The only time Alfred Hitchcock took the blame for a movie’s failure: “A lot of people complained”
Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t known for being a warm and cuddly actor’s director. He belongs in that category of auteurs populated by the likes of James Cameron, Stanley Kubrick, and David Fincher, who really don’t want to take any shit from their actors. For Hitchcock, actors were little more than cattle to be prodded and moved about a set, and he didn’t waste time on pleasantries.
While his behaviour towards his female stars has come under harsh scrutiny over the years and was, without question, unnecessary when it came to getting the performances he wanted out of them, there is no denying that Hitchcock had a singular vision that yielded some of the greatest films ever made. Rear Window, Vertigo, and Notorious are some of the highlights, but he is one of the few directors who made more classics than you could count on two hands.
Still, Hitchcock was hard to please, and he applied his high standards to his own work as much as anyone else’s. He had plenty of quibbles with his movies, but for the most part, he blamed the actors. He thought that Robert Cummings ruined Saboteur because he had a ‘comedy face,’ and he said that he should have cast a ‘stronger man’ than Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train. But there was one film that he was so disappointed by that he couldn’t even put all the blame on his stars.
In a 1963 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, the Master of Suspense discussed where everything went wrong with the 1950 film Stage Fright, a movie about a shy aspiring actor (Jane Wyman) who helps her crush (Richard Todd) evade the law after he is accused of killing his mistress’s husband. The incomparable Marlene Dietrich plays the mistress, but even her star power couldn’t rescue the film from the harsh judgment of audiences and critics.
When explaining where things went sideways, Hitchcock began, as usual, with actor-bashing. “The Jane Wyman part should have been a pimply-faced girl,” he said. “She just refused to be that, and I was stuck with her.” But then he did something unprecedented – he owned up to his own mistakes. “The other fault was that the menace wasn’t strong enough,” he continued. “The menace came from Dietrich and her partner – they were the villains– and they had no menace in them because they were afraid.”
As far as many audiences and critics were concerned, however, the cardinal sin of the film was its unreliable flashback in which Todd’s character remembers his mistress confessing to killing her husband. “A lot of people complained because the opening flashback was a lie,” the director conceded. “Now, why can’t a man tell a lie? I don’t know… You see, if you break tradition, you are in trouble every time.”
It’s true that Stage Fright is not one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated films, but it is far from his worst. He might have felt bitter about it, between the audience’s reaction, his clear distaste for Wyman, and his rare concession that he failed to make it menacing enough, but it remains a highly entertaining thriller. Its black-and-white theatrical setting is a refreshing change of pace from the director’s usual grandiosity, and Dietrich, as always, lights up the screen.
