 Sir
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (August 13, 1899 - April 29, 1980) was a highly
influential film director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the
suspense and thriller genres. He directed more than fifty feature films in a
career spanning six decades, from the silent film era, through the invention of
talkies, to the color era. Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful
and publicly recognizable directors in the world during his lifetime, and
remains one of the best known and most popular directors of all time, famous for
his expert and largely unrivalled control of pace and suspense throughout his
movies.
Hitchcock was born and raised in Leytonstone, London, England. He began his
directing career in the United Kingdom in 1922, but from 1939 he worked
primarily in the United States and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1956.
Hitchcock and his family lived in a mountaintop estate high above Scotts Valley,
California, from 1940 to 1972. He died of renal failure in 1980.
Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known for their
droll humor. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances
beyond their control or understanding.
Rebecca was the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture,
although four others were nominated. However, Hitchcock never won an Academy
Award for Best Director. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award
for lifetime achievement in 1967, but never personally received an Academy Award
of Merit.
Until the later part of his career, Hitchcock was far more popular with film
audiences than with film critics, especially the elite British and American
critics. In the late 1950s the French New Wave critics, especially Eric Rohmer,
Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut, were among the first to see and promote
his films as artistic works. Hitchcock was one of the first directors to whom
they applied their auteur theory, which stresses the artistic authority of the
director in the film-making process.
Hitchcock's innovations and vision have influenced a great number of filmmakers,
producers, and actors. His influence helped start a trend for film directors to
control artistic aspects of their movies without answering to the movie's
producer.
Life
Childhood and Youth
Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, Essex (now
London), the second son and youngest of three children of William Hitchcock
(1862-1914), a greengrocer and poultry worker, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock
(1863-1942). His family was mostly Roman Catholic. Hitchcock was sent to the
Catholic school St. Ignatius College in London. He often described his childhood
as being very lonely and sheltered, which was undoubtedly compounded by his
weight issues.
Hitchcock claimed that on one occasion early in his life, after he had acted
childishly, his father sent him to the local police station carrying a note.
When he presented the police officer on duty with the note, he was locked in a
cell for a few moments, long enough to be petrified. This was a favorite
anecdote of his, and the incident is often cited in connection with the theme of
distrust of police which runs through many of his films. His mother would often
make him address her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he
behaved badly, forcing him to stand there for hours. This would be recalled by
the character Norman Bates in Psycho.
At 14, Hitchcock lost his father and left the Jesuit-run St Ignatius' College in
Stamford Hill, 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, Famous Players-Lasky, and their British successors,
Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies.
Pre-war British Career
In 1925, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave him a chance to direct his
first film, The Pleasure Garden made at Ufa studios in Germany. The commercial
failure of this film threatened to derail his promising career. In 1926,
however, Hitchcock made his debut in the thriller genre. The resulting film, The
Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was a major commercial and critical success.
Like many of his earlier works, it was influenced by Expressionist techniques he
had witnessed firsthand in Germany. This is the first truly "Hitchcockian" film,
incorporating such themes as the "wrong man".
Following the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock began his first efforts to
promote himself in the media, and hired a publicist to cement his growing
reputation as one of the British film industry's rising stars. On December 2,
1926, he married his assistant director Alma Reville at Brompton Oratory. Their
daughter Patricia was born in 1928. Alma was Hitchcock's closest collaborator.
She wrote some of his screenplays and (though often un-credited) worked with him
on every one of his films.
In 1929, he began work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was in
production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first sound pictures.
With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of the British Museum,
Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop
for suspense sequences.
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 and his second, The 39 Steps (1935), is often considered
one of the best films from his early period. It was also one of the first to
introduce the concept of the "MacGuffin", a plot device around which a whole
story would revolve. In The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of
blueprints.
His next major success was in 1938, The Lady Vanishes, a clever and fast-paced
film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman (Dame May Whitty), who
disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika (a
thinly-veiled version of Nazi Germany).
By the end of the 1930s, Hitchcock was at the top of his game artistically, and
in a position to name his own terms when David O. Selznick managed to entice the
Hitchcocks to Hollywood.
Hollywood
Hitchcock's gallows humor and the suspense that became his trademark continued
in his American work. However, working arrangements with his new producer were
less than optimal. Selznick suffered from perennial money problems and Hitchcock
was often unhappy with the amount of creative control demanded by Selznick over
his films. Consequently, Selznick ended up "loaning" Hitchcock to the larger
studios more often than producing Hitchcock's films himself.
With the prestigious Selznick picture Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made his first
American movie, although it was set in England and based on a novel by English
author Dame Daphne du Maurier. This Gothic melodrama explores the fears of a
naive young bride who enters a great English country home and must grapple with
the problems of a distant husband, a predatory housekeeper, and the legacy of
her husband's late wife, the beautiful, mysterious Rebecca. The film has also
subsequently been noted for the lesbian undercurrents in Judith Anderson's
performance. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. However, the
statuette went to Selznick as the film's producer, and the film did not win the
Best Director award. There were additional problems between Selznick and
Hitchcock; Selznick, as he usually did, imposed very restrictive rules upon
Hitchcock, hindering his creative control. Hitchcock was forced to shoot the
film as Selznick wanted, immediately creating friction within their
relationship. At the same time, Selznick complained about Hitchcock's "goddam
jigsaw cutting," which meant that the producer did not have nearly the leeway to
create his own film as he liked, but had to follow Hitchcock's vision of the
finished product.
Hitchcock's second American film, the European-set thriller Foreign
Correspondent, was also nominated for Best Picture that year. It was filmed in
the first year of World War II and inspired by the rapidly-changing events in
Europe, as covered by an American newspaper reporter portrayed by a
wise-cracking Joel McCrea. The film cleverly used actual footage of European
scenes and scenes filmed on a Hollywood back-lot.
Hitchcock's work during the 1940s was diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and the courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947) to the
dark and disturbing Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
Suspicion (1941) marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer as well as
director. This was Cary Grant's first film with Hitchcock. Joan Fontaine won
Best Actress Oscar and New York Film Critics Circle Award for her outstanding
performance in Suspicion.
Saboteur (1942) was the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal, a
studio where he would work in his later years. Hitchcock was forced to utilize
Universal contract players Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, both known for
their work in comedies and light dramas; Hitchcock made the most of the
situation and got remarkably good performances from the two lead actors.
Breaking with Hollywood conventions of the time, Hitchcock did extensive
location filming, especially in New York City, and memorably depicted a
confrontation between a suspected saboteur (Cummings) and a real saboteur
(Norman Lloyd) atop the Statue of Liberty.
Shadow of a Doubt, his personal favorite of all his films and the second of the
early Universal films, was about young Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa
Wright), who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being
a serial murderer. In its use of overlapping characters, dialogue, and close-ups
it has provided a generation of film theorists with psychoanalytic potential,
including Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek. The film also harkens back to one of
Cotten's best known films, Citizen Kane. Hitchcock again filmed extensively on
location, this time in the northern California town of Santa Rosa.
Spellbound explored the then-fashionable subject of psychoanalysis and featured
a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali. The dream sequence as it actually
appears in the film is considerably shorter than was originally envisioned,
which was to be several minutes long, because it proved to be too disturbing for
the audience.
Notorious (1946) followed Spellbound. As Selznick failed to see its potential,
he allowed Hitchcock to make the film for RKO. From this point onwards,
Hitchcock would produce his own films, giving him a far greater degree of
freedom to pursue the projects that interested him. Notorious starred Hitchcock
regulars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and features a plot about Nazis, uranium,
and South America. It was a huge box office success and has remained one of
Hitchcock's most acclaimed films. Its inventive use of suspense and props
briefly led to Hitchcock's being under surveillance by the CIA due to his use of
uranium as a plot device.
After completing his final film for Selznick, The Paradine Case, Hitchcock
filmed his first color film, Rope, which appeared in 1948. Here Hitchcock
experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done
earlier with Lifeboat (1943). He also experimented with exceptionally long takes
— up to ten minutes long (see Themes and devices). Featuring James Stewart in
the leading role, Rope was the first of four films Stewart would make for
Hitchcock. Based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s, Rope is also among
several films with homosexual subtext to emerge from the Hays Office–controlled
Hollywood studio era.
Under Capricorn (1949), set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used the
short-lived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used
Technicolor in this production, then returned to black and white films for
several years. For these two films Hitchcock formed a production company with
Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures, which folded after these two
unsuccessful pictures.
Peak Years and Decline
With Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith,
Hitchcock combined many of the best elements from his preceding British and
American films. Two men casually meet and speculate on removing people who are
causing them difficulty. One of the men, though, takes this banter entirely
seriously. With Farley Granger reprising some elements of his role from Rope,
Strangers continued the director's interest in the narrative possibilities of
homosexual blackmail and murder. This was Hitchcock's first production for
Warner Brothers, which had distributed Rope and Under Capricorn.
MCA head Lew Wasserman, whose client list included James Stewart, Janet Leigh,
and other actors who would appear in Hitchcock's films, had a significant impact
in packaging and marketing Hitchcock's films beginning in the 1950s. With
Wasserman's help, Hitchcock received tremendous creative freedom from the
studios, as well as substantive financial rewards as a result of Paramount's
profit-sharing contract.
Three very popular films starring Grace Kelly followed. Dial M for Murder (1954)
was adapted from the popular stage play by Frederick Knott. This was originally
another experimental film, with Hitchcock using the technique of 3D
cinematography, although the film was not released in this format at first; it
did receive screenings in the early 1980s in 3D form. The film also marked a
return to Technicolor productions for Hitchcock. Rear Window starred James
Stewart again, as well as Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Here, the
wheelchair-bound Stewart observes the movements of his neighbors across the
courtyard and becomes convinced one of them has murdered his wife. Like Lifeboat
and Rope, the movie was photographed almost entirely within the confines of a
small space: Stewart's tiny studio apartment overlooking the massive courtyard
set. To Catch a Thief, set in the French Riviera, starred Kelly and Cary Grant.
A remake of his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much followed, this time with
James Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song, "Whatever Will Be, Will Be
(Que Sera, Sera)" (which became a big hit for Day). The Wrong Man (1957), based
on a real-life case of mistaken identity, was the only film of Hitchcock's to
star Henry Fonda.
Vertigo (1958) again starred Stewart, this time with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel
Geddes. The film was a commercial failure, but has come to be viewed by many as
one of Hitchcock's masterpieces; it is now placed highly in the Sight & Sound
decade polls.
Hitchcock followed Vertigo with three more successful pictures. All are also
recognized as among his very best films: 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 an electronically
produced soundtrack. These were his last great films, after which his career
slowly wound down (although some critics such as Robin Wood and Donald Spoto
contend that Marnie, from 1964, is first-class Hitchcock). Failing health also
reduced his output over the last two decades of his life. In 1972, Hitchcock
returned to London to film Frenzy, his last major success. For the first time,
Hitchcock allowed nudity and profane language, which had before been taboo, in
one of his films.
Family Plot (1976) was his last film. It related the escapades of "Madam"
Blanche Tyler played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi
driver lover Bruce Dern making a living from her phony powers. William Devane,
Karen Black and Cathleen Nesbitt co-starred.
Near the end of his life, Hitchcock worked on the script for a project spy
thriller, The Short Night, which was never filmed. The script was published in
book form after Hitchcock's death.
Hitchcock was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by
Queen Elizabeth II in the 1980 New Year's Honors. He died just four months
later, on April 29, before he had the opportunity to be formally invested by the
Queen. Despite the brief period between his knighthood and death, he was
nevertheless entitled to be known as Sir Alfred Hitchcock and to use the post
nominal letters "KBE", because he remained a British subject when he adopted
American citizenship in 1956.
Alfred Hitchcock died from renal failure in his Bel-Air, Los Angeles home, aged
80, and was survived by his wife Alma Reville, and their daughter, Patricia
Hitchcock O'Connell. A funeral service was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church
in Beverly Hills. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the
Pacific.
|
