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Dial M for Murder (1954)
What was your main reason for making Dial M for Murder?
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I was running for cover. When your batteries run dry, when you are out creatively, and you have to go on, that's what I call running for cover. Take a comparatively successful play that requires no great creative effort on your part and make it. Keep your hand in, that's all. When you're in this business, don't make anything unless it looks like it's going to promise something. If you have to make a film--as I was under contract to Warners at the time--play safe. Go get a play and make an average movie--photographs of people talking. It's ordinary craftsmanship. But there is another interesting facet about the photographed stage play. Some people make the mistake, I think, of trying to open the play up for the screen. That's a big mistake. I think the whole conception of a play is confinement within the proscenium--and that's what the author uses dramatically. Now you are undoing a newly-knitted sweater. Pull it apart and you have nothing. In Dial M, I made sure that I would go outside as little as possible. I had a real tile floor laid down, the crack under the door, the shadow of the feet, all part of the stage play and I made sure I didn't lose that. Otherwise, if you go outside, what do you end up with? A taxi arrives outside, the door opens, and they get out and go in.
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| Rear Window (1954) |
The critic on The Observer called this a horrible film because a man was looking out a window at other people. I thought that was a crappy remark. Everyone does it, it's a known fact, and provided it is not made too vulgar, it is just curiosity. People don't care who you are, they can't resist looking. |
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| Isn't there something sympathetic about the murderer in his confrontation scene with Stewart?
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Well, the poor man. It's the climax of peeping tomism, isn't it? "Why did you do it?" he says. "If you hadn't been a peeping tom, I would have gotten away with it." Stewart can't answer. What can he say? He's caught. Caught with his plaster down.
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| Kelly is the dominant partner in the relationship, isn't she?
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Yes, rather. She's a typical, active New Yorker. There are many of those women in New York, more like men, some of them.
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| To Catch a Thief (1955) |
Kelly is an American in the film, but she wasn't frigid like the typical American woman who is a tease--dresses for sex and doesn't give it. A man puts his hand on her and she runs screaming for mother immediately. The English women are the opposite of that. They are the best. They look like nothing--they look like school mistresses. Kelly is the English woman in that film. Outwardly, cold as ice, but, boy, underneath! And that was epitomized by the kiss in the corridor. Of course, the fireworks scene is pure orgasm. Just as the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest is a sexual symbol.
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| Wouldn't Kelly prefer Grant were really guilty of the robberies?
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Oh, of course, Let's put a mild word to it--it's more piquant that way, more in the nature of her fetish.
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| [After listing some of the television shows directed by Hitchcock, Bogdanovich notes that the introductions to the shows were written by James Allardice, prompting the following comment.]
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When he came to see me and asked what kind of introductions did I want him to write for me, I said, "Well, I won't tell you, but I'll run a film that should give you an idea of the kind of thing I want." So I ran The Trouble With Harry for him.
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| The Trouble With Harry (1956) |
I think The Trouble With Harry needed special handling. It wouldn't have failed commercially if the people in the distribution organization had known what to do with the picture; but it got into the assembly line and that was that. It was shot in autumn for the contrapunctal use of beauty against the sordidness and muddiness of death. Harry is very personal to me because it involves my own sense of humor about the macabre. It has in it my favorite line of all the pictures I ever made: when Teddy Gwenn is pulling the body by the legs like a wheelbarrow, and the spinster comes up and says, "What seems to be the trouble, Captain?'"
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The Trouble With Harry. 1955 |
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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Of all your pictures, why did you choose to remake The Man Who Knew Too Much?
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I felt that for an American audience, it contained sentimental elements that would be more interesting than some of the others. The second Man Who Knew Too Much was more carefully worked out than the first one. The first one was, shall we say, a spontaneous creation, without examination.
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| Doris Day, like many of your characters, complains about a lack of excitement in her life, and then is thrown into a terrible dilemma. Is this your comment on the virtues of the simple life? |
I think there's a lot to be said for that. Let's look at me psychologically. I don't feel any of the things that my characters feel, I have no such desires. My God, I've been happily married to the same woman for thirty-six years. I have no identification with my characters. If I did, I couldn't picture them as objectively as I do.
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| The Wrong Man (1957) |
I enjoyed making this film because, after all, this is my greatest fear--fear of the police. And I had all of that going for me. I've often thought of a scene of a man being taken to jail in England in what they used to call the Black Maria, and able to see out the grill window at the back all the things people were doing, going to restaurants, going home, lining up to go into a theatre. And this man is on the way to jail for probably ten, fifteen years, getting a kind of last glimpse of every-day life. In truth, perhaps The Wrong Man should have been done as a documentary, without any cinematic consciousness, by a newsreel cameraman with a camera in one position all the time. I felt the front part of the picture very much, and I liked the climax when the right man is discovered, while the wrong man is praying to the picture on the wall. I liked the ironic coincidence. I was disturbed by the fact that, due to the documentary line, we had to follow the wife's story, and his story kind of collapsed.
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