Alfred Hitchcock’s abandoned ‘Titanic’ movie: “The craziest thing I ever heard”
Many great projects have never materialised, leaving us with great ‘what could have beens’ that might’ve changed cinema forever. How about Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon? Or Alfred Hitchcock’s Titanic.
Of course, James Cameron would go on to make the most popular retelling of the ship’s sinking with 1997’s Titanic, an Oscar-winning sensation that grossed over $1 billion, but Hitchcock once planned to make his own version, which I can only imagine would’ve been considerably more tense. He wouldn’t have been the first, though, with movies about the infamous unsinkable ship emerging pretty much as soon as it hit the bottom of the ocean.
Seriously, Hollywood really won’t hesitate to capitalise on disaster, and less than a month after the ship sank in 1912, a silent short film, Saved From the Titanic, which even featured a survivor, Dorothy Gibson, was released. Then there was Atlantic/Atlantik, the first sound film about the ship, and 1943’s Titanic, a German propaganda film which blamed the Brits for the sinking while inserting a German hero into the narrative. It’s bizarre.
Hitchcock’s plan for his own take on the film came in the late 1930s when he transitioned from British cinema to Hollywood, and it was here, at the heart of the film industry, that he was determined to make a movie about the ship.
“I am going to America to make one or two films,” he claimed. “I hope that the first will be based on the disaster of the Titanic.”
While it was a promising idea, Hitchcock quickly ran into enough issues to discard it completely and focus on an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca instead, which proved to be a hit. Imagine if he’d actually made a Titanic film, though – that could’ve been a breakthrough for Hitchcock. The film didn’t get very far, sadly, although a 20-page treatment was written in preparation by none other than An Inspector Calls writer J B Priestley.
How was Hitchcock going to shoot the film without access to the kinds of special effects that made Cameron’s version so visually spectacular? Producer David O Selznick had the idea to buy an old ship and transform it into a set, but Hitchcock wasn’t convinced. He explained in Who The Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovich, that Selznick “wanted to change all the superstructure and tow it round through the canal and sink it off Santa Monica. That was the craziest thing I had ever heard.”
Hitchcock knew it wasn’t going to work, but that wasn’t the only thing stopping production. Over in England, the filmmaker was receiving caution that the film would have a damaging effect on the sea travelling industry, as well as making the country look bad, and even though Hitch insisted his film would be different, it was no use. With worries forming about potential lawsuits on top of this, Hitchcock decided to call it a day. Rebecca was a better option after all.
Hitch’s Titanic could’ve been incredible, but that’s not something we’ll ever get to witness. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine, because the British filmmaker wasn’t built for grand epics and disaster movies, preferring contained suspense instead. Rebecca was Hitchcock’s ticket to Hollywood, and he didn’t need to exploit a fairly recent tragedy and give into the disaster genre to get there.
