The Times (10/Oct/1985) - Books: A Hitch in time comes out fine
(c) The Times (10/Oct/1985)
A Hitch in time comes out fine
John Russell Taylor
THE LAST DAYS OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK
By David Freeman
Pavilion/Michael Joseph, £12.95
David Freeman knew Hitchcock little, late, and not, to put it kindly, at his best. That tends to be the way with "last days" stories. Freeman was called to revise a script written by Hitchcock's old collaborator Ernest Lehman; Hitch had been almost completely satisfied by that, but chafing at delays to the start of shooting he had, as was his wont, begun to doubt and dismantle in his mind the structure so carefully arrived at. Probably by the time Universal sent him Freeman he already realized that the film would never be made, but he went on doggedly working as though it would, through a haze of constant pain, an unpossible situation at home.
Like everyone else who came in contact with him, Freeman was fascinated by the man and the monument at 79 the last giant of the silent cinema still working. He realized from the start that it was too late to get personally close to his employer, but, as a good journalist, he kept a diary of his meeting, and proves an acute and on the whole sympathetic observer. Sometimes his journalistic instinct seems to win over his memory: he paints a vivid picture of panic in the office when Hitch finally accepted defeat, closed down the picture and dissolved his company, but unfortunately places it when he was dropped in to congratulate the master on his knighthood, blandly ignoring the fact that the shut-down occurred in May 1979 and the knighthood came in the New Year's Honours for 1980. His records of Hitchcock dicta seem accurate enough, and some of them, when encroaching senility has relaxed the controls of a lifetime and let some of the sad sexual fantasies run free, are very revealing.
