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