Retro-Active: The Best from the Cinema Retro Archives.
By Harvey
Chartrand
Neville
Heath was an English killer
responsible for the murders of two young women. He was executed by hanging in
London in 1946 (aged 29). Heath was a handsome and well-spoken sociopath who
could easily lure women to their doom.
In 1967, Alfred Hitchcock was trying to rebound
from the failure of the Cold War espionage thriller Torn Curtain with an
original screenplay entitled Frenzy (and later Kaleidoscope). The
unproduced project was to have been based on the crimes of serial rapist-killer
Heath, although the story would be set in the present day in and around New
York City. The original story would be told completely from the point of view
of a murderer who is both attractive and vulnerable.
Screenwriter Benn Levy wrote in a letter to
Hitchcock in January 1967: “It's got to be (based on) Heath, not (John George) Haigh
(the acid bath murderer). Told forwards, the Heath story is a gift from heaven.
You'd start with a ‘straight’ romantic meeting, handsome young man, pretty
girl. Maybe he rescues her from the wild molestations of a drunken escort. ‘I
can't stand men who paw every girl they meet.’ Get us rooting for them both. He
perhaps unhappily married and therefore a model of screen-hero restraint. She begins
to find him irresistibly ‘just a little boy who can't cope with life’ -- least
of all with domestic problems such as he has described. She's sexually maternal
with him, she'd give him anything -- and we're delighted. Presently a few of us
get tiny stirrings of disquiet at the physical love-scenes but don't quite know
why. By the time we see the climax of his love in action and her murder, then
even the slowest of us get it! But we shouldn't know till then.â€
Frenzy would also be a stylistic
departure for Hitchcock. After watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up,
Hitchcock felt he had fallen behind the Italians in technique. Hitchcock
biographer Patrick McGilligan writes: “Watching one Antonioni, he sat up
straight at the sight of a man all in white in a white room. ‘White on white!’
he exclaimed to (his personal assistant and script supervisor) Peggy Robertson.
‘There, you see! It can be done!’â€
Hitchcock was also impressed
by the camerawork improvisation of maverick American director John Cassavetes (Shadows). He asked the novelist Howard
Fast (Spartacus, Cheyenne Autumn) to sketch a treatment about a gay, deformed serial
killer. Pleased with the results, Hitchcock composed a shot list with over 450
camera positions and shot an hour’s worth of experimental color tests, using
unknown actors in various states of undress. This footage was filmed in New
York City, and gives a tantalizing glimpse of what Hitchcock had in mind, of how
revolutionary Frenzy/Kaleidoscope would have been in his body
of work – a Psycho for the more
liberated counterculture era. Unfortunately, MCA/Universal were disgusted by
the script and test footage and immediately canceled the project, reducing
Hitchcock to tears. Hitchcock was coerced into directing Topaz, Leon Uris’ behind-the-scenes account of the breakup of a
Soviet spy ring at the highest levels of the French government during the 1962 Cuban
missile crisis. Topaz was another in
a string of artistic and commercial failures for Hitchcock as he approached age
70.
What would have been
Hitchcock's most daring and controversial work was thwarted: an avant-garde
film using hand-held camerawork, a first-person viewpoint and natural lighting
(Ã la Blair Witch Project, filmed
32 years later), detailing the exploits of a gay bodybuilder who dabbles
in murder, rape and possibly necrophilia. It was conceived in 1964 as a prequel
to Hitchcock’s 1942 film Shadow of a Doubt and was initially titled Frenzy,
not to be confused with his eventual 1972 movie of the same name, from which
certain plot elements of the original Frenzy
were recycled.
Hitchcock’s interest in
Neville Heath first manifested itself in 1959 in his unproduced project No Bail for the Judge, which would have
starred Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Harvey and John Williams. A respected judge is
blamed for the murder of a prostitute, and his barrister daughter searches for
the real killer in London’s criminal demi-monde. Hepburn, who desperately
wanted to work with Hitchcock, suddenly withdrew from the project because of a
scene in which her character is brutally raped in Hyde Park by a good-looking London
pimp named Edward “Neddy-Boy†Devlin, who dominates Hepburn by
slowly strangling her with a necktie.
Audrey Hepburn never did work
with Hitchcock, but Laurence Harvey got along with the Master of Suspense and
starred in Arthur (1959), a grisly episode
of the long-running TV anthology series Alfred
Hitchcock Presents in which a beautiful woman (Hazel Court) meets with a
terrible fate.
The rape scene in No Bail for the Judge obviously was one that Hitchcock wanted to
realize, in one form or another. It is quite similar to the scene of Mark’s
rape of the frigid Marnie on
their honeymoon cruise. The unproduced script of No Bail for the
Judge also looks forward to the unproduced Frenzy/Kaleidoscope
and to Hitchcock’s serial killer masterpiece Frenzy (1972), with its sexually impotent necktie strangler Bob
Rusk (Barry Foster) loose in London, eager to pin the murders of several
attractive women on his best friend. The unproduced Frenzy contains a
sequence in New York’s Central Park where the killer, Willie Cooper, takes a
young woman into the bushes and murders her. And while Bob Rusk may have more victims
to his credit than Neville Heath and Willie Cooper, it is clear that Edward
“Neddy-Boy†Devlin was Hitchcock’s first “necktie stranglerâ€.
So, as Hitchcock matured as an
artist, his impulse to film violent misogynistic scenes intensified – scenes
which would finally be free from censorship in the freewheeling “anything goesâ€
atmosphere of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies.