April 18, 2025 • 66 mins
Here's a special episode from our friends at You Must Remember This. Hitchcock’s most iconic decade— a decade of Technicolor grandeur and peril inflicted on famous blondes—came to an end in 1964 with Marnie, a critical and box office flop which wounded Hitchcock’s ego and left him unsure how to move forward in a changing world. His four final films—Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot—are the result of his efforts to mix up his formula for an era in which he felt ripped off by James Bond and mourned the decline of the Golden Age stars.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hello Tim Harford here Today we're featuring an episode
from You Must Remember This. You Must Remember This is
the podcast dedicated to the secret and forgotten histories of
twentieth century Hollywood. Stories of sex, murder, institutional racism, bad men,
sad women, fascist gossip columnists, and much more. Their latest
(00:39):
season is called The Old Man Is Still Alive, and
it's about directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford
who got started in the Silent Era but were still
making movies in the psychedelic sixties. Keep listening for a
full episode of You Must Remember This, all about Alfred Hitchcock.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
And Jaska k Welcome to another episode of You Must
(01:29):
Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secrets and
or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I'm your host, Karna Longworth, and this is another episode
of our ongoing series The Old Man Is Still Alive.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
As Hollywood did No, I don't think so many years ago,
when I first started making pictures, of being in the
film business was a little bit disreputable. I hate rhymes
and pictures just as much as I do section and
old stories.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
I've forgotten exlusively.
Speaker 6 (02:10):
I've had such a good time in my life.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
It wouldn't bother me a bit if I diet at
any I.
Speaker 6 (02:14):
Think it's up to you, the younger fellas right now.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
That there is one thing that I hate more than
not being taken seriously.
Speaker 6 (02:20):
It's to be taken too seriously.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
We're being chilled by woman's lip and I'm still alive
to tell dale.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
In the mid nineteen fifties, over thirty years into his
directing career, Alfred Hitchcock shot to a new level of fame.
Much of this had to do with his television show
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, every episode of which was bookended by
appearances by Hitchcock himself, but it also had to do
(02:54):
with his movies, as simultaneously he entered into what many
would agree is the most spectacularly consistent, decade long stretch
of his career. Hitchcock made his first twenty five film
in England. He and his wife and frequent collaborator, Alma,
arrived in Hollywood in nineteen thirty nine. He insisted that
(03:18):
there was little difference between the British film industry and
the American one quote, if.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
You ask why do you like working in Ollywood? I
would say, because I can get home at six o'clock
for dinner.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
For much of the nineteen forties, hitch worked under contract
to mega producer David O'celznick. The first production of that partnership, Rebecca,
hadn't been a smooth ride. There had been much conflict
between Hitchcock and Salznick, but it had won the Best
Picture Oscar, the only one of Hitchcock's films to be
(03:57):
so honored. But by his final film for Salesnick, The
Paradigm Case in nineteen forty seven, Hitchcock had lost all
interest in fighting with the producer, who took over that
pick during post production. From then on, Hitchcock would act
as his own producer, although as we'll see, that didn't
(04:18):
necessarily protect him from studio interference. While the Selsnik era
included some future classics I'm Partial to Lifeboat and Notorious,
Hitchcock is better remembered for what came next, Beginning with
Strangers on a Train in nineteen fifty one. For over
(04:40):
a decade, Hitchcock cranked out one great film after another,
many of them high concept thrillers and stunning technocolor, including
Rear Window to Catch a Thief, Vertigo north By, Northwest
and more. In addition to gripping storytelling and incredible visual artistry,
(05:00):
these films were notable for their starry casts. Hitchworked repeatedly
with Carry grant Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart, and Grace Kelly,
but before this run ended, it was impossible not to
notice that Hitchcock's stars were aging out. Virtigo is considered
(05:21):
one of the greatest films ever made today, but in
nineteen fifty eight it was a box office flop, and
Hitchcock reportedly grumbled to friends that the problem was that
star Jimmy Stewart looked too old in it, and Kelly's
early retirement when she married the Prince of Monaco, which
(05:42):
we discussed at our Dead Blonde episode on Kelly, seemed
to Flummax Hitchcock as much as any other factor in
the rapidly changing Hollywood of the late nineteen fifties. In
the middle of this run came Psycho, a black and
white exploitation film, which, with its success and the controversy
it sparked, fundamentally changed Hollywood forever, not least by helping
(06:07):
to break down aspects of the production code that were
still lingering We've talked before about directors who had a
late career hits and then struggled to follow it up.
We've also talked about how the age of sixty was
often a demarcation point for our old man filmmakers when
things started to get weird. Hitchcock made Psycho when he
(06:32):
was sixty. Over the next decade and a half he
made six features, the most iconic of which was his
immediate follow up to Psycho, The Birds. Then came Marnie,
which is a transitional film in many ways, although maybe
none that Hitchcock would have chosen. He desperately wanted to
(06:52):
make it with Kelly, and when she declined to come
out of retirement, he cast his Birds star Tippi Hedron,
with devastating consequences to Hedron. Hitchcock's remaining four films, Torn Curtain,
topath As, Frenzy, and Family Plot are today amongst his
(07:13):
least scene and talked about. So today we will talk
about them, and also about how changes to the film
industry that took place in the nineteen sixties left Hitchcock,
who was then possibly the most famous film director in
the world, unable to seize on the momentum created by
his momentous hit Join Us, Won't You? For Part six
(07:39):
of The Old Man is Still Alive. More than any
other director we've discussed this season, Alfred Hitchcock embraced television.
That didn't mean he couldn't joke about it. Asked to
(08:01):
entertain at Lyndon Johnson's nineteen sixty five inauguration. Yes, that's
how famous Hitchcock was at this time. Hitchc compaired the
invention of television to.
Speaker 6 (08:12):
The introduction of vendor plumbing. Fundamentally, it brought no change
in the public sabbots. It simply eliminated the necessity of
leaving the house.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
By the time he said this, hitch had been coming
into his public's house via his TV show for ten years.
As much as the director was clearly firing on all
cylinders creatively for the second half of the fifties, it
seems undeniable that his presence on television enhanced his celebrity,
(08:48):
turning his movies into events in a way that they
hadn't been previously. This peaked with Psycho Paramount, where hitch
was under contract at the time. Thought so little of
the project that in order to make it, hitch had
to forego his fee and agree to finance the movie
(09:08):
himself in order for the studio to agree to distribute it.
Hitch ended up employing the crew from his own television
show and shooting on TV sound stages at Universal. Thanks
in part to its low budget, Psycho was insanely profitable,
no pun intended. It became the second highest grossing movie
(09:30):
of nineteen sixty, earning at the box office over ten
times its budget. The morning after the premiere of Psycho,
Lou Wasserman, who was Hitchcock's agent friend and then the
head of MCA Universal, the studio where the director spent
much of his Hollywood career, sent him a telegram asking
(09:51):
what will you do for an encore? Unusually for Hitchcock,
he didn't have a next project already lined up. He
was more shocked by the success of Psycho than anyone.
Speaker 6 (10:04):
Is this bonny piece of crop, he reportedly said, And
the money doesn't stop coming in, Possibly because he was
embarrassed by this new cash cow. Hitchcock soon sold the
rights to Psycho and his TV show to Universal, who
paid him in stock, making him the third largest shareholder
(10:28):
of the studio. He'd spend the rest of his career
making films there, Hitchcock was nominated for an Oscar for
directing Psycho. He didn't win. The film won none of
the four Oscars it was nominated for, and little did
anyone know at the time that this would be the
last of Hitchcock's films to be recognized. With so many nominations,
(10:53):
Hitchcock did not know that Psycho would be his last
opportunity for Academy recognition, but once the film struck out
on Oscar Night, his low opinion of that Body was confirmed.
They didn't like him clearly, and he didn't like them.
When the Academy finally gave him the Honorary Thalberg Award
(11:15):
in nineteen sixty eight, he gave what Peter Bogdanovich called
the shortest speech in Oscar history, greeting the crowd's standing
ovation by merely saying thank you and then walking off
the stage. After Psycho, hitch believed that he was on
the cusp of what he called a golden period. He
(11:38):
ended up finding his next film after hearing about two
separate stories of unexplained bird attacks. We talked about the
Birds and its star Tippy Hedron in our Erotic eighties
episode on Body double and Hedron's daughter, Melanie Griffith. You
may want to revisit that episode before you go any
(11:59):
further in this episode, but suffice it to say Hitchcock
discovered Hedron, molded her into his fetish object, repeatedly sexually
harassed her, and after Hedrin rejected him on the set
of Marnie, threw a fatal wrench in her career by
keeping her under contract and refusing to lend her to
(12:19):
other filmmakers. One irony here was that Hitchcock had made
a deliberate choice to cast an unknown actress in The
Birds because he wanted to prove that, in an era
in which movie stars had unprecedented power, he didn't need
a Carry Grant or a Grace Kelly, because hitch himself
(12:40):
was star enough. But when The Birds had failed to
perform as well as Psycho, he hedged his bets on
Marnie by casting one of the biggest stars in the
world at that moment, Sean Connery, who had appeared in
two James Bond films already. Marnie, in which Hedron gives
(13:00):
an astonishing performance as a woman dealing with multiple layers
of highly Freudian trauma, would be the last prestigious film
that would give this actress the chance to play a
leading role. It also ground Hitchcock's post Psycho momentum to
a halt. The Birds had been a commercial disappointment compared
(13:21):
to Psycho. Screenwriter Hunter recalled going to one movie theater
to see it, where the audience was flu mixed by
the film's inconclusive ending. But Marnie was an actual flop,
Hitchcock's first in ten years. Again, the ending was a problem,
but in this case, the real problem was that the
film spent most of its running time unraveling Marnie's psychosis
(13:46):
without suggesting within the narrative that Connery's character, who rapes
his wife on their wedding night, maybe needs to work
on his own shit. So when the film ends with
the couple enjoying an ostensible happy ending, even a nineteen
sixty four audience was a little what the fuck. Hitchcock
(14:08):
later acknowledged that this was his mistake, comparing Marnie's husband
to a necrophiliac and adding.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
O I'd say he's damned un healthy as a character.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
This was a painful flop too, because in so many
ways it served as examples of obsession gone wrong. Hunter
remembered that while making The Birds, his next movie was
all Hitch seemed to want to talk about. We discussed
Marnie on the sixty mile ride to and from location.
Were called Hunter. We discussed Marnie during lulls in the shooting,
(14:43):
and during lunch and during dinner.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Every night.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
We discussed Marnie interminably. Hitch wanted Hunter to write this
next film, but Hunter bristled at some of the director's ideas.
When the writer told the director that the idea of
scripting the scene in which Marnie is raped by her
husband on her wedding night disturbed me enormously, Hitch responded, Oh,
(15:11):
don't worry about that.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
That will be fine.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
During another conversation about the scene, Hunter reported that Hitch
told him Evan, when he sticks it in her, I
want that camera right on her face. Hunter persisted in
thinking that the rape scene was offensive, not because it
was a rape scene, but because it seemed out of
(15:40):
character for the Connery character. Hitch was unmoved by this argument,
and when Hunter turned in a version of the wedding
night scene with no rape, he was fired and replaced
by j Press and Allen, somewhat notorious for her anti feminism.
Press and Allen said she didn't see it as a rape,
(16:01):
but a quote unquote trying marital situation. And yet historians
who have studied press and Allan's contributions to Marnie have
cited elements including her introduction of animal imagery, planting the
idea that Marnie was being preyed on by her husband,
as well as her shaping of the rape scene itself
(16:23):
in a way that, to quote Tanya Mudleski, elicits the
feminist interpreter's sympathy for its trapped and caged heroine. Then
there's this passage from Peter Ackroyd's Hitchcock biography quote Hitchcock
told press and Allen of a recurrent dream he had
(16:45):
in which his penis was made of crystal, a fact
which he was obliged to conceal from Alma. Allan laughed
and told him that the obvious interpretation was that he
was trying to keep his talent separate and safe from Alma.
In addition to its shall we say, complicated sexual politics,
(17:09):
Marnie felt out of step with contemporary Hollywood, even to
some people involved in making the film one was Rita Riggs,
a costume designer, who described the movie as feeling frozen
in time. It's not clear on which movie Hitchcock began
(17:30):
drinking screwdrivers from a flask onset, but Ackroyd reports that
on Marnie, quote, Hitchcock himself was not well. He was
drinking more than ever and often fell asleep after lunch.
Ackroyd posits this may have been a contributing factor to
(17:52):
the sexual harassment alleged by Hedron and also by Marney
co star Diane Baker, who reported that once Hitchcock showed
up in her dressing room and kissed her on the mouth,
which made her so anxious that she had to see
a doctor. Wrote that at this stage, hitch was quote
(18:12):
simply behaving like an old fool and a drunken one
at that Jay President Allen, for her part, suggested that
Hedron over reacted quote I was there throughout all that time,
and the problem that Tippy people have talked about over
the years was not that overt, not at all. Hitch
(18:33):
was only trying to make a star out of her.
He may have had something like a crush on her,
but there was nothing overt. Nothing nothing. He would never
in one million years do anything to embarrass himself. He
was a very Edwardian fellow. What I will say here
is that Allan was not from the believe women generation.
(18:54):
On the contrary, the early sixties was not exactly a
golden age for women getting to collaborate closely with powerful,
famous filmmakers, and it was common for women who snagged
one of the few seats a mostly male table to
internalize misogyny and look down on other women who said
(19:16):
they felt they experienced sexism or worse from the men
responsible for hiring all of them. In nineteen sixty four,
the year Marnie was released, Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt
went to Hitchcock's New York hotel room to interview him.
Hitch drank several frozen dakeries that afternoon. Bogdanovitch recalled, this
(19:42):
most famous director in picture history had a number of
times admonished me with a slightly ominous you're not drinking
your drink, by which he meant my frozen dakri. Bogdanovitch recalled,
I had never had one before and rarely drank alcohol
of any sort. But his mischievous urging had resulted in
(20:06):
my becoming quietly smashed, and therefore not at all sure
that I hadn't missed some key sentence. Perhaps I was
too drunk to understand him. Polly, equally high, was now
squinting slightly at hitch By nineteen sixty four, Hitchcock was
more recognizable than any director had been in the history
(20:28):
of movies, thanks to his cameos in his films and
his weekly TV appearances.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
According to Bogdanovich.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
No other director also had so often been written off
by fashionable critics as having fallen into irredeemable decline. By
the end of the sixties, in Hollywood, Hitchcock was generally
considered over the hill. Much of that decline in reputation
had to do with Marnie, as well as his next
(20:57):
two films, Torn Curtain and Topaz. In nineteen sixty two,
while he was editing The burd Words, Hitchcock agreed to
sit down for a series of interviews with Francois Truffau.
This was the year, as Truffau would write later, when
(21:18):
Hitchcock was at the peak.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
Of his creative powers.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
There's only one place to go from a peak, though,
and that's down. In the book he compiled based on
their interviews and correspondence, initially titled Hitchcock but better known
as Hitchcock Trufa, Trufau writes, I am convinced that Hitchcock
was never the same of DORMONI under that its failure
(21:45):
costume considerable amount of confidence. A page later, he adds,
I am convinced that teach COCKO was not satisfied with
any of the films he made after Psycho. If Hitchcock
knowingly or otherwise was on the decline when he first
sat down with Truffau, the Frenchman was undoubtedly still on
(22:08):
the swing. The year he began interviewing Hitchcock, he released
one of the masterpieces of the era, Jules e Gim,
which came just three years after his directorial debut. The
Four Hundred Blows, helped launch the French New Wave. Truffeau
had moved on to filmmaking after spending much of the
(22:30):
previous decade as a revolutionary film critic who deliberately attacked
sacred French cows and was instrumental in developing the auteur theory.
Hitchcock biographer Peter Ackroyd claimed that Hitchcock had been known
to refer to the filmmakers of the French New Wave
or Enfrancis nouvelle Vague as nouvelle vagrants, but at the
(22:55):
same time, hitch was legitimately touched that a younger generation
had such an appreciation for his body of work. Hitchcock
was well aware that his films were collaborative, not least
with him his wife, frequent screenwriter and most trusted advisor, Alma,
but in conversation with one of the leading proponents of
(23:17):
our tour theory, according to Akroyd, it suited his purpose
to minimize their contributions. But after Hitchcock's death, considering how
Hitchcock had fit into the theory, Truffau considered an aspect
of auturism that had little to do with the creative
contributions of other members of the crew.
Speaker 6 (23:38):
All the interesting filmmakers, those who were referred to as
outs padique de cinema in nineteen fifty five before the
term was distorted, concealed themselves behind various characters in the
movies Hitchcock achieved abuted to a divorce in inducing the
public to identify with the attractive leading man whereas Hugekoki
(24:00):
himself almost always identified with the supporting rule the man
who is cuckoo, died and disappointed, the killer or monster,
the men rejected by others, the man who has no
right to love, the man who looks on without being
able to participate.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
In other words, an autour puts himself in the movie
one way or another, and Hitchcock did this literally. But
he also baked into his films his own insecurities and faults,
and then misdirected the audience. Don't look at me, look
at Kerry Grant. So many of his films explore what
(24:41):
are essentially b DSM dynamics, and it is certainly interesting
to consider the masochism of identifying with his most loathsome
characters as Hitchcock's key authorial fingerprint. So that summer of
nineteen sixty two, Trufa, who was staying at the Beverly
Hills Hotel, and his interpreter would ride with Hitchcock in
(25:04):
his limo over the hill to Universal Studios. They would
talk on the record all day long until six pm,
taking a break for Hitch's standard lunch of steak freed.
Though their initial encounters took place in nineteen sixty two
and you can watch them on YouTube. Truffau would become
a kind of confidante for Hitchcock for the next few years.
(25:27):
Over three years later, hitch wrote to Truffau to explain
that he felt he had been ripped off by Connery's
day job. He had realized, he wrote.
Speaker 6 (25:37):
Since James Bond in the imitators of James Bond, or
more or less making my wild adventure films such as
north By Northwest wilder than ever, I felt that I
should not try and go one better. I thought I
(25:59):
would return to the adventure film, which would give us
the opportunity for some human emotions. In an interview with Bogdanovich,
Hitchcock cited several examples of how the Bond films were
getting credit for things he invented. In addition to feeling
(26:19):
the crop duster scene in north By Northwest had been
retread in from Russia with Love, he also cited Arabesque
and That Man from Rio as other recent films that
copied him. He may have also felt some bitterness over
the bad reception of Marnie, a film in which he
did try to challenge the audience. Perhaps that guided his
(26:41):
thinking in putting together Torn Curtain, a film which its
credited screenwriter Brian Moore described as little else than a
Hitchcock compendium. When Moore told hitch that he thought the
film should either be scrapped or rewritten from scratch, he
was fired, and Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, the writers
(27:04):
of Billy Lyer, were brought in. Hitch began she before
the rewrites were finished, and the script remained what Ackroyd
referred to as a dead weight throughout the production. Certainly,
stars Paul Newman and Julie Andrews felt weighed down by
the material. Newman wrote Hitchcock a letter detailing his issues
(27:28):
with the script, which not only annoyed Hitchcock but damaged
his confidence. Because he had been convinced by the studio
to cast these top stars, and one of them was
now directly criticizing him, Hitchcock's fears were justified. During the shooting,
Newman recalled, we all wished we didn't have to make it.
(27:51):
Hitch swiftly lost interest too, and could be heard grumbling
about how much money these stars were costing. No wonder
when Newman asked the director about his motivation in one scene,
hitch responded.
Speaker 5 (28:06):
The all motivation is salary.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
Hitch also had a fatal falling out with composer Bernard
Herman during the course of making this film. According to Akroyd,
hitch wanted a more modern score than he had done
in the past. He wrote to Herman that he was
thinking about a new generation of moviegoers.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
This audience is very different to the one to which
we used to cater, he wrote. It is young, vigorous
and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognized
by almost all the European filmmakers, where they have sought
(28:51):
to introduce a bait and rhythm that is more in
tune with the requirement of the afore said audience.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Herman responded by saying that he didn't make pop music. Herman,
who had worked on eight Hitchcock films over the previous decade,
walked off the project and they never worked together again.
For what it's worth, truefo attributes to the firing of
Herman to Universal's desperation to keep up with the times
(29:24):
and not Hitchcocks. As Truefou wrote.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
One must be in Nindier that in sixty six in
Hollywood and Duswa it was the buctice of the film
industry to favoscos that would said as populovkods, the kind
of film music that could be done to in discotheqs.
In this sort of game, Elemen, a disciple of Wagner
and Stravinsky, was bound to be Hoduce, a loser.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Despite the presence of two stars who were very hot.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
In nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
In more ways than one, Torn Curtain lacks the free
zone between male and female leads that propels so many
Hitchcock films about couples. Julie Andrews was no Hitchcock blonde,
and in fact, this was the first of his films
without such an idealized product of his own fantasies in
about a decade. Torn Curtain begins with its stars in bed,
(30:23):
but for the rest of the film's two plus hours
it lacks sexual energy, and it's hard to tell what
is the chicken and what is the egg? Is this
movie not sexy because hitch wasn't that interested in it,
or was he not that interested in it because he
couldn't make it more about sex. Hitchcock's disinterest in Julie
(30:45):
Andrews is the obvious weak point of the movie. And
his confusion as to how to objectify her paradoxically leads
to Torn Curtain's most memorable scenes. In one, Newman finally
confides in his fiance something the audience has known.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
For a while.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Just the fact that the movie is structured this way
so that for its first two thirds, Newman, the most
gorgeous man in movies, is essentially sneaking around behind his
partner's back with the viewer is a sign that Hitch
himself seemed to think marriage to Mary Poppins would only
be tolerable through infidelity. But then, in this confession scene,
(31:27):
Hitch films the pair kissing in a way that highlights
and even eroticizes the glistening tears on her face. The
only other scene in the film that compares in terms
of erotic charge is when a female doctor trips Newman
so she can get him alone in her exam room
to talk about spy shit. She has caused an accident
(31:50):
that broke his ribs and treats his injuries while she
talks about how she's going to help him to safety.
Newman is bare, torsoed and prone in this scene, making
it empirically the sexiest moment in the picture and revealing
him as a sexual object in a way that hitch
seemingly can't when he's in the frame with Andrews. But
(32:14):
in both scenes, hitch suggests pain is a necessary precursor
for relief and release. When Bosley Crowther wrote in The
New York Times that Torn Curtain quote looks no more
novel or sensational than grandma's old knitted shawl, he seems
(32:35):
to have missed the movie's actual and substantial attractions. Torn
Curtain is a good, intense spy movie, the kind where
you are on the edge of your seat watching two
scientists scarling dueling formulas on a chalkboard. There is some
dated technology in it. The only way to explain why
(32:56):
hitchcock Y's is rear projection. In the scene in which
Newman reveals to the audience that he's a double agent.
Is that Hitchcock liked rear projection. But that scene is
immediately followed by an incredible and not at all old
fashioned sequence in which Newman and a woman he's just
met have to silently kill a Stossy agent who has
(33:18):
found him out. But what really must have stung was
that Crowther made his Grandma's old shawl dig In the
context of comparing Hitch's movie to the Bond film From
Russia with Love, Hitchcock felt he had been ripped off
by the Bond franchise and that specific film, and now
he was being perceived as a grandma compared to those
(33:41):
zeitgeisty movies of the sixties, and Crowther was hardly alone.
Times critic complained that though hitch had access to exciting
stars and a good screenwriter, he quotes Fritter's away their
talents in a limp spy story that has about as
much fizz as a can of warm beer. Diane Thomas,
(34:03):
writing in the Atlanta Constitution, shrugged tarn Curtin amounts almost
to a reminiscence of his earlier style, while allowing that
it is what audiences have come to expect from a
man who is a master of his art. As biographer
Donald Spoto put it, after a decade of successes, the
(34:24):
release of Torn Curtain was a disappointment for just about everyone.
It's safe to say that by this time Hitchcock was
demoralized by the state of the movies. He complained to Bogdanovich.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
Most films today are just pictures of people talking.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
So it was significant that when he saw Michael Angelo
Antonioni's blow Up, which became a surprise blockbuster around the
world in nineteen sixty six and nineteen sixty seven, Hitchcock
was inspired.
Speaker 6 (35:00):
These Italian directors are essentially ahead of me in terms
of technique, he exclaimed as himself rhetorically but also maybe literally.
What have I been doing all this time?
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Hitchcock was becoming woke to the new cinema just in time.
At the end of nineteen sixty seven, the top ten
grossing movies of the year would include The Graduate and
Number One, as well as Bonnie and Clyde, two Sydney
Poitier vehicles. Hitchcock had not yet made a film with
a black Star and yet another James Bond film, You
(35:37):
Only Live Twice. Hitchcock started envisioning a modern serial killer thriller,
complete with nudity and graphic violence. But this time it
was Universal who didn't want to get with the times.
After not having a single film on the annual top
ten for nineteen sixty six, Universal bounced back in nineteen
(35:58):
sixty seven with one title on the list, The Julie
Andrews starring thoroughly modern Millie. Though this was a period
musical set in the nineteen twenties, as we discussed last week,
for a brief time, period musicals which looked back at
the past in a couple of ways became irresistible cash cows,
even as films like The Graduate and Bunny and Clyde
(36:21):
were pointing at the future. In any case, Universal was
not in the business of making buzzy hits for young audiences.
They were in the business of keeping the old guard employed.
In fact, according to Henry Hathaway biographer Harold Poemainville, Universal
was the one studio apparently determined to hold out against
(36:46):
the youth revolution. In fact, they took the opposite tactic.
As a publicity stunt. They signed over the hill directors
like Mervin Lee Roy to development deals, gave them offices
on the lot, and let them spin their wheels, developing
projects that would never get made until the old timers
(37:06):
gave up and retired. Though Hitchcock was absolutely an old man,
he turned sixty eight in nineteen sixty seven, and though
his collaborators believed his glory days were behind him, he
had no intention to retire.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
But Universal refused.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
To let him make his serial Killer movie, which he
wanted to call Kaleidoscope Frenzy. According to Howard Fast, who
had been working on the Serial Killer script, Universal Quote
had belittled Hitchcock's attempt to do precisely what they had
been urging him to do, to attempt something different, to
catch up with the swiftly moving times. Instead, they asked
(37:48):
him to make an adaptation of a Leonoris bestseller, a
cold war thriller called Topaz. As hitch recalled to Bogdanovich.
Speaker 6 (37:58):
I was desperate for a subject and they asked me
to do it, so we took it on.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
So Topaz became not us Hitchcock's second cold war thriller
in a row, but his second film in a row
that he wasn't really excited about at all. It's possible
he couldn't have been excited about shooting anything at this stage.
As he told a French reporter around this time, I
dream of an IBM machane in which I didn't search
(38:31):
the screenplay at one end, and the film would emerge
at the other end, completed and in color. Perhaps because
of his enthusiasm for the Antonioni movie, Hitchcock decided to
assemble a cast of international actors for Topaz. Now, he
(38:51):
did give a black actor, Roscoe Lee Brown, a key role.
Some viewers might have recognized co star Michelle Picoli from
contempt Or The Young Girls of Roquefort, and the presence
of Brunette Beauty Corindor, a German bond girl, turned Tops
into a Howard Hughes fave, but for the most part,
(39:13):
the ensemble cast lacked recognizable star power. Tobe Has screenwriter
Samuel Taylor, who had also written Vertigo, believed that quote
one of the tragedies of Tobaz was that Hitchcock was
trying to make something as if he had Ingrid Bergmann
and Carrie Grant in it. Not only did hitch not
(39:34):
have stars of that caliber in this film, but the
way the movie is filmed seems to draw attention to
each actor's lack of star quality, from imperfect skin to
generic mid level handsomeness that can make it difficult to
tell some of the many white men in this movie
apart whether it was the material or absence of stars
(39:57):
that held his attention, or age or health or alcohol,
or some combination of the above. Hitchcock seems to have
had a hard time staying awake on set. Go away
for fifteen or twenty minutes and lie down if he could,
recalled actor John Forsyth, later Charlie of Charlie's Angels.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
Forsyth added, it.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Was sad to see there was one report that he
would doze off in his director's chair, and when this happened,
he made no attempt to reshoot what he had missed.
Surely he was not trying to insult the cast and
crew by dozing off. Old men doze off. But what
to make of the fact that he would sometimes leave
(40:42):
set during a shoot day to have lunch at Chasin's
telling anyone who suggested that he really should stay to
watch the scene.
Speaker 6 (40:50):
No, the actors already, the camera men already.
Speaker 5 (40:56):
If not, I'll cut it.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Watching Topaz, one wonders if anyone cut anything. The great
Hitchcock films feel meticulously constructed. Every image is there for
a reason. In his late films, particularly the very long
ones like Topaz and Family Plot, both of which are
over two hours, there is a lot of connective tissue
(41:23):
that feels extraneous. If you cut every shot in Topaz
of an actor parking a car getting out of the
car and walking into a building. Maybe it would be
ninety minutes. Hitchcock later characterized Topaz as a most on
happy picture to make. It was also an unhappy picture
(41:47):
to watch for many critics, though Manny Farber called it
pretty good entertainment, even he admitted there are a lot
of details that belong in a defunct movie drawer called
Hitchcock touches. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kale savely used
her review of Topaz as a kind of end of
(42:08):
the decade referendum on autourism and its tendency to celebrate
what she described as directors who go on making the
same picture in the same way year after year. In
a general sense, Kyle's attack here was sort of too much,
too late. Kaal had long been an antagonist to the
(42:28):
autor theory, at least as it was disseminated by what
were derisively called the Sarasites, but even the French critics
had by nineteen sixty nine largely either revised or abandoned autourism.
Four years earlier, Kaye Do Cinema's Gerard Gegin pressed his
colleagues to acknowledge that when you read the ka of
(42:52):
the time. Now, it's impossible not to be aware that
there are no criteria for the choices made. The politic
deserteur had become an elegant way of proclaiming that the
moon was made of green Geez. That doesn't mean that
Cale was totally wrong when she wrote that Topaz was
(43:15):
the same damned spy picture Hitchcock has been making since
the thirties, and it's getting longer, slower and duller. Certainly
Topaz is longer, slower and duller than any other Hitchcock
film that I've ever seen. But the idea that it
was same old, same old was the opposite of the
(43:38):
argument made in the equally scathing Time magazine review. At seventy,
wrote the unbylined critic, Hitchcock seems to have suddenly forgotten
his own recipe, even if he was checked out during
the shoot, hitch didn't seem fully prepared for how Topaz
would be received. He had shot a gun duel between
(44:01):
two characters which provoked derisive laughs at two previews before
he finally decided to scrap it. He complained Truffau that
the young American audience was too materialistic and cynical, to
get it. His French friend wasn't sure. Young Americans were
the problem. Topaz is not a good picture. Truthou acknowledged.
Speaker 6 (44:25):
The studio didn't like it, and neither did the publique,
the critics, nor even the hugecockions. The director himself wanted
to forget it and an imperative need to make up
for it. In May nineteen seventy, Truffau received a letter
from Hitchcock explaining why it was so difficult to find
(44:47):
a project that he wanted to make that Universal would
let him make. Quote in the film industry here there
are so many taboos. We have to avoid elderly persons
and limit ourselves to youthful characters, as so must contain
(45:09):
some anti establishment elements. No picture can cost more than
two or three million dollars. The caution, hitch went on
to explain, had to deal with the fact that studios
like Paramount and Fox were known to be losing an
enormous amount of money on expensive productions, and even the
(45:30):
low budget counter programming what hitch referred to as accidental films,
were hit and miss. It is becoming obvious. Hitch wrote
that nudity in itself is not a guarantee of books
office success. Perversely, Hitchcock's next film contained more nudity than
(45:54):
anything he had ever done. Hitchcock had told Evan Hunter,
screenwriter of The Birds, that he had moved that film
setting to northern California, even though the Daphne du Maurier
novel was set in the UK, because Hdge didn't want
(46:15):
to ever make a movie in England again. But then
he came across another novel, Arthur mc burns Goodbye Piccadilly
Farewell Lester Square, a London set story about a serial
killer of women and the wrong man who was sent
to jail for the killer's crimes. Though Universal had rejected
(46:35):
Hitchcock's similar concept a few years earlier, now they consented
to letting him make a film out of this novel.
The fact that it would be set in London and
in a rare change of pace for Hitchcock, shot on
location there, seemed to inoculate it somewhat for the Hollywood studio.
The fact that the story tracked a murderer who punishes
(46:57):
women for his own impotence, according to Ackroyd, meant that
the novel might have been written for Hitchcock. Hitch called
Anthony Schaeffer, then the author of the hit play Sleuth
and soon to be the screenwriter of several Agatha Christie adaptations,
to work with him on this adaptation.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
They wrote over the course of six weeks, their short
work days punctuated by lunches of steak and salad and
ending with cocktails promptly at four pm. Frenzy is Hitchcock's
first and only R rated film, and it's clear from
the first scene that something has changed. As a tour
guide is crowing about the lack of pollution in the Thames,
(47:41):
a female corpse floats down the river wearing just the
necktie she was strangled with. In the second scene, in
which we meet a man, Richard Blaney, wearing a tie
that looks just like the one on the corpse, we
also hear sexual slaying like tits and fingered. Later, there
(48:02):
is a shot of another actress's pubic hair that seems
totally gratuitous. And I haven't even mentioned the two on
screen rapes and murders. Oh, I didn't do it just
for the sake of showing nudes. Hitchcock insisted it was
necessary the rape scene as what it would be like
(48:25):
within the basic structure of a how catchem murder mystery.
We watch Blaney, played by Jim Fitch, behaves suspiciously but
not criminally, before learning that the real rapist killer is
his friend Bob Rusk, who presents as a dapper fruit
salesman at Covent Garden and with conspicuous charm and ostensible kindness,
(48:47):
earns the trust of both his victims and Blaney, who
is mistakenly arrested for Risk's crimes. Hitch referred to Rusk's
tie pin, which one of his victims dies clutching, as
the mcguffin of the movie, meaning the object which has
no importance other than to set part of the story
(49:08):
in motion and provide the excuse for set pieces. In Frenzy,
the tie pin does create an opportunity for two incredible sequences,
first the rape slash murder, in which actress Anna Massy
fights like hell to no avail, and then Frenzy's most
famous scene, in which Rusk, having realized that the corpse
(49:31):
he dumped into a potato delivery truck still has his
identifiable tie pin stuck in its fist, has to trail
the truck and ultimately dive in to save himself. The
potato sequence is the last great feat of conceptualization and
realization in Hitchcock's career. Though it runs for just about
(49:53):
two minutes, it required one hundred and eighteen setups to film,
and Massy, playing the corpse in the truck had to
wear a specially crafted modesty garment made out of potato slices.
The potatoes sequence contrasts nicely with a couple of scenes
set at dinner time at the house of the lead
(50:14):
detective investigating these murders. His wife is taking an exotic
cooking course, and Hitchcock has fun with the idea that
in a conventional marriage there is a kind of sadomasochistic
dance over dinner, which is itself a kind of sublimation
of sex. In a long monogamous relationship, many couples stop
(50:35):
having sex regularly, but they still have to eat, and
yet the detective, who is being served things he finds
on appetizing like quail, just longs for meat and potatoes,
itsself a kind of erotic joke, given that the evidence
of criminal kink has been hidden amongst the Russets. There's
(50:55):
even a shot in the potato truck sequence in which
Rusk has to wedge his head between the dead victim's
legs in order to retrieve his pin. The tie pin
may be a mcguffin, but away the entire movie is
a mcguffin in that it's an excuse for Hitchcock to
make perverse jokes about the nineteen seventies sexual climate with
(51:19):
several touches of food based surrealism. Talking to Bogdanovich, hitch
contextualized the decision to make the Innocent Man what he
called a loser and a non hero as a commentary
on the extinction of the kind of star he had
built his movies around in the forties and fifties. Quote,
(51:41):
after all, all beautiful profiles and wavy head leading men
have gone the way of all and some flesh. Hitchcock
wanted to cast Michael Kaine as the suave killer, but
Cain thought the character was quote really loathsome and I
(52:01):
did not want to be associated with it. Ironically, that
year he instead starred in Joseph Mankowitz's film of Sleuth
and Hitchcock, who cast cut rate Kine lookalike Barry Foster
never spoke to Kane again. Between this and the story
of hitchbreaking with herman and the making of Torn Curtain,
(52:23):
the director seemed to be in the not unheard of
old man phase of burning bridges. Though hitch was treated
as a conquering hero at London's Pinewood Studios, he found
making a movie away from his adopted home of Hollywood
to be drudgery. As he wrote in a letter.
Speaker 6 (52:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
During this period, hitch fell in his suite at the
Grand Hotel Clerages, which laid him up for a weekend.
But the bigger healthcareis came when Almah Hitchcock suffered a stroke.
She kept her spirits high, saying that if she had
to have a stroke, Claireag's was the best place in
the world to do it, But her arm was paralyzed
(53:22):
and her husband was deeply affected by this reminder of
Almah's mortality. Hitch continued slugging from his flask on frenzy,
and the day drinking, combined with his age, led to
more unplanned naps in the middle of filming scenes. When
he'd wake up, he'd ask the ad how the shot went,
(53:44):
and if the AD said all was well, Hitch would
give the order to print it and they'd move on.
Speaker 5 (53:52):
Hitch was happy with Frenzy, he told Bogdanovich.
Speaker 6 (53:56):
I like the extremes. It goes to funny and audible.
At the same time, the discomfiture of the villain, the
blend of the elements was dead to do, and I've
wanted to do that for a.
Speaker 3 (54:12):
Long time, but he was nervous about how it would
be received. When Truffau saw him at Can, the younger
man observed that the older man appeared aged, tired, and tense,
but after the movie screened, according to Traufoe, he looked
fifteen years younger. The change was due to the fact
(54:33):
that Frenzy had been very positively received at Can and
this wasn't festival fever. When it opened stateside, the reviews
were also very positive. Roger Ebert gave it four stars,
calling it a return to old forms by the master
of suspense. With Frenzy, wrote Penelope Gillot and The New Yorker,
(54:53):
we are nearly back in the days of his great
English films, which is astonishing for a man of his age,
and after the poorness of Torn Curtain. In the New
York Times, Vincent can be called Frenzy immensely entertaining and
the best acted Hitchcock film since north By Northwest. That said,
(55:15):
the same paper also published an essay by Victoria Sullivan
titled does Frenzy Degrade Women, which began with the sentences
I'm tired of going to movies and seeing women get raped.
It makes me so damned angry, and went on to
take Canby to task for seeming to enjoy the sexual
(55:36):
violence in the film. Probably mister Canby has never been raped,
Sullivan muses, then later adds that though Women's Liberation tells
us not to emulate males, I want to see films
about men getting raped by women.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
Crazy. I know Sullivan's phrasing is very of its time,
but the debate about rape on film is still ongoing
as far as Vincent Canby's taste goes. It's also worth
noting that in his review of Topaz, he called it
Alfred Hitchcock at his best. For his part, Hitchcock insisted
(56:13):
that he didn't personally get off on filming rapes. But
the way he articulated this defense almost betrayed the fact
that he had thought about it so much that it
no longer affected him. If I felt the same way
as the actor Barry Foster feels as a character, I'd
(56:33):
never get it on the screen. It's idiotic. In other words,
you get no kick out of making a thing like that,
not at all. No, it's a job to be done.
Speaker 3 (56:50):
In nineteen seventy three, to write his next and last film,
an adaptation of the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning,
hitch called Ernest Lehman, who had written North By Northwest
almost fifteen years earlier. Layman was shocked at how much
Hitchcock had changed in that decade and a half. He
had slowed down considerably. Layman recalled, he had none of
(57:13):
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.
Layman found it hard to believe hitch would actually make
it to production on the movie he was writing. Family
plot would get made, but it would take a while. First,
(57:35):
Hitchcock reported to the doctor with dizzy spells and was
outfitted with a pacemaker.
Speaker 5 (57:41):
Then, in April nineteen.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
Seventy four, hitch was feted at a Lincoln Center benefit gala.
The guests of honor seated alongside the old man were
True Foe and Grace Kelly. Hitch capped off the tribute
by telling the assorted masses, many of whom had paid
one thousand dollars a seat, they say that.
Speaker 6 (58:01):
When a man drowns, his entire life passes before his eyes.
I've had that experience tonight without even getting my feet wet.
Speaker 3 (58:16):
So it was not until early nineteen seventy five that
hitch turned to the problem of finding a cast for
family plot. He rejected the studio's suggestions, which were Eliza
Minelli and Jack Nicholson a missed opportunity if I've ever
heard one. Instead, Hitchcock managed to get Universal to agree
to cast Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris, who appeared that
(58:40):
same year in Nashville and the following year swapping bodies
with Jodie Foster in the original Freaky Friday. Duran's initial
impression of hitch hayes Bard with the whole fucking thing
when Durren once asked if he could do another take
so he could go deeper.
Speaker 5 (58:58):
Hitchcock responded, Bru, they'll never know.
Speaker 3 (59:03):
In belore Via, family plot is fun and would be
almost lighthearted, except that at times a sense of humor
is nearly as nasty as anything. In Frenzy, both William
Devane's criminal jeweler and Deren's slippery cab driver slash amateur
detective call their female partners bitch to their faces. Despite
(59:25):
the vulgarity. For the most part, family plot feels like
a two plus hour version of the early sequences in
an episode of Colombo or Moonlighting before the detective heroes
show up. For what it's worth, Colombo pre dates Family
Plot by five years. Trufau suggested that any positive reviews
(59:47):
were offered in fear of propagating unnecessary elder abuse. American
journalists interviewing hitch about the movie, he wrote.
Speaker 6 (59:56):
Many fistied finchep and respect, not because they liked Tias
fifty third film, but because I ductor, who is over
seventy years old, instead working enjoys with the mindb defe
AND's critical immunity.
Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
Hitchcock had been too fatigued to oversee most of post production.
Soon thereafter, Alma suffered another stroke, and this time she
was unable to bounce back, requiring full time care. Nurses
were brought in to help, and Hitch himself cooked dinner
a few times a week. They could no longer go
(01:00:33):
out to Chasen's, but gratefully the former hot spot offered takeout.
Hitch still went to his office on the Universal lot
every weekday, still had steak at lunch and a vodka
drink at four before heading home to bel Air. But
as Almah slipped away, he was unbearably lonely. He didn't
(01:00:54):
really have other friends, not anyone who he was as
close to as he was to his wife, his collaborator
and constant companion of fifty years. Hitch once told Bogdanovich
that he never talked to other directors except for maybe
murphyn Leroy when they ran into each other at the racetrack.
When Bogdanovitch reminded him that he had said this, Hitch replied,
(01:01:18):
that's pretty well true.
Speaker 6 (01:01:20):
Yes, I'm Alona, Ohays, Husban Even and Angrient. He started
working on making another movie and brought in writers to
adapt a spy novel called The Short Night. Truffau recalled
that hitch was talking about shooting on location in Finland,
(01:01:41):
but no one believed he would leave Almah at home
alone in her condition. Ernest Layman walked away when he
couldn't talk Hitch out of including a brutal rape. Layman
hadn't had faith that hitch would be up to making
family plot, and he had been wrong. But now it
seemed obvious that The Short Night was just a fantasy.
(01:02:02):
After Layman, Norman Lloyd was brought in, but at one
point hitch said to him, when not ever going to
make this picture because it's not necessary.
Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
In nineteen seventy nine, at the age of seventy nine,
Hitchcock was given the Air five Lifetime Achievement Award. He
sat sullenly through the ceremony, seated between Alma and Carrie Grant.
He gave his speech from the table.
Speaker 4 (01:02:30):
Adag commission to mention by name only four people who
have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragement and
constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor,
the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother
(01:02:55):
of my daughter Pat and the fourth is as fine
a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen,
and their name are Alma Reva.
Speaker 6 (01:03:13):
Truth O recalled that the evening left me and everyone
who attended it to the gloomy and gruesome memory, even
though Cbas, through a series of editing twigs, managed to
offer a face saving version of the ceremony on American television.
Alfred and almer Chkock appeared to be present, but the
(01:03:34):
soils were missing. They were ondly more alive than Anthony
Perkins stuffed mother in the Cellar of the Gothic Girls.
Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Just over a year later, Alfred Hitchcock was dead. Alma
died two years later. Next week we will discuss the
last phase of one of the most notoriously tyrannical directors
in Hollywood history. Join us, then, won't you? Thanks for
(01:04:13):
listening to You must remember this. The show is written, produced,
and narrated by Corina Longworth.
Speaker 5 (01:04:22):
That's Me. This season is edited and mixed by Evan Viola.
Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
Our social media research and production assistant is Brendan Whalen,
and our logo was designed by Teddy Blinks. If you
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(01:04:51):
And if you go to our website you Must Remember
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(01:05:13):
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Speaker 5 (01:05:33):
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Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
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We'll be back next week with an all new tale
(01:05:58):
from the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.
Join us, then, won't you? Good Night?
Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
That was You must remember this If you enjoyed the episode,
you can find the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Pushkin. Hello Tim Harford here Today we're featuring an episode
from You Must Remember This. You Must Remember This is
the podcast dedicated to the secret and forgotten histories of
twentieth century Hollywood. Stories of sex, murder, institutional racism, bad men,
sad women, fascist gossip columnists, and much more. Their latest
(00:39):
season is called The Old Man Is Still Alive, and
it's about directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford
who got started in the Silent Era but were still
making movies in the psychedelic sixties. Keep listening for a
full episode of You Must Remember This, all about Alfred Hitchcock.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
And Jaska k Welcome to another episode of You Must
(01:29):
Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secrets and
or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I'm your host, Karna Longworth, and this is another episode
of our ongoing series The Old Man Is Still Alive.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
As Hollywood did No, I don't think so many years ago,
when I first started making pictures, of being in the
film business was a little bit disreputable. I hate rhymes
and pictures just as much as I do section and
old stories.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
I've forgotten exlusively.
Speaker 6 (02:10):
I've had such a good time in my life.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
It wouldn't bother me a bit if I diet at
any I.
Speaker 6 (02:14):
Think it's up to you, the younger fellas right now.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
That there is one thing that I hate more than
not being taken seriously.
Speaker 6 (02:20):
It's to be taken too seriously.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
We're being chilled by woman's lip and I'm still alive
to tell dale.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
In the mid nineteen fifties, over thirty years into his
directing career, Alfred Hitchcock shot to a new level of fame.
Much of this had to do with his television show
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, every episode of which was bookended by
appearances by Hitchcock himself, but it also had to do
(02:54):
with his movies, as simultaneously he entered into what many
would agree is the most spectacularly consistent, decade long stretch
of his career. Hitchcock made his first twenty five film
in England. He and his wife and frequent collaborator, Alma,
arrived in Hollywood in nineteen thirty nine. He insisted that
(03:18):
there was little difference between the British film industry and
the American one quote, if.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
You ask why do you like working in Ollywood? I
would say, because I can get home at six o'clock
for dinner.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
For much of the nineteen forties, hitch worked under contract
to mega producer David O'celznick. The first production of that partnership, Rebecca,
hadn't been a smooth ride. There had been much conflict
between Hitchcock and Salznick, but it had won the Best
Picture Oscar, the only one of Hitchcock's films to be
(03:57):
so honored. But by his final film for Salesnick, The
Paradigm Case in nineteen forty seven, Hitchcock had lost all
interest in fighting with the producer, who took over that
pick during post production. From then on, Hitchcock would act
as his own producer, although as we'll see, that didn't
(04:18):
necessarily protect him from studio interference. While the Selsnik era
included some future classics I'm Partial to Lifeboat and Notorious,
Hitchcock is better remembered for what came next, Beginning with
Strangers on a Train in nineteen fifty one. For over
(04:40):
a decade, Hitchcock cranked out one great film after another,
many of them high concept thrillers and stunning technocolor, including
Rear Window to Catch a Thief, Vertigo north By, Northwest
and more. In addition to gripping storytelling and incredible visual artistry,
(05:00):
these films were notable for their starry casts. Hitchworked repeatedly
with Carry grant Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart, and Grace Kelly,
but before this run ended, it was impossible not to
notice that Hitchcock's stars were aging out. Virtigo is considered
(05:21):
one of the greatest films ever made today, but in
nineteen fifty eight it was a box office flop, and
Hitchcock reportedly grumbled to friends that the problem was that
star Jimmy Stewart looked too old in it, and Kelly's
early retirement when she married the Prince of Monaco, which
(05:42):
we discussed at our Dead Blonde episode on Kelly, seemed
to Flummax Hitchcock as much as any other factor in
the rapidly changing Hollywood of the late nineteen fifties. In
the middle of this run came Psycho, a black and
white exploitation film, which, with its success and the controversy
it sparked, fundamentally changed Hollywood forever, not least by helping
(06:07):
to break down aspects of the production code that were
still lingering We've talked before about directors who had a
late career hits and then struggled to follow it up.
We've also talked about how the age of sixty was
often a demarcation point for our old man filmmakers when
things started to get weird. Hitchcock made Psycho when he
(06:32):
was sixty. Over the next decade and a half he
made six features, the most iconic of which was his
immediate follow up to Psycho, The Birds. Then came Marnie,
which is a transitional film in many ways, although maybe
none that Hitchcock would have chosen. He desperately wanted to
(06:52):
make it with Kelly, and when she declined to come
out of retirement, he cast his Birds star Tippi Hedron,
with devastating consequences to Hedron. Hitchcock's remaining four films, Torn Curtain,
topath As, Frenzy, and Family Plot are today amongst his
(07:13):
least scene and talked about. So today we will talk
about them, and also about how changes to the film
industry that took place in the nineteen sixties left Hitchcock,
who was then possibly the most famous film director in
the world, unable to seize on the momentum created by
his momentous hit Join Us, Won't You? For Part six
(07:39):
of The Old Man is Still Alive. More than any
other director we've discussed this season, Alfred Hitchcock embraced television.
That didn't mean he couldn't joke about it. Asked to
(08:01):
entertain at Lyndon Johnson's nineteen sixty five inauguration. Yes, that's
how famous Hitchcock was at this time. Hitchc compaired the
invention of television to.
Speaker 6 (08:12):
The introduction of vendor plumbing. Fundamentally, it brought no change
in the public sabbots. It simply eliminated the necessity of
leaving the house.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
By the time he said this, hitch had been coming
into his public's house via his TV show for ten years.
As much as the director was clearly firing on all
cylinders creatively for the second half of the fifties, it
seems undeniable that his presence on television enhanced his celebrity,
(08:48):
turning his movies into events in a way that they
hadn't been previously. This peaked with Psycho Paramount, where hitch
was under contract at the time. Thought so little of
the project that in order to make it, hitch had
to forego his fee and agree to finance the movie
(09:08):
himself in order for the studio to agree to distribute it.
Hitch ended up employing the crew from his own television
show and shooting on TV sound stages at Universal. Thanks
in part to its low budget, Psycho was insanely profitable,
no pun intended. It became the second highest grossing movie
(09:30):
of nineteen sixty, earning at the box office over ten
times its budget. The morning after the premiere of Psycho,
Lou Wasserman, who was Hitchcock's agent friend and then the
head of MCA Universal, the studio where the director spent
much of his Hollywood career, sent him a telegram asking
(09:51):
what will you do for an encore? Unusually for Hitchcock,
he didn't have a next project already lined up. He
was more shocked by the success of Psycho than anyone.
Speaker 6 (10:04):
Is this bonny piece of crop, he reportedly said, And
the money doesn't stop coming in, Possibly because he was
embarrassed by this new cash cow. Hitchcock soon sold the
rights to Psycho and his TV show to Universal, who
paid him in stock, making him the third largest shareholder
(10:28):
of the studio. He'd spend the rest of his career
making films there, Hitchcock was nominated for an Oscar for
directing Psycho. He didn't win. The film won none of
the four Oscars it was nominated for, and little did
anyone know at the time that this would be the
last of Hitchcock's films to be recognized. With so many nominations,
(10:53):
Hitchcock did not know that Psycho would be his last
opportunity for Academy recognition, but once the film struck out
on Oscar Night, his low opinion of that Body was confirmed.
They didn't like him clearly, and he didn't like them.
When the Academy finally gave him the Honorary Thalberg Award
(11:15):
in nineteen sixty eight, he gave what Peter Bogdanovich called
the shortest speech in Oscar history, greeting the crowd's standing
ovation by merely saying thank you and then walking off
the stage. After Psycho, hitch believed that he was on
the cusp of what he called a golden period. He
(11:38):
ended up finding his next film after hearing about two
separate stories of unexplained bird attacks. We talked about the
Birds and its star Tippy Hedron in our Erotic eighties
episode on Body double and Hedron's daughter, Melanie Griffith. You
may want to revisit that episode before you go any
(11:59):
further in this episode, but suffice it to say Hitchcock
discovered Hedron, molded her into his fetish object, repeatedly sexually
harassed her, and after Hedrin rejected him on the set
of Marnie, threw a fatal wrench in her career by
keeping her under contract and refusing to lend her to
(12:19):
other filmmakers. One irony here was that Hitchcock had made
a deliberate choice to cast an unknown actress in The
Birds because he wanted to prove that, in an era
in which movie stars had unprecedented power, he didn't need
a Carry Grant or a Grace Kelly, because hitch himself
(12:40):
was star enough. But when The Birds had failed to
perform as well as Psycho, he hedged his bets on
Marnie by casting one of the biggest stars in the
world at that moment, Sean Connery, who had appeared in
two James Bond films already. Marnie, in which Hedron gives
(13:00):
an astonishing performance as a woman dealing with multiple layers
of highly Freudian trauma, would be the last prestigious film
that would give this actress the chance to play a
leading role. It also ground Hitchcock's post Psycho momentum to
a halt. The Birds had been a commercial disappointment compared
(13:21):
to Psycho. Screenwriter Hunter recalled going to one movie theater
to see it, where the audience was flu mixed by
the film's inconclusive ending. But Marnie was an actual flop,
Hitchcock's first in ten years. Again, the ending was a problem,
but in this case, the real problem was that the
film spent most of its running time unraveling Marnie's psychosis
(13:46):
without suggesting within the narrative that Connery's character, who rapes
his wife on their wedding night, maybe needs to work
on his own shit. So when the film ends with
the couple enjoying an ostensible happy ending, even a nineteen
sixty four audience was a little what the fuck. Hitchcock
(14:08):
later acknowledged that this was his mistake, comparing Marnie's husband
to a necrophiliac and adding.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
O I'd say he's damned un healthy as a character.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
This was a painful flop too, because in so many
ways it served as examples of obsession gone wrong. Hunter
remembered that while making The Birds, his next movie was
all Hitch seemed to want to talk about. We discussed
Marnie on the sixty mile ride to and from location.
Were called Hunter. We discussed Marnie during lulls in the shooting,
(14:43):
and during lunch and during dinner.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Every night.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
We discussed Marnie interminably. Hitch wanted Hunter to write this
next film, but Hunter bristled at some of the director's ideas.
When the writer told the director that the idea of
scripting the scene in which Marnie is raped by her
husband on her wedding night disturbed me enormously, Hitch responded, Oh,
(15:11):
don't worry about that.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
That will be fine.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
During another conversation about the scene, Hunter reported that Hitch
told him Evan, when he sticks it in her, I
want that camera right on her face. Hunter persisted in
thinking that the rape scene was offensive, not because it
was a rape scene, but because it seemed out of
(15:40):
character for the Connery character. Hitch was unmoved by this argument,
and when Hunter turned in a version of the wedding
night scene with no rape, he was fired and replaced
by j Press and Allen, somewhat notorious for her anti feminism.
Press and Allen said she didn't see it as a rape,
(16:01):
but a quote unquote trying marital situation. And yet historians
who have studied press and Allan's contributions to Marnie have
cited elements including her introduction of animal imagery, planting the
idea that Marnie was being preyed on by her husband,
as well as her shaping of the rape scene itself
(16:23):
in a way that, to quote Tanya Mudleski, elicits the
feminist interpreter's sympathy for its trapped and caged heroine. Then
there's this passage from Peter Ackroyd's Hitchcock biography quote Hitchcock
told press and Allen of a recurrent dream he had
(16:45):
in which his penis was made of crystal, a fact
which he was obliged to conceal from Alma. Allan laughed
and told him that the obvious interpretation was that he
was trying to keep his talent separate and safe from Alma.
In addition to its shall we say, complicated sexual politics,
(17:09):
Marnie felt out of step with contemporary Hollywood, even to
some people involved in making the film one was Rita Riggs,
a costume designer, who described the movie as feeling frozen
in time. It's not clear on which movie Hitchcock began
(17:30):
drinking screwdrivers from a flask onset, but Ackroyd reports that
on Marnie, quote, Hitchcock himself was not well. He was
drinking more than ever and often fell asleep after lunch.
Ackroyd posits this may have been a contributing factor to
(17:52):
the sexual harassment alleged by Hedron and also by Marney
co star Diane Baker, who reported that once Hitchcock showed
up in her dressing room and kissed her on the mouth,
which made her so anxious that she had to see
a doctor. Wrote that at this stage, hitch was quote
(18:12):
simply behaving like an old fool and a drunken one
at that Jay President Allen, for her part, suggested that
Hedron over reacted quote I was there throughout all that time,
and the problem that Tippy people have talked about over
the years was not that overt, not at all. Hitch
(18:33):
was only trying to make a star out of her.
He may have had something like a crush on her,
but there was nothing overt. Nothing nothing. He would never
in one million years do anything to embarrass himself. He
was a very Edwardian fellow. What I will say here
is that Allan was not from the believe women generation.
(18:54):
On the contrary, the early sixties was not exactly a
golden age for women getting to collaborate closely with powerful,
famous filmmakers, and it was common for women who snagged
one of the few seats a mostly male table to
internalize misogyny and look down on other women who said
(19:16):
they felt they experienced sexism or worse from the men
responsible for hiring all of them. In nineteen sixty four,
the year Marnie was released, Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt
went to Hitchcock's New York hotel room to interview him.
Hitch drank several frozen dakeries that afternoon. Bogdanovitch recalled, this
(19:42):
most famous director in picture history had a number of
times admonished me with a slightly ominous you're not drinking
your drink, by which he meant my frozen dakri. Bogdanovitch recalled,
I had never had one before and rarely drank alcohol
of any sort. But his mischievous urging had resulted in
(20:06):
my becoming quietly smashed, and therefore not at all sure
that I hadn't missed some key sentence. Perhaps I was
too drunk to understand him. Polly, equally high, was now
squinting slightly at hitch By nineteen sixty four, Hitchcock was
more recognizable than any director had been in the history
(20:28):
of movies, thanks to his cameos in his films and
his weekly TV appearances.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
According to Bogdanovich.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
No other director also had so often been written off
by fashionable critics as having fallen into irredeemable decline. By
the end of the sixties, in Hollywood, Hitchcock was generally
considered over the hill. Much of that decline in reputation
had to do with Marnie, as well as his next
(20:57):
two films, Torn Curtain and Topaz. In nineteen sixty two,
while he was editing The burd Words, Hitchcock agreed to
sit down for a series of interviews with Francois Truffau.
This was the year, as Truffau would write later, when
(21:18):
Hitchcock was at the peak.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
Of his creative powers.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
There's only one place to go from a peak, though,
and that's down. In the book he compiled based on
their interviews and correspondence, initially titled Hitchcock but better known
as Hitchcock Trufa, Trufau writes, I am convinced that Hitchcock
was never the same of DORMONI under that its failure
(21:45):
costume considerable amount of confidence. A page later, he adds,
I am convinced that teach COCKO was not satisfied with
any of the films he made after Psycho. If Hitchcock
knowingly or otherwise was on the decline when he first
sat down with Truffau, the Frenchman was undoubtedly still on
(22:08):
the swing. The year he began interviewing Hitchcock, he released
one of the masterpieces of the era, Jules e Gim,
which came just three years after his directorial debut. The
Four Hundred Blows, helped launch the French New Wave. Truffeau
had moved on to filmmaking after spending much of the
(22:30):
previous decade as a revolutionary film critic who deliberately attacked
sacred French cows and was instrumental in developing the auteur theory.
Hitchcock biographer Peter Ackroyd claimed that Hitchcock had been known
to refer to the filmmakers of the French New Wave
or Enfrancis nouvelle Vague as nouvelle vagrants, but at the
(22:55):
same time, hitch was legitimately touched that a younger generation
had such an appreciation for his body of work. Hitchcock
was well aware that his films were collaborative, not least
with him his wife, frequent screenwriter and most trusted advisor, Alma,
but in conversation with one of the leading proponents of
(23:17):
our tour theory, according to Akroyd, it suited his purpose
to minimize their contributions. But after Hitchcock's death, considering how
Hitchcock had fit into the theory, Truffau considered an aspect
of auturism that had little to do with the creative
contributions of other members of the crew.
Speaker 6 (23:38):
All the interesting filmmakers, those who were referred to as
outs padique de cinema in nineteen fifty five before the
term was distorted, concealed themselves behind various characters in the
movies Hitchcock achieved abuted to a divorce in inducing the
public to identify with the attractive leading man whereas Hugekoki
(24:00):
himself almost always identified with the supporting rule the man
who is cuckoo, died and disappointed, the killer or monster,
the men rejected by others, the man who has no
right to love, the man who looks on without being
able to participate.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
In other words, an autour puts himself in the movie
one way or another, and Hitchcock did this literally. But
he also baked into his films his own insecurities and faults,
and then misdirected the audience. Don't look at me, look
at Kerry Grant. So many of his films explore what
(24:41):
are essentially b DSM dynamics, and it is certainly interesting
to consider the masochism of identifying with his most loathsome
characters as Hitchcock's key authorial fingerprint. So that summer of
nineteen sixty two, Trufa, who was staying at the Beverly
Hills Hotel, and his interpreter would ride with Hitchcock in
(25:04):
his limo over the hill to Universal Studios. They would
talk on the record all day long until six pm,
taking a break for Hitch's standard lunch of steak freed.
Though their initial encounters took place in nineteen sixty two
and you can watch them on YouTube. Truffau would become
a kind of confidante for Hitchcock for the next few years.
(25:27):
Over three years later, hitch wrote to Truffau to explain
that he felt he had been ripped off by Connery's
day job. He had realized, he wrote.
Speaker 6 (25:37):
Since James Bond in the imitators of James Bond, or
more or less making my wild adventure films such as
north By Northwest wilder than ever, I felt that I
should not try and go one better. I thought I
(25:59):
would return to the adventure film, which would give us
the opportunity for some human emotions. In an interview with Bogdanovich,
Hitchcock cited several examples of how the Bond films were
getting credit for things he invented. In addition to feeling
(26:19):
the crop duster scene in north By Northwest had been
retread in from Russia with Love, he also cited Arabesque
and That Man from Rio as other recent films that
copied him. He may have also felt some bitterness over
the bad reception of Marnie, a film in which he
did try to challenge the audience. Perhaps that guided his
(26:41):
thinking in putting together Torn Curtain, a film which its
credited screenwriter Brian Moore described as little else than a
Hitchcock compendium. When Moore told hitch that he thought the
film should either be scrapped or rewritten from scratch, he
was fired, and Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, the writers
(27:04):
of Billy Lyer, were brought in. Hitch began she before
the rewrites were finished, and the script remained what Ackroyd
referred to as a dead weight throughout the production. Certainly,
stars Paul Newman and Julie Andrews felt weighed down by
the material. Newman wrote Hitchcock a letter detailing his issues
(27:28):
with the script, which not only annoyed Hitchcock but damaged
his confidence. Because he had been convinced by the studio
to cast these top stars, and one of them was
now directly criticizing him, Hitchcock's fears were justified. During the shooting,
Newman recalled, we all wished we didn't have to make it.
(27:51):
Hitch swiftly lost interest too, and could be heard grumbling
about how much money these stars were costing. No wonder
when Newman asked the director about his motivation in one scene,
hitch responded.
Speaker 5 (28:06):
The all motivation is salary.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
Hitch also had a fatal falling out with composer Bernard
Herman during the course of making this film. According to Akroyd,
hitch wanted a more modern score than he had done
in the past. He wrote to Herman that he was
thinking about a new generation of moviegoers.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
This audience is very different to the one to which
we used to cater, he wrote. It is young, vigorous
and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognized
by almost all the European filmmakers, where they have sought
(28:51):
to introduce a bait and rhythm that is more in
tune with the requirement of the afore said audience.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Herman responded by saying that he didn't make pop music. Herman,
who had worked on eight Hitchcock films over the previous decade,
walked off the project and they never worked together again.
For what it's worth, truefo attributes to the firing of
Herman to Universal's desperation to keep up with the times
(29:24):
and not Hitchcocks. As Truefou wrote.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
One must be in Nindier that in sixty six in
Hollywood and Duswa it was the buctice of the film
industry to favoscos that would said as populovkods, the kind
of film music that could be done to in discotheqs.
In this sort of game, Elemen, a disciple of Wagner
and Stravinsky, was bound to be Hoduce, a loser.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Despite the presence of two stars who were very hot.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
In nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
In more ways than one, Torn Curtain lacks the free
zone between male and female leads that propels so many
Hitchcock films about couples. Julie Andrews was no Hitchcock blonde,
and in fact, this was the first of his films
without such an idealized product of his own fantasies in
about a decade. Torn Curtain begins with its stars in bed,
(30:23):
but for the rest of the film's two plus hours
it lacks sexual energy, and it's hard to tell what
is the chicken and what is the egg? Is this
movie not sexy because hitch wasn't that interested in it,
or was he not that interested in it because he
couldn't make it more about sex. Hitchcock's disinterest in Julie
(30:45):
Andrews is the obvious weak point of the movie. And
his confusion as to how to objectify her paradoxically leads
to Torn Curtain's most memorable scenes. In one, Newman finally
confides in his fiance something the audience has known.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
For a while.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Just the fact that the movie is structured this way
so that for its first two thirds, Newman, the most
gorgeous man in movies, is essentially sneaking around behind his
partner's back with the viewer is a sign that Hitch
himself seemed to think marriage to Mary Poppins would only
be tolerable through infidelity. But then, in this confession scene,
(31:27):
Hitch films the pair kissing in a way that highlights
and even eroticizes the glistening tears on her face. The
only other scene in the film that compares in terms
of erotic charge is when a female doctor trips Newman
so she can get him alone in her exam room
to talk about spy shit. She has caused an accident
(31:50):
that broke his ribs and treats his injuries while she
talks about how she's going to help him to safety.
Newman is bare, torsoed and prone in this scene, making
it empirically the sexiest moment in the picture and revealing
him as a sexual object in a way that hitch
seemingly can't when he's in the frame with Andrews. But
(32:14):
in both scenes, hitch suggests pain is a necessary precursor
for relief and release. When Bosley Crowther wrote in The
New York Times that Torn Curtain quote looks no more
novel or sensational than grandma's old knitted shawl, he seems
(32:35):
to have missed the movie's actual and substantial attractions. Torn
Curtain is a good, intense spy movie, the kind where
you are on the edge of your seat watching two
scientists scarling dueling formulas on a chalkboard. There is some
dated technology in it. The only way to explain why
(32:56):
hitchcock Y's is rear projection. In the scene in which
Newman reveals to the audience that he's a double agent.
Is that Hitchcock liked rear projection. But that scene is
immediately followed by an incredible and not at all old
fashioned sequence in which Newman and a woman he's just
met have to silently kill a Stossy agent who has
(33:18):
found him out. But what really must have stung was
that Crowther made his Grandma's old shawl dig In the
context of comparing Hitch's movie to the Bond film From
Russia with Love, Hitchcock felt he had been ripped off
by the Bond franchise and that specific film, and now
he was being perceived as a grandma compared to those
(33:41):
zeitgeisty movies of the sixties, and Crowther was hardly alone.
Times critic complained that though hitch had access to exciting
stars and a good screenwriter, he quotes Fritter's away their
talents in a limp spy story that has about as
much fizz as a can of warm beer. Diane Thomas,
(34:03):
writing in the Atlanta Constitution, shrugged tarn Curtin amounts almost
to a reminiscence of his earlier style, while allowing that
it is what audiences have come to expect from a
man who is a master of his art. As biographer
Donald Spoto put it, after a decade of successes, the
(34:24):
release of Torn Curtain was a disappointment for just about everyone.
It's safe to say that by this time Hitchcock was
demoralized by the state of the movies. He complained to Bogdanovich.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
Most films today are just pictures of people talking.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
So it was significant that when he saw Michael Angelo
Antonioni's blow Up, which became a surprise blockbuster around the
world in nineteen sixty six and nineteen sixty seven, Hitchcock
was inspired.
Speaker 6 (35:00):
These Italian directors are essentially ahead of me in terms
of technique, he exclaimed as himself rhetorically but also maybe literally.
What have I been doing all this time?
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Hitchcock was becoming woke to the new cinema just in time.
At the end of nineteen sixty seven, the top ten
grossing movies of the year would include The Graduate and
Number One, as well as Bonnie and Clyde, two Sydney
Poitier vehicles. Hitchcock had not yet made a film with
a black Star and yet another James Bond film, You
(35:37):
Only Live Twice. Hitchcock started envisioning a modern serial killer thriller,
complete with nudity and graphic violence. But this time it
was Universal who didn't want to get with the times.
After not having a single film on the annual top
ten for nineteen sixty six, Universal bounced back in nineteen
(35:58):
sixty seven with one title on the list, The Julie
Andrews starring thoroughly modern Millie. Though this was a period
musical set in the nineteen twenties, as we discussed last week,
for a brief time, period musicals which looked back at
the past in a couple of ways became irresistible cash cows,
even as films like The Graduate and Bunny and Clyde
(36:21):
were pointing at the future. In any case, Universal was
not in the business of making buzzy hits for young audiences.
They were in the business of keeping the old guard employed.
In fact, according to Henry Hathaway biographer Harold Poemainville, Universal
was the one studio apparently determined to hold out against
(36:46):
the youth revolution. In fact, they took the opposite tactic.
As a publicity stunt. They signed over the hill directors
like Mervin Lee Roy to development deals, gave them offices
on the lot, and let them spin their wheels, developing
projects that would never get made until the old timers
(37:06):
gave up and retired. Though Hitchcock was absolutely an old man,
he turned sixty eight in nineteen sixty seven, and though
his collaborators believed his glory days were behind him, he
had no intention to retire.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
But Universal refused.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
To let him make his serial Killer movie, which he
wanted to call Kaleidoscope Frenzy. According to Howard Fast, who
had been working on the Serial Killer script, Universal Quote
had belittled Hitchcock's attempt to do precisely what they had
been urging him to do, to attempt something different, to
catch up with the swiftly moving times. Instead, they asked
(37:48):
him to make an adaptation of a Leonoris bestseller, a
cold war thriller called Topaz. As hitch recalled to Bogdanovich.
Speaker 6 (37:58):
I was desperate for a subject and they asked me
to do it, so we took it on.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
So Topaz became not us Hitchcock's second cold war thriller
in a row, but his second film in a row
that he wasn't really excited about at all. It's possible
he couldn't have been excited about shooting anything at this stage.
As he told a French reporter around this time, I
dream of an IBM machane in which I didn't search
(38:31):
the screenplay at one end, and the film would emerge
at the other end, completed and in color. Perhaps because
of his enthusiasm for the Antonioni movie, Hitchcock decided to
assemble a cast of international actors for Topaz. Now, he
(38:51):
did give a black actor, Roscoe Lee Brown, a key role.
Some viewers might have recognized co star Michelle Picoli from
contempt Or The Young Girls of Roquefort, and the presence
of Brunette Beauty Corindor, a German bond girl, turned Tops
into a Howard Hughes fave, but for the most part,
(39:13):
the ensemble cast lacked recognizable star power. Tobe Has screenwriter
Samuel Taylor, who had also written Vertigo, believed that quote
one of the tragedies of Tobaz was that Hitchcock was
trying to make something as if he had Ingrid Bergmann
and Carrie Grant in it. Not only did hitch not
(39:34):
have stars of that caliber in this film, but the
way the movie is filmed seems to draw attention to
each actor's lack of star quality, from imperfect skin to
generic mid level handsomeness that can make it difficult to
tell some of the many white men in this movie
apart whether it was the material or absence of stars
(39:57):
that held his attention, or age or health or alcohol,
or some combination of the above. Hitchcock seems to have
had a hard time staying awake on set. Go away
for fifteen or twenty minutes and lie down if he could,
recalled actor John Forsyth, later Charlie of Charlie's Angels.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
Forsyth added, it.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Was sad to see there was one report that he
would doze off in his director's chair, and when this happened,
he made no attempt to reshoot what he had missed.
Surely he was not trying to insult the cast and
crew by dozing off. Old men doze off. But what
to make of the fact that he would sometimes leave
(40:42):
set during a shoot day to have lunch at Chasin's
telling anyone who suggested that he really should stay to
watch the scene.
Speaker 6 (40:50):
No, the actors already, the camera men already.
Speaker 5 (40:56):
If not, I'll cut it.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Watching Topaz, one wonders if anyone cut anything. The great
Hitchcock films feel meticulously constructed. Every image is there for
a reason. In his late films, particularly the very long
ones like Topaz and Family Plot, both of which are
over two hours, there is a lot of connective tissue
(41:23):
that feels extraneous. If you cut every shot in Topaz
of an actor parking a car getting out of the
car and walking into a building. Maybe it would be
ninety minutes. Hitchcock later characterized Topaz as a most on
happy picture to make. It was also an unhappy picture
(41:47):
to watch for many critics, though Manny Farber called it
pretty good entertainment, even he admitted there are a lot
of details that belong in a defunct movie drawer called
Hitchcock touches. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kale savely used
her review of Topaz as a kind of end of
(42:08):
the decade referendum on autourism and its tendency to celebrate
what she described as directors who go on making the
same picture in the same way year after year. In
a general sense, Kyle's attack here was sort of too much,
too late. Kaal had long been an antagonist to the
(42:28):
autor theory, at least as it was disseminated by what
were derisively called the Sarasites, but even the French critics
had by nineteen sixty nine largely either revised or abandoned autourism.
Four years earlier, Kaye Do Cinema's Gerard Gegin pressed his
colleagues to acknowledge that when you read the ka of
(42:52):
the time. Now, it's impossible not to be aware that
there are no criteria for the choices made. The politic
deserteur had become an elegant way of proclaiming that the
moon was made of green Geez. That doesn't mean that
Cale was totally wrong when she wrote that Topaz was
(43:15):
the same damned spy picture Hitchcock has been making since
the thirties, and it's getting longer, slower and duller. Certainly
Topaz is longer, slower and duller than any other Hitchcock
film that I've ever seen. But the idea that it
was same old, same old was the opposite of the
(43:38):
argument made in the equally scathing Time magazine review. At seventy,
wrote the unbylined critic, Hitchcock seems to have suddenly forgotten
his own recipe, even if he was checked out during
the shoot, hitch didn't seem fully prepared for how Topaz
would be received. He had shot a gun duel between
(44:01):
two characters which provoked derisive laughs at two previews before
he finally decided to scrap it. He complained Truffau that
the young American audience was too materialistic and cynical, to
get it. His French friend wasn't sure. Young Americans were
the problem. Topaz is not a good picture. Truthou acknowledged.
Speaker 6 (44:25):
The studio didn't like it, and neither did the publique,
the critics, nor even the hugecockions. The director himself wanted
to forget it and an imperative need to make up
for it. In May nineteen seventy, Truffau received a letter
from Hitchcock explaining why it was so difficult to find
(44:47):
a project that he wanted to make that Universal would
let him make. Quote in the film industry here there
are so many taboos. We have to avoid elderly persons
and limit ourselves to youthful characters, as so must contain
(45:09):
some anti establishment elements. No picture can cost more than
two or three million dollars. The caution, hitch went on
to explain, had to deal with the fact that studios
like Paramount and Fox were known to be losing an
enormous amount of money on expensive productions, and even the
(45:30):
low budget counter programming what hitch referred to as accidental films,
were hit and miss. It is becoming obvious. Hitch wrote
that nudity in itself is not a guarantee of books
office success. Perversely, Hitchcock's next film contained more nudity than
(45:54):
anything he had ever done. Hitchcock had told Evan Hunter,
screenwriter of The Birds, that he had moved that film
setting to northern California, even though the Daphne du Maurier
novel was set in the UK, because Hdge didn't want
(46:15):
to ever make a movie in England again. But then
he came across another novel, Arthur mc burns Goodbye Piccadilly
Farewell Lester Square, a London set story about a serial
killer of women and the wrong man who was sent
to jail for the killer's crimes. Though Universal had rejected
(46:35):
Hitchcock's similar concept a few years earlier, now they consented
to letting him make a film out of this novel.
The fact that it would be set in London and
in a rare change of pace for Hitchcock, shot on
location there, seemed to inoculate it somewhat for the Hollywood studio.
The fact that the story tracked a murderer who punishes
(46:57):
women for his own impotence, according to Ackroyd, meant that
the novel might have been written for Hitchcock. Hitch called
Anthony Schaeffer, then the author of the hit play Sleuth
and soon to be the screenwriter of several Agatha Christie adaptations,
to work with him on this adaptation.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
They wrote over the course of six weeks, their short
work days punctuated by lunches of steak and salad and
ending with cocktails promptly at four pm. Frenzy is Hitchcock's
first and only R rated film, and it's clear from
the first scene that something has changed. As a tour
guide is crowing about the lack of pollution in the Thames,
(47:41):
a female corpse floats down the river wearing just the
necktie she was strangled with. In the second scene, in
which we meet a man, Richard Blaney, wearing a tie
that looks just like the one on the corpse, we
also hear sexual slaying like tits and fingered. Later, there
(48:02):
is a shot of another actress's pubic hair that seems
totally gratuitous. And I haven't even mentioned the two on
screen rapes and murders. Oh, I didn't do it just
for the sake of showing nudes. Hitchcock insisted it was
necessary the rape scene as what it would be like
(48:25):
within the basic structure of a how catchem murder mystery.
We watch Blaney, played by Jim Fitch, behaves suspiciously but
not criminally, before learning that the real rapist killer is
his friend Bob Rusk, who presents as a dapper fruit
salesman at Covent Garden and with conspicuous charm and ostensible kindness,
(48:47):
earns the trust of both his victims and Blaney, who
is mistakenly arrested for Risk's crimes. Hitch referred to Rusk's
tie pin, which one of his victims dies clutching, as
the mcguffin of the movie, meaning the object which has
no importance other than to set part of the story
(49:08):
in motion and provide the excuse for set pieces. In Frenzy,
the tie pin does create an opportunity for two incredible sequences,
first the rape slash murder, in which actress Anna Massy
fights like hell to no avail, and then Frenzy's most
famous scene, in which Rusk, having realized that the corpse
(49:31):
he dumped into a potato delivery truck still has his
identifiable tie pin stuck in its fist, has to trail
the truck and ultimately dive in to save himself. The
potato sequence is the last great feat of conceptualization and
realization in Hitchcock's career. Though it runs for just about
(49:53):
two minutes, it required one hundred and eighteen setups to film,
and Massy, playing the corpse in the truck had to
wear a specially crafted modesty garment made out of potato slices.
The potatoes sequence contrasts nicely with a couple of scenes
set at dinner time at the house of the lead
(50:14):
detective investigating these murders. His wife is taking an exotic
cooking course, and Hitchcock has fun with the idea that
in a conventional marriage there is a kind of sadomasochistic
dance over dinner, which is itself a kind of sublimation
of sex. In a long monogamous relationship, many couples stop
(50:35):
having sex regularly, but they still have to eat, and
yet the detective, who is being served things he finds
on appetizing like quail, just longs for meat and potatoes,
itsself a kind of erotic joke, given that the evidence
of criminal kink has been hidden amongst the Russets. There's
(50:55):
even a shot in the potato truck sequence in which
Rusk has to wedge his head between the dead victim's
legs in order to retrieve his pin. The tie pin
may be a mcguffin, but away the entire movie is
a mcguffin in that it's an excuse for Hitchcock to
make perverse jokes about the nineteen seventies sexual climate with
(51:19):
several touches of food based surrealism. Talking to Bogdanovich, hitch
contextualized the decision to make the Innocent Man what he
called a loser and a non hero as a commentary
on the extinction of the kind of star he had
built his movies around in the forties and fifties. Quote,
(51:41):
after all, all beautiful profiles and wavy head leading men
have gone the way of all and some flesh. Hitchcock
wanted to cast Michael Kaine as the suave killer, but
Cain thought the character was quote really loathsome and I
(52:01):
did not want to be associated with it. Ironically, that
year he instead starred in Joseph Mankowitz's film of Sleuth
and Hitchcock, who cast cut rate Kine lookalike Barry Foster
never spoke to Kane again. Between this and the story
of hitchbreaking with herman and the making of Torn Curtain,
(52:23):
the director seemed to be in the not unheard of
old man phase of burning bridges. Though hitch was treated
as a conquering hero at London's Pinewood Studios, he found
making a movie away from his adopted home of Hollywood
to be drudgery. As he wrote in a letter.
Speaker 6 (52:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
During this period, hitch fell in his suite at the
Grand Hotel Clerages, which laid him up for a weekend.
But the bigger healthcareis came when Almah Hitchcock suffered a stroke.
She kept her spirits high, saying that if she had
to have a stroke, Claireag's was the best place in
the world to do it, But her arm was paralyzed
(53:22):
and her husband was deeply affected by this reminder of
Almah's mortality. Hitch continued slugging from his flask on frenzy,
and the day drinking, combined with his age, led to
more unplanned naps in the middle of filming scenes. When
he'd wake up, he'd ask the ad how the shot went,
(53:44):
and if the AD said all was well, Hitch would
give the order to print it and they'd move on.
Speaker 5 (53:52):
Hitch was happy with Frenzy, he told Bogdanovich.
Speaker 6 (53:56):
I like the extremes. It goes to funny and audible.
At the same time, the discomfiture of the villain, the
blend of the elements was dead to do, and I've
wanted to do that for a.
Speaker 3 (54:12):
Long time, but he was nervous about how it would
be received. When Truffau saw him at Can, the younger
man observed that the older man appeared aged, tired, and tense,
but after the movie screened, according to Traufoe, he looked
fifteen years younger. The change was due to the fact
(54:33):
that Frenzy had been very positively received at Can and
this wasn't festival fever. When it opened stateside, the reviews
were also very positive. Roger Ebert gave it four stars,
calling it a return to old forms by the master
of suspense. With Frenzy, wrote Penelope Gillot and The New Yorker,
(54:53):
we are nearly back in the days of his great
English films, which is astonishing for a man of his age,
and after the poorness of Torn Curtain. In the New
York Times, Vincent can be called Frenzy immensely entertaining and
the best acted Hitchcock film since north By Northwest. That said,
(55:15):
the same paper also published an essay by Victoria Sullivan
titled does Frenzy Degrade Women, which began with the sentences
I'm tired of going to movies and seeing women get raped.
It makes me so damned angry, and went on to
take Canby to task for seeming to enjoy the sexual
(55:36):
violence in the film. Probably mister Canby has never been raped,
Sullivan muses, then later adds that though Women's Liberation tells
us not to emulate males, I want to see films
about men getting raped by women.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
Crazy. I know Sullivan's phrasing is very of its time,
but the debate about rape on film is still ongoing
as far as Vincent Canby's taste goes. It's also worth
noting that in his review of Topaz, he called it
Alfred Hitchcock at his best. For his part, Hitchcock insisted
(56:13):
that he didn't personally get off on filming rapes. But
the way he articulated this defense almost betrayed the fact
that he had thought about it so much that it
no longer affected him. If I felt the same way
as the actor Barry Foster feels as a character, I'd
(56:33):
never get it on the screen. It's idiotic. In other words,
you get no kick out of making a thing like that,
not at all. No, it's a job to be done.
Speaker 3 (56:50):
In nineteen seventy three, to write his next and last film,
an adaptation of the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning,
hitch called Ernest Lehman, who had written North By Northwest
almost fifteen years earlier. Layman was shocked at how much
Hitchcock had changed in that decade and a half. He
had slowed down considerably. Layman recalled, he had none of
(57:13):
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.
Layman found it hard to believe hitch would actually make
it to production on the movie he was writing. Family
plot would get made, but it would take a while. First,
(57:35):
Hitchcock reported to the doctor with dizzy spells and was
outfitted with a pacemaker.
Speaker 5 (57:41):
Then, in April nineteen.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
Seventy four, hitch was feted at a Lincoln Center benefit gala.
The guests of honor seated alongside the old man were
True Foe and Grace Kelly. Hitch capped off the tribute
by telling the assorted masses, many of whom had paid
one thousand dollars a seat, they say that.
Speaker 6 (58:01):
When a man drowns, his entire life passes before his eyes.
I've had that experience tonight without even getting my feet wet.
Speaker 3 (58:16):
So it was not until early nineteen seventy five that
hitch turned to the problem of finding a cast for
family plot. He rejected the studio's suggestions, which were Eliza
Minelli and Jack Nicholson a missed opportunity if I've ever
heard one. Instead, Hitchcock managed to get Universal to agree
to cast Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris, who appeared that
(58:40):
same year in Nashville and the following year swapping bodies
with Jodie Foster in the original Freaky Friday. Duran's initial
impression of hitch hayes Bard with the whole fucking thing
when Durren once asked if he could do another take
so he could go deeper.
Speaker 5 (58:58):
Hitchcock responded, Bru, they'll never know.
Speaker 3 (59:03):
In belore Via, family plot is fun and would be
almost lighthearted, except that at times a sense of humor
is nearly as nasty as anything. In Frenzy, both William
Devane's criminal jeweler and Deren's slippery cab driver slash amateur
detective call their female partners bitch to their faces. Despite
(59:25):
the vulgarity. For the most part, family plot feels like
a two plus hour version of the early sequences in
an episode of Colombo or Moonlighting before the detective heroes
show up. For what it's worth, Colombo pre dates Family
Plot by five years. Trufau suggested that any positive reviews
(59:47):
were offered in fear of propagating unnecessary elder abuse. American
journalists interviewing hitch about the movie, he wrote.
Speaker 6 (59:56):
Many fistied finchep and respect, not because they liked Tias
fifty third film, but because I ductor, who is over
seventy years old, instead working enjoys with the mindb defe
AND's critical immunity.
Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
Hitchcock had been too fatigued to oversee most of post production.
Soon thereafter, Alma suffered another stroke, and this time she
was unable to bounce back, requiring full time care. Nurses
were brought in to help, and Hitch himself cooked dinner
a few times a week. They could no longer go
(01:00:33):
out to Chasen's, but gratefully the former hot spot offered takeout.
Hitch still went to his office on the Universal lot
every weekday, still had steak at lunch and a vodka
drink at four before heading home to bel Air. But
as Almah slipped away, he was unbearably lonely. He didn't
(01:00:54):
really have other friends, not anyone who he was as
close to as he was to his wife, his collaborator
and constant companion of fifty years. Hitch once told Bogdanovich
that he never talked to other directors except for maybe
murphyn Leroy when they ran into each other at the racetrack.
When Bogdanovitch reminded him that he had said this, Hitch replied,
(01:01:18):
that's pretty well true.
Speaker 6 (01:01:20):
Yes, I'm Alona, Ohays, Husban Even and Angrient. He started
working on making another movie and brought in writers to
adapt a spy novel called The Short Night. Truffau recalled
that hitch was talking about shooting on location in Finland,
(01:01:41):
but no one believed he would leave Almah at home
alone in her condition. Ernest Layman walked away when he
couldn't talk Hitch out of including a brutal rape. Layman
hadn't had faith that hitch would be up to making
family plot, and he had been wrong. But now it
seemed obvious that The Short Night was just a fantasy.
(01:02:02):
After Layman, Norman Lloyd was brought in, but at one
point hitch said to him, when not ever going to
make this picture because it's not necessary.
Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
In nineteen seventy nine, at the age of seventy nine,
Hitchcock was given the Air five Lifetime Achievement Award. He
sat sullenly through the ceremony, seated between Alma and Carrie Grant.
He gave his speech from the table.
Speaker 4 (01:02:30):
Adag commission to mention by name only four people who
have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragement and
constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor,
the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother
(01:02:55):
of my daughter Pat and the fourth is as fine
a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen,
and their name are Alma Reva.
Speaker 6 (01:03:13):
Truth O recalled that the evening left me and everyone
who attended it to the gloomy and gruesome memory, even
though Cbas, through a series of editing twigs, managed to
offer a face saving version of the ceremony on American television.
Alfred and almer Chkock appeared to be present, but the
(01:03:34):
soils were missing. They were ondly more alive than Anthony
Perkins stuffed mother in the Cellar of the Gothic Girls.
Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Just over a year later, Alfred Hitchcock was dead. Alma
died two years later. Next week we will discuss the
last phase of one of the most notoriously tyrannical directors
in Hollywood history. Join us, then, won't you? Thanks for
(01:04:13):
listening to You must remember this. The show is written, produced,
and narrated by Corina Longworth.
Speaker 5 (01:04:22):
That's Me. This season is edited and mixed by Evan Viola.
Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
Our social media research and production assistant is Brendan Whalen,
and our logo was designed by Teddy Blinks. If you
like the show, please tell anyone you can any way
that you can. You can follow us on Twitter at
Remember This Pod, and we're on Facebook and Instagram too,
(01:04:51):
And if you go to our website you Must Remember
This Podcast dot com, you can find show notes for
this and every other episode, which include lists of our
sources and much more. At the website, you can also
find more like hats, t shirts, and our special limited
(01:05:13):
edition Dead Blonde coloring book. At patreon dot com slash
Karina Longworth. You can support the podcast get lots of
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Speaker 5 (01:05:33):
Other aspects of my life.
Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
Proceeds from Patreon go to help pay all the people
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We'll be back next week with an all new tale
(01:05:58):
from the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.
Join us, then, won't you? Good Night?
Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
That was You must remember this If you enjoyed the episode,
you can find the show wherever you get your podcasts.
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