Alfred Hitchcock

Film Director

• Born: August 13, 1899
• Birthplace: Leytonstone, (now in London), England
• Died: April 29, 1980
• Place of death: Bel Air, California

British film director

In a film career that lasted more than fifty years, Hitchcock directed numerous thrillers that explored the psychological depths of the human condition. In the process, he created some of the most memorable and influential films of the modern era. In 1955 he began hosting the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which showcased his films to millions of viewers.

Areas of achievement Film, television

Early Life

Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, part of what is now called the Cockney area of London. He was the third and last child of William Hitchcock and Emma Hitchcock and spent his early years with his brother, William, and sister, Ellen Kathleen, in a staunchly middle-class and Roman Catholic environment. His father was a hardworking, moderately successful grocer and, at least to Hitchcock, a somewhat intimidating figure. Hitchcock’s Catholic background marked him as an outsider in Anglican England, and his education at a Jesuit school, St. Ignatius College, reinforced not only his habits of discipline bred at home but also his overall sense of worry, guilt, and fear, qualities that proved to be integral to his creativity, to the intense concentration in his career, and to the world of disorder and pain envisioned in his films.

After leaving school, Hitchcock continued with occasional courses and workshops at the University of London, but when his father died in 1914, he suddenly needed to support himself and went to work for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company as a technical clerk. His skill as a draftsman led him to the advertising department, where the layouts he designed prepared him for the most momentous step in his life. His fascination for technical as well as visual details was well suited to the newly developing cinema, and he soon found a place at Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, a studio on the rise that welcomed his energy and many talents.

After assisting on several films, Hitchcock was finally trusted to direct on his own. In 1925 he traveled to Germany to direct his first two films, The Pleasure Garden (1925) and The Mountain Eagle (1926). Among his coworkers was Alma Reville, an experienced editor and assistant director. They would marry on December 2, 1926 (their only child, Patricia, was born on July 7, 1928), and continue to work together on films for more than fifty years.

Hitchcock made nine silent films between 1925 and 1929. He spoke of The Lodger (1926) as the first true Hitchcock film, and it indeed captured in an early form his lifelong fascination with attractive murderers, lovely blond women who provoke dangerous passions, and the threat of chaos and unpredictable disruptions that lurk beneath not only gloomy and mysterious settings but ordinary everyday locales as well. Other early works showed his versatility and include literary adaptations, a boxing film, and several of what might be called moral tales showing young men and women at risk in a precarious modern world. Linking all these films is a constant sense of experimentation with cinematic techniques, including some startling camera angles and expressionist effects (such as shadows, mysterious characters, and distorted images), and the beginning of what came to be known as “the Hitchcock touch”: an instantly recognizable blend of cinematic inventiveness and wry and sometimes shocking explorations of the deeper reaches of the human psyche and society. For Hitchcock, these early silent motion pictures were the cradle of “pure cinema” recalled in many of his later films, where pivotal scenes are shot without any dialogue.

Life’s Work

The British period of Hitchcock’s career reached its height in his first sound film, Blackmail (1929), and in the key films of the 1930’s that established him as a master of the genre that he was most often associated with, the thriller. Blackmail was begun as a silent picture, but Hitchcock shrewdly realized that the industry was about to change over to the newly developed sound technology and planned his film accordingly, integrating not only spoken dialogue but also startling sound effects into his tale of a woman tormented by guilt as well as by a blackmailer who threatens to reveal to her police detective “boyfriend” that she killed a man who sexually assaulted her. Blackmail was a great commercial and critical success, not only because of its novelty as Britain’s first “talkie” but perhaps also because viewers appreciated Hitchcock’s ability to tell an exciting and suspenseful story via fast-paced, visually interesting, and innovative cinematic techniques.

These qualities reached full expression in the series of films he made for Gaumont-British Pictures between 1934 and 1938, each of which crystallized a recurrent Hitchcock theme or motif. For example, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) throws an innocent family on holiday into the middle of an assassination plot that jeopardizes their daughter as much as a government official. As the title suggests, knowledge is dangerous in Hitchcock’s world. The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) is structured around what Hitchcock once defined as the “core of the movie,” the chase, in this instance a double chase as an innocent man, wrongly accused, is pursued by the police even as he is pursuing a spy organization. This film also highlights the device called the “MacGuffin,” the term Hitchcock used to describe whatever it is that sets the plot in motion. Interestingly, Hitchcock was not concerned with the particulars. His real focus was on the ripple effect, the disturbances and complications caused by the pursuit of something that is important but never really specified.

One final key element of Hitchcock’s developing technique that was refined in this series of thrillers was his notion of suspense. While he often made good use of sudden dramatic action, he typically worked for the more sustained tension and involvement created by letting his audience in on what was happening. Sabotage (1936) contains one of the classic examples of Hitchcock’s use of suspense: He shows viewers a young boy carrying a bomb that they know is set to go off at a quarter to the hour; thus, instead of a ten-second shock effect created by a sudden bomb blast, he creates ten minutes of excitement as viewers anticipate the inevitable.

By the end of the 1930’s, Hitchcock was contemplating a move to Hollywood, California, not only to capitalize on his popularity and increase his audience but also to take advantage of the tremendous technological facilities available in Hollywood studios. His American period began when he signed with film producer David O. Selznick in 1939 and left England to make Rebecca (1940), a costume melodrama that in some ways seems markedly different from his previous work but in other ways shows his skill at making domestic as well as espionage thrillers. Throughout his career, he showed tremendous imagination in expanding the form of the thriller, using it to examine psychological and interpersonal themes as well as broader action-adventure themes.

Not surprisingly, several of his films of the early 1940’s revolved around World War II: Foreign Correspondent (1940) urged an end to U.S. neutrality, Saboteur (1942) warned of the danger of subversive fascism within the United States, and Lifeboat (1944) reminded audiences that the enemy was well organized, disciplined, and resourceful, and could be defeated only by unified and committed action. However, his best films of this period were psychological and personal as well as political and historical. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) presents a haunting analysis of the violence and pathology that lie just beneath the surface of “normal” American life. Uncle Charlie is one of Hitchcock’s most memorable charming villains, alerting filmgoers to the fact that they face dangers not only from outside but also from within the family and the psyche. Notorious (1946) blends an exciting anti-Nazi tale with a stunning analysis of a relationship between a man and a woman driven apart by the clash of love and duty, but also by the demands of love. Although these conflicts are resolved by the end of Notorious, Hitchcock increasingly turned his attention to the irresistible but dangerous and destructive force of human passions and desires, including love.

Hitchcock was remarkably ambitious, productive, and successful throughout his working life, but the years from the early 1950’s to the early 1960’s may legitimately be called his “major” phase. During this period he consolidated and expanded his international reputation by continuing to make films that were both entertaining and artistically well crafted and by paying ceaseless attention to marketing and self-promotion. Hitchcock created a highly visible persona for himself by appearing in a brief cameo role in each of his films, regularly writing and giving interviews about how he made his films, attaching his name to a series of mystery story anthologies and a magazine, and hosting an enormously successful television series. Beginning in 1955, Alfred Hitchcock Presents brought him into millions of homes, and his memorable appearance as a short, overweight, simultaneously inviting and menacing host confirmed his image as the master of suspense and the macabre.

Despite his activities in other areas, though, it is the films of this period that mark it as his major phase. Even lesser efforts, including Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), and The Wrong Man (1957), are fascinating and shed important light on his lifelong interest in not only the dramatic but also the moral and metaphysical aspects of guilt, particularly the way guilt is shared or exchanged, literally passed from one person to another. His entertainment vehicles such as Dial M for Murder (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955) are witty, diverting, and thoroughly appealing, and they culminate in his most masterful blend of action, adventure, suspense, and romance, North by Northwest (1959), which for all its excitement also evokes a sense of anxiety about the instability of one’s self in a chaotic and overwhelming environment.

Finally, Hitchcock’s best films of this period are among the finest achievements of cinematic art. He often cited Rear Window (1954) as his example of what he meant by “pure cinema” because it uses visual means and skillful editing to create powerful emotional effects and tell a story of murder and romance, but perhaps also because it is in many ways a fable about making and watching motion pictures. The main character in the film, a photographer confined to a wheelchair, is primarily a voyeur, and Hitchcock’s examination of his Peeping Tom mentality applies equally to the guilty pleasures of the audience watching a film. Vertigo (1958) is in many ways Hitchcock’s most haunting film, studying a man’s obsession with and subsequent loving and brutal manipulation of a woman. The title of the film describes not only a medical but also an existential condition, and the main character’s fear of heights, which he ultimately overcomes, is only one aspect of a much broader disorientation of a human soul living in a world of corruption, chaos, and powerful emotional drives that are not so easily overcome. Psycho (1960) is one of Hitchcock’s most terrifying and influential works. Shot in black and white and on a low budget, in many ways it represents Hitchcock’s final statement on the horrors that lie just off the well-traveled roads, just beneath the surface of apparently normal and harmless individuals horrors that cannot be understood, avoided, or erased. Hitchcock conveys this horror visually by using evocative, even symbolic, set design, off-center and unsettling camera framing, and stunning montage effects, including one of the most celebrated sequences in all of film history, the murder in the shower.

Hitchcock continued to work almost until the end of his life, but clearly in decline. Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) are uninspired spy thrillers, and his last two films, Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976), show only occasional flashes of the Hitchcock touch. Slowed by health problems, old age, and perhaps a sense that he was incapable of keeping up with the demands of a new audience and a new filmmaking environment, he reluctantly closed his office. His last few months, though marked by tributes to his lifelong achievements and concerned attention by his longtime friends, were difficult and painful. He died on April 29, 1980.

Significance

Hitchcock’s achievements, popularity, and influence are enormous. Like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and D. W. Griffith, figures whose works he knew well, he was an entertainer and entrepreneur as well as an artist, a shrewd businessman with an uncanny knowledge of his audience. He knew how to attract, move, and manipulate this audience and, especially in his most characteristic works, please and satisfy even as he was frightening and otherwise disturbing them. This ability, coupled with his economical shooting style, skills as a producer and director, and relentless concern for marketing and self-promotion, allowed him a relatively high degree of independence and control in an industry that often operated, in the words of Griffith, as though it was simply cranking out sausages.

Commercial concerns, though, were not incompatible with his deeply felt responsibilities to his art, and part of what made him so captivating to viewers and influential on other filmmakers was his constant experimentation with film form, his attempt, as he put it, always to avoid the cliché and find new ways to mobilize the visual resources of cinema. For many modern viewers, Hitchcock is the ultimate auteur, a director’s director whose vision is imprinted in every film he ever made. It is this vision, not so much of the art of cinema as of the world, that may account for Hitchcock’s appeal. He presents a landscape of unaccountable humor and horror, an often nightmarish but instantly credible world in which peace is fragile, love is dangerous, violence is inevitable, and moral action is always compromised. Hitchcock often claimed that the shocks he administered were ultimately therapeutic, even pleasurable, helping viewers to make sense of and perhaps master what otherwise might be the overwhelming facts of life. Whether or not he is one of the great healers, he is unquestionably one of the great visual artists of the modern world.

Further Reading

Chandler, Charlotte. It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, a Personal Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Well-researched and -reported biography, based on interviews with actors, family members, technicians, and others.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by Sidney Gottlieb. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Includes important and otherwise inaccessible autobiographical comments and descriptions of Hitchcock’s theories and working methods.

McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: Regan Books, 2003. Scholarly biography providing new insights into Hitchcock, both the man and the director.

Phillips, Gen D. Alfred Hitchcock. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A very readable and authoritative overview of Hitchcock’s life and career. Part of Twayne’s Filmmakers series.

Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. 2d ed. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Chronological, film-by-film commentary on Hitchcock’s work. Knowledgeable and extremely readable background information, summaries, and brief analyses. Many illustrations.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. A thoroughly researched biography emphasizing the personal background of many of the tensions and horrors in Hitchcock’s films.

Truffaut, Francois, with Helen G. Scott. Hitchcock. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. This essential work captures Hitchcock’s reminiscences and observations on virtually his entire career. Many illustrations.

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Arguably the best and most influential critical study of Hitchcock, stressing the unity and artistic greatness of the films. Contains specific essays on twelve key films and other broadly focused essays on such topics as Hitchcock and feminism, the star system, and homosexuality.