Original subtitles

Made a living out of fear and intrigue, Living Famously now on BBC2 uncovers the

master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.

When I'm not playing solitaire, I take a book down from

the shelf.

And what with programmes on the air, I keep pretty much

to myself, Mr Saturday Dance.

Heard they crowded the floor Couldn't bear it without

you Don't get around much anymore

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 dare attempt.

But the screen's master of suspense...

the producer -director who shocked the world with Psycho.

Good evening.

It is 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 filmmakers' ways of looking at things.

The assembly of pieces of film.

to create fright.

You can imitate Hitchcock.

There's a uniqueness to his style.

His wonderful ability to create complex characters and put them under

pressure that he builds and builds until you think the soul is just going to

snap.

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.

I think his background had an awful lot to do with the kind of person Hitchcock

became later on.

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

society. 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, boom.

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

for his whole life. Can you remember any specific incidents when you were

frightened as a child?

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

I think that when I was probably about four or five years of age, being sent

with a note to the local police station.

And he handed this note to the desk sergeant who read it and as a result

him up in a cell for five minutes and then let him out and said, yeah, that's

what we do to naughty little boys.

This is 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...

has carried through his whole life in his relationship to authority.

But you see, the psychiatrist will always tell you, if you have a fear that

rooted in you and 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 placement.

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 precariously.

The movies provided excitement and escape for an overweight loner with a

clerical job.

I was originally in an engineering firm.

advertising department and I was the what was technically called a layer man

designing the ads I'm an advertising man not a red herring I've got a job a

secretary a mother two ex -wives and several bartenders depended upon me I

very keen movie goer and I heard that an American company were coming to London

to open the 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, and he was a draft

artist.

So somebody had said to him, why don't you go over to the studios and see if

can get a job? So he went with this big portfolio of pictures, because this time

it was silent movies.

went to get a job of drawing titles, like, and the sun set, and he would draw

the sun setting, and so on and so forth.

And when he went over there, and my mother said she saw this young man come

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

a better job than he did.

Always the master of suspense.

Hitchcock decided to bide his time and threw himself into the world of

filmmaking.

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 Balkan, who took over the studio where he was already working.

An English producer who was business -like and professional and who

Hitchcock as a potential filmmaker.

Michael Balkan sent Hitchcock to Germany to learn his craft at the most advanced

studios in the world.

There he learned so much about the technique, trick effect.

and the economy of filmmaking.

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.

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

I can imagine that it must have been a bit of a shock to you personally when

talkies came.

Well, the only thing wrong with the silent picture was that mouths opened

sound came out.

It's a bit like that asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs from the Earth,

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

of...

synchronised sound was a kind of disaster which wiped out such a lot

silent cinema.

Unfortunately, when talk came in, the Bulgarians, 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 what I call photographs of people talking, and bears

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...

Now, wait a minute.

This 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,

became his secret weapon.

She had been a film editor.

She was raised in the business.

I think it's certainly the case that she was a right -hand person to him, an

advisor. I think that she read his scripts, commented on them, looked at

pictures, gave suggestions all the time.

He would find a story, he would bring it home, have her read it. If she thought

it would make a picture, he'd go ahead.

If she said, no, it won't, he didn't even touch it. He had...

She had an unerring judgment. He went right 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

plot. You'd better do that from London. You'll be there soon enough.

I have the honour in presenting to you one of the most remarkable men...

In the world, miss the memory. What are the 39 steps?

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 rollercoaster ride

had never experienced before.

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

stranger. I know you think I'm crazy, but I'm not, I'm not! For heaven's sake,

stop this train!

I don't think he missed the fact that, you know, there weren't the special

effects available, the technology available that you've got now. I can't

Hitchcock now wanting to make films stuffed with special effects and great,

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

mean, he made films about, essentially 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 breathtaking

suspense. And why Hitchcock stands unrivaled as the incomparable master of

thrills.

La Signora Inglise.

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?

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 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. The end of it was the era of

the 39 steps and the lady vanishes.

He was surely one of the... best filmmakers in the world. The problem for

was he was getting larger than the English cinema was at that time.

It would have been unthinkable that someone with that kind of vision would

have been working in Hollywood.

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

the time.

It's an international problem. There are 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. Selvnick, fresh from producing Gone With the Wind, recognized

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 filmmaking.

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

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

life, he was now head -to -head with it in Hollywood.

It's next to be done.

How do you do?

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

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

woman. Whenever you touched me, 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 in this room, in all the rooms in the house.

You could sum up the complexities of the

relationship between Hitchcock and Selznick with Rebecca, the first film

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 Grand Slam Prize winner

that made motion picture history.

winner of the Academy Award, voted by America's critics as the best picture of

the year.

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 realized, 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 innocent 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 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 we never played the scene through or even read it through. It was little

pieces where the 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 somewhere in the editing of anywhere on

film, but you're somewhere in the editing department, because that's my

And he said, yes, you've got a very good background.

You can be my editor.

And a few days later, the first rushes come through, and it's the editor's

responsibility to set it up so that they can see rushes at lunchtime.

And he was setting it up, and at the end of each take, there was a...

He thought, something's the matter with the camera.

So he called up the labs and said, you know, there's this funny thing here. I

said, don't worry, 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.

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.

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

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 stye?

Do you know if you rip 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, he said, 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 did it against, 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 above all others 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

switchbacks and scream and scream and then get off giggling.

No, he was called a 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

memory and suspects that he's committed a terrible crime.

What insidious meaning did he read into the markings on a tablecloth?

Why, even 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

habit of falling in love with his leading ladies.

Hitchcock loved having beautiful women under his control.

I think he fantasized sexual relations and even marital

relations with them.

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

I think it was during the making of Notorious, a great film, a 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

in Notorious is that it has three characters, and Hitchcock said this to

Truffaut.

There's Harry Grant, there's Ingrid Bergman, who was probably Hitchcock's

favorite actress, and there's Hitchcock, who's watching all of this and filming

it from the off space.

And that's where we will eventually 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 knew her before you did, loved her before you did.

I wasn't as lucky as you.

He was often a reverie. He just was... gone thinking about ingrid bergman i

guess he was in love with her i mean i don't know ingrid bergman was quite a

quite a swath in her youth you know she was any number of internationally famous

love affairs and she was often close to her directors and why not hitch what is

it what's wrong with you

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

today, nothing he had done before counted.

Two fellows meet, like you and I. No connection between them whatsoever.

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

So, they swapped murders.

Fantastic, isn't it? You didn't know when Bruno proposed this pact that he

serious. Dead serious.

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

And now, wherever you go, whatever you do, you find yourself dominated by his

evil presence.

Well, everybody knows what happened next. He made some of the best movies

made. Strangers on a Train, in a sense, really was a new beginning because he

was running his own show pretty much at Warner Brothers, 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.

Right 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 again, 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 a whole

series of apartments that are actually movie screens.

Looking at lots of different screens, seeing lots of different stories going

and how, the way in which they come together.

Just, 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 traveling 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.

Those are just a few of my neighbors.

First I watched them just to kill time, but then I couldn't take my eyes off

them, just as you would be able to.

Alfred Hitchcock, more than once you've said the secret of making a quality

suspense motion picture is to put an average man in bizarre situations, to

threaten the audience with the thought that this could happen to you.

Now this seems an oversimplification, but is it basically what you're still

trying to do?

Actually, the central figure who is, shall we say, being attacked or on the

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

inadequate to him because he wasn't just a maker of thrillers.

And I think he probably got rather irritated with the term.

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

Hitch had a wonderful definition of suspense, and he defined it as a

shock.

And the story he told was that there are a group of men sitting around a table

having a board meeting.

In the midst of the meeting, a bomb explodes.

The audience will get five seconds of shock.

But if we tell them five minutes ahead of time, there is a bomb that's going to

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.

Now we get five minutes of suspense.

Well, we didn't have suspenseful 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

terror. As created by Alfred Hitchcock in the story that gives new meaning to

the word suspense.

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

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

will do if and when he does find out.

What was the strange attraction that brought these two together in spite of

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

fascinated with her. I think that is just...

Sublime filmmaking.

In stark contrast to his on -screen alter egos, Hitchcock's private life was

apparently happy and contented.

To rest from work, actually, they did very little. He read a lot, and I

was very close to my mother, and we would go out together and do various

Go to the movies a lot.

I have a friend who managed a repertory cinema here in Los Angeles and said they

used to come in and watch movies together all the time, no matter what

matter what kind. They were real film buffs.

They loved what they did.

And she created a secure haven for him.

It seemed that they had a very tranquil and very well -adjusted

family life, an orthodox bourgeois family life centered on the kitchen and

centered on the day's work.

I would go over to 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.

was like other children would go to visit their fathers in the office. I

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

you after you've seen it, when you get home.

When I

first saw Psycho, I was kind of disappointed. I thought, well, This is a

with three great moments and nothing much else.

And then I went away, and I suppose I saw it again about six months later, and

realised that 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 in

between. It's a wonderful movie, Psycho.

The content, as such, was, I felt, rather amusing.

And it was a bit of a joke, you know.

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

It was intended to cause people to scream and yell and so forth, but no

than the screaming and yelling on the switchback railway.

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

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

think that Psycho is the perfect counterexample 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 then it turned out that the whole rest

the world wanted to see it too.

He loved to do trailers, handmade trailers.

There's a very funny one for Thaiko, for instance, 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 that the twisting of the... Well, 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 -size figures, cardboard cut

-out figures.

of Hitchcock in the lobby of the theatre saying, you can't come in after it's

started, which, you know, unheard of discipline.

He would not let people into that movie after it had begun, 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 in addition to that, With the help of television, murder should be brought

into the home where it rightly belongs.

In 1955, his own television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, began in

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

A very popular TV show in which he appeared at the beginning and the end of

show in often very funny...

introductions and 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 centerfold

that magazine, I was known as a man of mystery and suspense.

To reestablish 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 this 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

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 marvelous magic

world of commercials.

Who knows?

We may also see a story.

Everyone recognized him. Now, of course, all along, he had had this little trick

of a tiny appearance in his own films.

which is part of the same thing.

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 in a reckless experiment.

And, of course, 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,

Howard Hawks looked like.

We know what Hitchcock looked like.

Your television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, now I know you didn't direct

all those films yourself, but is the technique that you adopt there basically

the same as you use for the cinema or quite different?

The economics alone demand a completely different

handling of the medium. In other words, television on film.

There's a much, 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.

Television, we get nine minutes.

So it's a totally different thing altogether.

Whilst producing his TV series, Hitchcock made the film North by

in which Cary Grant plays a man who's mistaken for a secret agent and then

pursued across America.

I'm an advertising man, not a red herring.

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

dependent upon me.

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

It was interesting because I...

was curious how, you know, I didn't read for it or anything, and I was cast in

this role.

It's a scene where I get punched just before the take.

Hitchcock says to the first assistant, tell me, does Landau work tomorrow and

the next day?

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

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

are not uncommon.

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

It does make you wonder what was going on in his mind, the notion of

an actor to something and then feeding him full of laxatives and then going

away. I mean, that's grotesque.

You once told me that actors were cattle to be shoved about.

I wonder if you care to enlarge on that.

Do you mean you want to make them larger cattle than they are?

No, no.

Well, I don't, that's really a joke.

But, um...

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

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.

And, yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody who was going to shirk the job lasted

the whole length of a Hitchcock shoot, because I think he probably would be a

tough man to work for.

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

You invariably appear in your own films, Mr Hitchcock. Have you ever been

tempted to become an actor yourself?

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

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 you know how to fold it.

Great man telling me, 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.

I used to feel left out because I remember in the auction gallery scene

Cary Grant, James Mason, even Rhi and I are all in this.

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

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

And he just went by me, and I walked over to him. I said, is there anything

want to tell me?

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

Sometimes one...

gets into little difficulties with the American people is that they

want everything spelled out, you know, exactly.

And they worry about content. I don't care about content at all. The film can

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 to us. 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 reinvented

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 anyone could

with that or see it differently.

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.

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

He seems to have used Cary Grant as his wish fulfillment, alter ego, and James

Stewart as his more realistic alter ego, with more hang -ups.

First I watched them just to kill time, but then I couldn't take my eyes off

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 debonair, a charmer.

How do I know you aren't a murderer?

You don't.

I think he was in love with quite a lot, 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, 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 Bird, Hitchcock's fantasies spilled over into

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 had been a model. And she was walking, and she walked away from us,

I said, she's got the job.

Because she was...

The kind of a person he would be amenable to.

Signed her to a seven -year contract before they even met. I mean, he set up

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 really not just to guide her, but indeed 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

that it wouldn't actually make a great deal of difference to the filming

schedule. And I don't think it would have done.

But Hitchcock wouldn't let her do it. He said that if she went off to this

charity event, she would get out of the character and it would be hard to bring

her back into character and she had to stay there.

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

line.

The way I described 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 and I suppose every other profession are 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 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 Tippy, Hitchcock also found himself out of touch with

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...

at a time when many directors have retired, and was feeling his age, his

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.

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 anymore. It was

odd because his mind was still working.

It was a kind of lag that occurred.

But he would sit there and come up with ideas.

He did have one fine film left in him.

It had an elegiac quality about it that was not immediate.

I mean, I think one of the reasons he wanted to shoot that movie, he said it,

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

You'll remember his father was a greengrocer.

Hitchcock had grown up in the world of that sort of thing, and he wanted his

cameras there to record it before it was gone.

But after finishing the film 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...

soothes his loneliness and his bitterness, his fear of being forgotten,

and his dismay over his own 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 there in his office, and he...

go in 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 there was a great sadness among those of us who worked with him who

maintained his office.

And 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 28, 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 and frenzy, not to mention a host of others. That's

naive.

And the people who say that 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 and his public image seems to have been to be

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 mentioned a switchback railway.

You do see yourself as a 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 will make them scream.

If you make the dip too deep, the screams will continue as the whole car

over the edge and destroys everyone.

But therefore, you mustn't go too far, because you do want them to get off the

switchback railway giggling with pleasure.

And tomorrow, Mae West invites you to come up and see her sometime, living

famously at the same time, 3 .30, here on BBC Two.

Thank you.