Hitch (44 page)

But as time went by and no definite project was under way, or even on the horizon, he began to get desperate. He hated not working, and was getting to the point where he would consider anything, pretty well, just to continue exercising his craft. The obvious answer seemed to be to take direction from Universal: what
properties did they own which might be turned to his purposes? A rummage through the books and plays they had acquired came up with nothing very promising except Leon Uris's sprawling and complicated espionage novel
Topaz
. It was not ideal, and his previous essay in espionage and Iron Curtain politics had not been too happy. But it was better than nothing, and Hitch set to work with a will. Uris himself was involved in writing the screenplay, but Hitch did not see how he could use this, and was forced to go into production with nothing like his usual preparation. The film was going to be expensive—around $4 million—with a lot of location shooting in Copenhagen, Paris and New York, though for obvious reasons the studio had to stand in for Cuba, where the central section of the film takes place. There was also a detailed and expensive studio reconstruction of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where Castro had stayed on his last visit to the States, and which had since been pulled down.

Production values, at any rate, were not lacking. But the large cast was mostly undistinguished (John Forsythe, from
The Trouble with Harry
, was the only familiar Hitchcock face), and Hitch was very unhappy at being rushed into production without working everything out in advance, and without even having a final script. He was already in London picking locations when he decided to throw out the script he had, and cabled Sam Taylor, who had written
Vertigo
for him, to fly in and rewrite the script completely at twenty-four hours' notice. Hitch did not even let him read the Uris script: Taylor started from scratch, writing the script scene by scene, sometimes only hours before it was due to be shot. This meant that Hitch had to stage the scenes in an improvisatory way greatly at odds with his usual practice, and though there are individual scenes which work rather well, like the death of the hero's Cuban mistress staged as a love scene which ends with her collapse in a flowing purple dress on to a black-and-white marble floor, the film as a whole lacks the careful structure, the building and relaxing of tension in a meaningful pattern over the whole span of the drama, which is the hallmark of Hitch's finest work.

Even casting was done bit by bit—the role of Juanita, for instance, was not assigned until the unit, well into the shooting, returned to Hollywood. And there was some chopping and changing. An actor called Aram Katcher was given the role of the Cuban police chief, shot all his scenes, and did not discover he was not in the film till it opened; Hitch had not liked his reading of the role, and
decided to reshoot it with Roberto Contreras, but made no announcement out of consideration for the replaced actor.

The main changes, and the main trouble, came with the ending. At least three different versions were shot. One of them involved a duel in a deserted stadium between the principal characters representing East and West, concluded when the Russian agent is picked off by a distant sniper because, obviously, his employers have no further use for him. This seems to have entertained Hitch but no one else at Universal. Then there was a more flip ending, with the two agents waving goodbye as one gets on a plane for Moscow and the other for Washington. And finally there was the ending of the released prints, which was cobbled up from material already shot, with the Russian agent going into his house in Paris, then the sound of a shot signifying that he has killed himself. This last ending was devised by someone at Universal when Hitch got tired of fighting them: symbolically it was his throwing his hand in, and latterly he has declined to discuss the film beyond making it clear that he regards it as a complete disaster, whatever some of his wilder admirers may say in its favour.

When
Topaz
came out in 1969, it marked in many ways the lowest ebb in his career for many years. On the other hand, all kinds of honours were coming his way. In 1968 he was awarded the Irving Thalberg Award by the Motion Picture Academy, as a tribute to his over-all career—and in some recompense, no doubt, for the awkward fact that he had never won an Oscar, even though many had been won by films he directed. In 1969 he was made an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 1976 he became a commander of the order. Other honours included honorary doctorates from the University of Southern California and elsewhere, the Cecil B. de Mille Award from the Foreign Press Association in Hollywood, and a knighthood of the Legion of Honour of the Cinémathèque Française. It was nice, of course, but a trifle valedictory, as though Hitch was regarded more as a historical monument than as a vital part of living cinema.

If it was beginning to seem a bit that way, Hitch, not for the first time, had a surprise in store. He always had in reserve his contract with Universal which enabled him to make whatever he wanted, without interference, provided it did not cost more than $3 million. With the escalating costs of film-making, that, which had been a reasonable budget, if not exactly big money, was getting less
and less. But this situation had its advantages. With a budget of under
£
3 million you could manage to keep a very low profile: not too much was riding on your commercial success or failure anyway. And given Hitch's name and reputation, any film he made was guaranteed instant sale all over the world, and a satisfactory television sale thereafter. In other words, even if it was not a very big success, at least there was hardly any way it could lose money. So if Hitch felt the need again to run for cover, this was a useful cover to be able to run to. And there was no reason why he should not. It had always been one of his greatest advantages that he was sublimely unimpressed by the Hitchcock myth. For everyone else a new Hitchcock movie might be THE NEW HITCHCOCK MOVIE, but for him it had always been just another movie, the quickest way from the last to the next. Therefore he did not now have any problem with pride, any idea that he, the great Alfred Hitchcock, could not possibly make a modest little picture, but should be aiming at the culminating masterpiece.

Whether or not he consciously worked all this out at the time, his next film after
Topaz
, which had been his most expensive ever, was a return to modesty and simplicity. The impression was intensified, if anything, by the fact that he chose to make it in England, thereby making comparisons with his thrillers of the 1930s more or less inevitable. But if it was in certain respects a harking back, in others, particularly as regards its content, it was anything but running for cover. What it amounted to was that Hitch had at last, providentially, found a way of licking his long-standing
Frenzy
project into shape. After
Topaz
he had taken up the idea again, and brought in three writers to work on it, but still it did not turn out to his satisfaction. Then, through one of the usual channels, a novel called
Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square
came into Hitch's office. Published in 1966, it was the work of a British writer, Arthur La Bern, whose best-known previous book had been
It Always Rains on Sunday
. And it happened to be about a psychotic killer of young women—as was the body of material Hitch had been working on for
Frenzy
. Otherwise, it had nothing in common with
Frenzy
, but the little it had was enough. Hitch saw that the right way to tackle the problem was to start again from scratch, so he bought the screen rights to
Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square
and that is precisely what he did.

In line with his habit—risky, one would think, if Hitch had not
had total confidence in his ability to handle writers—of choosing to work with writers currently in vogue. Hitch picked as script-writer on this film, which at once inherited the title
Frenzy
, Anthony Shaffer, who was then riding high in London and New York with his long-running stage thriller
Sleuth
. This time the choice worked out perfectly: Shaffer and Hitch fashioned a neat and workable screenplay from the book with extraordinary speed and efficiency, though not to the satisfaction of Arthur La Bern, who wrote to
The Times
of London after
Frenzy
opened complaining that the film was ‘distasteful' and the script ‘appalling', with ‘dialogue … a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce,
Dixon of Dock Green
and that almost forgotten
No Hiding Place
.' He does have a point. There is no denying a certain anachronistic quality to Hitch's 1971 view of London life and character—though physically it is the London of today, the atmosphere is really that of thirty or more years ago, when Hitch last lived in London and knew it as a native. But that hardly seems to matter: Hitch's landscape always has been a landscape of fantasy. All that counts is the intensity and conviction of the fantasy. And no doubt about it, Hitch's London in
Frenzy
exists, whether or not it has much to do with the London anyone else sees today.

Hitch's return to London in 1971 was in the nature of a triumphal entry—certainly much more so than his major previous return in 1949, when by his own confession he was enamoured of the spotlight. He was royally welcomed at Pinewood, where the studio scenes were shot, and immediately entertained to a lunch of banquet proportions, at which he had sitting beside him his old set-designer, Alex Vetchinsky from
The Lady Vanishes
days, brought in specially to make him feel at home. And he found to his pleasure that the atmosphere of British studios, in many respects more friendly and familial than Hollywood, had not changed much. Members of the unit still gathered informally in the local pub after the day's shooting was over, and the studio restaurant still retained the civilized amenities of linen tablecloths, silver and a very acceptable wine list. Despite Hitch's whimsical contention that in England no one would recognize him because he had so many doubles, he was recognized everywhere and his smallest move was news. He was photographed with the head of his image in Madame Tussaud's, and as a gag had a model of himself floated in the Thames, thus giving rise to the supposition that it was in this form he would make his traditional
guest appearance. (Actually he is part of the riverside crowd which observes the discovery of the first girl's body we see, floating past in a Thames a sententious official is just guaranteeing to be free from pollution.) But then of course since the 1940s, when he had last spent any significant amount of time working in Britain, he had not only made a succession of films which even chauvinistic British critics had to recognize as equal or superior to his best British films of the 1930s, but there had also been the television shows, which had done their work in Britain as everywhere else in the world. Though now officially an American, he remained one of the most famous Englishmen in the world, and was treated with all the deference and excitement due to a favourite son who has finally come home.

For the cast of his new film Hitch renewed his acquaintance with an old but great love, the English theatre. Most of the actors, while unfamiliar to American audiences, were notable names on the London stage: people like Alec McCowen, who plays the inspector in charge of the case, Vivien Merchant as his would-be gourmet cook wife, Jon Finch as the man unjustly suspected of murder, Barry Foster as the real murderer, and Anna Massie as one of the victims, combined demonstrated talent with a pleasing unfamiliarity for picturegoers, and gave a richness of characterization sadly lacking in Hitch's two previous films. And the script did allow scope lacking in those two films, especially, for Hitch's more outrageous touches of humour. Not only are there the essentially expository scenes between the inspector and his wife, enlivened and given character by the succession of more and more unpalatable dishes she presents him with, fresh from her school of cookery (here Hitch's famous interest in food really pays off), but the horror of the notorious sequence in which the murderer has to extract the body of one of his victims from a lorry-load of potatoes and break her fingers in order to regain a vital clue clenched in them depends largely on its being at the same time callously, outrageously funny.

Indeed, in parts of
Frenzy
Hitch takes evident pleasure in manipulating his audience's responses more brazenly than ever before. He rushes to make use of the new permissiveness in film-making to introduce more nudity than before, and, in the picture's first murder, more graphic sexual violence. (
Frenzy
was Hitch's first film to get the ‘R' adult rating in America.) And in the scene immediately following that murder, when we see the murderer leaving the scene, from outside, then the camera stays put while a secretary
goes into the office and we wait what seems an eternity before the anticipated scream, one can palpably sense Hitch directing the audience, seeing just how far he can go. The film also contains another variation on a favourite Hitchcock ploy, that of forcing the audience into guilty identification with the villain: the real murderer is deliberately made so much more charming and agreeable than the rather unappetizing character he is framing for his crimes that all one's normal moral responses are thrown right off.

Hitch had a good time on
Frenzy
Again everything was falling out right and it showed on screen: the film contains some of his most memorable effects ever, such as the extraordinary shot in which, as the murder takes his next victim into his house, the camera pulls back from the stairs they have just ascended, out of the front door and back into the street as the sounds of busy Covent Garden, up to now tellingly suppressed, come flooding back on to the sound-track. When the film opened the press were unanimous in hailing it as a fantastic return to form, and with press and public alike it proved his most popular film since
Psycho
twelve years before. In fact it would have been a totally triumphant experience if it had not been shadowed by a personal drama, which came close to being a personal tragedy. One morning at Claridge's, Alma had a serious stroke.