The one scene Alfred Hitchcock always regretted: “Bad technique, never repeated it”
When Alfred Hitchcock started making movies, he had no idea that the medium would transform in the way it did over the coming years – or that he’d be responsible for pioneering many of these changes. The director was given his first chance to make a film in 1922, which resulted in the unfinished Number 13, also known as Mrs Peabody. After an uncredited job co-directing Always Tell Your Wife with Seymour Hicks, he released his first solo film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925.
Within a few years, the invention of sound cinema was introduced, becoming the dominant mode within filmmaking. Hitchcock’s first sound picture, Blackmail, was released in 1929 and was a landmark moment for British sound cinema. Hitchcock continued making movies at a rapid pace, asserting himself as a Master of Suspense due to his penchant for thrillers, plot twists, and his incredible ability to build tension.
The filmmaker’s reputation as a critically acclaimed figure was propelled in the mid-1930s with movies like The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes. His Daphne du Maurier adaptations, Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, came in 1939 and 1940, respectively, helping to further cement him as a filmmaker capable of taking pre-existing works and giving them his own cinematic spin. In fact, Hitchcock rarely penned his movies, often hiring a screenwriter to adapt an existing novel for the screen.
In 1936, Alfred Hitchcock directed a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The film, titled Sabotage (interestingly, Hitchcock also made an unrelated film called The Secret Agent that same year), featured Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, and Desmond Tester. The story follows a man who is secretly involved with a terrorist group and tries to conceal his activities from his wife. However, tragedy unfolds when he enlists his wife’s younger brother, Stevie, to unknowingly deliver a bomb.
In the film, Stevie is just 12 years old. Thus, the infamous scene featuring Stevie boarding a bus with the bomb (unbeknownst to him – it is disguised in a film canister), only for it to explode, was controversial because Hitchcock, therefore, depicted the death of a child. It’s a scene that Hitchcock regrets and one that he wishes he could’ve done differently.
“The clock’s going, the time for the bombing to go off at such and such a time, and I drew this thing out, attenuated the whole business. Then someone should have said ‘oh my goodness there is a bomb,’ picked it up and threw it out the window. Bang! But everybody is relieved,” he said to the BBC. “But I made the mistake, I let the bomb go off and kill someone. Bad technique. Never repeated it.”
Hitchcock’s regrets are probably due to the fact that the movie wasn’t received as well as he’d hoped. Perhaps if he hadn’t had the child killed, people might not have been so shocked by the film. However, at the end of the day, the director was simply going off the source material, which really does depict such a horrible event, communicating the horrors of terrorism and how it can affect innocent people and destroy lives.
