Alfred Hitchcock's successful screen thrillers earned him the nickname "Master of Suspense," but he is also considered one of the greatest film directors in the history of cinema. He started out in British productions as a title and set designer, working his way up to the position of screenwriter and director by the mid-1920s. His notable early movies include The Lodger (1926), Blackmail (1929, the first British feature to use synchronous sound) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). He had commercial and critical success while still in Britain, and thrillers such as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) solidified his reputation for combining mystery and suspense with dashes of humor. In the '40s Hitchcock began making movies in the United States, hits such as Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Spellbound (1945, featuring a memorable dream sequence by Salvador Dali) as well as less successful but still technically daring films like Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948). He was in top form in the 1950s, and his movies from the era are still popular, including Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954, with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959, starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint). His other films include Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and Frenzy (1972). Hitchcock was one of the most recognized directors in history by appearance as well as by name, thanks to his cameo roles in his movies and to his TV shows Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).
Hitchcock was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1980, shortly before his death.
Born: Aug 13, 1899 in Leytonstone, London, England
Died: Apr 29, 1980 in Los Angeles, California
Occupation: Director, Actor, Writer
Active: '20s-'60s
Major Genres: Thriller, Drama
Career Highlights: Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo
First Major Screen Credit: The Passionate Adventure (1924)
Biography
Alfred Hitchcock has been the most well-known director to the general public since the 1940s -- and he remains so in the 21st century, more than 25 years after his death. His name evokes instant expectations on the part of audiences around the world: of a memorable night of movie-watching highlighted by at least two or three great chills (and a few more good ones), some striking black comedy, and an eccentric characterization or two in virtually every one of the director's movies across a half-century -- and usually laced with a comical cameo appearance by the director himself.
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born into a devoutly Catholic family in London, and his religious upbringing -- with its attendant issues of guilt -- would have a powerful influence on the psychological underpinnings of his later work. He was trained at a technical school, and initially gravitated to movies through art courses and advertising. He studied the work of other filmmakers, most notably the German expressionists, especially Fritz Lang. On visiting Germany's UFA studios in the early '20s, Hitchcock was reportedly overwhelmed by the sheer size and scope of the sets used by Lang for his 1924 Siegfried. Following two films on which he served as screenwriter, Hitchcock made his directorial debut with The Pleasure Garden in 1925. Hitchcock had his first major success the following year with The Lodger, a thriller loosely based on the real-life story of Jack the Ripper, adapted from a novel authored by Mrs. Marie Belloc-Lowndes. While he worked in a multitude of genres over the next six years (including one musical, Waltzes From Vienna, which he regarded as the nadir of his career), he found his greatest acceptance with his thrillers, which included Blackmail (1929) -- the first talking picture made in England -- and Murder (1930). These seem primitive by modern standards, but have many of the essential elements of Hitchcock's subsequent successes, even if they are presented in technically rudimentary terms. Additionally, in their own time they were considered quite innovative, especially Blackmail, which exists in two different versions, sound and silent. Each has its own virtues, but the talkie version makes use of sound in a uniquely suspenseful and sophisticated fashion for its time; the movie also introduced one of Hitchcock's trademark attributes, a finale in a larger-than-life setting, in this case the dome over the reading room of the British Museum. That setting was the result of a suggestion from a younger colleague of Hitchcock's, future film director Michael Powell, who offered the pursuit to the reading room dome as an alternative to a more standard chase through the streets. Hitchcock's later films would include climaxes at the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur), a murder at the United Nations, and a chase to the death on Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest).
Hitchcock first came to international attention in the mid-'30s with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), a thriller starring Leslie Banks as the desperate father, Nova Pilbeam as the kidnapped daughter, and Lang alumnus Peter Lorre -- in his first England-language movie -- as the ringleader of the assassins. The movie was notable not only for its pacing and suspense but also its violence, especially in the final section, which was inspired by an actual incident, the Sidney Street siege, in which the London police encountered heavily armed anarchists. The movie that established the director as a major force in filmmaking, however, was The 39 Steps (1935), loosely based on John Buchan's novel of the same name. With its careful balance of suspense, humor, and romance, the movie was received better in America than any British thriller since the advent of sound, and it made a star not only of Hitchcock within the ranks of his profession, but also of its two leads, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. At the time of the movie's release, the usual movement of filmmakers internationally was for American directors to head to England, where they were sought-after commodities; in Hitchcock's case, the reverse was true, as he began finding himself courted by Hollywood.
Hitchcock also endured a pair of box-office and critical disappointments during the mid-'30s. Secret Agent and Sabotage were relative failures, mostly due to casting problems. John Gielgud made a very unconvincing lead in the former, playing a reticent spy, and John Loder, subbing for an unavailable Robert Donat, gave a leaden performance in the latter and helped to defeat a pair of good performances by Sylvia Sidney and Oscar Homolka. Additionally, Hitchcock miscalculated the level of violence that the filmgoing public of 1936 would tolerate comfortably in Sabotage, in a scene involving a bomb on a London bus -- he later reportedly observed, rather sardonically, that he could have killed either the boy (Desmond Tester) or the dog, but not both the boy and the dog. His next film, Young and Innocent -- reportedly his favorite of all of his British thrillers -- was better received and showed off his technical expertise where it counted, in the climactic revelation of the killer's identity, in a bravura complex crane shot. But it was with The Lady Vanishes (1938) that everything came together in Hitchcock's work, the suspense, the humor, the romance, and the technical side of filmmaking all combining into a near-perfect whole, with superb pacing as well. Ironically, this was also the only project he ever inherited from another director, the film having already started life as a canceled production entitled "Lost Lady," which was to have been made in 1936 by Roy William Neill from a script by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. It became his greatest British success, as well as being his most humorous thriller, and made film stars of Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. Two of the supporting players, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, also became a regular double act in movies for years to come, and their characters, Charters and Caldicott, were later spun off into their own series by writer Keith Waterhouse on the PBS television series Mystery! Launder and Gilliat also became a major writer/director/producer duo in their own right in its wake, enjoying a quarter century of success in everything from thrillers to comedies.
Hitchcock was already being courted by American producer David O. Selznick, and The Lady Vanishes only upped the ante. He completed one last British film, Jamaica Inn, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel of ship wreckers in 18th century England, before heading to America to join Selznick's organization. From the outset, the relationship between director and producer was a strained and stormy one, as Hitchcock discovered that Selznick was very much a hands-on producer, exerting almost as much control on his set as Hitchcock, and that he often had his own agenda. The director had a strong enough personality to get what he wanted, but he didn't enjoy the duel for control, and he soon found an escape, but one loaded with its own problems. The multi-Oscar-winning Rebecca (1940) made a huge profit for Selznick and turned Hitchcock into one of Hollywood's top "money" directors, whose name on a marquee could attract audiences. It was then that Selznick began lending Hitchcock out to other producers for huge fees, many times the large salary that Hitchcock was earning; the director resented being used as a cash cow by his employer, but every time he was used on loan-out, it gave him a chance to get away from Selznick and work free from his interference. Those movies became some of his best work of this period in his career: the topical anti-Nazi thrillers Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Saboteur (1942) played to the politics of the era very successfully, despite the presence of a leading man in the latter -- Robert Cummings -- whom the director didn't want (it was also during the shooting of the latter movie that Hitchcock first met actor Norman Lloyd, who played the title role, who was to become an important collaborator on future projects); Lifeboat (1944), where Hitchcock faced the challenge (anticipating the thriller Phone Booth) of making a film drama on a single, confined set, the camera's movements confined to a few feet in any direction and its point-of-view limited to the confines of the boat; but the best of all of them was Shadow of a Doubt (1943), an unsettling take on homefront America in which a serial killer, played by genial leading man Joseph Cotten, comes home to his small town and targets a new victim in the person of his niece (played by Teresa Wright, who was then the virtual personification of young American womanhood).
Hitchcock also occasionally ran into problems with the Motion Picture Production Code, which restricted the content of what could be shown on the screen, and forced him to compromise on the script of Suspicion (1941). But he also tried various experiments during these years, with movies such as Spellbound (which came about initially through Selznick's personal fascination with Freudian analysis), in which he used surreal designs created by Salvador Dali to represent the manifestations of the unbalanced mind of the hero. Hitchcock capped his early Hollywood output with Notorious (1946), which he made for RKO (although Selznick ended up owning it), which mixed suspense and romance in near-perfect proportions, and proved an excellent dramatic vehicle for Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains. The end of Hitchcock's relationship with Selznick came with the production of The Paradine Case, which ultimately existed in three different running times, no version of which was successful.
In the years immediately after, Hitchcock went through a fallow period commercially, as he ventured into independent production and new approaches to shooting. This began with Rope (1948), a bold experiment -- following on from the challenge of Lifeboat -- in doing a thriller in the form of one continuous take, with no edits, retakes of shots, or inserted shots; this was also his first film in color. There were other experiments and digressions, mostly associated with his brief postwar return to British production, including the underrated period drama Under Capricorn (1949) and Stage Fright (1950), before he once again hit his commercial stride back in Hollywood with Strangers on a Train (1951), which was remade by Danny DeVito in 1987 as Throw Mama From the Train, and Dial M for Murder (1954), which was made in 3-D and remains one of the very few fully successful 3-D movies.
Hitchcock's biggest success of this period, however, was Rear Window (1954), based on a story by Cornell Woolrich and starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. This was Hitchcock's directorial tour de force, showing him expanding the boundaries of storytelling while still (in the manner of Lifeboat and Rope) confining himself to a single set and mostly a single point-of-view, breaking down the screen and the focus of the viewer and the film into small fragments. Even more striking was the fact that Hitchcock released Rear Window during 1954, the second year of Hollywood's switch to widescreen, anamorphic (i.e., Cinemascope) shooting -- every other director was scrambling to compose shots for an ultra-wide screen and finding ways to fill that screen, while he was busy breaking his screen into little pieces containing multiple, overlapping, and parallel story information, in picture and sound alike, and getting audiences to look and listen for every small detail. For many, the movie was his technical peak as a filmmaker -- and even here, he managed to slip in several in-jokes, including the particular makeup of the killer played by Raymond Burr, which made him a virtual dead ringer for Selznick.
It was during the second half of the 1950s that Hitchcock's output reached its zenith, with an output of suspense films that was extraordinary in its quality, even when the material wasn't always commercially successful. Starting with Rear Window, he created a series of movies that challenged viewers, sometimes quietly and sometimes boldly, but always in unexpected ways. This all led to a new venture for the director, in the form of a weekly suspense anthology series called Alfred Hitchcock Presents -- and suddenly he wasn't just one of the top filmmakers in Hollywood, but also a media star. The series ran for eight seasons, and although he only directed a handful of the episodes -- Norman Lloyd was one of those who played a key role in the actual production of the show -- his weekly appearances as the wry-witted, dark-humored host made him a fixture in American households and the minds of millions of people. Hitchcock was so well known that he was even burlesqued on two different cartoon shows of the period -- in The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, the heroes' nemesis Boris Badenov at one point impersonates a well-known English film director named "Alfred Hitchhike"; and in one of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons starring the duckling Yakky Doodle, the host is a sardonic and corpulent duck, resembling Hitchcock's physique and manner, whose presence is announced with a quotation from Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette," the Alfred Hitchcock Presents theme music.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in turn, overlapped with Hitchcock's last great sustained period of success, including his more opulent remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day. Hitchcock preferred the 1956 version, but most scholars and serious fans favor the 1934 original, which the director regarded as the work of a "talented amateur." This period also included the darkly romantic, chilling Vertigo (1958), with Stewart and Kim Novak, which was not especially successful at the time but has since come to be regarded as one of the jewels of the director's output. It was followed by the wildly paced, suspenseful (and often comical) North by Northwest (1959), with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint; the latter film, his only movie for MGM, was one of the director's most romantic movies and also exerted a massive influence on popular culture, as well as the source of inspiration for Stanley Donen's equally clever and romantic Charade (1963), also starring Grant.
There were a few more personal indulgences for the director during this period as well, including the fact-based black-and-white drama The Wrong Man (1956) and the gentle, whimsical The Trouble With Harry (1955), but these paled next to what, at first, seemed a relatively modest black-and-white movie with which he finished out the decade: Psycho (1960). Hitchcock originally had little confidence in the movie, and at one point had even considered folding it into the television series, but then Bernard Herrmann -- who had scored all of his major films from The Trouble With Harry onward -- delivered his score, a harrowing strings-only soundtrack that chilled listeners to the bone with its fierce glissandi passages. Originally released by Paramount with a full publicity press (including the well-advertised policy that no one would be admitted to theaters after the start of the movie), it drew lines around the block, and re-defined horror for decades (as well as permanently redefining the seemingly innocent notion of taking a shower). There were still triumphs to follow for Hitchcock, including The Birds (1963), which was not only a hit in theaters but set a new ratings record for its first network showing in the mid-'60s.
This period, however, also marked a downturn in his box office, with two failures in a row. Marnie (1964) managed to disappoint audiences and producers despite the presence of Sean Connery, then at the height of his James Bond fame, as one of the leads; and Torn Curtain (1966) failed despite the presence of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews (then in her post-Sound of Music box-office peak) as the leads. The director was also hurt by the studio's insistence that he cease using composer Bernard Herrmann (who had scored every Hitchcock movie since 1957) in favor of a more "commercial" composer, John Addison. Herrmann's music had become a key element of the success of Hitchcock's films since the mid-'50s, although it should be conceded that his proposed music for Torn Curtain -- the movie on which the split took place between the two -- was not one of his best scores. Of Hitchcock's final three movies, only Frenzy (1972), which marked his return to British thrillers after 30 years, was successful, although his last film, Family Plot (1976), has achieved some respect from cult audiences.
Hitchcock was granted a knighthood late in life, and was planning a new movie at the time of his death in 1980. Several years after he passed away, Hitchcock's box-office appeal was once again demonstrated with the re-release of Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, all of which had been withheld from distribution for several years, in new theatrical runs that earned millions of dollars each. In the case of Vertigo, which had not been successful on its initial release in 1958, this was a particularly important reissue -- from a cult film, it went on to become one of the director's most admired and popular movies. In the decades since, Hitchcock has proved to be every bit as popular in the home-video marketplace, his movies generating tens of millions more in sales and rentals; Rear Window also became the subject of a legal action over its story copyright during the late '80s that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 21st century, there are dozens of "special edition" DVD releases devoted to Hitchcock movies from the late '20s through the 1970s, even as his movies continue to attract audiences to repertory theater screenings. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), was a film director famous for skillfully wrought suspense thrillers. He was essentially concerned with depicting the tenuous relations between people and objects and rendering the terror inherent in commonplace realities.
Born into a working class family in London, Alfred Hitchcock attended St. Ignatius' College to prepare for the ministry. However, rebelling against his Catholic upbringing, he fled to the Bohemian seacoast in 1921. He soon involved himself in motion picture production, receiving valuable training with the British division of Famous Players Lasky. In 1923 he began writing scenarios for the Gainsborough Film Studios.
Hitchcock's first film, The Lodger (1925), an exciting treatment of the Jack the Ripper story, was followed by Blackmail (1930), the first British talking picture. Some think that Hitchcock's next films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), were responsible for the renaissance in British movie making during the early 1930s.
Fame Spread in Hollywood
In 1939 Hitchcock left England with his wife and daughter to settle in Hollywood. For the most part, his American films of the 1940s were expensively produced and stylishly entertaining. These included Rebecca (1940), based on a best-selling suspense novel; Suspicion (1941), about a woman who believes her husband is a murderer; Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the tale of a small-town psychopath diabolically masquerading as a Good Samaritan; Lifeboat (1944), a heavy-handed study of survival on the open seas; and Spellbound (1945), a murder mystery about psychoanalysts. Less ambitious but more accomplished was Notorious (1946), praised for its rendering of place and atmosphere. Hitchcock's first decade in Hollywood ended with two interesting failures: The Paradine Case (1947) and Rope (1948).
Hitchcock Became Master of Suspense
Beginning with the bizarre Strangers on a Train (1951), Hitchcock directed a series of films that placed him among the great artists of modern cinema. His productions of the 1950s were stylistically freer than his earlier films and thematically more complex. His most significant films during that time were I Confess (1953), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1956), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959).
Psycho (1960) was Hitchcock's most terrifying and controversial film, and made an entire generation of moviegoers nervous about taking a shower. The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), and Family Plot (1976) were Hitchcock's final and less brilliant films. Hitchcock also expanded his directing career into American television, with a series that featured mini-thrillers (1955-1965). Because of failing health, he retired from directing after Family Plot. He was knighted in 1979 and died soon afterward in Los Angeles on April 29, 1980.
Hitchcock Renaissance in the 1990s
Hitchcock's films enjoyed newfound popularity in the 1990s. After a restored print of Vertigo was released in 1996 and became surprisingly successful, plans were made to re-release other films, such as Strangers on a Train. According to Entertainment Weekly, as of 1997 plans were underway to remake as many as half a dozen Hitchcock films with new casts, an idea that met with mixed responses from Hitchcock fans.
Further Reading
The finest critical study of Hitchcock's films is by the French critic and film maker François Truffaut, Hitchcock (1966; trans. 1967). Other valuable treatments are Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films (1965; 2d ed. 1969), and George Perry, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (1965). For analysis of Hitchcock's work from his silent films to the early 1960s see the relevant chapter in John Russell Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-makers of the Sixties (1964).
Additional Sources
Nashawaty, Chris, "Deja View, " Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 6, 1996.
Ryall, Tom, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema, 2nd ed., Athlone, 1996.
(born Aug. 13, 1899, London, Eng. — died April 29, 1980, Bel Air, Calif., U.S.) British-born film director. He worked in the London office of a U.S. film company from 1920 and was promoted to director in 1925. His film The Lodger (1926) concerned an ordinary person caught in extraordinary events, a theme that was to recur in many of his films. Fascinated with voyeurism and crime, he proved himself a master of suspense with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934; remade 1956), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). His first U.S. film, Rebecca (1940), was a tense psychological drama. His virtuosity was evident in his later films Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Frenzy (1972).
Good E-V-E-ning. Master film director Alfred Hitchcock was born on this date in 1899. With many of his dramas of suspense and intrigue becoming classics of the cinema, Hitchcock was one of the best known directors never to have received an Oscar for directing. Suspicion (1941), Rear Window (1954), North By Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963), are just a few of his films that have chilled fans over the decades. In 1980, Queen Elizabeth II knighted the London native. He died later that year.
1899–1980, English-American film director, writer, and producer, b. London. Hitchcock began his career as a director in 1925 and became prominent with The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). In 1940 he began working in the United States. In his suspense thrillers, Hitchcock unsettled audiences both through the use of intense set pieces and the suggestion that normality as usually defined masks humanity's true and much darker nature. Hitchcock's style is so distinctive that any filmmaker working in the suspense genre invariably risks comparison to him. His best films include Strangers on a Train (1951), in which a tennis player is invited by a fellow rail passenger to trade murders; Rear Window (1954), a thriller about voyeurism; Vertigo (1958), an obsessive necrophiliac romance; North by Northwest (1959), in which a mother-dominated advertising executive is chased across the United States by foreign agents; and Psycho (1960), in which a mother-obsessed transvestite murders a thief. Other films include Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), The Birds (1963), Frenzy (1972), and Family Plot (1977). Hitchcock had two successful television series (1955–62 and 1963–65) and was one of the best known directors of his time, often appearing in humorous cameo appearances in his own films. He was knighted in 1980.
Bibliography
See F. Truffaut, Hitchcock (rev. ed. 1985); biographies by J. R. Taylor (1978) and D. Spoto (1983); studies by R. Durgnat (1974), D. Spoto (1976, repr. 1992), and P. Conrad (2001).
A twentieth-century English-born filmmaker who specialized in suspense. Some of his best-known films are The Birds, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Psycho.
Sir Alfred Joseph HitchcockKBE (August 131899 – April 291980) was an iconic and highly influential British-born filmdirector 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
colour era. Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful and publicly
recognizable world directors during his lifetime, and remains one of the best known and most popular of all time.
Famous for his expert and largely unrivalled control of pace and suspense, Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both
fear and fantasy, and are known for their
droll humour and witticisms. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances
beyond their control or understanding.
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 owned a mountaintop estate known as Cornwall Ranch or "Heart o' the Mountain" at the end of Canham Road, high above
Scotts Valley, California,
from 1940 to 1972. They bought a second home in late 1942 at 10957 Bellagio Road in Los Angeles, just across from the Bel Air
Country Club. Hitchcock died of renal failure in 1980.[1]
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
poulterer, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock (née Whelan; 1863-1942). His family was mostly Roman Catholic.[2] Hitchcock
was sent to the Jesuit Catholic school St.
Ignatius College in Enfield, London. He often described his childhood as being very lonely and sheltered, which was
undoubtedly compounded by his weight issues.[3]
It is widely known that as a child, Hitchcock's father once sent him to their local police station with a note asking the
officer to lock him away for ten minutes as punishment for behaving badly. This idea of being harshly treated or wrongfully
accused is more than commonly reflected in Hitchcock's films.[4]
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.[5]
When Hitchcock was 14, his father died; the same year, he 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.[6]
About that time, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film in
London. In 1920, he got a full-time job at Islington Studios with its American owner,
Famous Players-Lasky and their British successor, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies.[7]
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.[8] 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 when it was released throughout the U.K. in January 1927. 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".[9]
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 uncredited) 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 the PBS series
The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film,
emphasizing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman suspected of murder.[10]
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. (Hitchcock told French director François Truffaut: "There are two men sitting in a train going to
Scotland and one man says to the other, 'Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?'
'Oh,' says the other, 'that's a Macguffin.' 'Well,' says the first man, 'what's a Macguffin?' The other answers, 'It's an
apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'But,' says the first man, 'there are no lions in the Scottish
Highlands.' 'Well,' says the other, 'then that's no Macguffin.'")[11]
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 NaziGermany).
By 1938 Hitchcock had become known for his famous observation, "Actors are cattle." He once said that he first said this as
early as the late 1920s, when he thought of stage actors who were snobbish about motion pictures. However, Michael Redgrave said
Hitchcock made the statement during the filming of The Lady Vanishes. The phrase would haunt Hitchcock for years to come
and would result in a funny incident during the filming of his 1941 production of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, when Carole
Lombard brought some heifers onto the set to surprise the director.[12]
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 him to Hollywood.
Hollywood
Hitchcock's gallows humour 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. In addition,
Selznick, as well as fellow independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, made only a few films
each year, so Selznick did not always have projects for Hitchcock to direct. Remarkably, Goldwyn had also negotiated with
Hitchcock on a possible contract, only to be outbid by Selznick. Hitchcock was quickly impressed with the superior resources of
the American studios compared to the financial restrictions he had frequently encountered in England. Nevertheless, Hitchcock's
fondness for his homeland resulted in numerous American films set in, or filmed in, the United Kingdom, right up to his
next-to-last film, Frenzy.
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 Daphne
du Maurier and starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. This Gothicmelodrama explores the fears of a naïve 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. 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.[13] The film was the third longest of
Hitchcock's films at 130 minutes, exceeded only by The Paradine Case at 132 minutes and North by Northwest at 136
minutes.[14]
Hitchcock's second American film, the European-set thriller Foreign
Correspondent (originally titled Personal History), 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 backlot. Curiously,
because of Hollywood's Production Code censorship, the film avoided direct references to Germany and Germans.[15]
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.
