Though Hitchcock had been working with Paramount Studios for some time, MGM attempted to recruit the director to adapt Hammond Innes’ novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster set to star.
Hitchcock discovered filming in the area would be nearly impossible both physically and financially, so, along with hesitation about making such a politically charged film, decided to scrap Flamingo Feather altogether. Stewart and Hitchcock had recently finished filming The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) in Morocco, so Hitchcock soon performed a research trip in Africa to scout locations. He also wanted Grace Kelly to reappear with Stewart as the romantic interest, while Paramount Studios was bragging about using over 50,000 extras. Hitchcock (via BFI) had cast James Stewart as the lead-role adventurer and would be traveling to South Africa for filming. One of the most interesting unmade films of Hitchcock’s 1950s span was Flamingo Feather, a proposed adaptation of Laurens van der Post’s novel documenting a South African anthropologist who discovers communists in the area are enticing the Black population into rebellion. Possibly as a way to avoid being blacklisted by HUAC, Hitchcock became fascinated with using anti-communist plots in some of his unrealized projects. It appears that Hitchcock tried to trade in his 1930s Nazi fear in Europe for a 1950s Communist red-scare in America after his transition to Hollywood. Though a Hitchcock and Hepburn collaboration in the late 1950s likely would have been a blockbuster hit and elevated both of their careers, the scrapping of No Bail for the Judge allowed Hitchcock to move forward with arguably his biggest masterpiece, Psycho. However, Hitchcock refused, and the project was thrown out. The novel was extremely racy, and Paramount was hesitant to back its controversial subject matter while Hepburn was against filming a rape scene.Ĭlaims (via Newsweek) suggested Hepburn and Paramount lobbied for Hitchcock to continue filming but omit the rape scene. One of the more notable nearly-made Hitchcock films, No Bail for the Judge, was set to star Audrey Hepburn as the lawyer along with actors Laurence Harvey and John Williams. The documentary was scrapped at the time, but Hitchcock’s footage has been reconstructed and shown in a recent documentary, Night Will Fall, that dives into the backstory and process of the unmade film.Īnother failed attempt at bringing a successful thriller novel to the big screen, Hitchcock tried to adapt the Henry Cecil novel about an English lawyer, assisted by a thief, who has to defend her father, a High Court judge, after he is accused of murdering a prostitute.
Reports found (via BBC) that the British filmmakers decided it was no longer necessary to show Nazi atrocities to the German people, instead of focusing on repairing relationships with the country. Hitchcock was recruited as a supervising director in which he would uncover Nazi crimes and concentration camps, including segments created by Allied military units from the United States, United Kingdom, and France, as well as the Soviet Union. The unmade Nazi documentary that Hitchcock intended to direct would have been produced in 1945 toward the end of World War II. The most overt World War II anti-Nazi film made by Hitchcock was Notorious which starred Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains, where the formers are spies that are trying to obtain secrets from the latter Nazi leader. Several of Hitchcock’s British-era films from the ‘30s, like The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps, allude to international espionage, treason, and an immoral national enemy that hint at Europe’s crisis. Though Hitchcock never made a movie that explicitly involved World War II or named its primary players, his films of the 1930s and early 1940s carry messages that very obviously touch on the horrible situation in Europe and eventually in the United States.
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