Even casting was done bit by bit—the role of Juanita, for instance, was not assigned until the unit, well into the shooting, returned to Hollywood. And there was some chopping and changing. An actor called Aram Katcher was given the role of the Cuban police chief, shot all his scenes, and did not discover he was not in the film till it opened; Hitch had not liked his reading of the role, and decided to reshoot it with Roberto Contreras, but made no announcement out of consideration for the replaced actor.
The main changes, and the main trouble, came with the ending. At least three different versions were shot. One of them involved a duel in a deserted stadium between the principal characters representing East and West, concluded when the Russian agent is picked off by a distant sniper because, obviously, his employers have no further use for him. This seems to have entertained Hitch but no one else at Universal. Then there was a more flip ending, with the two agents waving goodbye as one gets on a plane for Moscow and the other for Washington. And finally there was the ending of the released prints, which was cobbled up from material already shot, with the Russian agent going into his house in Paris, then the sound of a shot signifying that he has killed himself. This last ending was devised by someone at Universal when Hitch got tired of fighting them: symbolically it was his throwing his hand in, and latterly he has declined to discuss the film beyond making it clear that he regards it as a complete disaster, whatever some of his wilder admirers may say in its favour.
When Topaz came out in 1969, it marked in many ways the lowest ebb in his career for many years. On the other hand, all kinds of honours were coming his way. In 1968 he was awarded the Irving Thalberg Award by the Motion Picture Academy, as a tribute to his over-all career—and in some recompense, no doubt, for the awkward fact that he had never won an Oscar, even though many had been won by films he directed. In 1969 he was made an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 1976 he became a commander of the order. Other honours included honorary doctorates from the University of Southern California and elsewhere, the Cecil B. de Mille Award from the Foreign Press Association in Hollywood, and a knighthood of the Legion of Honour of the Cinémathèque Française. It was nice, of course, but a trifle valedictory, as though Hitch was regarded more as a historical monument than as a vital part of living cinema.
If it was beginning to seem a bit that way, Hitch, not for the first time, had a surprise in store. He always had in reserve his contract with Universal which enabled him to make whatever he wanted, without interference, provided it did not cost more than $3 million. With the escalating costs of film-making, that, which had been a reasonable budget, if not exactly big money, was getting less and less. But this situation had its advantages. With a budget of under £3 million you could manage to keep a very low profile: not too much was riding on your commercial success or failure anyway. And given Hitch’s name and reputation, any film he made was guaranteed instant sale all over the world, and a satisfactory television sale thereafter. In other words, even if it was not a very big success, at least there was hardly any way it could lose money. So if Hitch felt the need again to run for cover, this was a useful cover to be able to run to. And there was no reason why he should not. It had always been one of his greatest advantages that he was sublimely unimpressed by the Hitchcock myth. For everyone else a new Hitchcock movie might be THE NEW HITCHCOCK MOVIE, but for him it had always been just another movie, the quickest way from the last to the next. Therefore he did not now have any problem with pride, any idea that he, the great Alfred Hitchcock, could not possibly make a modest little picture, but should be aiming at the culminating masterpiece.
Whether or not he consciously worked all this out at the time, his next film after Topaz, which had been his most expensive ever, was a return to modesty and simplicity. The impression was intensified, if anything, by the fact that he chose to make it in England, thereby making comparisons with his thrillers of the 1930s more or less inevitable. But if it was in certain respects a harking back, in others, particularly as regards its content, it was anything but running for cover. What it amounted to was that Hitch had at last, providentially, found a way of licking his long-standing Frenzy project into shape. After Topaz he had taken up the idea again, and brought in three writers to work on it, but still it did not turn out to his satisfaction. Then, through one of the usual channels, a novel called Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square came into Hitch’s office. Published in 1966, it was the work of a British writer, Arthur La Bern, whose best-known previous book had been It Always Rains on Sunday. And it happened to be about a psychotic killer of young women—as was the body of material Hitch had been working on for Frenzy. Otherwise, it had nothing in common with Frenzy, but the little it had was enough. Hitch saw that the right way to tackle the problem was to start again from scratch, so he bought the screen rights to Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square and that is precisely what he did.
In line with his habit—risky, one would think, if Hitch had not had total confidence in his ability to handle writers—of choosing to work with writers currently in vogue. Hitch picked as script-writer on this film, which at once inherited the title Frenzy, Anthony Shaffer, who was then riding high in London and New York with his long-running stage thriller Sleuth. This time the choice worked out perfectly: Shaffer and Hitch fashioned a neat and workable screenplay from the book with extraordinary speed and efficiency, though not to the satisfaction of Arthur La Bern, who wrote to The Times of London after Frenzy opened complaining that the film was ‘distasteful’ and the script ‘appalling’, with ‘dialogue … a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce, Dixon of Dock Green and that almost forgotten No Hiding Place.’ He does have a point. There is no denying a certain anachronistic quality to Hitch’s 1971 view of London life and character—though physically it is the London of today, the atmosphere is really that of thirty or more years ago, when Hitch last lived in London and knew it as a native. But that hardly seems to matter: Hitch’s landscape always has been a landscape of fantasy. All that counts is the intensity and conviction of the fantasy. And no doubt about it, Hitch’s London in Frenzy exists, whether or not it has much to do with the London anyone else sees today.
Hitch’s return to London in 1971 was in the nature of a triumphal entry—certainly much more so than his major previous return in 1949, when by his own confession he was enamoured of the spotlight. He was royally welcomed at Pinewood, where the studio scenes were shot, and immediately entertained to a lunch of banquet proportions, at which he had sitting beside him his old set-designer, Alex Vetchinsky from The Lady Vanishes days, brought in specially to make him feel at home. And he found to his pleasure that the atmosphere of British studios, in many respects more friendly and familial than Hollywood, had not changed much. Members of the unit still gathered informally in the local pub after the day’s shooting was over, and the studio restaurant still retained the civilized amenities of linen tablecloths, silver and a very acceptable wine list. Despite Hitch’s whimsical contention that in England no one would recognize him because he had so many doubles, he was recognized everywhere and his smallest move was news. He was photographed with the head of his image in Madame Tussaud’s, and as a gag had a model of himself floated in the Thames, thus giving rise to the supposition that it was in this form he would make his traditional guest appearance. (Actually he is part of the riverside crowd which observes the discovery of the first girl’s body we see, floating past in a Thames a sententious official is just guaranteeing to be free from pollution.) But then of course since the 1940s, when he had last spent any significant amount of time working in Britain, he had not only made a succession of films which even chauvinistic British critics had to recognize as equal or superior to his best British films of the 1930s, but there had also been the television shows, which had done their work in Britain as everywhere else in the world. Though now officially an American, he remained one of the most famous Englishmen in the world, and was treated with all the deference
and excitement due to a favourite son who has finally come home.
For the cast of his new film Hitch renewed his acquaintance with an old but great love, the English theatre. Most of the actors, while unfamiliar to American audiences, were notable names on the London stage: people like Alec McCowen, who plays the inspector in charge of the case, Vivien Merchant as his would-be gourmet cook wife, Jon Finch as the man unjustly suspected of murder, Barry Foster as the real murderer, and Anna Massie as one of the victims, combined demonstrated talent with a pleasing unfamiliarity for picturegoers, and gave a richness of characterization sadly lacking in Hitch’s two previous films. And the script did allow scope lacking in those two films, especially, for Hitch’s more outrageous touches of humour. Not only are there the essentially expository scenes between the inspector and his wife, enlivened and given character by the succession of more and more unpalatable dishes she presents him with, fresh from her school of cookery (here Hitch’s famous interest in food really pays off), but the horror of the notorious sequence in which the murderer has to extract the body of one of his victims from a lorry-load of potatoes and break her fingers in order to regain a vital clue clenched in them depends largely on its being at the same time callously, outrageously funny.
Indeed, in parts of Frenzy Hitch takes evident pleasure in manipulating his audience’s responses more brazenly than ever before. He rushes to make use of the new permissiveness in film-making to introduce more nudity than before, and, in the picture’s first murder, more graphic sexual violence. (Frenzy was Hitch’s first film to get the ‘R’ adult rating in America.) And in the scene immediately following that murder, when we see the murderer leaving the scene, from outside, then the camera stays put while a secretary goes into the office and we wait what seems an eternity before the anticipated scream, one can palpably sense Hitch directing the audience, seeing just how far he can go. The film also contains another variation on a favourite Hitchcock ploy, that of forcing the audience into guilty identification with the villain: the real murderer is deliberately made so much more charming and agreeable than the rather unappetizing character he is framing for his crimes that all one’s normal moral responses are thrown right off.
Hitch had a good time on Frenzy Again everything was falling out right and it showed on screen: the film contains some of his most memorable effects ever, such as the extraordinary shot in which, as the murder takes his next victim into his house, the camera pulls back from the stairs they have just ascended, out of the front door and back into the street as the sounds of busy Covent Garden, up to now tellingly suppressed, come flooding back on to the sound-track. When the film opened the press were unanimous in hailing it as a fantastic return to form, and with press and public alike it proved his most popular film since Psycho twelve years before. In fact it would have been a totally triumphant experience if it had not been shadowed by a personal drama, which came close to being a personal tragedy. One morning at Claridge’s, Alma had a serious stroke.
Afterwards she cheerfully observed that at least she had the sense and taste to have it in one of the world’s best hotels, on the principle that if these things have to happen, they might as well happen in comfort. But at the time there was nothing funny about it. A doctor was immediately summoned, she was carried off for examination, and it turned out that one arm was paralysed, her walking was affected, and to a lesser extent her speech. It seemed possible that she might become an invalid, though happily her mind and sense of humour remained as clear and incisive as ever, and she was soon busy comforting those around her. Hitch was of course distraught, but insisted on continuing with his preordained routine: the very day of the stroke, their granddaughter Mary was scheduled to arrive at London Airport in the afternoon, and naturally he went out himself to meet her, as arranged. In general, though, he stayed with Alma for as much of the time as he could. Right away they started therapy, and Alma, who had considerable native stubbornness as well as courage going for her, responded amazingly to treatment.
Hitch’s first reaction to the shock of her illness seemed to be to start neglecting his own carefully guarded health, abandoning his usual regime and eating and drinking with more freedom than for many years—almost as though he felt he was only taking care of himself for Alma, and the possibility of life without Alma was not to be contemplated. But by the summer of 1972 Alma was sufficiently recovered to be able to accompany Hitch on a gruelling tour of western Europe publicizing Frenzy, only a little the worse for her experience. And Hitch began seriously to look for another subject, for another film.
Chapter Fifteen
I cannot now remember exactly when I first heard that Hitch was preparing a new film. But it must I think have been towards the end of 1973. I was having lunch with him in his office-bungalow up at Universal, and he mentioned that he had spent the morning working on the script of this next, as yet unnamed, project. It was based, he said, on a Victor Canning novel called The Rainbird Pattern (‘but we certainly shan’t call it that’), published a year or so before. I confessed ignorance, even though the book had apparently received excellent reviews, and been a good, if not a best, seller. Well, he said, we’re really not keeping that much of the book—as usual, it’s the idea and a few possibilities that we pick out of it. And so he began to describe what the book and/or film was about.
What he proceeded to tell me seemed to me complicated but quite comprehensible. I stress this because I know from people who have encountered Hitch during the preparatory stages of a film that he tends to use anyone and everyone as a sort of preview audience, employing his famous skills as raconteur to construct the film for them in their mind’s eye and observe their reactions as some guide to how this or that will play. I gather that in the case of ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s 53rd film,’ as it was cryptically known right up to the start of shooting, he got quite a lot of puzzled or downright unfavourable response early on—one famous producer told me that when Hitch recounted the story to him he could not make head nor tail of it, and frankly said so. Be that as it may, the story seemed to me clear enough: there were these two separate plots involving two separate groups of characters whose paths keep crossing; a fake medium and her taxi-driver boy-friend who helps document her clients for her, who are set on the trail of an heir who has vanished in childhood; and a master-criminal kidnapper who is simultaneously, with the help of his girl-friend, pulling off a series of spectacularly successful jobs, strictly for the ransom money.
Finally, you discover that the connection between these two strands is that the master criminal is the long-lost heir; hence the irony of the investigators getting nearer and nearer to him for quite the wrong reasons, or at any rate for reasons quite different from what he supposes when he gradually becomes aware of their presence. The scene in which his suspicions crystallize into a certainty was the only one Hitch specifically described at this stage, in great detail and with obvious enjoyment. It is the kidnapping of the Bishop of San Francisco in Grace Cathedral in the middle of mass. The kidnappers drug him and drag him off before the eyes of the congregation, depending of course on the slightly embarrassed sense of decorum which possesses those in church and makes them hesitate to act in what would otherwise be a natural fashion, for fear it will seem out of place or irreverent, to give them the necessary time to make a getaway. All goes according to plan, except that ‘that man’ is there again—the taxi-driver, who as it happens is there for quite a different reason, trying to make an appointment to see the Bishop, who, it transpires, was the parish priest thirty years before in the village where the heir was last seen.
We know Hitch’s propensity for being turned on by particular scenes or visual ideas for his films, and working outwards from these until the threads join up into as coherent as possible a story line. Hitch himself put it succinctly to me some years ago: ‘First you decide what the characters are going to do, and then you provide them with enough characteristics to make it seem plausible that they should do it.’ So it seemed probable
that this scene he so lovingly described had been the grain of sand in the original book from which he would build up the pearl of his finished film.
What was my surprise, then, to discover that the scene does not exist at all in the book. The book’s plot is in outline as Hitch had described it, but with some important differences. First, it takes place in England, and a very quiet rural England at that, setting up a (very Hitchcockian, one would say) dislocation between the crimes going on and the mild, well-mannered circumstances in which they occur. Then, the characterization is more extreme and peculiar than he described it: the medium is a largely genuine medium, though not above reinforcing her psychic powers with a little help from her friend; the kidnapper is actually a homicidal maniac (rather than there being some faint hint that he may have been responsible for the fire in which his foster parents died and he managed to disappear at the age of twelve), and though his crimes catch up with him he has a son, probably just as crazed, who will inherit the money instead and unleash heaven knows what on the world in his turn. And thirdly, there is no kidnapping of a Bishop in the middle of mass. A Bishop is kidnapped, to be sure, but it is in the middle of a solitary country walk which he takes every week-end.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 34