When Alfred Hitchcock tried to wrangle 100 cats and failed miserably: “A disaster!”
If you need a job doing, it pays to hire the right person to do it, someone well qualified, with plenty of ability and experience. If you needed a film made, for instance, then in all of movie history, Alfred Hitchcock would probably be at the top of the phone book. If you needed a pet looking after, he possibly wouldn’t have been.
That’s not to say old Alf wasn’t something of an animal lover; by all accounts, he was fond of his Sealyham terrier dogs, occasionally making cameos in his movies just like he was prone to doing, and in fact, he cherished them enough that they were given the finest cuts of meat to chomp on while he made some of the best films of all time.
Birds, of course, were another major factor in Hitchcock’s career. His 1963 horror featuring Tippi Hedren was packed full of psychotic feathered friends, with the film using thousands of real birds, including seagulls, crows and ravens, to inflict ornithological terror on the cast as well as mechanical replicas. Hedren, for one, was so traumatised by it all that she even went on to found a sanctuary for rescued exotic big cats, which is literally the last place a bird would ever want to visit.
And cats were the crux of one issue Hitchcock had on one of his much earlier films, namely his 1932 thriller Number 17, a film about a group of criminals who hide their jewellery loot in a house of that number above a railway.
The feline fun he had on set was the topic of a conversation detailed in fellow director Francis Truffaut’s book about the British legend’s movies, with Hitchcock recalling, “A disaster! Part of the film was set in an empty house in which gangsters were hiding out, and there was to be a fair amount of gunplay. It occurred to me that it would be an intriguing idea if we used this house also as a refuge for all the stray cats of the neighbourhood.”
This was a decision that Hitchcock would rue massively, and probably contributed to it being one of his least successful movies, and one of the few in which he didn’t make one of his famous cameos.
He added, “Every time a gun was shot, a hundred cats would run up or down the stairs. On the morning we were finally all set to shoot the cats, I arrived to find the studio full of people. I asked why there were so many extras. ‘They’re not extras,’ I was told, ‘They’re the people who own the cats’.”
Hitchcock attempted to block off the bottom of the stairway, had the owners put their cats in position and then told the prop man to fire a gun. Unfortunately, not a single cat did what it was told and instead ran all over the studio, leading the crew to eventually stick a wire net around them all so they would stay in the same place. But it was to no avail.
The great director concluded: “Everything was ready. Camera. Bang! This time, only three ran up the stairs. All the rest turned and clung desperately to the netting. So I gave it up.”
As mentioned, Number 17 was not one of Hitchcock’s finest moments as critics found it ‘incomprehensible’ and even Truffaut himself told the director it was confusing. Fortunately, within two years, he made the acclaimed The Man Who Knew Too Much, and all, if not the cats, was forgiven.
