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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was a British film director closely associated with the suspense genre. Influenced by expressionism in Germany, he began directing in England, and worked in the United States from 1939. With more than fifty feature films to his credit, in a career spanning six decades, he remains one of the best known and most popular directors of all time. His innovations and vision have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors.
Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known for their droll humour. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances beyond their control or understanding. This often involves a transference of guilt in which the "innocent" character's failings are transfered to another character and magnified. Another common theme is the exploration of the compatibility of men and women; Hitchcock's films often take a cynical view of traditional romantic relationships.
Although Hitchcock was an enormous star during his lifetime, he did not rank highly with film critics of his own day. He never received an Academy Award, despite being granted the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 1967. The French new wave critics, especially François Truffaut, were the first to promote his films as having artistic merit beyond entertainment. Hitchcock was one of the first directors to which they applied their auteur theory, which stresses the centrality of the director in the movie-making process. Indeed, through his fame, public persona, and degree of creative control, Hitchcock transformed the role of the director, which had previously been eclipsed by that of the producer.
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Alfred Hitchcock was born 13 August 1899 in Leytonstone, London, the second son and youngest of the three children of William Hitchcock, a greengrocer, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock (nee Whelan). His family was mostly Irish Catholic. Hitchcock was sent to Catholic boarding schools in London. He has said his childhood was very lonely and protected.
According to Hitchcock, one day his father handed him a note. His father told him to give this note to the local policeman, who upon reading it, locked the boy in a jail cell for ten minutes. When the policeman returned, he explained that that was what happened to "bad little boys." He was frightened of the police for the rest of his life.
At 14, Hitchcock lost his father and he left St Ignatius' College, his school at the time, to study at the School for Engineering and Navigation. After graduating, he became a draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company.
About that time, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film in London. In 1920, he obtained a full-time job at Islington Studios under its American owners, Players-Lasky, and their British successors, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies. In 1925, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave him a chance to direct his first film, "The Pleasure Garden."
As a major talent in a new industry with plenty of opportunity, he rose quickly. His third film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was released in 1927. In it, attractive blondes are strangled, and the new lodger (Ivor Novello) in the Bunting family's upstairs apartment falls under heavy suspicion. This is the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man."
In 1926, Hitchcock married his assistant director Alma Reville. The two had a daughter Patricia, in 1928. Alma was Hitchcock's closest collaborator. She wrote some of his screenplays, and was by his side for every one of his films.
In 1929, he began work on Blackmail, his tenth film. While the film was in production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first sound pictures.
In 1933, Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success. His second, The 39 Steps (1935), is considered the best film from his early period.
His next major success was in 1938, The Lady Vanishes, a cleaver and fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old spy (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika (a thinly-veiled reference to Nazi Germany).
By this time, he had caught the attention of Hollywood, and was invited to make films in America by David O. Selznick.
With Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made his first American film, although it was set in England and based on a novel by English author Daphne du Maurier. The film evokes the fears of a naive young bride who enters a great English country home and must grapple with the legacy of the dead woman who was her husband's first wife. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940.
The droll touches of humour are still there in his American work, but suspense became his trademark. Selznick had perennial money problems, and consequently loaned Hitchcock to the larger studios more often than producing Hitchcock films himself.
Hitchcock's work during the early 1940's was very diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (1941), to the dark and disturbing "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943).
Shadow of a Doubt, his personal favorite, was about young Charlotte "Young Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright) who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Spencer (Joseph Cotten) of murder. In its use of overlapping dialogue and closeups it bears the influence of Cotten's better known film, Citizen Kane.
Spellbound explored the then very fashionable subject of psychoanalysis and featured a dream sequence which was designed by Salvador Dali. Notorious (1946), which starred Ingrid Bergman, briefly led to Hitchcock being under surveillance by the CIA because of the use of uranium as a plot device.
Rope (his first colour film) came next in 1948. Here Hitchcock experimented with the so-called ten minute take (see below). Under Capricorn, set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used this short-lived technique, but to a more limited extent. For these two films he formed a production company with Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures, which folded after these two unsuccessful pictures.
With Strangers on a Train (1951), Hitchcock began his golden age. Here two men casually meet and speculate on removing people who are causing them difficulty. One of the men though takes this banter entirely seriously.
Three very popular films, all starring Grace Kelly, followed. Dial M for Murder was adapted from the popular stage play by Frederick Knott. This was originally another experimental film, with Hitchcock using the technique of 3D cinematography. Rear Window, starred James Stewart. Here the wheelchair-bound Stewart observes the movements of his neighbours across the courtyard. He becomes convinced that the wife of a near neighbour has been murdered. To Catch a Thief, set in the French Riviera, starred Kelly and Cary Grant.
In 1958, Hitchock released Vertigo, a film many consider to be his masterpiece. Three more recognised classics followed: North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). The latter two were particularly notable for their unconventional soundtracks, both by Bernard Herrmann: the screeching strings in the murder scene in Psycho pushed the limits of the time, and The Birds dispensed completely with conventional instruments, using the first electronically produced soundtrack in a commercial film. These were his last great films, after which his career slowly wound down. "Frenzy" (1972) was Hitchcock's last major success. Failing health slowed down his output over the last two decades of his life.
Family Plot (1976) was his last film. It related the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler Barbara Harris, a fradulent spiritualist, and her taxi driver lover Bruce Dern making a living from her phoney powers.
Hitchcock was knighted in 1980. Later that year, Hitchcock died of renal failure in Los Angeles.
Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over surprise in his films. In surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth.
Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty, occasionally making this indictment clear, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable" audience. In Rear Window (1954), after L. B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the film, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr) confronts Jeffries by saying "What do you want of me?" Burr might as well have been addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald turns to face the camera directly for the first time — at this point, audiences often gasp.
One of Hitchcock's favourite devices for driving the plots of his stories and creating suspense was described as a "MacGuffin" by the director himself. Hitchcock described the "MacGuffin" as a red herring: a meaningless, unimportant detail that solely existed to serve as a reason for the story to exist.
Hitchcock also uses the number 13 in his films. Adding up various dates, street addresses, license plates, and other numbered items brings up the number 13 on a regular basis. Psycho (1960) provides several good examples. Norman Bates moves to select room 3, then room 1. The most recent date of entry in the logbook on check-in adds up to 13.
Hitchcock seemed to delight in challenging himself. In Lifeboat, Hitchcock has the entire action of the movie take place in a single lifeboat. He faced a bit of a dilemma as to how to make his trademark cameo appearance; his solution was to appear in a fictitious newspaper ad for a weight loss product.
Rope (1948) was another technical challenge that Hitchcock set for himself: a film that appears to have been shot entirely in a single take. The film was actually shot in eight takes of approximately 10 minutes each, which was the amount of film that would fit in a single camera reel; edits were hidden by having an object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used that point to cut, and began the next take from the same point, from which the object or the camera moved. There are only three obvious cuts in the entrie film.
His 1958 film Vertigo contains a camera trick that has been imitated and re-used so many times by filmmakers, it has become known as the Hitchcock zoom.
His films are known for featuring Alfred Hitchcock in cameos in the film — a technique used by other directors and writers including Colin Dexter in the ITV Inspector Morse series.
Hitchcock was in his mid-twenties, and a professional film director, before he'd ever drunk alcohol or been on a date. His films sometimes feature male characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers. In North by Northwest (1959), Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant's character) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him (in this case, they are). In The Birds (1963), the Rod Taylor character, an innocent man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and struggles to free himself of a grasping mother. The killer in Frenzy (1972) has a loathing of women but idealises his mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has a incredibly close relationship with his mother. Norman Bates' troubles with his mother in Psycho are infamous.
Hitchcock heroines tend to be lovely, cool blondes who seem at first to be proper but, when aroused by passion or danger, respond in a more sensual, animal, perhaps criminal way. As noted, the famous victim in The Lodger is a blonde. In The 39 Steps, Hitchcock's glamorous blonde star, Madeleine Carroll, is put in handcuffs. In Marnie (1964), glamorous blonde Tippi Hedren is a kleptomaniac. In To Catch a Thief (1955), glamorous blonde Grace Kelly offers to help someone she believes is a cat burglar. After becoming interested in Thorwald's life in Rear Window, Lisa breaks into Thorwald's apartment. And, most notoriously, in Psycho, Janet Leigh's character steals $40,000 and gets murdered by a young man named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who thought he was his own mother. (Or, as Norman put it himself, "My mother is — what's the phrase? — she isn't really herself today.") His last blonde heroine was French actress Claude Jade as the secret agent's worried daughter Michele in Topaz (1969).
Hitchcock saw that a reliance on actors and actresses was a holdover from the theater tradition. He was a pioneer in using camera movement, camera set ups and montage to explore the outer reaches of cinematic art.
Hitchcock's most personal films are probably Notorious (1946) and Vertigo — both about the obsessions and neuroses of men who manipulate women. Hitchcock often said that his personal favourite was Shadow of a Doubt.
Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death. Kim Novak's character is most attractive as a blonde, and though Jimmy Stewart's character believes she is suicidal (he later discovers the real truth about her), he falls in love with her and she with him. Stewart's character feels an angry need to control his lover, to dress her, to fetishise her clothes, her shoes, her hair.
Hitchcock had trouble giving proper credit to the screenwriters who did so much to make his visions come to life on the screen. Gifted writers worked with him, including Raymond Chandler and John Michael Hayes, but rarely felt they had been treated as equals.
Hitchcock once commented, "The writer and I plan out the entire script down to the smallest detail, and when we're finished all that's left to do is to shoot the film. Actually, it's only when one enters the studio that one enters the area of compromise. Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest." This viewpoint is contradicted by current available evidence (see Hitchcock at Work). Hitchcock was often critical of his actors and actresses as well, dismissing, for example, Kim Novak's performance in Vertigo, and once famously remarking that actors were to be treated like cattle. (In response to being accused of saying 'actors are cattle', he said 'I never said they were cattle; I said there were to be treated like cattle'.
Most of his films contain a short appearance of Hitchcock himself: the director was sometimes boarding a bus, or crossing in front of a business, or across the courtyard in an apartment, or in a newspaper advertisement. He generally carries a musical instrument in these cameos. It is a widely popular game to find Hitchcock's appearance in his films. There are books and websites dedicated to these appearances known as cameo roles.
The first book devoted to the director is simply named Hitchcock. It is a document of a one-week interview by Francois Truffaut in 1967. (ISBN 0671604295).
Hitchcock did not rank highly with film critics of his own day. Except for Rebecca, none of his films won an Academy Award for Best Picture. As a producer, Hitchcock received one Best Picture nomination for Suspicion (1941). He was nominated as Best Director for five of his films: Rebecca, Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window, and Psycho. Apart from the award for "Rebecca", the only other Academy Award that he ever received was the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, for quality in producing, in 1968. Hitchcock was made a Knight Commander of the British Empire on 3 January 1980 by Queen Elizabeth II just four months before his death in Los Angeles. Sir Alfred Hitchcock was cremated.
From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host and producer of a long-running television series entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents. While his films had made Hitchcock's name strongly associated with suspense, the TV series made Hitchcock a celebrity himself. His irony-tinged voice, image, and mannerisms became instantly recognizable, and were often the subject of parody. He directed a few episodes of the TV series himself, and he upset a number of movie production companies when he insisted on using his TV production crew to produce his motion picture Psycho. In the late 1980s, a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions.
Alfred Hitchcock is also immortalised in print and appeared as himself in the very popular juvenile detective series, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. The long-running detective series was clever and well-written with characters much younger than the Hardy Boys. Alfred Hitchcock agreed to introduce the cases of the Three Investigators after they succeeded in solving a very difficult case involving a castle and thereafter a parrot. Alfred Hitchcock formerly introduced each case at the beginning of the book. As a director, he even often gave them new cases to solve. At the end of each book, Alfred Hitchcock would discuss the specifics of the case with Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews and Peter Crenshaw and every so often the three boys would give Alfred Hitchcock mementoes of their case.
When Alfred Hitchcock passed away, his chores as the boys' mentor/friend would be done by a fictional character: a retired detective named Hector Sebastian. Due to the popularity of the series, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators scored several reprints and out of respect, the latter reprints were changed to just The Three Investigators. Over the years, more than one name has been used to replace Alfred Hitchcock's character especially for the earlier books when his role was emphasised.
At the height of Alfred Hitchcock's success, he was also asked to introduce a set of books with his name attached. The series was a collection of short stories by popular short story writers. They were primarily focused on suspense and thrillers. These titles included Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, Afred Hithcock's Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, Alfred Hitchock's Spellbinders in Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, Afred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery and Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful.
Some notable writers that contributed the collection include Shirley Jackson (Strangers in Town, The Lottery), T.H. White (The Sword in the Stone), Robert Bloch, H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and the creator of The Three Investigators Robert Arthur.
(all dates are for release)
The Hitchcock "dream team," refers to the group of people who worked with Hitchcock on his 1950's film. These frequent
collaborators include;
Robert Burks – cinematograper, Herbert Coleman – associate producer, John Michael Hayes – screenwriter, Edith Head – costume designer, Bernard Hermann – composer, Grace Kelly – actress, Peggy Robertson – Hitchcock's assistant, James Stewart – actor & George Tomasini – editor
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