The one movie Alfred Hitchcock swore he would never make: “I’ll have no part of that”
Whenever someone thinks of cinema’s greatest-ever auteurs, one of the most common traits that unites and defines almost all of them is that they’re also hugely talented screenwriters. However, Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t among them, not that it stopped him from attaining legendary status.
It’s a common misconception that a director needs to double as a writer to be remembered as one of the best, and with good reason. After all, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, the Coen brothers, Federico Fellini, and Quentin Tarantino penned most, if not all, of their features.
Then again, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Howard Hawks’ respective filmographies are hardly overflowing with writing credits, and the same applies to Hitchcock. He did dabble at the beginning of his career, but he was never listed in an official capacity on any of his productions after 1932’s Number Seventeen.
Beyond that, the ‘Master of Suspense’ is probably the definitive example of how one of the medium’s most influential and lauded directors isn’t required to trade heavily in original stories. Hitchcock loved a literary adaptation, and the printed page was responsible for some of his finest work.
The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds are just some of his many masterpieces that originated as novels, although they all made it to the screen slathered in the filmmaker’s signature stylistic sensibilities, technical innovations, and unmatched artistry.
Clearly, he had no issues turning a good book into an even better movie, but even Hitchcock had to draw the line somewhere. Fyodor Dostoevsky has tripped up many writers, directors, and producers over the years in attempts to translate the author’s hefty prose to celluloid, even if Hitchcock’s reasoning came across as somewhat bizarre.
“I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement,” he told Francois Truffaut, underlining that he wouldn’t dream of tackling the seminal tome. “There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema.”
It sounds odd that someone like Hitchcock, who helmed over two dozen page-to-screen translations throughout his career, didn’t want to go anywhere near Crime and Punishment because its author had already been celebrated for writing it. That said, it does make sense as it relates to his outlook on film.
He didn’t mind turning an unknown, underappreciated, or even semi-famous book into a movie, but Crime and Punishment was such a literary monolith that Hitchcock wouldn’t get the credit for making it into a watchable picture because it was already such a well-known novel.
To illustrate that point, when Truffaut asked if it was safe to say he’d never do a screen version, his response said it all: “Even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good.”
