Original subtitles

13 pick one.

You want a profile?

Yeah. Talk to him, Marty. Come here.

Listen, Teddy, wait until it's all in favor.

And tell us.

Now, don't turn the body to him.

Excuse me.

Now, talk to him. Do profile.

Pardon me, Marty? Yeah, would you explain the name Tippy? What is it?

it originate from?

It's a Swedish nickname.

For what?

For Toopsa.

For what?

Toopsa. Would you say that again, please?

Toopsa. You're welcome. That's an anatomical term.

Meaning?

Little girl.

Oh, really? In Swedish.

November 1961.

Alfred Hitchcock directs a screen test.

The woman is Tippi Hedren, a former model she has never acted

before.

Hitchcock plans to make her the star of his next film, The Birds.

For Hollywood's most successful director, fresh from the triumph of

nothing seems impossible.

So many people were saying, how can you do this, Hitch? Put somebody totally

unknown, has never acted before, how can you put this woman into this film that

you're going to do? It's going to be a major motion picture.

And Hitch gave me the assurance that I could do it.

He confided that he felt he was at the top of his form, that he was entering

golden age of filmmaking.

Everything was still ahead of him, and he was brimming all the time with ideas.

You know, we ought to do a film about that, or this, or... And indeed, I felt

was at the top of his form.

But Hitchcock's golden age would be a bumpy ride for the director and those

closest to him.

The successes of the past would prove elusive, and the man who valued order

above all else would court chaos.

in his emotional life.

T14, take one.

Marty, I'm sending over to you a high priestess.

But of what, you'll have to decide for yourself.

Hitchcock liked to say his definition of happiness was a clear horizon.

But even as he screen tested his new star, the storm clouds were gathering.

In the early 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock was looking for a home.

Brought to Hollywood in 1939 by David Selznick, he had endured seven years of

interference and financial exploitation before finally slipping the leash and

forming his own company, Transatlantic Pictures.

But Transatlantic collapsed, and with it the director's hard -won reputation for

box -office bankability.

At Warner Brothers, he went some way to burying the memory of the failure of

Rope and Under Capricorn, with hits like Strangers on a Train.

What he needed now was a secure base from which to prove once and for all

he was a force to be reckoned with.

Paramount Studios was to be that home.

The Paramount people felt that this was a logical home for Hitchcock.

They gave him every single opportunity and every single convenience he needed.

There was never an argument. Hitchcock would come in and say, I want to do this

picture, and they would say, yes.

When?

They'd never say why.

When? This is the apartment of a man named Jeffries, a news photographer

beat used to be the world.

Right now, his world has shrunk down to the size of this window.

Hitchcock's sense of security at Paramount is apparent in the choice of

first film, Rear Window.

Told almost entirely from the point of view of a wheelchair -bound Jimmy

and shot on an elaborate set, Rear Window managed to be both experimental

crowd -pleasing.

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.

That is, viewed from a safe distance.

It was a very quiet set, very well organized set, and I remember lots of

visiting the set. Sometimes Mr. Hitchcock would close it, but he was

of it. That imagine my...

Little apartment. Had everything but running water and ice cubes.

I had my bed, and I mean, I had food there, and I... It was complete.

This whole little village, if you will.

Sort of like Mr. Hitchcock's dollhouse, playing with his little dolls and

placing them where he wanted them.

The most beautiful doll in the dollhouse was Grace Kelly.

Every man who ever was lucky enough to work with Grace Kelly fell in love with

her. Me included.

I'm sure even Hitchcock.

Nobody could be in her presence and not fall in love with her. She's just a

lovely person.

Rear window, her second role for the director, confirmed Kelly as the

Hitchcock blonde.

Have you any idea at all why you have this obsession with this kind of woman?

I'm only obsessed because I don't believe in stamping the woman with the

sex all over her. I think it should be discovered in the course of our getting

acquainted with her.

And it's more interesting for this thing to be not apparent.

In other words, we don't have to have the sex hanging round her neck like

baubles all over her.

I'll soon fix that.

There, miss, now you're a special constable. As long as you stay, he

Yes, and as long as I go, you go. Come on.

Stop them! They've gone away!

The Hitchcock blonde has a long history, which goes as far back as Madeleine

Carroll in the 39th death.

Glamorous and glacial, Hitchcock's dream woman is usually brought down to earth

with a bump.

He always used to take the women who were very, very much in control of their

lives and put them in a situation of just great upheaval and see how they

out. Do they survive?

How do they survive?

Interesting.

It's always been assumed that Hitch was some kind of misogynist, but I have the

impression from a number of things that he told me later on that if you're

thinking of his films, that he wasn't identifying so much with the glamour

figures, the Cary Grants, the James Stuarts and so on, but if he was

with anybody, it was with the suffering heroine.

In fact, he always, as far as I can make out, enjoyed the company of women,

perhaps more than he enjoyed the company of men.

He certainly always had female assistants, female secretaries.

Alma, his wife, of course, was his most important assistant and collaborator

throughout his career.

By now, the Hitchcocks were firmly established in their adopted home.

In Hollywood, they lived in a modest bungalow in Bel Air, but their favourite

place was San Francisco.

The city and the surrounding area would provide an unforgettable setting for one

of Hitchcock's most haunting films, Vertigo.

Hitchcock.

recognized what he called a good yarn when he saw it.

And the thing that attracted him, of course, was the idea of a

man losing a woman to death and then resurrecting her.

That's all he needed to think, oh, I can do that. I can do that.

There's someone inside me and she says I must die.

Somebody don't let me go.

Vertigo remains one of Hitchcock's most enigmatic and, according to some,

revealing films.

The story of a man who tries to make over a woman in the image of one who is

dead is said to echo Hitchcock's own efforts to recreate his ideal actress.

He did try to make over women into the actresses he liked to work with.

He would have liked to have worked all his life with Ingrid Bergman and Grace

Kelly, you see.

And all actresses that he used were in his mind like that.

If I let you change me, will that do it?

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

There was a...

A kinship with the man in the story of wanting to make somebody over.

So he recognized that, of course. But it wasn't anything he pressed.

Not really.

With Vertigo, Hitchcock had made a real attempt to move beyond the traditional

suspense formula.

But few critics appreciated the effort.

One called the film far -fetched nonsense and claimed it made him feel

Others were less kind.

Hitch treated critics as a necessary evil.

He entertained as many critics as you could find, but he had no

great respect for them.

He didn't think they really knew what they were talking about most of the

They would see things in his pictures that he never intended, and they would

miss the points that he did intend.

I think they're very nice.

I think they're very human.

They're subject to all kinds of human foibles, is that the word?

And I think they mean very well.

I'm not going to stress the word mean.

I said they mean very well.

and they have their job to do, and I have my job to do.

But even as Vertigo received a mauling at the pens of the American and British

critics, elsewhere a powerful counter -movement was underway.

The master of suspense was about to become the master auteur.

We are now on the air.

It was François Truffaut, a leading light of the French New Wave cinema, who

most to transform Hitchcock's reputation, thanks to an extraordinary

with his hero that lasted for more than 50 hours.

Part interrogation, part act of homage, Truffaut, with collaborator Helen Scott

acting as interpreter, led Hitchcock step by step through his life and

Of the period of their childhood, they always tell the story of the sleep

station when your father had you locked up.

And what had you done to deserve that?

I cannot imagine, because my father used to call me

the little lamb without a spot.

Disarmed by Truffaut's affectionate respect, the director put aside the

persona and went further than he had ever done before in revealing the real

Alfred Hitchcock.

Why is it that the love scenes that I put in pictures are usually so

strong?

I don't get any particular...

kick out of doing that sort of thing myself. As we've discussed before, I'm a

celibate, you know.

I mean, I'm not against it.

But I just don't think about it very much, you know.

Yes, but your pictures are full of it.

Well, I would say that maybe that's the outlet.

As the crimes, as a matter of fact. Maybe, maybe.

In one exchange, Hitchcock described an idea for a film about 24 hours in the

life of a city, told entirely from the perspective of food.

I would like to do...

of 24 hours in the city. I can see the whole film from beginning to end now.

I tried to do it on a food analogy.

I tried to show the arrival of food in the city, the distribution of it, the

buying of it, the cooking, the eating.

And then gradually, the end of the film would be the sewer.

They tip it in the ocean, you know.

The early brand new gleaming green vegetables and the

mess of them that go out at the end of the day.

It's what people do to good things.

You should make your theme always the rottenness of humanity.

The Truffaut interview confirmed Hitchcock as a leading auteur director.

But to his increasing annoyance, he would never escape his other reputation

master showman.

You really are, and I mean this as a compliment, you really are a sort of ace

manipulator, it seems to me, because you know so much about the tricks of the

trade.

Don't you think technique would be a nicer word?

If I were a painter, would you call strokes of the brush tricks?

Ironically, the one thing that above all others stopped him from being taken

seriously as an artist was the very thing that contributed most to his fame.

Oh, oh, good evening.

I was just about to send greetings to an old friend.

For ten years, starting in 1955,

Hitchcock's TV shows were among the most popular on American screens.

Produced by his protégé, Joan Harrison, they were relished for their clever

twists and high production values, but most of all for Hitchcock's

introductions, written for him by Jimmy Allardyce.

He would do anything that Jimmy asked him to do.

for the lead -ins. Thus, you had Hitch inside a bottle.

Then you had Hitch in golfing knickers, playing golf in a most outlandish

outfit.

You had Hitch playing his own brother.

You had Hitch with a lion.

You had him doing well.

I must say, these lead -ins would come in, and I'd say to Joan Harrison, we

can't show this to him. He'll never do this. I mean, never.

We'd better send this back.

She said, Hitch will do it.

And he did.

He created that buffoonish character.

It was the one thing I blamed him for, but I understood why he did it. He

to be famous and rich, and he got all those things.

But by creating that buffoonish character,

he threw off the cinema world.

They sort of resented the fact that he had created that character that made him

worldwide famous, and therefore they said, his pictures can't be that good.

And therefore they never gave him an Academy Award.

The man who made Hitchcock into a television star was his agent, Lou

head of the MCA Talent Agency.

Wasserman embodied all the power of the so -called front office, the business

end of filmmaking.

He wielded the kind of authority that Hitchcock both respected and resented.

Under Wasserman's leadership, MCA had become one of the most powerful talent

agencies Hollywood had ever seen.

In 1958, it bought Universal Studios, where the Hitchcock television show was

made.

Wasserman's next move was to get Hitchcock away from Paramount and bring

Universal to make his feature films.

The Lever would be a dark story about a woman on the run, a strange young man,

his domineering mother, and a run -down motel.

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

after you've seen it, when you get home in the dark.

This was the last picture on his commitment to Paramount.

And I know that they were hoping for another North by Northwest or this grand

extravaganza, color, everything, and to do a black -and -white film noir, little

picture.

I mean, they were, you know, just threw up their hands, and they were horrified.

I couldn't believe it.

I said, why did you give this to me to read?

This belongs in your TV unit, not in their feature films.

The brutal killing, the peeping Tom business, it was a cheap kind of a

not my kind of a picture, not Hitchcock's kind of a picture, I didn't

I don't want any part of this picture.

Paramount all but disowned Psycho.

They were happy for it to be made on the Universal backlot, and even more

pleased when Hitchcock offered to finance the film himself.

For Hitchcock, however, psycho was the biggest gamble of his life.

Everyone who worked on the film was aware that budget concerns were

his mind.

I wanted, for my own sake, to do a big Technicolor wonderful movie.

And the first thing that Hitch said to me was, there's a company, American

International, that's making pictures for about $250 ,000.

And he said...

What if we did that?

And I think what he meant by that was, what if somebody of his caliber

directed one of these low -budget movies?

And he told me that he had intended to do Psycho for under a million dollars,

that he was going to use his TV team, all those people who had worked so

beautifully on his series, were now going to work on this movie.

And it was all kind of disappointing to me at first.

But Psycho was about more than money.

The television series had won Hitchcock a younger audience.

Psycho was to be their film.

Screenwriter Joe Stefano, a high school dropout who was in Freudian analysis at

the time, provided a vital link to the drive -in generation.

This was a movie about sex.

It had always been a movie about sex, as far as I was concerned.

And boys and their mothers don't have any problems that aren't sexual.

And I told Hitch that this was how I felt.

I even told him one time that I had had a session in which I realized, down deep

inside, that I could have murdered my mother when I was 14 years old.

And he was quite astounded by that and also quite pleased to hear it.

This young man, you had to feel sorry for him.

After all, being dominated by an almost maniacal woman was enough to drive

anyone to the extreme of, well, let's go in.

He set this picture up so well because one clothes set.

And rumors kept going out, nudity, nudity, murder,

blood, all this stuff, that he instigated and sent it out there so that

everybody could start to get the hype going.

The shower scene took seven days to shoot.

and over 70 setups, because even though it was on the screen for

two seconds, say the shot from up above was on the screen for two seconds,

it still took two hours to set up, because it was a very important part

the whole montage.

So it was very hard. I had no idea of the impact of the shower scene when I

doing it. I knew each scene had an impact, especially the last one.

But the total effect I didn't get until I actually saw it,

because then I saw what he had envisioned all along, which was each cut

film, each editing cut, was the slice of the knife.

I went into Hitch's office the day after it opened.

And as I walked in, he went.

And I laughed and sat down. And then he got a call that it was raining in

Chicago, where the movie was playing, and that people were standing all around

the block in the rain.

And he said, get them umbrellas.

This is Alfred Hitchcock. Having lived with Psycho since it was a gleam in my

camera's eye, I now exercise my parental rights in revealing

a number of significant facts about this slightly extraordinary entertainment.

I've suggested that Psycho be seen from the beginning.

In fact, this is more than a suggestion.

It is required.

After Psycho, Hitchcock moved to Universal Studios permanently.

From the top floor of the so -called Black Tower, Wasserman made sure his

director wanted for nothing.

He had his private office, he had a back area where he ate his lunches, and then

a hallway where production could be. The unit manager, the assistant director,

the art department, the editing department, and

he had a projection room.

And it was the only one of its kind on Universal's lot.

And it was...

Just marvelous to work under those conditions.

The scale of Psycho's success, which took everyone by surprise, brought with

problems of its own.

Hitchcock used to complain that, you know, he was in competition with

And that, you know, people complained if it wasn't the kind of Hitchcock movie

that they expected.

And I think that had its drawbacks for him.

Hitch was their property. He belonged to them. He was supposed to do what they

wanted.

They let him in their house every Sunday night on television, and they wanted

another Psycho.

But while fans wanted more of the same, critics seemed to want something

different.

The attacks of the so -called Hitchnockians had got under the

He wanted to show them that his brand of pure cinema...

could include characters of real psychological depth.

Unfortunately, he didn't reveal these ambitions to his screenwriter, Evan

Hunter, who even then was working on what he thought was a screwball comedy

a macabre twist called The Birds.

Hitch had an agenda that was quite opposite to mine. I wish he'd have told

what it was, because we could have worked it out.

But he was going for a sort of respectability that he hadn't had or

felt he hadn't had. I mean, there were those among us who felt he was

respectable enough, but he felt he hadn't been given the proper respect.

He showed the script to V .S. Pritchett, a friend of his who was a short story

writer and noted critic in London.

I was suddenly getting suggestions that were not Hitch's suggestions.

While Hunter worked on In the Dark, Hitchcock set about tackling what had by

become a major preoccupation, the creation of a female star who looked

Grace Kelly and who did as she was told.

He wanted somebody to own.

He wanted a star of his own.

No matter who the director is, you know, the care and feeding of stars is hard.

That's hard.

And I think Hitchcock got an age where he didn't want to do that anymore. He

wanted one of his own.

Perfectly understandable.

I was standing in the secretarial area chatting, and the door opened to Hitch's

office, and he came down to where I was standing, and there, framed in the

doorway to his office, almost as if it were a deliberate shot, was this tall,

glacial blonde.

And Hitch walked over to him, and he says, That's Melanie.

And I said, who is she?

And he told me she had done a, he saw her in a hair commercial or a shampoo

commercial or something.

And I said, do you think he's going to have the skill to do this stuff? And he

said, trust me.

After Seagull, you feel refreshed, exhilarated, work slick as a whistle.

Feel better.

I really didn't have any training as an actress. I had been doing commercials.

You know, I knew all about the cameras. I knew lighting. I knew all of those

kinds of things. But when you're dealing with product, it's quite a different

situation than being a character.

And Hitch was not only my director, he was my drama coach.

You know, I was a very lucky lady.

Location filming for The Birds took place in the tiny town of Bodega Bay,

hours north of San Francisco.

As ever, pre -planning had been meticulous.

But beneath the calm surface, Hitch, the auteur, was in turmoil.

I was pouring myself into the girl.

I was doing... I was doing Svengali, you know.

But something happened.

that I'd never done before, I began to examine the

script as I went along and I found

deficiencies in it.

I went through the thing in my mind in great detail and put this

new ending in it.

But this is in the middle of shooting the picture, which I'd never done

And for the first time, my crew around me said,

what's wrong with him?

He's getting upset.

Because to me, I always laugh my way through a picture.

They were strange, you know.

Back at Universal Studios, Hitchcock set to work on the film's complex set

pieces, culminating in the terrifying bird attack in the attic.

For five days, the three prop men had great huge cartons filled with ravens

seagulls and crows, pigeons, and they just kept hurling birds at me for five

days. And I would just fend them off as they came towards me.

They kept throwing birds at Tippi incessantly, nonstop, you know.

Cut, all right, let's go, and change the makeup and tear the dress a little and

the suit she was wearing, tear that a little, and let's go, let's go, and more

birds. And you could see in the rushes that she really is beginning to look

dazed, you know.

Towards the end of it, one of them jumped, and it cut my eye.

Just below my eye, thank God.

And I just, all of a sudden, I had had it with that whole thing. And I got all

of the birds off of me. And I just sat in the middle of the set and just

to cry from sheer exhaustion.

And everybody left the set.

They just left me there.

She was in bed three days at the end of it.

Caput.

Caput.

Hitchcock had been tinkering with the script of The Birds throughout

adding dialogue and writing new scenes designed to bring depth to the central

characters.

The first test came in March 1963 at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where the

film's premiere formed the centrepiece of the first -ever Hitchcock

retrospective.

At the end of it, there was silence.

And then a polite...

patter of applause and i thought oh you were dead

later

that year the birds opened the can film festival the film had battled most of

his fans in america and irritated many of his critics but thanks to champions

like truffle hitchcock's critical stock was rising a lot depended on his next

film a psychologically complex tale about a frigid kleptomaniac called

Once again, Hedren was cast in the leading role, but by now Hitchcock's

attachment to his new star had taken on a new intensity.

He was kind of trying to control who I saw, what I,

you know, all of those kinds of things. So that became a very, very difficult

time for me.

I think he became obsessed with this character named Tippi Hedren.

He felt that he had created Tippi Hedren.

I think he was having an old man's crease to care over Tippi,

Hitch was very possessive about the women in his life.

He was possessive of his own daughter, and Alma was his.

And he even tried to do that with me.

He would not take his eyes off of me. He may be talking to somebody over here,

but he was watching me all the time.

And it became very difficult.

Mrs. Hitchcock came to me on a number of times and said, I'm so sorry, I'm so

sorry you have to go through this, or that you're going through this.

So she, you know, it was apparent to her.

Meanwhile, Evan Hunter.

the original screenwriter on Marnie, was having problems of his own.

One scene in particular, in which the frigid Marnie is raped on her honeymoon,

would ultimately lead to a falling out with the director.

When we were discussing it for the hundredth time, and I gave all my

you know, I didn't think a guy who loves her would rape her on their wedding

night, and I thought it would be very difficult to rescue him after that scene

for the rest of the film.

And he said, Evan, and you know how directors do when they're framing a

shot? He said, Evan, and he came right in like this. He said, when he dicks it

in, I want that camera right on her face.

Just like that.

And I thought, oh boy, we got trouble here.

When he wanted to do something that might conceivably be defined as

he was like a little boy doing something very naughty, very naughty, and he

wanted to tell you about it. He never, ever told

or exposed consciously

what this...

within the context of what it meant to him.

Not at all. He never knew what a dream was about.

Not a clue.

He didn't dig into himself. It was all instinctual.

And it's what we call talent, you know?

During the filming of Marnie, everything sort of went fine until probably the

last quarter.

of the of the shoot it was a five -month shoot and um it eventually got to the

point where i i couldn't stand the control or the trying to control

and i resented it so highly that i finally told him that i i couldn't i

couldn't bear it anymore demands were putting being put onto me that i

acquiesce to and i said i need to get out

And he told me that I really couldn't, that I had my parents to worry about, my

daughter.

I said, it doesn't matter, I can't live this way.

And he literally said, I'll ruin your career.

She got very annoyed with him.

And so Hicks said to me, he said, she said something that no one is permitted

say to me. And I said, what did she say, what did she say? And he said...

She referred to my weight.

And apparently what she actually said was, you know, you fat pig, who the hell

do you think you are to tell me that I can or can't do this and that? So after

that, they never spoke directly to each other again throughout the shooting. It

was, would you tell Mr. Hitchcock? Would you ask Miss Hedren?

And that was the basis of the bust -up.

He kept me under contract.

He paid me my little salary every week.

for a couple of years.

And by that time, all of the people who did want to use me in films, because

after Marnie, you know, I was hot, you know, and was

just told I wasn't available.

There was never a question of us working together again.

It was just a very definite cutoff.

And it was by me.

I am totally responsible for it.

No, I'm not. He is.

Marnie bombed at the box office.

His next film, Torn Curtain, his 50th feature, fared even worse.

With three flops in a row, Alfred Hitchcock was beginning to look dated.

His response was characteristically bold.

In 1967, he attempted to reinvent himself once more with a project known

working title, Kaleidoscope Frenzy.

Hitchcock wrote the sexually explicit, often brutal script himself and planned

to shoot it on location in New York with a cast of unknowns.

To sell the concept to Universal, he commissioned an elaborate series of test

shots and stills which capture the ambition of his intentions.

We went to about 15 locations around the city of New York, and we went upstate

New York, and we went to the Maritime Harbor where all the Liberty ships had

berthed. We did all places where there was a great body of water.

Turns out that water figured very heavily into the story.

And every time this young boy saw water and stuff, he got turned on and he had

to commit a murder.

And unfortunately, his mother, in the film, discovered it was him and she

him in.

This was a film that he was...

strongly believed in and really wanted to do.

Kaleidoscope Frenzy is not a light film.

It begins in the first 20 minutes with one of the most brutal murders that's

ever been imagined for an American screen.

Lou Wasserman felt that Kaleidoscope Frenzy would do irreparable harm to the

Hitchcock franchise, that Hitchcock, the director and the marketable entity,

would basically come to an end if he made this film.

This is despite the fact that Hitchcock went to great lengths to convince both

Lou Wasserman and the board of MCA to do the film.

They basically told him no.

And for Hitchcock, he had not been told no probably for nearly 20 years.

Probably the last no he heard was in 1946 or something from David O.

So to be told no at a studio where he was one of the preeminent directors was,

it must have been a very difficult, almost shattering experience.

Kaleidoscope Frenzy was the last reflex of a director who for 40 years had

delighted in keeping one step ahead of his audiences.

Of the films that marked the end of his career, Only Frenzy, shot in Britain in

1972, showed any of the old magic.

Slowly, slowly, and slowly.

Split the hands, drop.

Eyes begin to stare.

Can the eyes stare?

Open, open.

Open.

By now, both Hitchcock and Alma were in poor health.

Alma had the first of two strokes during the making of Frenzy.

Hitchcock himself had been fitted with a pacemaker and was drinking heavily to

deaden the pain of chronic arthritis.

His arthritis in his knees was enormously painful. I still have the

him in mind. I was walking along the hallway of the bungalow that he

holding on to the wall to come down to a little office I had at the end there.

But it was just an unstated agreement that we were just going to keep Hitch

going as long as he wanted to go.

There was a woman down there in a blue hat who was paying no attention to

anything.

In 1978, Hitchcock was working on The Short Night, his 56th feature.

On one occasion, he asked screenwriter David Freeman to come to his house in

-Air for a story session.

Alma had been ill during that period, and she was feeling better.

And so he invited her to come into the story sessions.

When Hitchcock saw her sitting there in their house and listening,

engaged in this discussion, I thought, I could just feel the years coming off

his shoulders.

He never walked around during a story meeting. That's not something he did. He

would sit like a Buddha usually and just make his decrees.

But with Alma there in their house, he got up and kind of walked around or

walked in his fashion, and I think he was showing off for her. I think it

was he was showing her that he could still do it.

that she could participate, that this was possible.

He was saying to his wife, look, we can make another one. This can happen.

It's worth living.

I don't think there's anything less than that.

One day I was up in my office and I got a call from Sue, his secretary, stating

that, would you come down here right away? Mr. Hitchcock wants to see you.

He was behind his desk, and he was very maudlin.

What's wrong?

He says, I want you to do me a favor.

I said, well, of course.

What do you want me to do? And he says, I want you to call Mr.

Wasserman and tell him that I'm all through, that I'm never going to make

another movie.

It was very sad.

Something that I'll never forget.

Production on The Short Night was halted in May 1979.

Within days, Hitchcock's office was closed.

The following year, at the age of 80, and with a belated knighthood to add to

countless other honours, Sir Alfred Hitchcock died.

Alma, his toughest critic and fiercest defender, died two years later.

If you could make only one more picture, perish the thought, but if you could

only make one more picture, what would it be about?

I think it would be about murder, mayhem, violence, sex, beautifully

pictorially expressed, lovely costumes, perfect cutting,

and a joke or two.

If you've missed it, you can catch up with Paul Merton's intimate look at

Hitchcock on the BBC iPlayer.

But next here on BBC4, a portrait of three legends from the 50s and all with

same surname, the Beverley sisters.