The alternate ending the studio forced Alfred Hitchcock to shoot: “They say it’s their money”
Only the most successful, acclaimed, and award-laden directors in Hollywood are allowed to work with complete creative freedom and make their latest movie however they want without interference, but not always. Alfred Hitchcock was one of his era’s marquee auteurs, and he still had to answer to the studio.
These days, with the industry more business and financially motivated than ever, the list of filmmakers afforded uninhibited autonomy is thin. There’s Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, maybe Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve, probably Ryan Coogler after Sinners, and not many more.
Despite his track record of helming intense, atmospheric, acclaimed, and immensely profitable pictures that attained instant classic status, the ‘Master of Suspense’ didn’t always get his own way. Hitchcock was approaching the end of his career when he ran into studio trouble, too, which makes it stranger that the brains behind Rear Window, Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, The Birds, and many more found himself overruled on Topaz.
The 1969 espionage thriller was supposed to end with a brawl between Frederick Stafford’s André Devereaux and Michel Piccoli’s Jacques Granville in a stadium. However, when a rough cut of Topaz was screened for test audiences, they hated it, forcing Hitchcock back to the drawing board after a gentle nudge from his paymasters.
“It was a matter of, shall we say, disagreement with the front office,” he shared in a 1973 interview when asked why an alternate ending was shot. “They always have the last word because they say it’s their money. But I have complete artistic control over everything. I’m very familiar with the top men.”
Hitchcock may have claimed he had complete control over everything captured on camera, and he usually did, but that doesn’t obscure the fact that the only reason he filmed another conclusion for Topaz was because the people footing the bill for the production had told him to do it when the first one fell flat with viewers.
In fact, it ended up with two. Hitchcock went back to the drawing board and shot a new conclusion that featured Granville escaping to the Soviet Union, which was his preferred finale and was briefly seen on the big screen in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, those pesky test audiences in America said it was too confusing, leaving the director to hope that the third time marked the charm.
In the theatrical edition released in the United States, Granville shoots himself dead after his treachery is exposed, which happens offscreen, accompanied by a sound effect, because Hitchcock hadn’t actually shot any footage of the character’s demise. Not only that, but 20 minutes of footage were removed before Topaz made it to theatres, leaving its ending as one of the legendary director’s biggest creative compromises.
