Alfred Hitchcock

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 above a greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex. By the time he died in 1980, his films had collected 46 Academy Award nominations and his name had become an adjective used worldwide. What made a chubby, Catholic boy from East London into the most recognisable filmmaker who ever lived? And why did every camera trick, every nightmare he manufactured on screen, trace back to a five-year-old locked in a police cell by his own father?

• 2. Fear as Foundation

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  When Hitchcock was five years old, his father William sent him to the local police station with a note. The officer read it and locked the boy in a cell for a few minutes, telling him, "This is what we do to naughty boys." Hitchcock never fully recovered. He told interviewer Tom Snyder in 1973 that he was "scared stiff of anything... to do with the law" and that he would refuse even to drive a car in case he received a parking ticket.

  St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, where he enrolled on the 5th of October 1910, deepened that fear through a different instrument. The Jesuit priests there used a flat, hard, springy tool made of gutta-percha called a "ferula" which struck the full palm. Crucially, punishment came only at the end of the day. Boys who had been written up for infractions had to sit through all their lessons, anticipating what was coming. Hitchcock later said that this is where he developed his sense of fear.

  He told François Truffaut in 1962 that the Jesuits taught him "organisation, control and, to some degree, analysis." He also told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1963 that his compulsion to terrify audiences was his way of getting his own back: "It must be because I spent three years studying with the Jesuits. They used to terrify me to death, with everything, and now I'm getting my own back by terrifying other people."

  His other lasting phobia from childhood was an obsession with geography and transport timetables. He memorised every stop on the Orient Express and harboured a particular love for London trams. On film sets, he would read the scene and take numbers off the clapperboard and whisper the corresponding tram route names to himself. If the board showed Scene 23, Take 3, he would murmur "Woodford, Hampstead." An overwhelming majority of his films include rail or tram scenes, among them The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train and Number Seventeen.

• 3. The Making of a Director

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  On the 12th of December 1914, William Hitchcock died of emphysema and kidney disease at the age of 52. Alfred, not yet 15, took a job as a technical clerk at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company in Blomfield Street for 15 shillings a week. He attended night classes and, in June 1919, became a founding editor of Henley's in-house publication, The Henley Telegraph, to which he contributed short stories.

  When Hitchcock read in a trade paper that Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London, he drew title cards for a planned film adaptation of Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan and sent them in without being asked. They hired him. By 1922, The Times ran a piece noting the studio's "special art title department under the supervision of Mr. A. J. Hitchcock."

  His entrance into directing came through Michael Balcon's Gainsborough Pictures after Paramount withdrew from London. The editor on Woman to Woman (1923) was Alma Reville, who would become his wife on the 2nd of December 1926. Alma had been born just hours after Hitchcock himself. She converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and was confirmed at Westminster Cathedral by Cardinal Francis Bourne on the 5th of June 1927. When Hitchcock accepted the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, he named all her roles as film editor, scriptwriter, mother and cook before announcing: "And their names are Alma Reville." Writer Charles Champlin later put it plainly: "The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's."

  His first film as director, The Pleasure Garden (1926), was a commercial flop, but Balcon was impressed enough to commission a second. A Daily Express headline called Hitchcock a "Young man with a master mind." The critic Cedric Belfrage wrote in the British film magazine Picturegoer in March 1926 that Hitchcock possessed "such a complete grasp of all the different branches of film technique that he is able to take far more control of his production than the average director of four times his experience."

• 4. Brand Before Hollywood

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  The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, released in January 1927, was the film that established Hitchcock's name in Britain. It concerns the hunt for a Jack the Ripper-style killer who targets young blonde women only on Tuesdays. The trade journal Bioscope wrote on release: "It is possible that this film is the finest British production ever made." Hitchcock told Truffaut that it was effectively his first real film: it was the first he built from German Expressionist principles, the first to make a leading man appear guilty, and the first in which he placed himself in a cameo, sitting in a newsroom.

  Hitchcock understood early that a director's name needed to function like a brand. At a 1925 London Film Society meeting he declared that directors were what mattered most in filmmaking and that "the name of the director should stay clearly in the mind of the audience." By December 1927, he had drawn the simplified profile silhouette that would follow him the rest of his career, sending it to friends and colleagues as a Christmas present.

  The Lady Vanishes (1938) won him the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director that year. Benjamin Crisler of The New York Times wrote in June 1938: "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock." The film starred Michael Redgrave in his film debut and Margaret Lockwood, and was based on Ethel Lina White's 1936 novel The Wheel Spins.

  Producer David O. Selznick, having seen how far Hitchcock's reputation had already travelled, offered him a four-film deal at approximately $40,000 per picture. In June 1938, Hitchcock sailed to New York aboard the RMS Queen Mary and found himself already a celebrity, featured in magazines and fielding interviews from radio stations.

• 5. Hollywood Power and Control

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  Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in April 1939. Their relationship combined mutual respect with constant friction. Selznick complained about Hitchcock's "goddamn jigsaw cutting," a method of shooting only what was scripted so that the film could not be recut later. Their personalities also clashed: Hitchcock was reserved; Selznick was flamboyant. Eventually Selznick lent Hitchcock to larger studios.

  Rebecca (1940) won Best Picture at the 13th Academy Awards, the statuette going to producer Selznick. Hitchcock received his first nomination for Best Director. Suspicion (1941) gave him a new problem he had already encountered with The Lodger: the star system would not allow Cary Grant to be a murderer. Hitchcock had wanted the film to end with a wife poisoned by her husband, but the studio balked. One ingenious compromise: he placed a light inside the glass of milk that Grant carries up the stairs, ensuring audiences could not take their eyes off it.

  Psycho (1960) redefined what studios would allow. Produced on a budget of $800,000 and shot in black-and-white using crew members from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, it broke box-office records in the United Kingdom, France, South America, the United States and Canada. Hitchcock personally earned in excess of $15 million from it. He then exchanged his rights to Psycho and his television anthology for 150,000 shares of MCA, making him the third-largest shareholder and, in theory, his own boss at Universal.

  North by Northwest (1959) demonstrated a different kind of commercial power. During its opening two-week run at Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed $404,056, setting a non-holiday record for that theatre. Cary Grant plays a Madison Avenue advertising executive who is mistaken for a government agent and pursued across the United States.

• 6. Television and the Public Self

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  Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran from 1955 to 1965 and turned Hitchcock into a household name on a scale that cinema alone could not have achieved. The title sequence showed a minimalist caricature of his profile drawn with only nine strokes, which his real silhouette then filled in. He drew it himself. The theme was the Funeral March of a Marionette by the French composer Charles Gounod, who had been born in 1818.

  He directed 18 episodes of the series. His on-screen introductions deployed his signature dry humour; one involved a joke about a multi-person execution hampered by having only one electric chair, shown with a sign reading "Two chairs, no waiting!" The series became The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, and NBC broadcast the final episode on the 10th of May 1965.

  The television work spawned a commercial empire. Short-story collections appeared under his name, including Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology and Tales My Mother Never Told Me. In 1956, HSD Publications licensed his name to create Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, a monthly crime and detective digest. His foreign-language book editions were generating revenues of up to $100,000 a year. Hitchcock had become a celebrity whose profile was as bankable as any actor he ever cast.

• 7. The Weight of Obsession

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  Vertigo (1958) began with a casting problem: Hitchcock had wanted Vera Miles in the lead role, but she became pregnant. He told Oriana Fallaci: "I was offering her a big part, the chance to become a beautiful sophisticated blonde, a real actress. We'd have spent a heap of dollars on it, and she has the bad taste to get pregnant." He replaced her with Kim Novak, opposite James Stewart as Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia who becomes obsessed with a woman he is hired to shadow.

  Critics Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert both agreed that Vertigo is Hitchcock's most personal and revealing film, exploring what Spoto described as a Pygmalion-like obsession in which a man moulds a woman into the person he desires. At the time of release, the critic from Variety called it "too slow and too long," and box-office receipts were poor. By 2012, critics surveyed by the British Film Institute voted it the greatest film ever made, displacing Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which had held that position for decades.

  The film The Birds (1963) brought a different kind of obsession to the set. Tippi Hedren had been a model in New York when Hitchcock saw her in October 1961 in a television advertisement. He signed a seven-year exclusive contract with her at $500 a week. During the attic attack scene, which took a week to film, she was placed in a caged room while men in elbow-length protective gloves threw live birds at her. She broke down after a bird cut her lower eyelid, and filming was halted on doctor's orders. An HBO and BBC television film, The Girl (2012), documented her account of sexual harassment by Hitchcock throughout production.

  When screenwriter Evan Hunter tried to persuade Hitchcock to remove a rape scene from Marnie (1964), explaining that a man who loved the character would comfort her rather than assault her, Hitchcock replaced Hunter with Jay Presson Allen. Richard Brody wrote in 2016 that Hedren's performance in that film was "one of the greatest in the history of cinema."

• 8. Final Chapter

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  Having refused a CBE in 1962, Hitchcock was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1980 New Year Honours. He was too ill to travel to London; he had a pacemaker and was receiving cortisone injections for arthritis. On the 3rd of January 1980, the British consul general presented him with the papers at Universal Studios. When a reporter asked why it had taken the Queen so long, Hitchcock replied: "I suppose it was a matter of carelessness."

  He died of kidney failure on the 29th of April 1980 at his home in Bel Air. His funeral was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills the following day. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean on the 10th of May. He was survived by Alma and their daughter Pat, who had been born on the 7th of July 1928 and who herself died on the 9th of August 2021 at the age of 93.

  By the time of his death, nine of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. His personal favourite among them was Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the film he made while losing a hundred pounds on a diet of black coffee and steak. The BAFTA Fellowship had come in 1971. The AFI Life Achievement Award followed in 1979, four months before his knighthood, and four months before the end.