If Only Hitchcock had made 'A Beautiful Mind'...

The Brother and I watched A Beautiful Mind the other night, with him commenting on how strange it is watching it a second time. He's right: I saw it when it came out in the cinema a few years back, but hadn't seen it since, and it's a very different film when you really just how much of it is simply meant to be John Nash imagining stuff. Basically, ninety per cent of the film is him being mad, with the maddest thing of all being the film's suggestion that you can basically sort out schizophrenia through sheer willpower.

The other thing that's troubling about A Beautiful Mind is how it bears about as little relationship to the reality of the tale it purports to tell as the cinematic John Nash's delusions do to his on-screen life. To say it takes liberties is putting it mildly. Granted, there is indeed a hugely influential mathematician called John Nash who suffers from schizophrenia, was married to a woman called Alicia, and shared in the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, but that's about as far as it goes. The rest of the film is pretty much made up. Yes, even the Princeton pen ceremony, that Dead Poets Society tear-jerking climax of the film. It's not that that never happened to him; it never happens at all.

So as we nattered, dismantling it away to our hearts' content, I mused that Alfred Hitchcock would have had great fun with a story like this, especially given that the film as it stands is hardly ten per cent factual anyway. Why not drop that ten per cent down to three per cent and really have fun?


The pivotal scene in the film, as far as I can see, is the bit when John Nash is giving a lecture and panics when he sees some mysterious men in black standing at the doors to the lecture theatre he's in. He quits his lecture and runs from the platform, scurrying out of the building and running down some stairs, being pursued by an aged Christopher Plummer, who cries out something to the effect of, 'John, John, stop, I'm a psychiatrist, I'm here to help you!' Professor Nash is tackled to the ground and sedated, waking in shackles some time later in Christopher Plummer's opulent office, where he is told that he's a very sick man, that he's been imagining everything, and that even his crucial government work is all an illusion. While he sits trying to take this in, Christopher Plummer goes and tells Mrs Nash the bad news.

So, hand that material over to Alfred Hitchcock, circa 1956, making the film he should surely have made, starring Gregory Peck and Grace Kelly, who never acted together, in what always strikes me as the greatest of the Twentieth Century's cinematic tragedies . . .

Just imagine . . . Gregory Peck is John Nash, a promising young professor of mathematics in Princeton, who's as socially awkward as he is intellectually dazzling. A charming young student of his, Alicia, played by Grace Kelly, asks him out, and witty banter ensues. Around the same time, his old college roommate, played by Cary Grant, shows up and recruits him to do some top secret work for the government. John courts and marries the glamorous Alicia, all the while conducting clandestine work of national importance. One night he's pursued by mysterious armed men, and grows increasingly distraught, but he can't tell his wife what's bothering him. She starts to worry, and wonders to whom she can turn for help . . .

And then, a few weeks later, he gives a prestigious lecture and panics when he notices several men in black stationed around the lecture theatre. He breaks and runs, darting through a fire door, bounding down some stairs, being pursued across the grounds of the college by an aged Claude Rains, who cries something along the lines of, 'John, John, stop, I'm a psychiatrist, I'm here to help you!'

John is bundled to the ground by the men in black, sedated, and wakes in shackles in Claude Rains's opulent office, all leather and mahogany, where Claude Rains patiently explains to him that he's a very sick man, that all his government work is an illusion, that he's imagined it all. And then Claude goes and talks to Alicia, telling her just how sick her husband is, asking her whether she'd ever wondered why she'd never met Cary Grant, and saying that she needs to keep a close eye on John, to check through his files to see what he's writing, and to bring copies of them to Claude so he can help her husband . . .

Because of course, this is just a gaslighting operation, an attempt to convince a sane man and his wife that he's going mad, so that these sinister Cold War era baddies can get their nasty communist hands on military secrets crucial to America's defence!

I know, it sounds far fetched, but it's not much more so than the film as it stands, and in Hitch's hands it'd definitely work.

If only . . .