Alfred Hitchcock Living Famously

# When I'm not playing solitaire

# I take a book down from the shelf

# And what with programs on the air

# I keep pretty much to myself

# Missed the Saturday dance

# Heard they crowded the floor

# Couldn't bear it without you

# Don't get around much any more. #

MAN: 'This is the scene of the crime,

'a crime of passion filmed in a way you have never seen before

'and as no-one else would attempt but the screen's master of suspense,

'the director who shocked the world with Psycho.'

Good evening. It's a rare man whose past does not return to haunt him.

My past is about to catch up with me on this very show. If you are interested in watching,

you will be treated to a macabre succession of murders, mysteries and crimes of passion.

Alfred Hitchcock is probably the most famous director in film history.

He made his name and his fortune from scaring millions out of their wits.

But his films were more than just entertainment - he put his own deepest fears on the silver screen.

This process of frightening

is done by means of a given medium,

the medium of pure cinema.

He changed film-makers' ways of looking at things.

There's the assembly of pieces of film to create fright.

You can't imitate Hitchcock.

There's a uniqueness to his style.

His wonderful ability to create complex characters

and put them under pressure that builds and builds till you think their soul is gonna snap.

LOUD SQUAWKING They're coming! They're coming!

Mr Hitchcock, why do you always make mystery films?

Well, life is a big mystery, isn't it? It always has been.

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born near London in 1899.

His background had a lot to do with the kind of person Hitchcock became.

The important thing about Alfred Hitchcock is

that he was in every way a marginal person

in the Victorian-Edwardian society. His father was a grocer.

Now, today there's no shame at all in being "in trade", as they used to say.

But at that time, if your father was a grocer, you were on the margins of polite society.

He had this very strict Roman Catholic upbringing, rather strict father, brought up by Jesuits.

In addition to that, he was an unattractive, fat, little boy

who had an extremely overprotective mother.

I suppose it must have all started when I was in my mother's arms, at the age of six months,

and she said to me, "Boo!"

Now, you put all of these things together, plus a vivid imagination,

and all of the elements of genius,

and you have a person who is geared to being an outsider. And he was an outsider for his whole life.

Can you remember any specific instance when you were frightened as a child?

Well, I have a vague recollection of being scared by a policeman.

When I was probably about four or five years of age, being sent with a note to the local police station.

He handed this note to the desk sergeant, who read it and locked him up in a cell for five minutes,

then let him out and said, "That's what we do to naughty little boys."

This was obviously what his father had asked the sergeant to do.

I don't even know what it was for. I was probably unjustly incarcerated at the time.

And I think that was something that he carried through his whole life

in his relationship to authority.

The psychiatrist will always tell you,

if you have a fear that comes from something in your childhood,

the moment you can go back to it and release it, all is well.

It doesn't apply to me. I'm still scared of policemen.

Hitch still had this feeling about authority that it wasn't to be trusted completely.

He was somebody who watched and thought. He was not an active boy,

an almost precociously sedentary person,

who was starting to prepare himself to live his life vicariously.

The movies provided excitement and escape for an overweight loner with a boring clerical job.

I was originally in an engineering firm, in the advertising department.

And I was what was technically called a layer man, designing the ads.

I'm an advertising man. I've got a secretary, mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders dependent upon me.

I was a very keen movie-goer

and I heard that an American company were coming to London to open a studio,

so I applied for the job of designing their titles,

because those were the silent days.

My father met my mother...

He had gone to the London School of Engineering.

He was a draft artist.

Somebody had said to him, "Why don't you go over to the studios and see if you can get a job?"

So he went with this big portfolio of pictures,

because it was silent movies, so he went to get a job of drawing in titles,

like "And the sun set", and he would draw the sun setting.

He went over there and my mother said she saw this young man come in with this big portfolio.

But she didn't speak to him, because he didn't have a job,

and in those days, a gentleman didn't talk to a lady, especially if she had a better job than he did.

Always the master of suspense, Hitchcock decided to bide his time

and threw himself into the world of film-making.

MAN: Hitchcock was a self-made man,

taught himself by reading technical newspapers for the trade

and then had to work his way up the ladder

and achieve the power as well as the know-how,

to make the films that he was going to go on to make.

He met the right kinds of people.

One was Michael Balcon, who took over the studio where he was already working,

an English producer who was business-like and professional

and who recognised Hitchcock as a potential film-maker.

Michael Balcon sent Hitchcock to Germany to learn his craft at the most advanced studios in the world.

There he learned so much about technique, trick effects and the economy of film-making.

He simply amassed a level of experience unknown to today's people,

who, after appearing as an actor in one or two pictures, say,

"I want to direct my next picture. Give me a good cameraman."

Well, Hitch KNEW all that.

Darling, fancy seeing you!

But the introduction of talking pictures sent tremors through the film industry.

It must have been a bit of a shock to you when talkies came.

Well, the only thing wrong with the silent picture was that mouths opened and no sound came out.

It's a bit like that asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs -

a huge disaster, but a stimulus to new growth and new evolution.

The coming of synchronised sound was a kind of disaster which wiped out such a lot about silent cinema.

Unfortunately, when talk came in,

the vulgarians - the money-changers of the industry -

immediately commenced to cash in by photographing stage plays,

so that took the whole thing away from cinema completely.

It's like a lot of films one sees today, not that I see very many,

but to me they're "photographs of people talking" and bear no relation to the art of the cinema.

Hitchcock, although he never became fully reconciled to synchronised-sound cinema,

in that he always expressed regret for the passing of silent cinema,

because it was, in his words, the purest form of cinema, if you can't beat them you have to join them.

-How do I look?

-Well...

Wait a minute. It isn't quite right.

Embracing the new technology, Hitchcock made Blackmail.

Originally a silent movie, it became Britain's first talkie.

Now the hottest director in town, Hitchcock married his sweetheart Alma, who became his secret weapon.

She had been a film editor,

she was raised in the business.

I think she was certainly a right-hand person to him.

I think that she wrote his scripts, commented on them, looked at his pictures, gave suggestions.

He would find a story, bring it home, have her read it.

If SHE thought it'd make a picture, he would go ahead. If she said no, he didn't even touch it.

She had an unerring judgment. He went along with her judgment, and that was from the very beginning.

Over the next five years, Hitchcock made a series of hit films, culminating in The 39 Steps,

a spy thriller about an ordinary man embroiled in a deadly wartime plot.

Stop him!

I have the honour in presenting to you one of the most remarkable men in the world - Mr Memory.

What are the 39 steps?

SHOT RINGS OUT

The 39 Steps, I love. I think it's a wonderful film. The Lady Vanishes, I love. I can watch that ANY time.

Set on board a train, the film gave the audience a roller-coaster ride it had never experienced before.

The plot revolved around an innocent young woman who meets a mysterious stranger.

For heaven's sake, stop this train!

Leave me alone! Leave me alone!

I don't think he missed the fact there weren't the special effects available that you've got now.

I can't imagine Hitchcock now wanting to make films stuffed with special effects

and state-of-the-art technology. That's not the kind of film he made.

He made films about people.

'See The Lady Vanishes, sit in breathless anticipation, gripped by its overwhelming excitement,

'and you'll know why it is hailed as the unmatched classic of breath-taking suspense,

'and why Hitchcock stands unrivalled as the incomparable master of thrills.'

The English lady, where is she? There has been no English lady here.

What?

There has been no English lady here.

Hitchcock is a fascinating test case, in that you can see him learning his craft

but also learning more and more...

..about WHAT the movies were.

-When you make a film are you setting out to frighten men or women?

-Women,

because 80% of the audience in the cinema are women.

Because, you see,

even if the house is 50-50, half men, half women,

a good percentage of the men have...

has said to his girl, being on the make of course, "What do you want to see, dear?"

So that's where her influence comes, as well.

His work in England was awfully good at that point,

that was the era of The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes.

He was surely one of the best film-makers in the world.

The problem for him was he was getting larger than the English cinema was at that time.

It would have been unthinkable

that someone with that vision would not have been working in Hollywood.

That probably didn't make him popular with other people in the English cinema at the time.

It's an international problem.

There's certain things that America just does bigger, if not better, than anywhere else.

And at that time, Hitch wanted the biggest and this is where he came.

David O Selznick, fresh from producing Gone With The Wind,

recognised Hitchcock's potential and lured him to Hollywood.

When he came to the United States, Hitchcock had moved way up into a new class of film-making.

However, he found himself in a subordinate position working for David Selznick,

who didn't always understand or agree with what he wanted.

When Hitchcock came here, he was butting heads with one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.

And certainly the authority that he was trying to avoid all of his life,

he was now head to head with it in Hollywood.

-Why, it's Max De Winter!

-How do you do?

Hitchcock's first Hollywood film, Rebecca, was very much a British movie,

but it had an American producer.

The experience of making Rebecca wasn't much fun for Hitch. Hitchcock knew exactly what he wanted.

But Selznick was the old-fashioned producer who saw himself as the author of the film

and he wanted total and complete control.

The film tells the story of a man who tries to replace his dead wife with a new woman.

I knew you were comparing me with Rebecca.

They did not see eye to eye on very much.

Hitch made it work. He knew that he had to make it work, if he was to survive one picture in Hollywood.

'What is the mystery of Rebecca? What dread secret is hidden within the silent walls of Manderley?'

Not only this room, but all the rooms in the house.

You can almost hear it now.

Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?

You could sum up the complexities of the relationship between Hitchcock and Selznick with Rebecca,

the first film they did together.

It gave Hitchcock the best imaginable launch for a director's career in America -

Best Picture award with his first film.

'David O Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock bring you the prize-winner that made motion picture history,

'winner of the Academy Award...'

In Rebecca, Hitchcock displayed a technical expertise never before seen in Hollywood.

Hitchcock believed that films were the assembly of small bits of film

to create an emotion and a mood.

He believed in shooting films to get just the little bits.

Selznick was absolutely unaccustomed to that, horrified at it and realised, of course,

that Hitchcock was shooting so that you could only edit the film one way - HIS way.

I know EVERY shot and every...angle...

by heart.

So I become, in a sense, when I'm shooting the picture...

I very rarely look at the script, because I've now, by this time, learned the dialogue myself.

I rarely look at the script and I'm perhaps the equivalent, though maybe not so good as,

a conductor conducting an orchestra without a score.

What's specific to Hitchcock is

he never shot a master through, and...

and we never played the scene through or even read it through.

It was little pieces where camera was continually moved.

What he ultimately gave the editor were pieces to join.

There was no extra stuff shot.

-I

-could have edited that scene because there was nothing to edit.

An editor wanted to work with Hitchcock.

He said, "Sir, I would like to be in your editing department

"because that's my forte."

And he said, "Well, you've got a good background, you can be my editor."

A few days later, the first rushes come through. It's the editor's responsibility to set it up.

At the end of each take there was a t-ch! and he thought, "Something is the matter with the camera."

So he called up the labs and said, "There's this funny thing here."

They said, "That's where Hitchcock wants you to cut the film."

The fact that he had seen the film in advance in his mind is very important,

because it meant that the making of it was often for him slightly boring.

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

The break, the understanding of Americana,

comes with Shadow Of A Doubt, made in 1942.

Hitch had been in America for almost four years.

And this is the first really American picture by Hitchcock.

The environment of Shadow Of A Doubt was the idyllic community,

and into this wonderful community

of very happy people comes this evil influence, Uncle Charlie.

Oh, let me go, Uncle Charlie! Let me go!

America was nearing the end of its war with Hitler,

and the darkness that creeps into that idyllic small town that he so wonderfully created up there,

is also the darkness that was entering the American experience through World War II.

Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine?

With Hitchcock, you stayed with this kind of reality

so that he could play his fairy tales against it,

which made it more... as he once said,

"You know, if you bring somebody into a kitchen

"and they jump up on the kitchen table and scream, that's shocking."

"But if the kitchen looks like Dr Caligari's cabinet,

"you expect somebody to jump up on the table and scream."

And I think that was true.

He played everything against reality.

I don't want you to touch my mother.

So, go away, I'm warning you.

Go away or I'll kill you myself.

'Is there one rule which is indispensable to a director who wants to frighten an audience?'

I think he should understand the psychology of audiences.

He should also know that audiences love to enjoy the very thing that they have built in,

and that's fear that all started when the mother said, "Boo!"

But for some inexplicable reason they like to... How shall I say?

..put their toe in the cold water of fear to see what it's like.

That's why they go for rides on switchbacks and scream and scream and then get off giggling.

He was called the Master of Suspense.

He was really a master of these phobias.

He was frightened of success, frightened of failure,

frightened of...being hit by a car, frightened of illness.

Frightened.

Almost everything - heights,

wide open spaces, claustrophobic spaces, all of these things -

but the difference between HIS fears and other people's fears, HE could put it on film.

In the film Spellbound, Hitchcock explores the world of a man who has lost his memory

and suspects that he has committed a terrible crime.

'Why, when he held his sweetheart in his arms, did he gaze in fear at the dark lines of her robe?'

Hitchcock's insight into fear gave him a string of hits, made with Hollywood's brightest stars.

Throughout the '40s, he was so successful in entertaining people,

in creating films like Spellbound, first of three pictures with Ingrid Bergman.

-I take it this is your first honeymoon?

-Yes.

I mean, it would be, if it were.

I think that from the days of his working with Ingrid Bergman

he was in the habit of falling in love with his leading ladies.

Hitchcock loved having beautiful women under his control.

I think he fantasised...

sexual relations and even marital relations with them.

Once again, Hitchcock's most secret desires were plain for all the world to see.

I think it was during the making of Notorious,

great film, great towering achievement -

Bergman at her best, Cary Grant at his best and Hitch at his best -

and he said of Bergman,

he said, "She threw herself across my bed. She wept. She wept."

It was astonishing. I didn't know what to say.

What you have to remember when you watch, for example, the famous kissing scene in Notorious,

is that it has three characters, and Hitchcock said this to Truffaut.

There's Cary Grant, there's Ingrid Bergman, probably Hitchcock's favourite actress,

and Hitchcock, who's watching all of this and filming it from the off-space,

and that's where we will join him as members of the audience.

Grant was a kind of surrogate, if you will, for the man Hitchcock would have liked to be.

I'm sorry to intrude on this tender scene.

I...I knew her before you did, Doctor. I wasn't as lucky as you.

He was off in a reverie, he just was gone, thinking about Ingrid Bergman.

I guess he was in love with her.

Ingrid Bergman cut quite a swathe in her youth, you know, she was...

Any number of internationally famous love affairs.

She was often close to her directors, and why not Hitch?

What is it, dear? What's wrong with you?

They're poisoning me.

With the success of Notorious, Hitchcock became one of Hollywood's most bankable directors.

He ended up with a very good contract at Warner Brothers.

And the first film made under that contract, beginning 1950,

also marked the beginning of the greatest period of his career.

In fact, he said to everybody on the set, the first day of shooting on Strangers On A Train,

that his career was beginning today, nothing he had done before counted.

Two fellas meet, like you and I, no connection between them.

Each one has somebody that he'd like to get rid of,

so they swap murders.

'Fantastic, isn't it?

'You didn't know when Bruno proposed this pact that he was serious, dead serious.

'You had made the mistake of speaking to a stranger on a train

'and now wherever you go, you find yourself dominated by his evil presence.'

Well, everybody knows what happened next - he made some of the best movies ever made.

Strangers On A Train in a sense really was a new beginning, because he was running his own show.

And he made other good films for Warner Brothers, but the real beginning is Paramount,

because as soon as he went over to Paramount to make Rear Window, he found the ideal working situation

and he proceeded to make an unbroken series of nine masterpieces.

'This is the apartment of a man named Jeffries, a news photographer whose beat used to be the world.

'Now, his world has shrunk down to the size of this window. He's been watching the people across the way.

'Nobody seems to pull their blinds during a hot spell like this.

'He knows a lot about them by now. Too much, perhaps.'

I think the whole notion of Rear Window,

where you have another kind of surrogate film director, a man with a camera lens,

broken leg, can't move, in his apartment,

looking out at apartments that are actually movie screens,

looking at lots of different screens, seeing lots of different stories going on

and the way in which they come together. Just, em... just extraordinarily beautiful.

'For instance, down there on the second floor, the woman pacing about.

'He calls her Miss Lonely Hearts. So lonely that even death seems like a friend.

'This is the travelling salesman and his invalid wife.

'Out of their arguments and nagging comes a weird kind of love.

'Miss Torso, the body beautiful - viewed from a safe distance!'

Just a few of my neighbours.

I watched them just to kill time, then I couldn't take my eyes off them, just as YOU won't be able to.

Alfred Hitchcock, you have said

the secret of making a quality suspense motion picture

is to put an average man in bizarre situations,

to threaten the audience that "this could happen to you".

-This seems an oversimplification, but is it what you still try to do?

-Actually...

the central figure, who is, shall we say...

being attacked or on the run,

if he's a familiar figure -

average man - and also a familiar star,

the...story values are increased accordingly.

Everyone uses the label Master of Suspense for Hitchcock,

and clearly that's inadequate to him because he wasn't just a maker of thrillers.

And I think he got irritated with the term.

And yet, it does represent something quite profound about Hitchcock.

Hitch had a wonderful definition of suspense.

He defined it as a contrast to shock.

The story he told was that a group of men are sitting round a table having a board meeting

and in the midst of the meeting a bomb explodes.

And the audience will get five seconds of shock.

But if we tell them five minutes ahead of time a bomb will go off...

And we cut away to underneath a cabinet...

and we see a clock strapped to several sticks of dynamite and the hands are ticking...

Then we get five minutes of suspense.

We didn't have suspense before, because the audience were in ignorance.

'Vertigo, a feeling of dizziness, a swimming in the head,

'figuratively a state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror,

'as created by Alfred Hitchcock in the story that gives new meaning to the word suspense.'

I don't wanna die.

In Vertigo, James Stewart doesn't know the identity of the woman,

so for a long time we're in suspense about whether he will find out

and what he will do when he does find out.

'What strange attraction brought these two together in spite of the dark forces that tore them apart?'

The passage in Vertigo early on, in which, in this beautiful city, San Francisco,

James Stewart follows the Kim Novak character, it's nearly silent cinema.

I think that that is an absolute model of visual storytelling,

steadily building suspense,

and making us more and more fascinated with the Novak figure,

as the Stewart character is becoming fascinated with her.

I think that is just sublime film-making.

In stark contrast to his on-screen alter-egos,

Hitchcock's private life was apparently happy and contented.

To rest from work they actually did very little.

He read a lot.

I was very close to my mother

and we would go out together and do various things, go to the movies a lot.

I have a friend who managed a cinema here in Los Angeles

and said they used to come in and watch movies together all the time.

They were real film buffs. They loved what they did.

And she created a secure haven for him.

It seems they had a very tranquil and very well-adjusted family life,

an orthodox bourgeois family life centred on the kitchen and centred on the day's work.

I would go over and visit my father on the set, my mother would take me over.

It was just a normal thing for me, because that's where my father worked.

Other children would go to visit their fathers in the office, I would go on the set.

Your new film is called Psycho. Can you tell me something about it?

Well, Psycho is my first attempt at a shocker.

In other words, it has in its content certain episodes which do shock.

In some sense, it could be called a horror film,

but the horror only comes to you after you've seen it, when you get home.

When I first saw Psycho, I was kind of disappointed.

"Well, it's a film with three great moments and nothing much else."

I saw it again six months later, and I realised I'd missed an awful lot.

The three great moments had so overwhelmed my memory of the film that I'd forgotten all the subtlety.

It's a wonderful movie, Psycho.

The content as such was, I felt, rather amusing and it was... it was a big joke, you know?

And I was horrified to find that some people took it seriously.

It was intended to cause people to scream,

but no more than the screaming on the switchback railway.

He preferred his English films, because Americans didn't understand his sense of humour

and he was not often allowed to do here what he had done in England.

I think that Psycho was the perfect counter-example of that,

because I think it is him through and through with no compromises.

He made it for a very low budget over everybody else's dead body.

It was the film he wanted to see, and it turned out that the world wanted to see it too.

He loved to do trailers, handmade trailers.

There's a very funny one for Psycho, where he sort of gives you a brief conducted tour of the motel.

Good afternoon.

Here we have a quiet little motel.

And in this house, the most dire, horrible events took place.

It's difficult to describe the way the...twisting of the...the...

Well, I... It's...

Well, the murderer, you see, crept in here very slowly.

Of course, the shower was on. There was no sound.

And...

When Psycho opened,

all over the world, there were life-sized cardboard cut-out figures of Hitchcock

in the lobbies of theatres saying, "You can't come in after it's started," which...

Unheard of discipline.

And that was strictly enforced.

As you will have seen, murder seems to be the prominent theme.

As I do not approve of the current wave of violence that we see on our screens,

I have always felt that murder should be treated delicately.

And, with the help of television,

murder should be brought into the home, where it rightly belongs.

In 1955, his television series - Alfred Hitchcock Presents - began in America.

It became one of the most popular television series ever made.

Very popular TV show in which he appeared at the beginning and the end of the show,

in often very funny introductions and end comments.

Good evening.

Of late, I have grown weary of being a sex symbol and have decided to return to television.

I remind you that, before I posed for that famous photograph in the centrefold of THAT magazine,

I was known as a man of mystery and suspense.

To re-establish my reputation as a man of intrigue, join me as I bring you this story.

Notice that I do so while fully clothed.

We know from his TV show that he was very good at making fun of himself.

In fact, I've heard it said that only someone of Irish descent

could be so successful throughout his career at sending up the idea of the pompous Englishman.

It's all a matter of one's attitude.

As you know, this is part of a series.

I have three other towels just like it.

It made HIM...

a figure.

The point I wish to prove is that you will be caught up in the frightening mood of this tale

despite its introduction by such a jovial, cheerful person as myself.

He actually didn't become really, you know...

that well known until after the television series.

Then he couldn't go anywhere.

Loosen your girdle

and flee with me to the marvellous, magic world of commercials.

Who knows? We may also see a story.

Everyone recognised him.

Now, of course, all along he had had this little trick of a tiny appearance in his own films.

'Don't forget this man. He has plenty to do with the terrifying mystery

'that causes this glamorous woman to risk her life and reputation.'

And, of course, it made him... it made him an internationally known figure.

And that's a part of why Hitchcock is so well known, that we know what he looked like.

A lot of people couldn't tell you what John Ford looked like, what Howard Hawkes looked like.

We know what Hitchcock looked like.

Your television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents... I know you didn't direct all those films,

but is the technique that you adopt there basically the same as you use for the cinema or quite different?

No.

The economics alone...demand completely different handling... of the medium.

In other words, television on film is a much...

um...shall we say...

faster operation than the feature film?

In the feature film, we get about a minute and a half cut film a day.

In television we get nine minutes. Just totally different thing altogether.

Whilst producing his TV series, Hitchcock made the film North By Northwest

in which Cary Grant plays a man who is mistaken for a secret agent and then pursued across America.

I'm an advertising man.

I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders dependent upon me.

I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting slightly killed.

It was interesting because I was curious how, you know...

I didn't read for it, and I was cast in this role.

It's a scene where I get punched.

Just before the take, Hitchcock says to the assistant...

AS HITCHCOCK: "Tell me, does Landau work tomorrow and the next day?"

And the assistant director said, "Why, Mr Hitchcock? Why?"

And he said, "Because in this take I'd like James to really hit him.

"I'd like his jaw to come apart.

"There's no way to manufacture that excepting with a real blow."

You have to put it, though, in the context of a film set where practical jokes are not uncommon.

His did, by all reports, reach a level of cruelty

that does make you wonder what was going on in his mind.

Handcuffing an actor to something and then feeding him laxatives and then going away, that's grotesque.

You once told me that actors were cattle to be shoved about. I wonder if you'd care to enlarge on that?

-You mean, you want to make them larger cattle than they are?

-No, no.

Well, I don't... That's really a joke. But...

they're children, you know.

And...invariably the problem one always has with actors is coping with their ego.

But they have to have the ego and they have to be ultra-sensitive,

otherwise they wouldn't be able to do what is asked of them.

I think he was probably an easy man to work for so long as you knew what you were doing and did it.

But I don't think he'd be a man who'd suffer fools gladly.

I don't think anybody who was gonna shirk the job lasted the whole length of a Hitchcock shoot,

because... Yeah, he probably would be a tough man to work for.

The only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead.

You appear in your own films, Mr Hitchcock. Have you ever been tempted to become an actor?

Nothing so low as that.

He did pick on one actor quite a bit and one wondered why.

But he was the powerful Hitchcock and let everyone know it on the set,

and he demanded the ultimate, anything... He demanded SO much from actors.

If one had had a big part, I don't know how I'd have reacted at that age. I think I'd have folded -

the great man shouting at me!

It's the difficulty of stars, they want to be writers today, you know, they want to be producers.

They won't stick, like any decent cobbler would, to their last, you know.

He WAS intimidating, but...

you weren't afraid of him.

I never saw...

Hitch really...

..doing that much with actors. Again, it was trust.

MARTIN LANDAU: I used to feel left out. In the auction gallery scene,

Cary Grant, James Mason, Eva Marie and I are all in this.

He whispered something to every one of the actors but me. I felt left out.

Coming from the theatre, you know, the director tells you something.

I walked over to him and I said, "Is there anything you wanna tell me?"

He said, "Martin, I'll only tell you if I don't like what you're doing."

Sometimes one gets a little...

gets into little difficulties with the American people,

they want everything spelled out, you know, exactly

and they worry about content.

I don't care about content. The film can be about anything you like,

so long as I'm making that audience react in a certain way to whatever I put on the screen.

Hitch was nominated for director

FIVE times during his Hollywood career. He NEVER won.

It does show how far, in his great days,

Hollywood thought of him as just an entertainer.

This seems impossible. Why didn't he win?

He was simply too entertaining and too successful.

The power of cinema in its purest form is so vast because it can go over the whole world.

On a given night, a film can play in Tokyo, West Berlin, London, New York,

and the same audience is responding emotionally to the same things.

Despite all his successes, Hitchcock was still deeply insecure

and re-invented himself on the silver screen.

Directors often live out their fantasies on film.

Hitchcock's inner life had a great deal of erotic turmoil in it.

I don't see how one could disagree with that or see it differently.

The women were beautiful, elusive and untouchable

until some wonderful fellow came along and then that all changed.

That wonderful fellow was usually Cary Grant.

It was Hitchcock's personal burden not to look anything like Cary Grant.

'..Cary romanced by the kind of blonde that gets into a man's blood.'

He seems to have used Cary Grant as his wish-fulfilment alter-ego

and James Stewart as his more realistic alter-ego.

I watched them to kill time, then I couldn't take my eyes of them.

After all, James Stewart has a broken leg in Rear Window and has vertigo in Vertigo.

So he's sort of crippled in both,

he has an enforced sedentary life in both, like Hitchcock's sedentary life,

whereas Cary Grant is a charmer.

-How do I know you aren't a murderer?

-You don't.

I think he was in love, in a way, with his leading ladies, and he probably lusted after them.

He was infatuated with, you know, lots of women.

There is, I think you'd agree, Mr Hitchcock, a Hitchcock woman -

very tall, cool, iceberg outside and dampened-down fires within. But why is she always blonde?

I think that's traditional. I think that dates back to Mary Pickford.

If you remember, tradition of the cinema is that the hero was always a dark man

and the heroine was always a blonde.

I think it's the...simplification of identification really.

There's no question that his leading ladies of recent years were all blonde ladies,

even, you know...

I mean, Kim Novak, in Vertigo.

Grace Kelly. Grace was the ideal Hitchcock cool blonde.

Hitch loved the disparity between appearance and reality.

The cool, composed English blonde was a...

..jumble of passions in Hitchcock's fantasy life.

They're coming! They're coming!

But in his next film, The Birds, Hitchcock's fantasies spilled over into reality -

with starlet Tippi Hedren.

He saw her on a commercial, I think it was a cigarette commercial, and he sent for her.

This woman came in...

and I saw that she was blonde.

And...she was...had been a model.

And she walked away from us and I said, "She's got the job."

Cos she was the kind of person he would...he would be amenable to.

Signed her to a seven-year contract before they even met.

He set up all the mechanisms for it.

And here was going to be his ultimate fantasy blonde.

Then it became a kind of training process.

-If I do what you tell me, will you love me?

-Yes.

An unfortunate thing happened however. He tried not just to guide her, but to possess her.

So...to control whom she saw in her private time...

..whom she was dating,

what she wore away from the set.

She wanted to go off to some charity event for a couple of days

and she figured that it wouldn't make a great deal of difference to the filming schedule,

and I don't think it would have. But Hitchcock wouldn't let her go.

He said that if she went to this charity event, she would get out of the character.

And this young woman, who was willing to do everything for the picture, drew a line.

The way I describe the final indiscretion,

the moment that destroyed everything,

is that he made an overt sexual proposition to her.

Many other actresses would go along with such a thing for the sake of their career.

Hollywood is well known for such instances.

It was not in Tippi Hedren's character to do this.

I mean, this was his frustration, that it was...

..impossible.

He HAD to choose a woman who could remain on a pedestal and deny him.

It's psychology 101.

Also he was very much in love with Alma.

So this was... this was another part of his life,

and one that I think all of us understood

and to some degree respected,

because of our understanding...

..that life isn't always very simple.

Once begun on this downward path, you never know where you are to stop.

Already rejected by Tippi, Hitchcock also found himself out of touch with cinema audiences.

He was well into his 60s then

and he'd had nearly 40 years as a director, and that's a pretty good, long time.

It's not surprising if he was getting tired at a time when many directors have retired

and was feeling his age. His health was declining.

And a younger generation was taking over in Hollywood and new directors coming through,

and was he keeping up with the times?

It's hard for me to look at myself and say I'm losing my edge.

Why...I...I know that I couldn't do what these young art directors are doing today.

He didn't seem to find it easy to find subjects

and he didn't have Cary Grant and James Stewart working with him any more.

It was odd, because his mind was still working.

There was a kind of lag that occurred, and...

..but he would sit there and come up with ideas.

He did have one fine film left in him - Frenzy.

It had an elegiac quality about it.

I think one of the reasons he wanted to shoot that movie - he said this -

was he wanted to shoot Covent Garden before the whole thing was gone.

His father was a greengrocer, he knew that world.

He wanted his cameras there to record it before it was gone.

But after finishing Frenzy, Hitchcock's career and health went into decline.

One has to acknowledge with sadness, one has to assess but not judge,

the fact that Alfred Hitchcock's last years were not happy. They were not happy at all.

He was never more friendless.

To soothe his loneliness and his bitterness...

..his fear of being forgotten

and his dismay over his indiscretion in the Tippi Hedren episode,

he became a tragically indulgent drinker.

He was depressed. He was 78 and he was wearing out. He had awful arthritis in his knees.

And he kept Cognac in the loo in his office,

and he'd go there and knock back a few during the day.

He was less and less able to function as he had always functioned.

And we could see it closing down. And this was...

There was a great sadness among those of us who worked with him, who still maintained his office.

So it just kind of gradually faded away. It was too bad, but inevitable.

Alfred Hitchcock's life was spinning out his fantasies.

And when he could no longer do that physically, he died.

On April 28th 1980, Alfred Hitchcock died of liver failure. He was 80 years old.

Alfred Hitchcock was neither an angel nor a demon.

The naive people who claim that he was a simple, sweet, shy, loving, generous, quiet man

have a great burden of proof that this is the man who could give us Strangers On A Train, Psycho,

not to mention a host of others - that's naive.

And the people that say he was a monster are equally naive. He had a wide sadistic streak

that was always at war with the most gentle, childish plea for love and acceptance.

The little fat boy was ALWAYS that.

Part of his strategy in his public image seems to have been to be unknowable.

I think the answer is - we know him through his films.

He was a storyteller.

And...I don't think storytellers ever really die.

You do see yourself as a kind of switchback railway operator?

Well, I'm possibly in some respects

the man who says, in constructing it,

"How steep can we make the first dip?"

and, "This'll make them scream."

If you make the dip too deep,

the screams will continue as the whole car goes over the edge and destroys everyone.

You mustn't go too far, because you want them to get off the switchback railway giggling with pleasure.

Subtitles by Audrey Flynn BBC Broadcast - 2003

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