Hitchcock's
Unproduced Projects
Few
filmmakers of Hollywood's Golden Era have thrived in what was the heyday of the
studio system while also making deeply personal pictures. If there is a single
director whose career began in the days before the talkies that remained very
much in the mainstream through the post-Jaws blockbuster era, his name is Alfred
Hitchcock.
"I
could never retire," Hitchcock said at the age of seventy-eight. "I have lots
of ideas that I've never yet managed to get on the screen, and something always
comes up, some new story that excites me. I warn you, I mean to go on forever!"
To the great disappointment of movie audiences around the world, Hitchcock could
not go on forever and the film he was preparing at the time, The
Short Night, never made it to the screen. In one sense though, Hitchcock
was right, in that his presence -- now twenty years later -- is as strong as it
ever was, due to the films he left behind and his overall influence on the cinema.
What Hitchcock also left as a legacy, was a very intriguing statement, that he
had lots of ideas which still hadn't gotten to the screen. In
his fifty years as a motion picture director, Alfred Hitchcock completed fifty-five
feature films. Most filmographies overlook the director's German language version
of his 1930 British production Murder!, called Sir John Grieft Ein!
(or Mary), which has a completely different cast. Also excluded from most
lists is Hitchcock's silent version of Blackmail, which has obvious differences
from his more celebrated sound version, and indeed enjoyed its own successful
theatrical run. To the Hitchcock completist, anything the master put to film is
of interest. Happily, gems such as the above two titles have become available
again, if only to an occasional retrospective. With the 1993 re-release of Hitchcock's
wartime propaganda films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, and
a 1998 presentation of Incident at a Corner, the director's only color
telefilm, it would seem that there will always be something new to discover about
the Master of Suspense. What remains then are the projects which Hitchcock never
completed, and are thus lost. Hitchcock's
foibles in the film trade were less conspicuous than some of his celebrated colleagues,
such as Orson Welles and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, for the simple reason that his
output never diminished. For nearly three decades, audiences enjoyed sometimes
two pictures a year from the rotund Englishman who made those little suspense
pictures, like The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Notorious,
Rear Window and Psycho. While a legend such as Welles might be as
famous for Citizen Kane as he was for the films he didn't make, the sheer
volume of Hitchcock's work might lead one to suspect that he had little if any
trouble getting his films to the screen. Such was not the case. As
with any filmmaker, there were projects started by Hitchcock which for one reason
or another were abandoned, compromised, or never realized. Through the years Hitchcock
had many projects which came rather close to production, going as far as casting
star performers, securing locations, making budgets, designing sets, and drafting
a screen treatment or shooting script. Additionally, a great number of his movies
-- some of his most successful -- were not as he intended them to be. This
aspect in the career of one of the cinema's great artists has remained largely
unexplored. Thus the world has been deprived of examining how Hitchcock's completed
works either evolved, or were affected by works which did not come to fruition.
Hitchcock's unrealized projects reveal his diverse taste for story material as
they could not be more varied in theme and content. No
Bail for the Judge was to have been a big-budget, highly commercial,
star vehicle, while Mary Rose would have been
a small, intimate, and deeply personal picture. The bold original story called
Frenzy was a departure from Hitchcock's roots
of following a hero thrust into world of chaos and terror, whereas The
Short Night marked a return to the moral ambiguity of his British espionage
classics Sabotage and Secret Agent. Each
of these projects and more will be discussed here in great detail ... Beginning
with the original story that Hitchcock called Frenzy
and later Kaleidoscope, and the film he nearly
made with Audrey Hepburn, No Bail for the Judge.
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