Hitchcock 5 by Dave Knight

foreword

he acknowledged master of the thriller genre he virtually invented, Alfred Hitchcock was also a brilliant technician who deftly blended sex, suspense and humor. He began his filmmaking career in 1919 illustrating title cards for silent films at Paramountâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Famous Players-Lasky studio in London. There he learned scripting, editing and art direction, and rose to assistant director in 1922. That year he directed an unfinished film, No. 13 or Mrs. Peabody . His first completed film as director was The Pleasure Garden (1925), an Anglo-German production filmed in Munich. This experience, plus a stint at Germanyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s UFA studios as an assistant director, help account for the Expressionistic character of his films, both in their visual schemes and thematic concerns. The Lodger (1926), his breakthrough film, was a prototypical example of the classic Hitchcock plot: an innocent protagonist is falsely accused of a crime and becomes involved in a web of intrigue.

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN trangers on a Train is an American psychological thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros. on June 30, 1951. The film stars Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, and Robert Walker, and features Leo G. Carroll, Patricia Hitchcock, and Laura Elliott.

plot Amateur tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) wants to divorce his vulgar and unfaithful wife Miriam (Laura Elliott), so he can marry the elegant and beautiful Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), daughter of a senator (Leo G. Carroll). While on a train to meet Miriam, Haines meets Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), a forward stranger who recognizes Guy from gossip items in the newspapers that detail his marital problems. During lunch in Bruno’s compartment, Bruno tells Guy about his idea for the perfect “Criss-cross” murder(s):

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Produced by Alfred Hitchcock Screenplay by Whitfield Cook Czenzi Ormonde Based on Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith Starring Farley Granger Ruth Roman Robert Walker Music by Dimitri Tiomkin Cinematography Robert Burks Editing by William H. Zeigler Distributed by Warner Bros. Release date June 30, 1951 Running time 101 minutes Language English Budget US$1,200,000 (est.)

he will kill Miriam and in exchange, Guy will kill Bruno’s father. Since both are strangers, otherwise unconnected, there is no identifiable motive for the crimes, Bruno contends, hence no suspicion. Guy hurriedly leaves the compartment but leaves Bruno thinking he has agreed to the deal. Guy accidentally leaves his cigarette lighter behind, a gift from Anne to Guy, which Bruno pockets. Bruno heads to Guy’s hometown of Metcalf and follows Miriam and her two beaux to an amusement park, where he briefly illuminates her face with Guy’s lighter, then strangles her to death. Guy’s problems begin when his alibi — an inebriated college professor on the same train as Guy — cannot remember their meeting. But they increase exponentially when Bruno makes repeated appearances into Guy’s life as he seeks to remind Guy that he is now obliged to kill Bruno’s father, according to the bargain he thinks they struck on the train. Bruno sends Guy the keys to his house, a map to his father’s room, and a pistol. Soon after, Bruno appears at a party at Senator

“I still think it would be wonderful to have a man love you so much he’d kill for you.”

Morton’s house and hobnobs with the guests, much to Guy’s apprehension and Anne’s increasing suspicion. He demonstrates how to strangle someone while preventing them from screaming: with his hands around his “assistant’s” neck Bruno looks up and sees Anne’s younger sister Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock). Her eyeglasses and resemblance to Miriam trigger a flashback for Bruno to Miriam’s slaying, and he loses control of himself and begins to strangle his subject. After a moment he faints, and the frightened party guests pull him off the hysterical woman. Young Barbara rushes to her sister and tells her, “His hands were on her neck, but he was strangling me.” Anne puts together the facts of the crime and confronts Guy, who finally admits the truth. Guy finally agrees to Bruno’s plan over the telephone and creeps into Bruno’s home at night. When he reaches the father’s room he tries to warn the older man of Bruno’s intentions, but finds Bruno waiting for him instead, now aware that Guy’s sudden change of heart suggests betrayal. Bruno tells Guy that because

he will not complete his end of the bargain, he should be blamed for the murder which “belongs” to him — so he will frame Guy for the murder of Miriam. Anne visits Bruno’s house to tell his mother (Marion Lorne) that her son is responsible for the death of a woman, but she does not believe Anne and fails to understand how dangerous her son is. Guy wins the tennis match but takes much longer than expected; likewise, Bruno is delayed when he drops Guy’s lighter down a storm drain and must force his fingertips down the drain to recover it. Guy arrives at the park while Bruno is still waiting for sunset. The two men struggle on the carousel, which spins out of control and crashes after its operator is accidentally hit by a bullet from the police meant for the fleeing Guy. Bruno, mortally wounded in the crash, manages to tell the police of Guy’s guilt, but the lighter is found clutched in Bruno’s hand, finally exonerating Guy. An amusement park employee who remembered Bruno’s previous visit confirms that Bruno was

in fact the murderer. Reunited with Anne on a train home, Guy is asked by a friendly clergyman seated near them if he is Guy Haines. Starting to reply, Guy, remembering this is the way Bruno started their fatal conversation, stops himself and quickly leaves the club car with Anne, leaving the man perplexed. Guy finally agrees to Bruno’s plan over the telephone and creeps into Bruno’s home at night. When he reaches the father’s room he tries to warn the older man of Bruno’s intentions, but finds Bruno waiting for him instead, now aware that Guy’s sudden change of heart suggests betrayal. Bruno tells Guy that because he will not complete his end of the bargain, he should be blamed for the murder which “belongs” to him — so he will frame Guy for the murder of Miriam. Anne visits Bruno’s house to tell his mother (Marion Lorne) that her son is responsible for the death of a woman, but she does not believe Anne and fails to understand how dangerous her son is.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you, Mr. Haines. It might disturb Mother.”

Guy wins the tennis match but takes much longer than expected; likewise, Bruno is delayed when he drops Guy’s lighter down a storm drain and must force his fingertips down the drain to recover it. Guy arrives at the park while Bruno is still waiting for sunset. The two men struggle on the carousel, which spins out of control and crashes after its operator is accidentally hit by a bullet from the police meant for the fleeing Guy. Bruno, mortally wounded in the crash, manages to tell the police of Guy’s guilt, but the lighter is found clutched in Bruno’s hand, finally exonerating Guy. An amusement park employee who remembered Bruno’s previous visit confirms that Bruno was in fact the murderer.

CAST NOTES Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearance in this movie occurs 11 minutes into the film. We see him carrying a double bass as he climbs onto the train. Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him “a reel of storytelling time”, since au-

Farley Granger as Guy Haines Ruth Roman as Anne Morton Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony Leo G. Carroll as Senator Morton Patricia Hitchcock as Barbara Morton Laura Elliott as Miriam Joyce Haines Marion Lorne as Mrs. Anthony Jonathan Hale as Mr. Anthony Norma Varden as Mrs. Cunningham John Brown as Professor Collins Robert Gist as Detective Hennessey Georges Renavent as Monsieur Darville (uncredited)

diences would sense qualities in the actors that didn’t have to be spelled out. In his book-length interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock/ Truffaut, Hitchcock told Truffaut that he originally wantedWilliam Holden for the Guy Haines role, but Holden declined. “Holden would have been all wrong—too sturdy, too put off by

Bruno”, writes critic Roger Ebert. “Granger is softer and more elusive, more convincing as he tries to slip out of Bruno’s conversational web instead of flatly rejecting him.” Warner Bros. wanted their own stars, already under contract, cast wherever possible. In the casting of Anne Morton, Jack Warner got

what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock’s objections; the director found her “bristling” and “lacking in sex appeal” and said that she had been “foisted upon him.” Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock’s scorn throughout the production. Granger diplomatically describes it as Hitchcock’s “disinterest” in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of Rope (1948). “He had to have one person in each film he could harass”, Granger said. Kasey Rogers (Miriam, credited as Laura Elliott) noted that she had perfect vision at the time the movie was made, but Hitchcock insisted she wear the character’s thick eyeglasses, even in long shots when regular glass lenses would have been undetectable. Rogers was effectively blind with the glasses on, and needed to be guided by the other actors. In one scene, she can be seen dragging her hand along a table as she walks; this was in order for her to keep track of where she was.

Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock’s scorn throughout the production. Granger diplomatically describes it as Hitchcock’s “disinterest” in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of Rope (1948). “He had to have one person in each film he could harass”, Granger said.

“My theory is that everyone is a potential murderer.”

“I have a theory that you should do everything before you die.”

Preproduction

Hitchcock secured the rights to the Patricia Highsmith novel for just $7,500 since it was her first novel. Hitchcock kept his name out of the negotiations to keep the purchase price low. Highsmith was quite annoyed when she later discovered to whom she had sold the rights for such a small amount. Securing the rights to the novel was the least of the hurdles Hitchcock would have to vault to get the property from printed page to screen. He got a treatment that pleased him on the second attempt, from writer Whitfield Cook, who wove a homoerotic subtext (only hinted at in the novel) into the story and softened Bruno from a coarse alcoholic into a dapper, charming mama’s boy — a much more Hitchcockian villain. With treatment in hand, Hitchcock shopped for a screenwriter; he wanted a “name” writer to lend some prestige to the screenplay, but was turned down by eight writers, including John Steinbeck and Thornton Wilder, all of whom thought the story too tawdry and were put off by Highsmith’s first-timer status. Talks

with Dashiell Hammett got further, but here too communications ultimately broke down, and Hammett never took the assignment. Hitchcock then tried Raymond Chandler, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, Double Indemnity, in collaboration with Billy Wilder. Chandler took the job despite his opinion that it was “a silly little story.” But Chandler was a notoriously difficult collaborator and the two men couldn’t have had more different meeting styles: Hitchcock enjoyed long, rambling off-topic meetings where often the film wouldn’t even be mentioned for hours, while Chandler was strictly business and wanted to get out and get writing. He called the meetings “god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business.” Interpersonal relations deteriorated rapidly until finally Chandler became openly combative; at one point, upon viewing Hitchcock struggling to exit his limousine, Chandler remarked within earshot “Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car!” Not surprisingly, this marked their last

confab. Chandler completed that first draft, then wrote a second, without hearing a single word back from Hitchcock; when finally he did get a communication from the director in late September, it was his dismissal from the project. At their first conference, Hitchcock made a show of pinching his nose, then holding up Chandler’s draft with his thumb and forefinger and dropping it into a wastebasket. He told the obscure writer that the famous one hadn’t written a solitary line he intended to use, and they would have to start all over on page one, using Cook’s treatment as a guide. There wasn’t much time though — less than three weeks until location shooting was scheduled to start in the east. Ormonde hunkered down with Hitchcock’s associate producer Barbara Keon—disparagingly called “Hitchcock’s factotum” by Chandler—and Alma (Mrs. Alfred) Hitchcock; together the three women, working under the boss’s guidance and late into most nights, finished enough of the script in time to send the company east. The rest was complete by early November. Three notable additions

“Doesn’t that bloodhound ever relax? He sticks so close he’s beginning to grow on me, like a fungus. “

the trio had made were the runaway merrygo-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses. Even while the tortuous writing stage was plodding its course, the director’s excitement about the project was boundless. “Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio... pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain.” The more the film resolved in his mind’s eye, the more he knew his director of photography would play a critical role in the scenes’ execution. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks, who would go on to shoot every Hitchcock picture through Marnie (1964) except Psycho. “Low-keyed, mild mannered”, Burks was “a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an exceptionally apt choice for what would prove to be Hitchcock’s most Germanic film in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding.” None was more demanding than Bruno’s strangulation of Miriam,

The more the film resolved in his mind’s eye, the more he knew his director of photography would play a critical role in the scenes’ execution. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks, who would go on to shoot every Hitchcock picture through Marnie (1964) except Psycho

“It’s pretty late to start flirting with a discarded husband.”

Burks considered his fourteen years with Hitch the best of his career: “You never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it. Hitchcock insists on perfection. He has no patience with mediocrity on the set or at a dinner table. There can be no compromise in his work, his food or his wines.” In the end, Strangers on a Train received only one Academy Award nomination: for its director of photography, Robert Burks.

shown in her eyeglass lens: “It was the kind of shot Hitchcock had been tinkering with for twenty years—and Robert Burks captured it magnificently.” With cast nailed down, a script in hand, and a sympatico director of photography on board, the company was ready to commence filming. Hitchcock had traveled east in midsummer to shoot background footage of the Davis Cup matches at Forest Hills, New York, and while there had done some location scouting. Exteriors would be shot on both coasts, and interiors on soundstages at Warners. Hitchcock and his cast and crew decamped for the east coast on October 17, 1950. For six days they shot at Penn Station in New York City, at the railroad station at Danbury, Connecticut—which became Guy’s hometown “Metcalf ”—and in spots around Washington, D.C. By month’s end they were back in California. Hitchcock had written exacting specifications for an amusement park, which was constructed on the ranch of director Rowland Lee in Chatsworth, California.

DIAL M FOR MURDER

ial M for Murder is a 1954 American thriller film adapted from a successful stage play by Frederick Knott, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, and Robert Cummings. The movie was released by the Warner Bros. studio. The screenplay and the stage play on which it was based were both written by English playwright Frederick Knott, whose work often focused on women who innocently become the potential victims of sinister plots. The play premiered in 1952 on BBC television, before being performed on the stage in the same year in London’s West End in June, and then New York’s Broadway in October.

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The single setting in the stage play is the living-room of the Wendices’ flat in London (61A Charrington Gardens, Maida Vale). Hitchcock’s film adds a second setting in a gentleman’s club, a few views of the street outside, and a stylized courtroom montage. Having seen the play on Broadway, Cary Grant was keen to play the role of Tony Wendice, but studio chiefs did not feel the public would accept him as a man who arranges to have his wife murdered. In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its “Ten Top Ten” list—the best ten films in ten “classic” American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative

community. Dial M for Murder was ranked the ninth best film in the mystery genre.

Plot Tony Wendice (Milland) is an ex-professional tennis player who lives in a London flat with his wealthy wife, Margot (Kelly). Tony retired after Margot complained about his busy schedule, and she began an affair with American crimefiction writer Mark Halliday (Cummings), which Tony secretly discovered. Motivated by resentment, jealousy, and greed, Tony devised a plan to have Margot murdered. When Mark visits England, Margot introduces him to Tony as a casual acquaintance. After sending the two lovers out for the evening, Tony makes an excuse to meet at the flat with petty criminal C.A. Swann (Dawson), an old acquaintance from Cambridge. Tony has been following Swann in order to blackmail him into committing the murder. Tony tells Swann of Margot’s affair, including a love letter from Mark which she once kept in her handbag. Six months ago, Tony stole the handbag and anon-

ymously blackmailed her. After tricking Swann into leaving his fingerprints on the letter, Tony offers to pay him ÂŁ1,000 to kill Margot. If he refuses, Tony will turn him in to the police as the blackmailer. When Swann agrees, Tony explains his plan. He will take Mark to a party, leaving Margot at home and hiding her latchkey under the carpet on the staircase outside the front door of the flat. Swann is to sneak into the flat after Margot goes to bed and hide behind the curtains in front of the French doors leading to the garden. When Tony telephones from the party, Margot will go to the phone. Swann is to kill her from behind, open the French doors, and leave signs suggesting a burglary gone wrong, then exit through the front door, again hiding the key under the staircase carpet. The plan works until Tony phones the flat. Swann tries to strangle Margot with a scarf, but she stabs and kills him with a pair of scissors, then picks up the telephone receiver and pleads for help. Realizing the plan has gone wrong, Tony tells her not to do anything. At home, he

“Darling, I understand now, but that doesn’t stop me from loving you. ”

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Produced by Alfred Hitchcock Written by Frederick Knott (play & screenplay) Starring Ray Milland Grace Kelly Robert Cummings John Williams Music by Dimitri Tiomkin Cinematography Robert Burks Editing by Rudi Fehr Distributed by Warner Bros. Release date May 29, 1954 Running time 105 minutes Language English Budget US$1.4 million Box office $6,000,000

finds what he assumes is Margot’s latchkey in Swann’s pocket and puts it in her handbag, then calls the police, sends Margot to bed, plants Mark’s letter on Swann, and replaces Swann’s scarf with one of Margot’s stockings. He also persuades Margot to hide the fact that he told her not to call the police. The next day, Chief Inspector Hubbard (Williams) questions the Wendices and Margot makes several conflicting statements. When Hubbard explains that Swann must have entered through the front door, Tony falsely claims to have seen Swann after Margot’s handbag was stolen and suggests that Swann made a copy of her key. Hubbard arrests Margot after concluding that she killed Swann for blackmailing her with Mark’s letter when he came to collect. Margot is sentenced to death for murder. On the day before her scheduled execution, Mark tries to persuade Tony to save her by telling the police that he hired Swann to kill her, not realizing that this is what actually happened. Tony refuses, insisting the story is too unrealistic, just before Hubbard arrives. With

“They talk about flat-footed policemen. May the saints protect us from the gifted amateur.”

Ray Milland as Tony Wendice Grace Kelly as Margot Mary Wendice Robert Cummings as Mark Halliday John Williams as Chief Inspector Hubbard Anthony Dawson as Captain Lesgate aka Charles Alexander Swann Leo Britt as the storyteller Patrick Allen as Detective Pearson George Leigh as Detective Williams George Alderson as First Detective Robin Hughes as Police Sergeant

Mark hiding in the bedroom, Hubbard asks Tony about money he has been spending lately, tricks him into revealing that his latchkey is in his raincoat, and asks him about an attaché case. Tony claims to have lost the case, but Mark notices it on the bed, full of cash. Realizing his story is true, Mark stops Hubbard from

leaving and explains his theory. Hubbard claims to prefer Tony’s story that Margot gathered the money to pay Swann before deciding to kill him, but after Mark leaves, Hubbard discreetly swaps his own raincoat with Tony’s, and as soon as Tony has left, he uses Tony’s key to re-enter the flat. He really does suspect Tony, having

discovered that the key in Margot’s handbag was Swann’s. Mark returns after seeing Tony leave. Meanwhile, on Hubbard’s orders, police officers release Margot outside. She tries to unlock the door with the key in her purse, then enters through the garden, proving she is unaware of the hidden key. Hubbard has the handbag returned to the police station, where Tony retrieves it after discovering that he has no key. When he is unable to unlock the front door with the key from the bag, he takes Margot’s key from the staircase and opens the door, proving his guilt. With his escape routes blocked by Hubbard and another policeman, Tony surrenders.

Production After 1953’s I Confess, Hitchcock planned to film The Bramble Bush based on the 1948 novel by David Duncan as a Transatlantic Pictures production with partner Sidney Bernstein. However, there were problems with the script and budget, Hitchcock and Bernstein decided

to dissolve their partnership, and Warner Bros. allowed Hitchcock to scrap The Bramble Bush and begin production on Dial M for Murder. Margot and Mark’s names were changed for the film. In the original play, they were Shelia Mary Wendice and Max Halliday. Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In Dial M for Murder, he can be seen thirteen minutes into the film in a black-and-white reunion photograph sitting at a banquet table among former students and faculty.

Similar films and remakes Dial M for Murder is sometimes confused with a film with a similar setting and subject-matter, Midnight Lace (US; David Miller, 1960), starring Rex Harrison and Doris Day. In this film, a woman (Day) receives harassing telephone calls that escalate until she is in physical danger. In the end, the culprit turns out to be her own husband (Harrison). There is also a police inspector around (in both cases played by John

Williams), and additionally the setting is very British. Being one of the classic examples of a stage thriller, it has been revived a number of times since, including a US TV movie in 1981 with Angie Dickinson and Christopher Plummer. The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) produced a two-hour color version in 1968 featuringLaurence Harvey as Tony, Diane Cilento as Margot and Hugh O’Brian as Max. A Perfect Murder is a 1998 remake directed by Andrew Davis and starring Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow in which the characters of Halliday and Lesgate are combined, with the husband (Douglas) hiring, or rather coercing, his wife’s lover (played by Viggo Mortensen) into a scheme to kill her. However, the lover hatches a revenge plot against the husband. Things go disastrously wrong for both of them, bringing in the cold, smoothly dogged police inspector (David Suchet) whose role is also much reduced from Dial M. It’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s character (as the wife) who unravels much of the mystery.

“Oh, wait a minute, you clot; you can’t walk down the street like that - you, you’ll be arrested!.”

Margot and Mark’s names were changed for the film. In the original play, they were Shelia Mary Wendice and Max Halliday. Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In Dial M for Murder, he can be seen thirteen minutes into the film in a black-and-white reunion photograph sitting at a banquet table among former students and faculty.

Robert Cummings’ character, TV crime writer Mark Halliday, was originally called “Max Halliday” in the stage play. In the 1956 US TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, there is an episode called “Portrait of Jocelyn” that features a man called Mark Halliday, who murders his wife. The original play was also adapted in Soviet Union in 1981 under the title Tony Wendice’s Mistake The film was remade in Bollywood in 1985 as Aitbaar, starring Raj Babbar, Dimple Kapadia, and Suresh Oberoi. Aitbaar was later remade that same year in Tamil as Chaavi with Sathyaraj, Saritha, and Nizhalkal Ravi. Another Bollywood film, Humraaz (2002), starring Bobby Deol,Akshaye Khanna, and Amisha Patel, is inspired by both this film as well as A Perfect Murder. Mark returns after seeing Tony leave. Meanwhile, on Hubbard’s orders, police officers release Margot outside. She tries to unlock the door with the key in her purse, then enters through the garden, proving she is unaware

Ovitati con pellis aperum dolorro omnieni molland eraernatios andae ne nonectatur? Laut lam in et molor andis molestecatem ipsus rehenda eptatia dolorep erferum labo. Volesto comniaIcipsapel endandae nonsequunt aut imus. Ut harcius aliquid que volutatur sitatent dio. Me verspel mo dem etur, id quid et ad miliquodis del iliquam, anisquis sequi cores

“Well that’s the first and last reunion I ever went to. What a murderous thug I look.”

of the hidden key. Hubbard has the handbag returned to the police station, where Tony retrieves it after discovering that he has no key. When he is unable to unlock the front door with the key from the bag, he takes Margotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s key from the staircase and opens the door, proving his guilt. With his escape routes blocked by Hubbard and another policeman, Tony finally surrenders.

REAR WINDOW

ear Window is a 1954 American suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by John Michael Hayes and based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder". Originally released by Paramount Pictures, the film stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, and Thelma Ritter. The film is considered by many filmgoers, critics and scholars to be one of Hitchcock's best. The film received four Academy Award nominations and was ranked #42 on AFI's one hundred years 100 Movies list and #48 on the 10th-anniversary edition. In 1997, Rear Window was added to the United States National Film Registry.

R 28

Plot After breaking his leg during a dangerous assignment, professional photographer L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined in his Greenwich Village apartment, using a wheelchair while he recuperates. His rear window looks out onto a small courtyard and several

other apartments. During a summer heat wave, he passes the time by watching his neighbors, who keep their windows open to stay cool. The tenants he can see include a dancer, a lonely woman he nicknames “Miss Lonelyheart”, a songwriter, several married couples, and Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), a wholesale jewelry salesman with a bedridden wife. After Thorwald makes repeated late-night trips carrying his sample case, Jeff notices that Thorwald’s wife is gone and sees Thorwald cleaning a large knife and handsaw. Later, Thorwald ties a large packing crate with heavy rope and has moving men haul it away. Jeff discusses these observations with his wealthy socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and his insurance company home-care nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), then explains to his friend Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey), a New York City police detective, that they believe Thorwald murdered his wife. Doyle looks into the situation but finds nothing suspicious. Soon after, a neighbor’s dog is found dead with its neck broken. When a woman sees the

dog and screams, the neighbors all rush to their windows to see what has happened, except for Thorwald, whose cigar can be seen glowing as he sits in his dark apartment. Convinced that Thorwald is guilty after all, Jeff has Lisa slip an accusatory note under Thorwald’s door so Jeff can watch his reaction when he reads it. Then, as a pretext to get Thorwald away from his apartment, Jeff telephones him and arranges a meeting at a bar. He thinks Thorwald may have buried something in the courtyard flower patch and then killed the dog to keep it from digging it up. When Thorwald leaves, Lisa and Stella dig up the flowers but find nothing. Lisa then climbs the fire escape to Thorwald’s apartment and squeezes in through

an open window. When Thorwald returns and grabs Lisa, Jeff calls the police, who arrive in time to save her. With the police present, Jeff sees Lisa with her hands behind her back, wiggling her finger with Mrs. Thorwald’s wedding ring on it. Thorwald also sees this, realizes that she is signaling to someone, and notices Jeff across the courtyard. Jeff phones Doyle, now convinced that Thorwald is guilty of something, and Stella heads for the police station to post bail for Lisa, leaving Jeff alone. He soon realizes that Thorwald is coming to his apartment. When Thorwald enters the apartment and approaches him, Jeff repeatedly sets off his camera flashbulbs, temporarily blinding Thorwald.

Thorwald grabs Jeff and pushes him toward the open window as Jeff yells for help. Jeff falls to the ground just as some police officers enter the apartment and others run to catch him. A few days later, the heat has lifted and Jeff rests peacefully in his wheelchair, now with casts on both legs. The lonely neighbor woman chats with the songwriter in his apartment, the dancer’s lover returns home from the Army, the couple whose dog was killed have a new dog, and the newly married couple are bickering. In the last scene of the film, Lisa reclines beside Jeff, appearing to read a book on foreign travel in order to please him, but as soon as he is asleep, she puts the book down and happily opens a fashion magazine.

PRODUCTION The film was shot entirely at Paramount studios, including an enormous set on one of the soundstages, and filmed in Technicolor. There was also careful use of sound, including natural sounds and music drifting across the apartment building courtyard to James Stewart’s apartment. At one point, the voice of Bing Crosby can be heard singing “To See You Is to Love You”, originally from the 1952 Paramount film Road to Bali. Also heard on the soundtrack are versions of songs popularized earlier in the decade by Nat King Cole (“Mona Lisa”, 1950) and Dean Martin(“That’s Amore”, 1952), along with segments from Leonard Bernstein’s score for Jerome Robbins’s ballet

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Produced by Alfred Hitchcock Screenplay by John Michael Hayes Story by Cornell Woolrich Starring James Stewart Grace Kelly Wendell Corey Music by Franz Waxman Cinematography Robert Burks Editing by George Tomasini Distributed by Paramount Pictures Release date August 1, 1954 Running time 112 minutes Language English Budget US$1 million Box office $26,105,286

Fancy Free (1944), Richard Rodgers’s song “Lover” (1932), and “M’appari tutt’amor” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha (1844). Hitchcock used costume designer Edith Head on all of his Paramount films. Although veteran Hollywood composer Franz Waxman is credited with the score for the film, his contributions were limited to the opening and closing titles and the piano tune (“Lisa”) played by one of the neighbors, a composer (Ross Bagdasarian), during the film. This was Waxman’s final score for Hitchcock. The director used primarily “natural” sounds -- diegetic sounds arising from the normal life of the characters—throughout the film. The camera that features prominently in the film can be identified as a 35mm Exakta Varex VX with a Kilfitt Fern-Kilar f/5.6 400mm lens.

Reception A “benefit world premiere” for the film, with United Nations officials and “prominent members of the social and entertainment worlds” in

“Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.”

attendance, was held on August 4, 1954 in New York City, with proceeds going to the American-Korean Foundation (an aid organization founded soon after the end of the Korean War and headed by President Eisenhower’s brother). The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and is considered one of Hitchcock’s finest films. On the website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has been universally praised, garnering a 100% certified fresh rating, based on 61 reviews, with the overall consensus stating that “Hitchcock exerted full potential of suspense in this masterpiece.” Although veteran Hollywood composer Franz Waxman is credited with the score for the film, his contributions were limited to the opening and closing titles and the piano tune (“Lisa”) played by one of the neighbors, a composer (Ross Bagdasarian), during the film. This was Waxman’s final score for Hitchcock. The director used primarily “natural” sounds -- diegetic sounds arising from the normal life of the characters—throughout the film. Critic Bosley Crowther of The New York

Times attended that premiere, and in his review called the film a “tense and exciting exercise” and Hitchcock a director whose work has a “maximum of build-up to the punch, a maximum of carefully tricked deception and incidents to divert and amuse.” Crowther also notes: Mr. Hitchcock’s film is not “significant.” What it has to say about people and human nature is superficial and glib. But it does expose many facets of the loneliness of city life and it tacitly demonstrates the impulse of morbid curiosity. The purpose of it is sensation, and that it generally provides in the colorfulness of its detail and in the flood of menace toward the end. Time called it “just possibly the second most entertaining picture (after The 39 Steps) ever made by Alfred Hitchcock” and a film in which there is “never an instant...when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material.” The same review did note “occasional studied lapses of taste and, more important, the eerie sense a

Hitchcock audience has of reacting in a manner so carefully foreseen as to seem practically foreordained.”Variety called the film “one of Alfred Hitchcock’s better thrillers” which “combines technical and artistic skills in a manner that makes this an unusually good piece of murder mystery entertainment.” Nearly 30 years after the film’s initial release, Roger Ebert reviewed the Universal re-release in October 1983, after Hitchcock’s estate was settled. He said the film “develops such a clean, uncluttered line from beginning to end that we’re drawn through it (and into it) effortlessly. The experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like... well, like spying on your neighbors. Hitchcock traps us right from the first... And because Hitchcock makes us accomplices in Stewart’s voyeurism, we’re along for the ride. When an enraged man comes bursting through the door to kill Stewart, we can’t detach ourselves, because we looked too, and so we share the guilt and in a way we deserve what’s coming to him.”

“According to you, people should be born, live, and die in the same place.”

Analysis

Hitchcock’s fans and film scholars have taken particular interest in the way the relationship between Jeff and Lisa can be compared to the lives of the neighbors they are spying upon. The film invites speculation as to which of these paths Jeff and Lisa will follow. Many of these points are considered in Tania Modleski’s feminist theory book, The Women Who Knew Too Much:Thorwald and his wife are a reversal of Jeff and Lisa—Thorwald looks after his invalid wife just as Lisa looks after the invalid Jeff. Also, Thorwald’s hatred of his nagging wife mirrors Jeff’s arguments with Lisa.

James Stewart as L. B. "Jeff" Jeffries Grace Kelly as Lisa Carol Fremont Wendell Corey as Det. Lt. Thomas J. Doyle Thelma Ritter as Stella Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald Judith Evelyn as Miss Lonelyhearts Ross Bagdasarian as the Songwriter Georgine Darcy as Miss Torso Frank Cady and Sara Berner as the husband and wife living above the Thorwalds. Jesslyn Fax as Sculptor neighbor with a hearing aid Rand Harper as the Newlywed man Irene Winston as Mrs. Anna Thorwald Havis Davenport as the Newlywed woman

The newlywed couple initially seem perfect for each other (they spend nearly the entire movie in their bedroom with the blinds drawn), but at the end we see their marriage deteriorate as the wife begins to nag the husband. Similarly, Jeff is afraid of being ‘tied down’ by marriage to Lisa. The middle-aged couple with the dog seem content living at home. They have the kind of uneventful lifestyle that horrifies Jeff. The Songwriter, a music composer, and Miss Lonelyhearts, a depressed spinster, lead frustrating lives, and at the end of the movie find comfort in each other: The composer’s

new tune draws Miss Lonelyhearts away from suicide, and the composer thus finds value in his work. There is a subtle hint in this tale that Lisa and Jeff are meant for each other, despite his stubbornness. The piece the composer creates is called “Lisa’s Theme” in the credits. Miss Torso, a beautiful dancer, initially seems to live a carefree bohemian lifestyle and often has various men over at her apartment. In the end, however, it is revealed that she has been waiting for her sweetheart, a slight-framed and boyish soldier, to return. Other analyses, including that of François Truffaut in Cahiers du cinéma in 1954, cen-

ter on the relationship between Jeff and the other side of the apartment block, seeing it as a symbolic relationship between spectator and screen. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane has made the argument[citation needed] that Jeff, representing the audience, becomes obsessed with the screen, where a collection of storylines are played out. Other issues such as voyeurism and feminism are analyzed in John Belton’s book Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”. Rear Window is a voyeuristic film. As Stella (Thelma Ritter) tells Jeff, “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.” This applies equally to the cinema as well as to real life. Stella invokes the specifically sexual pleasures of looking that is identified as exemplary of classical Hollywood. The majority of the film is seen through Jeff’s visual point of view and his mental perspective. Stella’s words sum up Hitchcock’s broader project as film maker, namely, to implicate us as spectators. While Jeff is watching the rear window people, we too are being “peeping toms” as we watch him, and the people he watches

as well. As a voyeuristic society, we take personal pleasure in watching what is going on around us. This line of analysis has often followed a feminist approach to interpreting the film. Doane, who used Freudian analysis to claim women spectators of a film become “masculinized”, pays close attention to how Jeff’s rather passive attitude to romance with the elegant Lisa changes when she metaphorically crosses over from the spectator side to the screen: it is only when Lisa seeks out the wedding ring of Thorwald’s murdered wife that Jeff shows real passion for her. In the climax, when he is pushed through the window (the screen), he has been forced to become part of the show. The newlywed couple initially seem perfect for each other (they spend nearly the entire movie in their bedroom with the blinds drawn), but at the end we see their marriage deteriorate as the wife begins to nag the husband. Hitchcock’s fans and film scholars have taken particular interest in the way the relationship between Jeff and Lisa can be compared to the lives of

“A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.”

the neighbors they are spying upon. The film invites speculation as to which of these paths Jeff and Lisa will follow. Many of these points are considered in Tania Modleski’s feminist theory book, The Women Who Knew Too Much. Thorwald and his wife are a reversal of Jeff and Lisa—Thorwald looks after his invalid wife just as Lisa looks after the invalid Jeff. Also, Thorwald’s hatred of his nagging wife mirrors Jeff’s arguments with Lisa. A “benefit world premiere” for the film, with United Nations officials and “prominent members of the social and entertainment worlds” in attendance, was held on August 4, 1954 in New York City, with proceeds going to the American-Korean Foundation (an aid organization founded soon after the end of the Korean War and headed by President Eisenhower’s brother). The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and is considered one of Hitchcock’s finest films. the film has been universally praised, “Hitchcock exerted full potential of suspense in this masterpiece.”

VERTIGO

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Produced by Alfred Hitchcock Written by Alec Coppel Story by Pierre Boileau Starring James Stewart Kim Novak Barbara Bel Geddes Music by Bernard Herrmann Cinematography Robert Burks Editing by George Tomasini Distributed by Paramount Pictures Release Date May 9, 1958 Running time 128 minutes Language English Budget $2,479,000 Box office $7,311,013

ertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor, based on the 1954 novel D’entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac. It is the story of a retired police detective suffering from acrophobia who is hired as a private investigator to follow the wife of an acquaintance to uncover the mystery of her peculiar behavior. The film received mixed reviews upon initial release, but has garnered acclaim since and is now frequently ranked among the greatest films ever made, and often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career.

Plot After an incident where his latent acrophobia results in the death of an officer, detective John “Scottie” Ferguson retires, spending much of his time with his ex-fiancée Midge Wood.

Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice.

Scottie tries to gradually conquer his fear but Midge suggests another severe emotional shock might be the only cure. An acquaintance, Gavin Elster, asks Scottie to tail his wife, Madeleine, claiming she has been possessed; Scottie reluctantly agrees. Next day Scottie follows Madeleine to a florist for a bouquet of flowers; next she visits the grave of Carlotta Valdes; then she visits an art museumwhere she sits watching Portrait of Carlotta, a painting of a woman resembling

“You shouldn’t keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn’t have been that sentimental.”

her. Lastly, she enters the McKittrick Hotel but when Scottie investigates she is missing and the clerk insists she has not been there. Midge takes Scottie to a local history expert who informs them Carlotta Valdes tragically ended her life with suicide. Another visit with Gavin reveals Carlotta is Madeleine’s greatgrandmother and who Gavin fears is possessing Madeleine. Gavin also says Madeleine has no knowledge of Carlotta. Scottie tails Madeleine to Fort Point, where she suddenly leaps into San Francisco Bay. Scottie rescues Madeleine and takes her to his home. The meeting is tense and leads to a strange intimacy between them but after a phone call Madeleine quickly leaves. The next day Scottie follows her to his house and they decide to spend the day together because Scottie fears Madeleine might commit suicide. The two travel to Muir Woods where Madeleine, embarrassed from confessing that her dreams sound mad, runs to the ocean and they kiss. Upon hearing the details of her nightmare Scottie identifies the setting as Mission San Juan Bautista and takes Madeleine there

James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson Kim Novak as Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood Tom Helmore as Gavin Elster Fred Graham as Scottie's police partner Raymond Bailey as Scottie's doctor Henry Jones as the Coroner Ellen Corby as the hotel owner

where they proclaim their love for each other. Madeleine suddenly runs into the church and up the bell tower. Scottie, halted on the steps by vertigo and paralyzing fear, watches as Madeleine plunges to her death. An inquest declares Madeleine’s death a suicide but Scottie feels ashamed his weakness

has rendered him incapable of preventing someone’s death. Gavin does not fault Scottie but in the following weeks Scottie becomes depressed. While treated in a sanatorium, he becomes mute, haunted by vivid nightmares. Although Midge visits, his condition remains the same. After release, Scottie haunts the pla-

ces that Madeleine visited, often imagining that he sees her. One day, he spots a woman who reminds him of Madeleine. Scottie follows the woman to her hotel room where she identifies herself as Judy Barton from Kansas. Though initially suspicious and defensive, Judy eventually agrees to join Scottie for dinner.

After Scottie leaves Judy has a flashback revealing she was, in fact, the woman known as “Madeleine,” but she is not Gavin’s wife. Judy writes a confession letter to Scottie explaining she was an accomplice to the real Madeleine Elster’s murder by Gavin, and how Gavin had taken advantage of Scottie’s acrophobia. She

rips up the letter and decides to continue the charade because of her love for Scottie. Scottie remains obsessed by his memory of “Madeleine” and their similarities. He transforms Judy until she once more resembles Madeleine. Judy agrees to change on the chance they may finally find happiness together. Scottie

realizes the truth when Judy wears a unique necklace that he saw in the portrait of Carlotta Valdes. Instead of dinner, Scottie insists on taking Judy to the Mission San Juan Bautista. There, he reveals that he wants to reenact the event that led to his madness, admitting that he now knows Madeleine and Judy are the same. Scottie forces her up the bell tower and angrily presses Judy to admit her deceit. Scottie reaches the top, conquering his acrophobia at last. Judy confesses that Gavin had hired her to pose as a possessed Madeleine; Gavin faked the suicide by tossing the body of his alreadymurdered wife out the window.

Adaptation The screenplay is an adaptation of the French novel The Living and the Dead (D’entre les morts) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock had previously tried to buy the rights to the same authors’ previous novel, Celle qui n’était plus, but he failed, and it was made instead by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques. Although François Truffaut

â&#x20AC;&#x153;He did nothing. The law has little to say on things left undone.â&#x20AC;?

once suggested that D’Entre les morts was specifically written for Hitchcock by Boileau and Narcejac, Narcejac subsequently denied that this was their intention. However, Hitchcock’s interest in their work meant that Paramount Pictures commissioned a synopsis of D’Entre les morts in 1954, before it had even been translated into English. Hitchcock originally hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a screenplay, but rejected his work, which was entitled Darkling I Listen. The final script was written by Samuel A. Taylor — who was recommended to Hitchcock due to his knowledge of San Francisco — from notes by Hitchcock. Among Taylor’s creations was the character of Midge. Taylor attempted to take sole credit for the screenplay,

but Alec Coppel — the other screenplay writer hired by Hitchcock — protested to the Screen Writers Guild, which determined that both writers were entitled to a credit. When actress Vera Miles, who was under personal contract to Hitchcock and had appeared on both his television show and in his film The Wrong Man, could not act in Vertigo owing to her pregnancy, the director declined to postpone shooting and cast Kim Novak as the female lead. Ironically, by the time Novak had tied up prior film commitments and a vacation promised by Columbia Pictures, the studio that held her contract, Miles had given birth and was available for the film. Hitchcock proceeded with Novak, nevertheless. Columbia head

Harry Cohn agreed to lend Novak to Vertigo if Stewart would agree to co-star with Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, a Columbia production released in December 1958. In the book, Judy’s involvment in Madeleine’s death was not revealed until the denoument. At the script stage, Hitchcock suggested revealing the secret two-thirds of the way through the film so that the audience would understand Judy’s mental dilemma. After the first preview, Hitchcock was unsure whether to keep the “letter writing scene” or not. He decided to remove it. Herbert Coleman, Vertigo’s associate producer and a frequent collaborator with Hitchcock, felt the removal was a mistake. However, Hitchcock said “Release it just like that.” James Stewart agreed with Hitchcock

Hitchcock originally hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a screenplay, but rejected his work, which was entitled Darkling I Listen. The final script was written by Samuel A. Taylor who was recommended to Hitchcock due to his knowledge of San Francisco from notes by Hitchcock.

and said to Coleman: “Herbie, you shouldn’t get so upset with Hitch. The picture’s not that important.” Coleman made the necessary edits. Hitchcock’s decision was supported by Joan Harrison who felt that the film had been improved. When he received news of the edits, the head of Paramount, Barney Balaban was very vocal about the edits and ordered Hitchcock to “Put the picture back the way it was.” As a result, the “letter writing scene” remained in the final film. A coda to the film was shot that showed Midge and a more-or-less healed Scottie listening to a radio report (voiced by unseen San Francisco radio announcer Dave McElhatton) of Gavin Elster’s capture in Europe. This ending was mandated by British censorship

requirements (where the murderer could not be allowed to get away with his crime) and was not featured in the American cut of the film. It is included as an extra in the restored DVD release.

Musical score The score was written by Bernard Herrmann. It was not conducted by him, but was conducted by Muir Mathieson and recorded in Europe, due to a musician’s strike in the U.S. In a 2004 special issue by Sight & Sound devoted to Film Music, Martin Scorsese described the qualities of Herrmann’s famous score: Hitchcock’s film is about obsession, which means that it’s about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is

There, he reveals that he wants to reenact the event that led to his madness, admitting that he now knows Madeleine and Judy are the same. Scottie forces her up the bell tower and angrily presses Judy to admit her deceit. Scottie reaches the top, conquering his acrophobia at last.

also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession.

FILMING LOCATIONS Filmed from September to December 1957, Vertigo uses location footage of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its steep hills and tall, arching bridges. In the driving scenes shot in the city, the main characters’ cars are almost always pictured heading down the city’s steeply inclined streets. In October 1996, the restored print of Vertigo debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by surviving cast member Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself. Visiting the

“I’m not mad. I’m not mad. I don’t want to die. There’s someone within me and she says I must die. Oh Scottie, don’t let me go. “

Scottie tails Madeleine to Fort Point, where she suddenly leaps into San Francisco Bay. Scottie rescues Madeleine and takes her to his home. The meeting is tense and leads to a strange intimacy between them but after a phone call Madeleine quickly leaves.

San Francisco film locations has something of a cult following as well as modest tourist appeal. Such a tour is featured in a subsection of Chris Markerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s documentary montage Sans Soleil. Areas that were shot on location (not recreated in a studio): The Mission San Juan Bautista, where Madeleine falls from the tower, is a real place, but the tower had to be matted in with a painting using studio effects; Hitchcock had first visited the mission before the tower was torn down due to dry rot, and was reportedly displeased to find it missing when he returned to film his scenes. The original tower was much smaller and less dramatic than the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s version. The Carlotta Valdes headstone featured in the film (created by the props department) was left at Mission Dolores. Eventually, the headstone was removed as the mission considered it disrespectful to the dead to house a tourist attraction grave for a fictional person. As a Roman Catholic cemetery, it is unlikely Carlotta would have been buried there on account of her suicide and illegitimate daughter. All

“Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere.”

other cemeteries in San Francisco were evicted from city limits in 1912, so the screenwriters had no other option but to locate the grave at Mission Dolores. Madeleine jumps into the sea at Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. The gallery where Carlotta’s painting appears is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The Carlotta Valdes portrait was lost after being removed from the gallery, but many of the other paintings in the background of the portrait scenes on view. Muir Woods National Monument is represented by Big Basin Redwoods State Park; however, the cutaway of the redwood tree showing its age is a replica of one that can still be found at Muir Woods.[clarification needed] The coastal region where Scottie and Madeleine first kiss is Cypress Point, a location along the 17 Mile Drive near Pebble Beach. However, the lone tree by which they kiss is a prop brought specially to the location. The domed building past which Scottie and Judy walk is the Palace of Fine Arts.

The next day Scottie follows her to his house and they decide to spend the day together because Scottie fears Madeleine might commit suicide. The two travel to Muir Woods where Madeleine, embarrassed from confessing that her dreams sound mad, runs to the ocean and they kiss. Upon hearing the details of her nightmare Scottie identifies the setting as Mission San Juan Bautista and takes Madeleine there where they proclaim their love for each other.

Madeleine suddenly runs into the church and up the bell tower. Scottie, halted on the steps by vertigo and paralyzing fear, watches as Madeleine plunges to her death. An inquest declares Madeleineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death a suicide but Scottie feels ashamed his weakness has rendered him incapable of preventing someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death. Gavin does not fault Scottie but in the following weeks Scottie becomes depressed.

Coit Tower appears in many background shots; Hitchcock once said that he included it as a phallic symbol. Also prominent in the background is the tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building. The exterior of the sanatorium where Scottie is treated was a real sanatorium, St. Joseph’s Hospital, located at 355 Buena Vista East, across from Buena Vista Park. The complex has been converted into condominiums and the building, built in 1928, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Filmed from September to December 1957, Vertigo uses location footage of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its steep hills and tall, arching bridges. In the driving scenes shot in the city, the main characters’ cars are almost always pictured heading down the city’s steeply inclined streets. In October 1996, the restored print of Vertigo debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by surviving cast member Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself. Visiting the San Francisco film locations has something of a

“There’s no way for them to understand. You and I know who killed Madeleine.”

cult following as well as modest tourist appeal. Such a tour is featured in a subsection of Chris Marker’s documentary montage Sans Soleil. Areas that were shot on location (not recreated in a studio): The Mission San Juan Bautista, where Madeleine falls from the tower, is a real place, but

the tower had to be matted in with a painting using studio effects; Hitchcock had first visited the mission before the tower was torn down due to dry rot, and was reportedly displeased to find it missing when he returned to film his scenes. The original tower was much smaller and less dramatic than the film’s version.

The Carlotta Valdes headstone featured in the film (created by the props department) was left at Mission Dolores. Eventually, the headstone was removed as the mission considered it disrespectful to the dead to house a tourist attraction grave for a fictional person. As a Roman Catholic cemetery, it is unlikely Carlotta would have been buried there on account of her suicide and illegitimate daughter. The gallery where Carlotta’s painting appears is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The Carlotta Valdes

“You want to know something? I don’t think Mozart’s going to help at all.”

portrait was lost after being removed from the gallery, but many of the other paintings in the background of the portrait scenes on view. The “McKittrick Hotel” was a privatelyowned Victorian mansion from the 1880s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 and is now an athletic practice field for Sa-

cred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School. The St. Paulus Lutheran Church, seen across from the mansion, was destroyed in a fire years later. Podesta Baldocchi is the flower shop Madeleine visits as she is being followed by Scottie. The shop’s location at the time of filming was 224 Grant Avenue. The Podesta Baldocchi

“Anyone could become obsessed with the past with a background like that.”

flower shop now does business from a location The Empire Hotel is a real place, called the York Hotel, and now (as of January 2009) the Hotel Vertigo at 940 Sutter Street. Judy’s room was created, but the green neon of the “Hotel Empire” sign outside is based on the actual hotel’s sign (it was replaced when the hotel was re-named. Ernie’s Restaurant (847 Montgomery St.) was a real place in North Beach, not far from Scottie’s apartment. It is no longer operating. One short scene shows Union Square at dawn, with old-fashioned “semaphore” traffic lights. Pop Leibl’s bookstore, the Argosy, was not a real location, but one recreated on the Paramount lot in imitation of the real-life Argonaut Book Store, which still exists near Sutter and Jones. One significant difference from the movie and actual San Francisco geography is Elster’s Mission District Shipping Company (the Mission being described as “Skid Row”). The Mission district is actually inland, and the designation of a Mission Bay neighborhood

only occurred in the 1980’s. At the time, the neighborhood would have been referred to as South of Market (SoMA). It is possible a single “mission” phone exchange included port facilities, but the location of a shipyard in the mission district is a sheer impossibility. The coastal region where Scottie and Madeleine first kiss is Cypress Point, a location along the 17 Mile Drive near Pebble Beach. However, the lone tree by which they kiss is a prop brought specially to the location. Filmed from September to December 1957, Vertigo uses location footage of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its steep hills and tall, arching bridges. In the driving scenes shot in the city, the main characters’ cars are almost always pictured heading down the city’s steeply inclined streets. In October 1996, the restored print of Vertigo debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by surviving cast member Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself. Visiting the San Francisco film locations has something of a cult following as well as modest tourist appeal.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST orth by Northwest is a 1959 American thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason, and featuring Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures”. North by Northwest is a tale of mistaken identity, with an innocent man pursued across the United States by agents of a mysterious organization who want to stop his interference in their plans to smuggle out microfilm containing government secrets. Author and journalist Nick Clooney praised Lehman’s original story and sophisticated dialogue, calling the film “certainly Alfred Hitchcock’s most stylish thriller, if not his best”. This is one of several Hitchcock movies with a music score by Bernard Herrmann and features a memorable opening title sequence by graphic designer Saul Bass. This film is generally cited as the first to feature extended use of kinetic typography in its opening credits.

N 62

The title refers not to a compass position, but Thornhill’s flight north to Rapid City on Northwest Airlines. See the full discussion below.

PLOT Roger Thornhill, a twice-divorced Madison Avenue advertising executive (Cary Grant), is mistaken for “George Kaplan” when he summons a hotel bellhop who is paging Kaplan, and is kidnapped by Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein). The two take him to the house of Lester Townsend on Long Island. There he is interrogated by a man he assumes to be Townsend, but who is actually foreign spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). Thornhill repeatedly denies he is Kaplan, but Vandamm refuses to believe his men picked up the wrong man. He orders his right-hand man Leonard (Martin Landau) to get rid of him. Thornhill is forced to drink bourbon in an attempt to stage a fatal road accident. However, he pushes one thug out of the car and drives off. After a perilous drive, he is arrested for drunk

driving. He is unable to get the police, the judge, or even his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) to believe what happened to him, especially when a woman at Townsend’s residence says he got drunk at her dinner party; she also remarks that Lester Townsend is a United Nations diplomat. Thornhill and his mother go to Kaplan’s hotel room, but cannot find anyone there who has seen him. While in the room, Thornhill answers the phone; it is one of Vandamm’s henchmen. Narrowly avoiding recapture, Thornhill takes a taxi to the General Assembly building of the United Nations, where Townsend is due to deliver a speech. Thornhill meets Townsend face to face and is surprised to find that the diplomat is not the man who interrogated him, and Townsend expresses surprise that anybody else has been living in his house. Before they can talk any more, Valerian throws a knife, striking Townsend in the back. He falls forward, dead, into Thornhill’s arms. Thornhill sneaks onto the 20th Century Limited. On board, he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who hides Thornhill from poli-

Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan?

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Produced by Alfred Hitchcock Herbert Coleman Written by Ernest Lehman Starring Cary Grant Eva Marie Saint James Mason Leo G. Carroll Music by Bernard Herrmann Cinematography Robert Burks Editing by George Tomasini Studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Release date July 28, 1959 Running time 136 minutes Budget US$4 million Box office $13,275,000

cemen searching the train. She asks about his personalized matchbooks with the initials ROT; he says the O stands for nothing. They flirt, but are interrupted by police officers boarding the train. Unbeknownst to Thornhill, Eve is working with Vandamm and Leonard, who are in another compartment. Upon arriving in Chicago, Thornhill borrows a porter’s uniform and carries Eve’s luggage through the crowd, eluding police. Eve (who is revealed to be Vandamm’s lover) lies to Thornhill, telling him she has arranged a meeting with Kaplan. She gives him directions to the place. Thornhill travels by bus to an isolated crossroads, with flat countryside all around and only scarce traffic. Another man is dropped off at the bus stop, but turns out to be unconnected to Thornhill; the man leaves on a bus after observing that a nearby biplane is “dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” Moments later, the plane turns toward Thornhill. To his terror, it dives at him, passing him at an altitude of only a few feet, forcing him to throw himself to the ground; immediately after that, someone on

Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall James Mason as Phillip Vandamm Leo G. Carroll as The Professor Jessie Royce Landis as Thornhill's mother Clara Martin Landau as Leonard Philip Ober as Lester Townsend Adam Williams as Valerian Patrick McVey as Sergeant Flamm Ed Platt as Victor Larrabee

the plane opens fire on Thornhill with an automatic weapon, just missing him. This process is repeated several times. Thornhill flees to the cover of a cornfield, but the plane dusts it with pesticide, forcing him out. Desperate, Thornhill steps in front of a speeding gasoline tank truck, making it stop. The plane crashes into the tank truck and explodes. When passing drivers stop to see what is going on, Thornhill steals a pickup truck and drives back to Chicago. Thornhill returns to the hotel, where he is surprised to learn that Kaplan had already checked out when Eve claimed to have spoken to him. Suspicious, he goes to Eveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s room to question her. She lets him get cleaned up as she leaves. From the impression of a message written on a notepad, Thornhill learns her destination: an art auction. There, he finds Vandamm, Leonard, and Eve. Vandamm purchases a pre-Columbian Tarascan statue and departs. Thornhill tries to remain safely in police custody and identifies himself as a wanted fugitive, but the officers are ordered to take him to Midway Airport instead of a police station.

“In the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.”

The Professor reveals that George Kaplan does not exist: he was invented to distract Vandamm from the real government agent — Eve, who was already in a relationship with Vandamm when alerted by the Professor to Vandamm’s espionage activity. As Eve’s life is now in danger, Thornhill agrees to help the Professor in order to protect her.

He meets the Professor (Leo G. Carroll), an American spymaster who is after Vandamm. The Professor reveals that George Kaplan does not exist: he was invented to distract Vandamm from the real government agent — Eve, who was already in a relationship with Vandamm

when alerted by the Professor to Vandamm’s espionage activity. As Eve’s life is now in danger, Thornhill agrees to help the Professor in order to protect her. They fly to Rapid City, South Dakota, where Thornhill (now pretending to be Kaplan)

meets Eve and Vandamm in a crowded cafeteria at the base of Mount Rushmore. He offers to let Vandamm leave the country in exchange for Eve, but is turned down. When he tries to keep her from leaving, Eve shoots Thornhill and flees. He is taken away in an ambulance. At a secluded spot, however, he emerges unharmed, having been shot with blanks. To his dismay, he learns that, having proven her loyalty and made herself a fugitive, Eve will accompany Vandamm out of the country that night. To keep him from interfering further, Thornhill is locked in a hospital room. Thornhill manages to escape and goes to Vandamm’s mountainside home, slipping inside undetected. He learns that the Tarascan statue contains secrets on microfilm. While Eve is out of the room, Leonard fires the gun she used at Vandamm, demonstrating how the shooting was faked. Vandamm decides to throw Eve out of the airplane when they are flying over water. Thornhill manages to warn her by writing a note inside one of his ROT matchbooks and dropping it where she can find it.

On the way to the airplane, Eve grabs the statue and joins Thornhill. Leonard and Valerian chase them across the top of the Mount Rushmore monument. Valerian lunges at the pair, but falls to his death. Eve slips and clings desperately to the steep mountainside. Thornhill grabs her hand, while precariously holding on with his other hand. Leonard appears and treads on his hand. They are saved when the Professor has a police marksman shoot Leonard, who falls to his death, and Vandamm is arrested. The scene transitions from Thornhill pulling Eve up to safety on Mount Rushmore to him pulling her, now his wife, onto an upper bunk on a train. The final shot shows their train speeding into a tunnel.

Origins John Russell Taylor’s official biography of Hitchcock, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (1978), suggests that the story originated after a spell of writer’s block during the scripting of another movie project:

Alfred Hitchcock had agreed to do a film for MGM, and they had chosen an adaptation of the novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes. Composer Bernard Herrmann had recommended that Hitchcock work with his friend Ernest Lehman. After a couple of weeks, Lehman offered to quit saying he didn’t know what to do with the story. Hitchcock told him they got along great together and they would just write something else. Lehman said that he wanted to make the ultimate Hitchcock film. Hitchcock thought for a moment then said he had always wanted to do a chase across Mount Rushmore. Lehman and Hitchcock spitballed more ideas: a murder at the United Nations Headquarters; a murder at a car plant in Detroit; a final showdown in Alaska. Eventually they sett-

led on the U.N. murder for the opening and the chase across Mount Rushmore for the climax. For the central idea, Hitchcock remembered something an American journalist had told him about spies creating a fake agent as a decoy. Perhaps their hero could be mistaken for this fictitious agent and end up on the run. They bought the idea from the journalist for $10,000. Lehman would sometimes repeat this story himself, as in the documentary Destination Hitchcock that accompanied the 2001 DVD release of the film. In his 2000 book Which Lie Did I Tell?, screenwriter William Goldman, commenting on the film, insists that it was Lehman who createdNorth by Northwest and that many of Hitchcock’s ideas were not used. Hitchcock had the idea of the hero being stranded in the middle of nowhere, but sugges-

The scene transitions from Thornhill pulling Eve up to safety on Mount Rushmore to him pulling her, now his wife, onto an upper bunk on a train. The final shot shows their train speeding into a tunnel.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I may go back to hating you. It was more fun.â&#x20AC;?

“I didn’t realize you were an art collector. I thought you just collected corpses.”

ted the villains try to kill him with a tornado. Lehman responded, “but they’re trying to kill him. How are they going to work up a cyclone?” Then, as he told an interviewer; “I just can’t tell you who said what to whom, but somewhere during that afternoon, the cyclone in the sky became the crop-duster plane.” Guernsey turned his idea into a story about an American traveling salesman who travels to the Middle East and is mistaken for a fictitious agent, becoming “saddled with a romantic and dangerous identity.” Guernsey admitted that his treatment was full of “corn” and “lacking logic.” He urged Hitchcock to do what he liked with the story. Hitchcock bought the sixty pages. Hitchcock sat on the idea, waiting for the right screenwriter to develop it. At one stage “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose” was touted as a collaboration with John Michael Hayes. When Lehman came on board, the traveling salesman – which had previously been suited to James Stewart – was adapted to a Madison Avenue advertising executive, a position which Lehman

had formerly held. In an interview in the bookScreenwriters on Screenwriting (1995), Lehman stated that he had already written much of the screenplay before coming up with critical elements of the climax.

Production The filming of North by Northwest took place between August and December 1958 with the exception of a few re-takes that were shot in April 1959. This was the only Hitchcock film released by MGM. It is owned by Turner Entertainment, at Hitchcock’s insistence, the film was made in Paramount’s VistaVision widescreen process, making it one of the few VistaVision films made at MGM. The car chase scene in which Thornhill is drunkenly careening along the edge of cliffs high above the ocean, supposedly on Long Island, was actually shot on the California coast. At the time, the United Nations prohibited film crews from shooting around its New York City headquarters. In an example of guerrilla

filmmaking, Hitchcock used a movie camera hidden in a parked van to film Cary Grant and Adam Williams exiting their taxis and entering the building.[citation needed] The cropduster sequence, meant to take place in northern Indiana, was shot on location on Garces Highway (155) near the towns of Wasco and Delano, north of Bakersfield in Kern County, California (35°45′38.81″N 119°33′41.52″W). Years later, in a show at the Pompidou Centercalled “Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences”, an aerial shot of Grant in the cornfield, with a “road cutting straight through the cornrows to the edge of the screen”, was said to draw on Léon Spilliaert’s “Le Paquebot ou L’Estran”, which features “alternating strips of sand and ocean blue bands stretch[ed] to the edge of the canvas.” The aircraft seen flying in the scene is a Naval Aircraft Factory N3N Canary, a World War II Navy pilot trainer sometimes converted for cropdusting. The aircraft that hits the truck and explodes is a wartime Stearman (Boeing Model 75) trainer. Like its N3N lookalike, many

There was one point of agreement between Chandler and Hitchcock, although it would come only much later, near the release of the film: they both acknowledged that since virtually none of Chandler’s work remained in the final script, his name should be removed from the credits. Hitchcock preferred the writing credit of Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde, but Warner Bros. wanted the cachet of the Chandler name and insisted it stay on.

“ I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me. ”

were used for agricultural purposes through the 1970s. The plane was piloted by Bob Coe, a local cropduster from Wasco. Hitchcock placed replicas of square Indiana highway signs in the scene. In an extensive list of “1001 Greatest Movie Moments” of all time, the British movie magazineEmpire in its August 2009 issue ranked the cropduster scene as the best. Fifty years on, you could say that Hitchcock’s sleek, wry, paranoid thriller caught the zeitgeist perfectly: Cold War shadiness, secret agents of power, urbane modernism, the ant-like bustle of city life, and a hint of dread behind the sharp suits of affluence. Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, the film’s sharply dressed ad exec who is sucked into a vortex of mistaken identity, certainly wouldn’t be out of place in Mad Men. But there’s nothing dated about this perfect storm of talent, from Hitchcock and Grant to writer Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success), co-stars James Mason and Eva Marie Saint, composer Bernard Herrmann and even designer Saul Bass, whose opening-credits sequence still manages to send a shiver down the spine.

psycho

sycho is a 1960 American suspense/psychological horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. The film is based on the screenplay by Joseph Stefano, who adapted it from the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. The novel was loosely inspired by the crimes of Wisconsin murderer and grave robber Ed Gein, who lived just 40 miles from Bloch. The film depicts the encounter between a secretary, Marion Crane (Leigh), hiding at a secluded motel after embezzling money from her employer, and the motel’s disturbed owner and manager, Norman Bates (Perkins), and the aftermath of their encounter. Psycho initially received mixed reviews, but outstanding box office returns prompted a re-review which was overwhelmingly positive and led to four Academy Award nominations. Psycho is now considered one of Hitchcock’s best films and is highly praised as a work of cinematic art by international critics. The film spawned two sequels, a prequel, a remake, and

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a television movie spin-off. In 1992, the film was selected to be preserved by the Library of Congress at the National Film Registry.

Plot In need of money to marry her lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin), Phoenix secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals $40,000 from one of her employer’s clients and flees in her car. En route to Sam’s California home, she parks along the road to sleep. A highway patrol officer awakens her and, suspicious of her agitated state, he begins to follow her. When she trades her car for another one at a car dealership, he notes the new vehicle’s details. By the time Marion returns to the road, there is a heavy rainstorm which prompts her to spend the night at the Bates Motel rather than drive in the rain. Owner Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) tells Marion he rarely has customers because of his location along an older, less-traveled highway, and mentions he lives with his mother in the house overlooking the motel. He then

“I think I must have one of those faces you can’t help believing. ”

shyly invites Marion to have supper with him. She overhears Norman arguing with his mother about his supposed sexual interest in Marion, and during the meal, Marion angers him by suggesting he institutionalize his mother. He admits he would like to do so, but does not want to abandon her. Marion resolves to return to Phoenix to return the money. As she undresses in her room, Norman watches through a peephole in his office wall. After calculating how she can repay the money she has spent, Marion flushes her notes down the toilet and begins to shower. Suddenly, an anonymous figure enters the bathroom and stabs Marion to death. Norman finds the corpse, and immediately assumes that his mother committed the murder. He cleans the bathroom and places Marion’s body, wrapped in the shower curtain, and all her possessions—including the money—in the trunk of her car and sinks it in a nearby swamp. Shortly afterward, Sam is contacted by both Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) and private detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam),

who has been hired by Marion’s employer to find her and recover the money. Arbogast traces Marion to the motel and questions Norman, who lies unconvincingly about Marion having left weeks before. He refuses to let Arbogast talk to his mother, claiming she is ill. Arbogast calls Lila and tells her he will contact her again after

hopefully questioning Norman’s mother. Arbogast enters Norman’s house and is attacked by a figure who slashes his face with a large kitchen knife, causing him to fall down the stairs, and then stabs him to death. Norman confronts his mother and urges her to hide in the cellar. She rejects the idea and orders him out of her

room. Against her will, Norman carries her to the fruit cellar. When Arbogast does not call Lila, she and Sam contact the local police. Deputy Sheriff Al Chambers is perplexed to learn Arbogast saw a woman in a window, and reveals that Norman’s mother had died ten years earlier. Norman had found her dead alongside her married lover; an apparent murder-suicide. When Chambers dismisses Lila and Sam’s concerns over Arbogast’s disappearance, the two decide to search the motel themselves. Posing as a married couple, Sam and Lila check into the motel and search Marion’s cabin, where they find a scrap of paper with “$40,000” written on it. While Sam distracts Norman, Lila sneaks into the house to search for his mother. Sam suggests Norman killed Marion for the money so he could buy a new hotel. Realizing Lila is missing, Norman knocks Sam unconscious and rushes to the house. Lila sees him and hides in the cellar where she discovers the mummified body of Mrs. Bates. Seconds later, Norman rushes in, wearing his mother’s clothes and a

wig, and carrying a knife. Sam arrives just in time to subdue Bates and save Lila. After Norman’s arrest, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Fred Richmond (Simon Oakland) tells Sam and Lila that Mrs. Bates is alive in Norman’s fractured psyche. After the death of Norman’s father, the pair lived as if they were the only people in the world. Norman sits in a cell, his mind dominated by the Mother persona. In voiceover, she says that she will prove to the authorities that she is harmless by refusing to swat a fly on Norman’s hand. Marion’s car is shown being recovered from the swamp.

Development Psycho is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch which in turn is based loosely on the case of convicted Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein. Both Gein and Psycho’s protagonist, Norman Bates, were solitary murderers in isolated rural locations. Both had deceased domineering mothers, and had sealed off one room of their house as a shrine to their mother, and both dressed in women’s clothing.

When Arbogast does not call Lila, she and Sam contact the local police. Deputy Sheriff Al Chambers is perplexed to learn Arbogast saw a woman in a window, and reveals that Normanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mother had died ten years earlier. Norman had found her dead alongside her married lover; an apparent murder-suicide.

Marion resolves to return to Phoenix to return the money. As she undresses in her room, Norman watches through a peephole in his office wall. After calculating how she can repay the money she has spent, Marion flushes her notes down the toilet and begins to shower. Suddenly, an anonymous figure enters the bathroom and stabs Marion to death. Norman finds the corpse, and immediately assumes that his mother committed the murder. He cleans the bathroom and places Marion’s body, wrapped in the shower curtain, and all her possessions—including the money—in the trunk of her car and sinks it in a nearby swamp.

“Oh, we have 12 vacancies. 12 cabins, 12 vacancies.”

However, there are many differences between Bates and Ed Gein. Among others, Gein would not be strictly considered a serial killer, having officially killed “only” two people. Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock’s production assistant, read Anthony Boucher’s positive review of the Bloch novel and decided to show the book to Hitchcock, even though readers at Hitchcock’s home studio Paramount Pictures rejected its premise for a film. Hitchcock acquired rights to the novel for $9,500. He reportedly ordered Robertson to buy up copies to keep the novel’s surprises for the film. Hitchcock chose to film Psycho to recover from two aborted projects with Paramount: Flamingo Feather and No Bail for the Judge. Hitchcock also faced genre competitors whose works were critically compared to his own and so wanted to film new material. The director also disliked stars’ salary demands and trusted only a few people to choose prospective material, including Robertson. Paramount executives did not want to produce the film and refused to provide the budget that Hitchcock received from them

“Uh-uh, Mother-m-mother, uh, what is the phrase? She isn’t quite herself today.”

for previous films with the studio. Hitchcock decided to plan for Psycho to be filmed quickly and inexpensively, similar to an episode of his ongoing television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and hired the television series crew as Shamley Productions. He proposed this cost-conscious approach to Paramount but executives again refused to finance the film, telling him their sound stages were occupied or booked even though production was known to be in a slump. Hitchcock countered with the offer to finance the film personally and to film it at Universal-International if Paramount would distribute. He also deferred his director’s fee of $250,000 for a 60% ownership of the film negative. This offer was finally accepted. Hitchcock also experienced resistance from producer Herbert Coleman and Shamley Productions executive Joan Harrison, who did not think the film would be a success. James Cavanaugh, who had written some of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television shows, wrote the original screenplay. Hitchcock rejected it, saying that the story dragged and

read like a television short horror story. His assistant recalls that the treatment was very dull. Hitchcock reluctantly agreed to meet with Stefano, who had worked on only one film before. Despite Stefano’s newness to the industry, the meeting went well, and Hitchcock hired him. The screenplay is relatively faithful to the novel, with a few notable adaptations by Hitchcock and Stefano. Stefano found the character of Norman Bates — who, in the book, is middle-aged, overweight, and more overtly unstable — unsympathetic, but became more intrigued when Hitchcock suggested the casting of Anthony Perkins. Stefano eliminated Bates’ drinking, which evidently necessitated removing Bates’ “becoming” the Mother personality when in a drunken stupor. Also gone is Bates’ interest in spiritualism, the occult and pornography.Hitchcock and Stefano elected to open the film with scenes in Marion’s life, and not introduce Bates at all until 20 minutes into the film, rather than open with Bates reading a history book as Bloch does. Indeed, writer Joseph W. Smith notes that, “Her story occupies

only two of the novel’s 17 chapters. Hitchcock and Stefano expanded this to nearly half the narrative”. He likewise notes there is no hotel tryst between Marion and Sam in the novel. For Stefano, the conversation between Marion and Norman in the hotel parlor in which she displays a maternal sympathy towards him makes it possible for the audience to switch their sympathies towards Norman Bates after Marion’s murder. When Lila Crane is looking through Norman’s room, in the film she opens a book with a blank cover whose contents we do not see. In the novel these are “pathologically pornographic” illustrations. Stefano wanted to give the audience “indications that something was quite wrong, but it could not be spelled out or overdone.” In his book of interviews with Hitchcock, François Truffaut notes that the novel “cheats” by having extended conversations between Norman and “Mother” and stating what Mother is “doing” at various

given moments. For obvious reasons, these were omitted from the film. The first name of the female protagonist was changed from Mary to Marion, since a real Mary Crane existed in Phoenix. Also changed is the novel’s budding romance between Sam and Lila. Hitchcock preferred to focus the audience’s attention on the solution to the mystery rather than a budding romance, and Stefano thought such a relationship would make Sam Loomis seem cheap. Instead of having Sam explain Norman’s pathology to Lila, the film simply has a psychiatrist do the talking. (Stefano was in therapy dealing with his relationship with his own mother at the time of writing the film.) This provided some shock effect, since toilets were virtually never seen on screen in the 1960s. The location of Arbogast’s death was moved from the foyer to the stairwell. Stefano thought this would make it easier to conceal the truth.

the end

itchcock's disappointing Topaz (1969), an unwieldy, unfocused story set during the Cuban missile crisis, was devoid of his typical narrative economy and wit. He returned to England to produce Frenzy (1972), a tale much more in the Hitchcock vein, about an innocent man suspected of being a serial killer. His final film, Family Plot (1976), pitted two couples against one another: a pair of professional thieves versus a female psychic and her working-class lover. It was a fitting end to a body of work that demonstrated the eternal symmetry of good and evil.