Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Presenting: You Must Remember This - Alfred Hitchcock

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

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. Listen to You Must Remember This wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin Hello, Tim Harford here. Today we are featuring an episode from You Must Remember This. You Must Remember This is the podcast dedicated to the secret and forgotten histories of 20th century Hollywood. Stories of sex, murder, institutional racism, bad men, sad women, fascist gossip colonists and much more. Their latest 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 60s. Keep listening for a full episode of

You Must Remember This, all about Alfred Hitchcock. The time of the past Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secrets and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. I'm your host, Carina Longworth. And this is another episode of our ongoing series, The Old Man is Still Al alive. Is Hollywood dead? No, I don't think so. Many years ago when I first started making pictures,

being in the film business was a little bit disreputable. I hate vials and pictures just as much as I do sex and incest. Old stories I've forgotten, mercifully. I've had such a good time in my life. It wouldn't bother me a bit if I died at any time. I think it's up to you, younger fellas, right now. There's one thing that I hate more than not being taken seriously is to be taken too seriously.

You're being sued by women's lip. And I'm still alive to tell the tale. In the mid-1950s, over 30 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 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 25 films in England. He and his wife and frequent collaborator Alma arrived in Hollywood in 1939. He insisted that there was little difference between the British film industry and the American one. Quote, if you ask why do you like working in Hollywood, I would say because I can get home at six o'clock for dinner. For much of the 1940s, Hitch worked under contract to mega producer David O. Selznick. The first production of that partnership, Rebecca,

hadn't been a smooth ride. There had been much conflict between Hitchcock and Selznick, but it had won the Best Picture Oscar, the only one of Hitchcock's films to be so honored. But by his final film for Selznick, The Paradigm Case in 1947, Hitchcock had lost all interest in fighting with the producer, who took over that picture during post-production. From then on, Hitchcock would act as his own producer, although, as we'll see,

that didn't necessarily protect him from studio interference. While the Selznick 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 1951, for over a decade Hitchcock cranked out one great film after another, many of them high-concept thrillers in stunning technicolor, including Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and more.

In addition to gripping storytelling and incredible visual artistry, these films were notable for their starry casts. Hitch worked repeatedly with Cary 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. Vertigo is considered one of the greatest films ever made today, but in 1958, 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 we discussed in our Dead Blondes episode on Kelly, seemed to flummox Hitchcock as much as any other factor in the rapidly changing Hollywood of the late 1950s. In the middle of this run came Psycho, in the rapidly changing Hollywood of the late 1950s. 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 to break down aspects of the production code that were still lingering. We've talked before about directors who had a late career hit and then struggled to follow it up. We've also talked about how the age of 60 was often a demarcation point for our old man filmmakers when things started to get weird. Hitchcock made Psycho when he was 60. 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 make it with Kelly, and when she declined to come out of retirement, he cast his birds star, Tippi Hedren, with devastating consequences. To Hedren. Hitchcock's remaining four films, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family family plot, are today amongst his least seen and talked about.

So today we will talk about them. And also about how changes to the film industry that took place in the 1960s 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 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 entertain at Lyndon Johnson's 1965 inauguration. Yes, that's how famous Hitchcock was at this time. Hitch compared the invention of television to... The introduction of indoor plumbing. Fundamentally, it brought no change in the public's habits. It simply eliminated the necessity of leaving the house.

By the time he said this, Hitch had been coming into his public's house via his TV show for 10 years. As much as the director was clearly firing on all cylinders creatively for the second half of the 50s, it seems undeniable that his presence on television enhanced his celebrity, 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 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 of 1960,

earning at the box office over 10 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, "'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. Is this bloody piece of crap, he reportedly said, and the money doesn't stop coming in. Possibly because he was embarrassed by this new cash cow. he 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 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. 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 in 1968,

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 ended up finding his next film after hearing about two separate stories of unexplained bird attacks. We talked about the birds and its star, Tippi Hedren, in our erotic 80s episode on body

double and Hedren's daughter, Melanie Griffith. You may want to revisit that episode before you go any further in this episode. But suffice it to say, Hitchcock discovered Hedren, molded her into his fetish object, repeatedly sexually harassed her, and, after Hedren 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 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 Cary Grant or a Grace Kelly, because Hitch himself 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 Hedren gives 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 to Psycho. Screenwriter Hunter recalled going to one movie theater to see it where the audience was flummoxed 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 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 1964 audience was a little what the fuck. Hitchcock later acknowledged that this was his mistake, comparing Marnie's husband to a necrophiliac and adding,

I'd say he's damned unhealthy as a character. 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 60-mile ride to and from location,' recalled Hunter. "'We discussed Marnie during lulls in the shooting,

and during lunch, and during dinner every night. 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, don't worry about that. That'll be fine. 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 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. Preson Allen. Somewhat notorious for her anti-feminism, Preson Allen said she didn't see it as a rape, but a quote unquote, trying marital situation.

And yet, historians who have studied Preson Allen'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 in a way that, to quote Tanya Modleski, elicits the feminist interpreter's sympathy for its trapped and caged heroin. Then there's this passage from Peter Ackroyd's Hitchcock biography. Quote, Hitchcock told Presson Allen of a recurrent dream he had, in which his penis was made of crystal, a fact which he was obliged to conceal from Alma.

Allen laughed and told him that the obvious interpretation was that he was obliged to conceal from Alma. Alan 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, 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 drinking screwdrivers from a flask on set, 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 the sexual harassment alleged by Hedren and also by Marnie 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.

Ackroyd wrote that at this stage, Hitch was, quote, simply behaving like an old fool and a drunken one at that. J. Preson Allen, for her part, suggested that Hedren overreacted, 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 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 Alan was not from the believe women generation. 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 at a mostly male table to internalize misogyny and look down on other women who said they felt they experienced sexism or worse from the men responsible for hiring all of them. In 1964, 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 daiquiris that afternoon, Bogdanovich recalled. This 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 daiquiri, Bogdanovic recalled. I had never had one before and rarely drank alcohol of any sort. But his mischievous urging had resulted in 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 1964, Hitchcock was more recognizable than any director had been in the history of movies, thanks to his cameos in his films and his weekly TV appearances. According to Bogdanovich, no other director also had so often been written off by fashionable critics as having fallen into

a redeemable decline. By the end of the 60s 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 two films, Torn Curtain and Topaz. In 1962, while he was editing The Birds, Hitchcock agreed to sit down for a series of interviews

with Francois Truffaut. This was the year, as Truffaut would write later, when Hitchcock was at the peak of his creative powers. 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 Truffaut, Truffaut writes, I am convinced that Hitchcock was never the same after Marnie, and that its failure cost him a considerable amount of his self-confidence.

A page later, he adds, I am convinced that Hitchcock 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 Truffaut, the Frenchman was undoubtedly still on the upswing. The year he began interviewing Hitchcock, he released one of the masterpieces of the era, Jours et Gimes, which came just three years after his directorial debut, The 400 Blows, helped launch the French New Wave. Truffaut had moved on to filmmaking after spending much of the 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 en français Nouvelle, as nouvelle vagrance. But at the 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 his wife, frequent screenwriter and most trusted advisor Alma. But in conversation with one of the leading proponents of auteur theory, his wife, frequent screenwriter and most trusted advisor, Alma. But in conversation with one of the leading proponents

of auteur theory, according to Ackroyd, it suited his purpose to minimize their contributions. But after Hitchcock's death, considering how Hitchcock had fit into the theory, Truffaut considered an aspect of auteurism that had little to do with the creative contributions of other members of the theory. Truffaut considered an aspect of auteurism that had little to do with the creative contributions of other members of the crew. All the interesting filmmakers, those who were referred to as auteurs by D.K. de Sunyamay in 1955, before the term was distorted, concealed

themselves behind various characters in their movies. Hitchcock achieved a real tour de force in inducing the public to identify with the attractive leading man, whereas Hitchcock himself almost always identified with the supporting role. The man who is cuckolded and disappointed, the killer or monster, the man rejected by others, the man who has no right to love, the man who looks on without being able to participate." In other words, an auteur 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 Cary Grant. So many of his films explore what are essentially BDSM 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 1962, Truffaut, who was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel and his interpreter, would ride with Hitchcock in his limo over the hill to Universal Studios. They would talk on the record all day long until 6 p.m., taking a break for Hitch's

standard lunch of steak frite. Though their initial encounters took place in 1962, and you can watch them on YouTube, Truffaut would become a kind of confidant for Hitchcock for the next few years. Over three years later, Hitch wrote to Truffaut to explain that he felt he had been ripped off by Connery's day job. He had realized, he wrote, Since James Bond and the imitators of James Bond were 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 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 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 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 of Billy Liar, were brought in. Hitch began shooting 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 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. 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, Your motivation is your salary. Hitch also had a fatal falling out with composer Bernard Herrmann during the course of making this film. According to Ackroyd, Hitch wanted a more modern score than he had done in the past. He wrote to Herrmann that he was thinking about a new generation of moviegoers. 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 to introduce a beat and rhythm that is more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience." 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, Truffaut attributes the firing of Herman to Universal's desperation to keep up with the times, and not Hitchcock's. As Truffaut wrote, One must bear in mind here that in 1966, in Hollywood and elsewhere, it was the practice of the film industry to favor scores that would sell as popular records, the kind of film music that could be danced to in discotheques. In this sort of game, Ehrman, a disciple of Wagner and Stravinsky, was bound to be, how

do you say, a loser? Despite the presence of two stars who were very hot in 1966, in more ways than one, Torn Curtain lacks the frisson 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, 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 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 fiancé something the audience has known for a while. 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, 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 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 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," looks no more novel or sensational than Grandma's old knitted shawl, he seems 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

scrawling dueling formulas on a chalkboard. There is some dated technology in it. The only way to explain why Hitchcock uses 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 Stasi agent who has found him out. But what really must have stung was that Crowther made his grandmas 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 zeitgeisty movies of the 60s. And Crowther was hardly alone. Times critic complained that though Hitch had access to exciting stars and a good screenwriter,

he, quote, fritters away their talents in a limp spy story that has about as much fizz as a can of warm beer. Diane Thomas, writing in the Atlanta Constitution, shrugged. Tarn curtain 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 Spato put it, after a decade of successes, the 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, Most films today are just pictures of people talking. So it was significant that when he saw Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, which became a surprise blockbuster around the world in 1966 and 1967. Hitchcock was inspired. These Italian directors are a century ahead of me in terms of technique, he exclaimed,

asking himself rhetorically but also maybe literally, what have I been doing all this time? Hitchcock was becoming woke to the new cinema just in time. At the end of 1967, the top 10 grossing movies of the year would include The Graduate and Number One, as well as Bonnie and Clyde, two Sidney Poitier vehicles, Hitchcock had not yet made a film with a black star, and yet another James Bond film, You 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 10 for 1966, Universal bounced back in 1967 with one title on the list, the Julie Andrews starring Thoroughly Modern Millie. Though this was a period musical set in the 1920s, 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 Bonnie and Clyde 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 Pomanville, Universal was the one studio apparently determined to hold out against the youth revolution. In fact, they took the opposite tactic. As a publicity stunt, they signed over-the-hill directors like Mervyn LeRoy 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 gave up and retired.

Though Hitchcock was absolutely an old man, he turned 68 in 1967, and though his collaborators believed his glory days were behind him, he had no intention to retire. But Universal refused 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 him to make an adaptation of a Leonorous bestseller,

a Cold War thriller called Topaz. As Hitch recalled to Bogdanovich, I was desperate for a subject and they asked me to do it. So we took it on. So Topaz became not just 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 machine in which I'd insert 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 did give a black actor, Roscoe Lee Brown, a key role. Some viewers might have recognized co-star Michelle Piccoli from Contempt or The Young Girls of Roquefort, and the presence of brunette beauty Corinne Doar, a German Bond girl, turned Topaz into a Howard Hughes fave. But for the most part, the ensemble cast lacked recognizable star power. Topaz screenwriter Samuel Taylor,

who had also written Vertigo, believed that, quote, "'One of the tragedies of Topaz was that Hitchcock was trying to make something as if he had Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in it.'" Not only did Hitch not 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 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. He would go away for 15 or 20 minutes

and lie down if he could, recalled actor John Forsyth, later Charlie of Charlie's Angels. Forsyth added, it 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 set during a shoot day to have lunch at Chasen's, telling anyone who suggested that he really should stay to watch the scene. No, the actors already, the cameramen already. If not, I'll cut it. 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 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 90 minutes? Hitchcock later characterized Topaz as a most unhappy picture to make. It was also an unhappy picture to watch for many critics. Though many 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 Kael savilly used her review of Topaz as a kind of end-of-the-decade referendum on auteurism 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, Kale's attack here was sort of too much, too late. Kale had long been an antagonist to the auteur theory, at least as it was disseminated by what were derisively called the Saracites, but even the French critics had, by 1969, largely either revised or abandoned auteurism. Four years earlier, Cahier du Cinema's Gerard Guégan pressed his colleagues to acknowledge that, when you read the Cahier of the time now, it's impossible not to be aware

that there are no criteria for the choices made. The politique des auteurs had become an elegant way of proclaiming that the moon was made of green cheese. That doesn't mean that Kale was totally wrong when she wrote that Topaz was the same damn spy picture Hitchcock has been making since the 30s. 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 argument

made in the equally scathing Time Magazine review. At 70, read the unbyelined 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. in 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 two characters,

which provoked derisive laughs at two previews before he finally decided to scrap it. He complained to Truffaut 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, Truffaut acknowledged. The studio didn't like it, and neither did the public, the critics, nor even the huge coquillons. the critics, nor even the Hitchcock yawns. The director himself wanted to forget it and felt an imperative need to make up for it.

In mid-1970, Truffaut received a letter from Hitchcock explaining why it was so difficult to find 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. A film must contain some anti-establishment elements. No picture can cost more than two or three million dollars." The caution, Hitch went on to explain, had to do 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 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 box office success. Perversely, Hitchcock's next film contained more nudity than anything he had ever done. Hitchcock had told Evan Hunter, screenwriter of The Birds, that he had moved that film's setting to Northern California, even though the Daphne du Maurier novel was set in the UK, because Hitch didn't want to ever make a movie in England again. But then he came across another novel, Arthur Laburn's 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 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 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. They wrote over the course of six weeks,

their short workdays punctuated by lunches of steak and salad, and ending with cocktails promptly at 4 p.m. 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, 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 slang like tits and fingered. Later, there 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. I didn't do it just for the sake of showing nudes. Hitchcock insisted. It was necessary.

The rape scene is what it would be like. Within the basic structure of a how-catch-em murder mystery, we watch Blaney, played by Jim Fitch, behave 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,

earns the trust of both his victims and Blaney, who is mistakenly arrested for Rusk'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 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 Massey fights like hell to no avail.

And then, Frenzy's most famous scene, in which Rusk, having realized that the corpse 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 two minutes, it required 118 setups to film,

and Massey, playing the corpse in the truck, had to wear a specially crafted modesty garment made out of potato slices. The potato sequence contrasts nicely with a couple of scenes set at dinnertime at the house of the lead 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 having sex regularly, but they still have to eat. And yet the detective who is being served things he finds unappetizing like quail, just longs for meat and potatoes.

It's self a kind of erotic joke, given that the evidence of criminal kink has been hidden amongst the Russets. There's 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 in a way the entire movie is a McGuffin, in that it's an excuse for Hitchcock to make perverse jokes about the 1970s sexual climate with 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 40s and 50s. Quote, after all our beautiful profiles and wavy haired leading men have gone the way of all and some flesh. Hitchcock wanted to cast Michael Caine as the suave killer, but Caine thought the character was, quote,

really loathsome and I did not want to be associated with it. Ironically, that year he instead starred in Joseph Mankiewicz's film of Sleuth, and Hitchcock, who cast cut-rate Kane look-alike Barry Foster, never spoke to Kane again. Between this and the story of Hitch breaking with Herman in the making of Torn Curtain, 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, 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. During this period, Hitch fell in his suite at the grand hotel, Claridge's, which laid him up for a weekend. But the bigger health crisis came when Alma Hitchcock suffered a stroke.

She kept her spirits high, saying that if she had to have a stroke, clergy was the best place in the world to do it. But her arm was paralyzed, and her husband was deeply affected by this reminder of Alma'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, and if the AD said all was well, Hitch would give the order to print it and they'd move on. Hitch was happy with frenzy. He told Bogdanovich, I like the extremes it goes to, funny and horrible at the same time. The discomfiture of the villain, the blend of the elements was daring to do,

and I've wanted to do that for a long time." But he was nervous about how it would be received. When Truffaut saw him at Cannes, the younger man observed that the older man appeared aged, tired, and tense. But after the movie screened, according to Truffaut, he looked 15 years younger. The change was due to the fact that Frenzy

had been very positively received at Cannes, 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 Gilead in The New Yorker, "'we are nearly back in the days of his great English films, which is astonishing for a man of his age

and after the porness of torn curtain. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby called frenzy immensely entertaining and the best acted Hitchcock film since North by Northwest. That said, 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 violence in the film. Probably Mr. 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. 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 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 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. In 1973, to write his next and last film, an adaptation of the novel The Rain Bird pattern by Victor Canning, Hitch called Ernest Lehmann, who had written North by Northwest almost

15 years earlier. Lehmann was shocked at how much Hitchcock had changed in that decade and a half. He had slowed down considerably, Lehmann recalled. He had none of 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. Lehmann 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, Hitchcock reported to the doctor with dizzy spells

and was outfitted with a pacemaker. Then in April, 1974, Hitch was fetid at a Lincoln Center benefit gala. The guests of honor, seated alongside the old man, were Truffaut and Grace Kelly. Hitch capped off the tribute by telling the assorted masses, many of whom had paid $1,000 a seat. They say that when a man drowns,

his entire life passes before his eyes. I've had that experience tonight without even getting my feet wet." So it was not until early 1975 that Hitch turned to the problem of finding a cast for family plots. He rejected the studio's suggestions, which were Liza Minnelli 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 same year in Nashville, and the following year, swapping bodies with Jodie Foster in the original Freaky Friday. Dern's initial impression of Hitch? He's bored with the whole fucking thing. When Dern once asked if he could do another take so he could go deeper, Hitchcock responded.

Bruce, they'll never know in Peoria. Family plot is fun and would be almost lighthearted, except that at times that sense of humor is nearly as nasty as anything in frenzy. Both William Devane's criminal jeweler and Dern's slippery cab driver slash amateur detective call their female partners bitch to their faces. Despite the vulgarity, for the most part, Family Plot feels like a two-plus-hour version of the early sequences in an episode of Columbo or Moonlighting

before the detective heroes show up. For what it's worth, Columbo predates family plot by five years. Truffaut suggested that any positive reviews were offered in fear of propagating unnecessary elder abuse. American journalists interviewing Hitch about the movie, he wrote, "'Manifested friendship and respect,

"'not because they liked his 53rd film, "'but because a director who is over 70 years old "'and still working enjoys what might be defined "'as critical immunity.'" 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 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 Alma slipped away, he was unbearably lonely.

He didn't really have other friends, not anyone who he was as close to as he was to his wife, his collaborator, and constant companion of 50 years. Hitch once told Bogdanovich that he never talked to other directors, except for maybe Mervyn LeRoy when they ran into each other at the racetrack. When Bogdanovich reminded him that he had said this, Hitch replied, That's pretty well true. Yes, I'm a loner. Always have been. Even in England.

He started working on making another movie and brought in writers to adapt a spy novel called The Short Night. Truffaut recalled that Hitch was talking about shooting on location in Finland, but no one believed he would leave Alma at home alone in her condition. Ernest Lehmann walked away when he couldn't talk Hitch out of including a brutal rape. Lehmann 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. After Lehman, Norman Lloyd was brought in, but at one point Hitch said to him,

We're not ever going to make this picture, because it's not necessary. In 1979, at the age of 79, Hitchcock was given the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. He sat sullenly through the ceremony seated between Alma and Cary Grant. He gave his speech from the table. I gave permission 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 script writer, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat. And the fourth is a finer cook that has ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reveille. applause Truffaut recalled that the evening, it left me and everyone who attended it with a gloomy and gruesome memory. Even though CBS, through a series of editing tricks, managed to offer a face-saving version

of the ceremony on American television. Alfred and Alma Hitchcock appeared to be present, but their souls were missing. They were hardly more alive than Anthony Perkins' stuffed mother in the cellar of the Gothic House. 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.

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