Alfred Hitchcock Biography and List of Works

Film director, grand wizard of cinema magic, whose works from THE LODGER (1926) to FAMILY PLOT (1976) filled the screen with thrills and who contributed to the medium's growth as an art. When Alfred Hitchcock received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1979, he dedicated it to his wife Alma Reville, "a film editor, a script writer, the mother of his daughter and a talented cook."

"Subjective treatment, putting the audience in the mind of the character, is, to me, the purest form of the cinema. I suppose Rear Window is the best example of it."
(Hitchcock in Who the Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovich, 1997)

Alfred Hitchcock was born in London as the son of a poultry dealer and fruit importer. He was educated at a Jesuit school, London's St. Ignatius College and the School of Engineering and Navigation, where he studied mechanics, electricity, acoustics, and navigation. He worked then for a telegraph company and took art courses at the University of London. In 1920 he entered the film industry as designer of titles for Hollywood's Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount).

When the Famous Players studios was taken over by a British production company, Hitchcock become an assistant director, working also as screenwriter and art director in several films. His first assignment as a director come in 1925. Next year he married Alma Reville, a film editor and script girl, who would later collaborate as a screenwriter with him in several films.

In 1926 Hitchcock directed THE LODGER, which gained a good commercial success. It also marked his debut as an extra. The trademark of Hitchcock's personal appearances continued in later productions. In 1929 he directed BLACKMAIL, the first British feature film with synchronous sound.

Hitchcock's breakthrough as an internationally noteworthy thriller director started in 1934 with THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. The next film, THE 39 STEPS, was even greater success, and was one of the earliest Hitchcock's examples of the 'innocent man on the run'. Before leaving England, he made THE SECRET AGENT (1936), SABOTAGE (1937), YOUNG AND INNOCENT (1937), THE LADY VANISHES (1938) and JAMAICA INN (1939).

THE 39 STEPS

John Buchan's spy thriller The Thirty Nine Steps was published in 1915. Buchan was one of Hitchcock's favourite writers and many consider The 39 Steps as Hitchcock's best British film. However, Graham Greene considered the story 'inexcusably spoilt' by the director. The films begins with the assassination of an secret agent. The hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), bumps into a beautiful woman who calls herself 'Miss Smith. She asks Hannay if he has ever heard of 'the 39 Steps', and claims she must go to Scotland the next day to stop some vital secrets falling into enemy hands. Miss Smith is murdered and Hannay becomes the prime suspect for her murder.

Hannay is hunted by the police and captured. He manages to escape, and continues his run with a blonde, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll). In the end the secret of the 39 Steps is revealed - its is an organization of spies collecting information on behalf of a foreign government. Hannay spends a good portion of the film handcuffed to Pamela, which have been interpreted as Hitchcock's bondage fantasy or a critique on the institution of marriage.

The film was remade with Keith More as Hannay in 1956 and in 1978 by Don Sharp, starring Robert Powell. More Hitchcock than Buchan was Hannay's escape from the train on the Forth Bridge, the interlude with the puritanical crofter, the Sunday pre-luncheon drinks party, and the political rally from which the only escape is to pose as a visiting celebrity.

Hitchcock's first American movie, REBECCA (1940), won the Best Picture Academy Award. In the 1940s he directed among others SHADOW OF DOUBT (1943), SPELLBOUND (1945), NOTORIOUS (1946), and ROPE (1948).

"Blondes are the best victims. They're like virgin snow which shows up the bloody footprints."
(Hitchcock in Sunday Times, 1 September 1973, from Dictionary of Film Quotations, ed. by Tony Crawley, 1994)

In the 1950s Hitchcock made some of his most acclaimed films, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), REAR WINDOW (1954), VERTIGO (1958) and PSYCHO (1960). He produced TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965). Several book anthologies, juvenile series Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators (based on characters created by Robert Arthur), and a monthly mystery magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, also used Hitchcock's name as part of the title. Hitchcock films from the 1960s and 1970s include THE BIRDS (1963), MARNIE (1964), TORN CURTAIN (1966), TOPAZ (1969), FRENZY (1971) and FAMILY PLOT (1976), which was his last production. In 1979 Hitchcock received American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. In his last years Hitchcock's drinking had increased. His famous unrealised final project was The Short Night, set partly in Finland. The writer David Freeman had prepared the script and Catherine Deneuve had agreed to star in it. The film director Peter Bogdanovich offered to shoot all the Finland sequences from a storyboard prepared with Hitchcock.

"Practically all of Hitchcock's dramatic ideas were visual. If a cameraman is supposed to 'paint with light,' Hitchcock painted with moving camera."
(Jack Cardiff, in Hitchcock's notebooks by Dan Auiler, 1999)

Several of Hitckcock's film were based on novel, short stories or plays from such writers as Daphne du Maurier, John Steinbeck, John Galsworthy, Leon Uris, Victor Canning, Robert Bloch, W. Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Josephine Tey, John Buchan, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith and Winston Graham. Central themes in his works are the thin line between sanity and insanity, the random nature of events, the concept of shared guilt and the ease with which even an innocent man's world can be destroyed by crime.

For further reading: Hitchcock by Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol (1957); Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock by François Truffaut (1966); Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze by William Rothman (1982); The Dark Side of Genius by Donald Spoto (1983); The Art of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto (1992); The Alfred Hitchcock Quote Book by Laurent Bouzereau (1993); The Movies of Alfred Hitchcock by Judy Arginteanu (1994); Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock by John Russel Taylor (1996); Who the Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovich (1997); The Complete Hitchcock by Paul Condon and Jim Sangster (1999); Hitchcock's Notebooks by Dan Auiler (1999) - See also: The Definitive Film Links Site

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: catchy theme tune made the show phenomenally popular; Hitchcock directed fever than 20 episodes (260 approx x 25 min), in 1962-64 the series moved from CBS to NBC and become and hour for 93 episodes - among the script writers were Sterling Silliphant, Sarett Rudley, Roald Dahl, Robert C. Dennis, James P. Cavanagh, Francis Cockrell, Bernard Schoenfeld, Fredric Brown, Evan Hunter, Bill S. Ballinger, Charlotte Armstrong, Alan Crosland, Henry Sleasar, William Fay, Helen Nielsen.

WRITINGS:

NUMBER THIRTEEN, (1922)