The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  Montagu was also the man whom Balcon brought in to help refine The Lodger, the film in which Hitchcock took all that he had absorbed in Germany and made a film in London about London, its people, and its menacing “fog,” literal and metaphorical, under which this enormous beast of a city spluttered. It is a vivid projection of London, full of its humor, its dangers, and its folklore, and it provided a template for the Hitchcockian city: the glitter of civilization resting on a cesspit of human frailty. Decades after The Lodger, Hitchcock outlined the idea of a film he’d always wanted to make: “twenty-four hours in the life of a city . . . full of incidents, full of backgrounds.” Uniting his ambivalent feelings about people, consumption, and urban life, the film would be “an anthology on food, showing its arrival in the city, its distribution, the selling, buying by people, the cooking, the various ways in which it’s consumed. . . . So there’s a cycle, beginning with the gleaming fresh vegetables and ending with the mess that’s poured into the sewers. . . . Your theme might almost be the rottenness of humanity. You could take it through the whole city, look at everything, film everything.” The film was never realized—though aspects of it appear in Frenzy—because Hitchcock couldn’t find a way of hanging a story on the structure that would appeal to not just “the first row in the balcony or for a few seats on the aisle. It would have to be geared toward two thousand seats in the theater.” Raised in a family of London merchants, Hitchcock knew full well the importance of catering to the customer.

  The reaction to The Lodger from the British press could not have been more effusive. Hitchcock was lionized as the great hope of British cinema, “an English director of genius.” The film elevated to the status of “mystery and magic what might easily have proved merely a sordid record of crime,” wrote one reviewer. But what most enthused critics was that the setting for this dark fantasy was a place they recognized as home—the pockmarked capital of the British Empire. The apparent lack of authentically British subjects in British films was a constant source of worry in the interwar period. In December 1925, the film section of the Daily Herald reported on Hitchcock’s trip to Germany to make The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle. In the same article, it was noted that Hitchcock’s peer, the director Adrian Brunel, was slated to begin work on a film called London, “which will centre around life in the metropolis. It is good that at last someone should exploit the material in our own back-garden.”

  It wasn’t only critics who were chomping for more homemade fare. The Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 was one of many measures designed to spur the production of more British films and wean the nation’s picturegoers off Hollywood imports. The effort was part of a broader, existential panic about Britain and its empire in an age of rapid American growth. One of the several polemics about the threat of Americanization published in Britain in the 1920s was Americanism: A World Menace, published in 1922, the same year in which the BBC was founded, itself a project designed, in part, to inoculate its colonies from American culture, which was talked of as a virus.

  Hollywood films were regarded as especially dangerous. Four weeks after The Lodger was released, G. A. Atkinson, a film reviewer for the Daily Express and the BBC, issued a stark warning about how young Britons were being turned into Americans, one Gloria Swanson flick at a time. “They talk America, think America, and dream America. We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens.” Serious public voices even raised the possibility of having the British film industry funded by the Ministry of Defence, as though Hollywood were a threat to national security.

  Consequently, when Hitchcock began making imaginative and stylish films that dealt with life as lived on his home turf, he was lauded in some quarters as not just a wunderkind who had brought together the British, American, and German traditions in an exciting way but as a national hero; he was even name-checked by Lord Burnham in a speech in the Houses of Parliament about the importance of cinema to the continued strength of the empire. Downhill, the follow-up to The Lodger, appears risible today, with a thirty-something Ivor Novello playing a teenage schoolboy, but it drew praise from reviewers for its presentation of distinctive features of British life, including the London Underground and a public school. The following year, 1928, saw the release of The Farmer’s Wife, Hitchcock’s silent adaptation of a play about a rural widower in search of love. It’s a charming film of visual imagination, technical accomplishment, and gentle comedy—but some reviewers were struck by its potential as propaganda. “Americans, I am sure, would pay money to see the beautiful Devonshire woodlands” after seeing the film, wrote the Daily Mirror. “It’s been left to Alfred Hitchcock to put England on screen,” added London’s Evening Standard. “He has done so gloriously.”

  When Blackmail arrived in 1929, it solidified Hitchcock’s status as a soldier at the front line in the battle against Americanization. Since the introduction of the talkies two years earlier, the threat from Hollywood was deemed to have worsened. From converting young Britons to the fashions and habits of Americans, the motion pictures were now encouraging them to ditch the King’s English. But in Blackmail, the nation’s brightest film talent had delivered a tale of modern London in accents and dialects that wouldn’t make one’s ears bleed. “Hear English as it should be spoken,” ran an advertisement for the film. Among the reviews in Hitchcock’s scrapbook were those by the Daily Mail, which declared his film a “British Triumph” and a “shock for the Americans,” while the London Evening News praised it for being “All British—and with a London setting” and judged it equal to “anything Germany or America has achieved.” A reviewer for The Times exceeded them all, congratulating Hitchcock for having made a British Tosca, and for “sweeping aside American traditions of speed and glamour.”

  The irony was that Hitchcock had embraced the “speed and glamour” of American popular culture as gleefully as anyone in Britain. Indeed, as a filmmaker, he considered himself to be working in a furrow plowed by Americans, from Edwin Porter to Cecil B. DeMille, via D. W. Griffith. “I’m American trained. . . . I never learned in the British studios,” he told one interviewer, proudly recalling that a review of one of his early films praised it for its thoroughly American qualities. In the 1920s, Hitchcock was a member of the jokingly named Hate Club, in which he and others in the industry would gather to review—and usually lambast—the latest British releases.

  Hitchcock riding the London Underground in Blackmail.

  When we think of Hitchcock in this context, his cultural significance extends beyond film, and we can identify connections with other English or British popular artists whose work was a manifestation of, and a response to, American cultural influence. There’s an interesting parallel with the Beatles. Like Hitchcock, they served a creative apprenticeship in Germany at a time of cultural renewal following a cataclysmic war. Both injected their crowd-pleasing work with esoteric or avant-garde influences, greedily absorbed from around the world; and both used American popular culture as a means of circumventing the strictures of the class system at moments of imperial decline when old ideas about British identity were thrown into flux.

  The introduction of sound immediately allowed Hitchcock to deepen his depiction of life in the British Isles. Though he always insisted that he remained, at root, a silent filmmaker, accents, jokes, rhythms of speech, and ambient noise enabled him to create more rounded characters and textured settings in his 1930s films that domestic audiences would instantly recognize—whether it was the jury room of a murder trial, a crowded market, or a family dining table. He tackled weightier themes, too, issues of pressing topicality. The Skin Game dealt with class dynamics in the industrialized north of England, and Juno and the Paycock adapted Sean O’Casey’s celebrated play about an impoverished Dublin family struggling its way through the Irish Civil War.

  Neither of those films, however, quite have the brilliant flashes of social observation found in Hitchcock’s London-bound talkies, three of w
hich were scripted by Charles Bennett, who helped Hitchcock use his eye and ear for authentic background detail as a storytelling tool. The action in The 39 Steps, for example, is catalyzed by a music-hall audience of wisecracking Londoners, smoking, smirking, and heckling as they shout out sarcastic questions to the performer Mr. Memory, who holds explosive secrets in the depths of his encyclopedic mind. When a gunshot suddenly turns the place into a scene of mass panic, a couple of young strangers, a man and a woman, are brought together and end up back at the man’s home, hinting at the kind of illicit, unexpected liaisons that can happen in a megacity at night. In the murky London of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the action leads us—with grinning irony—into a sun worshippers’ temple, and it climaxes in a scene inspired by the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, a dramatic event instantly familiar to Londoners of the time, in which Winston Churchill joined armed police in a gunfight battle against anarchist revolutionaries holed up in a house in the East End. The characters, too, seem plucked from the London of Hitchcock’s experience: loud, jocular Cockneys; plodding police constables; eccentric shopkeepers; sardonic smart-asses more adept at keeping secrets than showing emotion; a smattering of ethnically indeterminate “foreigners,” expressing the truth that London was the capital of Britain but also a gateway to the rest of the planet.

  Hitchcock undercut any tub-thumping jingoism by pointing out that in putting his homeland on screen in such a way, he was emulating his contemporaries abroad, especially in America, that supposed scourge of British culture. The key to developing first-rate, distinctively British films, he said, was to follow Hollywood’s lead in producing commercial films about ordinary, everyday people. He complained that London film culture focused almost exclusively on grinding poverty or the wealthy elite. Instead, he wanted to see people from his background, “men who leap on buses, the girls who pack into the Tube, the commercial travellers . . . the cinema queues, the palais de danse crowds . . . the fellows who love gardening, the chaps who lounge in pubs . . . girls who catch their fingers in doors and say what they feel.” Unlike “stodgy” British films, “Americans use imaginative backgrounds. They give us pictures about telephone exchanges, icemen, newspaper reporters, police cars, repair gangs,” all “with a freshness that is lacking in our drawing room school of drama.”

  Hitchcock’s interest in social authenticity coincided with the British Documentary Film Movement of the 1930s. Unofficially led by the producer and director John Grierson, the movement was cinema’s iteration of a wider British trend of the interwar years, in which wealthy middle-class figures dedicated themselves to exposing the truth about the lives of working people. A documentarian, remarked one of those within the movement, “must be a gentleman, a Socialist, have a university education, [and] a private income.” This was not Hitchcock, who was only a couple of rungs up the ladder from the working-class people being documented. Within London’s cultural establishment, the documentary films of Grierson et al. came to be regarded as the gold standard of British cinema; Hitchcock’s thrillers of the 1930s were recognized for their inventiveness but dismissed as inconsequential. Grierson himself sneered at Hitchcock as “the best director, the slickest craftsman . . . of unimportant films.”

  But Hitchcock’s influences, objectives, and achievements were closer to the highbrow, polemical documentarians than is often acknowledged. As with Hitchcock’s best London films, the documentaries Grier­son directed—Drifters (1929); Granton Trawler (1934)—rely on montage and inventive use of sound, have an interest in juxtaposing tradition and modernity, and exhibit the inspiration of the “city symphony” film genre of the 1920s. Grierson, not averse to staging scenes in his documentaries, used fiction to underpin his portrayal of authenticity; Hitchcock used authenticity to underpin his fiction. The overlap between the documentarians’ interests and Hitchcock’s is smartly summed up by Housing Problems, a revelatory documentary produced by Ruby Grierson, John’s sister, about the slums of the East End, which featured working-class people talking candidly, straight to the camera, about their lives. Hitchcock had never lived in the slums, but he had grown up with them on his doorstep, and thirteen years earlier he’d attempted to make what would have been his debut feature, Number Thirteen, a work of fiction about the experiences of people living in a building created by the Peabody Trust, a philanthropic organization committed to tackling London’s housing crisis. It’s healthy to be skeptical of claims Hitchcock made in the thirties about earnestly wanting to work in documentary. This may have been a way of trying to assuage feelings of insecurity about his escapist fantasies when compared to the weighty, “serious” business of the documentarian intellectuals. However, it’s worth noting that, in 1969, Hitchcock hosted a Scottish television documentary honoring Grierson’s life and work, suggesting a genuine admiration for the aims and methods of the documentary movement, which sought to make British film distinctive by turning to the lived experiences of its population.

  In his career as a director in London, Hitchcock did his best to put the world he knew on the screen: pet shops, theaters, buses, boxing matches, fairgrounds, museums, churches, cinemas, pubs, marketplaces, railway carriages, boardinghouses, dentists’ offices, prison cells, tearooms, tenement houses, and artists’ studio flats—all were intrinsic parts of his plots. He avoided addressing the meaty issues of the day head-on, yet his London had authenticity in both large ways and small. Raymond Durgnat, who grew up in London in the 1930s, thought Hitchcock’s projection of the city, despite its adventures and fancies, was sharper and more truthful than anything produced by the famous Ealing Studios’ films of the 1950s. In an age when one “couldn’t just point a T.V. camera in the street” to capture reality, Hitchcock’s gimlet eye brought details of contemporary urban England to life. “He had first to notice certain details, love them enough to remember and to recreate them, and lastly to slide them deftly into a thriller context. . . . They are in no sense pebbles; they are cherished like jewels.” Even among the relatively small but ardent batch of Hitchcock fans in America at the time, the evocation of this gray city of eccentric people and surprising jolts of action was part of the fascination. As Norman Lloyd remembered, “You would go to these little theaters in New York, you know, the Thalia or someplace and see a Hitchcock film in black and white on a rainy day in New York; you’d come out thinking you were wearing a trench coat and all of that.”

  Having been so championed by the popular press, and even by some avant-garde outlets, as the embodiment of a great British cinema, Hitchcock’s move to America caused no little irritation, even some hurt. The timing of his departure, in 1939, just before Britain declared war on Germany, only exacerbated the sense of betrayal. Michael Balcon, the man who had done so much to nurture Hitchcock’s talent, took out space in a London newspaper to flay his former protégé for apparently deserting his country in its hour of need, referring to him haughtily as a “plump young junior technician.” Most refrained from making the issue personal, but the critic C. A. Lejeune observed that a lot of her peers believed Hitchcock “had sold his soul to Hollywood. . . . There would be no more Hitchcock pictures, only Hollywood pictures made by Hitchcock.” London Hitchcock, so the thinking went, had been a bespoke maker of exquisite Swiss watches, each with his hallmark engraved on the back; Hollywood Hitchcock was bound to be a factory foreman, churning out Model Ts on a relentless production line. Both were remarkable objects, but only one was a thing of beauty bearing the soul of its creator.

  There is merit in that argument, as Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie, Rebecca, shows. In many ways, the film was a professional triumph. Lejeune said Hitchcock’s detractors in London would have to eat their words: “his first Hollywood picture is in every way his best.” Although Hitchcock’s opinion on the film’s quality vacillated, he recognized that it was a crucial step in developing his career. In his words, it was “a completely British picture,” with an all-English cast, set mainly in England, and based on source material by an English author. Yet i
t was not like the depictions of England that audiences back home had come to expect from Hitchcock. Finely observed authenticity had slunk to the background, replaced by a more generic sense of Englishness, all stately home sternness and patrician hauteur. Hitchcock put this down to the demands of Selznick, and the influence of the film’s American screenwriter Robert Sherwood, who gave the script a “broader viewpoint than it would have had if made in Britain.” In fact, Rebecca was of a piece with Hollywood fashions. English and British films, such as the ones Hitchcock had been making since the silent days, tended to do modest business at the US box office, but romantic American fantasies about life across the Atlantic—almost always set in the past—were hugely popular with the public and the critics. Britons themselves could be unkind about these films. Graham Greene mocked Twentieth Century-Fox’s Lloyd’s of London (1937) by remarking that the “name of England is so freely on the characters’ lips that we recognize at once an American picture.” According to one scholar, between 1930 and 1945, Hollywood churned out more than one hundred and fifty “British” films. Hitchcock made a significant contribution to the genre: three of his first four Hollywood films were set in his homeland, including Foreign Correspondent, in which a straight-shooting American journalist battles an anti-British spy ring as the grip of war tightens on the sceptered isle. The movie helped bolster the wartime myth of London’s “Blitz spirit,” and was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1941, a category won by Rebecca.

  Eighty years later, it seems little has changed. Britain’s place in the film world is still to present tales of kings and queens, a vanished past, or fantasy worlds that have never existed. The first British film to win an Oscar was The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933. The travails of English aristocrats remain Academy Award catnip—The Queen, Darkest Hour, The King’s Speech, The Favourite, all spring to mind. The chances of a British version of Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri receiving the same attention are remote. Those from communities whose lives are underrepresented on British screens—Idris Elba, John Boyega, Thandie Newton, for example—often leave for Hollywood in order to reinvent themselves as on-screen Americans. In Hitchcock’s day, the Londoner Charles Chaplin made the same journey, as did Bristolian Archie Leach, metamorphosizing into a magnificent, rootless alien who went by the name Cary Grant.