The classic movie Alfred Hitchcock only made for the money: “Keep your hand in, that’s all”
Some auteurs seem so unassailably masterful that it’s hard to imagine they ever struggle with such human sensations as doubt, exhaustion, and lack of inspiration. Even though it sometimes took Stanley Kubrick decades of fussing to get a movie over the line finally and Terrence Malick famously spends years in the editing room, we often think of these directors as having complete clarity and control from start to finish. Movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Days of Heaven seem to arrive perfectly formed, as if the filmmakers created them flawlessly, minute by minute, without a shred of uncertainty along the way.
Of course, no matter how inflated the discourse gets about geniuses and auteurs, even the most revered artists suffer from the human condition. This is especially true of those who face pressure from producers and studios. Alfred Hitchcock was well-versed in this area. He often wanted to make his movies darker and more sexually explicit than his financiers were comfortable with and had to find a middle ground.
When you read interviews with Hitchcock, it’s striking just how critical he was of his own work. This ‘Master of Suspense’ was his own harshest critic, and he never shied away from pointing out where he went wrong. Often, his criticisms were directed at his collaborators, be they miscast actors or prying producers.
In 1954, he released Dial M for Murder, a spectacularly glamorous thriller based on a hit stage play in which Ray Milland plays a retired tennis player trying to murder his adulterous wife (Grace Kelly). It lacks some of the breathtaking suspense of Hitchcock’s more revered movies, but it is still essential viewing for fans of the genre. According to the director, however, it was the result of pure laziness.
“I was running for cover,” he said in a 1963 interview with Peter Bogdanovich. “When your batteries run dry, when you are out creatively, and you have to go on, that’s what I call running for cover. Take a comparatively successful play that requires no great creative effort on your part and make it. Keep your hand in, that’s all.”
The reason his batteries had run dry might have been because of his experience on his previous film, I Confess. It starred Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest grappling with his faith after getting swept up in a murder plot, and Hitchcock simply couldn’t get on board with the actor’s famous adherence to method acting, which he called “too obscure.” He was also unhappy with Anne Baxter, who played the other lead role. He’d tried to hire an actor from Quebec, but the studio refused to cast her, leaving him with a sense of dissonance about the whole thing.
For Dial M for Murder, he was beholden to Warner Bros. to make another film and had no intention of giving it any more effort than it deserved. “Go get a play and make an average movie–photographs of people talking,” he said. “It’s ordinary craftsmanship.”
‘Ordinary craftsmanship’ is not the phrase that comes to mind when watching a Hitchcock movie, including Dial M for Murder. Despite downplaying his work, the director couldn’t help but reveal that he did bring plenty of his own film theory to the project. Since it had been written as a play, he wanted to keep it confined to interiors rather than try to force the story outside just because he could. As a result, it feels circumspect, precise, and occasionally claustrophobic, all the things that we expect from vintage Hitchcock.
