The concept of the MacGuffin in Hitchcock is more slippery than may, at first, be apparent. To Truffaut, Hitchcock defines it as the secret or documents the spies are after, distinguishing between his own point of view and that of the characters in the film: these items ‘must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever’ (Truffaut 1968: 111-12). To illustrate this last point, he says that the uranium MacGuffin in NOTORIOUS had troubled the producer (Selznick), so he had offered to replace it with industrial diamonds (138). (I am not concerned with the accuracy of this story, which Leonard J. Leff disputes [1988: 194], but with the point Hitchcock is making: the nature of the MacGuffin is unimportant.) After the success of the film, he claims further to have chided another producer who had rejected the project because of the uranium: ‘You were wrong to attach any importance to the MacGuffin. NOTORIOUS was simply the story of a man in love with a girl who, in the course of her official duties, had to go to bed with another man and even had to marry him’ (Truffaut 1968: 138). Here Hitchcock introduces a third point of view on the MacGuffin: that of the audience. Even though the uranium MacGuffin is, in fact, the secret of the atomic bomb, Hitchcock is saying that the audience is simply not interested: it is the personal story which counts, and the MacGuffin is merely a means to an end.

Other examples of the MacGuffin in his spy movies would certainly support this. We are simply not interested in the nature of the ‘state secrets’ (or whatever) in these movies: the formula for an aircraft engine in THE 39 STEPS; the secret clauses in THE LADY VANISHES and Foreign Correspondent; the government secrets in NORTH BY NORTHWEST; the formula for an anti-missile missile in TORN CURTAIN. Nevertheless, the implications of such a lack of interest obviously merit discussion. I would like to look at this aspect of the MacGuffin first.