No Bail for the Judge - the unmade Hepburn/Hitchcock film
History is full of lost films and films that were planned but never got made for one reason or another. This in itself is not particularly interesting, as it is an inevitable part of life. But some lost or unmade films are more interesting than others so I thought I could write about some of them. Here is the first.
On the last day of 1959, this ad appeared in The Hollywood Reporter:
It is for the new, eagerly awaited film by Alfred Hitchcock, the film that would follow North by Northwest (1959), bring Hitchcock back to filming in the UK, and be his first collaboration with Audrey Hepburn. But the film was never made, and I wanted to find out why. I began with checking several different books about Audrey Hepburn and about Alfred Hitchcock. They were not helpful at all, making contradictory claims and stating things that cannot be true. The very existence of the ad above disproves almost all of what they have to say about the project. Let me give you some examples.
According to Charles Higham’s Audrey - A Biography of Audrey Hepburn (1986)1, in the spring of 1959 Hepburn was sent a script for the film, written by Samuel Taylor, and Hitchcock called her and said that, though based on a novel, the script was especially rewritten for her. She responded by being excited and happy about doing the film. She was pregnant when she received the script, which she never actually read. Instead, she tragically had a miscarriage. After that she no longer wanted to make the film, partly because she was horrified by violence and partly because she felt the film would be too much of a strain on her. She told her agent Kurt Frings to tell Hitchcock she no longer wanted to do it. Hitchcock cancelled the project due to this and would be angry with Hepburn for the rest of his life. (pp. 158-160)
According to Diana Maychick’s Audrey Hepburn - An Intimate Portrait (1993), Hepburn said “I adored the script Mr. Hitchcock sent over /.../ I will never forget the story. /…/ I was so excited, I told Mr. Hitchcock to send over the contracts.” But then she had her miscarriage and withdrew from the project. Hitchcock cancelled it and never forgave her. (pp. 161-162)
According to Warren G. Harris’s Audrey Hepburn - A Biography (1994), she was flattered by Hitchcock’s proposal but did not like the script and told her agent Kurt Frings that she did not want to do the film due to her being pregnant. Hitchcock cancelled the project and instead decided to make a film, i.e. Psycho (1960), without any major stars to prove that he did not need Hepburn or any other. (p. 171)
According to Barry Paris’s Audrey Hepburn: A Biography (1997) she did not like Hitchcock or his films, and Paris quotes Robert Wolders (Hepburn’s last partner) as saying that she probably never even wanted to do the film and that it was instead her agent Kurt Frings who was doing this arrangement on his own accord. Paris also quotes Hepburn as saying in an interview with Larry King that she thought she did not make the film due to “another picture that was conflicting.” which Paris claims was “a polite lie”. (p. 166)
According to Donald Spoto’s Enchantment - The Life of Audrey Hepburn (2006), Hepburn had been wanting to make a film with Hitchcock for a long time, and that she loved many of his earlier films. When Hitchcock heard that she wanted to work with him he proposed that they make No Bail for the Judge together and a contract was signed in February of 1959. But in May of 1959 she told her agent Frings that she did not want to make the film after all due to her pregnancy, that she wanted to break her contract, and that he should inform Hitchcock about this. Another alleged reason for why she wanted to break her contract was that she disliked the script as it contained a murder attempt with a necktie on her character and she disliked violence. Spoto claims Hitchcock later cancelled the film but not because she had left but because they were denied permission to film on location in London by the local authorities and also because news laws regarding prostitutes would make an important plot point of the film impossible. (pp. 197-199)
According to Patrick McGilligan’s Alfred Hitchcock - A Life in Darkness and Light (2003), Hitchcock had been working on the film for a few years for Paramount but the company had gotten uneasy about a scene in a park where Hepburn’s character had to fend off an attempted rape. This scene was unacceptable to them and “on behalf of the studio, [associate producer Herbert] Coleman shelved the script, and halted the production.” But McGilligan also suggests another reason. That Hepburn, due to her pregnancy, did not want to make the film and that this made Hitchcock want to cancel the project (“The birth of Hepburn’s son Sean Ferrer on January 17, 1960, bears this out.” McGilligan claims.) McGilligan also suggests that Hitchcock in any event had already decided to proceed with the making of Psycho, doing a first production conference on June 3, 1959. (pp. 576-578)
In his own book The Hollywood I Knew: A Memoir (2003)2, Herbert Coleman claims that Hepburn really wanted to make the film, if Hitchcock agreed to remove one scene, but that she got pregnant and left the project anyway. (p. 275)
Ian Woodward, claims in his book Audrey Hepburn: The Fair Lady of the Screen (1993) that Hitchcock abandoned the project because Hitchcock had become more interested in making a film with Tippi Hedren (The Birds 1963) than with Hepburn and that this was why he never made No Bail for the Judge. (This might seem puzzling but will be explained further down.)
Judging by these various accounts, and I have read others too, Hepburn was thrilled to be working with Hitchcock, yet she never wanted to work with him. She loved his films, yet had never liked them. She read the script and loved it, yet she never read it. She signed a contract, yet she never signed one. She cancelled because she was pregnant but she also cancelled because she had a miscarriage, but she also did not cancel because Paramount did, while it was Hitchcock who cancelled because of not getting filming permits. What kind of madness is this?
They do have one claim in common though, except Woodward, which is that the project was cancelled at some time after May 1959 and most of them say it was because Hepburn did not want to do it, for one reason or another.
But let us go back to the ad I posted at the top. It is from December of 1959. Why would Paramount publish this ad if the project had been cancelled for several months? All these accounts must be wrong. And not just about that. Consider for example McGilligan’s statement that Hepburn had a son, Sean Ferrer, in January 1960. (Most of the others make the same claim.) That is less than eight months after she had a miscarriage, which is possible but not plausible. It is also wrong. She had a son in 1960, but in July, not January. You do not have to take my word for it, here is a copy of the announcement.3 (Working in a film library makes research so much easier.):
For some reason Wikipedia claims Sean Ferrer was born in June but that is wrong too.
The idea that she did not want to do the film because she hated violence is also peculiar because Hitchcock was already famous for sex and violence so why did she want to collaborate with him in the first place? (I think it is safe to assume that the claim that she never had any interest in working with Hitchcock is just not true.) In The Nun’s Story (1959), Hepburn’s character is viciously assaulted by a mad inmate, and she has to fight for her life. The film she had just made, in the first half of 1959, was the bleak and violent The Unforgiven (1960), directed by John Huston after Alan LeMay’s novel. Charade (1963), while light-hearted, contains a lot of violence, and in 1967 she made Wait Until Dark (1967) which is both violent and disturbing. How does this square with the claim she could not handle violent scenes?
In the script for No Bail for the Judge there is a scene in a park which is often mentioned as a scene Hepburn disliked, as her character, a woman pretending to be a prostitute in order to solve a murder, was supposedly brutally assaulted. Some say it was an attempted rape. But in the scene as it is written, at least in the script version I am familiar with, her character is walking in the park with a customer, and they have sex. He is not assaulting her; it is a business transaction. Distasteful maybe, and it is still possible that Hepburn took a dislike to this scene, but it contains no violence or threats. In an article from 2007 that is partly about Samuel Taylor’s script for the film, Richard Franklin also points out that the script has no rape scene. It seems this is yet another misunderstanding from the biographers and scholars. (You can read the scene as written, both in a first treatment and in the script, here.)
But, to again refer to that ad, none of the above matters as she was still committed to the film. All the different reasons given for why she dropped out of the project must be wrong because she did not drop out.
Since the books did not provide any coherent or plausible explanations I turned to British and American trade papers from the late 1950s and early 1960s: notes, articles, and ads. The first mention I could find was from April 3, 1958, when a note in The Hollywood Reporter (THR) said that Alfred Hitchcock would return to Paramount (after having made North by Northwest for MGM) to produce and direct an adaptation of the novel No Bail for the Judge. On July 30, 1958, it was reported in THR that Ernest Lehman would write it, but on Nov 12, 1958, THR reported that Samuel Taylor would take over as writer. (He did.) On November 26, 1958, THR reported a rumour that Hepburn would star in the film after she had finished making The Unforgiven. On February 6, 1959, Hepburn was mentioned again as her back problem had become a potential obstacle (she had fallen off a horse during the making of The Unforgiven). But on March 16, 1959, Paramount confirmed that she would star in No Bail for the Judge.
On May 21, 1959, THR reported that the making of the film would be postponed until 1960 due to Hepburn’s “impending motherhood” and that Hitchcock had signed Laurence Harvey to play the male lead. On September 23, 1959, Variety wrote of the preparations for the film and that it would have a budget of $1.500.000. THR reported on November 3, 1959, that filming on location in London would begin around mid-summer of 1960.
If these various reports are correct, it would mean that the film was delayed but Hepburn and Hitchcock were still aiming to make it. But after a year of silence on the topic, on January 13, 1961, THR reported that “‘No Bail for the Judge’ planned for some time as an Alfred Hitchcock production for Paramount as an Audrey Hepburn starrer has been removed from the company’s schedule.” They quote Hitchcock as claiming, “recent crackdowns on the situation killed the film’s gimmick.” This would be in line with what Spoto claimed in his Hepburn biography.
Despite the conventional wisdom that Hitchcock had cancelled the project in 1959, after Hepburn said she did not want to do it, here we are in 1961 and only now is Hitchcock giving up on it. But Paramount did not give up, and neither did Hepburn. Paramount instead transferred the project to producer Gant Gaither, and he employed Hagar Wilde (famous for having written Bringing Up Baby (1938)) to write a new script, according to a note in THR on February 7, 1961. In a note in Boxoffice, March 26, 1962, the film is still listed as an upcoming Paramount project starring Audrey Hepburn and Laurence Harvey, produced by Gant Gaither and written by Hagar Wilde. It was not Hepburn who left first, but Hitchcock. She was still onboard in 1962, a year after he left. But a year later she had apparently also left, as a note in Boxoffice on April 16, 1963, again lists the film as an upcoming Paramount project written by Wilde, but this time no stars are attached to it and no producer either so Gaither must have given up too, or been fired. It still has no director.
Finally, later in 1963, a new director signed on to it. On October 10, 1963, Stage and Television Today reported that Lewis Gilbert was set to direct it and on December 10, 1963, they reported that Alan Hackney would write the script and Gilbert produce and direct. But Hackney left/was removed. In April 1965, Boxoffice still had it listed as an upcoming Paramount project to be produced and directed by Gilbert, but with no stars or writer(s) attached to it.
After this Paramount apparently lost interest. In a recorded interview with Gilbert from 19964 he describes how Paramount tried to get him out of his contract but he insisted they pay what they owe him. The details are a little fuzzy, and are slightly different in his autobiography All My Flashbacks (2010, pp. 237-242), but the reason for Paramount’s decision to let Gilbert go and finally cancel the project was that the star they wanted as the leading man, George Peppard, had instead signed with MGM and was no longer available. (Peppard made Operation Crossbow (1965) for MGM in the UK.) This I was able to corroborate. Gilbert and Paramount then made a new deal whereby they would finance another film for him in England, Alfie (1966). This too seems accurate. It was fortunate for Gilbert as Alfie would become a big international hit, and a key film of British cinema of the 1960s, but it was the end of No Bail for the Judge. I have not found any further mentions of it.
What I find interesting is not that the film was never made or that it was stuck in the development stage for so long. This often happens, for all sorts of reasons. What is interesting to me are all these book accounts of the film, how they contradict each other and that they are also contradicted by established facts. There might be different reasons for this. One is that they are based on interviews, and we are not reliable witnesses to what has happened in the past. Not regarding what has happened to us and not regarding what has happened to others, where we also often have only second-hand information to begin with. We forget, get things mixed up, or interpret incorrectly. (I have written more about that here.) The books are also referring to each other and if one is wrong, the others will just repeat the error rather than correct it. McGilligan used Paris’s book about Hepburn as a main source, calling it “the authoritative biography,“ but it is not. Paris’s tale of No Bail for the Judge is as wrong as the others. The entry for No Bail for the Judge in Stephen Whitty’s The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia (2016) is, it seems, primarily based on McGilligan’s book with the inevitable result.
I do not know exactly what happened regarding No Bail for the Judge but here is a version which I think is consistent with what I have figured out:
Hitchcock wanted to make the film and decided to ask Hepburn if she wanted to play the lead. She wanted to, even if she had concerns about some scenes in it. (She often had such concerns about her characters and her scenes it seems.) She was hired for the film but when she discovered, during the making of The Unforgiven, that she was pregnant the production of No Bail for the Judge was postponed until the summer of 1960. If the pregnancy had continued, she would have given birth in October or November of 1959 and been available to make the film in the summer of 1960, as planned. While Hepburn rested at home, Hitchcock began preparations for Psycho.5 But because of her miscarriage the plans changed again.6 Instead of giving birth in October or November she became pregnant, probably in October, and the filming had to be postponed again as she was now scheduled to give birth in the summer of 1960.
During her new pregnancy she was asked if she wanted to make another film for Paramount, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and she hesitantly said yes. The filming of it began in the autumn of 1960. Then in early 1961, Hitchcock gave up on making No Bail for the Judge and later in the year began preparations to make The Birds, which explains the claim in Ian Woodward’s book mentioned above. Although Hitchcock gave up on No Bail for the Judge before he discovered Hedren, which was in October of 1961. It is also possible that it was in 1961, not 1959, that Hitchcock learned, as Spoto suggests in his book, that it would not be possible to make it in London the way Hitchcock wanted to.
Paramount kept the project going for several years after this but after they lost Peppard they had had enough.
What is still unclear is why Hepburn, in 1960, decided to make Breakfast at Tiffany's before No Bail for the Judge. There can be many reasons for this but I do not want to speculate anymore. There was enough of that in those books.
Higham’s book has apparently two different titles, the other being Audrey: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.
Coleman’s book also seems to have been published with two different titles, the other being The Man Who Knew Hitchcock: A Memoir.
It is reprinted in the book The Audrey Hepburn Treasures (2006) by Ellen Erwin and Jessica Z. Diamond.
There are hours of interviews with Gilbert but the section about No Bail for the Judge is after approximately 35 minutes on side (tape) 11. It is part of the British Entertainment History Project.
Several of the books I have read claim that Hitchcock was so angry with Hepburn for leaving the project that it made him decide to make his next film, Psycho, without any major stars. It is probably true that he was disappointed by the delay but he and Hepburn were still scheduled to make the film, only next year; after he had made Psycho. (The filming of Psycho began in the autumn of 1959.) Besides, Janet Leigh was a big star, and Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Martin Balsam, and John Gavin were stars too. Not in the league of Hepburn, but they were not minor either.
Some have said that the miscarriage in May was during her third trimester but that would mean she would have been heavily pregnant during the making of The Unforgiven, which ended in late April. I think she was at most five months pregnant when she miscarried.