A Londoner to his bones. Hitchcock, 1972.
It’s redolent of the kind of marginalization that he experienced firsthand. Laurence Olivier was eight years younger than Hitchcock, yet he received a knighthood “for services to stage and film” in 1947, just two weeks after his fortieth birthday. Similarly, David Lean, who made his name in epics about heroes and adventurers of the British Empire, and in adaptations of Dickens novels, was nine years Hitchcock’s junior and didn’t direct his first film until 1942, yet he was elevated to Commander of the British Empire in 1953. When Hitchcock was offered the same honor in 1962 (a year after John Grierson had been given his), he declined it, probably because he felt insulted that it did not sufficiently recognize his achievements. Back in London on the filming of Frenzy in 1971—a few months after receiving the Légion d’honneur from the French government—he told Charles Champlin that after thirty years out of the country, the British honors system seemed as baffling to him as ever. “I’ve never really understood titles. You become Sir George. But who ever really calls you Sir George? Waiters in good restaurants and your servants at home. To your friends, you’re still good old Stinky.” Still, that didn’t prevent him from accepting a knighthood a few months before his death, even though the fact that he was no longer a subject of the Crown meant he was not technically entitled to call himself “Sir.” When asked by reporters why he thought it had taken the queen so long to honor him, he shrugged that she probably had other things on her mind.
Despite his self-exile, Hitchcock never took his eye off Britain’s film industry. During the fifties and sixties, he watched the “kitchen-sink” films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, and Billy Liar, which put working-class and lower-middle-class life on screen in a way that Hitchcock had fantasized about many years earlier. Frenzy attempted to capture something of that atmosphere, set in a version of the London Hitchcock had grown up in, one of greengrocers and market traders, publicans and barmaids, coarse humor and an edge of menace. Yet Frenzy also shows us how the London in Hitchcock’s core was not quite the city of 1972, the home of Marc Bolan and Spare Rib magazine. During the scripting of the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1955, Hitchcock noted certain small inaccuracies that had strayed into John Michael Hayes’s script, including in the sections set in London: the conduct of the receptionists at Claridge’s, the finer points of English reserve, the demeanor of MI6 agents. He also questioned the Americanisms Hayes had put in the mouths of the English characters and recommended changing them—but then added the caveat, “I am out of touch with the English.” That is plainly evident in Frenzy. The London here is like an alternate reality, one in which the fog has lifted, fashions and technology have moved on, but in every other respect it has been frozen in 1939. Arthur La Bern, the author of the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, on which the film was based, found Frenzy “distasteful,” and watching it was a “most painful experience.” He groaned at the dialogue, too, an “amalgam of an old Aldwych farce” and various hackneyed British television series. He lamented the absence of his “authentic London characters.”
Barbara Leigh-Hunt, the last of Hitchcock’s slaughtered London blondes, agrees that there was a discrepancy between the London of the 1970s and the city that Hitchcock attempted to evoke: “England had changed since he had lived and worked here. The club that my character was supposed to go to, that sort of thing didn’t happen anymore, and women didn’t dress like that anymore. I felt it was dated.” But reviewing the film in 2018, she was no longer bothered by the clunky anachronisms. “So much time has passed, it doesn’t matter now.” As the seventies drift into the waters of distant memory, what Hitchcock’s farewell to London gives us isn’t an accurate record of that moment in its history, but something equally vital: a concentrate of Hitchcock’s London, a feeling of the city untethered from time.
* Hitchcock’s episode was to celebrate the work of the World Health Organization. He dropped out over scheduling pressures and concerns regarding the quality of the script written by Richard Condon. Ultimately, four episodes were made by other directors and aired on ABC.
12
THE MAN OF GOD
In the final year of his life, Hitchcock’s health declined precipitously. For Alma and him, the previous decade had been increasingly testing. During the filming of Frenzy in 1971, Alma suffered a stroke, followed by another, far more debilitating attack in 1976, the year Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot, was released. Her ill-health left her largely housebound and in need of round-the-clock nursing. Hitchcock was devastated. For fifty years Alma had been
