Hitchcock primed us for the sixties, but as it swept through our culture, it left him behind. He’d always enjoyed prodding at the limits of what censors had deemed acceptable, and by the time the Motion Picture Production Code was formally dismantled in 1968, he had already prepared himself for a new era of permissiveness with a script that would make Psycho look quaint. Kaleidoscope (also known as Frenzy, though not to be confused with Hitchcock’s 1972 film of that name) proposed to take Hitchcock’s demonstrable interest in sexually motivated murder to graphic new heights—or depths, depending on one’s perspective. The story was loosely inspired by the real-life crimes of English murderer Neville Heath in the 1940s, though Hitchcock intended to set his film among the hippies of 1960s New York. The screenplay—one draft of which Hitchcock wrote himself—and the film tests he carried out in 1967 indicate that he planned a bracing new iteration of a Hitchcock film, with more nudity, sex, and violence than ever before. But his pitch was rejected by his studio of the time, Universal. Had it been made, it’s possible that Kaleidoscope might have taken its place alongside Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and other daring classics of the era. As Dan Auiler succinctly puts it, “This project was an intended turning point in Hitchcock’s career—a turn that the studio denied him.”
In a sense, he had become a victim of his own wild success. By the mid-sixties, Hitchcock was a cultural institution, an establishment figure who had hosted Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural gala and had lunched with Henry Kissinger. Moreover, after his agent and friend Lew Wasserman negotiated the purchase of Universal Pictures by his company MCA in 1962, Hitchcock signed lucrative deals with Universal in which he exchanged the rights to Shamley Productions, his production company, the television shows, and various of his movies, including Psycho, for a colossal amount of corporate stock, making him one of the wealthiest people in Hollywood, bolstered by his substantial investments in oil and livestock. He had always been acutely interested in the business side of the movies. Rodney Ackland recalled that when Hitchcock returned to England during the forties, his “conversation was of finance, mergers between Hollywood film companies, problems of distribution, how much his last picture had taken and so on.” Thirty years later, nothing much had changed when Hitchcock wrote to another old acquaintance in England about industry news that was of immense interest to him and his bank manager, but one wonders how much it would have excited distant friends across the pond: MCA’s huge slush fund, for example, “which they don’t know what to do with. The shares stand at $40, higher than anyone else. All of this, of course, has been given a lift by the film JAWS. Now I think that the next thing liable to happen in a lesser degree is Fox, whose shares have jumped 5 or 6 points in the last few days, following the release of a picture called STAR WARS.”
Unfortunately for him, executives at Universal were unable to reconcile Hitchcock the venerable shareholder with Hitchcock the artistic defiler of public morals. When the studio signed him, the hope and expectation was that Hitchcock would bring prestige and critical acclaim to their brand, along with box-office clout. They looked to him for another North by Northwest, not a leap into the mind of—as he himself put it—the “questionable old man of the later movies, who occupied himself dispassionately with sex matters.”
Ultimately, the two films Universal did allow him to make in the second half of the sixties were among the biggest failures of his Hollywood career, artistically and commercially. Torn Curtain is a diverting but uninspired revisitation of earlier Hitchcock spy thrillers. In that same genre, Topaz (1969) is a disjointed, meandering mess, the high point of which is Karin Dor’s death scene, in which her dress spreads around her as she falls to the gleaming tiled floor, like a flowing pool of purple blood. Both were attempts to engage with the state of the world in the Cold War era—as his classics The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes had engaged with the atmosphere of 1930s Europe—but neither feels urgently topical. Torn Curtain caused the implosion of Hitchcock’s association with Bernard Herrmann, who failed to provide the pop score that Universal wanted. A year earlier Hitchcock had lost another vital collaborator, when George Tomasini died of a heart attack. The unraveling had begun.
Hitchcock remained fascinated by the times in which he lived, collecting files’ worth of newspaper clippings about hippies, the Black Power movement, anti-apartheid and anticolonialism across Africa, the Weather Underground, the “opening-up” in China, and third-wave feminism. Nothing came of them. To François Truffaut, he complained that he was “completely desperate” for new material.
Now, as you realize, you are a free person to make whatever you want. I, on the other hand, can only make what is expected of me; that is, a thriller, or a suspense story, and that I find hard to do. So many stories seem to be
