Psyhosis

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			Psyhosis People like to call Alfred Hitchcock the ‘King of Horror’. But it was suspense that he used to frighten people, because the psychology of fear was something he had come to understand from his own experience. Hitchcock’s own phobia was fear of mixing with other people – he had no male friends, no girlfriends, and no lovers, but a sense of alarm and the continual threat of danger rarely left him. Despite the fact that Hitchcock spent most of his life in America, where psychoanalytical treatment was considered a normal thing, he never once tried to make use of such specialists. Like the majority of people suffering from psychological deviations, he saw nothing whatsoever strange in his own behaviour. Furthermore, he used the subjects of his films to replace sessions with a psychoanalyst. And the horror he experienced at the very thought of reality was something Hitchcock delighted in passing on to his audiences. “Innocent Lamb” Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899 in Leytonstone, which at the time was part of the county of Essex, but is now within the borders of Greater London. He was the youngest son of William Hitchcock, the owner of a small shop and the possessor of a somewhat dubious sense of humour. Alfred was usually referred to by his father as an ‘innocent lamb’, but this household nickname was no simple figure of speech – as a young boy he had occasion to experience just what it meant to be pronounced guilty for doing something he hadn’t done. What happened was this. On one occasion, when Alfred was about five or six years old, his father sent him with a note to a friend at the local police station. The policeman carefully read the message from Mr. Hitchcock and… took the boy straight into a cell, where he spent the worst ten minutes of his entire life. When at last he set him free, the policeman told Alfred that that was what happened to disobedient boys. Alfred Hitchcock was never to learn what he’d actually done to deserve his albeit short time under arrest. And, so he claimed, his father never said a word about it and he himself thought better of asking – punishments in the Hitchcock family always seemed to be spontaneous affairs and were never explained. The minutes he spent in the cell in terror at the unknown and complete failure to understand what he was being punished for had a very negative effect on Hitchcock’s mental health, but played a very positive part in the development of international cinema. All his life Hitchcock was affected by post-traumatic syndrome. He lived in constant fear of the police, the very sight of whom could send him into hysterics. But the feeling also made him an extremely careful driver and the most honest taxpayer in Hollywood – he was the only one of all his colleagues who paid the fiscal authorities every cent they demanded. But worse than all that, Hitchcock’s phobia at times reached the point of paranoia. He became convinced that he was under total surveillance by the all-powerful secret services. Thus in 1946, when he started work on the spy film Notorious, which was about uranium for an atom bomb, Hitchcock told his friends that the FBI was after him. The victimization of an innocent man became one of Hitchcock’s favourite themes, and throughout his whole career as a film director he continually produced films in which a totally uncomprehending ‘innocent lamb’ is punished for the sins of others. More terrible than terror The incident at the police station not only caused Hitchcock to experience a feral fear of the police, but helped him subsequently formulate one of the basic principles of his work, which he himself called suspense. Hitchcock loved to illustrate this concept by the following example. Imagine that two people are sitting at a table chatting quietly, when a bomb under the table goes off. The viewer is dazed – but only for about fifteen seconds. Hitchcock used the term ‘shock’ to describe this device, but pointed out that the scene could be played out in quite a different way. First show the bomb with a timer set at, say, 13.00; then cut to a clock with the hands showing 12.45; and then to the people quietly chatting. Then cut to the clock again, which is now showing 12.50 – and once again to the unsuspecting speakers. Their pointless conversation now becomes vitally important, and the viewer wants to shout at them to stop their senseless chatter because a bomb is about to explode. And instead of a fifteen second shock at the moment of the explosion, the viewer gets fifteen minutes of suspense. In other words, suspense is a situation in which the expectation of fear is more terrible than the terror itself. This was something that Hitchcock himself first experienced in the ill-fated police cell, and finally recognized at the Jesuit College. The Jesuit priests completed the building of Hitchcock’s attitude to the world, the foundations of which had been laid by the peculiar jokes played by his father. Hitchcock recalled that the monks at his school used thick rubber sticks for the purpose of punishing anything considered a misdeed. Furthermore, they made the administration of punishment into a whole show, the details of which were well known to them, but kept completely secret from the pupils. After lessons, the guilty parties would be taken to the father-superior, who with a stern, even sinister mien would enter the names of those to be punished in a special book together with the form of punishment and the time at which it was to be administered. No one ever knew how many strokes of the rubber cane he would get and when – and sometimes a pupil would be left waiting a whole day before the punishment was meted out. After college, Hitchcock had to experience suspenseful moments fairly frequently. Thus, the shooting of his first film, The Pleasure Garden, was attended by the increasing expectation of trouble. The French director, Fran?ois Truffaut, included a similar story from Hitchcock himself in his book, Hitchcock, which was written on the basis of numerous interviews: “And so at 7.20 on Saturday evening I’m standing on a platform at Munich Station, ready to leave for filming in Italy, when a thought keeps going round in my head: it’s your first film! … According to the timetable, the train is due to leave dead on eight. The clock is showing two minutes to. Suddenly Miles Mender (one of the actors – Truffaut) says in a tragic whisper: “Oh, my God! I’ve left my makeup case in the taxi,” and rushes off. … The minutes tick by, and it’s now 8.10. The train starts to move out slowly. Suddenly, I hear a terrible noise at the entrance to the platform, and can see Miles Mender jumping over the barrier and three railway staff chasing after him up the platform. He’s found his makeup and just managed to jump on to the last carriage. … We’re in a first-class compartment, approaching the Austro-Italian border. Suddenly Ventimiglia (a cameraman – Truff.) says: ‘Whatever you do, don’t even think of declaring a cine-camera to the customs. Otherwise, they’ll make us pay duty on every lens.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The German partners of the company have told us to smuggle the camera in,’ he replies. I ask him where it is. Apparently, it’s under my seat. … All my life I’ve lived in mortal fear of the police, so I can feel the sweat start to pour down my back. Just then, I’m also told that the ten thousand feet of film we’ve got in our baggage had better not be declared either. The customs officers come into our compartment. I’m in a state of suspense. They don’t find the camera, but they do stumble across the film – and since it’s not on the declaration, they remove it. So the next morning, we arrive in Genoa without a single metre of film. We spend a whole day unsuccessfully trying to buy it. On Monday, I decide to send our news reporter to Milan to get some film from Kodak. I myself start doing the accounts, converting lira into marks and marks into pounds, and getting thoroughly confused. The news reporter returns at midday with twenty pounds worth of film. Then we learn that the ten thousand feet of film confiscated at the border have actually been sent to us, and all we’ve got to do is pay the duty. So it turns out that I’ve spent twenty pounds – a largish sum in our modest budget! – needlessly. As it is, we’ve hardly got enough money for an on location shooting. At midday on Tuesday, the steamship Lloyd Prestino – that we need – leaves port on its way to South America. To board it, we have to hire a motor boat. That costs ten pounds. But when I take out my wallet at 10.30 to pay the helmsman, it turns out to be empty. There isn’t a penny left in it! Ten thousand lira has disappeared, as if it never existed. I rush to the hotel, and look under the bed and everywhere else – no sign of it. “My situation is desperate, but the job has to be done. And the enthusiasm that inspired my debut as a film director makes me forget the loss. But when the filming on the liner finished, I’m once more in the grip of desperation. I borrow ten pounds from a cameraman and fifteen from an actor. But even this isn’t enough to cover our expenses, so I write to London with a request for an advance on my money. “The night before returning to Munich I’m in a terrible state of nervous anxiety. The point is that I not only have no intention of telling our star that this is my first picture, I also don’t want her to find out about the pitiable financial state in which our expedition finds itself. So I do something that is not particularly decent. I twist the facts and blame everything on my fianc?e, Alma Reville, for bringing along an extra actress that we don’t need. I tell the actress that if she wants to stay on, she’ll have to borrow $200 from the star. She invents some story and shortly afterwards comes back with the money, which allows me to pay the bills and buy first-class rail tickets. We have to change in Zurich, in Switzerland. The next day we’re due to arrive in Munich, but at the station I’m forced to pay for excess baggage, because the American girls are carrying huge trunks full of clutter. The result is that once again there is practically no money left. … “The train is late. At nine in the evening we’re just in time to see the train we were supposed to be getting on to departing!” “That means spending the night in Zurich. With practically no money. Finally, the train stops. The suspense is such that I almost can’t bear it. Porters come rushing up, but with a barely noticeable sign I send them away – they’re far too costly – and drag the cases myself. Then the edge of one of them bashes into a compartment window and there is a deafening sound of broken glass – I’ve never heard anything like it in my life! An official immediately appears from nowhere: ‘Just step this way, Monsieur!’ I’m taken to an office and told that the broken window will set me back 35 Swiss francs. I pay it, and when I finally arrive in Munich, I’ve got one pfennig in my pocket. That was how my first shoot on location ended.” This story is a ready-made scenario for a gripping drama, which the audience, held by the continuous twists and turns, would undoubtedly watch without taking their eyes off the screen for a moment. It is this ability to see in ordinary situations the means for making a film that is the foundation of Hitchcock’s skill as a director. “I thought about running away…” The aggressiveness and hostility of the world around him was felt by Hitchcock as a child, and he suffered these feelings the whole of his life. His ancestors were Irish Catholics, and looked upon by the English Protestants as second class citizens. And as if his national and religious complex was not enough, Hitchcock was further troubled by his physical deficiencies and excessive suspiciousness. He felt that because he was fat, children didn’t want to play with him, so he was often left out of the games that other children of his age were playing. His only attempt to get involved in the kind of life led by ordinary people proved unsuccessful. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was fifteen years old. Like many other boys, he dreamed of becoming a volunteer for the front. But his excessive obesity (Hitchcock would ‘comfort’ his stresses and fears by eating) meant that he was put in the reserves, where he was taught subversion and continually laughed at because of his build. In the way Hitchcock viewed the world around him, he always remained a frightened child, who would do anything to avoid clashes with reality. So the best way out of this situation for him was to live in a world of dreams and illusions – the cinema. When in 1920 the American cinema company, Famous Players – Lasky (subsequently to be Paramount Studios) advertised in a newspaper for technical staff, Hitchcock was one of the first to respond. His desire to work in the cinema was affected neither by his shyness nor his unsociability. Shooting a film for Hitchcock became the equivalent of a session with his psychoanalyst. He would work and rework footage, trying again and again to relive the moments of shock so as to finally rid himself of unpleasant memories. But this practice didn’t really work, and he would often get stuck in the mire of his own sufferings, and for decades weave into the fabric of his films the threads of the motifs that run through them. One of these was the absurd, aggressive and dangerous world outside. Here, the main character may quite unexpectedly (for himself) turn out to be a spy who is being hunted by the secret services, while the owner of a hotel proves to be a raving psycho with a split-personality, and a smiling seller of fancy goods turns out to be a maniac who goes round strangling women. But the most significant in this sense is perhaps the film, The Birds, in which the love of a young rich girl for a novice lawyer is played out against the background of unprovoked attacks on people by seemingly inoffensive birds. The tension and unease of the whole film is only increased by Hitchcock’s use of a soundtrack consisting of the exaggerated rustle of bird wings. Just how convincing Hitchcock was, can be seen by the fact that when the picture first came out, many of those watching it started to look worriedly at birds, whenever they heard a similar sound. But the best-known illustration of unmotivated aggression is without doubt the scene from the film North by Northwest, where the main character finds himself in a cornfield under sudden attack from an aircraft. In a bid to protect himself from the chance occurrences of an unpredictable and hostile word, Hitchcock made a detailed study of it. On a regular shoot, he would pester the actors with questions about their characters: what birthday presents did the main character get as a child; what was the colour of his wife’s hair – a wife that never appeared in the film; what did his old aunt like to have with her tea. All his life he was afraid of travelling – and basically of any kind of change, yet he collected bus, train and steamship timetables, knew by heart the names and locations of towns and their maps, and kept lists of the names of tailors and restaurant menus. In 1940, he was invited by the producer David O. Selznick (who also produced the film Gone with the Wind) to America. During his first interview, he amazed reporters with his knowledge of New York, and when asked when it was that he’d managed to go there, astonished them even more by saying in a self-satisfied tone of voice that he’d never been there in his life. At Famous Players – Lasky, Hitchcock found not only his vocation in life, but the woman who would later be his wife – Alma Reville, who worked at the time in montage. If submersing himself in the world of the cinema made it possible for Hitchcock to avoid facing the outside world and in this way gave order to his life, then the problems that inevitably arose in the process of film making were entirely sorted out by Alma. The Hitchcocks did not fit the usual Hollywood pattern with the director’s wife as his muse. Hitchcock was inspired by his own complexes and fears, while Alma had a more prosaic role. From bitter experience, he subconsciously expected to be stabbed in the back – so Alma covered his rear. When she was there, he felt protected by a brick wall, but when she wasn’t, he felt like a helpless child. It is enough to recall once again the incidents involved in shooting The Pleasure Garden. At the time, Alma couldn’t go with Hitchcock, and while she was off the set, the whole business was one long nightmare for him. His infantilism reached such a stage that he couldn’t part with his wife for any length of time: without an intermediary between himself and the world outside, he felt distinctly uncomfortable. When Alma once spent a long time with her friend, the actress Ann Baxter, Hitchcock developed such a hatred of Baxter that he never again invited her to take part in a film. But everything changed when Alma fell ill. In 1958 she had an operation for cancer, and in 1971 and 1975 she suffered two strokes. But despite the help of the best doctors and all the care her husband could give, Alma remained paralysed. The stone wall crumbled and Alfred Hitchcock was left to face the aggressive and absurd world around him. He tried to build a new wall through the excessive consumption of alcohol and replace Alma with the ‘demon drink’. But as the months went by, his drinking became increasingly worse and increasingly desperate. Even heart disease and the insertion of a pacemaker weren’t enough to stop him. When he was drunk, he would open his shirt and show everyone the four-cornered object that had been fitted into his ribcage: “Good for ten years,” he would say. His jubilee, which was held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, turned out – for the organizers – to be a real Hitchcockian nightmare with plenty of suspense and a predictable ending. Since the affair was planned to be a live broadcast, they were naturally afraid of him getting drunk and tried to hide all the alcohol. But they hadn’t tried carefully enough, because by the time the ceremony was due to begin, Hitchcock was well plastered. And only thanks to the skill of the cameramen did this ‘thriller’ appear relatively decent on screen. A Peeping Tom In one of Hitchcock’s films, Rear Window, the main character has a broken leg and is forced to sit at home and watch his neighbours through an open window. And though James Stewart’s seclusion and ‘peeping’ are forced upon him by the plot line of the film, this was an attitude in life that Hitchcock took to voluntarily: people appeared to him to be dangerous, but interesting. The desire to peep at and spy on others came to him as a small child. On Sundays, when the whole family went to church, he would try to slip off and hide behind the organ. From this safe hiding place, he could carefully watch the congregation and see who appeared to be reverential, who was whispering, who was blatantly bored, and who was flirting. Playing the part of a detached observer was his favourite role in life: in the Jesuit College, on the film set, at home, and when invited out. At the college, Hitchcock never took part in children’s games – somehow he’d made the a priori decision that no one wanted to spend time with a fat boy, and just to be sure, he put on a superior air to isolate himself from the others. Hugh Grey, an old Jesuit father, recalled during the 1960s his former fellow-pupil as an arrogant and self-important know-it-all who was always top of the class – and disliked by everyone. A typical scene would be the little Alfred leaning against the trunk of a tree and watching with disdain as his contemporaries rushed around a field kicking a ball without a care in the world. Gradually this love of watching acquired definite sadistic characteristics. Once he had become a famous director, he not only followed the flow of life, while standing on the bank, as it were, but frequently thought up ‘critical’ situations that the people around him should find a way out of. And he derived great pleasure from watching the reactions of those he was ‘experimenting’ on. Gags, as the Americans called crude jokes played on people, were his favourite form of entertainment. But Hitchcock’s experiments on his acquaintances were far from being limited to just the film set. He liked them so much that he erased any boundary between reality and the fictional world of the cinema, between joking and downright ridicule. In one of his films an actor and an actress had to play a couple who were forced to spend almost a day handcuffed together, so on the film set Hitchcock decided to see what would happen if they had to do this in real life. He handcuffed them together – supposedly for the film, and then told them that he’d lost the key. Later, he told them that he’d just wanted to find out how two people of different sexes would spend their time, if they were fettered to the same chain. At some point, for instance, they would have to go to the toilet, so how would they solve that problem? On another occasion, he sent two tonnes of coal to a female acquaintance, who lived in a fashionable flat with central heating. And on another, he sent four hundred smoked herring to a woman he knew who felt ill at the very mention of the word fish. Then he knew that some of his staff were living cramped in a tiny flat, so he sent them a nightmarish present of monstrously large cupboards and beds. He sent the actor, Sir Gerald Du Maurier (the husband of the writer, Daphne Du Maurier, from whose books Hitchcock shot the films, Rebecca and The Birds) an invitation to a fancy-dress ball, but when he turned up dressed as a Turkish sultan, he found that all the other guests were wearing dinner jackets. A little practical joke he enjoyed playing on his guests – particularly, if they were well-mannered aristocrats – was to put special cushions on his sofas that let out a horribly indecent sound, whenever anyone sat on them. Subsequently recalling the ‘gag’, he said: “Imagine these haughty aristocrats coming to see you. You bow and scrape before them, and then show them to the sofa – and the moment they sit down, the cushions make a loud, filthy sound. It was a joke I played fairly often – because I enjoyed watching their faces.” Gentlemen prefer blondes? Hitchcock’s relationships with blondes are a theme worthy of separate study by psychologists and psychiatrists. Up to the age of twenty seven – while he was still unmarried – Hitchcock had not even tried to have a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. The complexes he suffered from his own physical shortcomings had prevented him from making the acquaintance of girls, and his Catholic upbringing stopped him from going with prostitutes. He married Alma Reville for two reasons: first, she showed an interest in him and didn’t push him away; and secondly, because she became an intermediary between him and the outside world. But the tiny, red-haired, energetic Alma was the complete opposite of Hitchcock’s ideal woman. His preference was for full-breasted, sexually languorous blondes. When Alma realized this, she dyed her hair blond, but this changed nothing in their relationship. The union between Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock was one of mutual understanding between two professionals, of tenderness and respect, but not of love and passion. Hitchcock loved blondes and hated them simultaneously. So it’s not surprising that all his leading ladies were well-matched with precisely this kind of fair-haired appeal: Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles. But in all of them there lurked a danger and they represented enormous temptation. The heroines they played were either the reason for the destruction of the men who took the bait of their charms, or the source of much trouble. They deceived their males by involving them in grubby intrigues and, playing on their fears (Vertigo), seduced them, and then put them in mortal danger (North by Northwest) or robbed them (Marnie). Throughout the whole of Hitchcock’s filmography, the positive blonde female characters can scarcely be counted on the fingers of one hand. Maybe this is because subconsciously blondes scared him, so he took it out on them – at least in his films. They fall from bell-towers (Vertigo); they are murdered in the shower by maniacs (Psycho); people try to kill them in various different ways (North by Northwest); and they get strangled with ties (Frenzy). In real life, Hitchcock was not exactly known for his political correctness, and frequently made comments that were not very flattering about his actresses behind their backs. The only one to avoid this treatment was Grace Kelly. Kim Novak, who played the leading role in Vertigo, came in for a lot of verbal abuse. Even many years after the shooting of the film, Hitchcock could not speak about her without fury and disgust, which incidentally revealed his own suppressed lust: “She was utterly vulgar with her full, pouting lips, her heavy thighs and her huge breasts covered with nothing but a sweater without the slightest hint of a bra!” Towards Tippi Hedren he was even crueller, because it was not her he tried to get his own back on, but her little daughter. What happened was that twice (in The Birds and Marnie) Tippi Hedren had replaced Grace Kelly, who had married Prince Renier of Monaco and ceased to star in films. Hitchcock saw a resemblance between the two actresses and hoped that in time Hedren could become a second Grace Kelly. But Hedren had no intention of becoming anyone but herself. Once, after a prolonged row between Hitchcock and Hedren, he gave Hedren’s five-year old daughter, Melanie (later to be the actress, Melanie Griffith) a small pine coffin in which lay a doll with the face of her mother. Once after work, Hitchcock was sitting with a script writer and talking about the actress Ingrid Bergman, who had played a role in one of his films and then gone to Europe with the Italian director, Roberto Rosselini. After his third glass, Hitchcock began shouting almost hysterically: “She was in love with me for thirty years, all her life she was madly in love with me… She fell on my bed crying and sobbing…” The person Hitchcock was talking to knew that this was nothing but fantasy, but he was shocked at his excited state. Then Hitchcock picked up a piece of paper and began sketching his own profile, giving himself a monstrously large paunch – and seemingly delighting in his own ugliness. Then suddenly coming to his senses, Hitchcock threw away his drawings and flung himself out of the room. He had always remained faithful to his wife – and to his own fantasies. by YULIYA ZORINA CURRICULUM VITAE Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899. After attending the St. Ignatius Catholic College, he went to an engineering and navigational school where he studied mechanics, acoustics and navigation. In 1915, he went to work for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company, while at the same time studying painting at London University. Soon afterwards, he was given the job as an artist in the company’s advertising department. At the age of sixteen, he got interested in cinematic photography and started to read professional magazines on the cinema. In 1920, Hitchcock managed to secure a job as a title designer for the London branch of the Hollywood company, Famous Players – Lasky (subsequently to be Paramount Studios). He was soon put in charge of the titles department, and in 1923 began shooting his first film – Number 13, which was never finished due to the closure of the studio. Hitchcock then went to work for the producer, Michael Balcon, one of the founders of the British cinema. During his time with Balcon, Hitchcock worked as a scriptwriter, a title designer and an assistant director. In 1925, he finally managed to shoot a full-length film, which was a joint Anglo-German production, The Pleasure Garden. In 1926, he shot his first thriller – The Lodger, and from that time on the genre became Hitchcock’s favourite. In 1940, at the invitation of David O. Selznick (who produced Gone with the Wind), Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. His first American film was an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which was immediately nominated for an Oscar (but the award was actually given to Selznick as the producer). In 1948, Hitchcock shot the film, Rope, which was his first film in colour, the first film he produced independently, the first film featuring his favourite actor, James Stewart, and the first film in which Hitchcock tried technical experimentation with the shooting. In 1955, Hitchcock was given American citizenship, and in the same year he began work on his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His last film, Family Plot, was released in 1976. Shortly afterwards, he began drinking heavily and became seriously troubled with his health – he got very fat, suffered with arthritis, and in 1974 was fitted with a cardiac pacemaker. In March, 1979 he was awarded an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award and in December of the same year he received an OBE and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He died on April 29, 1980 of heart failure at his home in Bel Air. His last words were: “I feel that the light is going out. Now at last I can rest and get a good sleep…” Hitchcock’s body was cremated and his ashes cast to the winds. Quite unexpectedly, a hero might turn out to be a spy, and a smiling seller of fancy goods – a maniac Playing the part of a detached observer was his favourite role in life: in the Jesuit College, on the film set, and at home “Hitchcock: The Final Cut” The combination of the names ‘Alfred’ and ‘Hitchcock’ have long become a brand that is famous throughout the world. In 2001, American computer games designers made use of the famous film director’s name when they released a game called Hitchcock: The Final Cut – a clever search consisting of mysteries, the clues for which are hidden in the master’s films. The point of the game is to solve a series of murders that have taken place on the set of a detective film – all of them committed by an evil genius in the same way as in Hitchcock’s films. Among the numerous puzzles, there is a specific mystery for cigar lovers. To open a drawer in the library that contains a video cassette essential for solving the murders, the player has to experiment with a good dozen cigars, which include Hoyo de Monterrey, Partagas, Romeo y Julieta and Cohiba. Of all the cigars presented, one has to be picked and transferred from the humidor to the draw. The largest cigar, marked as a Churchill, is the needed clue for solving the murder – because a Churchill was Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite cigar format. HITCHCOCK FILMS THAT ARE WORTH WATCHING 1. North by Northwest (1959). The mould for all subsequent James Bond films. 2. The Birds (1963). After watching this film, you start to get scared just looking at sparrows. 3. Psycho (1960). The most famous thriller; the most perfect on-screen murder. 4. Shadow of a Doubt (1943). You don’t trust strangers? Take a look first at your relatives… 5. Rebecca (1940). Sometimes THEY do return. CURIOUS FACTS FROM THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC LIFE OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK Curious facts from the cinematographic life of Alfred Hitchcock 1. Hitchcock makes an obligatory appearance in every one of his films in a cameo role. Either he’s reading a paper in an editorial office, or walking up a hotel corridor with his favourite pug dogs, or taking out the rubbish or calling from a telephone box. 2. Hitchcock was nominated for an Oscar five times for the films Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho. But he never won the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award. 3. Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘dream team’ looked approximately like this: Co-producer and assistant director – Alma Reville; Actors – Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren, Cary Grant, James Stewart; Cameraman – Robert Berks; Composer – Bernard Herrmann. 4. Alfred Hitchcock was known for his scornful attitude towards actors, about whom he said: “Actors are cattle”, “How can you respect a person who lives by putting on makeup?” Or “When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’ If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?’ I say, ‘Your salary.’” 5. The film Psycho was specially shot in black and white. “I thought,” said Hitchcock later, “that the blood would look too unnatural in colour. Particularly since for most people it is associated with black and white photographs in the newspaper columns devoted to crime.” After the film came out, Hitchcock was phoned by angry parents claiming that their daughters were now afraid to take a shower. Hitchcock’s reply was sarcastic: “So send them to the cleaners.”