Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  According to Keith Waterhouse, Newman once asked Hitchcock how he should be relating to Andrews in one scene where he receives a suspect parcel from her. “Well, Mr. Newman, I’ll tell you exactly what I have in mind here. Miss Andrews will come down the staircase with the package, do you see, when you, if you will be so good, will glance just a little to the right of camera to take in her arrival; whereupon my audience will say, ‘Hello, what’s this fellow looking at?’ And then I’ll cut away, do you see, and show them what you are looking at.” Waterhouse added that “I have heard no better or more concise an analysis of what film-making is all about either before or since.”

  Hitchcock had wanted something different in the way of music for Torn Curtain. He cabled Bernard Herrmann with the message that “this audience is very different to the one to which we used to cater. It is young, vigorous and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognised by almost all the European film-makers where they have sought to introduce a beat and rhythm that is more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience.” Instead Herrmann produced a score that was noticeable for its violins, flutes and strings. One of the horn players remembered Hitchcock saying, “What is this? It is not what I want.” There seems to have been a confrontation between the two men in the recording studio, where Herrmann asked him, “What do you want with me? I don’t write pop music.” Herrmann left in the early months of 1966, and never worked with Hitchcock again.

  Torn Curtain is in fact a highly entertaining thriller with no pretensions to being anything else, a well-made narrative with constant attention to the suspense of time and circumstance. The most notorious scene is one in which the American professor and his accomplice are obliged to murder their East German minder, named, perhaps coincidentally, Hermann Gromek. It is a long and painful process, involving a knife and a shovel and a gas oven, and was designed by Hitchcock to prove how difficult it can be to kill a man. “In my films,” he said, “killing does not happen casually.” But the most effective scenes are those in which the raw dramatic powers of anticipation and anxiety are excited, leaving the audience in a state of perpetual tension. This was the one area of cinema in which Hitchcock was still the absolute master.

  Yet the public, and the critics, already accustomed to the sensationalism and special effects exploited by “James Bond” films, did not see it that way. It was considered to be old-fashioned and simplistic; compared with such films as From Russia with Love and Thunderball, it seemed to the critic of the New York Times that it “looks no more novel or sensational than grandma’s old knitted shawl.” Its reception was for Hitchcock a severe disappointment; it seemed that he had lost his spark, that he was becoming increasingly out of touch with contemporary cinema.

  . . .

  Through the later months of 1966, after the manifest failure of Torn Curtain, he seemed to withdraw into the seclusion of Bellagio Road with Alma at his side. “I dread being alone,” he said. “Alma knows that, too.” They spent Christmas at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. A friend, Whitfield Cook, remarked that “I’ll never forget Alma saying that ‘Hitch insists on getting into ski pants, which takes him about an hour, and then he sits on the porch smoking the whole time!’ ” That was what he liked to do on holiday—sit and watch.

  He was preparing the ground. He had for a long time been interested in the careers of British killers, with John Christie, John George Haigh and Hawley Harvey Crippen near the top of his list (Crippen had actually been born in Michigan, but his reign of terror in London may grant him honorary British citizenship). Hitchcock had also become interested in Neville Heath who had brutally killed two women in 1946. This was the man for Hitchcock, and by the end of the year he was planning a film based upon a serial killer who had necrophiliac leanings. After the expensive disaster of Torn Curtain he decided that the film would be stripped down to its essentials, in the style of The Wrong Man. He asked Benn Levy to become the scriptwriter; significantly Levy had written some of the script for Blackmail, the first British talkie made by Hitchcock in 1929. The director was returning to his London roots.

  Levy flew to Hollywood in February 1967, and worked for the next two months on the film Hitchcock was inclined to call Kaleidoscope Frenzy. It concerned a psychotic killer, homosexual and deformed, who tried to lure into his net a female police officer. When the treatment had reached a conclusive phase Hitchcock handed the material to Howard Fast, the American novelist perhaps best known for Spartacus. “My God, Howard!” he said, “I’ve just seen Antonioni’s Blow-Up. These Italian directors are a century ahead of me in terms of technique! What have I been doing all this time!” It was a rare admission that he had indeed allowed the modern cinema to pass him by. Hitchcock decided to borrow some of the techniques of the Italian directors for his new film, including a hand-held camera and natural light. He was also ready for scenes of male and female nudity, with which he had only flirted in Psycho. After the debacle with Newman and Andrews, he was happy to use unknown actors. He wrote to Truffaut in April 1967 that “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.”

  Fast recalled that “Hitchcock gave me a very free hand. He seemed mostly interested in working out elaborate camera movements.” But it was all for nothing. The executives at Universal were horrified by the theme and by the central character; they rejected the script. Fast recalled that “they had belittled Hitchcock’s attempt to do precisely what they had been urging him to do—to attempt something different, to catch up with the swiftly moving times.” It has been said that he broke down in tears at the studio’s response. It is possible. There was always a small sphere of hysteria in the director’s psyche.

  . . .

  So what on earth was he supposed to do? He was too valuable a property to waste. His international fame, and his television popularity, would always entice an audience. In the summer of 1968 Universal came up with a film for which they had purchased the rights, an international thriller entitled Topaz; his doubts were compounded by his uneasy relationship with its author, Leon Uris, who seemed quite impervious to all of Hitchcock’s blandishments, bad jokes and brandy. They were both possessed of too large an ego to acquiesce to each other’s personality. Uris had been hired to write the screenplay but he recalled that Hitchcock was trying to dominate him, consigning him to the status of an employee. It was not going to work.

  The director turned instead to Samuel Taylor with whom he had worked on Vertigo, and also brought in old colleagues such as Henry Bumstead, the production designer, and Edith Head, costume designer. He would need all the help he could get. He had wasted too much time on the Uris script, and the film was scheduled to commence. “I’m in bad trouble, Sam,” he told Taylor. “I’ve got a script I just can’t shoot.” So why not delay it? “I have to go with it now. It’s in production.” Taylor, therefore, was obliged to write fast.

  The story was not uninteresting. It concerned an agent for the French secret services who, through certain contacts in Cuba, learns that the Soviet Union is sending missiles to Cuba. In deference to the international scope of the film, Hitchcock decided to hire relatively unknown foreign actors to play the principal parts. This was a mistake. Significant episodes of Topaz were to be filmed in Paris and Copenhagen. This was expensive and unnecessary.

  The filming did not go well. Henry Bumstead said in 2004 that “Topaz was a nightmare. I got high blood pressure on that picture. I’m still taking pills for it…There was just no time for prep [preparation], and I’ll tell you, prep is the most important time on a picture.”

  Hitchcock did not have any natural rapport with his cast. The French, Danish and German actors involved were not prepared for his dark humour and sexual innuendo, and his cockney badinage eluded them. Samuel Taylor recalled that “one of the tragedies of Topaz was
that Hitchcock was trying to make something as if he had Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in it.” Another actor on the set, John Forsythe, said that “He was no longer the great brain that sat in the chair watching…He would go away for fifteen or twenty minutes, and lie down if he could, and it was sad to see.” There was at least one occasion when he fell asleep during a long take, and no one was brave enough to wake him. Eventually he opened his eyes and said, “Well, how was it?” And then he laughed. He had, perhaps, finally lost interest in the proceedings. There were times when in the middle of filming in the studio he would decide to take his composer, Maurice Jarre, out to lunch at Chasen’s. When asked if he wanted to stay for the rest of the scene he replied, “No, the actors are ready; the cameramen are ready. If not, I’ll cut it.”

  His detachment or lack of interest manifested itself in the three different endings he filmed, on the understanding that Universal would pick the one they most liked. The most anodyne was chosen. “I could have fought the decision,” he said later, “but it didn’t seem worthwhile.” When not downright bored, he seems to have been anxious and dispirited throughout the proceedings. He agreed with critics and audiences alike that it had been a disaster. “Topaz,” he said, “was a most unhappy picture to make.” Pauline Kael in The New Yorker concluded that “the embarrassment of Topaz is that Hitchcock is lazy and out of touch.”

  . . .

  His daughter, in her memoir of Alma, stated “those were trying times for Daddy and the only thing that kept him balanced were Mama and his family.” He was, as he might have put it in the English phrase, “ticking over.” He read endlessly—“reading properties,” as he put it—in case inspiration struck; he watched every new film he could locate and had to endure the visits of studio executives who reminded him that his next project, if it should come, would have to be on a much smaller scale than the doomed Topaz. He also visited the local theatres and made trips to the racetrack. He vacated his second home in Santa Cruz, and it was eventually sold. The journeys to the estate had become too tiring.

  Yet there was no sense of an ending. “I am looking for a new film project,” he wrote to Truffaut, “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.” Yet one project, suggested to him towards the end of the year, seemed to fulfil all of his requirements.

  11

  BACK TO BASICS

  He was sent or given a novel, Arthur La Bern’s Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, that might have been written for him. It concerns a psychotic killer, sexually impotent, who preys upon women in central London; the wrong man is arrested, and he flees from prison to take revenge upon the real killer. Three years after Kaleidoscope Frenzy had been rejected by the studio, a similar story of serial killing and sexual innuendo was now accepted. On this occasion the studio acceded to his wishes in the knowledge that it could be made cheaply and quickly while trading on Hitchcock’s name. It would be filmed in London, thus distancing the murderous plot for American audiences, and Hitchcock would be given a budget of less than $3 million. He seemed to have jettisoned his original plans for an “experimental” film, complete with hand-held cameras and natural lighting, in favour of what might be called conventional Technicolor.

  Hitchcock moved quickly. He asked Anthony Shaffer, who was then enjoying great success with Sleuth on the English and American stages, to be his scriptwriter. He had telephoned the writer on New Year’s Eve 1970, and Shaffer believed at first that it was a practical joke perpetrated by one of his friends. But by the middle of January he was having lunch in New York with the director; the subject was a film called Frenzy. Hitchcock was about to travel to Paris to be made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, but he took the opportunity of returning to London in order to visit possible locations with Shaffer. Hitchcock wanted what were essentially the settings of the city with which he had been familiar as a boy, most notably Covent Garden which his father had known well. The dark Thames would flow through the film, and there was a role for Wormwood Scrubs prison in East Acton. The public houses would be of the old school. He objected to more modern pubs on the grounds that “they look wrong. There’s nothing like dark wood in a good pub.”

  The original novel had been located in London during the Second World War but Hitchcock wanted a contemporary setting. Yet in the end there was hardly any difference. Hitchcock’s version of the new city was thoroughly old-fashioned, as if it had stopped growing after he had left it, so that the scenes and dialogue have a somewhat dated flavour. But that did not affect his vision, which was as powerful as ever.

  Shaffer arrived in California on 21 January 1971, and by late February he and Hitchcock had fashioned a treatment of fifty-five pages. They worked well together, fortified by steak and salad at lunchtime as well as a recourse to cocktails at four. Shaffer once gently objected to the monotonous diet, and on the next day a fifteen-course meal arrived for him. Shaffer described his director as “lugubrious,” but that never impaired their professional relationship. On 27 February Shaffer returned to New York where he worked on the first draft of the completed script.

  It was not a pretty story. The hero or anti-hero, Richard Blaney, falsely accused of being a serial killer, is querulous and unsympathetic. The real psychopath, Bob Rusk, is a genial fruiterer at Covent Garden who lives with his mother in a flat off the market. The naked body of a woman is seen floating down the Thames; another murder scene is preceded by a long and vicious rape that Hitchcock insisted on filming in detail. When Rusk loses his tie pin, and realises that it had been clutched in extremis by another victim, he is forced to rummage through a consignment of potatoes in which he has dumped her body. Food, sex and violence—the holy trinity of Hitchcock’s imagination—culminate in a scene where Rusk, covered in potato dust, is eventually forced to break the fingers of his victim in order to recover the pin.

  By the beginning of April Shaffer had completed the first draft of the screenplay, which was scrutinised by both Hitchcocks. It was now 160 pages long, and met with their broad approval. It was time to move the office to London, where Hitchcock’s staff booked a suite at Claridge’s from the middle of May to the end of September. He was received at Pinewood Studios, where some of the film was to be shot, as a king from over the water. Even though he was now nominally an American, he had in truth become one of the most famous Englishmen of the age.

  He began the rigorous business of casting. He had already offered the part of the serial killer to Michael Caine, who turned it down on the grounds that the part was “really loathsome, and I did not want to be associated with it.” Hitchcock never spoke to him again, even when by coincidence they dined in the same Hollywood restaurant. His other choices were less recalcitrant. Alec McCowen, who was cast as the principal police officer, and Vivien Merchant, who played his wife, were better known as stage actors; but they seemed to relish the opportunity of working with Hitchcock.

  Only one member of the cast, Jon Finch, playing the innocent accused, proved troubling. He gave an interview before filming in which he suggested that Shaffer’s script was a little out of date. But that is how Hitchcock had wanted it. Finch also proffered suggestions of his own about the dialogue. This was not what Hitchcock wanted. His cameraman, Gilbert Taylor, recalled that the director “was very angry, and he was thinking about recasting.” It is fortunate that he kept the actor, who gave a thoroughly convincing portrait of an unsettled and unhappy man. It may have been Hitchcock himself who managed to unsettle him, of course, once more eliciting a convincing portrait from one of his cast through provocation and bullying.

  At the beginning of June Alma suffered a st
roke; it was fortunate that Hitchcock’s personal physician was travelling with them, and was able to begin treating her immediately. She did not want to be taken to an English hospital, and so was given continual care at the hotel. One of her arms was paralysed, and she had difficulty in walking. The effect on Hitchcock was acute. He was as disturbed and as anxious as he had been thirteen years before when Alma had been diagnosed with cancer, and the film was effectively suspended until she began to recover; any necessary meetings were held at the hotel, so that he could remain with her. Eventually she was well enough to fly back to California for further treatment. It may have been fortunate that she was staying at Claridge’s at the time and she told the associate producer, Bill Hill, “Well if I’m going to have a stroke, I can’t imagine a better place to have it.”

  Relieved of his immediate alarm Hitchcock began filming at the end of July. Although he was still staying at Claridge’s he set up his office in the Strand Palace Hotel, a hundred yards from Covent Garden market. He knew the setting well enough from his childhood, and someone remarked that Hitchcock’s father had once been a fruiterer. “No,” he replied, “my father was not a costermonger here. He was a wholesale cabbage buyer. He would buy acres of cabbages. Acres.” In the eventual trailer for the film Hitchcock said, “This is the famous London wholesale fruit and vegetable market, Covent Garden. Here you may buy the fruits of evils and the horrors of vegetables.”