How one word from Alfred Hitchcock sparked a 40-year mystery: “I hadn’t a clue what he meant”
When you think about all the enigmatic greats in history, across all disciplines, it’s not hard to make a case for Alfred Hitchcock being one of the leading figures.
After all, if for nothing else, he just had one of those faces. The kind that held a wealth of secrets that no one will ever know, stored away and taken to the grave. All the more reason to claim his rightful place as the master of suspension, with those moments holding just as much intensity as we watched and waited with bated breath, wondering what’s going to happen next.
Most people who had the pleasure of coming face-to-face with the mysterious filmmaker often described him in the same way. He’d arrive adorned in his signature attire, usually a suit and tie, with an expression so unreadable that it often gave his words a wistful double entendre. It says a lot that even the great critic Roger Ebert struggled to get a read on him, once setting the scene during an interview like one of the great director’s legendary scenes.
“Alfred Hitchcock waited in a deep chair by the window, like a judge in chambers preparing for a last word with a strangler…” wrote Ebert, and in the same interview, the director said he would have been a criminal lawyer in a past life even though he always had an intense “dread of the law”. Many of Hitchcock’s movies were misinterpreted, according to the director, taken in ways he hadn’t intended while making them.
At least this was the case with Psycho, which he once said he found hilarious in premise, and couldn’t understand why people took it so seriously. He’d made it with the intentions of unsettling people, as he always did, but in his mind, it gravitated more towards comedy than thriller. But these interpretations and ambiguities are precisely what made him one of the most reputable filmmakers – and one that will always beam with a charm of mystery, no matter the conversation.
And it’s because his words always held weight, even when they seemed complex or contradictory to how he appeared on the outside. For instance, writing for The Guardian, Christopher Frayling once recalled a brief encounter with the director and how one word stumped him for the best part of four decades, until one day, he accidentally stumbled upon the meaning behind his words.
Frayling had met Hitchcock when he’d given a Q&A at Cambridge University in 1966. After his talk, clad in his signature getup – “plain dark-blue suit, crisp white shirt, dark silk tie” with The Times poking out of his pocket – he’d uttered one word that made little to no sense at the time. Frayling, for whatever reason, probably nerves, had hummed the theme tune to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, to which Hitchcock had replied, “Sunrise”.
“I hadn’t a clue what he meant,” Frayling wrote, more startled by the fact that he’d gotten an interaction of any calibre than the meaning behind his strange one-liner. 40 years later, however, Frayling had been gifted a copy of FW Murnau’s Sunrise, when he finally realised that it contained the exact same score used by Hitchcock later in his TV show.
You can read as many interviews with Hitchcock as you’d like, but somehow that one little snippet is all you’ll ever need to know about who he was as a person. He could have dismissed Frayling as another strange fan who didn’t know how to act in his presence – after all, that was what he was, by his own admission. But he’d given a little unexpected sliver of information, without even knowing if it would even be received in the way he intended. Much like many of his films.
