Alfred Hitchcock was born in London, the son of William Hitchcock, a poultry dealer and fruit importer. He was educated at a Jesuit school, London’s St. Ignatius College, and the School of Engineering and Navigation, where he studied mechanics, electricity, acoustics, and navigation. He then worked for a telegraph company and took art courses at the University of London. In 1920 he entered the film industry as designer of titles for Hollywood’s Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount). When the Famous Players studios was taken over by a British production company, Hitchcock became an assistant director, working also as screenwriter and art director in several films. His first assignment as a director came in 1925. Next year he married Alma Reville, a film editor and script girl, who would later collaborate with him in several films. In 1926 Hitchcock directed The Lodger, which was commercially successful. It also marked his debut as an extra. The trademark of Hitchcock’s personal appearances continued in later productions. In 1929 he directed Blackmail, the first British feature film with synchronous sound.
Hitchcock made his international breakthrough in 1934 with The Man Who Knew Too Much. The next film, The 39 Steps, was an even greater success, and one of the earliest Hitchcock’s examples of the ‘innocent man on the run.’ Before leaving England, he made The Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1937), Young And Innocent (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Jamaica Inn (1939).
John Buchan’s spy thriller The Thirty Nine Steps was published in 1915. Buchan was one of Hitchcock’s favourite writers and many consider The Thirty-nine Steps Hitchcock’s best British film. The Thirty-nine Steps was remade with Keith More as Hannay in 1956 and in 1978 by Don Sharp.
Hitchcock’s first American movie, Rebecca (1940), won the Best Picture Academy Award. In the 1940s Hitchcock also directed among other films Shadow Of Doubt (1943), starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten, Spellbound (1945), which won an Academy Award for Best Music for Miklos Rozsa, Notorious (1946), starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and Rope (1948), shot in a series of eight-minute continuous takes. It was the director’s first colour movie—he had to re-shoot more than half of the film after he noticed that the colour of the setting sun appeared too vulgar on film. Hitchcock had also used in Lifeboat (1944) limited cinematic space—the film was shot in a gigantic water tank with back projections. Rope consisted of only eleven shots; usually Hitchcock’s films contained one thousand shots.
In the 1950s Hitchcock made some of his most acclaimed films, Strangers On A Train (1951), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960)—all of them dealt with psychically more or less disturbed people. Hitchcock himself suffered from all kinds of fears—he was frightened of police, authorities, his own emotions, and sex. In Rear Window (1954) James Stewart played a sympathetic Peeping Tom, Jeff, a photographer and an alter ego of Hitchcock, a professional voyeur as a director. In the United States Hitchcock produced a TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965). Several book anthologies, juvenile series Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators (based on characters created by Robert Arthur), and a monthly mystery magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, also used Hitchcock’s name as part of the title.
Psycho was based on Robert Bloch’s novel about Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). The film was listed in 1998 as one of the American Film Institute’s top 100 films of the century.
Hitchcock films from the 1960s include The Birds (1963), in which he tormented the star, Tippi Hedren, with birds for a week, and Marnie (1964), in which the director allegedly made advances to Hedren. Torn Curtain (1966), starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, is perhaps best known for its long murder scene. Topaz (1969) was slightly delayed when Andre Malraux, the French Minister of Culture, withdrew the crew’s shooting permit as he felt the film was anti-French. In the 1970s Hitchcock continued with Frenzy (1971), which marked the only time the director filmed a nude scene (Psycho not included) and Family Plot (1976), which was his last production. In 1979 Hitchcock received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. In the last years Hitchcock’s drinking had increased. His famous unrealized final project was The Short Night, set partly in Finland. The writer David Freeman had prepared the script and Catherine Deneuve had agreed to star in it. The film director Peter Bogdanovich offered to shoot all the Finland sequences from a storyboard prepared with Hitchcock.
Several of Hitchcock’s film were based on novels, short stories or plays by writers such as Daphne du Maurier, John Steinbeck, John Galsworthy, Leon Uris, Victor Canning, Robert Bloch, W. Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Josephine Tey, John Buchan, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith and Winston Graham. Central themes in his works are the thin line between sanity and insanity, the random nature of events, the concept of shared guilt, and how an innocent man’s world can be destroyed by crime.
