Unconsummated Hitchcock: “The Short Night”, the Auteur’s Last Hurray That Never Was!

 𝟝𝟜𝟝 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕕𝕤

◔◡◔ ◔◡◔ ◔◡◔

Rotund, sardonic Anglo-American auteur Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre comprised over 50 feature films but he was no stranger to unfinished or unrealised film projects. Starting with what was meant to be his directorial debut in Number 13 (AKA Mrs. Peabody) in 1922, for the next 57 years Hitch was at the helm for upward of twenty aborted films. Hardly any of the score of unmade movie projects ever got beyond the pre-production stage[1̲̅].

There were various reasons why the films never got made...difficulties in location (Walt Disney wouldn’t let Hitchcock film The Blind Man at Disneyland supposedly because of his disapproval of Psycho); Hitch’s dissatisfaction with scripts[2]; Hitchcock’s Titanic project was waylaid by a string of obstacles including objections from the British shipping industry; some projects were vetoed by producers and studio heads; Hitchcock couldn’t get the female lead he wanted for No Bail for the Judge (Audrey Hepburn)[3]. Hitch’s great success with The 39 Steps prompted him to try to direct film adaptions of other John Buchan novels featuring spy Richard Hannay, eg, Greenmantle, however he couldn’t afford the rights to the book. He even wanted to direct Shakespeare, his enthusiasm to do a modernised version of Hamlet (with Hitchcock favourite Cary Grant cast as the “Melancholy Dane”) was ultimately blunted by the threat of a lawsuit from a writer who had already penned a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy (‘Every Unmade Alfred Hitchcock Movie Explained’, Jordan Williams, Screen Rant, 12-Jun-2021, www.screenrant.com).

The final project pursued by Hitchcock was The Short Night, which was to be Hitchcock’s red-hot crack at making a “realistic Bond movie”. Originally conceived in the late 1960s (after two uninspiring earlier Hitchcock Cold War espionage features Torn Curtain and Topaz were coolly received), the director scouted locations in Finland. Hitch wanted the “real deal”, Sean Connery, to play the Bondesque double agent protagonist, the director must have been keen on the film...while the project was still parked in pre-production, without anything about the movie being nailed down, Hitch had a poster designed for the movie (‘Alfred Hitchcock’s unrealized projects’, Wikipedia). Alas, scripts were again a problem, Hitch churned through a bunch of writers and a number of different treatments in the search for the ‘right’ script, but an even bigger problem was Hitch himself! Now 80, Hitchcock‘s health was failing badly, he was unfocused and listless on the set[4], he simply was no longer up to it. Towards the end of 1979 Hitchcock quietly retired from the business and The Short Night project was shelved. 

—————————————

[1̲̅] Hitchcock managed to shoot only a few scenes of Mrs. Peabody before a lack of budget brought the production to a close 

[2] the prickly and demanding Hitchcock had fractious relationships with his scriptwriters, he even fell out with his favourites like Ernest Lehman, contributing to Hitchcock ditching The Wreck of the Mary Deare and starting work on the classic North by Northwest

[3] Hitchcock’s uber-creepy obsessiveness with many of his leading ladies (Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Ingrid Bergman et al) has been well documented, eg, Spellbound by Beauty, Donald Spoto (2008)

[4] ”moving in and out of senility” in the view of the last screenwriter parachuted into the project, David Freeman