The Skin Game

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. —AllMovie guide