During those years of Hitchcock’s physical and creative decline, his presence in contemporary cinema was maintained by his disciples. So many classic seventies films bear his thumbprint, from Don’t Look Now to Jaws to Carrie and the Bond franchise. Martin Scorsese, arguably the most accomplished American filmmaker of the last fifty years, credits Hitchcock as a key influence, especially on Taxi Driver, released a matter of weeks before Family Plot opened in theaters.* Travis Bickle might be an East Coast cousin of Norman Bates, or perhaps the charmless, estranged son of Uncle Charlie; the New York he inhabits is as dangerous and sordid as the London of The Lodger, oozing with violent misogyny, male rage, and disgust for the filth of the city. Beneath the patina of character and setting, Hitchcock’s commitment to showing over telling is also shared by Scorsese. “The Hitchcock pictures I like looking at repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly,” Scorsese told Roger Ebert, “often without the sound.” On Taxi Driver, it was Hitchcock’s ability to silently express the emotional experience of Catholic identity that most influenced him. “The Wrong Man . . . has more to do with the camera movements in Taxi Driver than any other picture I can think of. It’s such a heavy influence because of the sense of guilt and paranoia.”
In May 1979 it became obvious, even to Hitchcock, that making another film was an unreachable fantasy. He abruptly closed his office at Universal, leaving his devoted, long-serving staff suddenly unemployed. Life away from work proved an oxymoron. After a short while, he began turning up as though he’d never left, always in the same suit-and-tie uniform, pushing bits of paper around a desk, getting a haircut and a shoeshine, receiving the odd guest to hear his patter. On January 3, 1980, he received his knighthood in a special ceremony arranged, fittingly, on a Universal sound stage. The following day, the biographer Gilbert Harrison dropped by to interview him about Thornton Wilder. Afterward, Harrison reflected that he’d encountered “Alfred Hitchcock,” the myth rather than the man:
His face was florid. He was balding but not entirely bald. The main thing about him is his bulk. He seemed like a tuskless walrus dressed in a well-cut black suit with vest, white shirt and tie, propped up in a high-back swivel desk chair. And, out of that bulk which remained largely immobile during the interview, came this low, carefully modulated, middle-class English accent. There was little spontaneity in what he said. He chose his words carefully, and it seemed to me he had said them all before. It was as if he was remembering some script that he had written earlier. It was a little difficult to keep him on Wilder, who I think did not much interest him, and off of himself and his work.
Hitchcock died of renal failure on the morning of April 29, 1980. His funeral took place at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. A few days later he was cremated, his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean, a conspicuously unconventional farewell for a Catholic born in the nineteenth century. Though the Vatican had allowed cremations since 1963, the idea was that one’s ashes should still be interred; to do otherwise would be a denial of the Resurrection. On June 3, a memorial Requiem Mass was held at Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. The first hymn was the signal anthem of England’s late nineteenth-century Catholic revival, “Firmly I Believe and Truly.” Quite how firm or true was Hitchcock’s belief is an enduring mystery.
The severe discipline of his school days may have filled Hitchcock with fears and dark fixations, but he admitted that his time at St Ignatius College left more constructive legacies, too. Above all, he believed that a Jesuitical education had a profound influence on his ability to think, as it “shapes the mind into given reasoning powers.” Echoing James Joyce, who thought his Jesuit teachers taught him how “to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge,” Hitchcock said that St Ignatius College bequeathed him “organization, control, and, to some degree, analysis.” By “reasoning powers” and “analysis,” he was presumably referring to his enviable ability for thinking through a problem and learning lessons from it. The Jesuits’ reliance on casuistry—a method of moral reasoning in which one seeks to extract broad principles from specific cases—is apparent in Hitchcock’s theories on how to manipulate an audience. The death of Stevie in Sabotage, for example, taught Hitchcock that it is okay to murder a child in a film, but not when the audience is expecting the kid to be saved. His rules for creating suspense, developing character, using montage, and all the other tenets of the filmmaking gospel according to Alfred around which he built his public image had a casuistic stem.
Biographers have pointed out that St Ignatius College would almost certainly have inculcated in Hitchcock the lengthy tale of Catholic persecution in England, which might have dampened his patriotism and intensified his fascination with torture, pain, and suffering. Equally, he would have been versed in the astonishing history of the Jesuits’ long mission to spread the word of the Bible, which led its members to faraway lands. Exotic tales of the Jesuit missionaries who made scientific breakthroughs, won
