The one actor Alfred Hitchcock loathed with every fibre of his being: “That awful old man”
It’s no secret that Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t the biggest fan of actors, which was nothing if not an unusual position for a film director to find themselves in, since it’s impossible to make a narrative feature without them.
Heaven forbid if they had ideas of their own instead of blindly following his instructions, with Paul Newman becoming an enemy of the ‘Master of Suspense’ for having the temerity to question him. What Hitchcock really wanted were puppets that could be moved around a set without thinking twice.
Having infamously described them as “cattle”, the auteur treated them as such. If he hired someone for a role in one of his pictures, their job was to learn the lines as scripted, perform them as instructed, stand where they were told to stand, and do what they were told to do, no ifs, buts, or maybes about it.
While he spoke highly of several collaborators, both one-time cast members and frequent partners, there were just as many he sneered at. Whether it was down to miscasting, the actor in question being forced upon him by the studio, or a terrible performance, Hitchcock’s forked tongue frequently popped out from above his many chins to denigrate the stars he worked with.
However, there was one he completely abhorred, which shouldn’t come as a shock when they played the lead role and served as an uncredited producer on a picture the filmmaker never wanted to make, but was forced into directing because his previous feature had flopped, and he’d come to call 1932’s Number Seventeen “a disaster” in retrospect.
The by-the-numbers plot finds veteran stage actor Leon M Lion’s vagrant stumbling upon a dead body in an abandoned house, before a woman crashes through the roof to reveal her father is missing. More characters descend upon the scene, setting the stage for a mystery that sounds very Hitchcockian, even if the man himself wasn’t inclined to agree.
“It was a terrible picture,” he told Peter Bogdanovich. “Just another stage play, quite a successful London show, which they’d bought, and it didn’t transfer. Very cheap melodrama. It had that awful old man in it, Leon M Lion.” Clearly, he wasn’t a fan of his leading man, but why did Hitchcock despise him so much?
According to film historian and designated ‘Master of Suspense’ expert, Peter Tonguette, on the restored version of the movie’s Blu-ray commentary track, he simply hated his guts. Hitchcock never wanted to work with him in the first place, but because Lion had starred in the stage production of Joseph Jefferson Farjean’s play during its initial run, he manoeuvred himself into Number Seventeen, despite the director’s protestations.
That wasn’t even his first run-in with Lion either, with Hitchcock having previously clashed with him when he served as an intermediary between playwright John Galsworthy and the actor when he adapted the former’s The Skin Game, which Leon had also appeared in on stage, and on that occasion, he managed to avoid having to cast him against his will.
Needless to say, Hitchcock didn’t have rosy memories of Number Seventeen when he hated the movie, hated the actor who headlined the ensemble, and hated his hammy and overly theatrical performance in it.
