THE BLIND MAN – Alfred Hitchcock’s Unrealized Film

Alfred Hitchcock

1960 was a very good year for legendary auteur Alfred Hitchcock. He was coming off of back-to-back smash hits with North By Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). The former is widely considered one of Hitchcock’s masterworks, grossing almost $10,000,000. Psycho, on a shoestring budget of $800,000, made over $32,000,000 worldwide, and was universally acclaimed. Sending Hitchcock’s career into the stratosphere.

At this point, Hitchcock could write his own ticket and do anything he wanted. What did he want to do next? Re-team with North By Northwest screenwriter Ernest Lehman and make a thriller set in California’s Disneyland. The film was to have begun production in early 1961 and would have been called The Blind Man.

Both Hitchcock and Lehman, after the positive experience they had on North By Northwest, were anxious to move forward. Lehman officially signed on to the project in December 1960. Part of the proposed action would be a cat and mouse chase between the musician and the killer that takes place throughout Disneyland’s Fantasyland.

Premise

The premise of the script was that blind jazz pianist “Jimmy Shearing” regains his sight after surgically receiving the eyes of a dead man, in a role to be played by Jimmy Stewart. While watching the Wild West show at Disneyland with his family, Shearing begins to have visions of being shot. Realizing that the dead man whose eyes he has, was actually murdered. The image of the murderer still imprinted on the retina of his new eyes.

Shearing, soon realizes the killer is a man that he had previously met at Disneyland, and in the film’s climax, the two would fight to the death aboard the RMS Queen Mary. The ending of The Blind Man had Shearing defeating the killer.

Yet, in a fit of brutal irony, having acid thrown in his face. Rendering our hero blind again. Just the way he was when the movie started. All of this would have been quintessential Alfred Hitchcock. Of course, there would be problems, and the first of these problems would be a man named Walt Disney.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney was no fan of Alfred Hitchcock. Disney said publicly that Psycho was “disgusting” and that he would never let his kids watch a movie like that. When the man who started the House of Mouse read in the daily trades that Hitchcock was planning to make a film that took place in his beloved Disneyland. He was none too pleased.

Disney was vehemently against Hitchcock using the Disney name or location for his next production. Further, Disney stated that he would NEVER let Hitchcock shoot a movie in Disneyland. It was at this point that Hitchcock and Lehman switched the central setting from Disneyland to an around-the-world cruise liner. 

Production Problems

On top of the issues with Walt Disney, Jimmy Stewart had over-committed himself. When he realized that there was production trouble with Hitchcock’s latest project, he was forced to drop out of the film. He was not yet contractually obligated.

Inevitably, Lehman and Hitchcock were unable to resolve the plot differences, and Lehman broke his contract and dropped out of the picture. Hitchcock vowed never to speak to his collaborator Ernest Lehman again. They didn’t for 16 years until they got together again on 1976’s Family Plot, Hitchcock’s final film.

It’s staggering to think what Hitchcock’s most ambitious film to date would have looked like. One can only imagine that Bernard Hermann, who had scored the iconic soundtracks to North By Northwest, Vertigo & Psycho, would have been back. Hitchcock’s next film wouldn’t be for another three years, when The Birds would come out in 1963.

Hiatus

During Hitchcock’s hiatus, the director would sit down for a historical 50-hour interview with fellow director Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim). This would eventually be transcribed and published as the coffee table book “Hitchbook” in 1967. His popular anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents was also in full swing on the CBS Network.

After The Birds, you can make the case that Hitchcock’s remaining films were never up to the level of his masterpieces with the possible exception of Marnie, released in 1964 and starring Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren. Alfred Hitchcock would pass away from liver failure in Bel Air in 1980 at the age of 80. His career is unmatched, and it’s a shame we never got to see his fully-realized vision of The Blind Man.

Mark Gatiss

With that said, all is not lost. Ernest Lehman’s unfinished screenplay of The Blind Man was finally completed in 2015 by British writer/director/actor Mark Gatiss (Professor Lazarus from a great 2007 episode of Doctor Who). It was subsequently adapted for the radio by British producer Laurence Bowen.

Bowen had discovered Lehman’s unfinished script at a research institute in Texas, along with handwritten correspondence and notes that had been exchanged between Hitchcock and Lehman. In this version of the story, famous blind jazz pianist, “Larry Keating” agrees to a radical new eye transplant surgery.

The BBC

Much like the original screenplay, the operation that Keating undergoes is successful. However, he now has the eyes of a murdered man. With the image of his murderer burned onto his retina. Larry and his nurse “Jenny” begin a quest to track down the murderer before he kills again.

The always fantastic Hugh Laurie (House, The Night Manager) plays Larry Keating, and the cast includes Rebecca Front (The Thick Of It) and Peter Serafinowicz (Shaun Of The Dead), who narrates the story as Alfred Hitchcock. You can listen to the entire BBC production below. The BBC Radio production of The Blind Man was part of their “Unmade Movies” series.

This was a season of radio adaptions that primarily consisted of unfinished screenplays by major authors and directors of the 20th century. This included works by Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as Ernest Lehman. The finished script for The Blind Man doesn’t sound or “feel” like typical Hitchcock. But it’s still worth a listen, if only for historical reasons.

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