Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  While it eliminated the old-fashioned duel, the trouble with this ending was that it revived the possibility of the French condemning the film. And Sam Taylor especially hated the idea that the traitor might be allowed to abscond, telling Hitchcock that the revised ending was too cynical—“a betrayal of the very story you have told. … Your point, that you have made so effectively, is that the Cold War, and spying, and power politics, destroys lives.”

  Taylor convinced Hitchcock to work from available footage to devise yet a third alternative, to be used only in case of “emergency,” and even then solely in France: the audience hears the noise of a gunshot, followed by a freeze-frame of the front door of Topaz’s house. This would hint at the traitor’s suicide, along with “flashback shots of characters destroyed to achieve American goals superimposed over that image and one of a man reading a newspaper about the Cuban missile crisis,” in Bill Krohn’s words.

  Over the summer, Hitchcock stubbornly maneuvered to keep one of his two replacement endings. He thought the Orly Airport one was the toughest, the most realistic, but Universal preferred the freeze-frame, which wouldn’t offend anyone. Vacationing at the Villa d’Este in August, Hitchcock phoned editor William Ziegler to make a final decision. Orly Airport “is really the correct ending,” he insisted. “In every case, whether it be Philby, Burgess [or] Maclean, they’ve all gotten away with it and they’ve all gone back to Russia.”

  There was internal debate right up to release, and then a compromise: different versions would be made available for different markets. It wasn’t the first time the director had been obliged to offer different versions of Hitchcock films to different markets; it had been going on since Islington days. But it hadn’t happened to him in a long time, and it was all the harder to swallow now, at the twilight of his career.

  Topaz varied wherever it was shown. The Rank Organisation in England insisted on cutting at least twenty minutes out of the film, for example; in London, Universal showed the freeze-frame ending to critics at the premiere, and the Orly Airport version to the general public. American and French audiences got the freeze-frame. It was, Truffaut wrote later, “a solution of despair.”

  And what of the spectacular duel, doomed by preview audiences? Hitchcock told film critic Penelope Houston, ruefully, “I’ll probably let Langlois have it”—meaning Henri Langlois, the director of the renowned Paris Cinémathèque archive. After all the trouble with France, he probably meant it ironically. But after his death the duel sequence—which Hitchcock “smuggled out of Universal and kept in his garage,” according to Krohn—was indeed donated to the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Today it can be viewed, along with other cut scenes and ending variations, on the DVD edition of Topaz.

  When Topaz was released at Christmas, 1969, the other films stirring excitement in theaters—Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, Putney Swope, Midnight Cowboy, Take the Money and Run, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice—seemed to augur an American Nouvelle Vague. In contrast, Hitchcock’s latest looked all the more creaky and lackluster.

  Following so closely on the heels of the Truffaut book, Topaz should have offered a magnificent capstone to Hitchcock’s career. But the film disappointed—and in some quarters even the book backfired. Truffaut was attacked in the influential Film Quarterly for his preoccupation with technique and form as opposed to substance, and the extravagant artistic claims he made for Hitchcock were unfavorably compared, by Gavin Millar in Sight and Sound, to the director’s own relentless anecdote-telling and persistent self-deprecation. Truffaut’s “twin assertions in the introduction that Hitchcock is a major influence on world cinema and that he is grossly underrated,” asserted Millar, “seem to demand a level of response from Hitchcock himself beyond anything which the book gives us.”

  Although many young critics idolized Hitchcock, it was just as true—as it had been true even in the days of his earliest silent-film triumphs—that others were offended by the attention and adulation he received. The young detractors included such prominent critics as Pauline Kael of the New Yorker and Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, and they could be as extreme as the worshipers. (As far back as Vertigo Kauffmann had declared Hitchcock’s career dead, and called the James Stewart—Kim Novak film “an asinine, unredeemed bore.”) Richard Corliss in Film Quarterly now wrote that Hitchcock “is neither the Shakespeare of film, as Sarris and Robin Wood state, nor its Shadwell, as Pauline Kael might want us to believe.” Corliss argued that Topaz was really two films: “inept and effable, poorly acted and well acted, shoddily shot and exquisitely shot, mediocre and transcendent.”

  Better on balance than Torn Curtain, with some genuinely worthwhile elements, Topaz has grown in critical estimation, just as the Truffaut interview book has come to be accepted as a model of its type. Bill Krohn, for one, regards Topaz as “a chilling panorama of the human toll taken by Cold War politics.” That’s certainly what Hitchcock had hoped for—but he wouldn’t have agreed with Krohn’s verdict. He himself regarded Topaz as “a complete disaster,” according to John Russell Taylor, “whatever some of his wilder admirers may say in its favor.”

  * “I have heard,” concluded Waterhouse, “no better or more concise an analysis of what filmmaking is all about either before or since.”

  * The “second woman” is the young man’s second murder victim.

  * At this stage the script had been retitled “Kaleidoscope,” which was more Sixties-ish, but it kept shifting back and forth, and was generally known as “Frenzy.”

  * Burks had not shot Torn Curtain because of its Eastern European flavor, but he was still a candidate for future Hitchcock films, including “Frenzy.”

  * Hitchcock loved to describe the shot for interviewers: “Just before John Vernon [who plays Rico Parra] kills her, the camera slowly travels up and doesn’t stop until the moment she falls. I had attached to her gown five strands of thread held by five men off-camera. At the moment she collapses, the men pulled up the threads and her robe splayed out like a flower that was opening up. That was for contrast. Although it was a death scene, I wanted it to look very beautiful.”

  EIGHTEEN

  1970–1980

  Nineteen seventy went by in a blur of celluloid. Hitchcock continued his diet of French and Italian films, but also screened youth-exploitation movies about drugs and campus revolution (Getting Straight, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, even Woodstock), and a surprising number of “blax-ploitation” pictures (as if trying to puzzle out an audience he had virtually ignored in his own films). He kept up with the James Bonds, with the Academy Award contenders, with films made by old friends as well as autumnal works by colleagues like William Wyler and Billy Wilder. He re-watched Citizen Kane and The Big Sleep. He seemed never to miss a Walt Disney picture, and tried dutifully to sit through everything produced by Universal.

  Old friends stopped by the office or came to dinner at Bellagio Road. Hugh Gray, Victor Saville, Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison, Whitfield Cook, Herbert Coleman, and Norman Lloyd stayed in touch. Once or twice a week Hitchcock had lunch with Lew Wasserman, usually joined by MCA agents Herman Citron or Edd Henry. Mrs. Hitchcock sometimes came to the office for lunch, though often Hitchcock ate alone—or, if he was in the mood to talk, with Peggy Robertson.

  He still attended all the important stage shows at the downtown theaters. He still enjoyed horse racing, and several times accepted invitations to share a racetrack box with former MGM director Mervyn LeRoy, for whom he had a soft spot;* he and Alma were also hosted several times for dinner by onetime MGM executive Benny Thau.

  Hitchcock was now without a new film, or even his television series, before him; his schedule was never more open-ended than at the dawn of the new decade. Some days he simply stayed home, “reading properties,” according to the steady notation in his logbook. Getting in to see the legendary Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t hard: writers from small film journals, college students running film societies, a collector of rare recordi
ngs by Eric Coates (often hailed as the British king of light music), all got appointments.

  A lesser man, after the triple whammy of Marnie, Torn Curtain, and Topaz, might have elected to retire and rest on his laurels. But Hitchcock gave no hint of quitting. If anything, failure had made it all the more important for him to try again, and he spent most of 1970 resting, coaxing his body back into shape. The time off seemed to work, and when Hitchcock had a thorough physical on April 6, 1970, the results were positive.

  It was a cautious year, spent close to home, Universal, and Dr. Walter Flieg. The director took a week in Hawaii, and a few days in Canada, but there were no quick hops to New York, no long trips abroad; even weekends in Santa Cruz were down to a handful.

  “I am looking for a new film project,” Hitchcock wrote Truffaut during the summer, “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 Hitchcock standards.”

  But the slow pace was tonic, and by January 1971 something new looked like it might measure up.

  Arthur La Bern was a former Fleet Street reporter turned novelist and film writer whose long vitae included the acclaimed It Always Rains on Sunday, a 1947 film produced by Ealing from his novel. Angus MacPhail had been among the writers on that film, so Hitchcock knew all about La Bern—but it had taken him a while to get around to reading La Bern’s 1966 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. He must have smacked his lips as he read—the story was so Hitchcockian, like The Lodger, Psycho, and Hitchcock’s abortive “Frenzy” rolled into one, that La Bern could be accused of having written it with the director in mind.

  The story concerned a sexually impotent psycho killer who is preying on women in modern London. After his ex-wife and a barmaid girlfriend are murdered, an ex-RAF hero becomes the chief suspect. But he has a “rooted objection to being placed in a cell,” in the words of the book, and goes on the run.

  Here was the fiction, with real-life echoes, that he’d been looking for. Although he could describe the story as a run-for-cover, it combined his kind of wrong-man conceit with a fiendish, “Frenzy”-style killer. Indeed, La Bern’s book directly likened the killer to Neville Heath; and in the film Hitchcock would add pointed comparisons to Jack the Ripper and John Christie—covering three of the psychopaths who had come up in Hitchcock’s talks with Robert Bloch and Benn Levy.

  Everyone around him had witnessed the depths of the director’s despair after Topaz, and Lew Wasserman wanted to give his friend another chance. Now, suddenly, Hitchcock found Wasserman receptive to the project—all the more so because it was a London story that could be cheaply bought and filmed—even though the killer in La Bern’s novel was so reminiscent of the despised “Frenzy” that Hitchcock could recycle its title for the new film: Frenzy.

  But this was an English killer, not one that reflected on America, Wasserman reasoned; and indeed, Hitchcock would be permitted to shoot Frenzy almost entirely in London, which would be great publicity (while allowing him to escape Universal). Universal granted him a $2.8 million budget, small enough to minimize the studio’s risk, though Hitchcock had always been clever about stretching money.

  Time had moved on for Hitchcock since he had conceived the first “Frenzy” in a New Wave mold, with a modernist black-and-white camera style and a cast of young no-names. The new Frenzy would be brought more in line with traditional Universal productions; it would feature highly respected English stage players and old-fashioned color photography.

  Hitchcock even had an English playwright with a tasteful stage hit lined up to execute the script. En route to Paris in mid-January, the director stopped in New York for his first meeting with Anthony Shaffer, a former lawyer and author of the long-running stage hit Sleuth, a thriller about a mystery writer who plots the perfect murder of his rival. Shaffer then accompanied Hitchcock to London, where both stayed at Claridge’s while discussing the script and touring locations in Hyde Park, Leicester Square, Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and Bayswater, and on the Thames.

  Hitchcock noted the proximity of Hammersmith Hospital to Wormwood Scrubs prison, and decided to exploit that for the escape of the wronged man in the film’s third act. The film was envisioned as a Hitchcock travelogue of London, but also a personal scrapbook of memories—starting with Covent Garden, where the psycho killer lives in the book. The venerable fruit and vegetable market was a place Hitchcock knew well from his father’s trade, and now he laid plans to tie the setting even closer into the suspense by making the psychopath a produce wholesaler.

  Hitchcock himself was more like the wronged man of the story—Blaney, a man out of step with fashion, wearing an outdated tweed jacket with leather patches on the shoulders and elbows. As he and Shaffer toured London, Hitchcock, chagrined by how things had changed, found himself dwelling on the past. He agreed to set a scene at the recently built Hilton Hotel and another at New Scotland Yard, but rejected other contemporary locations suggested by Shaffer. Looking for a model of the old-style pub where Blaney bartends in the film, he complained to reporters about the “psychedelic nature” of up-to-date pub interiors. “They look wrong,” he said. “There’s nothing like dark wood in a good pub.”

  But the two hadn’t yet done any actual scriptwork, Hitchcock informed the press; they were merely working from three pages of notes from the book. “We haven’t got a line of dialogue,” Hitchcock said. Then, after meeting with old friends, including a lunch with Ingrid Bergman, Hitchcock flew to Paris, where he was installed as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. At his request, the ceremony was presided over by Henri Langlois of the Paris Cinémathèque, who had been fired in 1968 by André Malraux under Charles de Gaulle. (Only after international protests from prestigious filmmakers, including Hitchcock, had Langlois been reinstated.)

  Shaffer met with the director back in Los Angeles on January 22, launching a month of talks. But on the first day, the writer remembered, “I nearly talked myself out of writing the film by accusing the great man of being illogical and of leaving holes in his plots between the famous set pieces.” Lunch ensued “in arctic silence, Hitch thinking furiously throughout. At the end of it he said in his stertorous way, ‘Dear boy, quite obviously you’ve never heard of the icebox syndrome.’ ” No, the screenwriter admitted, he had not.

  “I leave holes in my films deliberately, so that the following scenario can take place in countless homes. The man of the house gets out of bed in the middle of the night, and goes down stairs and takes a chicken leg out of the icebox. His wife follows him down and asks what he’s doing. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘there’s a hole in that film we saw tonight.’ ‘No there isn’t,’ she says, and they fall to arguing. As a result of which they go to see it again.”

  “Just how many holes do you want to leave in Frenzy?” Shaffer asked skeptically.

  “I’m quite sure you won’t leave any, dear boy,” Hitchcock replied mischievously. “Just leave that to me.”

  Reconciled, the pair went back to work. To open the film, Hitchcock sketched an ambitious overhead shot, starting in midair above the Thames near his old neighborhood of Limehouse, then moving upriver and gliding under Tower Bridge Road, arriving to hover above County Hall, where a stuffy politician is making a speech about how the formerly polluted Thames has been thoroughly cleaned up (a bowler-hatted Hitchcock would be glimpsed amidst the onlookers). The politician’s self-serving speech is interrupted by the naked body of a woman washing up on the nearby muddy shore (the buttocks shot Hitchcock had pursued since Psycho).

  Covent Garden had been in La Bern’s novel; so was the famous dead-body-in-a-potato-sack scene. But Hitchcock seized on these elem
ents to weave a food motif throughout the film. Food would become a key to the main characters, hinting at their deeper urges. The psychopath, Rusk, likes to munch an apple after his nasty acts; Blaney (the wronged man) expresses his frustration in one scene by mangling a bag of grapes, in another by crushing a wineglass, cutting his hand (as Farley Granger does in Rope). The Chief Inspector meanwhile segues amiably from discussing criminal pathology to waxing euphoric over his office breakfast: bangers and mash.

  It was steak and salad that linked Hitchcock and Shaffer as they steered their way through the script. That was the daily repast served for lunch in the director’s bungalow—every day, without relief. One day, Shaffer dared to wonder aloud “very gently, about this monotony. I shouldn’t have. Next day, a fifteen-course dinner arrived, catered by Chasen’s, and was laid at my tableside. Hitch, of course, had his small steak and salad.”

  They were also linked by screenings: Shaffer was treated to the relevant Hitchcocks, and together they watched British psychopath films like Twisted Nerve (music by Bernard Herrmann) and Ten Rillington Place, about the Christie case. They perused medical literature on impotence and sexual pathology. They mulled the casting: Michael Caine was about to star in the film version of Sleuth, and Hitchcock had been following him since his debut in Zulu. The British actor’s first Oscar nomination had come for his turn as the sexually predatory Cockney of Alfie, a part not too far from Rusk (with his “man-about-town appearance,” in the book’s words). Hitchcock had Caine to lunch in the bungalow, but the part was a hard sell, and Caine was heavily booked up; he became the latest in a long line to squirm away from Hitchcock. (Barry Foster, the lesser-known actor who ultimately got the part, bore an obvious resemblance.)

  Hitchcock’s drinking now seemed to be regulated, and he and Shaffer quit work every day at 4 P.M. for daiquiris and gossip. The director was, Shaffer told Donald Spoto, “not only mythicized—he was also lugubrious,” but never more so than when drinking. Because Shaffer was so professional, and because Hitchcock had been shaping and reshaping this kind of run-for-cover film all his life, the script advanced with remarkable ease. Although Arthur La Bern later denounced the film adapted from his novel as “distasteful,” with “appalling” dialogue (“a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce, Dixon of Deck Green and that almost forgotten No Hiding Place,” as the author grouched in a “Letter to the Editor” in the Times), his complaint is rather surprising, as the most distasteful scenes were culled straight from the book.*