The filming proceeded well, despite the fact that there had been early problems. On the Friday before filming started Hitchcock fell badly in his hotel suite and was confined to bed for the weekend, but he was ready by early Monday morning. On this first day of filming Bill Hill recalled that “I was driving into London very early and on the radio I heard someone saying ‘If you are in London today or going to London today, will you please avoid Covent Garden because Alfred Hitchcock is starting his new movie there today.’ So naturally, when we got there, we couldn’t move.” Hill found Hitchcock sitting in his limousine, a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, apparently unperturbed by the crowds around him. Hill persuaded him to get out of the car and walk towards the camera already set up for him; the people took their photographs, and then left the area. “There you are,” Hill told them, “that’s it.” Filming in the market then commenced. Later in the day a union official approached Hitchcock’s staff and told them that the last take could not be completed because it was approaching six in the evening. Hitchcock protested, saying that he had understood he had been given permission to finish any take he had begun, and that in any case the interruption was bad for the actors. He threatened to take the entire film to Hollywood, thus creating a very bad advertisement for the British film industry. The union official relented, and he was not troubled again.
Bill Hill recalled that after these early stumbles, “everything went very, very smoothly. Everybody had a great respect for him and he was very pleasant with a great sense of humour…We all learned very early that you don’t change anything he says. If that’s what he wants, that’s what he is going to get.” Such was the regard for him that he was given permission to film inside Criminal Court Number One at the Old Bailey, where Blaney is wrongly convicted. There are photographs of him sitting, plump and imperturbable, in his chair labelled “Mr. Hitchcock.” There was one ominous notation on the call sheet for 24 September, with a reference to “Mr. Finch late and shooting held up from 9:45 to 10:50.” It has been said that Hitchcock made Finch apologise to each member of the cast, but it is more likely that Finch did so voluntarily.
The filming on the set was as tight and as disciplined as the work on location. He wrote to one relative, eager to see him, that “life is just a matter of going from the hotel to the studio and back to the hotel during the week, and weekends are spent resting as much as possible to be ready for the week ahead.” He had now reached his seventy-second year. He had spent thirteen weeks in London, including sixty-three shooting days that began at six in the morning and finished in the early evening. There were also six nights of filming which must have taxed his strength. According to some members of the cast and crew he still had a tendency to doze after a large lunch, waking up suddenly to ask his assistant director, Colin Brewer, “How was it for you, old bean?” When Brewer replied that it was fine, he would say, “OK, print it.” On one occasion Hitchcock was asked on waking whether he would like to repeat the scene. “Yes—and tell them to do it louder.” His favourite tipple was vodka and orange, which he sipped from a flask.
Finch recalled that “I don’t think he was that interested in what the actors were doing, but he was always aware of the camera, and he knew when someone was being shot too short or too long. When passers-by at Covent Garden asked me who the star of the film was, I told them ‘Alfred Hitchcock.’ ” Anna Massey, playing Blaney’s girlfriend, remembered that at the beginning of production “he had immense creative energy and a real mental zest…but then he got slow physically.”
The rape scene, in which the killer strangles and violates his victim at the same time, was the most gruelling for the actors. It took three days to film, and Hitchcock demanded the utmost fidelity to the horror of the matter. Barry Foster, who played the part of the psychopathic killer, recalled that “it was a very unsavoury business, and in the rape-strangling scene we were all trying to keep a firm grip on our stomachs.” In that scene Foster whispers “Lovely! Lovely!” as the victim begins to pray. The audience finally see her face in death, her eyes protruding, her tongue sticking out of her mouth, and her neck red. It was the sequence Hitchcock had been waiting to film for some years, and had been rehearsing for it ever since The Lodger. His personal assistant, Peggy Robertson, wrote to a colleague in Hollywood that “we’ve finished the rape and murder of Brenda sequence, and it is absolutely terrifying! I’ve seen the rushes three times now and am still absolutely petrified.” This was Grand Guignol in the Hitchcock style. He described it as the one “meaty” episode in the film. In a scene in a public house two businessmen have a conversation about the serial killer. “He rapes them first, you know.” “Nice to know every cloud has a silver lining.”
At the end of October 1971, Hitchcock returned to America after completing all of the principal photography. He could now also confer with an almost completely recovered Alma on the shaping of the film, and the post-production process went smoothly enough. There was, however, a problem with the music. He had publicly disagreed with Bernard Herrmann on Topaz, and now was disappointed with Henry Mancini’s work on Frenzy. It did not reflect the pop music that Hitchcock had in mind—this was, after all, still the era known as “swinging London”—and so the director hired the British composer Ron Goodwin instead. At their first meeting Hitchcock opened a box and brought out an exact model of his head. It was to be used for promotional purposes. “What do you think of that?” he asked the baffled composer. “Very nice,” Goodwin replied. It was the right answer. But what else could he have said?
In the middle of December the Hitchcocks flew to Marrakech for a vacation in the sun, but they returned at the beginning of the new year for more work on post-production. He then prepared himself for the rigours of promotion. Frenzy was given its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May where, as François Truffaut recalled, Hitchcock looked “aged, tired, and tense” and seemed to be “very much like a young man about to take a school examination.” But Hitchcock need not have worried. He was given a standing ovation at the end of the screening and, as Truffaut recalled, a week later he looked “fifteen years younger.” When he returned to the United States he was engaged in a relentless sequence of interviews, lunches and ceremonies through the month of June. He had never been so much in demand.
The reaction to the finished film was overwhelmingly favourable, and gave Hitchcock his greatest success since Psycho. It seems that the director had recovered his touch for suspense and for the macabre after the failures of Torn Curtain and Topaz. The headline above the review in the New York Times announced “Hitchcock in dazzling form,” an appreciation which became in Time magazine “Hitchcock is still the master.” The author of the original novel, Arthur La Bern, was not so impressed. He sent a letter to The Times of London in which he concluded that “the result on the screen is appalling. The dialogue is a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce, Dixon of Dock Green and that almost forgotten No Hiding Place. I would like to ask Mr. Hitchcock and Mr. Shaffer what happened between book and script to the authentic London characters I created.” They had simply passed through the medium of Hitchcock’s imagination.
The film itself has not dated. It is too intensely realised to age. An innocent man is on the run, and a killer is on the loose in a seedy and dilapidated London. This is the world of Hitchcock, with all the patterns and parallels it produces. He has gone further in realisation than he had ever done before, but his instincts and preoccupations are the same as those with which he started in the silent cinema. He himself said of the film in an interview that “it’s true all the way through—true in its setting, true in its characters, and true in its humour.”
. . .
He may have come full circle with his return to London but he had no thought of retirement. “If I can still put as much vitality into a movie as I’ve put into Frenzy,” he said, “what’s the point of retiring? I used to be called the ‘boy director’ and I still am.” Now seventy-three, though, he was necessarily slower than before; he was
eating and drinking more than the doctors would recommend, and his weight was becoming an increasing burden.
By the autumn of 1973 he had grown tired of inactivity. “I’m going to look around,” he told another interviewer. “See about some new forms of murder.” In a similar vein he said that “I have no hobbies, so I will just have to see where the next body will turn up.” That body turned up in his next film, Family Plot. He had come upon a novel, Victor Canning’s The Rainbird Pattern, that held distinct possibilities. It concerned a medium, Madame Blanche, and her boyfriend who have agreed to find the nephew of a wealthy spinster; inadvertently they disturb the plans of a kidnapper and his partner. When Hitchcock outlined the story to colleagues they were bewildered; it seemed to be going in several directions at once. But Hitchcock found in it the elements of a game, or a black comedy, in which the threads would finally be tied in a satisfying knot. The book was set in rural England, but he moved the story to California.
Courtesy of NBCU Photo Bank
Hitchcock with Alma, celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday, 1974.
He brought in his experienced scriptwriter, Ernest Lehman, who at once noted that “he had slowed down considerably. He had none of his former stamina, and I found that I had far less inclination, in the beginning of our story conferences, to do creative battle with this legendary and physically weakened man.”
By spring 1974 Lehman had prepared a script, and within a week the director had sent it back with multiple queries and emendations. Hitchcock also outlined the visual details of the opening scene and questioned matters of motivation and construction. He seemed to have recovered his energy. But then difficulties arose between them. “I found myself refusing Hitch’s ideas,” Lehman said, even though “those ideas were coming from a legendary figure.” He meant that he refused to be overawed.
They had one fundamental difference which, in other circumstances, would have been fruitful. Hitchcock worried about plot, while Lehman worried about character. The writer stated later that “Hitchcock sort of dropped things in to pay lip service, but he didn’t really want them in the picture. I pleaded with him, so he put them back in the script and shot them, then edited them out of the picture.” Hitchcock wrote to his former colleague from London days, Michael Balcon, that Lehman was “a very nervous and edgy sort of man” who was giving him “a rather difficult time.” Lehman professed to believe that Family Plot would never actually be made.
In the autumn Hitchcock began to suffer spells of dizziness which were diagnosed as a weakness of the heart. He was taken by ambulance to UCLA hospital where, after treatment, he was prescribed a pacemaker under the skin below his collarbone. The procedure was followed by pronounced fever and a bout of colitis, inflammation of the colon; the ordeal was completed with the removal of kidney stones. Lehman was now not the only one who believed that the projected film would come to nothing. But the director, for the moment incapacitated, continued to correspond by letter with Lehman.
By the early months of 1975 Hitchcock was back at work, preparing the sequence of a car chase that occurs at a crucial moment in the film. He had been tardy in choosing actors. In this film, more than any other, characters were simply parts of the design. The studio had suggested Liza Minnelli and Jack Nicholson for the parts of the medium and her boyfriend, but Hitchcock demurred. He did not want to spend more money on salaries than absolutely necessary. So he hired instead Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern who, as it turned out, were entirely suited to their parts. Karen Black and William Devane completed the quartet of pursued and pursuers who remain at cross purposes throughout the film. Hitchcock seems to have struck up a particular friendship with Dern, who acted as his cheerleader when fatigue set in. “I got to jack him up a little,” Dern said. “Get him ready for the day. He’s bored with the whole fucking thing.” But Dern also noticed that, when he was fully engaged, there was no one more attentive on the set than the director. “He noticed everything—a shadow on a performer’s face, a bad angle for a prop, a few seconds too long on a take.” There were times, however, when the director annoyed him. Dern once said to him, “Let me do another take on that, I didn’t go deep enough.” Hitchcock replied, “Bruuuuuce, they’ll never know in Peoria.” He was alluding to the old theatrical phrase, “Will it play in Peoria?,” as the standard of a typical American town. But Hitchcock knew that Dern, and Harris, were quirky and engaging performers. He told Dern that “I never know what you’re gonna do next. I know that the frame is perfect. I know the shot works perfectly. All I want is to be entertained.” He actually encouraged the actors to improvise which was, for him, a very unusual intervention. In this, his last film, he just liked seeing the actors perform.
Filming began in the middle of May 1975. Just before the cameras turned Hitchcock decided that he wanted the narrative to be set in the middle of nowhere rather than in San Francisco. He told his first assistant director, Howard Kazanjian, that he wanted all signs and references to northern California removed. “I don’t want any names on police cars. I don’t want names on any badges…I want it no city.” This was to be an abstract space. He had retained his aversion to filming on location, and much of the action took place on specially designed sets. Bumstead, still with him after all this time, recalled that “Hitch always drove right on the stage with his car, took six or seven steps to his chair, and now he says ‘This is more like it. This is nice.’ ” He sat in his chair, speaking only to the director of photography and his first assistants. But he rarely said anything at all. On the first day of filming he shook hands with all the performers. He kissed Barbara Harris on the cheek and whispered to her, “Barbara, I’m scared. Now go and act.”
But he was growing tired; he had some trouble in standing on his legs weakened by arthritis. By July he seemed to be exhausted, and hurried up the work so that he might finish early, and by the autumn he assigned the post-production work to his assistants. He did, however, supervise the score by John Williams who had just earned much praise for the music of Jaws. “He talked a lot about English music,” Williams recalled, “which he was very interested in: Britten, Walton, Elgar, Arthur Bliss and Vaughan Williams.” From John Williams Hitchcock wanted something light and exuberant since, as he told the composer, “murder can be fun.”
Family Plot is indeed filled with “fun,” albeit of a macabre kind. It is an absurdist thriller which does not take itself seriously at all. It harbours a stylised, and sometimes almost diagrammatic, pattern built on the illusions of balance, contrast and symmetry. There is no room for the exploration of character except in the most rudimentary way. William Devane said that “I played the clothes”; when he put on his costume, he had his part.
Hitchcock did not know what to call it. “It will be called Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Something,’ ” he said, “perhaps Hitchcock’s ‘Wet Drawers.’ ” For his obligatory cameo he had himself filmed in silhouette behind frosted glass in the door of a “Registrar of Births and Deaths.” It may be an allusion to his omnipotence as a film director, but it was also a way of disguising his face, which was becoming increasingly livid and puffy from injections of cortisone. Yet he appeared in the advertising posters, his rotund face suspended in a crystal ball, winking at his public. He seems to be intimating that, after all, it’s only a movie. It is a game, with all its rules on show. It suggests also that although he is the director, he is somehow detached from the whole process.
Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hitchcock on the set of Family Plot, his final film, 1975.
Family Plot was released in March 1976 to generally favourable reviews, reflecting both the obvious stature of the film-maker and the genuine public warmth that his longevity had aroused. Frank Rich in the New York Post observed that “like many modern painters (such as Klee and Kandinsky) great movie directors often become more intrigued by the abstract possibilities of style as they get older.” This is a very astute comment, underlined by Hitchcock’s allusion to Mondrian in one “o
verhead” sequence of a chase in a cemetery with a careful blocking out of routes and outlines.
. . .
His domestic routine, cherished for many years, was now shattered when Alma Hitchcock suffered a second and debilitating stroke. She was confined to the house in Bellagio Road and needed constant nursing; Hitchcock cooked for her two or three times a week while otherwise relying upon deliveries from Chasen’s restaurant. “Little did I believe,” he wrote to Michael Balcon, “that after all these years and the accumulation of a little wealth that I should approach my seventy-eighth year being a cook in the kitchen!” However much he may have tried to conceal it, he was much agitated. His granddaughter recalls, “I remember my grandfather being so upset about Alma—with tears in his eyes he kept asking ‘What am I going to do?’ ”
He himself was afflicted by arthritis that made it difficult for him to rise each morning; he wore reading glasses and was growing slightly deaf. He still went to his office each day at ten in the morning. It was a capacious room in a bungalow built for him, with a very large desk and comfortable leather sofas; the desk was of course a picture of neatness, and no librarian could have arranged the open bookshelves more precisely. Lunch was brought to him punctually at 12:30 in a dining room next door to the office. The meal invariably consisted of steak and salad. He had a flask or bottle of vodka in the top drawer of his desk and at four o’clock, just before returning home to Bellagio Road, he took a drink. Whether he took two or three is an open question, subject only to rumour, but he had good reason to fortify himself.
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