Despite being unfit for active military service,
Alfred Hitchcock
was very keen to contribute to the war effort, especially after a snide comment by his former producer
Michael Balcon
about "plump" British directors going to
Hollywood
"while we who are left behind short-handed are trying to harness the films to our great national effort".
Balcon's
target was unmistakable, but
Hitchcock
was restricted by his contract with producer
David O Selznick
and had to remain in California for much of the war.
He managed to help, though, by shooting some footage for the short
Watchtower Over Tomorrow
(US, 1941, d. John Cromwell, Harold Kress), and then by accepting an invitation from the
Ministry of Information
to shoot two propaganda shorts aimed at Resistance fighters.
After tortuous negotiations with
Selznick
,
Hitchcock
flew to England to make
Bon Voyage
and
Aventure Malgache
back-to-back between January and February 1944. The resulting films were all too characteristic of Hitchcock, in other words too suggestive and ambiguous to work as propaganda vehicles, which require a clearly-defined good-versus-evil setting to be truly effective.
As a result,
Aventure Malgache
was never shown at all, while
Bon Voyage
was only given limited screenings in France before being withdrawn. Although
Francois Truffaut
mentioned the films in passing in his seminal 1967 book on
Hitchcock
, they remained unshown until 1993, when they were finally released as a double bill.
Hitchcock's final contribution to the war effort was a 1945 documentary on the concentration camps, provisionally entitled
F3080
. Credited as "treatment advisor",
Hitchcock
supervised the editing of newsreel materials. However, the project was shelved during production, for forty years existing only as 55 minutes of edited footage and a written commentary. In 1985,
Trevor Howard
recorded the commentary and the result was shown on American television as
Memories of the Camps
.
Michael Brooke
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