Original subtitles

A lot of people think I'm a monster.

And they really do. I've been told that.

That they don't care for the...

to be associated with me because of the nature of the work one

does.

Well, I've cleaned all this up now.

Big difference.

You should have seen the blood.

The whole place was... Well, it's too horrible to describe.

Dreadful. And I'll tell you, there's a very important clue was found here.

Down there.

Well, the murderer, you see, crept in here.

Very slowly. Of course, the shower was on. There was no sound.

And, uh...

Hitchcock came to America in 1939.

During the 40s, he made Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, Notorious, The

Case, Rope, and Under Capricorn, a mixed collection in terms of box office and

artistic success.

In the 1950s, he reached the peak of his creative powers with a group of

brilliantly conceived psychological thrillers.

And he continued to develop the form he'd virtually invented, the tongue -in

-cheek adventure story that exploited to the full Hitchcock's and his audience's

fascination with crime, preferably laced with sex and humour.

I found women say, oh, you're nothing like I thought you were.

I said, what did you expect?

They said, well, we thought you'd be very unpleasant and this and that.

It has happened more than once.

I'm talking actresses, but responsible women.

And with a complete misconception.

Due to the fact that I deal in crime and that kind of thing.

Well, I'm just the opposite.

I'm more scared than they are of things in real life.

The fear of heights was one of Hitchcock's many self -confessed

I don't think anyone was able to master the subjective, to put you, the

audience, into the character that was being photographed the way that

did. He made you that person so that he developed the close shot and the

viewpoint to an extreme that even some of the earlier people who used the close

shot, like Griffith, Hitchcock learned from everybody, but somehow he was able

to...

Give it a different meaning. Or use the language differently, as different

writers use their language differently.

But what Hitchcock could do would be to put his own neuroses, which we could all

identify with, and his own hang -ups, if you will, all of

the problems that he felt, the visceral reactions that he had to scenes, he

could put it on film because he was thinking in terms of how best to get it

there. I deal in nightmares.

and nightmares have to be awfully vivid.

You're very glad when you wake up, just as you're about to drop through the trap

on the gallows.

It's all been so vivid and real to you in the nightmare, so therefore, while I

may have a bizarre situation, the treatment of it is very accurate.

The first screenplay of Vertigo had to be considerably rewritten to bring any

semblance of reality into it.

James Stewart refused to play the part unless it was made more believable.

Hitchcock brought in a new writer, Samuel Taylor.

The plot was that a man, discovering that

Stewart suffered from vertigo, put together

an idea of how to kill his wife by having her jump off a tower knowing that

Stewart would not be able to run up the stairs and save her.

That's what it amounts to.

It's an absurd plot.

The whole story is a man who is destroyed by his feeling of guilt that

let a woman die, and then tries to find her again, and when he finds a girl

who looks like her, tries to recreate the dead woman.

A reluctant Kim Novak is taken around by Stuart to be costumed, hairdressed, and

made up to look like his dead love.

This necrophiliac element in the plot seems particularly to have intrigued

Hitchcock. He took a close personal interest in the designing of Kim Novak's

dresses, in her hairstyles. He even chose her shoes himself.

Like the character she played, Kim Novak didn't enjoy the attempted

transformation.

People look for parallels and say, oh, this obsession to recreate a woman is

Hitchcock looking for his ideal woman again, you know, after having lost,

lost Ingrid Bergman and having lost Grace Kelly.

But that's a little far -fetched, too, I think.

Hitchcock was all for what he called the yarn. It's a nice old English word.

He said, that's a good yarn.

You see?

I don't think that there was any hidden meaning. But Hitchcock was a very

emotional man.

And having a good actor in Stuart, and having a good situation

of a man driven almost to madness by what has happened, he was able

to infuse it with enormous emotion.

More than almost any picture I know of his.

By the end of Vertigo, James Stewart has found out that Kim Novak was an

accomplice to the murder.

And this is where it happened.

And the two of you hid back there and waited for it to clear and then you

sneaked down and drove into town, is that it?

And then, you were his girl, huh?

Now, what happened to you?

What happened to you? Did he ditch you?

Oh, Judy, with all of his wife's money and all that freedom and that power, and

he ditched you. What a shame.

But he knew it was safe. He knew you couldn't talk.

Did he give you anything?

The money.

And the necklace.

Carlotta's necklace.

There was where you made your mistake, Judy.

You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing.

You shouldn't have been... You shouldn't have been that sentimental.

The tension was every place. The tension was all over the set.

And by this means, the characters, all

characters, seemed to develop and go right along with the tension and up to

it breaks. And for some reason, everybody knew that it was

time to break, and it did.

Well, that phone call at the police station.

It wasn't the concierge at the hotel.

It was a man with a foreign voice, and he told me if I mentioned one single

of what Louis Bernard told me in the marketplace that something would happen

Hank.

Like Novak, Doris Day had a hard time with Hitchcock. She said he ignored her

throughout the filming, and she was in a state of constant anxiety.

Mrs. Drayton never got back to the hotel, neither did Hank.

But Mr. Drayton should... Listen, Joe. Mr. Drayton checked out of the hotel 40

minutes ago.

Now, come on, Joe.

Now sit down. I'm going to kill you. You gave me sex.

Sit down.

I'm going to kill you.

Why didn't you tell me? I wasn't sure until now.

You did.

You did. Don't leave.

Don't leave.

Don't leave.

Don't leave.

was more dependent than he ever admitted on his screenwriters.

The remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much was scripted by one of his most

responsive collaborators, John Michael Hayes.

When I'm writing a script, I very often become emotionally involved with the

people I'm writing about. They become extremely real to me, and very often

they'll take on a life of their own, and I can't control it, but I feel about

them as people. I never...

I never had an indication from Hitch that he regarded these as created

but as real people, and I did.

He regarded them as means to an end.

But he was antisocial in that respect. He didn't want to join the human race

or to be part of it. And he looked, mostly when he talked about people, it

from the critical standpoint, real people I'm talking.

He found the...

the chink in their armor, the flaw, the thing that was wrong with them.

I rarely ever heard him say about someone, oh, what a wonderful person.

Wasn't he exciting?

He's nice to be around. He has, you know, great ideas.

There were days when I thought that he didn't like people, and the reason that

he made suspense films and put them in terrible situations was to...

show his dislike or to get even with him or something. Now, this is perhaps

unkind, but he never got

enthusiastic about his characters and his people in the story as people. He

thought of them as devices to get into trouble and to get them out.

At the beginning of one of Hitchcock's most memorable set pieces, Cary Grant is

deposited into a vast and empty landscape to wait for trouble.

There's a scene where Cary Grant is sent out into the countryside.

Now, you know, it's a set -up for him to be shot.

Now, one says to oneself, now, what's the cliché here?

He'll go out, he'll be sent to the corner of the street at night, stand

lamp, a cat will slither along the wall and a face will appear from a window.

This is the cliché. Now, I said, I won't do that.

I will start with nothing.

A prairie country.

Not a tree, not a house in sight, just a roadway.

And Cary Grant gets out of a bus and stands there.

And the audience is saying, well, it's perfectly normal. What can happen here?

There's not a sign of anything.

So it's a deliberate thing. I mean, I'm giving you the extreme example. Yes,

yes, of course.

Now we give them a bit for a good measure. We let the limousine go by or

cars go by. Now a man gets out of a jalopy across the street.

It drives away and leaves the solitary figure of a man. Now, Cary Grant's

curious. Goes over, and the man's waiting for a bus. Now, his bus is

along, and just as the bus pulls up, the man said, that's funny, and Grant said,

what's funny?

There's a crop duster over there dusting a place where there are no crops.

And before any elaboration, he's on the bus and is away.

So the audience are left alone with this first clue that something's wrong

around here.

This process of frightening is done by means of a given medium,

the medium of pure cinema is what I believe in.

The assembly of pieces of film to create fright is the essential

part of my job, just as much as a painter would

by putting certain colours together.

create evil on canvas.

His most extreme study of psychopathic evil came in 1960, Psycho.

It was made on a shoestring budget and it turned out to be the most brutal and

terrifying film he'd made.

He called it a rather gentle horror story.

Norman Bates is a variation on the Hitchcock psychopath.

A line that stretches back to Uncle Charlie, the elegant homicidal maniac in

Shadow of the Doubt, the two murderous students in Rope, Robert Walker's

character in Strangers on a Train, Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder.

In Psycho, the mother -fixated Norman Bates dresses up in women's clothing and

stabs his victims to death with a kitchen knife.

The content of 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.

Now, this film had a horrible scene at the beginning of a girl being murdered

the shower.

Well, I deliberately made that pretty rough.

But as the film developed, I put less and less physical

horror. into it, because I was leaving that in the mind of the audience. And as

the film went on, there was less and less violence, but the tension in the

of the viewer was increased considerably.

I was transferring it from film into their minds. So towards the end, I had

violence at all. But the audience by this time was screaming in agony.

Thank goodness.

The scene for which Psycho became most famous wasn't actually designed by

Hitchcock himself.

He'd handed over the shower scene to be storyboarded by a young graphic artist,

Saul Bass.

Interestingly enough, the storyboard for Psycho that I did for Psycho went

precisely as I laid it out.

And there was no change on that.

And frankly,

I myself at that point didn't even really understand the impact that some

these things would have.

I thought it was a neat little murder.

And I thought it was pure. I liked its purity.

But I must say that when it appeared in the theater, when I saw the thing in the

theater, it really scared the hell out of me, and apparently of everybody else.

Everyone just went, because it was not possible. It was not done that you

off your leading lady one -third of the movie in.

It's not possible that actually that had nothing to do with the rest of the

story. Absolutely nothing.

The story was finding out what happened to Marion.

But I had nothing to do with that. I mean, I was already gone.

But that's what he did. He was so smart.

He worked in a way that he said to me, I hired you because you are an actress

and I believe you know your job.

I am not going to do a great deal of directing unless you

don't... do enough or you do too much for your piece of his

cake.

My piece, he said, if you don't come up to that, I'll tell you. If you go over

it, I'll tell you. He said, the only thing I need is for you to fit into my

camera.

If I say, because for me, the way the shot is conceived, if I want you to get

on that shot and move on that shot, you have to do it.

Now, the problem is that many times an actor will say, well, but I didn't feel

like getting up on that shot.

Well, what he did actually was give you more respect as an actor or an actress

because he is saying you create your reasons for getting up because that's

way it has to be.

Another murder scene, that of the detective, Arbogast, had also been

by Saul Bass.

My initial notion about the storyboard for Arbogast was that

as Arbogast walks up the stairs, I called

for cuts of his hand going up the rail,

just close -ups.

I called for cuts of his feet, you know, just his feet moving up, you know,

hesitating, you know, and doing that.

And I also wanted to set up the balustrade, and that was why I wanted

cut, because I wanted those vertical balustrades, you know, that were on the,

you know, that were on the hand, you know, below the handrail.

Because later, what I had in mind was that when he gets...

The hit and killed that when he falls down the stairs, I wanted his hand to go

through all the vertical spindles and go, you know, cut right down the thing.

Now, when I laid that out and I brought it to Hitch, Hitch then said, no,

wrong. All I needed was a simple shot of a man creeping up the stairs.

These multiple shots.

would have suggested menace and there was no menace in this man coming up the

stairs so therefore it was a simple straightforward shot of him coming up

sustained at some length

People, to me, when they complain, say, about Psycho, they lack the sense of

humor that I had to have when I made it. Yes.

Because you couldn't make a picture like Psycho without your tongue in your

cheek. No. Because you know people are going to scream.

I don't think Psycho was a very funny film.

I don't think many people felt that.

I think that was Hitch.

Now, if you will excuse me, I must hurry off to a little social affair.

A dear friend is guest of honour.

It's astounding.

I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Good night.

There was always a macabre line to his humour. In public, he turned himself

a droll clown.

In private, he devised elaborate practical jokes designed to tease and

as much as amuse.

I gave a dinner party for my wife on her birthday.

It was held in a garden in a restaurant in Los Angeles, a table for about 14

people. So I decided to get casting to get me a lovely aristocratic elderly

lady. We dressed her up very beautifully, her hair done, and just sat

end of the table and then disowned her.

Everybody said, who's the old lady? I said, I don't know, we're trying to find

out. And she had instructions saying she was with Mr Hitchcock's party.

And the whole evening, everybody talked politely to her, but they mystified

everybody. And I denied all knowledge of her, of course.

His two television series, which ran for ten years, were memorable more for

Hitchcock's introductions than for the films he presented.

He exploited his own physical shape, that extraordinary appearance and bulk

had become his trademark.

This looks interesting.

He would go on so many diets, and he had suits in the closet for every weight,

so that he would fluctuate a great deal. Because he did enjoy eating, you know.

He did enjoy good food.

And my mother did all the cooking at home. They just had one woman that used

come in and help her, but she did all the cooking.

Once in a while, he'd say, well...

My mother looked like a cottage loaf, so you'd understand why I look the way I

do.

He did mind.

The only time... The only time I've seen him

truly disconcerted and angry was

in San Marz. We were there, the four of us, spent a Christmas and over New

Year's in San Marz.

And we started to walk towards the club and it slipped and fell. Sat

right straight down in the perfect comic sit down.

And it was an awful moment because his eyes flashed around to see if anybody

seen this happen. Luckily not. And the three of us converged on him, hiding

And he said, get me up, get me up.

And we got him up with some difficulty.

And that was it. That was the end of it.

But that was the only time in my life that I ever saw blackness cross his

For 35 years, Hitchcock had made a film a year. But by 1960, the momentum was

slowing down.

Throughout his career, he'd got fine performances out of all his leading

actresses. But one thing he felt he hadn't done was to take an unknown and

her into a star.

He wanted to play Svengali.

We were at... paramount he had called me in for the birds and at that time no

one was cast but he happened to see a commercial with

a young woman all he saw in this commercial was a woman who turned and

from camera he liked the way she walked and she was a blonde after seagull you

feel refreshed exhilarating work slick as a whistle feel better

When we met, we talked about food.

We talked about travel.

And I had traveled extensively by that time. I'd been around the world and that

sort of thing. Oh, hello, Buster.

Hi, sweetheart.

Oh, come say hello to me.

Come on.

So we did a test, a three -day screen test.

It's all in color. Pardon me, Marty. Yeah, would you explain the name Tippy?

What is it? Where does it originate from?

It's a Swedish nickname.

For what?

For Tupsa.

For what?

Tupsa. Would you say that again, please? Tupsa.

Thank you very much. You're welcome. That's an anatomical term.

Meaning?

Tupsa. Little girl.

Oh, really? Yes.

In Swedish.

You are shopping for a wife.

Yeah. Come and do your hair again.

Well, keep it up, keep it up.

I think

this has ruined me forever.

Remind me to tell you a story about donuts and their manufacture, will you?

One person.

He liked to hold court.

He would hold court on the set, and of course everybody would stop everything

they were doing to listen to the stories. Sometimes we would hear the

stories over and over again, but we'd all listen again and laugh because of

way he told them and what a special storyteller he was.

charming.

He could also be very brutal at times.

The birds were real, and Tippi Hedren and the other members of the cast

sometimes sustained real injury.

It was a very hard picture to do. And she did have to go to the hospital after

the first, when she had the day when they threw all the birds at her, when

was in.

But everybody did. You know, there were other people who had the same thing. You

know, Rod Taylor and Jessica Tandy. You know, they all, it was a very hard

picture. And yes, she probably had a harder time because she wasn't an

experienced actress.

Hitchcock had the greatest difficulty in getting a performance out of Tippi

Hedren. He said himself, I was in a state of despair. I was pouring myself

the girl. I taught her every expression, never a wasted one.

He felt the production was slipping away from his control.

By now, he was 64.

Apart from his problems with the actors, he'd taken on the most technically

demanding film of his life.

Outside, he said, all hell's broken loose. The birds are about to attack.

The man's standing at the pump, which is leaking, and he's thrown down his match

after lighting his cigar, and there's an enormous explosion which excites the

birds. They swoop down on the window, they break the window, and they attack

young couple. How do we do it, Al?

Well, of course, I was on the carpet. I mean, I didn't know for sure I had to

take him seriously. You see, because it was presented in a way that you didn't

know whether he was having you on or whether he was serious.

Went on and on.

Off the top of my head, there was no man in the world, nobody in the world could

have ever said, Al, you'd do a shot like that.

It wasn't one shot anyway.

But finally the tension built and he could see that I was getting bothered

he finally said, it's all right, Al, it's only another movie.

They're attacking the men. Well, none of you stay here. Come on out!

Tippi Hedren starred in Hitchcock's next film, Marnie, in 1964.

He'd hoped to cast Grace Kelly, but Prince Rainier had put a stop to her

career.

Without an actress of real stature, Marnie became a rather crude study of

kleptomania and sexual frigidity.

It does have one authentic Hitchcock moment.

Marnie is robbing a safe in her employer's office.

In all suspense, you see, the most important thing

is to give an audience information.

You cannot expect an audience to, how shall we say, get anxieties without

giving them the information to be anxious about. To give you a simple

man is standing there, another man is creeping towards him with a raised

Now the audience can see the victim and can see the attacker.

So now they get anxious and they want to shout, look out.

It's as simple as that.

So therefore, by presenting on the screen the girl at the safe and the

danger of discovery, you show the two things at the same time in a long time.

Not the old -fashioned way as they used to do in the movies, cut from one to the

other, because that is not as potent to an audience. It used to be in the old

days, but not as potent as showing the two images together, the image of the

cleaning woman and the image of the person robbing the safe.

You're sure making time tonight, Rita. What's the big rush? I want to get to

bed. Why is it that the audience are more anxious about the wrongdoer than

they are about the person who might discover?

If you take a scene, a simple scene of a burglar in a woman's bedroom, rifling

at the dressing table for jewelry, and you cut to the woman, the owner, coming

up the stairs, the whole audience saying, hurry up, get out.

They're not in sympathy with her at all. She's a victim.

Marnie's psychotic thieving and sexual coldness have attracted Sean Connery. He

marries her and determines to cure her in his own way.

If you don't mind, I'd like to go to bed.

I've told you the light from the sitting room bothers me.

Well, we certainly can't have anything bothering you, can we?

If you don't want to go to bed, please get out.

But I do want to go to bed, Marnie.

I very much want to go to bed.

Hitch became very, very protective over me

during the filming of Marnie, which became a little bit difficult for me

to handle.

And it was a rather sad kind of time.

There was one story that her daughter tells, which I've been... remember and

certainly wasn't meant to be sadistic in fact everybody laughed about it at the

time they went to dinner at Chasen's and my father had something it was

something to do with a little coffin and in it had a little tiny doll that that

he had had made up to look like Tippy and it was in relation to some joke it

wasn't just a flat thing like this you know and it was it was supposed to be a

very amusing thing it was you know the end of a joke everybody laughed about it

and all of a sudden now her daughter is coming out saying oh he was so sadistic

and oh he did this it really you know i i can't think of any time you know when

he was ever really i think probably the sadistic thing he ever did would when he

would come into my room before i woke up get hold of my lipstick and make a

clown's face on me now that i thought was sadistic apart from that that's

it

Early in his films, Hitch liked to get normal people in difficult situations

watch them squirm. I think he enjoyed that because there was a certain

antisocial or resentful part of him of resenting society or other

people. And then I think, if I were to guess, that it became narrowed down to

this type of woman, this type of lead, and he perhaps knew that he was never

going to...

be in love with the Madeline Carroll type, or they'd be in love with him, and

maybe it just narrowed his anger or his resentment.

He was a bully.

And, well,

I can give you the case of Sylvia Sidney when she was brought across for

sabotage.

Hitch had called her in Mid -Atlantic on the way two or three times, saying,

Welcome to Britain. I can't wait to be working with you.

And apparently when she arrived, he just decided to break down this great big

American film star.

And the result was that a few years later, I was having lunch with

her at the Cock and Bull, I remember here, and she's saying how much she

him, how much he'd bullied her, how much he'd gone out of his way to make her

unhappy and uncomfortable.

So I imagine he did that with other actors as well. I don't know.

In 1947, Anne Todd had worked with Hitchcock.

He seemed as if he was an overgrown schoolboy, never sort of grown up. And

lived in a strange world, I always used to think, of his own, which was... He

had a sort of sex obsession which went on and on in a very peculiar way.

And I think it was because Hitch himself was fat and not very good

looking. And he wanted so much to be like, in a funny way, the

stars he was directing. I mean, Cary Gaunt.

When he was directing, you could tell he was in it.

He so much liked to be in somebody who was very good looking.

rather marvellous.

My dear, I'm sure that Keane and Simi would like to see your jade.

Would they?

I have some such pretty pieces.

Very much indeed.

You look very, very appetising tonight, my dear.

A charming compliment from such a gourmet as yourself, Lord Hawfield.

Tell me, Mrs.

Keane,

I don't amuse you very much, do I?

Oh, no, I've always admired your wit, Lord Hawfield.

Then you may call upon my wit whenever you wish.

Life can be very boring for grass widows.

And what makes you think I'm a grass widow?

Oh, don't let's speak with that.

Golf widows, stock exchange widows, and law court widows, that's the same thing.

The charming Ruby.

Tell me, did your husband earn all that whacking away at jurors?

Lady Hawfield was admiring it, too.

It pleased me so much, because she has such excellent taste in most things.

Hey, Keane.

Fred, your wife is wearying of me.

Pity, pity.

He also was rather naughty, I think, with a lot of the...

Female actresses, because if they were, which most of them seemed to have the

same sort of character, something a bit ladylike, he wanted to sometimes pull it

down in a way and not make them exactly ridiculous, but to laugh. I remember

with Angry Bergman, I think it was notorious, he made her take off some

hair that she had on and put it by the bed.

I don't know if any of you remember having seen the film.

Well, nowadays, of course, I mean, nothing. But in those days, it was quite

thing for a big star to do that. But it was a funny little way of pulling

it down. It gave him a feeling of great domination, I think, because, after all,

he couldn't take part in life, really, the way he wanted to do. But when he was

directing, he was dominating people and living it. He knew nothing about life.

He knew nothing about women's problems.

You know, it's a very popular...

It's a well -known secret about Hitch.

But, you know, the business about the death of Suzanne Plaget in The Birds, he

knew nothing about death, really, although he dealt in it. He really knew

nothing about real death.

Because I said, you know, Susan's death bothers me, Hitch. He said, why? I said,

well, she's got a few pecks on her face. Won't she die of fright?

Who knows, he said.

I mean, that was a typical reaction.

He didn't really know.

And I said, you know, I lived in Windsor with June, and I said a young soldier

committed suicide, blew half his head off.

It took him three weeks to die.

I said, Hitch, you know, death is not that simple.

And he's looking dead ahead of him.

Later, you see, I swear that he pondered this a great deal, and the death scene

in Torn Curtain is a good example.

You know, that was the whole point of the scene.

You know, the woman beats the man over the head with a shovel.

And then they stab him and the knife breaks off and then they shove his head

the gas oven and he still won't die, you see.

That's Hedge, you know, that was Hedge. He really wasn't that morbid. He wasn't

morbid at all.

He's like a mystery writer. He wrote about it but didn't know a thing about

in fact.

The contents of an ordinary kitchen are turned into murderous weapons.

An innocent farmer's wife becomes the accomplice in the murder.

Which am I directing, this camera or that camera?

Take your pick, Gav.

Take my pick.

All right, now come on, fellas, come out of the way for a moment.

Hitchcock returned to Britain in 1971 to make Frenzy, the story of a mad

strangler of blonde women on the loose in London.

Once Hitchcock had achieved his murders behind drawn curtains, all the more

frightening for being stylized and discreet.

In Frenzy, the restraint is gone.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Is your mother back?

She's in Edinburgh at the moment.

Well, give her my best word. I wouldn't be.

There was an aura around him. He was so coddled, you know. I mean, he really

was. I mean, he never...

Creature comforts. I mean, he was shepherded everywhere.

There was a chair for him everywhere, a limousine for him everywhere.

You know, his whole life.

His whole life.

Frenzy was a commercial success, though it had a mixed critical reaction.

Hitchcock was feeling increasingly isolated.

He'd already fallen out years before with one of his key collaborators, the

writer who perhaps more than any other brought character and humour.

into a hitchcock plot he was marvelous to work with absolutely marvelous and uh

when he was working on the script he he loved it and picture making and all of

that all that went with it but uh he didn't like to give people credit uh for

anything uh he um he took most of it himself he felt that he inspired

uh when he made a picture it was his guidance it was his viewpoint it was his

uh

generative force that brought all these people together, and therefore he was

the person who did it.

The energy was running out.

By now, he'd fallen out with his composer, Bernard Herrmann. He'd lost

favorite cameraman and film editor, who died.

But he couldn't stop developing projects.

What else is there for me to do, he said.

In 1976, he made his last film, Family Plot.

The old mastery seemed to have gone for good.

In the same year, he wrote to François Truffaut, Now, as you realise you're a

free person to make whatever you want, I, on the other hand, can only make

what's expected of me, that is, a thriller or a suspense story, and that I

hard to do.

At the moment, I'm completely desperate for a subject.

Hitchcock was painfully conscious of having to live up to his own myth and to

the triumphs of the past.

There's a strange dichotomy there in Hollywood. They make mostly junk in

to make money.

But when they give their prizes, they always give their prizes or try to give

their prizes to something that they feel is significant or makes a statement.

When Hitchcock was not interested in that, his statements were of great

significance, but they were interior statements inside his characters.

In Hollywood, they always said, well, he tells these silly mysteries or suspense

stories.

And he,

being a very commercial man, was marvelous at publicizing

himself and talking to newspaper people and always seeking

out the photo chance, that sort of thing.

So Hollywood, in a way, nominated him as their house

clown, in a way.

It makes me very proud, indeed, to be the recipient.

of the american film institute's lifetime achievement award it is

especially meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid

after all when a man is found guilty of murder and condemned to death

it always makes him feel much better to know it was done by

a jury of his friends and neighbors with the help of inadequate

returns.

It protects your endurance and mine to recite the names of

those thousands of actors, writers, editors, cameramen, musicians,

technicians,

bankers and a variety

of other criminals who have contributed to my life.

I gave permission to mention by name only four people who have given

me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant

collaboration.

The first of the four is a film editor.

The second is a scriptwriter.

The third is the mother of my daughter Pat.

And the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in

a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville.

Working with Hitch in those days was delightful.

Everything was a joke.

He certainly puts all his feelings into his films, I think, don't you?

I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

You see, I've never been quite sure what feelings Hitch had.

I would say that he was the greatest technician.

I've ever met in my life in the film industry.

But whether it was tremendous technique which gave him the magnificence

of his movies or whether it was the heart, I'm not sure. I don't think it

the heart, quite frankly. I think it was just doing a tremendously good job

because he knew he had to do it and he was capable of it, you know?

That's what I think. I don't know.

Or a combination of the two.

I'd like to think so, but I'm still not sure.

So he remained, part of him remained, a commercial showman.

That's right.

Telling small stories. But telling small stories with magnificent touches in

the people and in the occasional situation.

Yes. That was his...

In a way, it was his strength, but it was also, but mainly it was his

He preferred telling an inconsequential yarn,

but bringing to it all the artistry he had.

You remember that agonizing shot in Notorious when you came zooming down and

into my hand?

where you saw the key in a close -up. So that was an extreme long shot close

-up, just the key that we saw now.

Well, you know what?

Cary stole that key after the scene.

Yes, and he kept it. He kept it for about 10 years.

And one day he put it in my hand and he said, I've kept this long enough. Now

it's for you, for good luck.

I have kept it for 20 years. And in this very same hand, There is the key.

He was always sitting in his chair with his big hands, looking up.

The audience will be expecting so -and -so at this time. He would give it to

them. I make films for audiences, he said. So he was always visualising the

on the screen.

You know, finished.

Please keep going to the movies, especially mine, because I need the

my starving wife and child.

Here we have a quiet little motel,

tucked away off the main highway, and as you see,

perfectly harmless looking.

When in fact, it has now become known as the scene of the crime.

This motel also has, as an adjunct, an

old house, which is, if I may say so, a

little more sinister looking, less innocent than the motel itself.

And in this house, The most dire, horrible events took place.

I think we can go inside because the place is up for sale. Although I don't

who's going to buy it now.

In that window on the second floor, the single one in front, that's where the

woman was first seen.

Let's go inside.

You see, even in daylight, this place still looks a bit sinister.

Now, it was at the top of these stairs that the second murder took place.

He came out of the door there and met the victim at the top.

Of course, in a flash, there was the knife.

And in no time, the victim tumbled and fell with a horrible crash. I think the

back broke immediately and hit the floor.

He was...

It's difficult to describe the way that the twisting of the... I

won't dwell upon it.

Come upstairs.

Of course the victim, or should I say victims, hadn't any conception as to the

type of people they would be confronted with in this house, especially the

woman. She was the weirdest and the most... Well, let's go into her bedroom.

Here's the woman's room.

Still beautifully preserved.

And the imprint of her figure on the bed where she used to lay.

I think some of her clothes are still in this wardrobe.

This was the son's room, but we won't go in there because his favorite spot was

the little parlor behind his office in the motel. Let's go down there.

All tidied up.

Big difference.

You should have seen the blood.

The whole place was, well, it's too horrible to describe.

Dreadful. And I'll tell you, there's a very important clue was found here.

Down there.

Well, the murderer, you see, crept in here very slowly. Of course, the shower

was on. There was no sound.

And...