Hitchcock already had casting for the three major parts in mind. In this December 1959 issue of Paramount World, Hitchcock’s No Bail for the Judge is set to start filming with Hepburn during “mid-summer” of 1960. Richard Franklin– an acolyte of Hitchcock’s and director of Psycho II- read the Sam Taylor script and felt the ending in which Edward gets drunk at one of his mother’s society parties, confesses to his crimes, and then falls to his doom lacked “the patina of Hitchcock,” though no doubt further refining could have led to a more inspired conclusion. Paramount executives wanted it cut, while Hitchcock remained adamant that it needed to stay put. This part of the plot would cause a great deal of grief throughout the project’s brief life. The scene can be read in excerpt form at this link. Throughout the sequence, Elizabeth is terrified, and only submits to Edward’s advances to keep her cover intact. In a bit of kinky foreplay, he uses his necktie to pull Elizabeth to him, then lowers her onto the ground before the screen fades to black. During a stroll with Edward in Hyde Park, Elizabeth uses the opportunity to try to get information about the murder out of him, but his lust-addled mind is elsewhere. This leads us to the most controversial part of Hitchcock’s conception of No Bail- the infamous Hyde Park sequence, often referred to as a rape scene. There is also the irony of Elizabeth’s disguise: she is not literally a prostitute, but has to use her body to glean information from Edward once she catches his attention. In the name of justice, she blackmails the petty thief into aiding her and then becomes willing to sacrifice him even after he does so. What’s more, Hitchcock wanted to create a sense of moral ambiguity about Elizabeth’s actions. Hitchcock imagined Elizabeth as a woman self-possessed to the point of repression, her misadventures in the underworld forcing her to confront sexual passions. Elizabeth’s investigation involves masquerading as a prostitute in order to infiltrate the underworld, compromising her safety when she catches the unwanted attention of Edward. The other big addition to the story would have been the usual dose of Hitchcockian psychosexuality. The killer would be her playboy son Edward and his preferred murder weapon would be a necktie– a tool that would be reused to much nastier effect by sex-murderer Bob Rusk in Hitchcock’s pentultimate thriller, Frenzy. Uninterested in such basic villainy, Hitchcock would have swapped him out for a respected society matron, an urbane antagonist cut from the same cloth as the Sebastians in Notorious, Tony Wendice in Dial M for Murder, or Phillip Vandamm in North by Northwest. In the book, the mastermind is a garden variety crook named Sydney Trumper, Flossie’s landlord and pimp. The identity of the villain would have changed as well. In Hitchcock’s version, she’d be the heart of the story– not only that, but a barrister to boot! In the novel, Elizabeth is on the periphery of the action. Hitchcock planned on shifting the protagonist role from the thief to Elizabeth, with the thief only serving as a supporting character. Hitchcock was rarely a stickler for adapting books to the letter and the trend was not to have been bucked for No Bail. He initially reached out to Ernest Lehman to write a script, but when Lehman declined, Samuel Taylor got the job instead. The judge being falsely accused of a crime undoubtedly appealed to Hitchcock’s love for the “wrong man” trope. He adored Cecil’s dry sense of humor and wanted to replicate that in a film version. The novel got on Hitchcock’s radar by the mid-1950s. The novel ends with the judge’s freedom, and the implication that Elizabeth and Ambrose will become a couple. Ambrose manipulates the criminals involved, getting them to turn on one another and denounce each other in court. Low’s snooping reveals Flossie was trying to blackmail the head of the prostitution ring, which led to her death. She offers not to call the police on him if he helps her investigate the murder. She recruits Ambrose Low, a petty thief raiding the Prout apartment for a rare stamp collection. While the press roars with schadenfraude over the respected judge’s apparent indiscretion, his daughter Elizabeth is unconvinced of his guilt. He has no recollection of what happened and so assumes he must be guilty. When he awakes, the judge finds Flossie dead with a knife in her back. Trying to walk off the injury, he is taken in by a kind prostitute named Flossie, who offers to let him sleep off the impact in her flat. The story starts off with straight-laced judge Sir Edwin Prout getting hit by a car. No Bail for the Judge was a 1952 novel written by Henry Cecil, a barrister and judge who used his career in law as inspiration for his fiction.
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