The two actors Alfred Hitchcock hated working with: “Obscure and completely miscast”
As blatantly obvious as it sounds, casting is pivotal to making a great movie. A director can be working from the greatest screenplay in the world and craft a visual masterpiece, but a bad performance or two can sink the whole thing. Alfred Hitchcock was usually on the money when it came to hiring his leading actors, but even the maestro was capable of the odd mistake or two.
Think of any of the countless masterpieces helmed by the ‘Master of Suspense’, and there’s guaranteed to be a top-quality performance or iconic moment associated with it. Janet Leigh in Psycho, James Stewart in Rear Window, Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, and Tippi Hedren in The Birds are just some of the examples that immediately spring to mind.
Of course, it’s not an exact science, no matter who’s calling the shots. Hitchcock had his thoughts about the function of actors, for better or worse, and he typically hired the ones he believed were best suited to his approach as a filmmaker. Sure, he made some enemies along the way and butted heads with several of his performers, but the results speak for themselves.
Even though he was already one of Hollywood’s most impressive young stars with two Academy Award nominations to his name who’d worked with heavyweight auteurs like Howard Hawks, William Wyler, and George Stevens, with the benefit of hindsight, Hitchcock didn’t think Montgomery Clift was well-known enough to shoulder the burden of leading his 1953 noir about a priest accused of murder.
“There were two things wrong with I Confess,” he told Peter Bogdanovich. “I didn’t enjoy working with Clift because he was too obscure, and Anne Baxter was completely miscast.” The latter played the female lead, and the only reason she ended up in the film was because Hitchcock had a typically unsavoury reaction to his first choice when she turned up in Canada ahead of production.
“I imported a girl from Sweden, Anita Bjork, who played the lead in Miss Julie. I wanted an unknown,” he explained. “When you go to Quebec, and a film star pops up, it’s ridiculous. But Bjork arrived with an illegitimate child and a lover. And the thing came out, and Warners said, ‘We can’t use her’. We had to ship her back. By this time, I was a week away from Quebec. I got messages that we should take Baxter; they didn’t have anybody else.”
The studio had informed Hitchcock that it didn’t want to risk a scandal by using an actor who’d had a child born outside of marriage, and without much time to find a replacement, Baxter was brought in out of necessity. Clearly, he wasn’t a fan of either her or Clift, and he never worked with either of them again.
