Alfred Hitchcock Biography     Elements     Works     Criticism


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)


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 favorite writers and many consider The Thirty-nine Steps Hitchcock's best British film. However, Graham Greene considered the story 'inexcusably spoilt' by the director. The film begins with the assassination of a secret agent. The hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), bumps into a beautiful woman who calls herself 'Miss Smith'. She asks Hannay if he has ever heard of 'the 39 Steps', and claims she must go to Scotland the next day to stop some vital secrets falling into enemy hands. Miss Smith is murdered and Hannay becomes the prime suspect for her murder. - Hannay is hunted by the police and captured. He manages to escape, and continues his run with a blonde, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll). In the end the secret of the 39 Steps is revealed - it is an organization of spies collecting information on behalf of a foreign government. Hannay spends a good portion of the film handcuffed to Pamela, which has been interpreted as Hitchcock's bondage fantasy or a criticism of the institution of marriage. The Thirty-nine Steps was remade with Keith More as Hannay in 1956 and in 1978 by Don Sharp, starring Robert Powell.

Hitchcock's first American movie, REBECCA (1940), won the Best Picture Academy Award. However, the critic in Variety (March 27, 1940) gave it a bad review. "Dave Selznick's picture is too tragic and deeply psychological to hit the fancy of wide audience appeal... General audiences will tab it as a long-drawn out drama that could have been told better in less footage." The film was based on Daphne du Maurier's novel, which drew mostly from Charlotte Brontë's classic Jane Eyre. 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 Miklós Rózsa, 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 color movie - he had to re-shoot more than half of the film after he noticed that the color 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. He once said: "It is possible to be cinematic in the confined space of the telephone booth." 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. Stewart has a broken leg; he spends his time at home watching his neighbours, and his nurse Stella says: "We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is to get outside their own house and look in for a change." Vertigo, Hitchcock's most ingenious film, was dismissed by several critics. "... it pursues its theme of false identity with such plodding persistence that, by the time the climactic cat is let out of the bag, the audience has long since had kittens..." (Arthur Knight in Saturday Review, June 7, 1958) Rear Window, starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, was treated coldly in the New Yorker: "What isn't understandable... is Alfred Hitchcock's association with this enterprise... I fear that Rear Window must be taken as another example of his footless ambition to make a movie that stands absolutely still... Maybe one of these days he's going to bust out the way he used to, and then we'll have some satisfactory films." (John McCarten, August 7, 1954) 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), proprietor of Norman Bates motel, who keeps the preserved corpse of his mother in his cellar. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) has stolen $40,000 from her employer and after having driven for almost a day and a half, she decides to stay for the night at the motel. Dressed as an old lady, his mother, Norman kills Marion, when she takes a shower. The scene is among the most famous in film history. Hichcock later told Francois Truffaut that the suddenness of the murder, out of the blue - only one-third of the way through the Bloch novel - did not hold him back from making the film in the first place. The composer Bernard Herrman provided for it an unforgettable score. Norman also kills Milton Arbogast, a private detective, who is on the trail of the money. Marion's sister Lila and Sam Loomis eventually reveal Norman's secret. The film was listed in 1998 as one of the American Film Institute's top 100 films of the century (number 18). Some critics realized that Hitchcock had made a hit, but others not, among them Moira Walsh in America (July 9, 1960): "Hitchcock seems to have been more interested in shocking his audience with the bloodiest bathtub murder in screen history, and in photographing Janet Leigh in various stages of undress, than in observing the ordinary rules of good film construction. This is a dangerous corner for a gifted movie maker to place himself in."

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. "Blondes are the best victims. They're like virgin snow which shows up the bloody footprints." (Hitchcock in Sunday Times, 1 September 1973, from Dictionary of Film Quotations, ed. by Tony Crawley, 1994) TORN CURTAIN (1966), starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, is perhaps best known for its long murder scene. Newman tries to kill an East German named Gromek, a police spy who refuses to die - he is battered, stabbed, nearly strangled and finally Newman manages to kill him by holding Gromek's head inside a gas oven. TOPAZ (1969) was slightly delayed when André 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.