Hitchcock Trivia, Part I

Alfred Hitchcock was as full of twists and turns in his real life as he was in his reel life.

This is only Part I, because there’s too much interesting trivia about the Master of Suspense to fit into one small space. And he didn’t like small spaces.

• Young Alfred was jailed for five minutes at the request of his father who intended to teach him a lesson. The cop said, “This is what we do to bad boys.” Ever after, Hitch was frightened of small spaces.

• Despite his fear of confined spaces, Hitchcock experimented with them in several films, including Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window.

• Hitchcock studied at St. Ignatius College, run by Jesuits who insisted on order, discipline, and a rigorous curriculum. His mates nicknamed him Cocky. 50 years later Hitch would tell current students about punishment: “It was not like they give boys the cane in other schools. This was a rubber strap … shall we say 12 [strokes] had to be spread over two days because each hand could take only three strokes as it became numb.”
• “Hitchcock became a notorious purloiner of eggs from the priests’ hen house, on the forbidden side of the presbytery garden,” according to Robert Gould, one of his schoolmates. “He loved to steal the eggs and throw them on the windows of the Jesuit residence. When an angry priest ran out, demanding to know who had dirtied the glass, Cocky affected an innocent look, glanced at the sky, shrugged, and said, “‘I don’t know, Father. It looks like the birds have been flying overhead.’ That’s how he got the nickname Cocky.”
• After his father died and young Alfred had to support his mother, he enrolled for a short time in evening lectures in navigation at the University of London, and simultaneously attended a few workshop courses, including, among other subjects, the elements of electricity, mechanics, force and motion, and draftsmanship.

• His first paying job was as an estimator for Henley Telegraph & Cable Company. He spent as much of his 15-shillings-a-week salary as he dared on the cinema.

• In 1929, Hitchcock fully directed the first British talkie, Blackmail.
• His American directorial debut was the gothic romance, Rebecca. Producer David O. Selznick had Hitchcock under contract to direct his impending movie, Titanic, later scuttled, and Hitch was assigned Rebecca instead. It went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.
• He filmed Dial M For Murder in 3-D, though prints were released flat. One time in the early ’80s, it was released in 3-D. They should release it in 3-D again, and soon.

• Leo G. Carroll appeared in six Hitchcock movies, more than any other actor. James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Edmund Gwenn came in second, with four each.

• Janet Leigh said she did not gulp after she was supposed to be dead in the shower scene of Psycho. She did blink, though, and it was edited out after being caught by Hitch’s wife, Alma Reville.

• Psycho, one of Hitchcock’s most famous movies, cost only $800,000 to make.
• Hitchcock was under FBI surveillance due to his use of uranium as a plot device in Notorious.
• His favorite of his own films was Shadow of a Doubt.

• Salvador Dalí designed the dream sequences for Spellbound. They were subsequently shortened considerably because they were so disturbing.

• Hitchcock once said, “Fear, you see, is an emotion people like to feel when they know they’re safe.”

• All the European settings of Torn Curtain were built on the Universal lot.

• Hitchcock had a boyish fixation for toilets and related humor. In Lifeboat, the initials BM are tattooed on John Hodiak’s chest; in Shadow of a Doubt, the initials BM are engraved on a ring, and the sound and/or sight of a toilet appears in no fewer than 15 of his films.
• Dial M For Murder was filmed in only 36 days.
• In Spellbound, two unprecedented point-of-view shots were achieved by constructing a large wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the camera took) and out sized props for it to hold: a bucket-sized glass of milk and a large wooden gun. For added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was hand-colored red on some copies of the black-and-white print of the film.

• Hitchcock once said, “Some films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake.”

• Alfred Hitchcock directed five Oscar-winning films, and was nominated all five times as Best Director. He never won.