“We all knew we had a loser on our hands,” Newman recalled afterward.
The director “just lost heart during the shooting,” according to Vertigo writer Sam Taylor. “He just couldn’t get a chemistry going with them [Newman and Andrews], and he got very depressed and just went through the motions.”
In the end Hitchcock stared past the leads, but this time he ignored most of the supporting players, too. “Sometimes with actors it was a puzzling experience,” recalled matte artist Albert Whitlock, “his lack of communication.”
Instead, he took to yelling at the “rooks and pawns,” according to Waterhouse. “It was painful, one day, to see a wretched bit player being harangued by the distinguished director for not jumping off a bus in the proper manner. Hitchcock made him do retake after retake, cruelly tormenting him for being unable to comprehend a simple note of direction when he called himself an actor. The poor fellow was jumping off the bus in what he must have firmly believed, from his own observation, was the way that people do jump off buses; unfortunately, this did not coincide with the picture in Mr. Hitchcock’s mind. The director wanted the actor to emulate, to perfection, a photograph he had never seen.”
Hitchcock went through the motions for more than three months, including two weeks of unscheduled hiatus when Newman incurred a chin infection, before filming was finally completed in mid-February 1966. Through most of that time the director visited his personal physician at least twice weekly at 8 A.M. before heading over to the set at Universal.
Bernard Herrmann was awaiting instructions in England, where he had moved in the midst of a fractious divorce. Now run by executives who started out in the music agency business, Universal insisted on a pop music score for Torn Curtain—preferably with a hit song performed by Julie Andrews—and Hitchcock didn’t necessarily disagree. He had long recognized the value of music in his films.
Even by the time of The Birds, Hitchcock felt that Herrmann’s music was becoming too predictable in its portentousness. Then Herrmann’s score for Joy in the Morning, a sudsy MGM film that followed Marnie, particularly “disappointed” him. “NOT ONLY DID I FIND IT CONFORMING TO THE OLD PATTERN,” Hitchcock bluntly wired Herrmann early in the filming of Torn Curtain, “BUT EXTREMELY REMINISCENT OF THE MARNIE MUSIC IN FACT THE THEME WAS ALMOST THE SAME.
“UNFORTUNATELY FOR WE ARTISTS WE DO NOT HAVE THE FREEDOM THAT WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE BECAUSE WE ARE CATERING TO AN AUDIENCE AND THAT IS WHY YOU GET YOUR MONEY AND I GET MINE.”
Trying to explain the the new direction he wanted Herrmann to adopt, the director explained that “catering to an audience” meant catering to increasingly younger audiences, staying hip to the Nouvelle Vague, and likewise to contemporary trends in film music.
“THIS AUDIENCE,” he wrote, “IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE ONE TO WHICH WE USED TO CATER IT IS YOUNG VIGOROUS AND DEMANDING STOP IT IS THIS FACT THAT HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED BY ALMOST ALL OF THE EUROPEAN FILMMAKERS WHERE THEY HAVE SOUGHT TO INTRODUCE A BEAT AND A RHYTHM THAT IS MORE IN TUNE WITH THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE AFORESAID AUDIENCE STOP THIS IS WHY I AM ASKING YOU TO APPROACH THIS PROBLEM WITH A RECEPTIVE AND IF POSSIBLE ENTHUSIASTIC MIND STOP IF YOU CANNOT DO THIS THEN I AM THE LOSER STOP I HAVE MADE UP MY MIND THAT THIS APPROACH TO THE MUSIC IS EXTREMELY ESSENTIAL.”
Herrmann gave Hitchcock no cause for concern in his return telegram, which said, “DELIGHTED COMPOSE BEAT SCORE FOR TORN CURTAIN ALWAYS PLEASED HAVE YOUR VIEWS.”
For whatever reasons, then, Hermann followed his own muse and wrote a score of instrumental extremes, with heavy emphasis on the bass, brass, and woodwinds, and almost no apparent melody. It may have been vintage Herrmann, but it wasn’t the departure Hitchcock had asked for. Hitchcock wanted Herrmann to provide upbeat musical relief from a film that everybody—the director included—found flat and dull.
Both men were under great strain when Hitchcock kept an appointment with Herrmann in late March to listen to the first recording of the music. But the director didn’t get very far, absorbing only the Prelude before shutting the recording off. Where was the pop sound he wanted? he demanded furiously.
Herrmann was just as angry. “Look Hitch,” he said, “you can’t out-jump your own shadow. And you don’t make pop pictures. What do you want with me? I don’t write pop music.”
“I’m entitled to a great pop tune if I want one,” replied Hitchcock sullenly.
“Hitch, what’s the use of my doing more with you?” Herrmann said fatally. “I had a career before, and I will afterwards.”
Those were their last words. Whether Hitchcock actually fired Herrmann is unclear—accounts differ—but according to Herrmann’s own account, he quit. After which, British composer John Addison, who won an Oscar for the pastiche score of Tom Jones in 1963, was forced to play catch-up with a light score that was among the most forgettable Hitchcock ever used.
A few years later, Herrmann visited the director at Universal to pay his respects, and repair the damage. But Hitchcock refused even to come out of his office to greet his old comrade—refused ever to work again with the man who wrote the ultimate Hitchcockian music for The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Marnie.
“IF YOU CANNOT DO THIS,” Hitchcock had predicted, “THEN I AM THE LOSER.”
Before Torn Curtain’s midsummer opening Hitchcock conducted publicity on the East Coast, then met with François Truffaut in London for final editing of the interview book. Afterward he spent a week with Sidney Bernstein in Orbetello, Italy, returning to London in time to promote the film’s release in England. In England and America, reviewers struggled to detect some merit in the fiftieth Hitchcock film. “What went wrong here, one suspects,” wrote Penelope Houston in Sight and Sound, “was something basic in the storyline.” “Awful,” “preposterous,” and “irritatingly slack,” Renata Adler concluded in the New Yorker. “Hitchcock is tired,” declared Richard Schickel in Life, “to the point where what once seemed highly personal style is now merely repetition of past triumphs.”
The best scene in the film—the only truly memorable one—dated back to the very first synopsis: Gromek’s death. The East German undercover agent has followed the defector to an isolated farm outside Berlin, where he is making surreptitious contact with an American agent. Confronted in the kitchen by Gromek and threatened with arrest, the scientist and a farm woman accomplice have no choice but to fight back. First they attempt to strangle Gromek, and stab him with a butcher knife; then they try to bludgeon him with a shovel. But the tough villain keeps springing back to life. Finally they shove Gromek headfirst into a oven, turning on the gas and holding him inside—until he asphyxiates, his fingers twitching spasmodically. The struggle—as shot by Hitchcock, characteristically, without any real dialogue or music—is not only brutal but uncomfortably comical. Although Brian Moore complained to Donald Spoto that the director “went further than I think he should have in that case,” it was the most Hitchcockian scene in Torn Curtain—and a last bitter allusion to the Holocaust. (“One couldn’t help but think that here we are back at Auschwitz again and the gas ovens,” Hitchcock told Richard Schickel.)
But in the end the only thing faintly Notorious about Torn Curtain was the Macguffin—the “antimissile missile” formula sought by Paul Newman. Hitchcock had anticipated the atomic bomb for his 1945 film, and Frances FitzGerald in her book Way Out There in the Blue makes a good case that Torn Curtain likewise anticipated war weaponry of the future. Ronald Reagan, an ex-client of Lew Wasserman’s who now occupied the California governor’s seat, watched the latest Hitchcock film and took note, according to FitzGerald. Years later, as president, Reagan was inspired by Hitchcock’s Macguffin to propose his still-controversial, still-unrealized “Star Wars” missile-defense shield.
Despite initial crowds, Torn Curtain did less well than Marnie at the box office, making it a second, and more expensive, knockdown for Hitchcock. Though accustomed to such disappointments in his long career, he
no longer had the resilience of the boy wonder who went to the studio bristling with energy, ideas, and mischief, who worked all day and then stayed after dark to shoot necessary scenes, who bounded up three flights of steps when he came home late and then hosted a party, or attended a first night, or went dancing at a nightclub.
Marnie had been a setback, but Torn Curtain was a profound failure that indicated a more chronic condition—a malaise. Hitchcock’s twice-weekly doctor appointments continued, and in September and October he and Alma took another monthlong vacation, hoping to restore his bounce, pausing again at the Villa d’Este before doing a little publicity and sightseeing in Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Munich, and Paris.
When he returned to Hollywood, he seemed in better spirits. Yet this was a time for sober adjustments. The hotel-of-crooks story was the most ambitious of his future projects, the least run-for-cover, and as the one least likely to become a star vehicle, it was also the least palatable to Lew Wasserman and Universal. It was the kind of offbeat slice of life Hitchcock had always mused about filming, but in spite of working with Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli for over a year, he couldn’t conjure any confidence in the project. “We had a friendly exchange of ideas and arguments,” Scarpelli remembered. “Maybe it was our fault. Maybe it was his. He was tired, but we were tired too.”
Every decision now was a marker on the road, and this step marked a departure from Hitchcock’s lifelong practice: never again would two projects vie simultaneously for his attention.
At Christmas, the Hitchcocks flew with the Sam Taylors to St. Moritz. This must be the year, according to Donald Spoto’s book, when Hitchcock organized his day around the cocktail hour, always with “gargantuan lunches and four-hour dinners” whose menus he “dictated.” He waved from the balcony when Alma and the Taylors ventured outdoors; once again, on vacation, he took a vacation from doctor’s orders.
This Christmas, according to Spoto, Hitchcock seemed fixated on necrophilia, demonstrating to Suzanne Taylor how a man might strangle a woman with only one hand. To Spoto, that seemed like evidence of an increasingly morbid bent, though Hitchcock had always fixated on murders—staging stranglings in his films at dinner parties, even posing as a strangler for publicity photos. Some of his favorite crimes involved strangling followed by necrophilia. And, it was at St. Moritz that the director decided on his next subject, one deeply rooted in his nationality, and his imagination: the story of a necrophiliac serial killer.
Such a project could become the ultimate run-for-cover, while also giving him a chance to acknowledge a debt to the Nouvelle Vague. Even before he started working with François Truffaut, Hitchcock had been conscientiously screening the works of the new generation of foreign-language filmmakers, especially those from France and Italy. The autobiographical, socially critical, sexually explicit, psychological and philosophically oriented, sometimes fantastical and often stylistically un-orthodox films of these young directors had flavored his screening diet for nearly a decade.
Hitchcock watched all of Truffaut’s films; he kept up loyally with the output of anyone with whom he was acquainted. Curiously, though, the pictures that really struck him—startled him, really, out of his rut—were those of Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni. Again and again he screened their films—Blow-Up, Red Desert, Masculine Feminine—all of them innovative in format and intellectual in content, and almost anti-Hitchcockian in their antidramatic narratives. But he was fascinated by their visual adeptness; watching one Antonioni, he sat up straight at the sight of a man all in white in a white room. “White on white!” he exclaimed to Peggy Robertson. “There, you see! It can be done!”
Inspired by such experimentalists, Hitchcock decided to shoot his new psycho-killer film in a contemporary, pseudo-vérité style—as much as possible on actual locations, working with fast film stock and natural light, and a cast of cheap young unknowns.
He had the sentimental idea that an old friend might join him in tilting at this windmill, and mentioned the project with deliberate casualness to Sam Taylor and Charles Bennett, but he detected little appetite from them for his Nouvelle Vague shocker. Surprisingly, then, he contacted Benn Levy. Although Levy was principally a playwright and stage director, he also had a good track record in film—and he had contributed dialogue to the sound version of Blackmail and directed Lord Camber’s Ladies, which Hitchcock produced in 1931. Hitchcock and Levy had quarreled disastrously during Lord Camber’s Ladies, but had reconciled after being thrown together over the years in show business circles. For five years after World War II Levy had served as a respected Labour Party MP and emerged as an assertive voice on peace issues and the arts, but he also kept busy as a writer, and was excited by the prospect of reuniting with Hitchcock on a film that would draw from real life.
As part of his modernizing campaign, the director wanted the story to be based on a postwar Jack the Ripper, either John Haigh (the acid-bath murderer he had read about during the filming of Stage Fright) or Neville Heath (the earlier, brutal sexual mutilator). Both of these notorious London murderers were familiar to Levy, but one was preferable.
“It’s got to be Heath, not Haigh,” Levy wrote Hitchcock on January 18, 1967, shortly after agreeing to the assignment. “Told forwards the Heath story is a gift from heaven. You’d start with a ‘straight’ romantic meeting, handsome young man, pretty girl. Maybe he rescues her from the wild molestations of a drunken escort. ‘I can’t stand men who paw every girl they meet.’ Get us rooting for them both. He perhaps unhappily married and therefore a model of screen-hero restraint. She begins to find him irresistibly ‘just a little boy who can’t cope with life’—least of all with domestic problems such as he has described. She’s sexually maternal with him, she’d give him anything—and we’re delighted. Presently a few of us get tiny stirrings of disquiet at the physical love scenes but don’t quite know why. By the time we see the climax of his love in action, and her murder, then even the slowest of us get it.” Before the letter closed, Levy reiterated his Hitchcockian notion that the film should be “told forwards, i.e. more from the angle of the pursued than the pursuers.” And he added: “At one point, if I know my Hitch, I don’t doubt but that Heath with his maximum of charms will accost a policewoman.”
Hitchcock liked that: not only was Levy spewing out ideas before his contract was finalized, but his tossed-off notion of Heath accosting a policewoman was reminiscent of No Bail for the Judge, offering Hitchcock a chance to recycle his idea of a lady barrister posing as a prostitute. In “Frenzy,” as the project was tentatively titled, the near-victim would instead be an undercover policewoman.
“Supposing,” Hitchcock replied, sparking off Levy’s idea, “that the third woman* is a plant by the police so that you get the extreme suspense of watching the man fall into a trap—or does he fall? Supposing he nearly succeeds with the third woman, especially if he maneuvers her into some remote area which prohibits protective observation.”
Hitchcock’s chemistry with Levy convinced him to offer Levy a seventy-five-thousand-dollar deal for an outline, treatment, and first-draft script. (Note that these terms, for a friend and writer with a track record with Hitchcock, were substantially higher than the amount offered to Bloch for a book and film—higher, even, than the salary Brian Moore received for the bigger-budgeted Torn Curtain.) Arriving from London on February 18, 1967, Levy went straight to dinner at Bellagio Road; the next morning, he and Hitchcock commenced their discussions.
Levy was in the United States for the next two months, completing a treatment and developing a draft script that revolved around a young murderer of women, and a female police officer set up as a decoy. Although Neville Heath was the model for the killer, the story would be Americanized by virtue of its New York setting. Hitchcock supplied Levy with books about Heath, muscle magazines to help characterize the killer—a bodybuilder—and articles on hippies, who are among his victims. In April the director and writer traveled together to New York, st
aying at the St. Regis. Hitchcock gave Levy a tour of the city, and the film-to-be.
Life photographer Arthur Schatz was engaged to ride around with them and shoot color slides of prospective sites, including a few that were familiar from other Hitchcock films. Scenes were planned for the New Jersey flats (as in Shadow of a Doubt), and in front of the United Nations (as in North by Northwest). Hitchcock intended to use a Shea Stadium baseball game as one background, and Central Park as another. Unknown actors and models posed in the settings for Schatz. “As we reached the locations,” the photographer recalled in Dan Auiler’s book Hitchcock’s Notebooks, Hitchcock “would tell me the story of what was happening in the film.”
As Hitchcock told and retold the story, Levy wrote and rewrote. “Frenzy” evolved into an American manifesto—even offering a passing glimpse of the President of the United States himself. At the same time it was going to be a very personal Hitchcock film, a triumphant reprise of his signature themes. Hitchcock envisioned the mother of the killer as a professional actress, playing with the idea of the mother giving a Broadway performance, while suspecting her son of horrible deeds. (The police are slow to suspect the real killer, of course, although at one point a traffic cop pulls him over.) At the end of “Frenzy,” the mother would agree to help the police trap her son—a kind of apologetic reversal of Psycho.
The “Frenzy” murders would all be triggered by proximity to water, which had been a source of danger in other Hitchcock films. The first victim (a UN employee) would be slain in broad daylight near a waterfall in a secluded patch of woods outside New York City; the second, an art student, would be wooed to a shipyard and viciously murdered amid abandoned World War II freighters. The “Mothball Fleet” sequence would be a nail-biting cinematic crescendo, a Hitchcockian tour de force.
The director’s eagerness about the project, combined with the sudden fragility of his career after Torn Curtain, even lured Mrs. Hitchcock back into the script talks. Although Alma had been a silent partner for Marnie, she was instrumentally involved in “Frenzy.” The participation of Levy, a mutual friend, lured her into helping—a by-product Hitchcock had counted on.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 97