The man who helped establish the Hitchcock persona

Alfred Hitchcock in the James Allardice-scripted introduction for The Jar, an episode on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Another in a series about unsung figures of television.

Alfred Hitchcock was long known as the “master of suspense.” But it was writer James Allardice who helped mold the director’s image with the public.

Allardice (1919-1966) wrote all of the introductions and epilogues performed by Hitchcock on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Each week, audiences witnessed Hitchcock making droll remarks, including jibes at his unnamed sponsors. (“And speaking of business,” he says with disdain, “we come to this item.”)

Norman Lloyd, still with us at 103, discussed Allardice in a 2000 interview for the Archive of American Television. Lloyd worked at a producer on Hitchcock’s television shows after being an actor in the director’s Saboteur (1942) as the villain who fell from the Statue of Liberty.

Allardice “was a little fella, he looked not unlike Woody Allen,” Lloyd said. “Actually a little better looking. But…same height, the glasses and everything.”

The writer “had an absolute genius for creating this character Hitchcock played every time the show went on the air,” Lloyd added. “Hitchcock said every word this man wrote. Never changed a comma…What he was doing was precious in regard to the success of the show.”

Hitchcock’s creative team would send summaries of several episodes for Allardice. According to the Lloyd interview, Allardice sometimes didn’t even begin writing until a few days before the deadline but always delivered his work in on time.

To be sure, Hitchcock already was famous when Alfred Hitchcock Presents debuted in 1955. The director’s name had long been attached to the titles of his films (“Alfred Hitcock’s To Catch a Thief,” “Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window” and so on.)

However, now Hitchcock himself was coming into millions of homes via television. No silent, momentary cameos like in his films. The director was now truly a performer. Because the two shows were anthologies, Hitchcock was the only face the audience could count on seeing every week.

And it was Allardice who was feeding him his lines and establishing the settings.

What settings they were. Hitchcock in a giant bottle. Hitchcock holding a ticking bomb, describing it as a dynamite-powered clock. Hitchcock’s brother “George” manipulating Hitchcock like a marionette (a dual role, of course).

Allardice spent a full decade working for Hitchcock on the two television series. (Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran seven seasons, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ran three.)

“Jimmy had a voice, so to speak that he used Hitchcock for,” Lloyd said in the 2000 interview. “It became the Hitchcock persona but it was Jimmy saying a lot of things about the world through these mad introductions and conclusions.”

You can view an excerpt from Lloyd’s interview where he discusses Allardice below.

What if Fleming hadn’t exited U.N.C.L.E.?

The cast of Checkmate

We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Ian Fleming crying U.N.C.L.E. and opting to end his participation in the television series that would become The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But would have happened if he had stuck around?

It might have been similar to Checkmate, a 1960-62 crime drama on CBS.

Checkmate featured two dashing private detectives (Anthony George and Doug McClure), aided by an academic (Sebastian Cabot). Two things stood out about the show: it was produced by a production company owned by Jack Benny and it was billed as having been created by novelist Eric Ambler (1909-1998), a contemporary of Ian Fleming. In fact, in the novel From Russia, With Love, Fleming’s James Bond has an Ambler novel with him on his journey to Istanbul. Amber in 1958 also married Joan Harrison, an associate of Alfred Hitchcock, who oversaw production of the director’s television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

According to IMDB.com, Ambler never wrote an episode of Checkmate. According to the IMDB.com information, he sometimes got a creator credit and sometimes didn’t during the two seasons of the show. (From a few episodes we’ve seen, the “Created by Eric Ambler” credit appears in the main titles during the first season and shows up in the end titles in the second.)

Ambler’s participation (or lack of it) in Checkmate mirrors what was shaping up with the television project originally named Solo: it was originally to have billed Ian Fleming’s Solo, but the heavy lifting of devising a pilot episode story was done by writer Sam Rolfe. Once Fleming signed away his U.N.C.L.E. rights for 1 British pound, Rolfe still only got a “developed by” credit instead of a “created by” credit for the 1964-68 series.

Based on a sampling of episodes, Checkmate is entertaining. One episode (The Human Touch) featured Peter Lorre as the villain. Also, the series, including its theme music, was an early credit for composer John Williams (who called himself Johnny Williams at the time). Still, Ambler didn’t do the heavy lifting in terms of coming up with stories. That was left to others.

As a result, we suspect had The Man From U.N.C.L.E. come out as Ian Fleming’s Solo, the author would have been a kind of front man (even if he had lived past August 1964) while executive producer Norman Felton, Rolfe (who produced the show’s first season) and others done most of the work of devising story lines.

Fleming and Hitchcock: how to turn old news into a `scoop’

This week, the U.K. Daily Mail newspaper had a story it presented as a scoop: that Ian Fleming wanted Alfred Hitchcock to direct the first James Bond movie and he went through novelist Eric Ambler to make an approach to the famed director.

“I say you chaps, what’s the fuss?”

You can view the Mail’s story BY CLICKING HERE. Warning: be prepared to read deep into the story before finding the whole story. But first, here’s an excerpt:

James Bond creator Ian Fleming wanted Alfred Hitchcock to direct the first 007 movie, it has emerged.

A telegram sent in 1959 has revealed one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ in British cinema history and will leave James Bond fans shaken and stirred.

Fleming sent the communique in which he asked Hitchcock to take the helm of the first Bond film through a mutual friend. (emphasis added)

Oh, and here’s the headline (at least on the Web edition):

Revealed: The secret telegram that shows Ian Fleming wanted Alfred Hitchcock to direct the first Bond film (emphasis added)

The “first Bond film” in question was Thunderball, which originated as a film project in the late 1950s. When it fell apart, Fleming turned it into a novel, starting a complicated legal fight. Thunderball would eventually become the fourth film in the series produced by Eon Proudctions and would spawn a non-Eon remake, 1983’s Never Say Never Again.

If you read all the way to the 11th paragraph of the Daily Mail story, you’ll see the article cites the Web site Letters of Note, which IN A MAY 2 POST (or 13 days before the Daily Mail story) produced an image of the telegram sent from Fleming to Ambler about making an approach to Hitchcock.

Letters of Note, meanwhile, credited Robert Sellers’s book, The Battle for Bond, which was first published in 2007, or five years ago, with turning up the telegram.

Letters of Note is a Web site that reproduces images of letters, correspondence, etc., involving famous people. Nor is this the first time, it has dealt with Fleming. Last year, the site presented a copy of a letter Fleming sent to a reader indicating that James Bond survived the end of the From Russia With Love novel. The value Letters of Note brings is that people can view images of the original documents.

The Daily Mail didn’t mention The Battle for Bond until the next-to-last paragraph. Now, the Daily News could have added more value to the story but didn’t.

For example, why did Fleming send a telegraph to a British novelist with a Los Angeles address? Well, even minor research would have shown Ambler was working as a movie and television writer, including the screenplay for the movie The Wreck of the Mary Deare and creating the 1960-62 television series Checkmate. Dig a little bit deeper and you’d discover that Ambler in 1958 married to Joan Harrison, a Hitchcock associate who was a producer on the Alfred Hitchock Presents television show, and had worked with the director even further back, including as a writer on 1939’s Jamaica Inn.

And, finally, digging just a little further back, you’d discover that in the From Russia, With Love novel, the literary Bond takes a copy of an Eric Ambler novel with him to Istanbul (Chapter 13). Adding any or all of these details would have made for a much richer article. Instead, the newspaper takes a revelation from a five-year-old book and tells us how Bond fans will be shaken and stirred.

Not quite.