Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Penelope Houston, Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Volume One

  1935

  The 39 Steps

  As director. Sc: Charles Bennett, based on the novel by John Buchan. Dialogue: Ian Hay. Continuity: Alma Reville. Ph: Bernard Knowles. Art Dir: Oscar Werndorff. Ed: Derek N. Twist. Sound Recordist: A. Birch. Musical Dir: Louis Levy. Wardrobe: Marianne. Dress Designer: J. Strassner.

  Cast: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, John Laurie, Helen Haye, Frank Cellier, Wylie Watson, Gus MacNaughton, Jerry Verno, Peggy Simpson, and Alfred Hitchcock (litterer, as Donat and Mannheim leave the Music Hall).

  (B & W, Michael Balcon with Ivor Montagu for Gaumont-British, 87 mins.)

  “This is Hitchcock’s most virtuoso and most famous work during his English period. Its chase is handled with great technical finesse and with marvelous touches of macabre humor and banter, moving the hero from a train to a leap from a bridge, across the nicely observed Scottish landscape to a party in a large house (whose owner turns out to be the chief of the spy ring), to a political meeting, to a Salvation Army rally, through yet another flight across the landscape handcuffed to a girl, and finally to a musical hall in London. Though its plot is unbelievable, Hitchcock’s continual mastery of suspense keeps it alive.”

  Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films

  1936

  Secret Agent

  As director. Sc: Charles Bennett, from the Campbell Dixon play and based on the Ashenden novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Dialogue: Ian Hay. Continuity: Alma Reville. Additional Dialogue: Jesse Lasky Jr. Ph: Bernard Knowles. Art Dir: Oscar Werndorff. Set Dec: Albert Julian. Ed: Charles Frend. Recordist: Philip Dorté. Dresses: J. Strassner. Musical Dir: Louis Levy.

  Cast: John Gielgud, Madeleine Carroll, Peter Lorre, Robert Young, Percy Marmont, Florence Kahn, Lilli Palmer, Charles Carson.

  (B & W, Michael Balcon with Ivor Montagu for Gaumont-British, 86 mins.)

  “The privileged moments are all incidental to the ultimate intrigue—a box of chocolates, a secret message on an assembly line, a dead mans head pressing an eerie note on a church organ, a convenient train wreck to sort out the active sinners from the not-so-innocent bystanders. Despite the relative fastidiousness of its two leads, Secret Agent remains one of Hitchcock’s most engaging films from his British period.”

  Andrew Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film: History and Memory, 1927-1949

  Sabotage (U.S.: The Woman Alone)

  As director. Sc: Charles Bennett, from the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Dialogue: Ian Hay, Helen Simpson. Continuity: Alma Reville. Additional Dialogue: E. V. H. (Ted) Emmett. Ph: Bernard Knowles. Ed: Charles Frend. Art Dir: Oscar Werndorff. Set Dec: Albert Julian. Sound: A. Cameron. Dresses: J. Strassner. Wardrobe: Marianne. Music Dir: Louis Levy. Cartoon Sequence: By arrangement with Walt Disney.

  Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oscar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder, Joyce Barbour, Matthew Boulton, S. J. Warmington, William Dewhurst, Peter Bull, Torin Thatcher, Austin Trevor, Clare Greet.

  (B & W, Michael Balcon with Ivor Montagu for Gaumont-British, 76 mins.)

  “Mr. Hitchcock keeps perfectly within the bounds of the movie art. He knows exactly what a movie should be and do; so exactly, in fact, that a live wire seems to run backward from any of his films to all the best films one can remember, connecting them with it in a conspiracy to shock us into a special state of consciousness with respect to the art.”

  Mark Van Doren, The Nation, March 13, 1937

  1937

  Young and Innocent (U.S.: The Girl Was Young)

  As director. Sc: Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood, and Anthony Armstrong, based on the novel A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey. Continuity: Alma Reville. Dialogue: Gerald Savory. Ph: Bernard Knowles. Sound: A. O’Donoghue. Ed: Charles Frend. Art Dir: Alfred Junge. Music Dir: Louis Levy. Wardrobe: Marianne. Song: Lerner, Goodhart and Hoffman.

  Cast: Nova Pilbeam, Derrick de Marney, Percy Marmont, Edward Rigby, Mary Clare, John Longden, George Curzon, Basil Radford, Pamela Carme, George Merritt, J. H. Roberts, Jerry Verno, H. F. Maltby, John Miller, and Alfred Hitchcock (photographer with tiny camera, as de Marney escapes from the courthouse).

  (B & W, Edward Black for Gaumont-British, 84 mins.)

  “I like it best of all his pictures. It may not be, academically speaking, the cleverest. The adepts who go to a Hitchcock film to grub out bits of montage may be disappointed. … The real charm of the film is its eye for human values. Hitchcock seems to know, with a certainty that has sometimes evaded him, what is important and what is immaterial to a person in certain circumstances, just how far emotion can affect behavior.”

  C. A. Lejeune, Observer, January 3, 1938 (The C. A. Lejeune Film Reader)

  1938

  The Lady Vanishes

  As director. Sc: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White. Continuity: Alma Reville. Ph: John J. Cox. Ed: R. E. Dearing. Cutting: Alfred Roome. Sound: S. Wiles. Settings: Alex Vetchinsky. Music Dir: Louis Levy.

  Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Mary Clare, Emile Boreo, Googie Withers, Sally Stewart, Philip Leaver, Zelma Vas Dias, Catherine Lacey, Josephine Wilson, Charles Oliver, Kathleen Tremaine, and Alfred Hitchcock (at Victoria Station, near the end, crossing the screen and smoking a cigarette).

  (B & W, Edward Black for Gainsborough, 97 mins.)

  “Hitchcock builds suspense on suspense, deception on revelation, like a maestro playing the fifty-two card trick. With the heroine, we cannot believe the evidence of her eyes. Miss Froy’s handwriting on the window, the only surety of her existence, disappears like the Uncertainty Principle on the moment of its discovery. The bandaged patient may contain the vanished lady, or a corpse, or anyone. As for the nun in high heels, she is the stuff of dream as well as deception. And the illusion of the moving train itself, though filmed in a small studio, hustles us towards an excitement, a denouement, and explosions of laughter to relieve the suspense. The Lady Vanishes is Hitchcock at his most worldly and assured. Yet beneath the entertainment, there is the menace of a Europe about to be plunged into the horror of war.”

  Andrew Sinclair, Masterworks of the British Cinema

  1939

  Jamaica Inn

  As director. Sc: Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Dialogue: Sidney Gilliat. Additional Dialogue: J. B. Priestley. Continuity: Alma Reville. Ph: Harry Stradling, Bernard Knowles. Settings: Tom Morahan. Costumes: Molly McArthur Ed: Robert Hamer. Music: Eric Fenby. Musical Director: Frederic Lewis. Special Effects: Harry Watt. Sound: Jack Rogerson. Makeup: Ern Westmore. Prod Mgr: Hugh Perceval.

  Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Leslie Banks, Robert Newton, Marie Ney, Emlyn Williams, Wylie Watson, Horace Hodges, Hay Petrie, Frederick Piper, Herbert Lomas, Clare Greet, William Devlin, Jeanne de Casalis, Bromley Davenport, Mabel Terry-Lewis, George Curzon, Basil Radford, Morland Graham, Edwin Greenwood, Mervyn Johns, Stephen Haggard.

  (B & W, Erich Pommer and Charles Laughton for Mayflower Pictures, 98 mins.)

  “It has suspense and a good run of motion. It has a fine tone—the Inn and the doings there, the coaches and night roads, the English types Hitchcock knows so well how to keep both vivid and credible. … What it is above everything else is true to its form, without pretensions but without fawning. Better movies can be made, and have been; more ambitious movies are being made all over the place without half the honest picture skill, consequently without half the audience satisfaction and freedom from pose.”

  Otis Ferguson, The New Republic, September 6, 1939

  1940

  Rebecca

  As director. Sc: Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison. Adaptation: Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, from the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Ph: George Barnes. Music: Franz Waxman. Music Assoc: Lou Forbes. Art Dir: Lyle Wh
eeler. Interiors: Joseph B. Platt. Special Effects: Jack Cosgrove. Interior Dec: Howard Bristol. Supervising Ed: Hal Kern. Assoc. Ed: James E. Newcom. Scenario Asst: Barbara Keon. Recorder: Jack Noyes. Asst Dir: Edmond Bernoudy.

  Cast: Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson, Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny, C. Aubrey Smith, Florence Bates, Leo G. Carroll, Melville Cooper, Leonard Carey, Edward Fielding, Lumsden Hare, Forrester Harvey, Philip Winter, and Alfred Hitchcock (passerby outside phone booth, toward the end of the film).

  (B & W, David O. Selznick for Selznick International Pictures, 130 mins.)

  “One feels the genuine chill when watching Rebecca.”

  Peter Cowie, Fifty Major Filmmakers

  Foreign Correspondent

  As director. Sc: Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison. Dialogue: James Hilton, Robert Benchley. Music: Alfred Newman. Art Dir: Alexander Golitzen. Assoc Art Dir: Richard Irvine. Ph: Rudolph Maté. Special Photographic Effects: Paul Eagler. Supervising Ed: Otho Lovering. Ed: Dorothy Spencer. Interior Dec: Julia Heron. Costumes: I. Magnin & Co. Asst Dir: Edmond Bernoudy. Sound: Frank Maher. Special Production Effects: William Cameron Menzies.

  Cast: Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Albert Basserman, Robert Benchley, Edmund Gwenn, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harry Davenport, Martin Kosleck, Frances Carson, Ian Wolfe, Charles Wagenheim, Edward Conrad, Charles Halton, Barbara Pepper, Emory Parnell, Roy Gordon, Gertrude Hoffman, Martin Lamont, Barry Bernard, Holmes Herbert, Leonard Mudie, John Burton, Jane Novak, and Alfred Hitchcock (pedestrian reading a newspaper as he strolls past McCrea’s hotel early in the film).

  (B & W, Walter Wanger for Walter Wanger Productions, 119 mins.)

  “With so much that is brilliant—the realism of the wrecked plane, the beautiful scenes in the darkness of the windmill amid the turning wheels, the superb melodramatic shot of the torturers’ faces seen by the victim under the arclamps—I scarcely noticed the blemishes. This film is worth fifty Rebeccas.”

  Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, October 10, 1940

  1941

  Mr. and Mrs. Smith

  As director. Sc: Norman Krasna, based on his original story. Music: Edward Ward. Ph: Harry Stradling. Art Dir: Van Nest Polglase. Assoc Art Dir: L. P. Williams. Gowns: Irene. Set Dec: Darrell Silvera. Sound: John E. Tribby. Special Effects: Vernon L. Walker. Ed: William Hamilton. Asst Dir: Dewey Starkey.

  Cast: Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Gene Raymond, Jack Carson, Philip Merivale, Lucile Watson, William Tracy, Charles Halton, Esther Dale, Emma Dunn, Betty Compson, Patricia Farr, William Edmunds, Adele Pearce, and Alfred Hitchcock (passing Robert Montgomery in front of his building).

  (B & W, Harry E. Edington for RKO-Radio Pictures, 95 mins.)

  “It swings along a merry path with only a smattering of dull episodes, providing many marital pyrotechnics and maneuvers familiar to most couples. Story, as is the case with most marital farces, is not too solidly set up, but its deficiencies in this regard will easily be overlooked in the general humorous melee.”

  Variety, January 22, 1941

  Suspicion

  As director. Sc: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, and Alma Reville, from the novel Before the Fact by Francis Iles. Music: Franz Waxman. Ph: Harry Stradling. Special Effects: Vernon L. Walker. Art Dir: Van Nest Polglase. Assoc. Art Dir: Carroll Clark. Gowns: Edward Stevenson. Set Dec: Darrell Silvera. Sound: John E. Tribby. Ed: William Hamilton. Asst Dir: Dewey Starkey.

  Cast: Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty, Isabel Jeans, Heather Angel, Auriol Lee, Reginald Sheffield, Leo G. Carroll, and Alfred Hitchcock (posting a letter at the village postbox).

  (B & W, Harry E. Edington for RKO-Radio Pictures, 99 mins.)

  “Suspicion, while seeming to gratify the commonplace desire for a romantic thriller, simultaneously urges us to take a closer look and thereby to become self-conscious viewers, aware that the commercial spectacle can entertain us only by entrapping us. Like all of Hitchcock’s most successful films, Suspicion invites us to penetrate its surface, to cease watching as escapists and attempt an unflinching (and still generally unheard-of) critical spectatorship, one that might enable us to grasp, not just the exquisite strategies of spectacles far more suasive than Suspicion seems even to its most credulous viewers. That is, Suspicion asks us to become aware of the manipulations made routine by the very industry that produced it.”

  Mark Crispin Miller, “Hitchcock’s Suspicions and Suspicion,” Boxed In: The Culture of TV

  1942

  Saboteur

  As director. Sc: Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker. Ph: Joseph Valentine. Art Dir: Jack Otterson. Assoc. Art Dir: Robert Boyle. Ed: Otto Ludwig. Asst Dir: Fred Frank. Set Dec: R. A. Gausman. Set Continuity: Adele Cannon. Music Dir: Charles Previn. Music: Frank Skinner. Sound: Bernard B. Brown. Sound Technician: William Hedgcock. Special Effects: John P. Fulton.

  Cast: Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Otto Kruger, Alan Baxter, Clem Bevans, Norman Lloyd, Alma Kruger, Vaughan Glaser, Dorothy Peterson, Ian Wolfe, Frances Carson, Murray Alper, Kathryn Adams, Pedro de Cordoba, Billy Curtis, Marie Le Deaux, Anita Bolster, Jeanne Romer, Lynn Romer, and Alfred Hitchcock (standing in front of Cut-Rate Drugs in New York).

  (B & W, Jack H. Skirball for Frank Lloyd Productions-Universal, 108 mins.)

  “To put it mildly, Mr. Hitchcock and his writers have really let themselves go. Melodramatic action is their forte, but they scoff at speed limits this trip. All the old master’s experience at milking thrills has been called upon. As a consequence—and according to Hitchcock custom—Saboteur is a swift, high-tension film which throws itself forward so rapidly that it permits slight opportunity for looking back. And it hurtles the holes and bumps which plague it with a speed that forcefully tries to cover them up.”

  Bosley Crowther, New York Times, May 8, 1942

  1943

  Shadow of a Doubt

  As director. Sc: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell. Ph: Joseph Valentine. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin. Art Dir: John B. Goodman. Assoc Art Dir: Robert Boyle. Sound: Bernard B. Brown. Sound Technician: Robert Pritchard. Set Dec: R. A. Gausman. Assoc Set Dec: E.R. Robinson. Musical Dir: Charles Previn. Set Continuity: Adele Cannon. Ed: Milton Carruth. Asst Dir: William Tummell. Teresa Wright’s Gowns: Adrian. Costumes: Vera West.

  Cast: Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, MacDonald Carey, Henry Travers, Patricia Collinge, Hume Cronyn, Wallace Ford, Edna May Wonacott, Charles Bates, Irving Bacon, Clarence Muse, Janet Shaw, Estelle Jewell, and Alfred Hitchcock (on the train to Santa Rosa, holding thirteen spades in a bridge game).

  (B & W, Jack H. Skirball for Universal-Skirball Productions, 108 mins.)

  “Very rarely have I seen a picture where it ceases to be a picture and you are sitting there in the theatre not realizing you are, transported completely into the life which is there upon the screen. Never before has such an experience happened to me in a murder picture. I do think it is a masterpiece which you have created.”

  From a letter from Gordon McDonell to Hitchcock upon seeing Shadow of a Doubt, January 10, 1943

  1944

  Lifeboat

  As director. Sc: Jo Swerling, from a story by John Steinbeck. Ph: Glen MacWilliams. Art Dir: James Basevi, Maurice Ransford. Set Dec: Thomas Little. Assoc Set Dec: Frank E. Hughes. Ed: Dorothy Spencer. Costumes: René Hubert. Makeup: Guy Pearce. Special Photographic Effects: Fred Sersen. Technical Adviser: Thomas Fitzsimmons. Sound: Bernard Freericks, Roger Heman. Music: Hugo W. Friedhofer. Musical Dir: Emil Newman.

  Cast: Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn, Canada Lee, and Alfred Hitchcock (seen in Reduco newspaper advertisement).

  (B & W, Kenneth MacGowan for Twentieth Century–Fox, 96 mins.)

  “Lifeboat is not only an extraordinary film, it is also an extraordinary Hitchcock film. Here, he has expanded his mathematical formula of
mere suspense until it fully exploits a pathos that never becomes sleek or slick. Despite the fact that only nine characters carry the action which is laid entirely within the confines of a life-craft, there is no strain in the development, no sense of the mechanical ingenuity necessary to keep the events taut and moving. The characters are dimensional, fresh and human, all quite free of the formula quality with which Hollywood habitually endows a collection of antitheticals in group-dramas.”

  Herb Sterne, Rob Wagner’s Script, January 22, 1944

  Bon Voyage

  As director. Sc: J. O. C. Orton and Angus MacPhail, from a story by Arthur Calder-Marshall. Ph: Günther Krampf. Prod Design: Charles Gilbert. Music: Benjamin Frankel. Technical Adviser: Claude Dauphin.

  Cast: John Blythe, the Molière Players.

  (B & W, British Ministry of Information for Phoenix Films, 26 mins.)

  “… earnestly and somewhat melodramatically unmasks the dastardly duplicity of the fascists.”

  Sidney Gottlieb, “Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache,” Hitchcock Annual, 1994

  Aventure Malgache

  As director. Sc: J. O. C. Orton and Angus MacPhail. Ph: Günther Krampf. Prod Design: Charles Gilbert.

  Cast: the Molière Players.

  (B & W, British Ministry of Information for Phoenix Films, 31 mins.)

  “… focuses on the shrewd, witty, and endearing theatricality of a Resistance fighter.”

  Sidney Gottlieb, “Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache,” Hitchcock Annual, 1994

  1945

  Spellbound