ALFRED HITCHCOCK . by Peter Ackroyd . (Chatto & Windus £12.99 . With this nutritious, compact and superb critical biography, Ackroyd emphasises the importance of Victorian and Edwardian London in the imagination of Alfred Hitchcock — the ‘damp-looking dirty blackness’ of the East End; the ‘manifold ruffianism’ of the Cockneys; the pubs, street markets, theatres and music halls, with their ‘variety acts, dioramas and Italian operettas’. Alfred Hitchcock (pictured) was born in 1899 in Leytonstone, East London . In addition to the gaudiness, the city was a place with dark staircases, gaslight, rain and spooky cobbled alleys: the ideal setting for murder. Hitchcock was born in 1899 in Leytonstone, East London, the son of a wholesale grocer. They were a Catholic family, Irish originally, and the boy who would become ‘one of the most distinguished directors in the world’ was educated by the Jesuits. The bullying Christian Brothers may have taught ‘the virtues of order, control and precision’, but they also instilled (with the strap) a belief in mystery and miracles. The logic and reason, coupled with a mood of anxiety, dread and paranoid suspicion, seeped into Hitchcock’s work: ‘He thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door’. Looking back on his schooldays, he said that, as the Jesuits had frightened him, ‘now I’m getting my own back by terrifying other people’. Hitchcock was never any oil painting. A 5 ft 7 in Humpty Dumpty, he was the neurotic fat boy with piggy eyes, who was filled with ‘lavish and peculiar’ repressed sexual fantasies. His entire oeuvre, Ackroyd suggests, was a study of voyeurism, violence and guilt with, on the one hand, the rape and murder of vulnerable women, and, on the other, the pursuit of a hero accused of crimes he did not commit. His very first work, in 1927, The Lodger, was about a man wrongly accused of being Jack The Ripper and, already, Hitchcock could whip up an atmosphere of ‘doubt and suspense’, the camera dwelling on ‘dark puddles shimmering with opalescent light’. His opening in movies began at the studios in Islington and Twickenham, where Hitchcock created the captions for silent movies and designed the title cards. Here, he met Alma Reville, whom he married in 1926. Alma was an editor who ‘emphasised the importance of smooth continuity and the subtle use of close-up’. She was thin and boyish, wearing trouser-suits tailored at Austin Reed, ‘the gentlemen’s outfitters’. The Hitchcocks lived at 153 Cromwell Road and had one daughter, Patricia. Apart from conceiving Patricia, Ackroyd assures us, Hitchcock and Alma never had sex together again. Ackroyd goes into raptures about The Lodger, which starred Ivor Novello. ‘The use of light was its music, rising in intensity, in the process creating a unique rhythm of meaning’. Would Hitchcock have seen it this way? The shower scene from Hitchcock's Psycho (Janet Leigh pictured playing Marion Crane in the film) is one of the most recognisable shots in cinematic history . When he wrote his granddaughter’s film studies essay for her, he (or she) was awarded a C. ‘Well, I’m sorry. That’s the best I can do,’ he said, grumpily. But it never does to ask an artist to explain his own flavour and texture — it makes for self-consciousness. Such was Hitchcock’s critical and popular success that, by the early Thirties, he was earning £13,000 a year — £700,000 in today’s money. His skill was to merge larger-than-life melodramas — bombs, assassins, enemy agents — with mundane tasks and anxieties, about catching trains, losing a tie-pin, or (notoriously) taking a shower. He moved to Hollywood in 1939, to make Rebecca with Laurence Olivier. The Hitchcocks bought a house in Bel Air and an 85-acre ranch in Santa Cruz. The brightness of California’s blue pools and red clay tennis courts was in marked contrast to London’s charcoal murk yet, as in his English films, Hitchcock found that, in the sunshine, ‘fear became an intrinsic aspect of daily life’. Cary Grant, Gregory Peck and James Stewart were now his wrongly accused leading men. Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren and Grace Kelly were his ‘ideal blonde beauties’, the women alone, menaced by intruders. Princess Grace, in particular, was described by Hitchcock as ‘a volcano covered with snow’ — with the implication that these ice maidens rather liked being plunged into dangerous situations, because it aroused them. He was respected, but not liked. With the stars, Hitchcock was awkward, even contemptuous, calling them ‘cattle’. Marlene Dietrich called him ‘a strange little man. I didn’t like him’, and Hitchcock had an unfortunate fondness for cruel practical jokes — plying people with drinks laced with laxatives, handcuffing people and losing the key. He also ‘had a schoolboy’s obsession with sex that went on and on in a very peculiar way’, the dirty jokes accompanied by salacious groping. Hitchcock (pictured with his two granddaughters) was respected in the industry, but not liked. Marlene Dietrich called him ‘a strange little man. I didn’t like him’ Then there’s Hitchcock’s clammy behaviour towards Tippi Hedren during the making of The Birds and Marnie — ‘he was almost obsessed with me,’ says the actress, ‘and it’s very difficult to be the object of someone’s obsession’. Ackroyd valiantly tries to defend the director’s control freakery by arguing that Hitchcock was doing nothing worse than deliberately trying to elicit a nervous and terrified performance for the cameras.’ Through provocation and bullying, says Ackroyd, Hitchcock was being professional. It was a strategy. Hmm. I think I prefer Francois Truffaut’s observation that ‘Hitchcock filmed scenes of murder as if they were love scenes, and scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder’. The camera always lingers on faces that could be wracked with either pain or pleasure. (‘When he sticks it in her,’ he gleefully instructed his cinematographer prior to shooting a rape sequence, ‘I want the camera right on her face!’) Victims swoon. Hands grasp a neck — strangulation is an embrace, for example, in Strangers On A Train or the shocking despatch of Anna Massey in Frenzy. Everybody remembers Psycho, with Anthony Perkins as the ‘excitable and sexually ambiguous’ Norman Bates — a thin version of Hitchcock himself, it seems. In the shower scene, ‘chocolate syrup was used for the blood’. A smashing detail I hadn’t known before. The audiences screamed to such an extent, Hitchcock pocketed a profit of $15 million. In The Birds, gulls and crows were flung at Tippi Hedren in an attic set for five days solid, scratching her to pieces. Live birds were tied to her body with elastic bands, so that they’d bounce about and flap and perch on her face. ‘The actual biting is done by glove puppets,’ Ackroyd maintains. But a lot of those pecks look genuine — Hitchcock’s revenge, it is said, because Hedren had rejected his advances. Hitchcock died in 1980 from ailments related to obesity and alcoholism: colitis, arthritis, gall stones, renal failure. He’d done more than anyone since Edgar Allan Poe to make our flesh creep. As usual, the Honours Committee made a fool of itself, only getting around to making him Sir Alfred on his deathbed.
Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899 in Leytonstone, East London . He later became ‘one of the most distinguished directors in the world . But his insecurities began to seep into his cinematography . Actress Tippi Hedren once said ‘he was almost obsessed with me'