For 1945’s Spellbound, Hitchcock even brought in surrealist artist Salvador Dali to help concoct the film’s complex dream sequences. The director hired the likes of Dorothy Parker, Raymond Chandler, Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck to punch up his scripts, and tried to get both Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov to write for him. Hitchcock teamed with legendary Hollywood actors like Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Jimmy Stewart, but he also enlisted the help of talents from outside the film world.
He worked with famous painters and literary figures. The portly Hitchcock can be seen in the “before” and “after” photos in a newspaper ad for a weight loss product called “Reduco Obesity Slayer.” One of the most creative cameos came in the 1944 film “Lifeboat,” which takes place entirely on a raft adrift at sea. The director usually appeared in the background as a pedestrian or a public transportation passenger, and his walk-on parts eventually became so beloved that he had to place them early in the film to avoid distracting his audience. Part of Hitchcock’s fame was due to the self-referential and often humorous appearances he made in 39 of his movies. The actors were chained to each other for a good while before Hitchcock suddenly “found” the key in a coat pocket and explained that the ordeal had been a ruse to help them build chemistry. During the filming of “The 39 Steps,” he handcuffed the two leads together for a scene and then pretended to have lost the key. In some cases, Hitchcock even used his pranks as part of the creative process. The crewman accepted, only to later find that the director had secretly dosed him with a laxative before slapping on the cuffs. For one of his most elaborate stunts, Hitchcock bet one of his crew that the man couldn’t spend a whole night locked in handcuffs. He delighted in placing whoopee cushions under his coworkers’ chairs and once held a dinner party where all the courses had been inexplicable dyed blue with food coloring.
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Hitchcock had a penchant for pulling absurd and often cruel pranks on his movie sets and in his private life. Among other contributions, she was responsible for persuading Hitchcock to consider using composer Bernard Herrmann’s now-famous string score for the shower murder scene in the film “Psycho.” 3. Reville moved further behind the scenes as Hitchcock’s career progressed, but she continued to consult on key script, casting and editing decisions well into the 1960s.
As a young director, he was even known to look over to Reville after each take and ask, “Was it all right?” before moving on to the next shot. Reville later served as a writer, script supervisor, editor and assistant director on dozens of Hitchcock’s early films, and he came to value her opinion above all others. The two married in 1926 after working together at the London branch of a production company called Famous Players-Lasky. Hitchcock worked with many of the top talents in Hollywood, but his most trusted advisor was almost certainly his wife, Alma Reville.
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