Hitchcock & Western

One of the most fascinating experiences I’ve had in the last year was the time I had lunch with executive producer, Howard Kazanjian (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi) and director, screenwriter, Walter Hill (Geronimo, The Long Riders, Broken Trail). Quietly sitting in between these two veteran film makers as they discussed the motion picture business and the talented individuals they had worked with was as educational as it was entertaining. Among the great artists they talked about working with were George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, and Alfred Hitchcock. Peckinpah made a great western entitled The Wild Bunch. I didn’t think Lucas and Hitchcock contributed to my favorite genre but Walter Hill disagreed. He said that all movies are basically “westerns.” Howard noted that Star Wars was a “western set in space.” I could see that. Having worked with Hickok a number of times, Howard Kazanjian had the most to say about him. Here’s what I remember. Alfred Hitchcock Presents was perhaps the only true horror show on TV, an anthology of both mysteries and melodramas that debuted in 1955 and aired through 1962. Hitchcock had already made thirty films and used his rotund profile in silhouettes as a trademark, himself offering a drooling introduction to the show that was about to follow. At the end of each episode Hitchcock again returned to center stage to inform the audience that the dastardly criminal or sociopath presented was dutifully apprehended and currently receiving appropriate punishment, as he said “as a necessary gesture to morality.” Despite a lifetime devoted to the most ghoulish, strange, and murderous endings conceivable, he viewed his own final illness as a terrible inconvenience and intolerably mundane. At age eighty Sir Alfred Hitchcock struggled through the indignity of dialysis after renal failure. He died of chronic congestive heart failure only four months after he was dubbed a knight by Queen Elizabeth II in 1980. Upon his request, he preferred not to deal with the untidiness of a dead body and was promptly cremated. It was decided that North by Northwest was the closest Hitchcock ever came to making a real western film. I could see that too. And even if I couldn’t, I wasn’t about to argue the point with two giants of the industry. “That’s the way it is, so good evening,” as Hitchcock would say.