Abandoned Alternate Titles for Two Great Films: Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Hitchcock’s Vertigo

We have here a page out of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s note­book, which Lists of Note—the sis­ter site of Let­ters of Note, always a favorite of ours here at Open Cul­ture—post­ed as a col­lec­tion of alter­na­tive titles for Dr. Strangelove. The list includes Dr. Dooms­day, The Dooms­day Machine, Dr. Doomsday and His Nuclear Women, Don’t Knock the Bomb: these ideas came not from an inter­fer­ing stu­dio, but from Kubrick­’s own mind as he worked his way toward the most suit­able name. You can see him get­ting clos­er; while this page does­n’t include the film’s final title, Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb, it does include Dr. Strangelove’s Bomb, Strangelove; Nuclear Wise­man, and the Gib­son­ian-sound­ing The Pas­sion of Dr. Strangelove. I myself will always won­der how Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus would have played, but when you deal with cin­e­mat­ic crafts­men as detail-ori­ent­ed and reput­ed­ly “per­fec­tion­ist” as Kubrick, you know that their dri­ving desire to get things right extends all the way to their titles and beyond.

This holds just as true for Alfred Hitch­cock. Alone in the Dark, Behind the Mask, The Dark Tow­er, With­out a Trace, all pos­si­ble titles for the movie we now know as Ver­ti­go. When Hitch­cock­’s San Fran­cis­co psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller recent­ly topped Sight and Sound’s crit­ics poll of the great­est films of all time, it sure­ly did so for cin­e­mat­ic mer­its hav­ing noth­ing to do with its name.

But would a Ver­ti­go by any oth­er title feel quite as fresh and grip­ping today, 55 years after it first came out? This goes espe­cial­ly for the pre-thread­bare titles I rat­tled off above, which only account for four of 47 of the sug­ges­tions Para­mount Pic­tures exec­u­tive Sam Frey pitched to Hitch­cock, includ­ing Deceit, Deceit­ful, and, for good mea­sure, Decep­tion. You can read all of them below, or at Lists of Note. I quite like The Face Vari­a­tions, but Hitch­cock knew his project most inti­mate­ly, and thus knew that Ver­ti­go it had to be.

1. Afraid to Love
2. Alone in the Dark
3. The Appari­tion
4. Behind the Mask
5. Car­lot­ta
6. Check­mate
7. Con­science
8. Cry from the Rooftop
9. The Dark Tow­er
10. Deceit
11. Deceit­ful
12. Decep­tion
13. Don’t Leave Me
14. Dream With­out End­ing
15. The Face Vari­a­tions
16. Foot­steps
17. For the Last Time
18. The Hid­den life
19. In the Shad­ows
20. The Inves­ti­ga­tor
21. A Life Is For­ev­er
22. The Lure
23. Mal­ice
24. The Mask and the Face
25. The Mask Illu­sion
26. My Madeleine
27. A Mat­ter of Fact
28. Nev­er Leave Me
29. Night Shade
30. Noth­ing Is For­ev­er
31. Past, Present and Future
32. The Phan­tom
33. The Sec­ond Chance
34. The Shad­ow
35. Shad­ow and Sub­stance
36. Shad­ow on the Stairs
37. Shock
38. Steps on the Stairs
39. Ter­ror
40. To Live Again
41. Tonight Is Ours
42. Too Late My Love
43. Two Kinds of Women
44. The Unknown
45. Want­ed
46. With­out A Trace
47. The Wit­ness

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside Dr. Strangelove: Doc­u­men­tary Reveals How a Cold War Sto­ry Became a Kubrick Clas­sic

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

20 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.