I cannot now remember exactly when I first heard that Hitch was preparing a new film. But it must I think have been towards the end of 1973. I was having lunch with him in his office-bungalow up at Universal, and he mentioned that he had spent the morning working on the script of this next, as yet unnamed, project. It was based, he said, on a Victor Canning novel called The Rainbird Pattern (‘but we certainly shan’t call it that’), published a year or so before. I confessed ignorance, even though the book had apparently received excellent reviews, and been a good, if not a best, seller. Well, he said, we’re really not keeping that much of the book—as usual, it’s the idea and a few possibilities that we pick out of it. And so he began to describe what the book and/or film was about.
What he proceeded to tell me seemed to me complicated but quite comprehensible. I stress this because I know from people who have encountered Hitch during the preparatory stages of a film that he tends to use anyone and everyone as a sort of preview audience, employing his famous skills as raconteur to construct the film for them in their mind’s eye and observe their reactions as some guide to how this or that will play. I gather that in the case of ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s 53rd film,’ as it was cryptically known right up to the start of shooting, he got quite a lot of puzzled or downright unfavourable response early on—one famous producer told me that when Hitch recounted the story to him he could not make head nor tail of it, and frankly said so. Be that as it may, the story seemed to me clear enough: there were these two separate plots involving two separate groups of characters whose paths keep crossing; a fake medium and her taxi-driver boy-friend who helps document her clients for her, who are set on the trail of an heir who has vanished in childhood; and a master-criminal kidnapper who is simultaneously, with the help of his girl-friend, pulling off a series of spectacularly successful jobs, strictly for the ransom money.
Finally, you discover that the connection between these two strands is that the master criminal is the long-lost heir; hence the irony of the investigators getting nearer and nearer to him for quite the wrong reasons, or at any rate for reasons quite different from what he supposes when he gradually becomes aware of their presence. The scene in which his suspicions crystallize into a certainty was the only one Hitch specifically described at this stage, in great detail and with obvious enjoyment. It is the kidnapping of the Bishop of San Francisco in Grace Cathedral in the middle of mass. The kidnappers drug him and drag him off before the eyes of the congregation, depending of course on the slightly embarrassed sense of decorum which possesses those in church and makes them hesitate to act in what would otherwise be a natural fashion, for fear it will seem out of place or irreverent, to give them the necessary time to make a getaway. All goes according to plan, except that ‘that man’ is there again—the taxi-driver, who as it happens is there for quite a different reason, trying to make an appointment to see the Bishop, who, it transpires, was the parish priest thirty years before in the village where the heir was last seen.
We know Hitch’s propensity for being turned on by particular scenes or visual ideas for his films, and working outwards from these until the threads join up into as coherent as possible a story line. Hitch himself put it succinctly to me some years ago: ‘First you decide what the characters are going to do, and then you provide them with enough characteristics to make it seem plausible that they should do it.’ So it seemed probable that this scene he so lovingly described had been the grain of sand in the original book from which he would build up the pearl of his finished film.
What was my surprise, then, to discover that the scene does not exist at all in the book. The book’s plot is in outline as Hitch had described it, but with some important differences. First, it takes place in England, and a very quiet rural England at that, setting up a (very Hitchcockian, one would say) dislocation between the crimes going on and the mild, well-mannered circumstances in which they occur. Then, the characterization is more extreme and peculiar than he described it: the medium is a largely genuine medium, though not above reinforcing her psychic powers with a little help from her friend; the kidnapper is actually a homicidal maniac (rather than there being some faint hint that he may have been responsible for the fire in which his foster parents died and he managed to disappear at the age of twelve), and though his crimes catch up with him he has a son, probably just as crazed, who will inherit the money instead and unleash heaven knows what on the world in his turn. And thirdly, there is no kidnapping of a Bishop in the middle of mass. A Bishop is kidnapped, to be sure, but it is in the middle of a solitary country walk which he takes every week-end.
The next time I saw Hitch, I asked about these differences. The first one was merely practical: he did not want to make a film in Britain this time, and so had transferred the action right away to San Francisco and round about. Though, he added, he was now wondering about San Francisco, because it was so hackneyed a location—‘I think if I see one more car chase bouncing over those hills I shall scream.’ Maybe somewhere on the East Coast instead, but anyway in America. The second he readily agreed to. He did not want this film to be too heavy and serious, so he was reworking the characters in an altogether lighter vein. Anyway, he thought the supernatural was always difficult to accommodate in a story that was not centred on it, since it tended to remove the characters concerned from normal human sympathies and make them too special.
As for the homicidal maniac: ‘People always think villains are extraordinary, but in my experience they are usually rather ordinary and boring—certainly less interesting and peculiar than most of the ordinary, law-abiding people you meet. In this story, the way I see it, the villains are actually rather dull characters, they are the straight men, if you like, their motives are very simple and mundane. Whereas the more ordinary couple are actually very peculiar. And you see, each is moved some way in the direction of the other: the criminals are made to have much more of the ordinary in them, while the good guys have more of the criminal in them. It makes it less melodramatic, lighter and more believable—almost a comedy thriller. I think I’ll keep a bit of ambiguity about the kidnapper’s background in infant mayhem and the possible genuineness of the psychic’s powers, just for fun, but that’s all.’
And the kidnapping of the Bishop? The book had given him the idea for it, because he had always been fascinated by the special attitudes of people under some kind of social constraint, such as being part of a church congregation, and had wanted to stage a crime in the middle of a church service just to work out the possibilities of the situation. The kidnapping of a bishop seemed like the perfect opportunity, but what would be the point of doing it as it was done in the book? ‘Kidnap him in ordinary clothes alone in a wood and he might as well be a stockbroker. If you are going to kidnap a bishop, you want to do it at the moment when he is most evidently being a bishop—in the middle of mass, in front of a crowded congregation.’ Though in the script the denomination of the Bishop is carefully unspecified, one can hardly doubt from the way he describes it that the idea of snatching a bishop in the midst of High Mass, before the eyes of a crowded congregation, has for Hitch the special appeal of breaking a taboo.
At this time Hitch was already working every day with Ernest Lehman on the script, and he showed me the actual physical script they were working on. It was a large loose-leaf book of double foolscap size, each left-hand page containing Lehman’s first full draft and on the facing page, typed up and then further annotated by hand, Hitch’s comments and glosses—often far more copious than the script itself. The comments varied from a brief query on the wording of a line of dialogue to very elaborately thought-out arguments about the dramatic logic of a particular turn of events: all of them a basis for discussion rather than an instruction to change. And discussion was what was going on: each morning, regular as clockwork, Lehman came to the studio and they would talk over as much as they could get through before lunch, maybe only a line or two sometimes, sitting comfortably side by side on a large sofa with the script between them. Then Lehman would go off to make the modifications they had agreed on and come back the next day for more. (When I asked excitedly if he had scripts like this for his other films, Hitch said no, he had only just thought of this layout.)
Why Ernest Lehman? Because, obviously, they had got along very well on North by Northwest, and also because Lehman was between assignments at this time. I wondered whether the routine of working with Hitch had changed at all in the fifteen years since North by Northwest. I remembered Hitch had said afterwards that originally he thought of North by Northwest as much more abrupt and disjointed, like an early Nevinson painting, all jagged, angular shapes; then had felt he had to fill in the gaps to make it smoother-flowing, so as not to distress a modern public used to having everything spoon-fed them. Perhaps changing times, changing assumptions about plotting based on television conventions, would have loosened things up a bit? But Lehman found that if anything Hitch had become even more tight and meticulous in his script preparation—before, he had wanted things worked out sufficiently to give him a reliable working basis, but on the new film he wanted all the cracks to be neatly and convincingly papered over and everything set in script terms and dramatic logic (or the appearance of it) before he set foot on a sound stage.
All the same, the collaboration with Lehman was not entirely without problems, any more than it had been on North by Northwest. Again Lehman toyed from time to time with the idea of resigning, and was persuaded back, grumbling but still fascinated. He ended incredulous at all the agony which had gone into the creation of such a slight picture, and amazed that so little of it showed. Finally, his main difference of opinion with Hitch was over the ending, which Hitch eventually wrote himself and submitted to Lehman, listened to his objections (mainly that the medium is shown throughout as a complete fake, so to suggest at the last that maybe she has a touch of psychic power is disturbingly inconsistent), discussed his alternative solutions, and then went right ahead and used his own version.
So the preparation went on, and already by late spring of 1974 they had begun to hire the crew, though starting dates were vague—this autumn, the New Year, next spring …—and no casting definite, though Hitch went through an intensive series of screenings of films currently around the studio (Universal, of course) to look over the work of possible actors or technicians. I once encountered him quite mystified about Goldie Hawn after seeing Sugarland Express and wondered for a wild moment if someone had suggested she might be a possible successor to Grace Kelly, you know, cool with a sizzle of sexuality underneath. To be fair, though, she would have been conceivable casting, as in a very different way would Angela Lansbury, whom Hitchcock went to see in Gypsy at this time, for the role eventually played by Barbara Harris. The studio’s most enthusiastic suggestion, Liza Minnelli, he just could not see in the part.
The script completed, more or less, Hitch started work with his sketch artist, Tom Wright, who had worked on one or two other Hitchcock films in this capacity, and who was this time to be second-unit director as well. I was out of the country at the start of this stage of the preparation, and by the time I got back Hitch himself had had a succession of health problems which put him in and out of hospital for most of the autumn—first, he had a heart pacer fitted, which he delights to show with gruesome details of the surgical processes involved. Then, as a result of a bad reaction to the antibiotics he was given, he got colitis, and once over that he had a kidney stone removed (‘Of course, they don’t cut you any more, they go in through the front, if you see what I mean,’ he added with relish). He noted with fascination the instant banking of heart data in Chicago, and insisted that all the surgery be done with local anaesthetics so he could watch how it was done. I had the feeling that what turned most listeners green even in description might well sometime become more grist to his mill.
By December 1974, when I saw him again, the production was moving towards its final stages of preparedness. The script was pretty well fixed, for the moment (the final pre-production script bears evidence of some intensive final polishing around the end of March and the beginning of April 1975, but nearly all in matters of detail), and instead Hitch was concentrating on laying out the action sequences with Tom Wright. This applied particularly to the car chase sequence in the picture, which presumably the second unit would do anyway, but which was clearly going to be done exactly as Hitch designed it. The whole film, as usual, was set out shot by shot in a sort of story-board form, keyed into the final shooting script, so that by the time Hitch went on to the floor he, and everyone else relevant in the unit, knew exactly what he wanted to shoot and how he wanted to shoot it, and could refer to this story board in case of doubt. Hitch still maintains, perversely, that once he has prepared a film in this way and cast it, anyone could shoot it. He says this, but it seems very doubtful, seeing how much extra moment-to-moment explanation and decision-making is necessary with even the most detailed script of this kind, which in the last analysis can only be an aide-mémoire for the director, the one man who knows completely what this shorthand means.
The car chase is not exactly a car chase, not for most of its length, but a prolonged cat-and-mouse game in which the psychic and her boy-friend, lured on a wild-goose chase to a rendezvous on top of a mountain, find the brake fluid has been drained from their car as it careers wildly down out of control. Then, escaping with their lives, they are pursued by the would-be killer in his car until he gets killed himself in a car wreck. One day when I saw him, Hitch had spent the morning laying this out, and was talking with great enthusiasm about the necessity of re-examining conventional situations to make quite sure if the conventional way of shooting them is in fact the best. Sometimes of course it is the only sensible way. But sometimes, as in this case, if you start to ask questions you do not get very sensible answers.
Why, for instance, must you always see the edge of the windscreen and the top of the bonnet in a driver’s-eye-view shot of the road, especially in a car speeding towards or away from something or out of control? No reason at all, says Hitch. In fact, it is flouting an important psychological truth, that though of course they are physically there in the driver’s field of vision, he will see only—and therefore we, for full identification, should also see only—what is important to him: the road rushing vertiginously to meet him, the landscape flying past on either side. So Hitch had been designing the sequence accordingly, shot by shot, with the illustrator sketching under his direction, taking visual notes, then going away and drawing up the individual shot compositions and coming back to discuss further and where necessary modify—exactly as, at an earlier stage, the scriptwriter had worked.
How far is the film thus arrived at in words and drawn images transferred exactly to the screen? The answer, as one might suppose, is closely but not slavishly. Though the ‘story board’ is kept on set, I never saw Hitch himself refer to it during the shooting—obviously he does not need to, it is primarily a stage in his thinking about a film, or thinking it out, and once that is done it is hardly needed. Even the locations are selected at an early stage in the script preparation and their characteristics embodied in the script, rather than leaving anything to last-minute inspiration.
For example, there is a sequence in the middle of the film in which the taxi-driver makes contact with the widow of the man who tried to kill him, at the latter’s funeral. Recognizing him (in a shot in which everything is right out of focus except the man himself, glimpsed in the distance beyond the funeral party at the graveside), she tries to escape, and he pursues her. As Hitch says, there is an obvious conventional way of doing this: shot of back of retreating woman; shot of front of advancing man, gaining on her; close-up of her breaking into a run, panicked; close-up of him looking determined, gaining on her, and so on. The scene is necessary, but if you shoot it the same old way it is boring. Audiences can imagine for themselves the reactions of the two involved, they don’t have to be shown. And as usual, because that is the way it is conventionally done, Hitch wanted, if it was reasonably possible, to do it differently. Looking at the cemetery they had chosen as a location (in Glendale, quite close to the studio), he was struck by its curious irregular, rather overgrown grid pattern, and at once had the idea of shooting the pursuit from above—a high platform built for the purpose—in one shot, with the two characters moving to and fro across the grid in rough parallel, like ‘an animated Mondrian’. But all this was worked out in detail months before shooting started, whereas another director might well select the location which would give him the idea at the last moment.
Clearly, the idea of situating the story very specifically in and around San Francisco had been abandoned quite early on, and the decision taken to make the film mostly in and near the studio. But the image of Grace Cathedral remained for the Bishop’s kidnapping, and with it some other unobtrusively San Francisco locations for the houses of various characters. At one time Hitch even contemplated doing the cathedral sequence in the studio, on the principle that all he really needed was one column and the rest could be matted in. But he discovered that in the studio the sequence would cost $200,000, so decided he might as well go on location, and while he was there himself shoot the other San Francisco exteriors, which had formerly been assigned to the second unit.
By this time, then, the main things left imponderable were the casting and the title. On 22 April the title was settled as Deceit, and most of the casting was done, with Bruce Dern as Lumley, the taxi-driver, Barbara Harris as Blanche, the psychic, Roy Thinnes as Adamson, the kidnapper, Karen Black as Fran, his girl-friend, and, just before production started, Cathleen Nesbitt as Julia Rainbird, the old lady who sets the whole thing off.
It is, I think, a fair indication of the small importance Hitch attaches to performers among the various elements in a film that casting was left so late, until everything else had been settled; no consideration was given to making the characters conform to the known personalities and capabilities of the actors envisaged; rather, the roles were left as strictly circumscribed slots into which the actors would eventually be fitted. The only really known quantity among them, in that he had worked with Hitch before on Marnie (very briefly) and some television, was Bruce Dern, though Cathleen Nesbitt would of course be very familiar to him from his days of constant attendance at the London theatre. Roy Thinnes was working just next door on Robert Wise’s Hindenburg. Barbara Harris he got, I discovered, from once having seen her in the film of A Thousand Clowns and remembering her as suitable over the studio’s objections that she was ‘unreliable’; he had never seen her in the theatre and was amused to discover that in one of her biggest stage successes, On a Clear Day …, she had also played a psychic. Karen Black he got from I don’t know where, certainly not Day of the Locust, which he had not seen (though following its box-office career with interest), but anyway on the enthusiastic recommendation of the studio, who felt she was going somewhere, and certainly with no rooted objection on his part, since Fran was the least developed principal in the script and any reasonably attractive, reasonably competent actress would do.
In any case, he clearly regarded the two kidnappers as the less interesting roles, and spoke with more enthusiasm about Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris, finding in them both just the characteristic of built-in personal oddity which would give density and individuality to their characters as written in broad outline. In other words, he was still following his old adage that the most important part of directing actors is casting them right, so that you can rely on them to take on naturally the required shape without constant instruction, Barbara Harris especially delighted him with her constant creativity in the apparently unconscious invention of business and telling detail to bring the outlines to life: when the shooting was concluded he said that of all the actors he had ever worked with he thought she had made the most important personal contribution to the film of elements he had never even thought of, without any need for urging or obvious ‘direction’ from him. Indeed, the only actor I saw him do much apparent direction of was Karen Black, and then evidently not because he felt it was necessary but because she seemed to want reassurance that the master was satisfied. I was amazed at the transformation she seemed to have undergone since the previous year, when I had observed her quite a lot during the shooting of Day of the Locust. There, in tune with the atmosphere of the production as a whole, she was playful, extrovert, kooky and, from time to time, temperamental; shooting this film she was staid, deferential, eagerly concentrating on the purely technical problems of fitting into a staged action, referring to Hitch rather like a good little girl who hopes for an approving pat on the head from her teacher.
Shooting was due to start on 5 May 1975, but at the last moment it was delayed till 12 May to accommodate further costume and make-up tests. Even this time was not lost, though. One of the few patches in the script which was not laid out in full detail was the opening scene, a long dialogue between Blanche and Miss Rainbird in which the plot foundations are laid during a seance. The indications as to how precisely this would be shot remained sketchy. Since the tests required were for Cathleen Nesbitt and Barbara Harris, Hitch directed them himself, using the chance to rehearse the first scene in various ways so that by the time shooting started he was just as detailed in his conception of it as he was for the rest of the film.
Watching Hitch at work is an education in precision and in economy. The atmosphere on a Hitchcock set is different from that of any other I have ever been on. Even at Universal Studios, before the shooting moved to location in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, it was rather like making a film in church. There are some very gifted directors who choose to work in an atmosphere of apparent chaos. Billy Wilder, the veteran who had most recently been working at the same studio, on The Front Page, kept the cast and crew in stitches with a constant stream of jokes and tricks, and seemingly welcomed any and every distraction, even to the extent of every now and then throwing the Universal Studios guided tour an unscheduled attraction by letting them troop in their hundreds through the sound stage while he was actually shooting, to the consternation of the studio authorities. Not so Alfred Hitchcock. The studio set was strictly closed to visitors of any kind, and within an atmosphere of the utmost courtesy and formality prevailed.
It was, of course, all part of a deliberate pattern. Ever since he arrived in Hollywood, he has directed in the same unvarying uniform. He explains the aberration from his own point of view largely in terms of comfort—undertaking any job as arduous as directing a feature film, he wants to be as comfortable as possible and since a dark suit is what he has always worn, this is what he feels most comfortable in. But there is more to it than that. Clothing in southern California is especially susceptible to structuralist analysis in terms of signs and meaning, and by the code in operation a jacket means fairly formal, a tie means formal (whatever kind of tie, and whatever worn with), and a suit, even the flashiest, most sporty tweed, means very formal indeed. So Hitch’s working clothes mean to everyone else the height of formality, and when they dress likewise, as sooner or later most of the senior members of the unit do (the first assistant director told me he was advised that a jacket and tie would be a good idea when he was first signed months before shooting started), they are put automatically into a particularly restrained, formal, purposeful frame of mind.
Which, for Hitch’s purposes, is perfect. There are no people running around, no raised voices or temperaments on a Hitchcock set. He himself sits quietly observing, expressing the absolute minimum, which, for a nervous or insecure actor, could be alarming. He communicates mainly with the director of photography (Leonard South, a senior man who has photographed few features on his own, but was for years operator for the late Robert Burks and is used to Hitchcock’s technique), his first assistant and his script girl. Round about, everyone walks almost on tiptoe, and one hears constantly the formulas of extreme courtesy—’I beg your pardon’, ‘I’m so sorry’, ‘Might I suggest …’ Even at a glance this is an operation entirely under control, knowing exactly where it is heading. Hitch intervenes directly only when something does not go according to plan, and practically everything does. And it should therefore not have been surprising, I suppose, to discover that of all the films I have ever seen in production, this was the one which was being the most shot in one or at most two takes. When I commented on the oddity of this in current Hollywood practice, he said briskly, ‘If you know what you want, and you know when you’ve got it, why do more?’
One afternoon, for instance, right after a press lunch he had staged in a mock-up graveyard—a nonsense occasion with Bloody Marys to drink, waitresses in mourning, and the names and birth-dates of the journalists present inscribed on gravestones, no doubt devised to compensate the Hollywood press for the fact that the set itself was closed, as well as to support Hitch’s public image as a macabre joker—I watched him polish off a whole sequence on two adjacent sets in about two and a half hours.
The situation is that the master-criminal (Roy Thinnes, at this time) and his girl-friend-accomplice (Karen Black) are just collecting on their latest caper—a giant diamond as ransom for a kidnapped businessman. The girl, heavily disguised (as Marnie, more or less) in a blond wig, dark glasses, and black from her rakish hat to her rather kinky, very high-heeled boots, has just picked up the diamond from the police and is now landing in a police helicopter which has flown at her unspoken direction to a golf course miles from anywhere where so that the exchange can be completed. First, in a partial mock-up of a helicopter we see Karen Black gesture the pilot to stay where he is, look for a sign, get out carrying a gun and vanish into the darkness. Then the pilot gets out and looks after her, registering reactions to a flashing light and then to the sound of a car driving away. In the next scene, in the wood, we see Adamson, the criminal, standing with a body slumped at his feet; Fran comes up to him, hands over a little bag; he opens it and drops the ransom diamond into the palm of his hand, then examines it with a jeweller’s glass while we zoom into close-up: diamond, glass, eye. Then, satisfied, they turn and head off through the dark wood, all without a word of dialogue, leaving the recumbent body to be picked up and taken back to civilization.
This is the whole of one sequence, in fact, except for a cut-in shot of a guide light flashing in the wood to go in the middle of the first shot of Karen Black. (‘Will there be enough time for it?’ asks the cameraman of the way Hitch has staged the shot. ‘Oh yes,’ says Hitch. ‘We don’t need to leave time for it. A couple of frames will be more than enough to insert the cutaway.’) The helicopter is a mock-up of the front half, placed against an incredibly tiny black screen; the wood is pocket-sized, like something out of The Thirty-Nine Steps. When the pilot gets out of the helicopter on the far side from the camera and walks around the front of it, there are only about six inches of the screen to spare behind him. I comment on this to Hitch, who seems very pleased—the rather complicated action of Karen Black getting out of the helicopter, after several rehearsals, has been captured on the first take, and the pilot’s subsequent movement has run to two takes, the second modifying slightly the direction in which he looks and the speed of his reactions to what he sees and hears. ‘Remember’, says Hitch, ‘all that matters, all that exists for the audience, is what is on the screen. It doesn’t matter if the set extends no more than six inches beyond what the camera records—it could as well be six miles for all the effect it would have on the audience. The whole art is knowing what matters in each shot, what the point you are selling is.’
The wood too is just a few tree-shapes looming out of the darkness, so what point would there be in having any more on the stage than just that? The scene that takes place there is as clearly laid out in the script as the rest, but here Hitch has to explain a little further to his camera crew. ‘What are we selling in this shot? That there is a body there, and that he’s not dead. That’s all we want to show, but it has to be absolutely clear.’ The shots envisaged in the script are done just as planned, up to the zoom into a tight close-up, and then Hitch decides to add a shot of Adamson and Fran turning and walking off into the shadows; in the script that is covered by the pilot’s reaction shot. The shot is set up instantly and done in one take, which wraps up shooting for that day an hour or so ahead of schedule.
The following week, in San Francisco, things are rather different. On location the same cloistered conditions can hardly apply. Grace Cathedral, seat of the Episcopalian Bishop of San Francisco, is on Nob Hill, right by the Fremont and Mark Hopkins hotels. It is, despite what should be its dominating position, rather tucked away among high-rises: the building itself, an elaborate essay in vaguely French Gothic, is curious in being built entirely in reinforced concrete, and the grey plaster of a curving stair brought from the studio to represent the approach to the pulpit blends alarmingly well with the concrete column it twines around, so that it comes as quite a shock to find it ending in thin air out of view of the camera. The shooting mostly takes place in one corner, but it is not possible, or perhaps no one has wanted, to rope it all off. People can wander in and out as they wish provided they stay out of camera range, though since as yet no one seems to know that Hitch is shooting there we have few purposeful visitors. Also, there are more relatively unruly elements, in the shape of a couple of hundred extras in the congregation as well as the cathedral choir.
The extras, as is the way with extras, want to act, to make the most of their few seconds’ screen time with elaborate reactions, and dare to attempt discussion of motivation with the master. But if he was was not going to take that from Paul Newman he is certainly not going to take it from extras. At one point, when the abduction of the Bishop is actually taking place, some extras at the back ask him to describe what is happening so that they will know how to react. ‘Can you see what’s happening?’ No. ‘Then there you are. You can’t see what’s happening, you just have the vague idea that something is. You don’t have to react beyond a slight show of curiosity.’ All the same, they want to, relishing each split second of screen time and trying to cram as much reaction as possible into it. Hitch remains calm and kindly, except that at one point he turns witheringly on one chattering unfortunate: ‘The gentleman at the end of the front row is having a very animated conversation, all the time, with his—with the woman he’s living with. Now let’s try and pay some attention to the movement of the picture!’ The shot finally in the can (three or four takes), he walks away, shakes his head, grins and says, ‘That’s what you would call directing idiots.’
The abduction itself is shown—again exactly as broken down in the script—by not being shown. Fran, heavily disguised as an old lady, hobbles forward and appears to fall at the Bishop’s feet; he leans over her; Adamson dressed as a verger hurries forward to help, and the rest is done in a series of instantaneous flashes: Adamson’s hand with a hypodermic, close-up of the Bishop’s face as he passes out, close-up of Fran’s head passing the camera as she leaps up, close-ups of Fran’s and Adamson’s hands going under the Bishop’s arms as they prepare to haul him away, a couple of reaction shots from choir and congregation, a shot of Fran and Adamson dragging the Bishop to his feet, more reaction shots, and a brief flash of the kidnappers vanishing through the side door. Perfect silent technique, in fact, built on a very fast montage of detached, in themselves almost static shots. In the event Hitch simplified the script version still further: the shots of the hands going under the Bishop’s arms are eliminated, and so, particularly, is that from the congregation’s point of view of the two of them pulling the Bishop to his feet. On the spur of the moment he adds one more shot, of Karen Black’s feet scrabbling on the floor as she struggles to rise, a little detail which catches his attention and amuses him while actually shooting. And that is all. ‘The whole point is that it happens in a flash, before anyone has a chance to see what is going on. So that is the position I want the audience in too.’ Even though these shots will flash past in seconds, he still pays immense attention to getting them absolutely right, explaining carefully to the participants exactly what has to be clear from each one. As we leave at the end of the day he suddenly gets involved in explaining precisely where in the dummy arm of the Bishop the needle should enter—‘It may not look important, but get it a little off and dozens of doctors will be writing in at once to complain. In this business you have to know a little of everything!’
The first day in San Francisco it was grey and cool. But on the second there is bright sunlight, so while Hitch is at lunch they seize the opportunity to shoot Bruce Dern’s arrival, seen from high up on a building across the road. The bystanders are mystified because they can’t see a camera, and a couple of ladies who look like mother and daughter ask me disappointedly, ‘Is that all—just that fellow entering the cathedral?’ That fellow, I remark, happens to be the star of the film, Bruce Dern. ‘Bruce Dern,’ cries the daughter, buckling visibly at the knees. ‘I’m sure he looked at me when he went in. I thought he looked familiar. Bruce Dern …!’ Between takes I sit talking with Hitch and Alma, who is as usual with Hitch on location, though these days she rarely appears on studio sets. ‘I suppose it’s my own background in silent cinema, where a big crew was eight or nine, but I don’t find it so enjoyable with sixty people around. I always find myself visualizing the finished films from Hitch’s scripts before he starts shooting, and then I like to stay away until the rough cut to see how far my visualization corresponds with the film itself.’ And how far did it? ‘Pretty closely, as a rule. But there are always a few surprises.’ Hitch himself was in a particularly expansive mood, and inclined to talk about all sorts of things. Some observations on the architecture around us led to his asking me about Coventry Cathedral, which he had not yet visited, and the present state of Westminster Cathedral, which he had not been into for many years (though it was the scene of one of his most famous cinematic deaths, that of Edmund Gwenn in Foreign Correspondent): had they finished marbling the interior yet? How did the Eric Gill Stations of the Cross look nowadays?
Shortly after the successful conclusion of the location shooting in San Francisco some unexpected troubles arose with the shooting, acknowledged in a brief press announcement dated 13 June which stated that the character portrayed by Roy Thinnes had ‘undergone a conceptual change calling for a new character concept’ to be played by William Devane, an actor best known up to then for his portrayal of John F. Kennedy in the television programme The Missiles of October. Stories vary as to what lay behind this change, which necessitated reshooting and put the film, up to then a few days ahead of schedule, rather behind. (It was originally scheduled to take fifty-eight days to shoot, and the budget envisaged was a modest $3.5 million, of which, Hitch wryly remarked, $550,000 would go on fringe benefits of various kinds that never show on the screen.) Variety said Roy Thinnes was fired after differences of opinion, and elsewhere Hitch was quoted as saying, ‘When I’m directing a film, I’m directing a film, not some actor.’ Given Hitch’s absolute and abiding horror of scenes and confrontations, it seems very unlikely that anything of the sort occurred, but rather that Hitch put into practice his often-stated principle that if he found he was not getting what he wanted from an actor his natural way of dealing with the situation would be to pay the actor off and start again with someone else. A spectator did describe to me the nearest thing to a confrontation when Roy Thinnes cornered Hitch at his regular table at Chasens’ during one of his regular Thursday dinners to ask him, in some distress, why? Hitch, equally distressed, just kept saying, ‘But you were too nice for the role, too nice.’
Also, possibly, too chilly and lacking in the wildness the part requires. In this regard, William Devane proved a perfect replacement: the left side of his face, the Kennedy side, is handsome and heroic, while the right side is low-browed and sinister, so that by cunning alternation he can be shown as attractive, sexy, yet somehow uncontrolled and dangerous, Jekyll and Hyde rolled into one. With this important change the shooting continued without further mishaps, to conclude on 18 August, only thirteen days over schedule. And on the way it was given a new title: as of the beginning of July it was Family Plot instead of Deceit. Why the change? Well, said Hitch, they had made inquiries about the market effectiveness of Deceit and discovered that for some reason most people associated the word with marital deception and therefore expected some kind of plot involving the murder of a husband or wife. Family Plot (a play on words, of course, referring back to the complicated plot of family relations and to the physical plot of ground in the cemetery where Adamson is supposedly buried) was suggested by someone in the publicity department, and Hitch, if not specially enthusiastic about it, felt that at least it did not give a positively misleading impression.
After the completion of shooting there were still, naturally, many things to be done, and some decisions still to be made. The process work in such sequences as the runaway car ride had to be finished, and gave Hitch quite a lot of trouble. He had been talked, somewhat against his better judgement, into using a blue-screen matte process in which the foreground characters are visually married in the actual printing of the film with a background shot elsewhere during the post-production stage. If the match is not very exact there tends to be an ugly blue line left round the foreground action, and Hitch’s last experience of the process had not been too happy. But the studio persuaded him to try it again, arguing that it had improved out of all recognition in twelve years. However, in the event he found this overoptimistic, and wished he had stuck to tried and true back-projection instead, which would, he pointed out, have been a lot less expensive finally than the superficially cheaper blue-screen process, after the scenes concerned had been redone and redone till they finally met his exacting standards. Even when I first saw the film, on 7 January 1976, and for some weeks after, with the announced première date of 21 March getting closer and closer, the process work was not quite finished, but finally it came out right and the answer print was received on 9 March, a couple of days ahead of schedule.
More in the class of a delayed decision was the choice of composer and the writing and recording of the incidental music for the film. When Hitch was halfway through shooting the film I asked him who was going to write the music. To my surprise, considering how important the music has been in many of his films, and how exhaustively he prepares just about everything in advance, he said he had not decided: ‘Possibly Maurice Jarre—he’s flexible,’ and proceeded to tell me about his troubles and dissatisfaction with the score Henry Mancini wrote for Frenzy (which was scrapped and replaced after it had been recorded). Evidently nothing in Family Plot or Frenzy had been planned in relation to the musical score, which was slotted into a relatively small, circumscribed place in Hitch’s considerations, to be supplied when the rest of the film was nearing completion, strictly to the pattern he would lay down. In the event, the choice of composer was not announced until the end of the year, when it transpired that the music would be written by John Williams, who, whether flexible or not, had the advantage of being a quick worker and composer of the score for Universal’s current biggest-moneymaker-ever, Jaws.
Up to the very last, Hitch continued to work over details, correcting and refining. In the editing he decided to reverse the order of a couple of sequences, so that the scene in which Adamson and Fran trace Blanche and Lumley and overhear a little of their conversation now comes before the scene to which the conversation originally referred (the second meeting with Miss Rainbird) and the corresponding dialogue was blotted out and reworked. More consideration of Ernest Lehman’s objections to Blanche’s apparent demonstration of genuine psychic powers in the final scene led to some redubbing in the New Year when the Hitchcocks returned from their annual pilgrimage to St. Moritz. On a shot of Adamson’s back as he carries the drugged Blanche to captivity after she has tumbled to his true identity was dubbed a line referring to the diamond in the chandelier (not in the shooting script), which could just possibly explain away Blanche’s final revelation—maybe she was not completely unconscious at the time or heard the remark unawares. When Ernest Lehman saw the film he was unhappy about the line, and suggested something slightly less contrived-sounding, while admitting that any line at this point was necessarily contrivance. The line was redubbed using one of Lehman’s suggestions. A less involved viewpoint might well be that it was all a fuss over something quite unimportant. The final scene with its whimsical touch of mystification is really only a playful coda, not seriously affecting our understanding of what has gone before. So, if you are going to do it at all, you might as well do it shamelessly, without bothering one way or the other about putting a line in just for the record. However, the fact that even at the last moment Hitch was still modifying, still worrying, is in itself revealing.
Family Plot was scheduled for an Easter 1976 release. But when in December the possibility came up of its being the opening attraction at the benefit première of Filmex, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, on 21 March 1976, Universal liked the idea and moved forward the date for delivery of the final print accordingly. On 18 March there was the first preview before an audience at the University of Southern California: Hitch himself was present, spoke before the film and was very pleased with the student audience’s reaction—‘They didn’t miss a trick.’ The reception at the opening of Filmex was also enthusiastic, if in a less detailed fashion. The showing was part of a show business junket—fireworks, performing elephants and such, plus a charity benefit dinner afterwards, in the course of which Hitch was presented by James Stewart with a newly set-up Filmex Award, and made some whimsical comments about the squareness of the award’s shape, hoping it was no reflection on him and his work, and seeing it also possibly as a die with just one spot on it, himself.
After this very successful première the national openings of the film were scheduled for Easter. So the publicity machine at Universal went into operation, with Hitch himself deeply involved. Since he did not plan to travel very much with this film, the kick-off of the campaign was a unique press conference coast-to-coast on closed-circuit television. The proceedings began at 9 a.m. Los Angeles time, on Stage 5 of the NBC studios at Burbank. Hitch was bright and fresh, very much on form, and if many of the questions were routine, some of the answers were not. He reiterated his mistrust of symbolic interpretation in his films, politely side-stepped an invitation to go through the actors-are-cattle routine one more time, and said some familiar things in an unfamiliar fashion, bearing out his own instruction to avoid the cliché. What was the mandatory age of retirement for a director in Hollywood, someone asked. ‘I would say, around reel twelve.’ Was he planning on retirement? ‘What’s retirement?’ No, he did not have any property in mind for his next picture. But yes, there definitely would be a fifty-fourth. He replied to a congratulation on his and Alma’s impending golden wedding anniversary that they were both in excellent health ‘and clear conscience’ (strange association of ideas, murmured someone). The last question of all seemed to take him by surprise: given the context of Family Plot, a lady asked, had he any idea what he would like to see inscribed on his own tombstone? He considered. ‘Well, I suppose something like “You see what can happen to you if you aren’t a good boy”.’ A gag, of course, but also still the same old anxieties, still the same old guilts, even seventy years on.