In May 1972, I met Hitchcock before the Cannes Festival where he was going to present Frenzy. He appeared aged, tired, and tense, for he was always very emotional before introducing a new picture, very much like a young man about to take a school examination. At the request of a television network, I interviewed Hitchcock.
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. You have always made stylized films, Do you miss black-and-white cinema?
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. No, I like color. It’s true that I filmed Psycho in black and white to avoid showing red blood in the killing of Janet Leigh in the shower. On the other hand, since color pictures, we have problems with the decors. Violent contrast—for instance, extravagant luxury or abject poverty—can be expressed with precision and clarity on the screen. However, if we wish to show an average apartment, it is difficult to create a realistic decor because of the risk of lack of precision.
F.T. A few years back, cinematographic audacity—eroticism, violence, politics—came from European productions. Today, American cinema has gone way beyond Europe in terms of insolence and freedom of expression. What do you think of the situation?
A.H. It reflects the moral climate and the way of life that prevail today in the United States, as well as being a result of national events that have had an impact on the film-makers and on the public. Still, American cinema dealt with social and political themes long ago, without attracting crowds to the box office.
F.T. Are you in favor of the teaching of cinema in universities?
A.H. Only on condition that they teach cinema since the era of Méliès and that the students learn how to make silent films, because there is no better form of training. Talking pictures often served merely to introduce the theater into the studios. The danger is that young people, and even adults, all too often believe that one can become a director without knowing how to sketch a decor, or how to edit.
F.T. In your opinion, should a film suggest painting, literature, or music?
A.H. The main objective is to arouse the audience’s emotion, and that emotion arises from the way in which the story unfolds, from the way in which sequences are juxtaposed. At times, I have the feeling I’m an orchestra conductor, a trumpet sound corresponding to a close shot and a distant shot suggesting an entire orchestra performing a muted accompaniment. At other times, by using colors and lights in front of beautiful landscapes, I feel I am a painter. On the other hand, I’m wary of literature: A good book does not necessarily make a good film.
F.T. Do you think the old rules still apply, namely that an appealing main character and a happy ending are still valid?
A.H. No. The public has developed.
Hitchcock, the practical joker. Upon my arrival in Beverly Hills during the Christmas season in 1973, I found this card, which I understood only after a lengthy examination: Alma and Alfred H. had recopied the alphabet, deliberately dropping the letter I.
Thus, the card can he read: “A VFRY HAPPY NO L.”
There’s no more need for the final kiss.
F.T. Why don’t you film today some of the subjects that interested you in the past, and that producers refused to finance?
A.H. The need for profit is just as valid today as it was in the past. Even if I wanted to make, write, play, and finance a film on my own, I couldn’t do it because I would run into problems with the trade unions.
F.T. Do you prefer to shoot a screenplay with strong situations and sketchy characters, or the opposite?
A.H. I prefer the strong situations. It is easier to put them into images. In order to probe a character in depth, you often need too many words. In Frenzy, the killer is likable. It’s the situation that makes him disturbing.
F.T. In 1956, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much was a great hit. Your first version of the picture was made twenty-two years before. If you were to consider another remake today, which of your former films would you choose to do over again?
A.H. The Lodger, which I made in 1926. A London family wonders whether their new roomer is Jack the Ripper—an excellent story filmed without sound, which was the basis for two later versions by other directors.
F.T. Do you have any suggestions for reforms in respect to the awarding of the Oscars?
A.H. The awards would have to be given out every three months, which would be difficult. The disadvantage of the present formula is that the awards invariably go to pictures that were released between September and December 31st!
F.T. A few years ago, everyday life was banal, and the extraordinary was in films. Today, the extraordinary is commonplace: political kidnappings, plane hijackings, scandals, and the assassinations of chiefs of state. How can a director of suspense and espionage films compete with everyday life in 1972?
A.H. The reportage of a news item in a newspaper will never have the impact of a moving picture. Catastrophes only happen to others, to people we don’t know. The screen allows you to meet and to know the killer and his victim, for whom you’re going to tremble with fear because you care about him. There are thousands of car accidents every day. If the victim is your brother, you are really interested. If the film is well made, a screen hero will become your brother or your enemy.
F.T. Frenzy is your first European movie in twenty years. What is the difference between your work in Hollywood and your work in England?
A.H. When I enter the studios—be it in Hollywood or in London—and the heavy doors close behind me, there is no difference. A coal mine is always a coal mine.
* * *
A week later, when I met Hitchcock on his way back from Cannes, he looked fifteen years younger. Frenzy had been enthusiastically hailed at the festival and Hitchcock, beaming with pleasure, admitted that he had been very scared. But now, he knew that this “little film,” whose budget was slightly less than two million dollars, would be successful, and that the studio would overlook the poor artistic and box-office results of Topaz, a picture made against his better judgment.
In casting Frenzy, Hitchcock abandoned his long-standing practice of using glamorous and sophisticated stars, à la Grace Kelly, in favor of girl-next-door types—Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Anna Massey, Vivien Merchant, and Billie Whitelaw. They all gave admirable performances, injecting a fresh realism into Hitchcock’s work by reinforcing the impression of a commonplace news item, and strengthening the plausibility and raw truth of the gruesome story from which all feeling was excluded.
The male casting was less felicitous. The features of the innocent suspect (Jon Finch) mainly conveyed a self-centered sullenness which kept the public from sympathizing with him. And, as played by Barry Foster, the villain was too lightweight to inspire the viewers with fear.
Even so, Frenzy was impregnated with charm, probably because, following the nightmarish shooting of Topaz, Hitchcock made it in a state of euphoria. He was about to celebrate his fifty years of film-making, and with Alma by his side, he set up his camera in Covent Garden, in the popular and lively London of his youth.
Hitchcock had often said, “Some directors film slices of life, I film slices of cake.” With its entirely British aspect, Frenzy did in fact look like a slice of homemade cake baked by a seventy-year-old gastronome who had turned the clock back and was once again the young boy director of his film debut.
Three months later, Hitchcock acquired the rights to a new British novel, The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning, with the intention of transposing the action from the English countryside to Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was while working with Ernest Lehman on the screenplay of the film—which became Deceit, and, subsequently, Family Plot—that Hitchcock underwent heart surgery for the implantation of a pacemaker. I am not being indiscreet in mentioning this, because of all the friends and journalists who saw Hitchcock from 1975 on, rare were those to whom Hitchcock failed to display this medical gadget, opening his shirt to reveal the rectangular object implanted in his chest. Detaching each syllable and sta
ring at his interlocutor, he would deliberately announce, “It’s made to last for ten years.” We all know that the pacemaker is made to regularize the heartbeat. Working by battery, the pacemaker ensures seventy heartbeats per minute, and its functioning is verified once a month by phone. This requires dialing the number of the medical center in Seattle (or, in Hitchcock’s case, in Chicago), and placing the phone receiver against one’s chest.
With Helen Scott during the Paris shooting of Topaz.
Once the visitor was fully informed about the use of the pacemaker, Hitchcock would indulge in his favorite pastime: a scene-by-scene description of his forthcoming picture, as if to prove to himself that its construction was solid and that he had mentally worked out its every detail.
What particularly appealed to Hitchcock in Family Plot was the passage from one geometric figure to another. First, two parallel stories are introduced, then the gap between them gradually narrows, and finally they mesh, winding up as a single story. This construction stimulated him in that he was about to deal with a difficulty he had never handled before.
In Family Plot, we meet two couples who belong to different worlds. The first couple consists of a pseudo fortune-teller (Barbara Harris) and her accomplice (Bruce Dern), a taxi driver who, in the course of his job, discreetly gathers pertinent information which his girlfriend will subsequently pretend to intuit. The other couple consists of an elegant jeweler (William Devane)II and his girlfriend (Karen Black), whose real occupation is kidnapping important personalities and trading them back for valuable diamonds which they conceal in a chandelier in their home.
The stories crisscross when the viewer realizes that the illegitimate son who is sought by the pseudo fortune-teller on behalf of an elderly woman who intends to make him her heir is, in fact, the kidnaping jeweler. It is not until the final reel that a gripping confrontation between the four characters takes place.
Released in the United States and then in Europe during the spring and summer of 1976, Family Plot was well received by the press, but the public’s response was less enthusiastic. In this all-American film in which, once again, the weakness of the villain was responsible for the weakness of the picture, Hitchcock was renewing the blend of humor and an intriguing kidnaping which had accounted for the success of several of his prewar British pictures.
There was unanimous agreement on the fine performance of Bruce Dern and even more on that of Barbara Harris, who displayed wonderful invention and drollery in the role of Blanche Tyler, the pseudo fortune-teller.
Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that Family Plot was not a success. As with Topaz, a short suspense segment made American audiences snicker, so it was cut from the prints distributed in the United States. I believe the European prints correspond more closely to the original editing.
Contrary to popular belief, artists who are known to be experts in the art of provoking and controlling the publicity around their reputation and their work are generally candid in their statements to the press. One might even say that the more facetious they sound, the more sincere they actually are. This was true of Salvador Dali when he stated that the two things he loved most were money and his wife.
When Family Plot opened in New York, I saw Hitchcock on American television, facing up to some thirty trade journalists. They all manifested friendship and respect, not because they liked his fifty-third film, but because a director who is over seventy years old and still working enjoys what might be defined as critical immunity.
At one point, a journalist raised his hand and asked, “When one is seventy-six years old, and one wakes up in the morning and one is Alfred Hitchcock, what docs it feel like?” The question wasn’t brilliant, but I loved Hitchcock’s response: “When the film is a success, one feels very good, but if it isn’t, one feels miserable!”
After Family Plot, Hitchcock felt miserable, and I was in Montpellier shooting The Man Who Loved Women when I received this letter from him:
. . . At the moment, I am completely desperate for a subject.
Now, as you realize, you are a free person to make whatever you want. I, on the other hand, can only make what is expected of me; that is, a thriller, or a suspense story, and that I find hard to do.
So many stories seem to be about the neo-Nazis, Palestinians fighting Israelis, and all that kind of thing. And, you see, none of these subjects has any human conflict.
How can you have a comedy Arab fighter? There is no such thing: nor can you have an amusing Israeli soldier. I describe these things because they come across my desk for consideration.
Sometimes, I think that the best comedy or drama could be made right here in my office with Peggy, Sue and Alma. The only difficulty about that idea would be that one of them would have to be killed off, which I would regret extremely.
—excerpt from a letter dated October 20, 1976
When I visited Hitchcock two months later, at Christmastime, in the Universal bungalow which had served for twenty years as the office of “Alfred Hitchcock Productions,” he was screening Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon. He stopped the screening and ushered me into his office, ordered two steaks, and we resumed our conversation in the same place and under the same conditions in which we had left off fourteen years before!
I asked him a question about Psycho that had always puzzled me. At the moment Janet Leigh is being stabbed in the shower, I wondered who had stepped into the bathroom with knife in hand. Was it Anthony Perkins wearing a wig? A woman? A stand-in? A dancer? Bearing in mind that the killer is filmed in backlighting, conveying the impression of a shadow show, any of these possibilities is plausible. Hitchcock informed me that the attacker was a young woman wearing a wig. He added that the scene was shot twice because, although the only lighting was placed behind the woman, the reverberation of the white bathroom walls was so strong that it revealed her face too clearly. That is why her face was blackened in the second take, so as to create the impression of a dark and unidentifiable silhouette on the screen.
We went on to discuss generalities about Hollywood, among them the rivalry between Paramount and Universal, who were simultaneously working on a remake of King Kong, since neither studio wanted to join the other in sharing the risks of this project. Like most genuinely powerful men, Hitchcock concealed his power, claiming that he was merely a producer-director who had to defer to the judgment of Universal’s front office. He never referred to the fact that he was one of the five principal stockholders of one of the largest companies in the world, as well as an intimate friend of Lew Wasserman, and therefore an adviser who had considerable influence.
A few years earlier, Airport had replenished Universal’s treasury. The studio had subsequently produced a sequel, and in the neighboring offices, during our talks, a third episode of the aerial adventure was under way. For this version, the screenplay called for a 747 jumbo jet to crash in the water, and apparently the studio approved of the scene. There was no telling whether Hitchcock thought it absurd or valid, but it was obvious that, as an engineer and a narrator, he was fascinated by the problem that the scene raised: “They’re going to have the plane crash in the sea with 450 passengers aboard,” he said, “but the cockpit will be absolutely watertight, and the oxygen supply will be sufficient for a few hours. Thus, they have to find a way to get the plane back in the air. The studio has assigned two additional young writers to figure out a solution . . . .” I pointed out to Hitchcock that he might have had to cope with similar problems if Selznick had maintained his project of having Hitchcock make The Titanic in 1939 instead of Rebecca.
Getting back to the current situation, Hitchcock informed me with real satisfaction that he had chosen the subject for his fifty-fourth picture, after having abandoned Unknown Man: No. 89, a novel by Elmore Leonard to which he had acquired the rights. He was about to go back to two old projects by adapting two books dealing with the same subject. The first was an investigative reportage titled The Springing of George Blake by Sean Bourke; the second was
a novel by Ronald Kirkbride, based on the same story and titled The Short Night.
It was a spy story between East and West in which a double agent, George Blake, was sentenced to forty-two years of imprisonment for spying on behalf of the USSR. Blake, an Englishman, escaped from the Wormwood Scrubs Prison in October 1966, with the complicity of some of his fellow inmates, but mostly with the help of members of the London underworld recruited by the KGB. Blake and his Irish cellmate, Sean Bourke, escaped from the jail and roamed around London until they were retrieved by the Soviet secret service, which shipped them to Moscow.
But Bourke, who was homesick, returned to Ireland the following year and wrote his adventure, which became the basis for the Kirkbride thriller. The British government demanded his extradition, but their demand was rejected. Meanwhile, Blake was travelling in Eastern Europe. According to the letters he wrote to his mother, it would seem that a sentimental problem was a determining factor in his behavior and his flight. He and his wife had quarreled, and she divorced him shortly after his escape, and remarried.
Hitchcock had been thinking about this story for a long time; as early as 1970 he had approached Catherine Deneuve and Walter Metthau to play the leads. Later on, he decided to locate the action in Finland, and contemplated casting Liv Ullmann and Sean Connery in the picture.