Saturday Evening Post (02/Dec/1950) - The Role I Liked Best...

Details

• article: The Role I Liked Best...
• author(s): Alfred Hitchcock
• newspaper: Saturday Evening Post (02/Dec/1950)
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat (1944), The Reduco Corporation, William Bendix

Article

The Role I Liked Best...

MANY movie-goers think I play bit parts in the films I direct as a good-luck gesture that insures their success. That's nonsense. I've had my share of flops. Actually, I started putting myself in pictures twenty-five years ago in order to save the cost of extra players. I continued it from habit, I guess, or maybe because I'm just a frustrated ham.

My favorite role was in the picture Lifeboat, and I had an awful time thinking it up. Usually I play a passer-by, but you can't have a passer-by out on the ocean. I thought of being a dead body floating past the lifeboat, but I was afraid I'd sink. And I couldn't play one of the nine survivors, as each had to be played by a competent actor or actress.

Finally I hit on the perfect plan. I was on a strenuous diet at the time, working my way painfully down from 300 to 200 pounds. So I decided to immortalize my reduction and get my bit part by posing for "before" and "after" pictures. These photographs were used in a newspaper advertisement of an imaginary drug, Reduco, and the audience saw them — and me — when William Bendix opened an old newspaper he had picked up on the boat.

This role was a great hit. Letters literally poured in from fat people, asking where they could buy Reduco, the miracle drug that had helped me lose 100 pounds. Maybe I shouldn't admit it, but I got a certain satisfaction from writing back that the drug didn't exist, and adding smugly that the best way to lose weight was to go on a strenuous diet, as I had done.