Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, above his family's greengrocer shop in Leytonstone, then a suburb on the eastern edge of London. He was the youngest of three children of William Hitchcock, a grocer and poulterer, and Emma Jane Whelan, both from Catholic families with Irish roots ^[1]. The household was strict and observant, and the young Hitchcock attended St Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in Stamford Hill, where he later credited the priests with instilling in him a lasting sense of fear, order, and discipline ^[2].

One story from his childhood followed him for the rest of his life, largely because he retold it so often. As a small boy, he said, his father sent him to the local police station with a note, and the desk sergeant locked him in a cell for a few minutes with the words that this was what happened to naughty boys. Whether the incident occurred exactly as described, Hitchcock cited it as the source of his lifelong dread of police and wrongful accusation, themes that would run through dozens of his films ^[1].

His father died in 1914, when Alfred was fifteen, and the boy left school to help support the family. He studied navigation, mechanics, and draughtsmanship at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation, then took a job as a technical clerk at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. In his spare hours he took art classes at the University of London and read voraciously, developing a particular taste for the crime fiction of the period and for the films arriving from America ^[2].

Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 through the drawing board rather than the camera. When the American studio Famous Players-Lasky opened a London branch at Islington, he applied with a portfolio of sample title card designs and was hired to illustrate the intertitles for silent pictures ^[1]. He absorbed every department of the studio, writing scenarios, designing sets, and serving as an assistant director. When the facility passed to the British producer Michael Balcon's Gainsborough Pictures, Hitchcock's rise accelerated. On productions in Germany during the mid 1920s he watched F. W. Murnau at work, and the visual methods of German expressionism, with their distorted shadows and subjective camera angles, marked his style permanently ^[3].

Balcon gave him his first directing assignments, and in 1927 Hitchcock delivered The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, a silent thriller about a mysterious tenant suspected of being a serial killer. It was his first commercial and critical success, and he later called it the first true Hitchcock film: an innocent man hunted, a city gripped by fear, and a camera that made the audience complicit in suspicion ^[2]. In 1929 he directed Blackmail, begun as a silent and converted mid production into Britain's first significant sound feature, an early sign of his appetite for technical experiment ^[1].

Through the 1930s he became the leading director in British cinema, producing a run of lean, witty thrillers for Gaumont-British that included The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). These films fixed the pattern that anyone asking who was Alfred Hitchcock would come to recognize: an ordinary person swept into espionage or murder, chases across memorable landscapes, and suspense built from what the audience knows and the characters do not ^[3]. The American producer David O. Selznick took notice and signed him to a Hollywood contract, and Hitchcock sailed for the United States in 1939 ^[1].

His first American picture, Rebecca (1940), an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel produced by Selznick, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Hitchcock himself received the first of five nominations for Best Director, though he never won the competitive award, a fact often cited among the more surprising Alfred Hitchcock facts ^[4]. The 1940s brought Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt (which he frequently named his personal favorite), the wartime thriller Lifeboat, and the psychoanalytic mystery Spellbound. In Notorious (1946) he refined his mature style, fusing a spy plot with a wounded love story and staging one of the most discussed kisses in studio era cinema under the constraints of the Production Code ^[2].

The decade from the early 1950s to the early 1960s is widely regarded as the peak of his career, and any account of Alfred Hitchcock achievements rests heavily on it. Strangers on a Train (1951) turned a Patricia Highsmith novel into a study of guilt transferred between two men. Rear Window (1954) confined James Stewart to a wheelchair and an apartment window and built an entire film from the act of watching. Vertigo (1958), a commercial disappointment on release, was later reappraised so thoroughly that in 2012 the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound critics poll ranked it the greatest film ever made, displacing Citizen Kane after fifty years ^[5]. North by Northwest (1959) sent Cary Grant across the country in a chase that ended on the faces of Mount Rushmore, and Psycho (1960), shot cheaply with his television crew, shocked audiences with the murder of its apparent heroine partway through the story. The shower scene, assembled from dozens of quick cuts over roughly forty five seconds of screen time, became the most analyzed sequence in American film ^[4].

Hitchcock followed Psycho with The Birds (1963), a technically ambitious story of unexplained avian attacks on a California coastal town, and Marnie (1964). His later output slowed, but Frenzy (1972), made back in London, was received as a strong late work, and Family Plot (1976) closed the filmography. Across the whole career he completed more than fifty features, an output few directors of comparable reputation have matched ^[1].

Hitchcock planned films exhaustively before shooting, working with writers and storyboard artists until, as he liked to claim, the picture was finished in his head and the filming itself was almost an anticlimax. He drew a famous distinction between surprise and suspense: a bomb exploding without warning gives the audience a few seconds of shock, but a bomb the audience knows is under the table turns an ordinary conversation into unbearable tension. He explained the principle at length in his 1962 interviews with the French director Francois Truffaut, published as the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, which became one of the most influential texts on film craft ever printed ^[3].

He also coined, or at least popularized, the term MacGuffin for the object everyone in a thriller chases and no one in the audience needs to care about: the secret plans, the uranium, the government microfilm. For Hitchcock the mechanics of the plot mattered far less than the emotions it generated in the viewer ^[3].

No director before him marketed himself so effectively. His brief silent cameos in his own films became a game audiences played, and from 1955 to 1965 he hosted the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents, introducing each episode in deadpan style. The show, along with his droll trailers and the mystery magazine bearing his name, made his silhouette, profile, and drawling voice familiar to millions who might never have noticed a director's name on a poster ^[4]. Any Alfred Hitchcock biography has to reckon with the fact that the man constructed his own legend as deliberately as he constructed his films.

In 1926 Hitchcock married Alma Reville, a film editor and screenwriter he had met at the Islington studio, where she was already an experienced professional when he was still lettering title cards. Their only child, Patricia, was born in 1928 and later acted in several of her father's films, including Strangers on a Train and Psycho ^[1]. Alma remained his closest collaborator for more than half a century, reading scripts, watching rough cuts, and holding an effective veto over his work. Accepting the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1979, Hitchcock said he asked to share the honor with four people: a film editor, a scriptwriter, the mother of his daughter, and a fine cook, all of them named Alma Reville ^[4].

Off the set he lived quietly. The family settled in Bel Air and kept a ranch near Santa Cruz in Northern California, and Hitchcock's chief indulgences were food and wine rather than Hollywood society. He struggled with his weight throughout his adult life and joked about it constantly in public, folding even his own body into the persona ^[2].

His reputation has not gone unquestioned. The actress Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds and Marnie, wrote in later years that Hitchcock harassed her and punished her professionally when she rejected him, allegations aired in her 2016 memoir and in earlier biographies ^[6]. Writers on Hitchcock have long debated his controlling treatment of his leading actresses, the famous cool blondes of his films, and the question remains a serious part of any honest assessment of the man behind the work.

Honors that had eluded Hitchcock in his prime arrived in his final decade. He received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1968 Academy Awards ceremony, where his entire acceptance speech consisted of five words of thanks. The American Film Institute presented him with its Life Achievement Award in March 1979, and at the end of that year Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the New Year Honours. Asked why the knighthood had taken so long, the lifelong holder of American citizenship since 1955 reportedly answered that he supposed it was a matter of carelessness ^[4].

His health declined steadily through the late 1970s. Arthritis and kidney trouble made work difficult, and a planned final project, a spy thriller titled The Short Night, was developed in script form but never filmed. He closed his office at Universal early in 1980 ^[1].

Alfred Hitchcock died at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on April 29, 1980, at the age of eighty. Following a funeral Mass at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Pacific. Alma Reville survived him by two years ^[1].

Few filmmakers have exerted comparable influence. The critics of the French New Wave, led by Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer, treated Hitchcock as the exemplary case for the auteur theory, the argument that a director could be the true author of a commercial film, and their advocacy transformed his reputation from popular entertainer to major artist ^[3]. Directors as different as Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and David Fincher have acknowledged his methods, and terms he made current, from the MacGuffin to the shower scene itself, belong to the common language of the medium ^[5].

His films remain in constant circulation. Psycho was added to the United States National Film Registry in 1992, and Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Birds have joined it, a concentration of titles from a single director matched by almost no one ^[4]. Vertigo's rise to the top of the 2012 Sight and Sound poll confirmed a critical standing that would have startled the film's first audiences ^[5].

Scholars continue to argue over the darker currents in the work and the life: the obsession with guilt and voyeurism, the treatment of women on screen and off. That the arguments continue is itself a measure of the films' durability. More than four decades after his death, Hitchcock remains the rare director whose name alone describes a genre, a mood, and a way of placing an audience exactly where the storyteller wants it ^[2].