Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Marnie
had been a setback, but
Torn Curtain
was a profound failure that indicated a more chronic condition—a malaise. Hitchcock’s twice-weekly doctor appointments continued, and in September and October he and Alma took another monthlong vacation, hoping to restore his bounce, pausing again at the Villa d’Este before doing a little publicity and sightseeing in Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Munich, and Paris.
When he returned to Hollywood, he seemed in better spirits. Yet this was a time for sober adjustments. The hotel-of-crooks story was the most ambitious of his future projects, the least run-for-cover, and as the one least likely to become a star vehicle, it was also the least palatable to Lew Wasserman and Universal. It was the kind of offbeat slice of life Hitchcock had always mused about filming, but in spite of working with Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli for over a year, he couldn’t conjure any confidence in the project. “We had a friendly exchange of ideas and arguments,” Scarpelli remembered. “Maybe it was our fault. Maybe it was his. He was tired, but we were tired too.”
Every decision now was a marker on the road, and this step marked a departure from Hitchcock’s lifelong practice: never again would two projects vie simultaneously for his attention.
At Christmas, the Hitchcocks flew with the Sam Taylors to St. Moritz. This must be the year, according to Donald Spoto’s book, when Hitchcock organized his day around the cocktail hour, always with “gargantuan lunches and four-hour dinners” whose menus he “dictated.” He waved from the balcony when Alma and the Taylors ventured outdoors; once again, on vacation, he took a vacation from doctor’s orders.
This Christmas, according to Spoto, Hitchcock seemed fixated on necrophilia, demonstrating to Suzanne Taylor how a man might strangle a woman with only one hand. To Spoto, that seemed like evidence of an increasingly morbid bent, though Hitchcock had always fixated on murders—staging stranglings in his films at dinner parties, even posing as a strangler for publicity photos. Some of his favorite crimes involved strangling followed by necrophilia. And, it was at St. Moritz that the director decided on his next subject, one deeply rooted in his nationality, and his imagination: the story of a necrophiliac serial killer.
Such a project could become the ultimate run-for-cover, while also giving him a chance to acknowledge a debt to the Nouvelle Vague. Even before he started working with François Truffaut, Hitchcock had been conscientiously screening the works of the new generation of foreign-language filmmakers, especially those from France and Italy. The autobiographical, socially critical, sexually explicit, psychological and philosophically oriented, sometimes fantastical and often stylistically un-orthodox
films of these young directors had flavored his screening diet for nearly a decade.
Hitchcock watched all of Truffaut’s films; he kept up loyally with the output of anyone with whom he was acquainted. Curiously, though, the pictures that really struck him—startled him, really, out of his rut—were those of Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni. Again and again he screened their films—
Blow-Up, Red Desert, Masculine Feminine
—all of them innovative in format and intellectual in content, and almost anti-Hitchcockian in their antidramatic narratives. But he was fascinated by their visual adeptness; watching one Antonioni, he sat up straight at the sight of a man all in white in a white room. “White on white!” he exclaimed to Peggy Robertson. “There, you see! It
can
be done!”
Inspired by such experimentalists, Hitchcock decided to shoot his new psycho-killer film in a contemporary, pseudo-vérité style—as much as possible on actual locations, working with fast film stock and natural light, and a cast of cheap young unknowns.
He had the sentimental idea that an old friend might join him in tilting at this windmill, and mentioned the project with deliberate casualness to Sam Taylor and Charles Bennett, but he detected little appetite from them for his Nouvelle Vague shocker. Surprisingly, then, he contacted Benn Levy. Although Levy was principally a playwright and stage director, he also had a good track record in film—and he had contributed dialogue to the sound version of
Blackmail
and directed
Lord Camber’s Ladies
, which Hitchcock produced in 1931. Hitchcock and Levy had quarreled disastrously during
Lord Camber’s Ladies
, but had reconciled after being thrown together over the years in show business circles. For five years after World War II Levy had served as a respected Labour Party MP and emerged as an assertive voice on peace issues and the arts, but he also kept busy as a writer, and was excited by the prospect of reuniting with Hitchcock on a film that would draw from real life.
As part of his modernizing campaign, the director wanted the story to be based on a postwar Jack the Ripper, either John Haigh (the acid-bath murderer he had read about during the filming of
Stage Fright
) or Neville Heath (the earlier, brutal sexual mutilator). Both of these notorious London murderers were familiar to Levy, but one was preferable.
“It’s got to be Heath, not Haigh,” Levy wrote Hitchcock on January 18, 1967, shortly after agreeing to the assignment. “
Told forwards
the Heath story is a gift from heaven. You’d start with a ‘straight’ romantic meeting, handsome young man, pretty girl. Maybe he rescues her from the wild molestations of a drunken escort. ‘I can’t stand men who paw every girl they meet.’ Get us rooting for them both. He perhaps unhappily married and therefore a model of screen-hero restraint. She begins to find him irresistibly ‘just a little boy who can’t cope with life’—least of all with domestic
problems such as he has described. She’s sexually maternal with him, she’d give him anything—and we’re delighted. Presently a few of us get tiny stirrings of disquiet at the physical love scenes but don’t quite know why. By the time we see the climax of his love in action, and her murder, then even the slowest of us get it.” Before the letter closed, Levy reiterated his Hitchcockian notion that the film should be “told forwards, i.e. more from the angle of the pursued than the pursuers.” And he added: “At one point, if I know my Hitch, I don’t doubt but that Heath with his maximum of charms will accost a policewoman.”
Hitchcock liked that: not only was Levy spewing out ideas before his contract was finalized, but his tossed-off notion of Heath accosting a policewoman was reminiscent of
No Bail for the Judge
, offering Hitchcock a chance to recycle his idea of a lady barrister posing as a prostitute. In “Frenzy,” as the project was tentatively titled, the near-victim would instead be an undercover policewoman.
“Supposing,” Hitchcock replied, sparking off Levy’s idea, “that the third woman
*
is a plant by the police so that you get the extreme suspense of watching the man fall into a trap—or does he fall? Supposing he nearly succeeds with the third woman, especially if he maneuvers her into some remote area which prohibits protective observation.”
Hitchcock’s chemistry with Levy convinced him to offer Levy a seventy-five-thousand-dollar deal for an outline, treatment, and first-draft script. (Note that these terms, for a friend and writer with a track record with Hitchcock, were substantially higher than the amount offered to Bloch for a book
and
film—higher, even, than the salary Brian Moore received for the bigger-budgeted
Torn Curtain.
) Arriving from London on February 18, 1967, Levy went straight to dinner at Bellagio Road; the next morning, he and Hitchcock commenced their discussions.
Levy was in the United States for the next two months, completing a treatment and developing a draft script that revolved around a young murderer of women, and a female police officer set up as a decoy. Although Neville Heath was the model for the killer, the story would be Americanized by virtue of its New York setting. Hitchcock supplied Levy with books about Heath, muscle magazines to help characterize the killer—a bodybuilder—and articles on hippies, who are among his victims. In April the director and writer traveled together to New York, staying at the St. Regis. Hitchcock gave Levy a tour of the city, and the film-to-be.
Life
photographer Arthur Schatz was engaged to ride around with them and shoot color slides of prospective sites, including a few that were familiar from other Hitchcock films. Scenes were planned for the New Jersey flats (as in
Shadow of a Doubt
), and in front of the United Nations (as
in
North by Northwest
). Hitchcock intended to use a Shea Stadium baseball game as one background, and Central Park as another. Unknown actors and models posed in the settings for Schatz. “As we reached the locations,” the photographer recalled in Dan Auiler’s book
Hitchcock’s Notebooks
, Hitchcock “would tell me the story of what was happening in the film.”
As Hitchcock told and retold the story, Levy wrote and rewrote. “Frenzy” evolved into an American manifesto—even offering a passing glimpse of the President of the United States himself. At the same time it was going to be a very personal Hitchcock film, a triumphant reprise of his signature themes. Hitchcock envisioned the mother of the killer as a professional actress, playing with the idea of the mother giving a Broadway performance, while suspecting her son of horrible deeds. (The police are slow to suspect the real killer, of course, although at one point a traffic cop pulls him over.) At the end of “Frenzy,” the mother would agree to help the police trap her son—a kind of apologetic reversal of
Psycho.
The “Frenzy” murders would all be triggered by proximity to water, which had been a source of danger in other Hitchcock films. The first victim (a UN employee) would be slain in broad daylight near a waterfall in a secluded patch of woods outside New York City; the second, an art student, would be wooed to a shipyard and viciously murdered amid abandoned World War II freighters. The “Mothball Fleet” sequence would be a nail-biting cinematic crescendo, a Hitchcockian tour de force.
The director’s eagerness about the project, combined with the sudden fragility of his career after
Torn Curtain
, even lured Mrs. Hitchcock back into the script talks. Although Alma had been a silent partner for
Marnie
, she was instrumentally involved in “Frenzy.” The participation of Levy, a mutual friend, lured her into helping—a by-product Hitchcock had counted on.
These were the last three Hitchcocks, and after Levy finished his tour of duty, leaving behind a solid treatment, the two Hitchcocks soldiered on together. In May 1966, they meticulously mapped out the shots for the “Mothball Fleet” sequence. As they had done since the silent era, the husband-and-wife team went over and over the crucial scene, debating the “maximum effect,” in Hitchcock’s words, “without being too horrifying and running into censorship problems.” As usual, Hitchcock did most of the talking while Alma listened.
The shipyard sequence would be preceded by a scene in which Willie (the killer) and Patti (the second murder victim) dine in a country restaurant. When they depart for the shipyard, Hitchcock asked his wife, “Is his mind made up that he’s going to kill her?” “Yes,” Alma replied, after thinking it over. “He knows she’s got a boyfriend and he may not get another chance. He goes to a lot of trouble to get her in the engine room.”
After luring her onto one of the abandoned vessels, Willie begins to rip
her clothes off, but his frenzy is interrupted by a shipboard fire he must extinguish before it can alert people on shore. “I’m scared [that] if we make it too horrific, we’ll get too much criticism,” Hitchcock said. He outlined a strategy whereby Willie would attack and stab Patti, but she would break away, running up iron stairs (“shoot through grilles, etc. so the shadows cross her body and we don’t have too much nudity”)—but then what? He couldn’t decide if there ought to be more stabbing, or perhaps a strangling. “The question is in tackling so much detail, how far can we go without the audience coming out of the theater, saying, ‘It’s too horrible, don’t go.’ ”
Hitchcock pondered having the killer let her go “with a smile,” and then having Patti just barely make it to the top of the stairs before fainting, and cracking her head as she falls. “Then there wouldn’t be
two
murder charges against him,” Alma noted, disputing his logic.
“How about if she gets away, and he chases her upstairs, and he kills her at the top of the stairs?” Hitchcock then mused. “We see her face, and she falls to the deck. We can use the shadows and the light carefully, so that we can get away with enough. We see the knife uplifted. Lots of inserts, rather like the shower sequence in
Psycho.
There will be many dark shadows and corners. We can build this in the studio so we can control it.”
Alma wondered if that wouldn’t seem like too much of “a repetition of
Psycho
,” in her words. Now, after the knockdowns of
Marnie
and
Torn Curtain
, it seemed more important than ever that Hitchcock avoid obvious repetition and place a premium on novelty.
“No,” Hitchcock insisted, “because it will emerge spontaneously by her running away.” He visualized Patti running up only a short, cramped flight of steps—not higher than the ceiling of his study—before Willie catches her, “a montage of heads, knife, hands, body, then she falls in big head [close-up]. She hits her head on [something hard] enough to kill her. We have a moment for him in calm contemplation. Also, based on photos, we can construct a set with a grille on top, so that the moonlight streams through the top almost like zebra stripes.”
Brainstorming aloud, Hitchcock got to a part of the story they hadn’t decided on. What should happen next? The men on shore, he said, would have noticed the fire.
“Which is best for us?” asked Alma. “Does he [Willie] know the men are coming, or not?”
“Isn’t it more suspenseful,” Hitchcock said, picking up the thread, “to milk the situation so that only the audience know the men are coming—because, for some inexplicable reason, the audience are on the side of the criminal at this point. Like Tony in
Psycho
, putting the car in the swamp; then, when it stopped, the audience held their breath.