Sir, - Hugh Leonard suggests (Weekend, June 5th) that, although Alfred Hitchcock was a master film-maker, he was not good at handling actors. He may be partly influenced in this view by a remark that Hitchcock was alleged to have made that actors were "like cattle".
In fact Hitchcock claimed that he was misquoted on this, but, in any case, anyone who is familiar with Hitchcock's films (and I have seen most of them, some several times over), will know that this is arrant nonsense. Hitchcock had in fact an excellent record in his relationship with actors.
James Stewart and Cary Grant were happy to make four films each for Hitchcock. Ingrid Bergman made three films for him - though one was the disastrous Under Capricorn.
Doris Day and Kim Novak gave the performances of their careers for Hitchcock in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo respectively.
Finally, the character actor Leo G. Carroll, (later famed as Mr Waverly in the Man From Uncle series), made about a dozen films with Hitchcock, usually, but not invariably, in sympathetic roles.
I conclude with a quote from an American critic who, in a review of Hitchcock's masterly I Confess, said: "this film is directed by a man who makes most of his rivals seem like amateurs".
I agree. Hitch was really a master. - Yours, etc.,
Emmet M. J. McElhatton, Gortlee, Letterkenny, Co Donegal.