A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.Life’s not always easy, especially right now! Sometimes, just stepping back and looking at the big picture can really help. Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. If only he’d been able to make it, Kaleidoscope might have been the Hitchcock-iest Hitchcock film of all. But, throughout a career spanning five decades, he had always catalogued humanity’s most violent and misogynistic impulses, and played with bold new cinematic approaches. They saw him, presumably, as the self-parodying, avuncular host of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series and its spin-off literary anthologies and records. Maybe so, but if Wasserman and MCA/Universal’s other executives wanted to protect the Hitchcock brand, they clearly didn’t understand it. “You have to realise that he was a brand,” says Law, “with TV syndication rights, a back catalogue of valuable films, books, magazines and a persona known around the world.” John William Law, who discusses Kaleidoscope in his new book, The Lost Hitchcocks, believes that Wasserman wasn’t just worried about the film’s effects on Universal’s reputation, but on the industry which had grown around Hitchcock himself. But it was all in vain. “In no time at all they rejected the script and told Hitchcock they couldn’t allow him to film it,” said Fast. He was “further in the development of this project than any other unrealised production,” writes Dan Auiler in his book, Hitchcock Lost. Hitchcock went into a studio meeting armed with photos, footage and a detailed script that included 450 specific camera positions. These Italian directors are a century ahead of me in terms of technique! What have I been doing all this time?”Īlas, executives at MCA/Universal didn’t share his enthusiasm. “My God, Howard,” Hitchcock said to Fast. He hired two further writers, Hugh Wheeler and Howard Fast, to polish his screenplay, the latter of whom would recall his revitalised sense of purpose in Patrick McGilligan’s biography, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. He was going to experiment with an unknown cast, handheld cameras, natural light and location shooting – anything to prove that he wasn’t “tired” or “distracted”. Something had to be done.īut this wasn’t to be a typical Hitchcock production. “There is a distracted air about the film,” wrote Richard Schickel in Life magazine, “as if the master were not really paying attention to what he was doing.” Schickel went on to complain that the “mechanical” Torn Curtain was the work of a “tired” Hitchcock repeating “past triumphs”. Torn Curtain, Hitchcock’s 50th film, had gone down especially badly when it came out in 1966. On the other hand, his last two releases, Marnie and Torn Curtain, had both been disappointments. He had just been given an honorary Oscar, the Irving G Thalberg award, and Francois Truffaut’s book of interviews with him had just been published, so his place in the pantheon of all-time great directors was secure. Hitchcock had hoped that the film would go into production in 1967. Kaleidoscope was deemed so transgressive that not even the man behind Psycho was allowed to make it. If he had succeeded, we might currently be celebrating the 50th anniversary of a boundary-pushing, taboo-shattering masterpiece. Determined to catch up with Europe’s most innovative directors, Hitchcock wanted to apply their radical methods to one of his own typically dark narratives. But Hitchcock had an even more shocking film planned just a few years later. In a recent documentary about that one scene, 78/52, Peter Bogdanovich remembers the “sustained shriek” that filled the cinema when Psycho premiered in New York. For all of his phenomenal achievements, Alfred Hitchcock is probably best known for Psycho, and in particular the scene in which – spoiler alert – a man dressed in his dead mother’s clothes stabs a naked woman in a motel shower.
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