Clint Eastwood: Which Alfred Hitchcock film did he reject?

In September 1968, filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock appeared in L’Etau cinemas with Frederick Stafford and Danny Robin, but at the same time he was already imagining what his next film would be. For this new project, she contacted a very fashionable actress who recently became a director: Clint Eastwood. She offers him a role, but the latter is not as excited as he recalls Entertainment WeeklyQuotes from an ex-man’s anonymous words:

Hitchcock wanted me to star in one of his films. I was not crazy about the script. I had lunch with him in his office. When I entered, he was sitting straight and not moving. Only the eyes were moving. They led me across the room.

Due to suspicions about the story, Eastwood turned down Hitch’s offer and could have been replaced by another actor, as Walter Mathews, Sean Connery and Steve McQueen were also mentioned. Except that the project has never seen the light of day.

Eastwood really wanted to play in The Short Night. The filmmaker asked screenwriter James Costigan (who will sign Les Prédateurs) to write an adaptation of the novel. Short night Ronald Kirkbride is mixed with the real life of spy George Blake, in the KGB mall that has infiltrated MI6.

The Wizard of Suspension eventually abandoned the project after Frenzy to shoot a family conspiracy. However, in the late 1970s, he returned to writing “Short Night”. But Hitchcock wanted to open his film with a rape scene, which led to the departure of his co-worker Ernest Lehmann, who was hired in October 1977 to solve the script.

Finally this is the version written by the third author, David Freeman, that is most readily available today because it is reproduced this book. So we followed the journey of Gavin Brand, a dual agent, out of jail. He is followed by Joe Bailey, the brother of one of his victims who works for the CIA. Bailey manages to meet the brand’s family, but falls in love with his wife, who is also under his spell. The situation is obviously complicated on the day of the re-appearance of the brand …

In terms of casting, the role of the brand’s wife could have been played by Liv Ulman or Catherine Deneuve. In ExpressIn 2002, the actor made this statement:

There was Hitchcock, whom I met, thanks to François Truffaut, in Paris. We had lunch together, he told me about a spy movie project. The script was not developed and he had died before that. It’s a shame. Apparently he was very hard on the actors, but I wanted to enter his world.

The film will remain a discontinued project, culminating in the disappearance of Alfred Hitchcock on April 29, 1980. Since then Universal, which owns the script rights, has never released it in production.

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