Here Are 15 Things About Alfred Hitchcock That You Probably Didn't Know.
1. While Alfred Hitchcock's fear of law enforcement and breakfast contributed to his moniker as the 'Master of Suspense,' the courageous director nonetheless suffered from personal fears.
William, his stern father, sent him to the Leytonstone police station on the outskirts of their east London house as a punishment when he was a boy, and this experience left him terrified of police officers. 'I was just presented with a letter when I was about four or five years old, and when the chief of police read it, he threw me in jail and said, 'That's what we do to misbehaving boys,' Hitchcock remembered afterwards.
On top of that, omelettes were definitely not his go-to for breakfast. 'Eggs revolt me; I'm terrified of them more than anything.' He once mentioned this in an interview. 'That holeless white sphere... Has anything ever been more repulsive than a cracked egg yolk releasing its yellow liquid?' Blood is bright crimson. Yellow egg yolk, however, is repulsive. The flavor is foreign to me.
2. Alfred Hitchcock started out in the early 1920s creating art title cards for silent films. Now he's famous for the intricate title sequences in his own films. The Famous Players-Lasky Company, an American firm with headquarters in London, was the venue for the performance. I got to know the authors and studied their screenplays while I was in this department, you see,' Hitchcock said French director François Truffaut in their famous Hitchcock/Truffaut chats. And there is where I honed my scriptwriting skills.' Hitch also got his start in the film industry as a result of this experience. 'I used to be sent out to film it if an additional scene was required,' he informed Truffaut.
3. Alfred Hitchcock picked up some tips from an old cinema master in 1924 when he and his wife Alma were dispatched to Germany to shoot two Anglo-German features, The Prude's Fall and The Blackguard, by the British production firm Gainsborough Pictures, with which he was under contract. Hitchcock was embraced by expressionist director F.W. Woolgar when he was based in Neubabelsberg. The Last Laugh was being shot by the same director, Nicolaus Murnau, who had previously directed the terrifying Dracula adaption Nosferatu. According to Hitchcock, 'I learnt how to convey a tale without words' from his time working with Murnau.
4. A 1923 silent drama by Alfred Hitchcock was found in New Zealand, but the most of his early films have been lost.
Of Hitchcock's early silent features, only nine have survived to the present day. The White Shadow, a melodrama he worked on in 1923 about good and wicked twin sisters, was believed to be lost until 2011, when three of the six reels were discovered at the New Zealand Film Archive unlabeled. The original 1989 donor of the film reels was the grandson of a collector and projectionist from New Zealand.
Although renowned filmmaker Graham Cutts was officially the film's director in the 1920s, Hitchcock—who was only 24 years old—had many roles in the production, including screenwriting, assistant directing, and art directing.
5. Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock's 1929 first feature film and the first 'talkie' picture released in Britain, was about a murder probe presided over by the fiancée of the killer. The film introduced sound to British cinema.
Despite Blackmail's origins as a silent picture, the movie's final cut included synced sound effects added in post-production employing cutting-edge American audio technology.
6. Hitchcock himself appeared onscreen often; in fact, Alfred Hitchcock seemed to be the most consistent image in all of his films. With hardly noticeable cameos in 39 of his own films, the director mastered the craft.
One of his most elusive cameos was in the one-shot film Lifeboat, in which he played a weight-loss ad that one of the actors read from a newspaper. His only cinematic appearance is in 1956's The Wrong Man, when he narrates the opening as a silhouette rather than his usual cameo. It took the place of an earlier, canceled appearance in which the filmmaker got out of a taxi at the beginning of the film.
7. Whether he was in front of or behind the camera, Alfred Hitchcock achieved the same level of success on both screens.
Hitchcock had become famous by 1965. That was also the year that his anthology TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which had started in 1955 and had its name changed to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour when the episodes were lengthened from 25 to 50 minutes, ended.
During the opening credits of the series, a silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock took the place of a caricature of his signature profile. However, after the title sequence, Hitchcock made an appearance to introduce each new narrative. There were at least two versions of the opening shot for each episode. One version targeted the sho'ws network sponsors, while Hitchcock often used the European opener to make fun of American viewers in general.
7. The film director Alfred Hitchcock penned the encyclopedia article on filmmaking, the medium that brought him fame.
With his trademark sardonic first-hand knowledge of the craft, Hitchcock wrote some of the 'Motion Pictures, Film Production' section for the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
'It is erroneous to believe, as is all too usually the case, that the brilliance of the motion picture rests in the fact that the camera may go abroad, can walk out of the room, for example, to show a taxi coming,' Hitchcock stated in regards to the habit of moving the camera during a scene. This could be just boring and isn't always a benefit.
8. Alfred Hitchcock made the MacGuffin famous.
You are familiar with its nature even if you are unable to describe it. The so-called motivating ingredient that propels a film's storyline forward is known as the MacGuffin. Consider the titular monument in The Maltese Falcon, the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, or the blueprints for the plane's engine in The 39 Steps, directed by Hitchcock himself.
The word was first used by Angus MacPhail, who worked with Hitchcock as a screenwriter on Spellbound and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hitchcock was unconcerned with the significance of such story points, despite their putative importance. My biggest takeaway from life so far is that there is no such thing as a MacGuffin. Hitchcock told Truffaut in 1962, 'I'm persuaded of this, but I find it extremely difficult to convey it to others.' This highlights the fact that the spectator is never informed why the government secrets in North by Northwest are genuinely important. 'Look at this,' Hitchcock said, 'the MacGuffin has been reduced to its most basic form: complete and utter nothingness!'”
9. Alfred Hitchcock's films toyed with the idea of bringing attention to the rising tensions in Europe that would lead to the outbreak of World War II, as seen in the horrifying aircraft crash finale of Foreign Correspondent, for example. For decades, no one would see the picture Hitchcock worked on, which depicted the war's graphic atrocities.
Until 1985, the Imperial War Museum in London housed the 1945 documentary Memory of the Camps, shot by crews who followed the Allied troops that rescued individuals from the Nazi extermination camps at the conclusion of the war. At the request of his friend Sidney Bernstein, who is billed as the film's director, Hitchcock worked as a 'treatment adviser' for the original commissioning agencies—the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information. However, the finished picture was discarded due to its perceived negative impact on Germany's postwar rebuilding efforts.
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, the video was edited and finally shown as an episode of PBS's FRONTLINE on May 7, 1985.
10. Despite its high position in many best-of lists, Alfred Hitchcock's 1961 film Vertigo and four of his other masterpieces were almost unavailable to the public for nearly 20 years, from 1961 to 1983. Vertigo, Rear Window, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much were all films directed by Alfred Hitchcock that were intentionally kept from the public.
The director got complete ownership of the five pictures as a result of a contingency provision in his 1953 multi-film agreement with Paramount Pictures. Paramount made what seems like a financially astute decision in the years before Blu-ray and DVD: they returned the rights back to Hitchcock eight years after each film's premiere. The film rights to all five masterpieces were bought by Universal Pictures three years after Hitch's death in 1980, re-releasing them to the public.
11. 'Everyman' Jimmy Stewart had a string of roles with Alfred Hitchcock, including the role of the intrusive, wheelchair-bound photographer in Rear Window and the villain in the 'one-take' thriller Rope, but after 'Vertigo,' Hitchcock decided he didn't want to collaborate with Stewart again. Stewart was ready to reprise his role from Hitchcock's 1958 follow-up, North by Northwest, after his appearance in Vertigo. However, Hitch had his own agenda.
The filmmaker claimed that Stewart's advancing years were a major factor in Vertigo's underwhelming box office performance and swore to never work with Stewart again. 'Hitchcock, as was his nature, did not tell Jimmy there was no way he was going to get North by Northwest.' However, when Stewart became tired of waiting and landed roles in Bell Book and Candle instead, 'Hitchcock used that as his excuse, allowing him to diplomatically avoid confronting Jimmy and maintaining their personal friendship, which both valued.' Thus, Hitchcock got actor Cary Grant instead.
12. Although Alfred Hitchcock was under contract with Paramount Pictures, the company was reluctant to fund Psycho due to the film's explicit content. Paramount agreed to release the picture, and Hitchcock personally funded it, forgoing his usual pay in return for 60% ownership of the rights. The director used his less expensive Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV crew and filmed the picture on less expensive black and white film in order to further save expenses. Hitch's risk paid off: he allegedly pocketed $6 million from Psycho.
13. Once Psycho began, Alfred Hitchcock would not let theaters to admit anybody, not even the queen of England.
Not only did Hitchcock go to tremendous pains to ensure that viewers didn't spoil Psycho's finest surprise, but he also made sure that they liked the whole film leading up to the twist.
Hitchcock tried to cover up the surprise in the cities where the film premiered by purchasing all copies of Robert Bloch's source material. Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins were not allowed to give interviews on the picture since Hitchcock personally oversaw its commercial rollout. Along with that, he insisted that theaters in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and New York stick to rigid theatrical showtimes and not let anyone in after the film had begun.
You won't be able to cheat yourself—that's the message on the lobby cards that were part of the marketing materials for Psycho. Watch PSYCHO from the start if you can. Because of this, you should not plan on getting into the theater after each showing of the film has begun. Say what you want, but nobody listens—not even the manager's brother, the US president, or the Queen of England!”
14. Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed films that were not necessarily Hitchcockian. His daughter Patricia revealed that the director's favorite film, and the last one he personally screened before he passed away, was Smokey and the Bandit starring Burt Reynolds. Hitchcock was known to screen films in his studio lot office every Wednesday.
15. A competitive Oscar was never won by Alfred Hitchcock.
Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Ingmar Bergman, and many other outstanding directors have never been named Best Director, a fate that is both a blessing and a curse for Hitchcock. A total of five of Hitchcock's films—Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window, and Psycho—received Academy Award nominations. On the other side, he always returned home empty-handed.
A mere five words constituted his long-awaited acceptance speech when the Academy bestowed the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award upon him in 1967: 'Thank you, very much indeed.'
Interview with Truffaut
Hitchcock agreed to answer 500 questions over the course of a 50-hour interview with French filmmaker François Truffaut, which started on August 13, 1962—his 63rd birthday—and lasted eight days at Universal Studios. In 1967, after four years of transcribing and organizing the cassettes, Truffaut released the book he had dubbed the 'Hitchbook' to the public. In 2015, a documentary was based on the audio recordings. Truffaut wanted to interview Hitchcock because, in his opinion, the director was more than just a Hollywood star, contrary to what the American media had portrayed him as. According to Truffaut, Hitchcock had clearly 'given more attention to the possibilities of his craft than any of his peers' based on his films. 'Oedipus' consultation with the oracle' was his analogy for the interview.
The avian inhabitants
Both Marnie and The Birds are considered 'undisputed classics,' according to cinema researcher Peter William Evans. Grace Kelly, who had been Princess Grace of Monaco since 1956, was announced to be returning from retirement to play in Hitchcock's planned picture Marnie in March 1962. After Kelly requested that Hitchcock delay Marnie until 1963 or 1964, the director enlisted the help of Evan Hunter—known for his work on The Blackboard Jungle—to draft a screenplay adaption of 'The Birds,' a short tale by Daphne du Maurier that Hitchcock had previously included in his 1963 collection My Favorites in Suspense. Tippi Hedren was cast as the lead by him. Hitchcock cast her in the part, saying, 'I signed her because she is a classic beauty.' Prior to this, she had worked as a model in New York. The commercial was shown on NBC in October 1961 for the diet drink Sego. They are no longer featured in movies. He demanded, without providing a reason, that Grace Kelly's first name be transcribed as 'Tippi' in single quotation marks.
The Birds stars Jessica Tandy as the controlling mother of lawyer Mitch Brenner and Melanie Daniels as a young socialite who meets him at a bird store. In Bodega Bay, Hedren pays him a visit, bringing with her a couple of lovebirds. All of a sudden, flocks of birds begin to congregate, observe, and attack. The inquiry: 'What are the desires of the birds?'questions remain unsolved. The Revue Studio, which was responsible for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, provided Hitchcock with the tools he needed to make the picture. Utilizing a mix of mechanical and trained birds set against a background of wild ones, he claimed it to be his most technically demanding picture. We planned every shot beforehand.
Hedren said that Hitchcock sexually harassed and grew infatuated with her on set, as dramatized in the HBO/BBC television film The Girl. Allegedly, he kept her apart from the rest of the crew, followed her about, yelled obscenities at her, had her handwriting studied, and had a ramp constructed to go straight into her trailer from his private office. One of her Marnie co-stars, Diane Baker, remarked, 'othing could have been more horrible for me than to arrive on that movie set and to see her being treated the way she was.' The attic attack scene, which took a week to film, involved two men throwing live birds at her from a caged room. At the weekend's conclusion, she sewed elastic bands into her clothing and used nylon thread to connect one leg of each bird so they wouldn't take flight too soon. After a bird bit her lower eyelid, she sobbed and the doctor ordered filming to stop.
My name is Marnie.
Grace Kelly revealed her decision not to star in Marnie in June 1962. In October 1961, Hedren signed a seven-year, $500/week deal with Hitchcock, and he chose to pair her with Sean Connery for the major part. According to Richard Brody, who praised Hedren's performance as 'one of the best in the history of cinema,' the picture depicts a 'narrative of sexual violence' perpetrated against Hedren's character. Brody further said that the film is 'sick' and that this is due to Hitchcock's illness. Reviewers in the New York Times dubbed it Hitchcock's 'most disappointing film in years' in 1964, praising the performances of Hedren and Connery but criticizing the film's amateurish script and 'glaringly fake cardboard backdrops' as reasons for the criticism. The director had a lifelong struggle with intense sexual desire and the inability to satisfy it. He eventually found a virtual solution through his art.
The film follows Marnie Edgar as she flees from her employment after stealing $10,000. Even at Mark Rutland's Philadelphia business, where she applied for a job, she was stealing. In an earlier scene, she is terrified of the color red and has a panic attack when a rainstorm is raging. Using blackmail, Mark finds her and forces her to marry him. While on their 'honeymoon,' Mark rapes her despite her repeated protests that she does not desire physical contact. Mark and Marnie learn that Marnie's mom was a prostitute in her younger years. Legend has it that during a rainstorm, Marnie's mom got into a struggle with a client, thinking the client was trying to molest her. In an effort to protect her mom, Marnie ended up killing the client. She chooses to remain with Mark once her recollection of what transpired calms her anxieties.
Years that followed: 1966–1980
The last films
Due to his deteriorating health, Hitchcock was unable to produce as much in his latter two decades of life. Stephen Rebello, a biographer, said that Universal coerced him into making the films Torn Curtain and Topaz, the latter of which is adapted from a Cuban-set book by Leon Uris. Both featured espionage plots that revolved on the Cold War. Paul Newman and Julie Andrews' Torn Curtain marked the end of Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann's 12-year working relationship. Because Hitchcock disapproved of Herrmann's music, he cast John Addison, Jay Livingston, and Ray Evans in his stead. When it came out, Torn Curtain bombed at the box office, and both reviewers and studio executives thought Topaz was terrible.
Based on the book Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, Hitchcock's second-to-last feature, Frenzy, was shot in Britain. The storyline signaled a comeback to the murder-thriller subgenre after two films centered on espionage. The 'Necktie Murders,' really perpetrated by Richard Blaney's buddy Bob Rusk, become a major focus of the inquiry due to Blaney's history of violent wrath. Instead of having polar opposites, like in Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock makes the antagonist and victim kindred spirits this time around.
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For the first time, Hitchcock permitted nakedness in Frenzy. Donald Spoto dubbed the second scene 'one of the most repulsive instances of a detailed murder in the history of cinema,' referring to the unsuspecting woman who is raped and murdered in one of the two sequences depicting nude women. Models were used in lieu of Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Anna Massey, who declined to appear in the sequences. According to biographers, Hitchcock was known for often fooling the head of the Motion Picture Production Code, Joseph Breen, and pushing the boundaries of film censorship. Till the mid-1960s, Hitchcock would subtly allude to censorship-prohibited indiscretions. Yet according to Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock's 'inescapable inferences' were both frightening and entertaining to Breen and others who noticed when he was introducing such stuff.
Hitchcock directed his last feature, Family Plot. 'Madam' Blanche Tyler, portrayed by Barbara Harris, is a spiritualist who makes a livelihood off of her false abilities; the story follows her and her boyfriend, Bruce Dern, a cab driver. Family Plot has a darker tone than Victor Canning's The Rainbird Pattern, which served as inspiration for the film. Ernest Lehman, the film's screenwriter, had a darker tone in his first draft, but Hitchcock wanted it to have a lighter, funnier tone, so it became Deceit and eventually Family Plot.
Death and knighthood
Hitchcock collaborated with James Costigan, Ernest Lehman, and David Freeman on the screenplay for an espionage thriller called The Short Night as he neared the end of his life. Preparation was never made into a film. As his health deteriorated, Hitchcock fretted about his wife, who had just recovered from a stroke. The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock, a book written by Freeman, including the script in its final form.
Although Hitchcock turned down a CBE in 1962, he was made a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 1980 New Year Honours. On January 3, 1980, at Universal Studios, the British consul general handed him the documents since he was too sick to fly to London. He was on cortisone injections for his arthritis and had a pacemaker. Hitchcock joked, 'I assume it was a matter of carelessness' in response to a reporter's question about the Queen's tardiness after the ceremony. Janet Leigh, Cary Grant, and others were present for a luncheon that followed.
On March 16, 1980, he made his last public appearance when he presented the American Film Institute award recipient for the next year. The next month, on April 29th, he passed away at his Bel Air home from renal failure. According to Mark Henninger, a Jesuit priest, and Donald Spoto, a biography of Alfred Hitchcock, the director refused to visit a priest. However, Henninger and another priest, Tom Sullivan, reportedly held Mass at Hitchcock's house, and Sullivan overheard Hitchcock confessing. His daughter and wife will carry on his legacy. His corpse was burned during a funeral service on April 30 at Beverly Hills' Good Shepherd Catholic Church. On May 10, 1980, his body parts were dispersed across the Pacific Ocean.
Legacy
Recognition and praise
Hitchcock received two stars—one for his work in television and another for his contributions to the silver screen—when he was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 8 February 1960. Both 'the most widely recognized individual in the world' and 'a simple middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an artistic genius' were how John Russell Taylor characterized him in 1978. A 2007 vote by reviewers at Britain's The Daily Telegraph selected him as the best filmmaker of all time, and in 2002, he was named the most influential director of all time by MovieMaker. The film critic for the newspaper, David Gritten, wrote the following: 'Hitchcock accomplished more than any director to define contemporary cinema, which would be entirely different without him. Without a doubt, Hitchcock was the finest filmmaker to come from these islands.' In 1992, Hitchcock was named No. 4 in the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll's list of the 'Top 10 Directors' of all time. His talent was in storytelling, ruthlessly withholding important details while captivates audiences emotionally. On Sight & Sound's 2002 list of The Greatest Directors of All Time, Hitchcock came in at number two in the critics' vote and number five in the directors' poll. When the Japanese cinema magazine kinema Junpo polled its readers, they chose Hitchcock as the 'Greatest Director of 20th Century.'. Among Entertainment Weekly's '50 Greatest Directors' of all time, Hitchcock was named number one in 1996. In 2005, Hitchcock was placed second on the 'Top 40 Greatest Directors of All-Time' list by Empire magazine. Hitchcock was named the best film director of all time by Total Film magazine in 2007's '100 Greatest Film Directors Ever' issue. with a 1979 AFI Life Achievement Award. The Academy Award for Best Director was nominated to him five times. In 1940, for Best Picture, the Academy selected Rebecca, which had eleven nominations; Foreign Correspondent, another picture by Hitchcock, was also considered for that year's award. U.S. National Film Registry officials had chosen to preserve eight of his films—Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds—by 2018.
Along with other British cultural figures, Hitchcock was chosen by artist Sir Peter Blake—who designed the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to appear in a reimagined version of the cover in 2012. In the same year, he was featured in a BBC Radio 4 series called The New Elizabethans as someone 'whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and given the age its character.' The British Film Institute organized a traveling homage to Alfred Hitchcock in June 2013 that included nine restored versions of his early silent films, including The Pleasure Garden. The screenings took place in the Harvey Theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Archives
Hollywood, California's Academy Film Archive is home to Alfred Hitchcock's collection. Here you may see Hitchcock's first known color footage with home videos and 16mm film filmed on the set of Blackmail and Frenzy. The Academy Film Archive has been kind enough to save several of his home videos. The Academy's Margaret Herrick Library is the permanent home of Alfred Hitchcock's papers. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas has the David O. Selznick and Ernest Lehman archives, which include items pertaining to Alfred Hitchcock's involvement in the creation of Rebecca, North by Northwest, The Paradine Case, Spellbound, and Family Plot.
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