The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #25

Our presentation of the Hitchcock/Truffaut tapes concludes with Part Twenty-Five

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #24

In Part Twenty-Four . . . the penultimate edition of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes . . . we
fly into the everlasting mystery of The Birds (1963)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #23

Part Twenty-Three: Psycho (1960)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #22

Up to bat for in-depth discussion in Part Twenty-Two: 1959's North By Northwest and . . . Les Quatres cents coups

(no, I'm not kidding)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #21

The principal topic of Part Twenty-One: Vertigo (1958)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #20

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes enters its home stretch with Part Twenty, and a discussion of 1954's Rear Window

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #19

Part Nineteen entails a general discussion of technique

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #18

Part Eighteen: I Confess (1953)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #17

Up for discussion in Part 17: Strangers on a Train (1951)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #16

Under discussion in Part 16: 1949's Under Capricorn

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #15

Under discussion in Part Fifteen: Rope (1948)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #14

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes make a tranquil return to this blog.

Under discussion in Part Fourteen are Notorious (1946) and The Paradine Case (1947)

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #13

There were times – thankfully not many – when Alfred Hitchcock was moved to make a film solely to explore a technical gimmick that caught his fancy or to solve some purely cinematic problem.The most famous of these instances, 1948's Rope demonstrated just how disastrous such indulgences could be (in Technicolor, yet); for despite his oft-retailed and successfully marketed pose as the Master of Suspense, totally preoccupied with the mechanics of his craft (and then only for the purpose of manipulating audiences), Hitchcock's more everlasting creations carried what was at least an equivalent interest in matters beyond their physical production. But explaining to an interviewer the forces that drove intensely emotional works like Vertigo, or his 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, would not have been an easy thing to do (assuming for the moment that such things can even be expressed); explaining them to hero worshippers like François Truffaut was a doomed enterprise from the start. It was better, safer, far less strenuous to pretend he only cared about montage and Macguffens.

It was, if nothing else, one way of staying alive in the hopeless minefield of Hollywood.

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes make a limp return to this blog with a discussion of that "microcosm of the War," 1944's Lifeboat, a film whose existence Hitchcock freely admits was inspired by the challenge its rather limited and claustrophobic setting posed. And for once it's easy to take him at his word, because regardless of how many defenders it has among the faithful, Lifeboat has almost nothing going for it, being an apallingly simplistic wartime fable – with none of the rude emotional power that often drives such primal narratives – populated by one tiresome stock character after another. What else could have attracted him to the project? So taken was Hitchcock with surmounting the technical issues inherent to a film set entirely within the confines of a lifeboat, in fact, that he seems blissfully unaware (even in 1962) of just how hackneyed John Steinbeck's story and Jo Swerling's screenplay really were.

True to form, François Truffaut applauds Hitchcock's labor on one of the worst films he had ever put his name to (while noting the rather limited dimensions of its human landscape), declaring it (get this) "psychological" and highly "moral" . . . this from someone who during the war frequently professed his admiration for Vichy's original old goat, Marshall Petain.

A discussion of Lifeboat's largely negative critical reception . . . and Hitchcock's brief return to Britain to make two wartime propaganda films (Aventure malgache and Bon voyage) . . . leads into a somewhat tedious footslog through 1945's Spellbound.

Blog-a-thon Entry #4:Alfred Hitchcock PotpurriThe Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #12

Who would have guessed that another Blog-a-thon would be upon us so soon? Not I, for one. But thanks to the prodigious efforts of Squish over at The Film Vituperatem we here at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger . . . find ourselves once again unable to resist the essentially communal spirit of the hour. And what better (or easier) entry could there be for a Blog-a-thon devoted to Sir Alfred Hitchcock than a whole mess of images, a Musical Indulgence and . . . you guessed it . . . Part Twelve of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes; entailing discussions of two films from 1942, Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt.

Saboteur is a film that only those who go in for Alfred Hitchcock's by-then patented suspense mechanisms could think a major work. Clearly Hitchcock himself has little regard for the film, spending, as he does, most of his retrospective analysis on its failings; as if in this discussion, some two decades later, he were still trying to figure out what went wrong.

To use the term 'discussion' to describe what transpires in relation to Shadow of a Doubt is, however, stretching the term a bit, since Hitchcock really doesn't get to say very much.

If you've been following this series, then I don't have to tell you who does most of the talking, do I.

It is, of course, not the first instance where François Truffaut spends an inordinate amount of time explaining to Hitchcock his own movie (it's not the last, either). By now, the Master of Suspense probably realized this was going to be a regular feature these talks, something one sits through and endures as best as one can. Short of calling in Security gorillas to bounce the team of François and Helen off the Universal lot . . . then working them over with beaver-tail saps before dumping them in Griffith Park . . . there wasn't a whole lot he could do but wait for the next question to arrive (I imagine he spent these lulls actively fantasizing about how he'd change the menu at Chasen's if only they'd let him). As I say, this is not by now an unusual occurrence in these recordings, but it's an especially annoying one this time because Shadow of a Doubt may be the finest film Alfred Hitchcock directed in the 1940s.

Ostensibly the story of a young girl who slowly comes to discover that her elegant, charming, and most favored uncle is what we now call a serial killer, Shadow of a Doubt is at once a droll portrait of wholly American innocence and a night-filled document of its sundering. It has to be remembered that, despite the best efforts of novelists such as Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, our popular culture had not yet even begun to exhaust the theme of foul, unutterable doings just beyond the facade of small-town American life. Indeed, Hitchcock's is really the first film to take up the theme full-on. And while there have been those who will argue that Thornton Wilder's presence as co-scenarist played more than a subordinate role in creating the film's sense of social dread . . . after all, Wilder was not that many years removed from his bleak stage masterpiece Our Town . . . it doesn't fully account for Hitchcock's absolute engagement with it. His shepherding of this fundamentally dark tale evinced, in a way no film of his had before, an intense focus not just on the mechanics of telling its story, but on bringing what light his art could bear to all of its larger implications.

The key question, of course, is exactly what it was that so inspired Alfred Hitchcock on this occasion; why this project and not, say, Foreign Correspondent? While avoiding an outright spoiler, I can safely say you will not learn the answer to that question here. François Truffaut, unfortunately, seems to have little interest in it. I daresay he thought he already knew everything he needed to know.

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #11

Call me a skeptic, but Alfred Hitchcock's rationale, the one he would admit to, for directing a textbook Screwball Comedy by Norman Krasna entitled Mr. and Mrs. Smith has always struck me as extremely dubious. To hear him tell it in Part Eleven of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes, it was all the doing of Carole Lombard. She simply asked him to direct a film for her and . . . in what Hitchcock calls "a weak moment" . . . he did it. Just like that.

While Hitchcock had far greater respect for actors than he ever let on (a self-constructed myth discussed in this excerpt), it's hard to imagine an artist of his single-mindedness directing anything at the request of an actor or a producer or . . . anyone; absent some form of contractual obligation. George Cukor? Sure. Hawks? Hmmm. Maybe. Hitchcock?? It doesn't wash.

Barring a barefoot run through RKO Production records, I'm left to surmise his true intent for taking on the project. To me his participation in Mr. and Mrs. Smith had more to do with re-establishing in Hollywood what had always been a crucial part of his filmmaking in Britain, now that it looked as though he was over here for good. During the 20s and 30s, Hitchcock was usually able to weave his creative identity out of the Suspense pieces he'd achieved great success with and take up different narrative forms almost at will. Sometimes the results were utterly disastrous (Waltzes from Vienna, for instance; which was a failure on every level), but more often (the sublime Rich and Strange, or vastly underestimated works such as Juno and the Paycock, The Manxman, The Skin Game, The Farmer's Wife and Easy Virtue) they were anything but. What's more, the commercial Thrillers that heralded the dawn of his world-wide recognition were generally suffused with elements (mostly comic, but not always) that had little to do with that form as audiences knew it, then or now. He was, in short, a much more adroit and varied filmmaker in England . . . . this is not, necessarily, to say that he was a better one (which I don't believe) . . . than he was ever permitted to be in the US.

Why the leash? It was mainly institutional. America's film industry was structured in such a way as to deter, as much as possible, any impulse toward creative risk. It was a counter-impulse rather than a mechanized function. If a certain director . . . even a relatively autonomous director like Cecil B. DeMille, let's say . . . had a firmly established commercial track record with a specific kind of motion picture, then those with an overdeveloped sense of duty to the stockholders saw no point in encouraging said director to try their hand at anything else. Which is not to say that every filmmaker worthy of our attention didn't attempt to wrest themselves from the niches they themselves had created (such struggles are nothing less than the history of American Cinema), its simply that the economics of the industry weren't geared toward versatility then. They aren't now, either.

In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, he tried several times in his Hollywood career to reclaim some measure of this long-ago versatility, but he could only succeed insofar as he buried it within his commercially-proven Suspense model. On those rare occasions when he boldly tried something different (though one might argue that the basic elements, as it were, of his ebullient black-comedy pastorale, 1955's The Trouble With Harry were in his work all along) he was met with the uncomprehending stares of a nation.

After this intriguing opening, marked as it is by a rather odd tirade about stage actors and 'New York' writers who work in the film industry solely for financial inducements, the excerpt moves into a discussion of Joan Fontaine and his 1941 film Suspicion that . . . save for an entertaining (if not altogether believeable) anecdote about that film's momentary fate at the hands of Sol Lesser when he ran RKO Pictures for a half-hour . . . is sheer Snoresville.

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #10

There was something vaguely cringe-inducing about that passage in Hitchcock/Truffaut where François Truffaut leads off a discussion of 1940's Foreign Correspondent by calling it the kind of film a B-picture director would make (as opposed to a slightly overstuffed A like Rebecca, presumably). In fact, I seem to recall my own eyebrows heading north when reading it the first time so long ago. But I just assumed Alfred Hitchcock knew Truffaut meant well (how could he not?), and didn't take offense as other, thinner-skinned artists might have.

No egg-shell ego there, thought I.

Part Ten of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes opens with this passage; and much of what's here did end up in the published volume. What was not, however, published (indeed, could not have been published) is the supreme note of annoyance in Hitchcock's voice, stopping just short of outright anger. It's there in the tiny pauses, the throat-clearing, the ominously quiet insistence that the film did very well, the sharp elevations in volume as he describes how one sequence was rendered; as if Hitchcock were thinking to himself, "B picture? Is he serious?? After forty years of trying to get to where I am now in this demented circus of a business, I have to sit here and listen to amateur-hour insights from this cinephile fruit, this jumped-up ex-movie reviewer, and then get insulted by him??? Frig you and the New Wave you rode in on, you Renoir wannabe!".

In the book, of course, there's almost no sense of this. Hitchcock proceeds as though no insult, intentional or otherwise, had been given. But the recording bears every sign of a man trying very hard to restrain himself as his ego tries to digest what is to it an undigestible morsel. And what better way to push it through than finding in the moment occasion to bring forth . . . God help us, but it was inevitable . . .The MacGuffen.

The MacGuffen (his spelling, by the way; not reproduced in the book or anywhere else, then or now) was something Alfred Hitchcock talked about at great tedious length in interview after interview as though it were a skeleton key to his aesthetic (which it wasn't). In essence, it was a designation he dreamed up for the kind of storytelling device that advances a film's plot but does little else; a situational hook, if you will, upon which he could hang the weighty cloak of his mise en scene. As the decades mounted he never stopped trotting it out, and always emphasized (just as he does here) its essential meaninglessness; as if there were no contradiction in these conditions. The message was clear: Plot elements about secret codes and missing spies and stolen documents, those were the province of screenwriters; rudimentary irritants he had to work around on his way to realizing his art. They were interchangeable puzzle pieces, and he always maintained that the audience could not have cared less about them.

There is some truth in this, but not enough to warrant his transforming it into an ethos. MacGuffen was, after all, just another word for genre conventions; and Hitchcock . . . despite his repeatedly implying that they were a concern peculiar to his filmmaking alone . . . was scarcely the only director working in American Cinema who had to confront them (he was, if anything, the only one who felt compelled to talk about them again and again). As I say, he was somewhat correct in his assertion that audiences didn't care what the intrigue in his films centered around, but I doubt if the public's indifference, even in the aggregate, was any match for his own. In other words, Hitchcock was probably indulging in more than a bit of projection on these occasions. Which is understandable. He was, after all, far too disciplined a storyteller to ever go the post-1946 Howard Hawks route and eschew chunks of MacGuffen-like coherence in the name of really good, effective scenes. Consequently, he was forever saddling himself with plot devices he regarded as ancillary to his art. He couldn't get away from them, and it was a conflict he could not bring himself to resolve.

Thanks to Truffaut's questioning the efficacy of the MacGuffen in practice, Hitchcock deep-sixes the remainder of the excerpt by recounting its presence in his 1946 film Notorious; a long, bizarre saga in which he refuses to speak the name David Selznick, claims to have possessed inside knowledge of the Manhattan Project in 1944, and was then stalked by the FBI.

Truffaut, almost on cue, seems to swallow it whole.

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #9

In Part Nine of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes, Alfred Hitchcock's voice drips with what can only be described as amused contempt as he speaks of Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca as a kind of literary hangover of Victoriana. A "novelette", he calls it; humorless, a wheezy work designed to pull in the women and nothing else. He seems somewhat astonished that François Truffaut could entertain the notion that the adaptation he directed for David O. Selznick in 1940, his first American film, was a picture he really wanted to make; at least in the miserably faithful manner he was forced to execute it throughout the production (a circumstance he attributes to Selznick and the success of Gone With the Wind). "It's not a Hitchcock picture", he says, with all the economy one could ask for.

The mention of Selznick's 1939 commercial behemoth sparks another desultory round of joke-telling. Truffaut leads off with an old one, using a delivery that (in any language, I don't doubt) has 'doom' written all over it. Hitchcock then points out, not unkindly, that the joke is . . . not exactly new; then proceeds to tell one of the many variations handed down through time.

I don't know why the people who produced these excerpts, knowing they had 50 hours of tape to fit into 12 hours of broadcast, decided to include these passages. If it weren't for the personal dynamic they sometimes (not always, and not on this occasion) reveal, they'd be a massive waste of precious time.

When this desultory lull passes, things become terribly strange. Returning to Rebecca, Hitchcock begins to marvel . . . sounding genuinely puzzled . . . at the propensity for what he himself labels "Hitchcock films" to linger in the retrospective ether for so long and with such frequency. Voicing this dilemma, he asks how it is that his work, especially his work in Hollywood, never dates, stays as fresh and as vital and as brilliant as the day it was wrought; even in the case of films made 20 years prior.

The extreme (and I do mean extreme) narcissism of this statement . . . which I suspect had even Truffaut's eyebrows raised to the ceiling; which doesn't stop him from falling for it . . . leads me to think this is another instance of Hitchcock toying with his interviewer. Yet, as I say, he sounds utterly serious.

And who knows but that he was serious? By 1962 there were few directors in the history of cinema with as high a public profile as Alfred Hitchcock. He was a household name; a registered trademark both in spirit and in fact. Since 1955 he'd been in America's living rooms as the genial, avuncular, wry toast presenter of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on CBS (later on NBC). He wasn't the first director to invade homes in such a fashion. Cecil B. DeMille hosted the Lux Radio Theater on the NBC Blue network (later CBS) for 20 years, after all. But Television, as everyone knew all too well by the 1960s, was a far more powerful medium; and anyone featured on it week after week in those days instantly became one of the most recognizable people on earth.

Just imagine what that can do to a movie director, even one already semi-well known as Hitchcock. Never strangers to the more lurid strains of vanity, many filmmakers were so convinced of their creative primacy that a natural resentment was spawned toward those who got all the attention, namely the actors. They didn't create cinema; they just brought suckers into the tent, as it were. But Hitchcock was one of the very few who, by his determination and razor-sharp marketing sense, was able to vault himself into the public eye . . . and stay there. Everyone in America knew that voice, that grim countenance, that "Good Ev-e-ning". Most people in his day could not have picked, say, Fritz Lang or Frank Borzage or even Billy Wilder out of a lineup. But everyone knew who Hichcock was, even if a goodly number weren't completely certain what he did besides host an anthology series on television every week.

And I ask you, who wouldn't be a thoroughgoing narcissist in the face of all that?

The discussion weaves through the use of Special Effects in Rebecca, the absence of them in Jules et Jim, and how it was David Selznick got the Academy Award for Rebecca and not Alfred Hitchcock. And then it's over.

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #8

One of the more curious passages in Hitchcock/Truffaut takes center-stage in
Part Eight of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes.

Before the exploration of his largely triumphal career in Hollywood commences, Alfred Hitchcock is asked to render a few observations on the current state of Cinema in Great Britain, as well as his own role in its history. Before the Master of Suspense can get an answer rolling, however, a somewhat less-than-restrained François Truffaut proceeds -- seeming aware of how awkward his interruption is -- to offer his own remarkably strident view:

To him, British cinema before the arrival of Hitchcock in the late 1920s had been at best a languid affair; a strain of cinematic expression overwhelmed and brought low by a frightful inanition that seemed to have telling implications about Britain's national character. Even at its best, he suggests, British filmmaking had always hopelessly pallid, particularly when compared to the extraordinary vitality of the Hollywood paradigm (which, even more tellingly, appears to be Truffaut's default standard of comparison for everything). Hitchcock, we are to assume from this, changed all that.

Admittedly, his is not a wholly indefensible proposition (what Truffaut forgets is that Britain's film industry never had anything like the resources of America's), but he takes it one wanton step further by suggesting that the creative coma British Cinema suffered through prior to Hitchcock's arrival not only resumed once he left for Hollywood, but persisted without leave up to the present hour. To hear him tell it, the words 'British' and 'Cinema' are incompatible. And the only British directors worth a good goddamn were Hitchcock and Charles Chaplin (who didn't make a film in the UK until the 1950s). Everyone else was a hack.

It's hard to discern the extent to which Truffaut did or did not believe this. For all we know it may have been another wild and rash adventure in flattering his subject. One has to remember that this is a man who shifted on a dime from being an uncritical fanboy who loved all cinema indiscriminately to a polemicist wielding a fierce, incredibly strident case against the then-prevailing currents in French Cinema. His judgements had always been informed on the deepest levels by what can best be described as strategic imperatives, and in his years as a film critic his larger ambitions had compromised him so thoroughly that, as a result, he ended up with credibility roughly equivalent to that of an overpaid quote-whore for some industry sheet. Who could tell if he really believed anything he said? While the answer to that would withstand more interrogation than decency allows, it is not difficult to know how utterly, demonstrably wrong he was on this occasion.

Think about it a second. Carol Reed, The Archers (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger for the non-cinephile contingent), Basil Dearden, David Lean, Charles Crichton, Jack Clayton, The Brothers Boulting, Anthony Asquith, Robert Hamer; lesser, but altogether benign figures such as Seth Holt, Terence Fisher, Ronald Neame and Val Guest; expatriates like Joseph Losey and Cyril Endfield; the Free Cinema/Woodfall menagerie: Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger (and these are just the names that come to me offhand). Whatever misgivings one might have about this one or that one's output, whatever bright early promise ended in tatters of mediocrity, it is absurd to think that filmmaking in Britain by 1962 had ever been as moribund or devitalized as Truffaut suggests here (also, take note how little is actually said in this putative discussion of current British filmmaking about the rise of Richardson, Riesz, et al. Cynical as it sounds, I can't help but suspect that Truffaut wasn't altogether keen to spend time discussing that other, far less romanticized new wave of the late 1950s). For an industry of its relatively diminutive size and scope, in fact, what it accomplished apart from the contributions of Alfred Hitchcock was nothing short of miraculous.

But try telling François Truffaut that.

The weird Anglophobia of this excerpt doesn't stop there, however. Once Hitchcock finally gets an opportunity to speak on the subject of British Cinema, he does so with great cynicism about his home country's attitude toward the medium and, in doing so, reveals a measure of overt class resentment that had mostly been absent from his films. A goodly portion of this excerpt appeared in the final tome but, as ever, it is one thing to read, say, Hitchcock expressing his distaste for the patronization of film by the upper classes, or his dismissing europhilic dilettantes in the London Film Society, it's another thing to hear in his voice the well of contempt that informed it.

I remember a few years ago telling someone that I had gone from loving the 'Hitchcock/Truffaut' book as a teenage cinephile to the view that reading it was not unlike watching two not-terribly-attractive people engaging in sexual intercourse (a judgement I apply now to all such interview books). Not just for its generally saccharine facade of cinephilic bonhomie (which was, as these recordings definitively establish, largely manufactured in the editing), but for the nagging sense one gets that each party was using the occasion to fulfill some wholly personal agenda through the other.

If Part Eight is anything, it is the realization of this: Two filmmakers taking a conversational lull, a momentary breather before delving into an anatomy of one's triumph, in order to do some Brit bashing; each one giving voice to a private gripe he'd been independently carrying around; thereby achieving their one and only true collaboration.

The excerpt ends with a rare and marvellous sound that the public never got to hear (for he would never permit himself such liberty): Alfred Hitchcock laughing.

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #7

Part Seven of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes entails lengthy discussions of 1937's Young and Innocent and 1938's The Lady Vanishes, both of which dwell largely on matters of technique. It is, I think, an indicator of the infectiousness with which Alfred Hitchcock, for once, describes his own work (rather than listening with weary patience while François Truffaut describes it to him) that one scarcely notices the total absence in this excerpt of that weird personal dynamic between the two principals on such gaudy display in the others. Whether detailing a justly celebrated shot in Young and Innocent (while pointing out its technical distinctions from a similar, even more celebrated shot in his 1946 film Notorious) or running through those elements that made The Lady Vanishes, in his words, a work of fantasy, Hitchcock is never less than compelling throughout. And Truffaut, to his credit, finally decides to let the old man speak.

I tell you, if all the excerpts were like this one, my task in writing these intros would be one helluva lot easier.

The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #6

Second-guessing the stated intention of an artist during an interview is always a dodgy proposition, especially when the subject is one as famously deliberate and methodical as Alfred Hitchcock. Having no way to confirm or, for that matter, disprove the subject's testimony, an interrogator is left a choice that no one who's interested in good journalism would envy. He or she either accepts what they're told, no matter how outlandish or illogical, or pursues their skepitcism by nailing the subject down (a potentially suicidal course for the fortunes of the discussion). As an interviewer, François Truffaut not only held true to the non-adversarial, passive character of the former course, he seemed blissfully unaware that any other method was possible.

That being said, I'm not quite certain how anyone would react if they'd been confronted with some of what Alfred Hitchcock says in Part Six of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes. For instance, he would have Truffaut (and by extension us) believe that one of the chief intentions in his approach to Secret Agent (1936) was remaining true to its Swiss setting; that he deliberately constructed the film to better integrate the story with its soundstage Switzerland, in other words. On its face this sounds reasonable, but Hitchcock stretches the point to such absurd lengths (virtually all of which was cut when the book was put together), one can sense that even Truffaut isn't a hundred percent certain whether or not his subject is serious. Along similar lines, Hitchcock soon describes a scene he tried and (by his account) failed to work into his 1959 film, North By Northwest that would have hurled the entire piece into the realm of the surreal if he'd actually included it (in fact it directly anticipates a sequence in Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger's 1970 film, British Sounds). Truffaut, to his credit, makes a tiny step towards questioning the logic of the thing in context. Hitchcock, perhaps sensing he'd better not push it, cuts him off and says "Let's get back to Secret Agent."

It's instructive to note, by way of an aside, that in the book generated from these interviews, Truffaut not only omits this screwball digression, he attributes the 'let's get back' admonition to himself (not the first sign that Hitchcock/Truffaut was a more carefully crafted work than anyone could have imagined, and not the last).

When the subject turns to his 1936 masterpiece Sabotage, something curious happens: Hitchcock begins to speak of a "grave error" he committed by violating the audience's expectations at a key moment in the film; thereby making them, in his words, "resentful". There is genuine regret in his recollection. Truffaut, not surprisingly, agrees (what else); adding only that by utilizing a child in the sequence, Hitchcock was engaging in an abuse of the medium's power (whereupon he recounts what he says were similar problems he confronted shooting Les Quatres cents coup; a long excursion that has to be heard to be believed). It makes for one of the more revealing moments in these recordings.

If Alfred Hitchcock had a diminishing flaw as an artist, it lay in repeatedly measuring the success or failure of a given work entirely in terms of how skillfully he was able to manipulate its audience; an incapacity to trust and surrender to the moment that resulted in the somewhat arthritic style that weighed down too much of his later work (save for the odd exhilarating moment or two). No artist in cinema, certainly none of his caliber, was ever so obsessed with the psychology of audiences; almost making of them a collaborator in his art. He did not regret this undeniably disturbing sequence in Sabotage because it subverted their expectations . . . that was something he did countless times in his 50 years as a filmmaker . . . but, by his account, because it happened unintentionally; as if that fundamental control, the ability to lead a viewer in whatever direction pleased him, was central to his own identity as an artist and the focus of deeper intentions no one would second-guess.

Then they talk about cartoons.