Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock: The Master Who Never Won

On his sixty-third birthday, 13 August 1962, Alfred Hitchcock sat down at Universal Studios opposite a young French critic and began answering five hundred questions. The interview ran fifty hours across eight days and became a book. François Truffaut's conclusion was that Hitchcock had "given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues" — a strange verdict on a man the Academy nominated five times for Best Director and never once rewarded.

Above the Greengrocer's Shop

He was born on 13 August 1899 in a flat over his parents' shop at 517 High Road, Leytonstone, youngest child of William Edgar Hitchcock, a greengrocer and poulterer, and Emma Jane Whelan. He remembered himself as "a well-behaved boy," and his father called him his "little lamb without a spot." The formative episode of his childhood was not affection but terror. William sent the five-year-old to the local police station carrying a note, and the officer on duty locked him in a cell for a few minutes, telling him, "This is what we do to naughty boys." Half a century later he told Tom Snyder he had been "scared stiff of anything ... to do with the law."

He was schooled at convent schools in Poplar and Battersea before entering St Ignatius College, Stamford Hill, in October 1910. The Jesuits left the deepest mark. "The Jesuits taught me organisation, control and, to some degree, analysis," he said. His favourite subject was geography; he collected maps and memorised the timetables of London trams, a habit of systematising space and time that never left his films.

In 1913 he took night classes in mechanics, electricity, acoustics and navigation at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation. His father died in December 1914, and Hitchcock supported his mother on fifteen shillings a week as a technical clerk at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. In 1919 he founded and edited The Henley Telegraph, then moved into its advertising department drawing graphics for cable advertisements — work he later called his "first step toward cinema."

The Apprentice Who Drew Title Cards

Also in 1919 he talked his way into Islington Studios as a title-card designer, and between 1922 and 1925 worked as co-writer, art director and production manager on roughly eighteen silent films. His directorial debut, The Pleasure Garden (1926), made no money, but the Daily Express labelled him a "Young man with a master mind."

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) settled the matter. Bioscope called it "possibly the finest British production ever made," and it carried his first cameo. "In truth," he told Truffaut, "you might almost say that The Lodger was my first picture." Blackmail (1929) became Britain's first talkie. On 2 December 1926 he married the screenwriter Alma Reville at Brompton Oratory; their daughter Patricia was born on 7 July 1928.

Britain's Third Institution

Under Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British from 1933 he made The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent and Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). The 39 Steps introduced the MacGuffin — the plot device with no value except as motivation, named by his collaborator Angus MacPhail. Robert Towne judged that "it's not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with The 39 Steps." The Lady Vanishes won him the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, and Benjamin Crisler wrote in The New York Times: "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world."

Hollywood on Contract

He sailed for New York on the Queen Mary in June 1938 and signed a seven-year deal with David O. Selznick in April 1939. Rebecca (1940) won Best Picture and brought the first of his five fruitless Best Director nominations. Suspicion (1941) made him his own producer and contained the glass of milk lit from within. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) remained his personal favourite. Rope (1948), his first colour film, was cut to look continuous but shot in ten long takes. Rear Window and Dial M for Murder followed in 1954; he became an American citizen in 1955. From 1955 to 1965 he hosted Alfred Hitchcock Presents, directing eighteen episodes and turning his own nine-stroke profile caricature and Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette into national furniture.

Vertigo, Psycho and the Summit

Vertigo (1958) introduced the dolly zoom, developed by Irmin Roberts, and drew mixed reviews and thin business; in 2012 the Sight & Sound critics' poll named it the greatest film ever made, displacing Citizen Kane. North by Northwest (1959) grossed $404,056 in a fortnight at Radio City Music Hall; Time called it "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining." Psycho (1960), shot in black and white on an $800,000 budget with his television crew, killed its heroine early and broke box-office records across four continents. He personally earned more than $15 million and traded the rights and his TV anthology for 150,000 MCA shares, becoming the studio's third-largest shareholder.

The Hedren Problem

The Birds (1963) was his most technically demanding film, with every shot sketched in advance, and it introduced Tippi Hedren. It also produced the darkest chapter of his life. During the week-long attic sequence she was caged with handlers throwing live birds, then had birds tied to her clothing by elastic; filming stopped on a doctor's orders after one cut her eyelid. Her Marnie co-star Diane Baker said that "nothing could have been more horrible for me than to arrive on that movie set and to see her being treated the way she was." Richard Brody, writing in 2016, called Marnie "the story of sexual violence" and the film "sick, and it's so because Hitchcock was sick."

Why Alfred Is Called a Genius

The quality is pre-visualisation. Hitchcock did not discover his films while shooting them; he built them beforehand, shot by shot, as an engineer builds a mechanism — every frame of The Birds sketched in advance, Rope timed to the length of a film magazine, Rear Window's emotional range carried by close-ups of one immobilised face. What he was designing was not a story but an audience's nervous system: where it would look, what it would fear, how long it could be held. The Jesuits, he said, gave him "organisation, control and, to some degree, analysis," and that is a fair inventory of the gift. Truffaut's fifty-hour interview exists precisely because Truffaut believed Hitchcock had thought harder about the medium than anyone else working in it.

The honest counter-case is substantial. He never wrote his own scripts and depended heavily on collaborators — most of all on Alma Reville, who co-wrote The 39 Steps, Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt, and of whom Charles Champlin wrote that "the Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's." His peers never gave him the directing Oscar; Vertigo's canonisation came half a century after it disappointed. And genius in craft plainly bought him nothing in character: the treatment of Hedren is not a footnote to the achievement but a permanent charge against the man who managed it.

Legacy

Nine of his more than fifty features sit in the United States National Film Registry. He took the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, where he thanked four people — a film editor, a scriptwriter, the mother of his daughter and a fine cook — before revealing that "their names are Alma Reville." He was knighted in December 1979 and died on 29 April 1980, aged eighty.