From the archive: working with Alfred Hitchcock on his last film in 1982

The screenwriter David Freeman worked with Alfred Hitchcock on what would have been his final film, The Short Night, but Hitchcock’s failing health and retirement meant that it was never shot. The cover story of the Observer Magazine of 8 August 1982 (‘Hitchcock: The Last Movie’) is taken from Freeman’s journal.

Hitchcock had been interested in the case of the Soviet double-agent George Blake, and had the rights to two books about him. The director had fallen out with the first screenwriter and Freeman was picked to take over. Freeman says that, while he was growing up, Hitchcock’s films ‘seemed like a permanent part of the mindscape, the way mountains or rivers are part of the physical world’.

It wasn’t a straightforward gig dealing with Hitchcock. ‘He moved in and out of senility and yet, for all that, he seemed in no hurry to finish his work, even though his life was clearly limited,’ he wrote. ‘The pleasure, and sometimes the problem, is letting his mind roam, then ever so gently tugging it back to the script.’

There’s plenty of evidence of the auteur’s wit: ‘When I tried to persuade him to drop the title The Short Night, I proposed calling the picture Pursuit. He wouldn’t commit himself. To bolster my case I told him we should actually call it Pursuito, like Vertigo or Psycho. Hitchcock nodded and replied, “Call it Prosciutto and change the locale to Italy.’’’

Freeman thinks that Hitchcock’s obsessive focus on details was a way to avoid actual scriptwriting: ‘He asks to see London street maps… demanding to know where the traffic lights are… and what the traffic patterns are in the evening.’

After Hitchcock couldn’t go on any more, he briefly, and poignantly, returned to his now largely empty Universal Studios office, as if nothing had changed: ‘He was like some cryptic English-Chekhovian figure, playing out the last days of his private, imagined Raj.’