Alfred Hitchcock (133 page)

“I am looking for a new film project,” Hitchcock wrote Truffaut during the summer, “but it is very difficult. In the film industry here, there are so many taboos: We have to avoid elderly persons and limit ourselves to youthful characters; a film must contain some anti-establishment elements; no picture can cost more than two or three million dollars.

“On top of this, the story department sends me all kinds of properties which they claim are likely to make a good Hitchcock picture. Naturally, when I read them, they don’t measure up to Hitchcock standards.”

But the slow pace was tonic, and by January 1971 something new looked like it might measure up.

Arthur La Bern was a former Fleet Street reporter turned novelist and film writer whose long vitae included the acclaimed
It Always Rains on Sunday
, a 1947 film produced by Ealing from his novel. Angus MacPhail had been among the writers on that film, so Hitchcock knew all about La Bern—but it had taken him a while to get around to reading La
Bern’s 1966 novel
Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square.
He must have smacked his lips as he read—the story was so Hitchcockian, like
The Lodger, Psycho
, and Hitchcock’s abortive “Frenzy” rolled into one, that La Bern could be accused of having written it with the director in mind.

The story concerned a sexually impotent psycho killer who is preying on women in modern London. After his ex-wife and a barmaid girlfriend are murdered, an ex-RAF hero becomes the chief suspect. But he has a “rooted objection to being placed in a cell,” in the words of the book, and goes on the run.

Here was the fiction, with real-life echoes, that he’d been looking for. Although he could describe the story as a run-for-cover, it combined his kind of wrong-man conceit with a fiendish, “Frenzy”-style killer. Indeed, La Bern’s book directly likened the killer to Neville Heath; and in the film Hitchcock would add pointed comparisons to Jack the Ripper and John Christie—covering three of the psychopaths who had come up in Hitchcock’s talks with Robert Bloch and Benn Levy.

Everyone around him had witnessed the depths of the director’s despair after
Topaz
, and Lew Wasserman wanted to give his friend another chance. Now, suddenly, Hitchcock found Wasserman receptive to the project—all the more so because it was a London story that could be cheaply bought and filmed—even though the killer in La Bern’s novel was so reminiscent of the despised “Frenzy” that Hitchcock could recycle its title for the new film:
Frenzy.

But this was an English killer, not one that reflected on America, Wasserman reasoned; and indeed, Hitchcock would be permitted to shoot
Frenzy
almost entirely in London, which would be great publicity (while allowing him to escape Universal). Universal granted him a $2.8 million budget, small enough to minimize the studio’s risk, though Hitchcock had always been clever about stretching money.

Time had moved on for Hitchcock since he had conceived the first “Frenzy” in a New Wave mold, with a modernist black-and-white camera style and a cast of young no-names. The new
Frenzy
would be brought more in line with traditional Universal productions; it would feature highly respected English stage players and old-fashioned color photography.

Hitchcock even had an English playwright with a tasteful stage hit lined up to execute the script. En route to Paris in mid-January, the director stopped in New York for his first meeting with Anthony Shaffer, a former lawyer and author of the long-running stage hit
Sleuth
, a thriller about a mystery writer who plots the perfect murder of his rival. Shaffer then accompanied Hitchcock to London, where both stayed at Claridge’s while discussing the script and touring locations in Hyde Park, Leicester Square, Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and Bayswater, and on the Thames.

Hitchcock noted the proximity of Hammersmith Hospital to Wormwood Scrubs prison, and decided to exploit that for the escape of the wronged man in the film’s third act. The film was envisioned as a Hitchcock travelogue of London, but also a personal scrapbook of memories—starting with Covent Garden, where the psycho killer lives in the book. The venerable fruit and vegetable market was a place Hitchcock knew well from his father’s trade, and now he laid plans to tie the setting even closer into the suspense by making the psychopath a produce wholesaler.

Hitchcock himself was more like the wronged man of the story—Blaney, a man out of step with fashion, wearing an outdated tweed jacket with leather patches on the shoulders and elbows. As he and Shaffer toured London, Hitchcock, chagrined by how things had changed, found himself dwelling on the past. He agreed to set a scene at the recently built Hilton Hotel and another at New Scotland Yard, but rejected other contemporary locations suggested by Shaffer. Looking for a model of the old-style pub where Blaney bartends in the film, he complained to reporters about the “psychedelic nature” of up-to-date pub interiors. “They look wrong,” he said. “There’s nothing like dark wood in a good pub.”

But the two hadn’t yet done any actual scriptwork, Hitchcock informed the press; they were merely working from three pages of notes from the book. “We haven’t got a line of dialogue,” Hitchcock said. Then, after meeting with old friends, including a lunch with Ingrid Bergman, Hitchcock flew to Paris, where he was installed as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. At his request, the ceremony was presided over by Henri Langlois of the Paris Cinémathèque, who had been fired in 1968 by André Malraux under Charles de Gaulle. (Only after international protests from prestigious filmmakers, including Hitchcock, had Langlois been reinstated.)

Shaffer met with the director back in Los Angeles on January 22, launching a month of talks. But on the first day, the writer remembered, “I nearly talked myself out of writing the film by accusing the great man of being illogical and of leaving holes in his plots between the famous set pieces.” Lunch ensued “in arctic silence, Hitch thinking furiously throughout. At the end of it he said in his stertorous way, ‘Dear boy, quite obviously you’ve never heard of the icebox syndrome.’ ” No, the screenwriter admitted, he had not.

“I leave holes in my films deliberately, so that the following scenario can take place in countless homes. The man of the house gets out of bed in the middle of the night, and goes down stairs and takes a chicken leg out of the icebox. His wife follows him down and asks what he’s doing. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘there’s a hole in that film we saw tonight.’ ‘No there isn’t,’ she says, and they fall to arguing. As a result of which they go to see it again.”

“Just how many holes do you want to leave in
Frenzy?
” Shaffer asked skeptically.

“I’m quite sure you won’t leave any, dear boy,” Hitchcock replied mischievously. “Just leave that to me.”

Reconciled, the pair went back to work. To open the film, Hitchcock sketched an ambitious overhead shot, starting in midair above the Thames near his old neighborhood of Limehouse, then moving upriver and gliding under Tower Bridge Road, arriving to hover above County Hall, where a stuffy politician is making a speech about how the formerly polluted Thames has been thoroughly cleaned up (a bowler-hatted Hitchcock would be glimpsed amidst the onlookers). The politician’s self-serving speech is interrupted by the naked body of a woman washing up on the nearby muddy shore (the buttocks shot Hitchcock had pursued since
Psycho
).

Covent Garden had been in La Bern’s novel; so was the famous dead-body-in-a-potato-sack scene. But Hitchcock seized on these elements to weave a food motif throughout the film. Food would become a key to the main characters, hinting at their deeper urges. The psychopath, Rusk, likes to munch an apple after his nasty acts; Blaney (the wronged man) expresses his frustration in one scene by mangling a bag of grapes, in another by crushing a wineglass, cutting his hand (as Farley Granger does in
Rope
). The Chief Inspector meanwhile segues amiably from discussing criminal pathology to waxing euphoric over his office breakfast: bangers and mash.

It was steak and salad that linked Hitchcock and Shaffer as they steered their way through the script. That was the daily repast served for lunch in the director’s bungalow—every day, without relief. One day, Shaffer dared to wonder aloud “very gently, about this monotony. I shouldn’t have. Next day, a fifteen-course dinner arrived, catered by Chasen’s, and was laid at my tableside. Hitch, of course, had his small steak and salad.”

They were also linked by screenings: Shaffer was treated to the relevant Hitchcocks, and together they watched British psychopath films like
Twisted Nerve
(music by Bernard Herrmann) and
Ten Rillington Place
, about the Christie case. They perused medical literature on impotence and sexual pathology. They mulled the casting: Michael Caine was about to star in the film version of
Sleuth
, and Hitchcock had been following him since his debut in
Zulu.
The British actor’s first Oscar nomination had come for his turn as the sexually predatory Cockney of
Alfie
, a part not too far from Rusk (with his “man-about-town appearance,” in the book’s words). Hitchcock had Caine to lunch in the bungalow, but the part was a hard sell, and Caine was heavily booked up; he became the latest in a long line to squirm away from Hitchcock. (Barry Foster, the lesser-known actor who ultimately got the part, bore an obvious resemblance.)

Hitchcock’s drinking now seemed to be regulated, and he and Shaffer quit work every day at 4
P.M.
for daiquiris and gossip. The director was,
Shaffer told Donald Spoto, “not only mythicized—he was also lugubrious,” but never more so than when drinking. Because Shaffer was so professional, and because Hitchcock had been shaping and reshaping this kind of run-for-cover film all his life, the script advanced with remarkable ease. Although Arthur La Bern later denounced the film adapted from his novel as “distasteful,” with “appalling” dialogue (“a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce,
Dixon of Deck Green
and that almost forgotten
No Hiding Place
,” as the author grouched in a “Letter to the Editor” in the
Times
), his complaint is rather surprising, as the most distasteful scenes were culled straight from the book.
^*

The murders are extremely graphic in the novel. In one passage the first victim, Blaney’s ex-wife, is slowly strangled, an act that follows Rusk’s impotent attempts at lovemaking; afterward (in the film
and
book), the dead wife’s bulging eyes stare lifelessly at the killer. Later, Rusk murders Blaney’s barmaid girlfriend and stuffs her body in a potato sack, tossing the sack in the back of a lorry. He is forced to jump in and ride along, after he realizes she has an incriminating item in her grip; in order to retrieve it, he must bend back the dead woman’s fingers until they break. This scene, too, is in the book, and Hitchcock earmarked it for one of his crescendos in the film.

In shrewd ways Hitchcock judiciously edited the book. Where the novel has lengthy courtroom scenes, the film conveys Blaney’s guilty verdict in concise Hitchcockian fashion, when a bailiff guarding a courtroom door swings it open momentarily to eavesdrop. The film also excised Blaney’s brief escape to Paris, saving further screen time and budget. Yet Hitchcock couldn’t win with writers, who could be offended in so many ways.

It is true that the “appalling” dialogue wasn’t all La Bern’s. In subtle and unsubtle ways, Hitchcock was determined to make the film deliberately archaic—as, at the twilight of his career, he consciously sought to replicate his beginnings. “He was intractable about not modernizing the dialogue of the picture,” Shaffer told Spoto, “and he kept inserting antique phrases I knew would cause the British public a hearty laugh or even some annoyance.”

The film did boast one major innovation, on the other hand, that was entirely Hitchcock’s, and entirely to the good; he elevated the minor character of Chief Inspector Oxford to importance, giving him a fluffy wife, and supper scenes revolving around the wife’s experimentation with nouvelle
cuisine. Like other Hitchcock detectives down through the years, the Chief Inspector has everything “ass about face,” in Rusk’s words; after convicting the wrong man, though, something nags at the Chief Inspector enough to convince him to pursue further investigation on his own. (La Bern particularly objected to the film’s “grotesque misrepresentation of Scotland Yard.”)

One thing nagging the Chief Inspector is his wife, with whom he discusses the case—and his misgivings—in a series of delightful interludes that were a transparent riff on Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock. (The director, like the Chief Inspector, preferred his shepherd’s pie—though Alma was a splendid cook in any cuisine; the Rusk case was an analogue for a script the Hitchcocks might have worked out at mealtimes.)

Leaving the script in Shaffer’s hands, Hitchcock flew in and out of London during the first week of March to receive from Princess Anne an honorary membership in Britain’s new Society for Film and Television Arts, at a public ceremony held at Royal Albert Hall. Shaffer returned to Los Angeles for more talks in April, but he and Hitchcock were in sync and the rewrites went quickly and smoothly. A rare Hitchcock film without multiple writers,
Frenzy
was ready, astonishingly, for preproduction in London on May 23.

Leaving his old Hollywood confreres behind, Hitchcock rounded up a British crew for
Frenzy.
Sound mixer Peter Handford had enjoyed a bonhomie, and long conversations about steam trains, with the director during
Under Capricorn
, but Handford was surprised to receive a call out of the blue from Hitchcock asking him to record
Frenzy.
“He’d taken the trouble to trace me,” Handford remembered. “I thought that was the most wonderful thing, for such a famous man to take all that trouble over a sound recordist.”

Gilbert Taylor had once been a clapper boy at Elstree, before becoming the virtuoso cameraman of
Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac
, and
Macbeth.
Hitchcock told Taylor he admired his camera work on those films, but before he took the job Taylor felt compelled to confess a youthful indiscretion: While shooting
Number Seventeen
, Hitchcock had subjected the clapper boy and others on the set to a barrage of pranks, including grabbing people and cutting off the ends of their ties. One day, in return, Hitchcock himself was lured into a darkened room and tackled by two people, who managed to cut off his tie and make their escape without his discovering their identities. Furious, the director convened cast and crew, threatening reprisals. No one stepped forward to confess. Now, Taylor did confess to pulling off that stunt with a friend. The cameraman noted Hitchcock’s surprisingly earnest reaction—along
the lines of “Why pick on me?” But the director also said with a chuckle that it was a good thing Taylor hadn’t come clean at the time, for undoubtedly he would have fired him.