“It’s no good showing things as they are – people wouldn’t believe them”: Alfred Hitchcock on To Catch a Thief

Straightening out the zigzag course conversations are apt to take, especially when prompted by questions, I find that in the main my talk with Alfred Hitchcock after the London premiere of To Catch a Thief covered two subjects: the combination of realism and fantasy, and the difference of opinion between himself and certain critics about the existence of metaphysical elements in his work.

Melodrama, Hitchcock said, breaks the bounds of realism in much the same way, if not to the same extent, as ballet – the kind, that is, where the performers “dance characters.” For him all melodramas are a form of fantasy. There is, in his own films, usually a documentary germ, taken perhaps from the shelves of the Surêté, Scotland Yard or the New York Police Department. “You take something ordinary to start with, but you have to whip it up into colour. And you give it the colour of melodrama chiefly by choice of situation. It’s all very fine to talk of the action being motivated by the characters, but because of the difficulties in constructing a screenplay, what in fact happens is that you make it appear so. In thrillers it’s the situations that matter most, and their originality.” 

“People often ask me how I get offbeat effects. Here’s an example. The other day I thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to open a mystery in a big motor plant in Detroit – shiny new cars coming off the assembly line, and at the wheel of one of them… a dead body.’ Well… It’s vivid, it’s offbeat. And I haven’t the vaguest idea whether it’ll ever develop into a story, or fit into a picture I make. But I’ve just used an idea I had seventeen years ago, turning it into a new opening for my remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much – my only remake, incidentally.” (Hitchcock’s reason for remaking this picture is that the American public never saw it.)

The ending of To Catch a Thief, originally planned by Hitchcock himself, was one of the more curious instances of an idea developed by him from a “documentary germ.” Talking one day with the head of the Homicide Department in New York, he overheard an officer in telephone conversation with a wanted man, who had just been located; the officer was agreeing quite amiably to allow this man to give himself up on the following Monday (this was a Saturday) so that he should not have to break his weekend date with a girl. 

This struck Alfred Hitchcock as so delightfully bizarre that he modelled a scene on the incident. It was to follow the moment when the thief, hanging by her hands from the edge of the roof, is caught, and would have shown her and her accomplice casually agreeing to be arrested – when, in a couple of days’ time, they were ready. “It would have made an amusing payoff,” Hitchcock said, “but it would also have deflected the story, and at this stage the spectator would want to know what happens to the principal characters. Besides, it might have seemed incredible. Very often the truest things appear too far-fetched. If you’re an observer of life as a whole, of the oblique, the not-quite-on-the-nose, you come to accept the fact that it’s no good showing certain things as they are – people just wouldn’t believe them.”

A good thriller, he went on, should be like a switchback; the spectator is taken along, up and down, so that, identifying himself with the hero, he is mentally levitated from his seat and has to grip the edges. “The whole art of movie-making is based on the audience’s identification with the people on the screen – that’s why, whatever you show, reality or fantasy, it must seem credible.” To Catch a Thief, he said in answer to a question of mine, is a woman’s picture. Not that he sets out to make his films specially for either men or women, but since his arrival in Hollywood he has realised that it would be foolish not to take into account the fact that the majority of cinema audiences are women. “It’s important that film-makers should have a sense of responsibility for the stability and continuity of their industry… And if sometimes you have to make corn, try at least to do it well.”

When Hitchcock was in France, shooting exteriors for To Catch a Thief, articles about him were constantly appearing in the press; “Les Cahiers du Cinéma,” indeed, devoted the whole of its October, 1954, issue to his work. “I wouldn’t on principle discourage analytical writing,” Hitchcock said seriously, then gave a roguish smile, “but I must admit that some of those articles made me wonder – ‘is this really me they’re discussing?’” If, as was suggested, he introduces a Roman Catholic argument into his work, this is, he says, instinctive rather than deliberate. Certain critics, for instance, were under the impression that his villains are usually given opportunities for confession. “It depends on the circumstances,” he remarked about this. “You see, I’m not particularly interested in villains. I believe that most criminals are really sick people; they’re born that way; they can’t help it. I don’t really go into their psychology much in my films.” And, though a practising Roman Catholic (educated at St. Ignatius College by Jesuits, from whom it was that he “learnt, among other things, to be realistic”), he does not purposely bring religion into them either.

There is, however, nothing new in believing that he does. In The Lodger, made in 1926, there is a scene showing a man, who has been hanging for hours by his handcuffed wrists from an iron railing, being taken down in a state of collapse. “It’s just possible,” Hitchcock said, “that I made some passing reference to the effect that this figure resembled Christ’s when being taken down from the cross. But the scene was not intended to suggest this. Nevertheless, one of the newspapers thought that it did. No – what interested me was the drama of being handcuffed. There’s a special terror,” he said, “a sort of ‘thing’ about being tied up, haven’t you noticed? The classic line when somebody in a melodrama is about to be handcuffed goes: ‘Oh no, Inspector, not that, please!’ And the answer: ‘We must – this is a serious case.’ I’ve often exploited this situation,” he added. In The 39 Steps, of course, it was fundamental…”