches indicating camera set-ups: the whole film was laid out as a story board, shot by shot. Throughout, Hitch carefully avoided ever asking of anything, ‘Can it be done?’ Instead he merely stated what they were going to do and set his team of expert technicians to work out how.
Curiously, and to himself inexplicably, Hitch found himself in an unaccustomedly emotional state during the making of The Birds. As a rule he prides himself on leaving work at the studio and detaching himself completely when he gets home—and in any case, he insists, all the excitement and involvement of creation is over by the time he begins work on the actual shooting. But with The Birds he found himself nervy and oppressed—possibly because of the kind of subject he was handling, a vision of Judgement Day for humanity, possibly for deeper-laid, more mysterious personal reasons. However that might be, the strange mood which was upon him shook him out of his habitual routine, according to which once he had finished to his satisfaction making the film in his head he would never look at the script again while making it in fact. This time he started studying the scenario all over again while shooting it, and found himself quite unhappy with some sections of it. So he began to do something he never normally did—improvise on set. He threw away completely the original concept of the scene in which the principal characters are besieged when the birds attack the outside of the house, and restaged the reactions there and then. Once started, he began to change quite a lot of things according to the inspiration of the moment, always moving deeper inside the characters, making the viewpoint far more subjective than he had originally intended, and in particular keeping the audience much closer to the Tippi Hedren character, Melanie, seeing things more or less through her eyes. Without going so far as to equate Hitch’s attitude with Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ one can at least see that while making the film he himself was going imaginatively through the experiences of his unfortunate heroine and in turn forcing his audience through them.
It is this which imparts such a strong emotional quality to a film which might easily have remained, in other hands, a brilliant but rather arid exercise in technical virtuosity. Technical virtuosity there is in plenty, sequence after sequence in which the audience, once given a chance to think, is bound to wonder how on earth the effects were produced. But within the movie the audience is given precious little chance to stop and think. And though the over-all vision of the film is apocalyptic, there is room also for some typically ruthless Hitchcock humour, in the amorous sparring match of the opening, and in the scene in the restaurant which provides some relief in the midst of the horrors, with the old lady ornithologist (played by Ethel Griffies, an English actress, then eighty-five, whom Hitch remembered from the London stage in his childhood) and the drunk prophesying doom, a character compounded of many such in plays by Sean O’Casey and some slightly malicious memories of O’Casey himself.
Throughout production of the film certain vital elements remained deliberately fluid. It took Hitch a long time to settle on the right closing shot—for a while he toyed with the idea of having the fugitives from Bodega Bay arrive in San Francisco to find the Golden Gate Bridge completely covered with birds—before he decided to stick with the completely open ending the film now has. It proved, in fact, rather too open for Universal, the company for whom the film was made. Originally there was no ‘The End’ title; the film just faded out on the glistening, endless vista of birds, waiting … But on the insistence of Universal, rather to Hitch’s irritation, a final title was superimposed so that audiences would not be left too completely disoriented. In the editing Hitch decided to cut a couple of scenes he had shot, one of them a love scene between Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, because he felt they slowed things down too much. And the sound-track this time needed special attention: once the picture was edited Hitch dictated a detailed sound script specifying how much sound and of what kind every moment of the film should have. He did not want music in the ordinary sense of the term, but with Bernard Herrmann he worked out a complete pattern of evocative sound and ‘silence’ which was then realized in Germany by Remi Gassman and Oskar Sala, specialists in electronic music.
The Birds was the first film on a new contract Hitch had made with Universal, but it was a continuation and extension of a longstanding personal and professional association, for Universal had been taken over completely by MCA, for whom, in their television incarnation as Revue, Hitch’s Shamley Productions had made all the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series and various other television shows. Moreover, the present head of Universal was Lew Wasserman, Hitch’s close personal friend who had been present at the emotional moment of announcing to Tippi Hedren that she was going to play Melanie in The Birds and had wanted for years to bring all Hitch’s activities together under one roof. The link was to be strengthened further the year after The Birds came out, when Hitch made over his rights in the television shows in return for stock in MCA, so that from then on he was in a very real sense his own employer at Universal—even though, as will be seen, that did not guarantee him the independence he desired.
Despite its lack of big, expensive stars, The Birds was the most expensive film Hitch had made to date, and it was launched with a big publicity campaign based on the catch-line, devised by Hitch himself, ‘The Birds is Coming.’ Oddly, critical reactions were rather lukewarm. Though praise for the birds themselves and all the special effects was pretty general, the critics tended to find the human characters dull and colourless, the opening section up to the first real attack by the birds too long, and in particular they were cool towards Tippi Hedren, in whom they looked for a new Grace Kelly and came away disappointed. All the same, the public liked The Birds, which turned out profitably for all concerned. Just as Psycho had set off a whole string of horror-comic exercises in outrage, the new film sparked numerous excursions to Armageddon, with mankind attacked by everything from rats to giant rabbits. Again, Hitch was just those few vital steps ahead.
Personally, though, he remained possessed by the strange mood which had come over him during the making of The Birds. He sought relief from it, as from all his personal problems through the years, in more work. In defiance of the critics, he still believed in the enormous potential of Tippi Hedren, and anyway he had her on a 52-weeks-a-year, 7-year contract, so he wanted to use her. Abruptly, he decided to reactivate the Marnie project, now as a vehicle for her. Joseph Stefano, who had started work on the adaptation of the book, was otherwise occupied, and in any case Hitch decided he wanted to depart more radically from the original, particularly by combining the attributes of two characters, the husband and the psychiatrist, and writing the role for a young, sexy actor instead of a father-figure (thereby pulling the same sort of switch he had with the Anthony Perkins character in Psycho). He began work on the script again with Evan Hunter, but then decided that maybe a female writer would be more in tune with his intentions and recruited Jay Presson Allan, who at that time was having a big theatrical success with her adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Again, Tippi Hedren was in on the whole creative process of the film. But things were beginning to go a little sour in her relationship with Hitch. The situation of Trilby and Svengali can never be easy for either party. Hitch felt, understandably, that he had invented Tippi, taught her everything she knew, and made her a star. She should be duly grateful, and do exactly what he said. Grateful she was, but she was unwilling, or unable, to relinquish her independence completely. She had married her agent, Noel Marshall, she had a child, and felt the need of some life of her own. Under contract for every week of the year she might be, but she did not feel that gave Hitch the right to interfere in her private life, to decide what she should wear, where she should go and whom she should see every hour of the day. Though charming as ever when she did what he wanted, he was becoming in her eyes unreasonably possessive and domineering. There seemed to be trouble ahead.
For the moment, though, things went smoothly enough. The subject-matter of Marnie is strange enough in all conscience, dealing as it does with a sort of obsessional, fetishistic eroticism, according to which the man in the story is as sick as the girl, or as Hitch says, ‘We’re all perverted in different ways.’ Marnie is a compulsive thief, sexually frigid, the product of an unloving, man-hating mother and a childhood trauma which has left her with a terror of the colour red. Mark Rutland is a young, attractive, rich widower who develops a fixation on her as soon as he realizes she is a thief, desiring her because of rather than in spite of her compulsion. What interested Hitch from the outset was the strange sadistic relationship which develops between them, the ‘sub-text’ in which what Mark really wants is to catch Marnie in the act of thieving and rape her on the spot. Apparently through all the discussions of motivation and character with Tippi Hedren during the preparation of Marnie he never mentioned this to her, any more than he mentioned the urination scene at the back of his mind to Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman during the kiss sequence of Notorious. It was just something in his mind, which should come out on screen without being specified.
And this, no doubt, is what accounts for the extraordinary, otherwise inexplicable intensity of the finished film on screen. But also, since there is something almost telepathic about the way great directors work on their audiences through the medium of the cinema, it seems likely that the very strained relations which developed between Hitch and Tippi Hedren during the course of shooting have somehow left their residue in the performances: maybe Hitch is in some way taking a sublimated, psychological revenge on her in the way Mark (Sean Connery) has to dominate, rape and torment Marnie through the resolution of her trauma in the film. Certainly it was a very difficult film to do, highly emotional and demanding for its leading actress and everyone else concerned. Hitch was nervy, Tippi Hedren was nervy, just about everyone was nervy in the course of shooting. The crisis came when, about two-thirds of the way through, Tippi made what she considered a fairly reasonable request. She wanted to go east for a week-end to attend some charity function, and asked Hitch if he could slightly rearrange the shooting schedule to accommodate this. His answer was a flat no. Not only would it be inconvenient, but he thought a break like that, taking her out of the mood they had created for the character (mainly by keeping her in virtual isolation during the shooting period), would harm her performance. She doubted this, she resented it, she really needed a break. Consequently, the unthinkable happened: there was a scene on set. This never happened to Hitch, never. And harsh things were said: afterwards all Hitch would volunteer was, ‘She did what no one is permitted to do. She referred to my weight.’ There was a total stand-off. For the rest of the film they communicated only through a third party: ‘Would you ask Miss Hedren to …?’ ‘Would you tell Mr. Hitchcock …?’
Amazingly, this all seems to have worked to the film’s good. It is probably the most controversial of Hitch’s works, his admirers being split down the middle between those who regard it as one of his masterpieces and those who find it embarrassingly talky, old-fashioned and slipshod. The case of the anti group depends largely—beyond a general and understandable unease with the film, which is very disturbing however you look at it—on some very casual process shots (of Marnie riding, for instance) and some even more stagy and artificial painted backdrops, notably that at the end of the street where Marnie’s mother lives. But that at least, whether successful or not, was deliberate: Hitch wanted to recreate the unreal, dreamlike effect he had seen two or three times in his life, in Southampton, and again in Wellington, New Zealand, of ships looming surrealistically above the roofs of houses, with no evidence of water to explain them or give perspective. And as for the rest, he has never cared too much, right back to silent days in England, about giving more than a formal nod towards what he considers technical inessentials. If you get the idea that a character is riding a horse, that is all you need; to be completely literal about it is excessive.
Whatever one makes of Marnie today, there was no denying it was then a failure, both critically and commercially—the first Hitch had had in nearly a decade. It was also to prove the end of an era in other ways. It was to be the last Hitchcock film photographed by Robert Burks, edited by George Tomasini, with a score by Bernard Hermann and, for that matter, starring Tippi Hedren. Shortly after it was completed Robert Burks, Hitch’s faithful cinematographer since Strangers on a Train, died with his wife in a fire at their home—a deep distress to Hitch, since Burks was a personal friend as well as a trusted professional associate. Shortly afterwards George Tomasini died. Bernard Hermann stuck around a while longer, since despite his spiky, rather perverse personality Hitch liked him and respected his work. But the fates were set against his completing work on any other Hitchcock film. And then there was Tippi Hedren, still under contract, but obviously not the most popular person around.
Even so, Hitch did not immediately drop the idea of making another film with her. He had what seems on the face of it a very strange and uncharacteristic idea. Back in 1920 he had seen in London a curious piece of Celtic whimsy by J. M. Barrie, Mary Rose—a play about a young woman who is spirited away on a haunted island during a belated honeymoon, and reappears years later totally unmarked by the passage of time, though her husband is now middle aged and her infant son grown up and run away to sea. The play was taken at the time as a dainty, wistful fantasy, its more sinister undertones disregarded (like those of Barrie’s most famous play, Peter Pan). Hitch was immune to the charm, but was fascinated by the horrific element he perceived in the story. What, after all, could be more horrifying than the idea of a young man dandling his even younger mother on his knee? And beneath the fey, Celtic-twilight surface lay an almost science-fictional premise, and an alarming question: if the dead did come back to life, would we really want them and what would we do with them? Also, the subject seemed like a suitable vehicle for ‘that Hedren girl’, as Hitch was then off-handedly calling her. He had a script written on this basis, and planned out in detail how he would make the figure of Mary Rose herself convincingly corporeal yet ghostly with a bluish neon tube inside her clothes. This was obviously a project he was really set on, which he continued to talk about making for several years. But Universal were hesitant about the idea from the start, and finally said a flat no; even today it is specifically laid down in his contract that he may not do Mary Rose.
This was the last role he seriously considered Tippi Hedren for. In 1966 she was lent out to another Universal production, curiously enough directed by the other great British survivor from silent days, Charles Chaplin. But after The Countess from Hong Kong her connection with Hitch terminated, coolly but quite amicably. And Hitch’s other two projects at this time had nothing to do with her.
For a while he worked on adapting the John Buchan novel The Three Hostages, another story featuring Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps. It is a complicated story about three children of important people kidnapped by enemies of the British Empire, and Hannay’s roundabout pursuit and rescue of them. Finally Hitch decided he could not escape the basic problem of a plot based on hypnotism (the main villain is supposed to be a hypnotist of incredible power), which never seemed to work out convincingly on screen. And then, for even longer, Hitch worked on R.R.R.R.R. an idea which, like the two others, went back originally in his experience to before the war and his arrival in America. It was then that he had developed, particularly at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz, a lifelong fascination with the mechanics of a major hotel, the details of its day-to-day running. Now he thought he saw a way to get this into a film, with a story about an Italian immigrant hotelier who has worked his way up from the bottom and now decides to share his success with his family; they turn out to be a gang of thieves and have in various ways to be prevented from stealing the jewels of a rich woman staying at the hotel. To write the script Hitch brought over the Italian writing team of Age and Scarpelli, who had not long before had a big success with a kindred subject in the Monicelli film Big Deal on Madonna Street, about a group of amateurish crooks trying to rob a department store. But language problems were almost insuperable, and Hitch discovered to his distress that discipline and construction were not exactly the strong suit of the Italians. He continued to play with the idea for a couple of years, but finally despaired of getting it into satisfactory shape, and abandoned it after a final attempt when he had completed Torn Curtain.
Difficulties seemed to be inescapable at this period in Hitch’s life. Not that everything had always gone that smoothly before. There was always a certain amount of wastage, in the shape of properties worked on which never somehow reached the screen—though even there Hitch was persistent, as with Rope and I Confess. And the seeming casualness and simplicity of a film like North by Northwest was often the end product of a lot of anguish and hard work. Occasionally something would actually go very smoothly—the films written by John Michael Hayes, Psycho—but these were the exceptions rather than the rule. Happily the exceptions had predominated during the 1950s; but in the 1960s the rule was reasserting itself, with a vengeance.
Torn Curtain was certainly no exception. The germ of the idea had come to Hitch back in 1951, when two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected to Russia amid a great deal of publicity. What intrigued Hitch was the figure least considered: Mrs. Maclean. How did she feel? What, if anything, had she known or suspected? And if it came as a complete shock, how did she cope with it? That was the starting-point of a story about defection, told from the woman’s point of view. Truth to tell, this is not very clear from the film—something evidently got lost along the way. Again various writers played around with the idea, under Hitch’s direction. Eventually the Ulster novelist Brian Moore came up with a treatment that seemed to hold water, and a screenplay based on that treatment. But still Hitch was not satisfied: in particular he was unhappy with the dialogue and brought in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, authors of the big stage success Billy Liar, who seemed at that time to be writing practically every film made in Britain, to do a rewrite job on it. Their contribution to the screenplay was considerable enough for Hitch to feel strongly that they should receive screen credit. But Brian Moore disputed this, and an adjudication by the Screen Writers Guild gave him sole credit, to Hitch’s irritation.
Then there was the question of casting. Hitch now admits to major miscalculations where the two principals, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, were concerned. Why? Well, pressure from Universal and his other advisers. Julie Andrews had just become about the biggest thing in films with The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, a fact which was hardly lost on Hitch, however much he might torment Ernest Lehman (who wrote The Sound of Music) with the assertion that it became the biggest money-maker ever only because most of the people who saw it thought they were seeing Mary Poppins. In principle it did seem that Julie Andrews might have the makings of a Hitchcock woman—cool, crisply in command of things, able to be elegant, able to be blond, and perhaps able to produce the requisite sizzle of understated sexiness. To emphasize the ‘you’ve never seen Julie Andrews like this’ aspect, the film opens with a scene in which she is seen (or rather, considering the amount of covering, understood to be) in bed with her fiancé before they are married. Well, it might have worked, but it did not. No one seems to know why. Hitch speaks politely of her; she speaks politely of him. But obviously there was no spark of communication between them.
Paul Newman was something else again. Hitch’s impatience with the affectations of the Method actors was well known, but he had managed to do wonders with Eva Marie Saint, whom he liked, and Montgomery Clift, whom he didn’t. And there was no reason why he should not be able to use Paul Newman equally well as a star rather than an actor—an almost equally conservative director, Mark Robson, had done so with encouraging results a couple of years before in The Prize, a thriller with many obvious echoes of North by Northwest, also written by Ernest Lehman. But the first real social encounter between Hitch and Newman got them off on the wrong foot. Hitch invited Newman home to a small dinner party. The first thing Newman did was to take off his jacket at table and drape it over the back of his chair. Then he refused Hitch’s carefully chosen vintage wine and asked for beer instead. And to make matters worse, he insisted on going and getting it himself out of the refrigerator in the kitchen and drinking it from the can. With someone who would behave like that—who would feel it necessary to behave like that to make some point of showing he was not intimidated—Hitch could clearly not relate, and the whole of the shooting was overshadowed by the judgements reached that evening.
To make matters worse, the two stars were expensive: so expensive the budget was tight in other respects. Hitch was not too devoted to location shooting anyway, and would no doubt have regarded Universal City, Long Beach, the campus of the University of Southern California and a farm in Camarillo as just as good as the German locations they are made to represent, even if the money had not been tight. But he did regret he could not send an American camera team to Germany to shoot material for back-projections, but had to rely on the, as it proved, inferior work of a German team. All the same, the film commits a cardinal error, and a very unusual one for Hitch: it is for the most part flat and dull. The real emotional drama of the woman’s angle gets lost, the stars seem un-involved, and there is remarkably little suspense at any point, not because invention and construction have failed, but because we just do not care about anyone in the story.
There is, however, one exception—the sequence which in the final script seems to have been the only one that really turned Hitch on. Watching other people’s films, and observing ‘how they do it in the movies’, Hitch had always been struck by the unnatural ease with which people killed one another. A slight tap on the head or a desultory squeeze of the throat was apparently infallible, and a rank amateur who had never handled a gun before could still be relied on to shoot to kill first time. How different things were in life: what he observed from the famous trials he loved to read was, over and over, the extreme difficulty of actually killing anybody. And he wanted to show that in a film. Torn Curtain gave him a chance in the sequence where Paul Newman’s status as an undercover agent is discovered by a police spy who has followed him to an isolated farm, and the only thing he can do, inexperienced intellectual that he is, is to kill the man. The scene is the most successful in the film as an example of Hitch’s attempt to get entirely natural-looking lighting through the use of diffusion and gauzes, but what makes it memorable is its completely justified nastiness. It has to be a silent killing, as another Communist agent is just outside, and it has to be accomplished with the weapons to hand in an ordinary farm kitchen. And slowly, horrifyingly, the man refuses to die—he is battered, stabbed, nearly strangled, and finally, in desperation, has his head thrust into a gas oven. After seeing this, no one could ever think again that killing is simple for the amateur.
Unfortunately, this is the only sequence in the film which really lights up, and in general the shooting was an unhappy experience for Hitch. Perhaps the worst experience came when the shooting was over. Universal signified to Hitch that they did not want Bernard Herrmann to write the score—they would like something less ‘old-fashioned’, more obviously saleable in the form of a soundtrack album. Hitch stood up for Herrmann, and went out on a limb for him. But he made clear to Herrmann, as usual, exactly what he wanted: nothing too heavy, not obvious thriller music, and particularly so in the rather light-hearted opening. Herrmann played him sketches, which he felt were a bit on the heavy side. But Herrmann said he could fix it. Came the day of the recording, at Goldwyn Studios. Hitch was there, hearing the completed score for the first time. The credit music was played and recorded heavy with menace. Hitch was unhappy, but Herrmann said, ‘Wait till you hear the next cut’, and began to conduct that. Whatever its virtues as music, it was just what Hitch had said he did not want. Hitch was furious. He felt he had been betrayed, and after the second cut told Herrmann that it was not according to their agreement, he did not want to hear any more, and left the recording, shaking and silent. He was driven back to the studio, was let off at the gate and went straight to the head of the music department to accept responsibility and offer to pay off Herrmann himself. A new score was commissioned from John Addison, whose most notable film score up to then was for Tom Jones. The break between the old collaborators was decisive, with each feeling that the other had deliberately let him down. In fact both were under a strain at the time: Hitch had had a more than usually gruelling period of shooting with Torn Curtain, and Herrmann was in the middle of a marital break-up. Later tempers cooled a bit, and Herrmann, who shortly afterwards moved to London, did drop into Hitch’s office happily with his new wife the next time he was in Hollywood. But Hitch avoided seeing him, and they never worked together on a film again.
Torn Curtain was almost universally slated by the critics, and the public was lukewarm. After Marnie, this was a real reverse, and Hitch, despite his big holding of MCA stock, was in the rockiest position he had been for many years. Films were getting ever more expensive to make, and the moderate success hardly existed any more—commercially films were either a triumph or a disaster, and no director, however distinguished, could expect to be staked by a production company to many disasters in a row. Of course, Hitch did have a contract with Universal, but they had to agree to the projects under consideration—certainly if they were going to cost more than $3 million. After Torn Curtain Hitch was looking for a new property that excited him and would also be acceptable to Universal. Mary Rose was out of the question, though he was still talking about it as a possibility (or a hope) after Frenzy in 1972. He gave up the battle over R.R.R.R.R. himself. He returned to the first version of Frenzy, but could still not overcome the problem of the ‘third act’.
At least at this period of his life Hitch had some greater opportunity for social life, and for some small adventures outside the charmed circle of the movies. In January 1965, before starting work on Torn Curtain, he and Alma went with the Wassermans to President Johnson’s inauguration in Washington. They parked in the area where the Justices parked, so there were only eight or ten other cars there. Alma got very cold during the outdoor ceremony, so they rushed away immediately it was over to head back to the hotel. Making a quick getaway from the car park they turned out into Pennsylvania Avenue, only to discover that they were heading the wrong way, right in front of the President’s cavalcade. There was nothing they could do except continue, the Wassermans and Alma slumped down in the back hissing to Hitch, who whenever possible sits in the front, ‘For heaven’s sake wave.’ Which he did, thoroughly relishing the situation, and that way they travelled in style all the way. Strangely enough, it never occurred to anyone to question his right to be there: Alfred Hitchcock head of the inaugural parade? Well, why not, after all?
After Torn Curtain he had to attend to some of his investments. Among them were many head of cattle, out on the range somewhere hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. They had been bought on the advice of his investment counsellor, and Hitch would probably never have seen them except that it proved necessary to establish legally that there were so many specific head of cattle and that the owner did have a more than merely nominal connection with them. So off Hitch went in his usual business suit to meet and be photographed with his herd. He was fascinated to observe that all the cowboys were mechanized, with no horses in sight except for show, and they rounded up the few token head of Hitch’s cattle in Land-rovers. He found the hospitality of the cowboys overwhelming—in particular, the giant steaks they ate for breakfast were rather too much for him—and he loved to observe the exotic details of life on the range as it really was, rather than as they did it in the movies. He was particularly curious about the rather 1984ish compound in which they lived, all fenced off and surrounded by a wide area brightly illuminated all night by floodlights. Were the cattle, he wondered, his mind running alone the lines of The Birds, seriously expected to attack?
But as time went by and no definite project was under way, or even on the horizon, he began to get desperate. He hated not working, and was getting to the point where he would consider anything, pretty well, just to continue exercising his craft. The obvious answer seemed to be to take direction from Universal: what properties did they own which might be turned to his purposes? A rummage through the books and plays they had acquired came up with nothing very promising except Leon Uris’s sprawling and complicated espionage novel Topaz. It was not ideal, and his previous essay in espionage and Iron Curtain politics had not been too happy. But it was better than nothing, and Hitch set to work with a will. Uris himself was involved in writing the screenplay, but Hitch did not see how he could use this, and was forced to go into production with nothing like his usual preparation. The film was going to be expensive—around $4 million—with a lot of location shooting in Copenhagen, Paris and New York, though for obvious reasons the studio had to stand in for Cuba, where the central section of the film takes place. There was also a detailed and expensive studio reconstruction of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where Castro had stayed on his last visit to the States, and which had since been pulled down.
Production values, at any rate, were not lacking. But the large cast was mostly undistinguished (John Forsythe, from The Trouble with Harry, was the only familiar Hitchcock face), and Hitch was very unhappy at being rushed into production without working everything out in advance, and without even having a final script. He was already in London picking locations when he decided to throw out the script he had, and cabled Sam Taylor, who had written Vertigo for him, to fly in and rewrite the script completely at twenty-four hours’ notice. Hitch did not even let him read the Uris script: Taylor started from scratch, writing the script scene by scene, sometimes only hours before it was due to be shot. This meant that Hitch had to stage the scenes in an improvisatory way greatly at odds with his usual practice, and though there are individual scenes which work rather well, like the death of the hero’s Cuban mistress staged as a love scene which ends with her collapse in a flowing purple dress on to a black-and-white marble floor, the film as a whole lacks the careful structure, the building and relaxing of tension in a meaningful pattern over the whole span of the drama, which is the hallmark of Hitch’s finest work.
Even casting was done bit by bit—the role of Juanita, for instance, was not assigned until the unit, well into the shooting, returned to Hollywood. And there was some chopping and changing. An actor called Aram Katcher was given the role of the Cuban police chief, shot all his scenes, and did not discover he was not in the film till it opened; Hitch had not liked his reading of the role, and decided to reshoot it with Roberto Contreras, but made no announcement out of consideration for the replaced actor.
The main changes, and the main trouble, came with the ending. At least three different versions were shot. One of them involved a duel in a deserted stadium between the principal characters representing East and West, concluded when the Russian agent is picked off by a distant sniper because, obviously, his employers have no further use for him. This seems to have entertained Hitch but no one else at Universal. Then there was a more flip ending, with the two agents waving goodbye as one gets on a plane for Moscow and the other for Washington. And finally there was the ending of the released prints, which was cobbled up from material already shot, with the Russian agent going into his house in Paris, then the sound of a shot signifying that he has killed himself. This last ending was devised by someone at Universal when Hitch got tired of fighting them: symbolically it was his throwing his hand in, and latterly he has declined to discuss the film beyond making it clear that he regards it as a complete disaster, whatever some of his wilder admirers may say in its favour.
When Topaz came out in 1969, it marked in many ways the lowest ebb in his career for many years. On the other hand, all kinds of honours were coming his way. In 1968 he was awarded the Irving Thalberg Award by the Motion Picture Academy, as a tribute to his over-all career—and in some recompense, no doubt, for the awkward fact that he had never won an Oscar, even though many had been won by films he directed. In 1969 he was made an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 1976 he became a commander of the order. Other honours included honorary doctorates from the University of Southern California and elsewhere, the Cecil B. de Mille Award from the Foreign Press Association in Hollywood, and a knighthood of the Legion of Honour of the Cinémathèque Française. It was nice, of course, but a trifle valedictory, as though Hitch was regarded more as a historical monument than as a vital part of living cinema.
If it was beginning to seem a bit that way, Hitch, not for the first time, had a surprise in store. He always had in reserve his contract with Universal which enabled him to make whatever he wanted, without interference, provided it did not cost more than $3 million. With the escalating costs of film-making, that, which had been a reasonable budget, if not exactly big money, was getting less and less. But this situation had its advantages. With a budget of under £3 million you could manage to keep a very low profile: not too much was riding on your commercial success or failure anyway. And given Hitch’s name and reputation, any film he made was guaranteed instant sale all over the world, and a satisfactory television sale thereafter. In other words, even if it was not a very big success, at least there was hardly any way it could lose money. So if Hitch felt the need again to run for cover, this was a useful cover to be able to run to. And there was no reason why he should not. It had always been one of his greatest advantages that he was sublimely unimpressed by the Hitchcock myth. For everyone else a new Hitchcock movie might be THE NEW HITCHCOCK MOVIE, but for him it had always been just another movie, the quickest way from the last to the next. Therefore he did not now have any problem with pride, any idea that he, the great Alfred Hitchcock, could not possibly make a modest little picture, but should be aiming at the culminating masterpiece.
Whether or not he consciously worked all this out at the time, his next film after Topaz, which had been his most expensive ever, was a return to modesty and simplicity. The impression was intensified, if anything, by the fact that he chose to make it in England, thereby making comparisons with his thrillers of the 1930s more or less inevitable. But if it was in certain respects a harking back, in others, particularly as regards its content, it was anything but running for cover. What it amounted to was that Hitch had at last, providentially, found a way of licking his long-standing Frenzy project into shape. After Topaz he had taken up the idea again, and brought in three writers to work on it, but still it did not turn out to his satisfaction. Then, through one of the usual channels, a novel called Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square came into Hitch’s office. Published in 1966, it was the work of a British writer, Arthur La Bern, whose best-known previous book had been It Always Rains on Sunday. And it happened to be about a psychotic killer of young women—as was the body of material Hitch had been working on for Frenzy. Otherwise, it had nothing in common with Frenzy, but the little it had was enough. Hitch saw that the right way to tackle the problem was to start again from scratch, so he bought the screen rights to Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square and that is precisely what he did.
In line with his habit—risky, one would think, if Hitch had not had total confidence in his ability to handle writers—of choosing to work with writers currently in vogue. Hitch picked as script-writer on this film, which at once inherited the title Frenzy, Anthony Shaffer, who was then riding high in London and New York with his long-running stage thriller Sleuth. This time the choice worked out perfectly: Shaffer and Hitch fashioned a neat and workable screenplay from the book with extraordinary speed and efficiency, though not to the satisfaction of Arthur La Bern, who wrote to The Times of London after Frenzy opened complaining that the film was ‘distasteful’ and the script ‘appalling’, with ‘dialogue … a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce, Dixon of Dock Green and that almost forgotten No Hiding Place.’ He does have a point. There is no denying a certain anachronistic quality to Hitch’s 1971 view of London life and character—though physically it is the London of today, the atmosphere is really that of thirty or more years ago, when Hitch last lived in London and knew it as a native. But that hardly seems to matter: Hitch’s landscape always has been a landscape of fantasy. All that counts is the intensity and conviction of the fantasy. And no doubt about it, Hitch’s London in Frenzy exists, whether or not it has much to do with the London anyone else sees today.
Hitch’s return to London in 1971 was in the nature of a triumphal entry—certainly much more so than his major previous return in 1949, when by his own confession he was enamoured of the spotlight. He was royally welcomed at Pinewood, where the studio scenes were shot, and immediately entertained to a lunch of banquet proportions, at which he had sitting beside him his old set-designer, Alex Vetchinsky from The Lady Vanishes days, brought in specially to make him feel at home. And he found to his pleasure that the atmosphere of British studios, in many respects more friendly and familial than Hollywood, had not changed much. Members of the unit still gathered informally in the local pub after the day’s shooting was over, and the studio restaurant still retained the civilized amenities of linen tablecloths, silver and a very acceptable wine list. Despite Hitch’s whimsical contention that in England no one would recognize him because he had so many doubles, he was recognized everywhere and his smallest move was news. He was photographed with the head of his image in Madame Tussaud’s, and as a gag had a model of himself floated in the Thames, thus giving rise to the supposition that it was in this form he would make his traditional guest appearance. (Actually he is part of the riverside crowd which observes the discovery of the first girl’s body we see, floating past in a Thames a sententious official is just guaranteeing to be free from pollution.) But then of course since the 1940s, when he had last spent any significant amount of time working in Britain, he had not only made a succession of films which even chauvinistic British critics had to recognize as equal or superior to his best British films of the 1930s, but there had also been the television shows, which had done their work in Britain as everywhere else in the world. Though now officially an American, he remained one of the most famous Englishmen in the world, and was treated with all the deference and excitement due to a favourite son who has finally come home.
For the cast of his new film Hitch renewed his acquaintance with an old but great love, the English theatre. Most of the actors, while unfamiliar to American audiences, were notable names on the London stage: people like Alec McCowen, who plays the inspector in charge of the case, Vivien Merchant as his would-be gourmet cook wife, Jon Finch as the man unjustly suspected of murder, Barry Foster as the real murderer, and Anna Massie as one of the victims, combined demonstrated talent with a pleasing unfamiliarity for picturegoers, and gave a richness of characterization sadly lacking in Hitch’s two previous films. And the script did allow scope lacking in those two films, especially, for Hitch’s more outrageous touches of humour. Not only are there the essentially expository scenes between the inspector and his wife, enlivened and given character by the succession of more and more unpalatable dishes she presents him with, fresh from her school of cookery (here Hitch’s famous interest in food really pays off), but the horror of the notorious sequence in which the murderer has to extract the body of one of his victims from a lorry-load of potatoes and break her fingers in order to regain a vital clue clenched in them depends largely on its being at the same time callously, outrageously funny.
Indeed, in parts of Frenzy Hitch takes evident pleasure in manipulating his audience’s responses more brazenly than ever before. He rushes to make use of the new permissiveness in film-making to introduce more nudity than before, and, in the picture’s first murder, more graphic sexual violence. (Frenzy was Hitch’s first film to get the ‘R’ adult rating in America.) And in the scene immediately following that murder, when we see the murderer leaving the scene, from outside, then the camera stays put while a secretary goes into the office and we wait what seems an eternity before the anticipated scream, one can palpably sense Hitch directing the audience, seeing just how far he can go. The film also contains another variation on a favourite Hitchcock ploy, that of forcing the audience into guilty identification with the villain: the real murderer is deliberately made so much more charming and agreeable than the rather unappetizing character he is framing for his crimes that all one’s normal moral responses are thrown right off.
Hitch had a good time on Frenzy Again everything was falling out right and it showed on screen: the film contains some of his most memorable effects ever, such as the extraordinary shot in which, as the murder takes his next victim into his house, the camera pulls back from the stairs they have just ascended, out of the front door and back into the street as the sounds of busy Covent Garden, up to now tellingly suppressed, come flooding back on to the sound-track. When the film opened the press were unanimous in hailing it as a fantastic return to form, and with press and public alike it proved his most popular film since Psycho twelve years before. In fact it would have been a totally triumphant experience if it had not been shadowed by a personal drama, which came close to being a personal tragedy. One morning at Claridge’s, Alma had a serious stroke.
Afterwards she cheerfully observed that at least she had the sense and taste to have it in one of the world’s best hotels, on the principle that if these things have to happen, they might as well happen in comfort. But at the time there was nothing funny about it. A doctor was immediately summoned, she was carried off for examination, and it turned out that one arm was paralysed, her walking was affected, and to a lesser extent her speech. It seemed possible that she might become an invalid, though happily her mind and sense of humour remained as clear and incisive as ever, and she was soon busy comforting those around her. Hitch was of course distraught, but insisted on continuing with his preordained routine: the very day of the stroke, their granddaughter Mary was scheduled to arrive at London Airport in the afternoon, and naturally he went out himself to meet her, as arranged. In general, though, he stayed with Alma for as much of the time as he could. Right away they started therapy, and Alma, who had considerable native stubbornness as well as courage going for her, responded amazingly to treatment.
Hitch’s first reaction to the shock of her illness seemed to be to start neglecting his own carefully guarded health, abandoning his usual regime and eating and drinking with more freedom than for many years—almost as though he felt he was only taking care of himself for Alma, and the possibility of life without Alma was not to be contemplated. But by the summer of 1972 Alma was sufficiently recovered to be able to accompany Hitch on a gruelling tour of western Europe publicizing Frenzy, only a little the worse for her experience. And Hitch began seriously to look for another subject, for another film.