KEY
INFO
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Born As: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
Born: August 13, 1899, Leytonstone,
England
Died: April 28, 1980 from Liver Failure and Heart Problems
Education: St. Ignatius College, London; School of Engineering
and Navigation
(mechanics, electricity, acoustics, navigation); University
of London (art)
By Charles Ramirez Berg
The acknowledged master of the thriller genre he virtually
invented, Alfred Hitchcock was also a brilliant technician who
deftly blended sex, suspense and humor. He began his filmmaking
career in 1919 illustrating title cards for silent films at
Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky studio in London. There he
learned scripting, editing and art direction, and rose to assistant
director in 1922. That year he directed an unfinished film,
No. 13 or Mrs. Peabody . His first completed film as director
was The Pleasure
Garden (1925), an Anglo-German production filmed in Munich.
This experience, plus a stint at Germany's UFA studios as an
assistant director, help account for the Expressionistic character
of his films, both in their visual schemes and thematic concerns.
The Lodger (1926), his
breakthrough film, was a prototypical example of the classic
Hitchcock plot: an innocent protagonist is falsely accused of
a crime and becomes involved in a web of intrigue.
An early example of Hitchcock's
technical virtuosity was his creation of "subjective sound"
for Blackmail
(1929), his first sound film. In this story of a woman who stabs
an artist to death when he tries to seduce her, Hitchcock emphasized
the young woman's anxiety by gradually distorting all but one
word "knife" of a neighbor's dialogue the morning after the
killing. Here and in Murder!
(1930), Hitchcock first made explicit the link between sex and
violence.
 The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), a commercial and critical
success, established a favorite pattern: an investigation of
family relationships within a suspenseful story. The 39
Steps (1935) showcases a mature Hitchcock; it is a stylish
and efficiently told chase film brimming with exciting incidents
and memorable characters. Despite their merits, both Secret
Agent (1936) and Sabotage
(1936) exhibited flaws Hitchcock later acknowledged and learned
from. According to his theory, suspense is developed by providing
the audience with information denied endangered characters.
But to be most effective and cathartic, no harm should come
to the innocent as it does in both of those films. The
Lady Vanishes (1938), on the other hand, is sleek, exemplary
Hitchcock: fast-paced, witty, and magnificently entertaining.
Hitchcock's last British film,
Jamaica Inn (1939),
and his first Hollywood effort, Rebecca
(1940), were both handsomely mounted though somewhat uncharacteristic
works based on novels by Daphne du Maurier. Despite its somewhat
muddled narrative, Foreign
Correspondent (1940) was the first Hollywood film in his
recognizable style. Suspicion
(1941), the story of a woman who thinks her husband is a murderer
about to make her his next victim, was an exploration of family
dynamics; its introduction of evil into the domestic arena foreshadowed
Shadow of a Doubt
(1943), Hitchcock's early Hollywood masterwork. One of his most
disturbing films, Shadow was nominally the story of a young
woman who learns that a favorite uncle is a murderer, but at
heart it is a sobering look at the dark underpinnings of American
middle-class life. Fully as horrifying as Uncle Charlie's attempts
to murder his niece was her mother's tearful acknowledgment
of her loss of identity in becoming a wife and mother. "You
know how it is," she says, "you sort of forget you're you. You're
your husband's wife." In Hitchcock, evil manifests itself not
only in acts of physical violence, but also in the form of psychological,
institutionalized and systemic cruelty.
 Hitchcock
would return to the feminine sacrifice-of-identity theme several
times, most immediately with the masterful Notorious
(1946), a perverse love story about an FBI agent who must send
the woman he loves into the arms of a Nazi in order to uncover
an espionage ring. Other psychological dramas of the late 1940s
were Spellbound
(1945), The Paradine
Case (1948), and Under
Capricorn (1949). Both Lifeboat
(1944) and Rope (1948) were
interesting technical exercises: in the former, the object was
to tell a film story within the confines of a small boat; in
Rope, Hitchcock sought to
make a film that appeared to be a single, unedited shot. Rope
shared with the more effective Strangers
on a Train (1951) a villain intent on committing the perfect
murder as well as a strong homoerotic undercurrent.
During his most inspired period,
from 1950 to 1960, Hitchcock produced a cycle of memorable films
which included minor works such as I
Confess (1953), the sophisticated thrillers Dial
M for Murder (1954) and To
Catch a Thief (1955), a remake of The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and the black comedy The Trouble
with Harry (1955). He also directed several top-drawer films
like Strangers
on a Train and the troubling early docudrama (1956), a searing
critique of the American justice system.
His three unalloyed masterpieces
of the period were investigations into the very nature of watching
cinema. Rear Window
(1954) made viewers voyeurs, then had them pay for their pleasure.
In its story of a photographer who happens to witness a murder,
Hitchcock provocatively probed the relationship between the
watcher and the watched, involving, by extension, the viewer
of the film. Vertigo
(1958), as haunting a movie as Hollywood has ever produced,
took the lost-feminine-identity theme of Shadow of a Doubt and
Notorious and identified its cause as male fetishism.
 North
by Northwest (1959) is perhaps Hitchcock's most fully realized
film. From a script by Ernest Lehman, with a score (as usual)
by Bernard Herrmann, and
starring Cary Grant and Eva
Marie Saint, this quintessential chase movie is full of all
the things for which we remember Alfred Hitchcock: ingenious
shots, subtle male-female relationships, dramatic score, bright
technicolor, inside jokes, witty symbolism and above all masterfully
orchestrated suspense.Psycho
(1960) is famed for its shower murder sequence a classic model
of shot selection and editing which was startling for its (apparent)
nudity, graphic violence and its violation of the narrative
convention that makes a protagonist invulnerable. Moreover,
the progressive shots of eyes, beginning with an extreme close-up
of the killer's peeping eye and ending with the open eye of
the murder victim, subtly implied the presence of a third eye
the viewer's.
Later films offered intriguing
amplifications of his main themes. The
Birds (1963) presented evil as an environmental fact of
life. Marnie (1964),
a psychoanalytical thriller along the lines of Spellbound
showed how a violent, sexually tinged childhood episode turns
a woman into a thief, once again associating criminality with
violence and sex. Most notable about Torn
Curtain (1966), an espionage story played against a cold
war backdrop, was its extended fight-to-the death scene between
the protagonist and a Communist agent in the kitchen of a farm
house. In it Hitchcock reversed the movie convention of quick,
easy deaths and showed how difficult and how momentous the act
of killing really is.
 Hitchcock's
disappointing Topaz (1969),
an unwieldy, unfocused story set during the Cuban missile crisis,
was devoid of his typical narrative economy and wit. He returned
to England to produce Frenzy
(1972), a tale much more in the Hitchcock vein, about an innocent
man suspected of being a serial killer. His final film, Family
Plot (1976), pitted two couples against one another: a pair
of professional thieves versus a female psychic and her working-class
lover. It was a fitting end to a body of work that demonstrated
the eternal symmetry of good and evil.
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