The only movie Alfred Hitchcock was “ashamed” of making: “Not a pleasant experience”
Unless a director starts their career off on the right foot and trends upwards from there, the earliest years of a filmmaker’s professional life are always the hardest. Alfred Hitchcock eventually evolved into one of cinema’s all-time greats, and it’s not a coincidence that his biggest regrets all came during his beginnings.
He bluntly described his second completed picture, 1927’s The Mountain Eagle, as “a very bad movie” that he was glad ended up as a lost film, with the future ‘Master of Suspense’ often bowing to the whims of his paymasters as a relative novice who hadn’t yet honed what would become his signature style.
Once he set off to America and won the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ with his first Stateside production, Rebecca, Hitchcock quickly attained auteur status. For the rest of his filmmaking days, very rarely did he have anything other than complete autonomy and creative freedom on his projects.
That didn’t happen until the dawn of the 1940s, though, with Hitchcock forced to persevere with his misgivings throughout the late 1920s and the entire 1930s. His first feature-length undertaking of the latter decade, Juno and the Paycock, was a completely different proposition compared to what he’d been accustomed to.
Adapted from the play of the same name by Seán O’Casey, the cast was populated by actors more familiar with the stage than the silver screen, and Hitchcock struggled to wrap his head around trying to turn a working-class Irish play that was designed for the theatre into a workable movie.
“I must say that I didn’t feel like making the picture because, although I read the play over and over again, I could see no way of narrating it in cinematic form,” he told Francois Truffaut. “I photographed the play as imaginatively as possible, but from a creative viewpoint, it was not a pleasant experience.”
While Juno and the Paycock wasn’t a bad film by any means, Hitchcock didn’t only have a miserable time shooting it, he felt like a fraud when it won acclaim because he didn’t believe he’d contributed anything worthwhile to the production other than standing behind the camera and letting the stage show play out as usual, albeit structured cinematically rather than theatrically.
“The film got very good reviews,” he noted. “But I was actually ashamed, because it had nothing to do with cinema. The critics praised the picture, and I had the feeling I was dishonest, that I had stolen something.” From Hitchcock’s perspective, the lines between adapting and plagiarising had become too blurred for comfort, leaving him indifferent towards the movie’s positive reception because he didn’t think he’d done enough to deserve being involved in the praise.
Some directors would embrace it and take the win, but he was never that kind of filmmaker.
