The movie Alfred Hitchcock admitted he phoned in: “That was coasting, playing it safe”
In the annals of Hollywood history, few directors have ever been as disarmingly honest about their films as the great Alfred Hitchcock.
The ‘Master of Suspense’ was one of the most technically proficient directors to ever work in the movie business, and he delivered more classic pictures in his career than almost anyone else. Fascinatingly, though, he rarely looked at his work as ‘art.’ He wanted his movies to be box office hits, so if he ever found himself in a position where he’d experienced a flop, he’d have no qualms about setting his sights on the most commercial project he could find for his next outing.
Some cinephiles mightn’t like hearing this about a director as celebrated as Hitchcock. The idea of him being so craven about his motives in making a film sounds like cinematic blasphemy, after all. However, when the man himself gave an interview in 1963 about his 1954 thriller Dial M for Murder, he explained exactly why he agreed to turn the successful stage play into a motion picture.
“When you’re in this business, don’t make anything unless it looks like it’s going to promise something,” he mused. “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.”
It’s hard to imagine any of today’s auteurs being so frank about the origin of one of their films, but Hitchcock didn’t see any issue with commercial success being his main motivator in the case of Dial M for Murder. He even confessed in his seminal series of interviews with Francois Truffaut that, before signing up for the film, he’d been working on another project for Warner entitled The Bramble Bush, about a man who steals the passport of a murder suspect.
When he realised that he was barking up the wrong tree with that film because it “wasn’t any good”, he simply laid his hands on the first surefire thing that came his way. “That was coasting, playing it safe,” he admitted.
For Hitchcock, applying his talents to a piece of material like Dial M for Murder was his way of keeping his career ticking over, even when he wasn’t feeling as creatively supercharged as usual. He was contractually obligated by Warner to make a film, of course, but he also wouldn’t have wanted to go a year without making something.
You see, Hitchcock was always a director known for his prolific output, and he would probably argue that when you’re making at least one film almost every year, they’re not all going to be close to your heart. “I was running for cover,” he mused in ‘63. “When your batteries run dry, when you are out creatively, and you have to go on, that’s what I call running for cover.”
At the core of the matter, despite Hitchcock being remembered as an auteur with a distinct vision and personal style, he also made plenty of films that required him to operate as a safe pair of hands. You could say he was Quentin Tarantino and Ron Howard rolled into one; a director capable of turning passion projects into indelible classics that feel like pure, uncut Hitchcock, but also a helmer equally adept at being a craftsman who could elevate humdrum material.
This is why Dial M for Murder, a movie Hitchcock dismissed as one of his paycheque gigs, was rubber-stamped in 2008 by the American Film Institute as the ninth greatest mystery film of all time. The man didn’t make bad pictures, even when he was phoning them in.
