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