In the spring Jay Presson Allen delivered her second-draft script for a film that would have comprised an informal trilogy of dissimilar subjects linked by the same director and star: Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren. “This ghost story,” Joseph McBride observed in his definitive article on the subject, “would have taken Hitchcock’s characteristic mingling of eroticism and death into dimensions beyond which any he had explored on the screen.” Hitchcock never forgot his pleasure at watching the James Barrie play in 1920. Barrie’s ghost story concerns a young girl who disappears while on holiday with her parents on a Scottish island, dubbed “The Island That Likes to Be Visited.” When the girl returns after twenty days, she can’t explain where she has been or what has happened to her. Later, at eighteen, Mary Rose gets married and bears a child; returning to the same island on her anniversary, once again she vanishes. This time she goes missing for many years, returning guiltily to look for her son only after he is fully grown into a man.
