Me And Hitch – Evan Hunter, 1997 ★★★

Two for the Birds

The movie business makes for strange bedfellows. How else to explain the collaboration of Evan Hunter, gritty, streetwise creator of The Blackboard Jungle and the 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals under the penname “Ed McBain”; with that genteel and sophisticated Master of the Macabre himself, Alfred Hitchcock? Hardly birds of a feather, but what about results?

Evan Hunter worked on two screenplays for Hitchcock in the 1960s. The first of them, The Birds, was a qualified success. The second, Marnie, climaxed in a disagreement which led to Hunter’s dismissal in the pre-production stage. Decades later, Hunter looked back on their time together in this short book.

…the first thing I asked was, “What do I call you?”

“Why, Hitch,” he said, sounding surprised. “Everyone else does.”

While poles apart in many ways, Hunter and Hitch were alike, too. Both were meticulous craftsmen. Both were known for suspenseful dramas alleviated by lighter moments of comedy and romance. Both had ideas about women which would raise eyebrows today.

“There was never any question in either of our minds, by the way, that the leading role would be a woman’s,” Hunter writes of The Birds. “Instinctively, we recognized that women fear birds more than men do, a psychological truth that later hurt the movie’s box office gross and baffled Hitch.”

Hitchcock’s own problematic attitude toward women was considerably darker. It reared its head in the making of Marnie and became the direct cause of Hunter’s firing.

Tippi Hedren, star of both The Birds and Marnie, later described her time with Hitch as having to keep a pervy creep at bay until he got so frustrated at her failure to put out that he threatened to ruin her career. Something of this personality shows up in Hunter’s account.

Marnie featured Hedren in the title role, a woman who has a habit of stealing money from employers until one employer finds her out and falls in love with her. The employer, a guy named Rutland played by Sean Connery, presses her into marriage and then tries to have sex with her for the first time. She says no. He insists, eventually forcing himself on her.

At least that was how Hitchcock envisioned it:

“Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!”

Tippi Hedren's Marnie on her wedding night with Sean Connery's Rutland. According to Me And Hitch, Marnie wasn't the only one with qualms about that night. Image from https://www.michigandaily.com/arts/04interview-tippi-hedren12.

Hunter couldn’t imagine making Rutland likable if he did such a thing, and said so. This went back and forth until Hitchcock fired Hunter with a rubber-stamped signature. Later, the screenwriter Hitchcock replaced Hunter with, Jay Preston Allen, explained to Hunter what went wrong:

“You just got bothered by the scene that was his reason for making the movie. You just wrote your ticket back to New York.”

There’s a bittersweet quality to this book not all due to the Marnie experience. In fact, the other movie, the one Hitchcock and Hunter worked on together all the way through, left its own sore spots for Hunter. Sometimes he and Hitchcock had very different ideas about a scene; other times the results fell short of Hunter’s expectations.

Their association actually began in 1959, with a teleplay Hunter scripted for the TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” “Appointment At Eleven,” adapted from a story by Robert Turner, featured a man in a bar watching a clock. Hunter suspected Hitchcock liked the subtle way Hunter drew out the mostly interior drama. A couple of years later, when Hitchcock decided to adapt a Daphne Du Maurier novella about a Cornish couple attacked by birds, he reached out to Hunter.

As Hitchcock explained when he first posed the possibility of a collaboration to Hunter, very little about the novella would be kept, aside from its title, The Birds.

The first thing he said was that he never wanted to work in Britain again, and certainly did not wish to use as his lead characters an inarticulate farmer and his dreary wife.

“So forget the story entirely,” he said. “The only elements we’ll be…”

We’ll be!

“…using from it are the title and the notion of birds attacking human beings. Other than that, we’ll be starting from scratch and building an entirely new story. When can you come out?”

The most enjoyable aspect of this book are glimpses you get at Hitchcock the man. He insists on Hunter wearing a jacket and tie to their story conferences, and gets touchy when Hunter’s wife at the time mishandles a bottle from his prize wine collection, but on the whole he emerges as the affable fellow you expect from his stand-up sequences in “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Hitch and Hunter on the set of The Birds. By now, Hitch's rule about a jacket and tie were firmly established. Image from https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Hitchcock_Gallery:_Evan_Hunter.

When Hitchcock visits the Hunters to take Evan and his wife for Halloween, he brings along copies of his latest spook-story anthology for the Hunters’ three sons. When children stand at the roadside holding signs asking Hitchcock to stop and say hello, he does – signing autographs for up to a half-hour.

Hunter recalls having an idea of how to rework the Du Maurier novella into something more Hitchcockian. He wanted to start off by making it into a comedy, about a high-society girl who meets a handsome lawyer in a pet store buying lovebirds for his sister. She pretends to be an employee to get to talking with her. He recognizes her from the society pages but plays along.

Hunter took his inspiration from “screwball comedies of the forties”:

Once we got them laughing, we would be leading them down the garden path. And once the early comic scenes turned frightening, then whenever there was a lull between bird attacks, we could hope for a sort of nervous laughter that would lead to further screaming even if we photographed an innocent feather duster.

By the time he got around to writing Me And Hitch, Hunter nursed serious doubts about that very approach:

When I first suggested “Screwball Comedy Becomes Terror,” Hitch should have said, “That is the worst idea I have ever heard in my life.” Let’s move on.” Instead, we marched ahead confidently, blithely trying to graft upon Du Maurier’s simple tale of apocalyptic terror a slick story about two improbable lovers confronted with an even more improbable situation – birds attacking humans.

Hunter’s negativity for The Birds was a bit of a surprise to me. It was a well-regarded film when this book was published, eight years before Hunter’s death in 2005. It is even better regarded now, not only for the famous bird attacks but the odd tonal blend of comedy and suspense. It’s not a deft film, I’d agree, but it is quite a good one.

Hunter takes pride in one sequence he wrote, a long argument among the principals and some diners at a restaurant regarding the birds which is a standout moment in the film. On the whole he seems embarrassed by such things as the failure to develop a believable romance between the main characters and what others call a strength, its ambiguous ending.

Hunter didn’t like the rewrites Hitchcock did on his script, and he didn’t like that Hitchcock sought outside advice to resolve story issues. He even was bothered that the film included no music. Ultimately it came down to Hitchcock’s cerebral approach to the material: “He was going for high art.”

With Marnie, problems came earlier and proved impossible to resolve. Hunter recalls he was game anyway, eager to extend his collaboration with Hitchcock despite the distraction it was causing his fiction career. He wasn’t wild about the story, but felt he could craft something appropriately dark and probing, with references to psychological phenomena like “screen memory.” If only he could get Hitchcock to see things his way about Marnie’s rape scene…

I wish this had been a longer book. Perhaps Hunter felt he only had 90 pages of material to offer, but Me And Hitch leaves you wanting much more. It’s written in a clean, functional, matter-of-fact way that assumes you know the movies well enough already and just need some filling in on details. This becomes problematic with the Marnie section.

Still, it was a good read. If you are a fan – of Hitch, of Evan Hunter, or especially both of them – you will want to seek this out in the used-book section. Perhaps it could be republished as part of a collection including Hunter’s screenplays for The Birds and Marnie. I suspect one would have fun comparing Hunter’s Marnie with the final version and playing “Spot-the-Difference.”