Hitchcock
Nevertheless, it was precisely at the time when Hitchcock had finally achieved full recognition, via a series of homages, that his luck changed.
North by Northwest, which he defined as “a drama about a man on the run,” had been plagiarized, botched and caricatured—in particular by the James Bond films. Hitchcock felt he had to renounce the film genre he had built up for thirty years, since The Thirty-nine Steps, and this meant he would avoid big-budget pictures. The Birds was several years in advance of the fad for catastrophe films. Because of the special effects, it was nevertheless fairly costly, but not as successful as it deserved to be. The following picture, Marnie, was a fascinating film, but a box-office flop, and belongs in the category known as the “great flawed films.”
Parenthetically, I want to define what I mean by a “great flawed film.” It is simply a masterpiece that has aborted, an ambitious project weakened by some errors in the making: a fine screenplay that is “unshootable,” an inadequate cast, a shooting contaminated by hatred or blinded by love, or an inordinate gap between the original intention and the final execution. This notion of “great flawed films” can apply only to the works of a great director—one who has demonstrated that in other circumstances he can achieve perfection. In an overall view of his achievements, a true cinéphile may, on occasion, prefer such a director’s “great flawed film” to one of his acknowledged masterpieces—thereby preferring, for example, A King in New York to The Gold Rush, or The Rules of the Game to Grand Illusion. If one accepts the concept that a perfect execution often conceals the film-maker’s intentions, one must admit that the “great flawed film” may reveal more vividly the picture’s raison d’etre.
I might also point out that, while the masterpiece does not necessarily arouse the viewer’s emotions, the “great flawed film” frequently does—which accounts for the fact that the latter is more apt to become what the American critics call a “cult film” than is the masterpiece.
I would add that the “great flawed film” is often harmed by an excess of sincerity. Paradoxically, this sincerity makes it clearer to the aficionados, but more obscure to the general public, which has been conditioned to absorb mixtures that give priority to gimmicks rather than to straightforward confessions. In my opinion, Marnie belongs to that bizarre category of “great flawed films” which is often underrated by the critics.
I am convinced that Hitchcock was never the same after Marnie, and that its failure cost him a considerable amount of his self-confidence. This was not so much due to the financial failure of the film (he had had others), but rather to the failure of his professional and personal relationship with Tippi Hedren, whom he discovered through a television commercial. In casting Tippi Hedren in two of his films, he entertained the notion of transforming her into another Grace Kelly.
It is important to recall that after the shooting of The Birds, and before giving Tippi Hedren her second chance in Marnie, Hitchcock made a series of film tests of several beautiful women, among them many prominent European models.
It is also useful to read Donald Spoto’s biography The Dark Side of Genius, as well as David Freeman’s piece “The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock” (Esquire, April 1982), for details on the disastrous falling-out between Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, and on Hitchcock’s decline following Family Plot and during the writing of The Short Night. Some commentators have reproached both writers for publicizing the most pathetic moments of the old age of a great man. My own judgment is less severe: Having known Hitchcock socially and professionally only in the final years of his life, these two young men had no reason to feel grateful or friendly to him. From the viewpoint’ of cinema historians, the case of Alfred Hitchcock—both the man and his work—is so rewarding and complex that we can predict that before the end of this century, there will be as many books written about him as there are now about Marcel Proust.
Hitchcock was not much of a letter writer, but thanks to the 6,000 miles that separated us, we remained in regular contact through a correspondence that enables me to quote him in the final phases of his life.
Throughout this book, it is obvious that Hitchcock was always lucid and self-critical with respect to his own work, provided the film under discussion had been made in the distant past, and had been compensated for by a more recent success. I, in turn, respected this very natural sensitivity in a man who was otherwise neither proud nor vain. That is why I avoided the critical comments on Marnie and Torn Curtain that I might have made if either one of these films had been made long before our conversations.
In any case, I am convinced that Hitchcock was not satisfied with any of the films he made after Psycho.
In the mid-sixties, Hollywood was going through a crisis due to the great strides made by television. American pictures were losing their international impact to such a degree that several major companies set out to finance small European productions in their countries of origin, in order to release them with the Hollywood output on the European marketplace. At the same time, the American majors merged their European outlets: Paramount with Universal and Warner with Columbia, while M-G-M halted its production.
Disappointed by the box-office failure of Torn Curtain, Hitchcock found himself without a film project for the first time in years. In addition, as already stated, he had already lost some of his self-confidence after Marnie. This accounts for the fact that in shooting Torn Curtain he allowed the studio to influence him, first in the choice of the two stars, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, and—much more seriously—in dropping one of his oldest collaborators—composer Bernard Herrmann. Was Hitchcock so unfair as to attribute the impression of gloom that overshadows Marnie to Herrmann? Herrmann’s removal is a flagrant injustice, since it is a matter of record that his contributions to The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Psycho had greatly enhanced the success of these films. Herrmann had written and directed a score of some fifty minutes for Torn Curtain. Its beauty, consistent with his talent, can be appreciated today, since it was eventually made into a record in London. What happened?
The studio—one always refers to “the studio” when speaking of an aberrant decision—did not like Bernard Herrmann’s musical score for Torn Curtain, and though it had been recorded, “they” succeeded in convincing Hitchcock to discard it. We must bear in mind here that in 1966, in Hollywood and elsewhere, it was the practice of the film industry to favor scores that would sell as popular records—the kind of film music that could be danced to in discotheques. In this sort of game, Herrmann, a disciple of Wagner and Stravinsky, was bound to be a loser.
Another important name was missing from the credits of Torn Curtain: Robert Burks, who, except for Psycho, had been the director of photography for all of Hitchcock’s films since Strangers on a Train. Not only was Hitchcock not responsible for the end of this collaboration, but he was still sincerely missing Burks, since the previous year in the burning of his house.
Deprived of his favorite stars, his director of photography, his composer and his chief editor, Hitchcock felt that he was embarking on a new phase of his career, and that it would be a rough one.
In 1967, at a time when there had been no announcement of a new Hitchcock project in the trade press, he wrote me:
I am, at present, preparing a new picture. It has no title, but deals with a psychopathic murderer of young women. It is roughly based on an English crime case. It is a purely realistic story, and the central figure is a young man who has some kind of relationship with his mother.
The thing that interests me about the story is the fact that after the first murder you know that when he meets the second girl, her life is in danger and you wonder when death will come. The third girl is a young police woman who has been “set up” to trap him. So this third segment of the film is also quite suspenseful, because you are wondering how soon he will find out that this is an attempt to trap him.
I have brought over an English playwright named Benn W. Levy. The last time I worked with h
im was in 1929, when he did the dialogue for the first English talking picture. Blackmail. He has been writing plays on and off over the years with varying degrees of success.
I’m going to treat this film quite realistically and, if possible, use as many real interiors as I can . . . .
—excerpt from a letter dated April 6, 1967
A few weeks later, Hitchcock mailed me the screenplay, which he had titled Frenzy (but which should not be confused with the film he made four years later under the same title). As I recall, this initial Frenzy had a good plot, but also a disadvantage in that it had too many points in common with Psycho, and I suppose this is the reason why Hitchcock finally dropped it.
It was at this time that Hitchcock, who had always had the strength to reject projects he deemed inadequateI—especially during the period he was under contract to Selznick—allowed Universal’s front office to persuade him to adapt a novel which the studio had just purchased at a very high price.
Topaz was a spy novel. Its only merits were that it was based on a true story (the presence of a Communist agent in the entourage of General de Gaulle) and that it was a best-seller in Amcrica. In France, the book had been banned by the Gaullist censorship, but one could acquire a French version published in Canada, under the counter, as during the Occupation.
Unfortunately, the story of Topaz involved too many locations, too many conversations, and too many characters. The contract for the literary rights specified that the author of the voluminous novel would write the screenplay. This resulted in a considerable waste of time before Hitchcock was finally allowed to call upon his friend Samuel Taylor, who did the best he could with the screenplay.
While in Paris, where he was shooting some of the exterior scenes for Topaz, Hitchcock implied some of his doubts and reservations about the picture in an interview with Pierre Billard of L’Express. “For me,” he said, “a film is ninety-nine percent finished with the screenplay. Sometimes, I’d prefer not to have to shoot it. You conceive the film you want and after that everything goes to pieces. The actors you had in mind are not available, you can’t get a proper cast. I dream of an I.B.M. machine in which I’d insert the screenplay at one end and the film would emerge at the other end, completed, and in color.”
Hitchcock had always avoided polities in his pictures, but Topaz was deliberately anti-Communist and included several very sarcastic segments on Fidel Castro’s entourage. There were even scenes of Cuban policemen torturing members of the opposition. When L’Express asked him, “Do you regard yourself as a liberal?”, Hitchcock answered, “I think I am in every sense of the term. I was recently asked whether I was a Democrat. I answered that I was a Democrat, but in respect to my money, I am a Republican. I am not a hypocrite.”
In contrast to Torn Curtain, in which the joint salaries of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews amounted to more than half the film’s total budget, Topaz had no major stars. Its cast was made up of competent American, French, Scandinavian and Hispanic actors. The French cast included Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli, Michel Subor, Dany Robin, and young Claude Jade, who could pass for an illegitimate daughter of Grace Kelly.
An actor of limited ability, Frederick Stafford, although credible as a secret agent, lacked plausibility as the father of the young girl. Impeccable in his virile physique, he was an obvious substitute for Sean Connery. In fact, before shooting Marnie, Hitchcock had tried to sign Sean Connery for two or three pictures, but though Connery wanted to get away from the image of James Bond, he refused to commit himself for more than one picture.
The key to the Topaz plot is, as I said earlier, the unmasking of a Soviet spy in the entourage of General de Gaulle, with Michel Piccoli portraying the spy. The screenplay winds up with Piccoli, aware that he is about to be discovered, deliberately allowing himself to be killed by Frederick Stafford in the course of a gun duel. The scene was shot in the awesome setting of an empty stadium near Paris. During a sneak preview in Los Angeles, this scene provoked hoots of laughter from a youthful American audience. Hitchcock went back to Paris to reshoot the scene with a few variations. Back in Hollywood, at another sneak preview, there was once again a scornful reaction to the modified scene, but now Piccoli and Stafford were no longer available. Hitchcock finally discarded the duel scene, but he resented the early reactions to it. He claimed that young Americans had become so materialistic and cynical that they could not accept the concept of chivalrous behavior. It was beyond their understanding that a traitor to his country should accept a gun duel in which he would allow himself to be killed.
In any case, he was under pressure, and for the first time in his long career Hitchcock could not think of an ending to his film. He eventually settled for a purely formal solution which, I suspect, was influenced by a picture that was enjoying a huge success at the time, Costa-Gavras’ Z. In the final part of Topaz, there is a series of shots and close-ups of the film’s characters, homogenized by a spirited musical score, with the rhythm of the image and sound track announcing that the conclusion is near. Nevertheless, Hitchcock insisted upon letting the viewer know that Piccoli has finally committed suicide—but how, when all the footage shot at the stadium was deemed worthless? Hitchcock resorted to a crude finagling, a solution of despair. Any director who has torn his hair out in front of the moviola because he requires a scene that he has not shot is bound to sympathize with this dilemma. As the film unfolds, the public has seen the exterior of Piccoli’s home, a sort of bachelor apartment facing the courtyard on the ground floor of a town house located somewhere in the 17th arrondissement. Now, the scene Hitchcock needs would show Piccoli going home after becoming aware that he has been discovered. The image of the town house, seen from the exterior, would be frozen for a second, just time enough to insert the sound of a gunshot. In this way, the essential idea would be saved: Piccoli enters his house and shoots himself as soon as the door closes behind him.
Unfortunately, throughout the entire film, we have never once seen Piccoli going home. At the beginning of the picture we see him in his dressing gown, welcoming his mistress, Dany Robin. As she leaves the house, she runs into Philippe Noiret, who is about to call on Piccoli. Therefore, the only piece of film Hitchcock possessed to convey his idea—that of Piccoli going home and killing himself—was a shot of Noiret entering the town house! Although the shot is filmed from a distance, it is impossible to mistake Noiret’s silhouette for Piccoli, especially since Noiret walks with a cane throughout the film. So what we finally see is Noiret entering the house, but only at the very end of the shot, at the moment the arm holding the cane is already inside the apartment. Thus, all that appears on the screen is the darkened half-body of a man disappearing behind the door; the image of the house is then frozen and we hear a gunshot, followed by the music and the final credits.
It is obvious that despite a few scattered beautiful scenes, mainly in the Cuban episode, Topaz is not a good picture. The studio didn’t like it, and neither did the public, the critics, nor even the Hitchcockians. The director himself wanted to forget it, and felt an imperative need to make up for it.
According to a letter from Hitchcock, Hollywood was going through a crisis, and was in a state of utter confusion in the summer of 1970. He wrote:
I am looking for a new film project, but it is very difficult. In the film industry here, there are so many taboos: We have to avoid elderly persons and limit ourselves to youthful characters; a film must contain some anti-establishment elements; no picture can cost more than two or three million dollars. On top of this, the story department sends me all kinds of properties which they claim are likely to make a good Hitchcock picture. Naturally, when I read them, they don’t measure up to the Hitchcock standards.
How lucky you are not to be categorized and stamped as I am, for this is the root of my difficulties in acquiring a good subject, especially in respect to acceptance by the audience.
Everyone here, and especially the majors, is being very cautious. For instance, Paramount made
four big pictures for a global budget of a few hundred million dollars that turned out to be flops. Fox is pretty much in the same situation and the company’s fate is dependent on a film no one has seen yet: Tora, Tora, Tora, the story of Pearl Harbor, co-produced by the Japanese and the Americans. Several reliable sources have informed me that the picture cost thirty-two million dollars. Universal’s Airport is a big hit here in the States, and optimistic rumors predict it will net as much as thirty million dollars in American grosses alone.
We also have all kinds of other films which I refer to as “accidental” and which are enormous box-office hits. Filmed for the most part by amateurs, they are apparently very popular with young audiences. Of course, not all these “accidental” films are successful, especially those which include nudity scenes, and it is becoming obvious that nudity in itself is not a guarantee of box-office success.
This is a general picture of the situation that prevails here at the moment . . . .
—excerpt from a letter dated August 27, 1970
Soon after writing this letter, Hitchcock selected a British novel. Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern. He simplified the plot considerably and named the project with the title of the screenplay he had once rejected—Frenzy.
In contemporary London, a sexual maniac strangles women, using neckties. A quarter of an hour after the picture begins, Hitchcock reveals the identity of the killer, who has been introduced in the second scene. We also meet a second character who is going to be accused of the killings; he will be discovered, followed, arrested, and condemned. For an hour and a half we watch him struggling to escape from the trap like a fly caught in a spiderweb.
web.
Frenzy is the combination of two kinds of films: those in which Hitchcock invites us to follow the itinerary of a killer (Shadow of a Doubt, Stage Fright, Dial M for Murder, Psycho), and those in which he describes the troubles of an innocent man who is on the run (The Thirty-nine Steps, I Confess, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest). Frenzy re-creates that nightmarish, stifling Hitchcockian universe in which the characters know each other—the killer, the innocent man, the victims, the witness; that world boiled down to the essential, where each conversation in a shop or in a bar happens to deal with the killings; a world made up of coincidences so systematically organized that they crosscut each other vertically and horizontally. Frenzy is the image of a crossword puzzle on the leitmotif of murder.