As things turned out, there was no next film. Though not for want of application on Hitch’s part. Soon after Family Plot went into release it was announced that he was working on a project called The Short Night, to be based on a novel of that name by Ronald Kirkbride, suggested by the escape of the real-life British spy George Blake, plus The Springing of George Blake, a non-fiction account of the same events by Sean Bourke, the man who helped Blake get away. He saw the story as, centrally, an overshadowed love story, Notorious-style, between the Blake-character’s wife and a counter-espionage agent who is secretly stalking him. A script was started, with the Irish-American writer James Costigan, but Costigan was rapidly paid off when he said it was totally incredible to him that a wife would wait even a few months for a husband in jail. ‘How can you write a love story,’ said Hitch, ‘with a man who thinks like that?’
This was early in 1977. That summer Hitch, having doubts about the viability of the project in hand, fell in love with the possibilities of a pulp novel about a detective who falls in love with an alcoholic involved in one of his cases, and tries to force her off the bottle and into his arms (shades of Vertigo and Marnie). This did not get very far, and by autumn he was back with The Short Night, this time working with the faithful Ernest Lehman. Despite a certain amount of the usual hair-tearing (on Lehman’s side at least), by the following spring the script was, Hitch assured me, just about ready to go: a well-constructed story in three sections: a long central love story which all took place on a Finnish island where Blake’s wife is waiting for him to take her and the children into Russia, and the counterspy is waiting for him to turn up, flanked by big action sequences, Blake’s escape at the beginning and his final attempt to flee over the Russian border with his children, commandeering a train in the process, when his wife refuses to go with him.
Hitch’s health had been giving some cause for alarm, and Alma had been getting about much less since her second stroke, so that he dutifully went back each evening after a long day at the office to cook their evening meal himself, since he felt this was the least he could do. In the summer he had a new heart-pacer fitted, and was astonishingly rejuvenated. Though he had been talking, a little impractically, about shooting the whole film in California, he now dispatched Robert Boyle, his longtime art director, to Finland to scout locations, and announced his intention of starting to shoot there in September, with a few days of London locations thrown in while he was in Europe. It is hard to know now how serious he was about this, since he had not done any definite casting, though he was thinking of Sean Connery for the role of the hero. But more to the point, he was having more and more trouble getting around because of arthritis in his legs, and the rigours of an arduous location seemed to be more or less out of the question.
It never came to the test, though, since he was advised that the Finnish weather was liable to be treacherous in September, and the shooting was officially put off until spring 1979. That seems to have been where things started to go seriously wrong. It may well have been that Hitch accepted in his own mind that the film would never be made, but if so he gave no sign of it. He brushed aside suggestions by his closest associates that he might meanwhile ‘run for cover’ by making a quick, intimate film like Dial M for Murder based on, for example, Ira Levin’s hit play Deathtrap. It was to be The Short Night or nothing. Unfortunately, inclined as he always was to chafe at inactivity and grow neurotic, he started to worry about the script which had before seemed to him perfectly satisfactory, began to tinker with it, brought in new writers, and would spend weeks on working out the details of quite irrelevant sequences like one in which the Blake-character randomly rapes and then brutally murders the sister of the Sean Bourke-character before taking off for Finland and no further mention that all that has happened.
Otherwise he became increasingly a recluse. He never went out any more, and seldom entertained people at his office. He was now so unsteady on his feet that he had to be ignominiously help-carried to his car, though he did doggedly continue to come in nearly every day. The writing was on the wall, but neither he nor any of his daily associates seemed willing to read it. How could he? Only a year or so before he had said ‘I could never retire. That seems to me the most horrible idea. What would I do? Sit at home in a corner and read?’ But finally he himself took the necessary decision. One morning in May 1979 his personal assistant, Peggy Robertson, had some bad news for him: ‘Hitch, you’d better sit down. Victor Saville died yesterday.’ Hitch responded with scarcely a flicker to this loss of an old friend, buy replied simply: ‘You’d better sit down. I’ve some news too. I’m cancelling the film and closing down the company.’
It was expected at Universal that some sort of announcement to this effect would be made but it never was: they seem to have behaved in exemplary fashion to their most distinguished employee. At first there was question of his moving to new offices in the ‘black tower’ office block at the gates of Universal City, but in the end he stayed where he was, in a truncated version of his old company bungalow; all the company employees, including Peggy and his faithful secretary Sue, had been let go, and he had only a succession of temporary secretaries from the typing pool for company. Naturally he did not come in as much as he had, but the facade, and the fiction of the film yet to be made, were rigorously preserved. To mark his eightieth birthday the American Film Institute gave him one of their special awards, and a slap-up dinner to go with it, to which just about everyone who had ever worked with him was invited. Hitch seemed terribly frail, hardly leaving a wheelchair, and for most of the proceedings played his impassive Buddha role to the point that many began to wonder if he had tuned out completely. But then at the end he got up and amazed everyone by making a charming and witty speech: clearly there was plenty of life in him yet. Or so it appeared on television, but later françois Truffaut, who was there, told me that the speech was pre-recorded and edited in.
It was virtually the last public appearance. In the New Year’s Honours List for 1980 he was finally knighted, though why he had at last decided to accept if it was indeed true that he had previously on various occasions turned the honour down remained a mystery. Perhaps Charles Chaplin’s belated acceptance of a knighthood had something to do with it, perhaps not. At any rate, he was quoted expressing laconic pleasure at the elevation, which presumably remained strictly honorary since he was no longer a British citizen, and doubting whether he would be able to journey to London for the investiture – which finally took place in a private ceremony on a sound-stage in Hollywood. There is little more to tell. Inactive and retired, whether he admitted it or not, he was losing the will to live. He ceased to see movies, he ceased to read, he could not even be drawn into the tests of his memory for theatrical minutiae of his youth which had always been a staple pastime around the office. Towards the end of April he went into hospital: he had been having trouble with his heart pacer, and a recurrence of his kidney condition. But the whole machine was worn out, and the indomitable will was no longer there to keep it going against all odds. During the night of April 28 he died peacefully in his sleep.
Hitchcock’s death was the end of an era. He was, after all, the last director of silent features who was still going strong, the last of the cinema’s founding fathers still functioning. But it was good that he went as he did, rapidly and without pain, saved the indignity of retirement, uselessness and talking always about those projects which everyone knew would never be made. He went almost as he had wished: what he really wanted, he said, was to drop dead on set, in the midst of making a movie. And also, as he would have wished, he took his mystery with him intact.