He planned to play up the love story in order to obtain the same balance between espionage and emotion as in Notorious, a picture to which he often referred before starting on a new script.
He intended to alter the story of The Short Night as follows: A British spy working for the Soviets escapes from a London prison. The U.S. Secret Service knows that he is planning to make his way to Russia after getting his wife and children, who live on the Finnish coast. An American agent is dispatched to the island and assigned to wait there for the escaped spy and to kill him. While he is waiting, the agent and the spy’s wife fall in love, but for obvious reasons he cannot tell her about his assignment. As in Notorious, the story illustrates the conflict between duty and love, but the last part, consisting of a manhunt on a train on the frontier between Russia and Finland, is more action-packed, and the film was to wind up with a happy ending.
The screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, who was responsible for North by Northwest and Family Plot, had already created several versions of the scenario, but Hitchcock was not satisfied with any of them.
There was increasing skepticism in Hitchcock’s entourage. Alma, who had suffered a first stroke in London at the end of the shooting of Frenzy, had become an invalid. She required nursing care around the clock. In the studio, no one could imagine how Hitchcock could abandon his wife for two months to go and shoot-the film in Finland. Besides, afflicted with arthritis, his own mobility was becoming increasingly difficult. As the script was written, it seemed highly unlikely that the Finnish part could be shot by a second crew, with Hitchcock directing the interior scenes in the Universal studios. In fact, before shooting Frenzy, Hitchcock had travelled to Finland to photograph the locations in which he wanted to shoot.
Toward the end of 1978, he made two decisions to confirm the prospect of an imminent shooting: He dispatched Norman Lloyd, one of his closest collaborators for thirty-five years, on another location tour in Finland and, in an attempt to indicate that the delay was due to Ernest Lehman, he hired a young writer named David Freeman to work out a new version of the screenplay.
I did not see Hitchcock in 1978. That is why the American Film Institute’s tribute to him on March 7, 1979, under the glorious and funereal title of “Life Achievement Award,” left me and everyone who attended it with a gloomy and gruesome memory, even though CBS, through a series of editing tricks, managed to offer a face-saving version of the ceremony on American television.
Although Ingrid Bergman, who presided over the ceremony, was afflicted with cancer and aware of her own fate, she was deeply disturbed by the obvious deterioration of Hitchcock and his wife. Backstage she whispered, “Why do they always organize this kind of ceremony when it’s too late?” Since that was the reason for my presence there, I too was forced to deliver a cheerful tribute: “In America, you call this man Hitch. In France, we call him Monsieur Hitchcock . . . .” But my heart wasn’t in it. In front of an all-star Hollywood audience which eulogized them with anecdotes, film excerpts, and toasts, Alfred and Alma Hitchcock appeared to be present, but their souls were missing; they were hardly more alive than Anthony Perkins’ stuffed mother in the cellar of the gothic house.
Two weeks later, resigned to the fact that he would never shoot another film, Hitchcock closed his office, dismissed his staff, and went home. The Queen of England bestowed the title of Sir Alfred upon him, thereby settling an old secret rivalry with another London-born genius, Charlie Chaplin. All that was left to Sir Alfred was to await death, a few forbidden vodkas hastening its advent. It came on April 29, 1980.
Whenever I want to forget Hitchcock in his declining years, I think back to a gala homage sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York on April 29, 1974, six years before his death. It was a truly stimulating event.
For some three hours, we were shown a hundred film excerpts displaying his virtuosity and grouped into categories like “The Screen Cameos” (Hitchcock’s appearances in his movies), “The Chase” (pursuit sequences), “The Bad Guys” (killings and love scenes), plus two brilliant sequences: the clash of the cymbals in the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and the plane attack on Cary Grant in North by Northwest, which I had been asked to present. Each series of excerpts was introduced with a short speech by the most beautiful Hitchcockian actresses—Grace Kelly, Joan Fontaine, Teresa Wright, Janet Leigh—and a few friends.
I knew all of these movies by heart, but upon seeing the excerpts isolated from their contexts, I was struck by the sincerity and the savagery of Hitchcock’s work. It was impossible not to see that the love scenes were filmed like murder scenes, and the murder scenes like love scenes.
I knew his work; in fact I thought I knew it very well. Yet that evening I was awed by what I saw on the screen: splashes of color, fireworks, ejaculations, sighs, death rattles, screams, blood, tears, twisted wrists. It occurred to me that in Hitchcock’s cinema, which is definitely more sexual than sensual, to make love and to die are one and the same.
At the end of the evening, in the midst of applause, Hitchcock was supposed to make a short speech from the stage. To everyone’s surprise, the lights went out and Hitchcock appeared . . . but on the screen! A few days earlier, he had filmed his final thanks in front of a curtain at the Universal studios.
When the lights went up again, a spot was, focused on the loge where Hitchcock and Alma were seated. With the audience urging him to say a few words, he uttered a simple sentence: “As you have seen on the screen, scissors are the best way.” It was one of those double en-tendres that Hitchcock enjoyed using, this time referring to the scene where Grace Kelly stabs the blackmailer with a pair of scissors in Dial M for Murder, but also to the film editor’s skillful use of scissors in the cutting room.
Today, Hitchcock’s work has inspired many disciples, and this is only natural, since he is a master. As always, however, one imitates only that which is imitable: the choice of material, and perhaps even the treatment of the material, but not the spirit with which it is impregnated.
Many people merely admire Hitchcock’s science and his skill, overlooking the quality which, with the passage of time, impresses me much more—namely his deep emotivity.
One cannot say Hitchcock was an underrated or misunderstood artist, since he was a public moviemaker, and a popular one at that. At the risk of sounding paradoxical, I would add to Hitchcock’s merits that of having been a commercial artist. True, it is not difficult to win the approval of wide audiences when one laughs at the same things they do, when one is sensitive to the same aspects of life and moved by the same dramas. This complicity between certain creators and their audience has resulted in successful careers. In my opinion, Hitchcock does not belong to this category, since he was a singular man, not only by virtue of his physique, but also by virtue of his spirit, his morality, and his obsessions. Unlike Chaplin, Ford, Rossellini, or Hawks, he was a neurotic, and it could not have been easy for him to impose his neurosis upon the whole world.
When, as an adolescent, he realized that his physique isolated him from others, Hitchcock withdrew from the world to view it with tremendous severity. More than once in the course of our conversations he used the expression “When the heavy doors of the studio closed behind me . . . ,” thus indicating that he embraced cinema as one embraces a religion.
It is obviously Hitchcock expressing himself in Shadow of a Doubt when Joseph Cotten says “The world is a pigsty . . . .” And in Notorious, we recognize Hitchcock when Claude Rains timidly goes into his mother’s room in the middle of the night to confess, “Mother, I married an American spy,” as if he was a guilty little boy. In I Confess, when the sexton tells his wife—whose name is Alma and who is presented as an angel—“We are strangers who have found work in this country. We must not attract attention . . . ,” we again recognize Hitchcock speaking.
Finally, in Marnie, the last picture to reveal Hitchcock’s deepest emotions, can there be any doubt that Sean Connery, in trying to control, dominate, a
nd possess Tippi Hedren by investigating her past, finding her a job, and giving her money, is expressing Hitchcock’s own feelings as a frustrated Pygmalion?
In other words, I am less interested in Hitchcock’s ritual personal appearances in each of his films than in those passages where I recognize his personal emotions, and the fleeting release of his controlled violence. I believe that all the interesting film-makers—those who were referred to as “auteurs” by the Cahiers du Cinéma in 1955, before the term was distorted—concealed themselves behind various characters in their movies. Alfred Hitchcock achieved a real tour de force in inducing the public to identify with the attractive leading man, whereas Hitchcock himself almost always identified with the supporting role—the man who is cuckolded and disappointed, the killer or a monster, the man rejected by others, the man who has no right to love, the man who looks on without being able to participate.
André Bazin was not an unconditional admirer of Hitchcock, but I am grateful to him for using the key word equilibrium in connection with Hitchcock. The whole world is familiar with Hitchcock’s silhouette; it is the silhouette of a man who has always lived in fear of losing his balance. In Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to meet an old Jesuit priest, Professor Hugh Gray, before his death. Hugh Gray was the first translator of André Bazin in the United States, as well as a fellow student of Hitchcock’s at Saint Ignatius College of London near the turn of the century. He had vivid memories of Hitchcock as a very plump little schoolboy. In the schoolyard he always stood alone, leaning against a wall, with his hands already folded across his stomach and an expression of disdain on his face, as he watched his schoolmates playing ball.
It is obvious that Hitchcock organized his life in such a way that no one would allow himself the familiar gesture of patting him on the back.
David O. Selznick referred to this detachment when he wrote his wife in 1938, “I finally met Hitchcock. He seems a nice person, but he is hardly the kind of man you would want along on a camping trip.”
This is why the Hitchcockian image par excellence is that of an innocent man who is mistaken for another man who is being hunted—a man who finds himself falling from a roof, hanging onto a drainpipe that is about to give way.
This man who was impelled by fear to relate the most terrifying stories; this man who was a virgin when he married at the age of twenty-five and who never had any woman except for his wife; this man was indeed the only one who was able to portray murder and adultery as scandals, the only man who knew how to do so—in fact, the only man who had the right to do so.
Hitchcock was never concerned to know exactly what his pictures were saying—and even less to let others know it—but no other film-maker could describe so clearly, in response to the questions that were put to him by Helen Scott and myself, the course he followed in constructing the stories he selected and, in the course of the description, to reveal himself.
When cinema was invented, it was initially used to record life, like an extension of photography. It became an art when it moved away from the documentary. It was at this point that it was acknowledged as no longer a means of mirroring life, but a medium by which to intensify it. The film-makers of the silent era invented everything, and those who were not able to invent were failures, Alfred Hitchcock often regretted the setback that occurred with the advent of talking pictures and the hiring of stage directors who were not concerned with visualizing stories, but who were content to record them on film.
Hitchcock belonged to a different family, the family of Chaplin, Stroheim, Lubitsch. Like them, he did not merely practice an art, but undertook to delve into its potential, and to work out its rules, rules more demanding than those pertaining to the writing of a novel.
Hitchcock not only intensified life; he intensified cinema.
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT, 1983
Alfred Hitchcock was born in London on August 13, 1899. He studied at Saint Ignatius College, London. In 1920 he joined Famous players-Lasky, an American company that had opened an English studio at Islington. For two years he wrote and designed the subtitles for numerous silent “art” films: Hugh Ford’s The Call of Youth and The Great Day (1921), Donald Crisps The Princess of New York and Tell Your Children (1921), and George Fitzmaurice’s Three Live Ghosts (1922).
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I. In 1961, when Rouben Mamoulian was fired from the shooting of Cleopatra, Walter Wanger and Darryl F. Zanuck had called upon Hitchcock “as the only director capable of saving the production.” Hitchcock refused and went on to shoot The Birds. Joseph L. Mankiewicz took over the shooting of Cleopatra and went down in the ensuing shipwreck.
II. William Devane was a last-minute choice. Before casting him in the role of the villain, the director had hired Roy Thinnes, whom he fired after two days of shooting. This was the first time this had happened in Hitchcock’s career. Simultaneously, Luis Bunuel did the same thing on his shooting of That Obscure Object of Desire. There was a difference of only six months in the ages of I litchcock and Bunuel. Moral: At the age of 75, a director no longer has the patience to deal with a difficult actor who is going to be a pain in the neck.
THE FILMS OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK
(The titles in boldface are those of films directed by Alfred Hitchcock.)
1922
NUMBER THIRTEEN (unfinished) Production: Wardour & F., 1922. Producer: Alfred Hitchcock. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Director of Photography: Rosenthal. Studio: Islington. Principal Actors: Clare Greet, Ernest Thesiger.
ALWAYS TELL YOUR WIFE
After the director fell ill, the film was finished by Alfred Hitchcock and the producer, Seymour Hicks. Famous Players-Lasky stopped production at Islington. Alfred Hitchcock and a small crew were kept on by the studio. When Michael Balcon founded a new independent company with Victor Saville and John Freedman and began to shoot his first film at Islington, A. Hitchcock, hired as Assistant Director, also filled other positions.
WOMAN TO WOMAN
Production: Michael Balcon, Victor Saville, John Freedman, 1922-1923. Producer: Michael Balcon. Director: Graham Cutts. Scenario: Graham Cutts and Alfred Hitchcock, from the play by Michael Morton. Director of Photography: Claude L. McDonnell. Sets: A. Hitchcock. Assistant Director: A. Hitchcock. Editor: Alma Reville. Studio: Islington. Distributors: Wardour & F., 1923, 7 B; France, Gaumont, 1924; U.S.A., Selznick, 1924. Principal Actors: Betty Compson (Daloryse); Clive Brook (David Compos and Davis Anson-Pond) and Josephine Earle, Marie Ault, M. Peter.
1923
THE WHITE SHADOW
Production: Michael Balcon, Victor Saville, John Freedman, 1923, G.B. Producer: Michael Balcon. Director: Graham Cutts. Scenario: Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Morton. Director of Photography: Claude L. McDonnell. Sets: A. Hitchcock. Editing: A. Hitchcock. Studio: Islington. Distributors: Wardour & F., 1923, 6 B.; U.S.A., Selznick, 1924. Principal Actors: Betty Compson, Clive Brook, Henry Victor, Daisy Campbell, Olaf Hitton.
1924
THE PASSIONATE ADVENTURE
Production: Michael Balcon, Gainsborough, 1922 1923, G.B. Director: Graham Cutts. Scenario: Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Morton. Director of Photography: Claude McDonnell. Sets: A. Hitchcock. Assistant Director: A. Hitchcock. Studio: Islington. Distributors: Gaumont, 1923; France. Excella Films (by agreement with A. C. and R. C. Bromhead), 1928; U.S.A., Selznick, 1924. Principal Actors: Alice Joyce, Clive Brook, Lilian Hall-Davies, Marjorie Daw, Victor McLaglen, Mary Brough, John Hamilton, J. R. Tozer.
1925
THE BLACKGUARD
Production: Gainsborough, Michael Balcon, 1925, G.B. Associate Producer: Erich Pommer. Director: Graham Cutts. Scenario: A. Hitchcock, from a novel by Raymond Paton. Sets: A. Hitchcock. Assistant Director: A. Hitchcock. Studio: U.F.A. at Neubabelsberg (Berlin). Distributor: Wardour & F., 1925, 6,016 feet. Principal Actors: Walter Rilla (the blackguard), Jane Novak, Bernard Goetzke, Frank Stanmore.
THE PRUDE’S FALL
Production: Michael Balcon, Victor Saville, John Freedman, 1925, G.B. Producer: Mic
hael Balcon. Director: Graham Cutts. Scenario: Alfred Hitchcock. Assistant Director: A. Hitchcock. Sets: A. Hitchcock. Distributor: Wardour & F. Studio: Islington. Principal Actress: Betty Compson.
THE PLEASURE GARDEN
Production: Michael Balcon (Gainsborough), Erich Pommer (Emelka—G.B.A. 1925). Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Scenario: Eliot Stannard, from the novel by Oliver Sandys. Director of Photography: Baron Vintigmilia. Assistant Director and script-girl: Alma Reville. Studio: Emelka at Munich. Distributors: Wardour & F., 1925, 6,458 feet; U.S.A., Aymon Independent, 1926. Principal Actors: Virginia Valli (Patsy Brand, the dancer), Carmelita Geraghty (Jill Cheyne), Miles Mander (Levett), John Stuart (Hugh Fielding), Frederic K. Martini, Florence Helminger, George Snell, C. Falkenburg.
1926
THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE (U.S.A.: FearO’ God) Production: Gainsborough, Emelka, 1926. Producer: Michael Balcon. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Scenario: Eliot Stannard. Director of Photography: Baron Vintigmilia. Studio: Emelka at Munich. Location Work: Austrian Tyrol. Distributors: Wardour & F., 1926, 6,000 feet; U.S.A., Artlee Indep. Dist., 1926. Principal Actors: Bernard Goetzke (Pettigrew), Nita Naldi (Beatrice, the governess), Malcolm Keen (Fear O’God), John Hamilton (Edward Pettigrew).
THE LODGER (A Story of the London Fog)
Production: Gainsborough, Michael Balcon, 1926. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Scenario: Alfred Hitchcock and Eliot Stannard, from the novel by Mrs. Bclloc-Lowndes. Director of Photography: Baron Vintigmilia. Sets: C. Wilfred Arnold and Bertram Evans. Editing and subtitles: Ivor Montagu. Assistant Director: Alma Reville. Studio: Islington. Distributor: Wardour & F., 1926, 6 reels, 7,685 feet. Principal Actors: Ivor Novello (the lodger), June (Daisy Jackson), Marie Ault (Mrs. Jackson, her mother), Arthur Chesney (Mr. Jackson), Malcolm Keen (Joe Betts, the policeman, Daisy’s fiancé).