Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  The murders are extremely graphic in the novel. In one passage the first victim, Blaney’s ex-wife, is slowly strangled, an act that follows Rusk’s impotent attempts at lovemaking; afterward (in the film and book), the dead wife’s bulging eyes stare lifelessly at the killer. Later, Rusk murders Blaney’s barmaid girlfriend and stuffs her body in a potato sack, tossing the sack in the back of a lorry. He is forced to jump in and ride along, after he realizes she has an incriminating item in her grip; in order to retrieve it, he must bend back the dead woman’s fingers until they break. This scene, too, is in the book, and Hitchcock earmarked it for one of his crescendos in the film.

  In shrewd ways Hitchcock judiciously edited the book. Where the novel has lengthy courtroom scenes, the film conveys Blaney’s guilty verdict in concise Hitchcockian fashion, when a bailiff guarding a courtroom door swings it open momentarily to eavesdrop. The film also excised Blaney’s brief escape to Paris, saving further screen time and budget. Yet Hitchcock couldn’t win with writers, who could be offended in so many ways.

  It is true that the “appalling” dialogue wasn’t all La Bern’s. In subtle and unsubtle ways, Hitchcock was determined to make the film deliberately archaic—as, at the twilight of his career, he consciously sought to replicate his beginnings. “He was intractable about not modernizing the dialogue of the picture,” Shaffer told Spoto, “and he kept inserting antique phrases I knew would cause the British public a hearty laugh or even some annoyance.”

  The film did boast one major innovation, on the other hand, that was entirely Hitchcock’s, and entirely to the good; he elevated the minor character of Chief Inspector Oxford to importance, giving him a fluffy wife, and supper scenes revolving around the wife’s experimentation with nouvelle cuisine. Like other Hitchcock detectives down through the years, the Chief Inspector has everything “ass about face,” in Rusk’s words; after convicting the wrong man, though, something nags at the Chief Inspector enough to convince him to pursue further investigation on his own. (La Bern particularly objected to the film’s “grotesque misrepresentation of Scotland Yard.”)

  One thing nagging the Chief Inspector is his wife, with whom he discusses the case—and his misgivings—in a series of delightful interludes that were a transparent riff on Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock. (The director, like the Chief Inspector, preferred his shepherd’s pie—though Alma was a splendid cook in any cuisine; the Rusk case was an analogue for a script the Hitchcocks might have worked out at mealtimes.)

  Leaving the script in Shaffer’s hands, Hitchcock flew in and out of London during the first week of March to receive from Princess Anne an honorary membership in Britain’s new Society for Film and Television Arts, at a public ceremony held at Royal Albert Hall. Shaffer returned to Los Angeles for more talks in April, but he and Hitchcock were in sync and the rewrites went quickly and smoothly. A rare Hitchcock film without multiple writers, Frenzy was ready, astonishingly, for preproduction in London on May 23.

  Leaving his old Hollywood confreres behind, Hitchcock rounded up a British crew for Frenzy. Sound mixer Peter Handford had enjoyed a bonhomie, and long conversations about steam trains, with the director during Under Capricorn, but Handford was surprised to receive a call out of the blue from Hitchcock asking him to record Frenzy. “He’d taken the trouble to trace me,” Handford remembered. “I thought that was the most wonderful thing, for such a famous man to take all that trouble over a sound recordist.”

  Gilbert Taylor had once been a clapper boy at Elstree, before becoming the virtuoso cameraman of Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, and Macbeth. Hitchcock told Taylor he admired his camera work on those films, but before he took the job Taylor felt compelled to confess a youthful indiscretion: While shooting Number Seventeen, Hitchcock had subjected the clapper boy and others on the set to a barrage of pranks, including grabbing people and cutting off the ends of their ties. One day, in return, Hitchcock himself was lured into a darkened room and tackled by two people, who managed to cut off his tie and make their escape without his discovering their identities. Furious, the director convened cast and crew, threatening reprisals. No one stepped forward to confess. Now, Taylor did confess to pulling off that stunt with a friend. The cameraman noted Hitchcock’s surprisingly earnest reaction—along the lines of “Why pick on me?” But the director also said with a chuckle that it was a good thing Taylor hadn’t come clean at the time, for undoubtedly he would have fired him.

  Discussing the look he wanted for Frenzy, Taylor was cautioned that despite the gruesome story, Hitchcock had no desire to make a “Hammer horror.”* He wanted a realistic nightmare—“a day in Covent Garden.” Taylor, who grew close to the director during filming, thought Frenzy “was a boring film from his point of view. He didn’t pretend that it would be anything more than it was. I think he would have liked to have been on something better.”

  Hitchcock took his customary care assembling the cast, small parts and all. He had known the onetime revue artist Elsie Randolph, a longtime song-and-dance partner of the debonair Jack Buchanan (whom Hitchcock had nearly directed in a film), for donkey’s years; having played Elsie, the ship busybody in Rich and Strange in 1932, now she would play Elsie again—the receptionist at the hotel where Blaney and “Babs” have an afternoon delight.

  Jon Finch (as Blaney), Barry Foster (Rusk), Barbara Leigh-Hunt (Brenda Blaney), Anna Massey (Barbara “Babs” Milligan), Clive Swift (Johnny Porter), Billie Whitelaw (Hetty Porter), Alec McCowen (Chief Inspector Oxford), and Vivien Merchant (Mrs. Oxford) were all well-regarded performers in England. Only McCowen (who had appeared in A Night to Remember and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), Merchant (Oscar-nominated for Alfie), and Finch (the dour star of Roman Polanski’s bloody Macbeth) had any kind of profile in Hollywood, but their names wouldn’t do much to add to the film’s box-office prospects.

  Although McCowen had appeared in films before, he was best known for Shakespearean leads with the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was therefore surprised to be cast as a policeman; it wasn’t his sort of territory. Similarly, Massey rang up Hitchcock to ask if he had her confused with someone else. “Don’t worry,” he replied, “it’s only a mo-o-ovie.” He had to adopt his best salesman’s face for a long lunch with the skeptical Merchant, another thespian more accustomed to classical leads, assuring her that her part was most valuable. (Then, during filming, Merchant had so much fun getting into it that Hitchcock let her embroider her part with stage business and asides.)

  Only Finch, who really had to carry Frenzy with his acting and personality, offended Hitchcock. The book’s Blaney is quite a bit older than the actor, who had just turned thirty; La Bern’s Blaney is closer to fifty, a World War II veteran, in fact—which figures into the plot connections and relationships. Hitchcock wanted a younger Blaney to attract younger audiences, but Finch was too young to play a man who is supposed to have been a squadron leader in Suez. Hitchcock was blithe as always about such trifling inconsistencies. But that wasn’t the real problem with Finch.

  Before the filming began, Finch earnestly told reporters that Hitchcock seemed past his prime, that the actors might have to improvise a little to improve the quaint script. If that wasn’t bad enough, the actor also committed the mortal sin, for a man who had not yet proved himself, of giving Hitchcock a critique of his own dialogue. The director was not only flabbergasted; he was “very angry and he was thinking about recasting,” recalled cameraman Taylor. “That’s a fact.”

  In subtle ways and worse, Hitchcock never let Finch forget this transgression. More than once he pointedly stopped the actor before a take, asking if Finch was satisfied with his lines; when Finch once dared to suggest a minor word change, Hitchcock ceremoniously halted the photography until Anthony Shaffer could be found and consulted. Whenever Finch strayed by so much as a hem or haw, the script girl corrected him sharply.

  Hitchcock gave Finch no warmth or support on the set, so the actor always remained off bala
nce—just as Blaney is throughout the story. According to cameraman Gil Taylor, Hitchcock also “wasn’t very kind to him in terms of shooting close-ups or reverses.” If the cameraman suggested an over-the-shoulder shot to include Finch, Hitchcock was inclined to demur. “Of course,” Taylor recalled, “Jon used to come to me to say, ‘Where’s my bloody close-up mate?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, the Governor doesn’t want it.’ ”

  Hitchcock’s treatment of Finch was “an act of spite,” cameraman Taylor reflected, exacerbating the film’s aloofness toward Blaney—whom one critic has called “the least appealing hero” in the director’s oeuvre. But Blaney gets no warmth or approval in La Bern’s book, either, where he is every bit a loser, brusque and unpleasant even with his few friends. Although his ex-wife and girlfriend are murdered, in both film and book Blaney thinks only about himself; self-absorbed, he doesn’t even pause to mourn them.

  Up to a point, the film likes Rusk—and Barry Foster, the actor playing him—much better. “The real murderer is deliberately made so much more charming and agreeable than the rather unappetizing character he is framing for his crimes,” John Russell Taylor wrote about Frenzy, “that all one’s normal moral responses are thrown right off.”

  Before photography began, Hitchcock seemed ebullient, filming an entire production in London for the first time since Stage Fright. He and Alma got out to restaurants and plays; they went to see Ingrid Bergman on stage in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, and afterward went for drinks with her and other cast members. Hitchcock had everybody in stitches over what he’d said to Jessica Tandy on the set of The Birds. “Listen, Jessica,” he warned the distinguished actress, just before releasing the birds for the worst attack scene, “if one of them gets up your skirt, grab it! Because a bird in the hand …”

  The studio scenes would be shot at Pinewood in Buckinghamshire, the flagging command center of the J. Arthur Rank empire, where the James Bond series had been produced and Chaplin made his last picture—the London studio, where Hitchcock had shot Young and Innocent. His return to England was celebrated “in the nature of a triumphal entry,” in the words of John Russell Taylor, with a lavish studio banquet where he was seated beside art director Alex Vetchinsky from The Lady Vanishes.

  Each day by 8 or 8:30 A.M. during the filming in July and August, the director was driven in a Rolls-Royce through the front gates and directly onto the stage, within a few paces of his caravan, so he wouldn’t have to walk very far. “Good morning, old bean,” he’d invariably say, as he emerged with a smile, to assistant director Colin M. Brewer. “Is everything ready for me?” An honor guard of his staff awaited him: Brewer, Peggy Robertson, and cameraman Gil Taylor. Hitchcock always delegated liberally; besides policing the set, his assistant directors guided the second unit and minor bridge scenes.

  Brewer would do especially heavy lifting on this film, for Hitchcock now stayed in his trailer until the set had been arranged and lit, the actors briefed. There, sipping coffee, he went over the day’s plans with Brewer and Taylor, reviewing the shot list, which had been numbered and story-boarded. Only when everything was ready did he appear on the set.

  By this time, nearly everyone treated him with undisguised awe, as though he were a walking Madame Tussaud’s waxwork. His mystique was intimidating, but so was the man—slow, formal, pachydermous. “Hitchcock at work, for all his amiability and chattiness, is a remote and mysterious figure,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “hedged about with etiquette.”

  In order to cope with anxious actors, he had to summon the old warmth and sense of humor. “He would always before a take tell you some dirty schoolboy joke,” said Anna Massey, adding, “he did that to relax you because it relaxed him.”

  He saved his worst puns for one actor who couldn’t get his lines straight, and faltered during repeated takes. Hitchcock asked, “Are you a Catholic?”

  Yes, came the wary nod.

  “I also am a Catholic, so now together let us celebrate the Feast of the Enunciation.”

  Another nervous actress Hitchcock scolded with a curious phrase: “Genuine chopper,” he said.

  “Genuine chopper?” she repeated, baffled.

  “Real axe,” he explained ponderously. “Say it quick!”

  “Relax?”

  “That’s it, dear.”

  On one hand, Hitchcock felt at ease while making this run-for-cover film, away from Universal, back in the home of his youth and his heart. Yet he couldn’t summon much affection for Pinewood, and London had changed in upsetting ways. The contrast was never greater between the legendary public figure and the human being, freighted now with melancholy and infirmities.

  Asked by a reporter if he felt sentimental about returning to London, Hitchcock sighed. “One is preoccupied with one’s work,” he replied. “I get up at 6 A.M., come on the set at 7:45 and go home at 6:30. London is just work and a hotel room.” “Just work” put him in mind of his father’s profession. “No, my father was not a costermonger here. He was a wholesale cabbage buyer. He would buy acres of cabbage. Acres.”

  Everyone asked the same thing—even François Truffaut, who visited him on the set and wondered if Hitchcock was suffering pangs of nostalgia. No, the director replied. “When I enter the studios—be it in Hollywood or in London—and the heavy doors close behind me, there is no difference. A salt mine is always a salt mine.”

  Whenever he appeared in public, Londoners swarmed and Fleet Street wrote about him. Influenced by the French, and led by influential British film scholars such as Robin Wood (whose 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films rallied auteurists everywhere and proved nearly as important as Truffaut’s), the local critics had swung back in his favor—and there was certainly a nostalgia for Hitchcock and his films.

  The press flocked to the first day’s filming at Covent Garden, where as a young boy Hitchcock had followed his father around as he purchased and sold comestibles. The exploding flashbulbs seemed to take Hitchcock by surprise as he emerged from his Rolls-Royce. He glanced around, looking for familiar faces, but soon was basking in the attention—even posing and “directing” the extraneous lenses.

  “To anyone who would listen,” wrote Donald Spoto, “Hitchcock spoke of his childhood in old London, and of the Moroccan tomatoes available at Covent Garden in both 1901 and 1971, and of the citrus fruits from Israel, the grapes from Spain, the vegetables from California, and the special produce from all over the world.” According to Spoto, the director even spoke a little of his long-dead father; when an old man came up to say that he remembered William Hitchcock, the director showed a flicker of sadness.

  Mornings he was at his best, his most alert, and more work got done before lunch than after. Filming was tougher than writing, and it couldn’t be broken up by long lunches, afternoon naps, or screenings. He couldn’t take a few days off if he felt like it. As the days mounted, his energy sagged; starting at midday, Hitchcock would be tempted by orange juice and vodka.

  He professed to hate teatime—that late-afternoon break unique to the English workday—except that now he made it the excuse for an orange-juice-and-vodka break, shared with the people on the set he liked best, cameraman Taylor and Barry Foster. By the time the assistant director nudged him to say that teatime was over, his mood sometimes had dipped, and he’d say, “You direct it.” (Priding himself on his professionalism, though, he generally allowed himself to be coaxed back to his feet.)

  Hitchcock started off “meticulously,” recalled Shaffer, before losing steam. “Early on,” Anna Massey agreed, “he was concerned about every detail—clothes and colors and set dressings. But then he got slow physically. Off the set, the only conversation that seemed to interest him was about food—he taught me how to make a good batter—and later I realized that this was apt at a time when we were making a film so crowded with food.”

  As rough as he might have been on Jon Finch, Hitchcock was gentle and generous to others in the cast—especially the two actresses playing the murder victims. He liked Barb
ara Leigh-Hunt better, even though Massey had the bigger part. Leigh-Hunt, however, was the one with the particularly degrading scene, in which she is abused, her clothes ripped off, before she is strangled. Hitchcock cleared the set of everyone except a handful of crew members when that difficult scene was filmed. The repeated takes seemed as painful for Hitchcock as for Leigh-Hunt. “He was trying all the time to spare the girl’s modesty,” recalled Taylor, “because she didn’t like what she was doing, she didn’t like exposing her breasts.”

  Hitchcock seemed to almost dote on Barry Foster.* He supplied the actor with books about Neville Heath from his private library; the two had long talks about Heath, and Hitchcock even ordered him to curl his hair to resemble Heath. The director shared his storyboards to show Foster how individual scenes would be shot, and when Foster suggested a bit of unplanned blocking for his scene with Blaney’s ex-wife—he thought his character might wander angrily around the office, slamming drawers—Hitchcock accommodated the impromptu action.

  He fine-tuned Foster’s eerie performance right down to the film’s very last scene, when Rusk enters his flat dragging a heavy trunk in which he intends to dump another body, and is caught flat-footed by Blaney and the Chief Inspector. That scene wasn’t in La Bern’s novel, which ends with Blaney alone in the flat, bludgeoning a person he thinks is Rusk—actually Rusk’s latest victim, already dead. But Hitchcock’s instinct for rounding things out brought Blaney, Rusk, and the Chief Inspector together for a better ending.