Alfred Hitchcock

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Sir
Alfred Hitchcock
KBE
Hitchcock, Alfred 02.jpg
Born Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
13 August 1899
Leytonstone, Essex, England
Died 29 April 1980 (aged 80)
Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Citizenship British
United States (from 1955)
Education Salesian College, Battersea
Alma mater St Ignatius' College, London
Occupation
Film directorfilm producerscreenwriterfilm editoractor
Years active 1919–1980
Spouse(s) Alma Reville (m. 1926)
Children Patricia Hitchcock
Awards List of awards and nominations received by Alfred Hitchcock
Website alfredhitchcock.com Edit this at Wikidata
Signature
Alfred Hitchcock signature.jpeg
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English
film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is one of the most influential and
extensively studied filmmakers in the history of cinema.[1] Known as the "Master of
Suspense", he directed over 50 feature films[a] in a career spanning six decades,
becoming as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his
cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing of the television
anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65). His films garnered 46 Academy Award
nominations including six wins, although he never won for Best Director despite
having had five nominations.

Born in Leytonstone, London, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title
card designer after training as a technical clerk and copy writer for a telegraph-
cable company. He made his directorial debut with the British-German silent film
The Pleasure Garden (1925). His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the
London Fog (1927), helped to shape the thriller genre, while his 1929 film,
Blackmail, was the first British "talkie".[4] Two of his 1930s thrillers, The 39
Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), are ranked among the greatest British
films of the 20th century.

By 1939, Hitchcock was a filmmaker of international importance, and film producer

David O. Selznick persuaded him to move to Hollywood. A string of successful films
followed, including Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941),
Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Notorious (1946). Rebecca won the Academy Award for
Best Picture, although Hitchcock himself was only nominated as Best Director;[5] he
was also nominated for Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945).

The "Hitchcockian" style includes the use of camera movement to mimic a person's
gaze, thereby turning viewers into voyeurs, and framing shots to maximise anxiety
and fear. The film critic Robin Wood wrote that the meaning of a Hitchcock film "is
there in the method, in the progression from shot to shot. A Hitchcock film is an
organism, with the whole implied in every detail and every detail related to the
whole."[6] Hitchcock made multiple films with some of the biggest stars of
Hollywood, including four with Cary Grant in the 1940s and 50s, three with Ingrid
Bergman in the last half of the 1940s, four with James Stewart over a ten-year span
commencing in 1948, and three with Grace Kelly in the mid-1950s.

After a brief lull of commercial success in the late 1940s, Hitchcock returned to
form with Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M For Murder (1954). Between 1954
and 1960, Hitchcock directed four films often ranked among the greatest of all
time: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho
(1960), the first and last of these garnering him Best Director nominations.[7] In
2012, his psychological thriller Vertigo, starring Stewart, replaced Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane (1941) as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made based
on its world-wide poll of hundreds of film critics.[8] By 2018 eight of his films
had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry,[b]
including The Birds (1963) and his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).[c]
He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979
and was knighted in December that year, four months before he died.[11]

Contents
1 Biography
1.1 Early life: 1899–1919
1.1.1 Early childhood and education
1.1.2 Henley's
1.2 Inter-war career: 1919–1939
1.2.1 Famous Players-Lasky
1.2.2 Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany
1.2.3 Marriage
1.2.4 Early sound films
1.3 Early Hollywood years: 1939–1945
1.3.1 Selznick contract
1.3.2 Early war years
1.3.3 Wartime non-fiction films
1.4 Post-war Hollywood years: 1945–1953
1.4.1 Later Selznick films
1.4.2 Transatlantic Pictures
1.5 Peak years: 1954–1964
1.5.1 Dial M for Murder and Rear Window
1.5.2 Alfred Hitchcock Presents
1.5.3 From To Catch a Thief to Vertigo
1.5.4 North by Northwest and Psycho
1.5.5 Truffaut interview
1.5.6 The Birds
1.5.7 Marnie
1.6 Later years: 1966–1980
1.6.1 Final films
1.6.2 Knighthood and death
2 Filmmaking
2.1 Style and themes
2.2 Representation of women
2.3 Relationship with actors
2.4 Writing, storyboards and production
3 Legacy
3.1 Awards and honours
3.2 Archives
3.3 Hitchcock portrayals
4 Filmography
4.1 Films
5 See also
6 Notes and sources
6.1 Notes
6.2 References
6.3 Works cited
7 Further reading
7.1 Articles
7.2 Books
8 External links
Biography
Early life: 1899–1919
Early childhood and education

William Hitchcock, probably with his first son, William, outside the family shop in
London, c. 1900; the sign above the store says "W. Hitchcock". The Hitchcocks used
the pony to deliver groceries.
Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in the flat above his parents' leased grocer's
shop at 517 High Road, Leytonstone, on the outskirts of east London (then part of
Essex), the youngest of three children: William Daniel (1890–1943), Ellen Kathleen
("Nellie") (1892–1979), and Alfred Joseph (1899-1980). His parents, Emma Jane
Hitchcock (née Whelan; 1863–1942), and William Edgar Hitchcock (1862–1914), were
both Roman Catholics, with partial roots in Ireland;[12][13] William was a
greengrocer as his father had been.[14]

There was a large extended family, including Uncle John Hitchcock with his five-
bedroom Victorian house on Campion Road, Putney, complete with maid, cook,
chauffeur and gardener. Every summer John rented a seaside house for the family in
Cliftonville, Kent. Hitchcock said that he first became class-conscious there,
noticing the differences between tourists and locals.[15]

Describing himself as a well-behaved boy—his father called him his "little lamb
without a spot"—Hitchcock said he could not remember ever having had a playmate.
[16] One of his favourite stories for interviewers was about his father sending him
to the local police station with a note when he was five; the policeman looked at
the note and locked him in a cell for a few minutes, saying, "This is what we do to
naughty boys." The experience left him, he said, with a lifelong fear of policemen;
in 1973 he told Tom Snyder that he was "scared stiff of anything ... to do with the
law" and wouldn't even drive a car in case he got a parking ticket.[17]

When he was six, the family moved to Limehouse and leased two stores at 130 and 175
Salmon Lane, which they ran as a fish-and-chips shop and fishmongers' respectively;
they lived above the former.[18] Hitchcock attended his first school, the Howrah
House Convent in Poplar, which he entered in 1907, at age 7.[19] According to
biographer Patrick McGilligan, he stayed at Howrah House for at most two years. He
also attended a convent school, the Wode Street School "for the daughters of
gentlemen and little boys", run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus. He then
attended a primary school near his home and was for a short time a boarder at
Salesian College in Battersea.[20]

Petrol station at the site of 517 High Road, Leytonstone, where Hitchcock was born;
commemorative mural at nos. 527–533 (right).[21]
The family moved again when he was 11, this time to Stepney, and on 5 October 1910
Hitchcock was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, Tottenham (now in the
London Borough of Haringey), a Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for
discipline.[22] The priests used a hard rubber cane on the boys, always at the end
of the day, so the boys had to sit through classes anticipating the punishment if
they had been written up for it. He later said that this is where he developed his
sense of fear.[23] The school register lists his year of birth as 1900 rather than
1899; biographer Donald Spoto says he was deliberately enrolled as a 10-year-old
because he was a year behind with his schooling.[24]
While biographer Gene Adair reports that Hitchcock was "an average, or slightly
above-average, pupil",[25] Hitchcock said that he was "usually among the four or
five at the top of the class";[26] at the end of his first year, his work in Latin,
English, French and religious education was noted.[27] His favourite subject was
geography, and he became interested in maps, and railway and bus timetables;
according to John Russell Taylor, he could recite all the stops on the Orient
Express.[28] He told Peter Bogdanovich: "The Jesuits taught me organization,
control and, to some degree, analysis."[25]

Henley's
Hitchcock told his parents that he wanted to be an engineer,[26] and on 25 July
1913,[29] he left St Ignatius and enrolled in night classes at the London County
Council School of Engineering and Navigation in Poplar. In a book-length interview
in 1962, he told François Truffaut that he had studied "mechanics, electricity,
acoustics, and navigation".[26] Then on 12 December 1914 his father, who had been
suffering from emphysema and kidney disease, died at the age of 52.[30] To support
himself and his mother—his older siblings had left home by then—Hitchcock took a
job, for 15 shillings a week (£73 in 2017),[31] as a technical clerk at the Henley
Telegraph and Cable Company in Blomfield Street near London Wall.[32] He continued
night classes, this time in art history, painting, economics, and political
science.[33] His older brother ran the family shops, while he and his mother
continued to live in Salmon Lane.[34]

Hitchcock was too young to enlist when the First World War started in July 1914,
and when he reached the required age of 18 in 1917, he received a C3 classification
("free from serious organic disease, able to stand service conditions in garrisons
at home ... only suitable for sedentary work").[35] He joined a cadet regiment of
the Royal Engineers and took part in theoretical briefings, weekend drills, and
exercises. John Russell Taylor wrote that, in one session of practical exercises in
Hyde Park, Hitchcock was required to wear puttees. He could never master wrapping
them around his legs, and they repeatedly fell down around his ankles.[36]

After the war, Hitchcock took an interest in creative writing. In June 1919 he
became a founding editor and business manager of Henley's in-house publication, The
Henley Telegraph (sixpence a copy), to which he submitted several short stories.
[37][d] Henley's promoted him to the advertising department, where he wrote copy
and drew graphics for advertisements for electric cable. He enjoyed the job and
would stay late at the office to examine the proofs; he told Truffaut that this was
his "first step toward cinema".[26][45] He enjoyed watching films, especially
American cinema, and from the age of 16 read the trade papers; he watched Charlie
Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton, and particularly liked Fritz Lang's Der
müde Tod (1921).[26]

Inter-war career: 1919–1939

Famous Players-Lasky
An early 1920s image of Hitchcock while directing his film titled Number 13
Hitchcock (right) during the making of Number 13 in London
While still at Henley's, he read in a trade paper that Famous Players-Lasky, the
production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London.[46] They were
planning to film The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli, so he produced some
drawings for the title cards and sent his work to the studio.[47] They hired him,
and in 1919 he began working for Islington Studios in Poole Street, Hoxton, as a
title-card designer.[46]

Donald Spoto wrote that most of the staff were Americans with strict job
specifications, but the English workers were encouraged to try their hand at
anything, which meant that Hitchcock gained experience as a co-writer, art director
and production manager on at least 18 silent films.[48] The Times wrote in February
1922 about the studio's "special art title department under the supervision of Mr.
A. J. Hitchcock".[49] His work included Number 13 (1922), also known as Mrs.
Peabody; it was cancelled because of financial problems—the few finished scenes are
lost[50]—and Always Tell Your Wife (1923), which he and Seymour Hicks finished
together when Hicks was about to give up on it.[46] Hicks wrote later about being
helped by "a fat youth who was in charge of the property room ... [n]one other than
Alfred Hitchcock".[51]

Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany

Hitchcock sculpture at the site of Gainsborough Pictures, Poole Street, Hoxton[52]

When Paramount pulled out of London in 1922, Hitchcock was hired as an assistant
director by a new firm run in the same location by Michael Balcon, later known as
Gainsborough Pictures.[46][53] Hitchcock worked on Woman to Woman (1923) with the
director Graham Cutts, designing the set, writing the script and producing. He
said: "It was the first film that I had really got my hands onto."[53] The editor
and "script girl" on Woman to Woman was Alma Reville, his future wife. He also
worked as an assistant to Cutts on The White Shadow (1924), The Passionate
Adventure (1924), The Blackguard (1925), and The Prude's Fall (1925).[54] The
Blackguard was produced at the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam, where Hitchcock
watched part of the making of F. W. Murnau's film The Last Laugh (1924).[55] He was
impressed with Murnau's work and later used many of his techniques for the set
design in his own productions.[56]

In the summer of 1925, Balcon asked Hitchcock to direct The Pleasure Garden (1925),
starring Virginia Valli, a co-production of Gainsborough and the German firm Emelka
at the Geiselgasteig studio near Munich. Reville, by then Hitchcock's fiancée, was
assistant director-editor.[57][50] Although the film was a commercial flop,[58]
Balcon liked Hitchcock's work; a Daily Express headline called him the "Young man
with a master mind".[59] Production of The Pleasure Garden encountered obstacles
which Hitchcock would later learn from: on arrival to Brenner Pass, he failed to
declare his film stock to customs and it was confiscated; one actress could not
enter the water for a scene because she was on her period; budget overruns meant
that he had to borrow money from the actors.[60] Hitchcock also needed a translator
to give instructions to the cast and crew.[60]

In Germany, Hitchcock observed the nuances of German cinema and filmmaking which
had a big influence on him.[61] When he was not working, he would visit Berlin's
art galleries, concerts and museums. He would also meet with actors, writers, and
producers to build connections.[62] Balcon asked him to direct a second film in
Munich, The Mountain Eagle (1926), based on an original story titled Fear o' God.
[63] The film is lost, and Hitchcock called it "a very bad movie".[59][64] A year
later, Hitchcock wrote and directed The Ring; although the screenplay was credited
solely to his name, Elliot Stannard assisted him with the writing.[65] The Ring
garnered positive reviews; the Bioscope magazine critic called it "the most
magnificent British film ever made".[66]

When he returned to England, Hitchcock was one of the early members of the London
Film Society, newly formed in 1925.[67] Through the Society, he became fascinated
by the work by Soviet filmmakers: Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein,
and Vsevolod Pudovkin. He would also socialise with fellow English filmmakers Ivor
Montagu and Adrian Brunel, and Walter C. Mycroft.[68]

Hitchcock's luck came with his first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London
Fog (1927), about the hunt for a serial killer, wearing a black cloak and carrying
a black bag, is murdering young blonde women in London, and only on Tuesdays.[69] A
landlady suspects that her lodger is the killer, but he turns out to be innocent.
To convey the impression footsteps were being heard from an upper floor, Hitchcock
had a glass floor made so that the viewer could see the lodger pacing up and down
in his room above the landlady.[70] Hitchcock had wanted the leading man to be
guilty, or for the film at least to end ambiguously, but the star was Ivor Novello,
a matinée idol, and the "star system" meant that Novello could not be the villain.
Hitchcock told Truffaut: "You have to clearly spell it out in big letters: 'He is
innocent.'" (He had the same problem years later with Cary Grant in Suspicion
(1941).)[71] Released in January 1927, The Lodger was a commercial and critical
success in the UK.[72][73] Hitchcock told Truffaut that the film was the first of
his to be influenced by German Expressionism: "In truth, you might almost say that
The Lodger was my first picture."[74] He made his first cameo appearances in the
film; he was depicted sitting in a newsroom, and in the second, standing in a crowd
as the leading man is arrested.[75][76]

Marriage
External image
image icon The Hitchcocks on their wedding day, Brompton Oratory, 2 December 1926.
On 2 December 1926, Hitchcock married the English-American screenwriter Alma
Reville (1899–1982) at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington.[77] The couple
honeymooned in Paris, Lake Como and St. Moritz, before returning to London to live
in a leased flat on the top two floors of 153 Cromwell Road, Kensington.[78]
Reville, who was born just hours after Hitchcock,[79] converted from Protestantism
to Catholicism, apparently at the insistence of Hitchcock's mother; she was
baptised on 31 May 1927 and confirmed at Westminster Cathedral by Cardinal Francis
Bourne on 5 June.[80]

In 1928, when they learned that Reville was pregnant, the Hitchcocks purchased
"Winter's Grace", a Tudor farmhouse set in 11 acres on Stroud Lane, Shamley Green,
Surrey, for £2,500.[81] Their daughter and only child, Patricia Alma Hitchcock, was
born on 7 July that year.[82]

Reville became her husband's closest collaborator; Charles Champlin wrote in 1982:
"The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's."[83] When Hitchcock
accepted the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, he said that he wanted to mention
"four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragement,
and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a
scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter, Pat, and the fourth is as
fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are
Alma Reville."[84] Reville wrote or co-wrote on many of Hitchcock's films,
including Shadow of a Doubt, Suspicion and The 39 Steps.

Early sound films

An advertisement for the film Blackmail Surrounding text describes the film as "A
Romance of Scotland Yard" and "The Powerful Talking Picture"
Advertisement for Blackmail (1929)
Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, Blackmail (1929), when its production
company, British International Pictures (BIP), converted its Elstree studios to
sound. The film was the first British "talkie"; this followed the rapid development
of sound films in the United States, from the use of brief sound segments in The
Jazz Singer (1927) to the first full sound feature The Lights of New York (1928).
[4] Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop
for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British
Museum.[85] It also features one of his longest cameo appearances, which shows him
being bothered by a small boy as he reads a book on the London Underground.[86] In
the PBS series The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early
sound recording as a special element of the film, stressing the word "knife" in a
conversation with the woman suspected of murder.[87][clarification needed] During
this period, Hitchcock directed segments for a BIP revue, Elstree Calling (1930),
and directed a short film, An Elastic Affair (1930), featuring two Film Weekly
scholarship winners.[88] An Elastic Affair is one of the lost films.[89]
In 1933 Hitchcock signed a multi-film contract with Gaumont-British, once again
working for Michael Balcon.[90][91] His first film for the company, The Man Who
Knew Too Much (1934), was a success; his second, The 39 Steps (1935), was acclaimed
in the UK and gained him recognition in the United States. It also established the
quintessential English "Hitchcock blonde" (Madeleine Carroll) as the template for
his succession of ice-cold, elegant leading ladies. Screenwriter Robert Towne
remarked, "It's not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist
entertainment begins with The 39 Steps".[92] This film was one of the first to
introduce the "MacGuffin" plot device, a term coined by the English screenwriter
Angus MacPhail.[93] The MacGuffin is an item or goal the protagonist is pursuing,
one that otherwise has no narrative value; in The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a
stolen set of design plans.[94]

Alma Reville, Joan Harrison, Hitchcock, and Patricia Hitchcock, 24 August 1937
Hitchcock released two spy thrillers in 1936. Sabotage was loosely based on Joseph
Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent (1907), about a woman who discovers that her
husband is a terrorist, and Secret Agent, based on two stories in Ashenden: Or the
British Agent (1928) by W. Somerset Maugham.[e]

At this time, Hitchcock also became notorious for pranks against the cast and crew.
These jokes ranged from simple and innocent to crazy and maniacal. For instance, he
hosted a dinner party where he dyed all the food blue because he claimed there
weren't enough blue foods. He also had a horse delivered to the dressing room of
his friend, actor Gerald du Maurier.[95] Hitchcock followed up with Young and
Innocent in 1937, a crime thriller based on the 1936 novel A Shilling for Candles
by Josephine Tey.[96] Starring Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney, the film was
relatively enjoyable for the cast and crew to make.[96] To meet distribution
purposes in America, the film's runtime was cut and this included removal of one of
Hitchcock's favourite scenes: a children's tea party which becomes menacing to the
protagonists.[97]

Hitchcock's next major success was The Lady Vanishes (1938), "one of the greatest
train movies from the genre's golden era", according to Philip French, in which
Miss Froy (May Whitty), a British spy posing as a governess, disappears on a train
journey through the fictional European country of Bandrika.[98] The film saw
Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director.
[99] Benjamin Crisler of the New York Times wrote in June 1938: "Three unique and
valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Carta,
the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas
in the world."[100]

By 1938 Hitchcock was aware that he had reached his peak in Britain.[101] He had
received numerous offers from producers in the United States, but he turned them
all down because he disliked the contractual obligations or thought the projects
were repellent.[102] However, producer David O. Selznick offered him a concrete
proposal to make a film based on the sinking of RMS Titanic, which was eventually
shelved, but Selznick persuaded Hitchcock to come to Hollywood. In July 1938,
Hitchcock flew to New York, and found that he was already a celebrity; he was
featured in magazines and gave interviews to radio stations.[103] In Hollywood,
Hitchcock met Selznick for the first time. Selznick offered him a four-film
contract, approximately $40,000 for each picture (equivalent to $726,525 in 2019).
[103]

Early Hollywood years: 1939–1945

Selznick contract
Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in April 1939,[104]
and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood.[105] The Hitchcocks lived in a spacious flat
on Wilshire Boulevard, and slowly acclimatised themselves to the Los Angeles area.
He and his wife Alma kept a low profile, and were not interested in attending
parties or being celebrities.[106] Hitchcock discovered his taste for fine food in
West Hollywood, but still carried on his way of life from England.[107] He was
impressed with Hollywood's filmmaking culture, expansive budgets and efficiency,
[107] compared to the limits that he had often faced in Britain.[108] In June that
year, Life magazine called him the "greatest master of melodrama in screen
history".[109]

Although Hitchcock and Selznick respected each other, their working arrangements
were sometimes difficult. Selznick suffered from constant financial problems, and
Hitchcock was often unhappy about Selznick's creative control and interference over
his films. Selznick was also displeased with Hitchcock's method of shooting just
what was in the script, and nothing more, which meant that the film could not be
cut and remade differently at a later time.[110] As well as complaining about
Hitchcock's "goddamn jigsaw cutting",[111] their personalities were mismatched:
Hitchcock was reserved whereas Selznick was flamboyant.[112] Eventually, Selznick
generously lent Hitchcock to the larger film studios.[113] Selznick made only a few
films each year, as did fellow independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, so he did not
always have projects for Hitchcock to direct. Goldwyn had also negotiated with
Hitchcock on a possible contract, only to be outbid by Selznick. In a later
interview, Hitchcock said: "[Selznick] was the Big Producer. ... Producer was king.
The most flattering thing Mr. Selznick ever said about me—and it shows you the
amount of control—he said I was the 'only director' he'd 'trust with a film'."[114]

File:Rebecca (1940) - Trailer.webm

Trailer for Rebecca (1940)
Hitchcock approached American cinema cautiously; his first American film was set in
England in which the "Americanness" of the characters was incidental:[115] Rebecca
(1940) was set in a Hollywood version of England's Cornwall and based on a novel by
English novelist Daphne du Maurier. Selznick insisted on a faithful adaptation of
the book, and disagreed with Hitchcock with the use of humour.[116][117] The film,
starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, concerns a unnamed naïve young woman
who marries a widowed aristocrat. She lives in his large English country house, and
struggles with the lingering reputation of his elegant and worldly first wife
Rebecca, who died under mysterious circumstances. The film won Best Picture at the
13th Academy Awards; the statuette was given to producer Selznick. Hitchcock
received his first nomination for Best Director, his first of five such
nominations.[5][118]

Hitchcock's second American film was the thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), set
in Europe, based on Vincent Sheean's book Personal History (1935) and produced by
Walter Wanger. It was nominated for Best Picture that year. Hitchcock felt uneasy
living and working in Hollywood while Britain was at war; his concern resulted in a
film that overtly supported the British war effort.[119] Filmed in 1939, it was
inspired by the rapidly changing events in Europe, as covered by an American
newspaper reporter played by Joel McCrea. By mixing footage of European scenes with
scenes filmed on a Hollywood backlot, the film avoided direct references to Nazism,
Nazi Germany, and Germans, to comply with the Motion Picture Production Code at the
time.[120][failed verification]

Early war years

In September 1940 the Hitchcocks bought the 200-acre (0.81 km2) Cornwall Ranch near
Scotts Valley, California, in the Santa Cruz Mountains.[121] Their primary
residence was an English-style home in Bel Air, purchased in 1942.[122] Hitchcock's
films were diverse during this period, ranging from the romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs.
Smith (1941) to the bleak film noir Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in a publicity shot for Suspicion (1941)
Suspicion (1941) marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer and director. It is
set in England; Hitchcock used the north coast of Santa Cruz for the English
coastline sequence. The film is the first of four in which Cary Grant was cast by
Hitchcock, and it is one of the rare occasions that Grant plays a sinister
character. Grant plays Johnnie Aysgarth, an English conman whose actions raise
suspicion and anxiety in his shy young English wife, Lina McLaidlaw (Joan
Fontaine).[123] In one scene, Hitchcock placed a light inside a glass of milk,
perhaps poisoned, that Grant is bringing to his wife; the light ensures that the
audience's attention is on the glass. Grant's character is actually a killer, as
per written in the book, Before the Fact by Francis Iles, but the studio felt that
Grant's image would be tarnished by that. Hitchcock therefore settled for an
ambiguous finale, although he would have preferred to end with the wife's murder.
[124][f] Fontaine won Best Actress for her performance.[126]

Saboteur (1942) is the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal Studios
during the decade. Hitchcock was forced by Universal to use Universal contract
player Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, a freelancer who signed a one-picture
deal with the studio, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas.[127]
The story depicts a confrontation between a suspected saboteur (Cummings) and a
real saboteur (Norman Lloyd) atop the Statue of Liberty. Hitchcock took a three day
tour of New York City to scout for Saboteur's filming locations.[128] He also
directed Have You Heard? (1942), a photographic dramatisation for Life magazine of
the dangers of rumours during wartime.[129] In 1943 he wrote a mystery story for
Look magazine, "The Murder of Monty Woolley",[130] a sequence of captioned
photographs inviting the reader to find clues to the murderer's identity; Hitchcock
cast the performers as themselves, such as Woolley, Doris Merrick, and make-up man
Guy Pearce.[citation needed]

File:Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Trailer.webm

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) trailer with Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright
Back in England, Hitchcock's mother Emma was severely ill; she died on 26 September
1942 at age 79. Hitchcock never spoke publicly about his mother, but his assistant
said that he admired her.[131] Four months later, on 4 January 1943, his brother
William died of an overdose at age 52.[132] Hitchcock was not very close to
William,[133] but his death made Hitchcock conscious about his own eating and
drinking habits. He was overweight and suffering from back aches. His New Year's
resolution in 1943 was to take his diet seriously with the help of a physician.
[134] In January that year, Shadow of a Doubt was released, which Hitchcock had
fond memories of making.[135] In the film, Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa
Wright) suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being a serial
killer. Hitchcock filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern
California city of Santa Rosa.[136]

At 20th Century Fox, Hitchcock approached John Steinbeck with an idea for a film,
which recorded the experiences of the survivors of a German U-boat attack.
Steinbeck began work on the script which would become the Lifeboat (1944). However,
Steinbeck was unhappy with the film and asked that his name be removed from the
credits, to no avail. The idea was rewritten as a short story by Harry Sylvester
and published in Collier's in 1943. The action sequences were shot in a small boat
in the studio water tank. The locale posed problems for Hitchcock's traditional
cameo appearance; it was solved by having Hitchcock's image appear in a newspaper
that William Bendix is reading in the boat, showing the director in a before-and-
after advertisement for "Reduco-Obesity Slayer".[137] He told Truffaut in 1962:

At the time, I was on a strenuous diet, painfully working my way from three hundred
to two hundred pounds. So I decided to immortalize my loss and get my bit part by
posing for "before" and "after" pictures. ... I was literally submerged by letters
from fat people who wanted to know where and how they could get Reduco.[138]
Hitchcock's typical dinner before his weight loss had been a roast chicken, boiled
ham, potatoes, bread, vegetables, relishes, salad, dessert, a bottle of wine and
some brandy. To lose weight, his diet consisted of black coffee for breakfast and
lunch, and steak and salad for dinner,[134] but it was hard to maintain; Donald
Spoto wrote that his weight fluctuated considerably over the next 40 years. At the
end of 1943, despite the weight loss, the Occidental Insurance Company of Los
Angeles refused his application for life insurance.[139]

Wartime non-fiction films

Further information: German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
"I felt the need to make a little contribution to the war effort, and I was both
overweight and over-age for military service. I knew that if I did nothing, I'd
regret it for the rest of my life ..."
— Alfred Hitchcock (1967)[140]
Hitchcock returned to the UK for an extended visit in late 1943 and early 1944.
While there he made two short propaganda films, Bon Voyage (1944) and Aventure
Malgache (1944), for the Ministry of Information. In June and July 1945, Hitchcock
served as "treatment advisor" on a Holocaust documentary that used Allied Forces
footage of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The film was assembled in
London and produced by Sidney Bernstein of the Ministry of Information, who brought
Hitchcock (a friend of his) on board. It was originally intended to be broadcast to
the Germans, but the British government deemed it too traumatic to be shown to a
shocked post-war population. Instead, it was transferred in 1952 from the British
War Office film vaults to London's Imperial War Museum and remained unreleased
until 1985, when an edited version was broadcast as an episode of PBS Frontline,
under the title the Imperial War Museum had given it: Memory of the Camps. The
full-length version of the film, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was
restored in 2014 by scholars at the Imperial War Museum.[141][142][143]

Post-war Hollywood years: 1945–1953

Later Selznick films

Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (1945)

Hitchcock worked for David Selznick again when he directed Spellbound (1945), which
explores psychoanalysis and features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí.
[144] The dream sequence as it appears in the film is ten minutes shorter than was
originally envisioned; Selznick edited it to make it "play" more effectively.[145]
Gregory Peck plays amnesiac Dr. Anthony Edwardes under the treatment of analyst Dr.
Peterson (Ingrid Bergman), who falls in love with him while trying to unlock his
repressed past.[146] Two point-of-view shots were achieved by building a large
wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the
camera took) and out-sized props for it to hold: a bucket-sized glass of milk and a
large wooden gun. For added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was hand-
coloured red on some copies of the black-and-white film. The original musical score
by Miklós Rózsa makes use of the theremin, and some of it was later adapted by the
composer into Rozsa's Piano Concerto Op. 31 (1967) for piano and orchestra.[147]
[failed verification]

The spy film Notorious was followed next in 1946. Hitchcock told François Truffaut
that Selznick sold him, Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, and Ben Hecht's screenplay, to
RKO Radio Pictures as a "package" for $500,000 (equivalent to $6,555,461 in 2019)
because of cost overruns on Selznick's Duel in the Sun (1946).[citation needed]
Notorious stars Bergman and Grant, both Hitchcock collaborators, and features a
plot about Nazis, uranium and South America. His prescient use of uranium as a plot
device led to him being briefly placed under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.[148] According to Patrick McGilligan, in or around March 1945,
Hitchcock and Hecht consulted Robert Millikan of the California Institute of
Technology about the development of a uranium bomb. Selznick complained that the
notion was "science fiction", only to be confronted by the news of the detonation
of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945.[149]

Transatlantic Pictures
A typical scene from Rope showing James Stewart
A typical shot from Rope (1948) with James Stewart turning his back to the fixed
camera
Hitchcock formed an independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, with
his friend Sidney Bernstein. He made two films with Transatlantic, one of which was
his first colour film. With Rope (1948), Hitchcock experimented with marshalling
suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat. The film
appears as one continuous take, but it was actually shot in 10 takes ranging from
4-1⁄2 to 10 minutes each; a 10-minute length of film was the most that a camera's
film magazine could hold at the time. Some transitions between reels were hidden by
having a dark object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those
points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera in the same place.
The film features James Stewart in the leading role, and was the first of four
films that Stewart made with Hitchcock. It was inspired by the Leopold and Loeb
case of the 1920s.[150] Critical response at the time was mixed.[151]

Under Capricorn (1949), set in 19th-century Australia, also uses the short-lived
technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used Technicolor in
this production, then returned to black-and-white for several years. Transatlantic
Pictures became inactive after the last two films.[152][153] Hitchcock filmed Stage
Fright (1950) at Elstree studios in England, where he had worked during his British
International Pictures contract many years before.[154] He paired one of Warner
Bros.' most popular stars, Jane Wyman, with the expatriate German actor Marlene
Dietrich and used several prominent British actors, including Michael Wilding,
Richard Todd and Alastair Sim.[155] This was Hitchcock's first proper production
for Warner Bros., which had distributed Rope and Under Capricorn, because
Transatlantic Pictures was experiencing financial difficulties.[156]

His thriller Strangers on a Train (1951) was based on the novel of the same name by
Patricia Highsmith. Hitchcock combined many elements from his preceding films. He
approached Dashiell Hammett to write the dialogue, but Raymond Chandler took over,
then left over disagreements with the director. In the film, two men casually meet,
one of whom speculates on a foolproof method to murder; he suggests that two
people, each wishing to do away with someone, should each perform the other's
murder. Farley Granger's role was as the innocent victim of the scheme, while
Robert Walker, previously known for "boy-next-door" roles, played the villain.[157]
I Confess (1953) was set in Quebec with Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest.[158]

Peak years: 1954–1964

Dial M for Murder and Rear Window
Still image from the film Read Window featuring Stewart and Kelly
James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954)
I Confess was followed by three colour films starring Grace Kelly: Dial M for
Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). In Dial M for
Murder, Ray Milland plays the villain who tries to murder his unfaithful wife
(Kelly) for her money. She kills the hired assassin in self-defence, so Milland
manipulates the evidence to make it look like murder. Her lover, Mark Halliday
(Robert Cummings), and Police Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) save her from
execution.[159] Hitchcock experimented with 3D cinematography for Dial M for
Murder.[160]

Hitchcock moved to Paramount Pictures and filmed Rear Window (1954), starring James
Stewart and Grace Kelly again, as well as Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Stewart's
character is a photographer called Jeff (based on Robert Capa) who must temporarily
use a wheelchair. Out of boredom, he begins observing his neighbours across the
courtyard, then becomes convinced that one of them (Raymond Burr) has murdered his
wife. Jeff eventually manages to convince his policeman buddy (Wendell Corey) and
his girlfriend (Kelly). As with Lifeboat and Rope, the principal characters are
depicted in confined or cramped quarters, in this case Stewart's studio apartment.
Hitchcock uses close-ups of Stewart's face to show his character's reactions, "from
the comic voyeurism directed at his neighbours to his helpless terror watching
Kelly and Burr in the villain's apartment".[161]

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Pat Hitchcock with her daughter Terry and husband Joseph O'Connell, Alma Reville,
Mary Alma O'Connell, Alfred Hitchcock (clockwise from top left), c. 1955–1956
From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host of the television series Alfred Hitchcock
Presents.[162] With his droll delivery, gallows humour and iconic image, the series
made Hitchcock a celebrity. The title-sequence of the show pictured a minimalist
caricature of his profile (he drew it himself; it is composed of only nine
strokes), which his real silhouette then filled.[163] The series theme tune was
Funeral March of a Marionette by the French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893).
[164]

His introductions always included some sort of wry humour, such as the description
of a recent multi-person execution hampered by having only one electric chair,
while two are shown with a sign "Two chairs—no waiting!" He directed 18 episodes of
the series, which aired from 1955 to 1965. It became The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in
1962, and NBC broadcast the final episode on 10 May 1965. In the 1980s, a new
version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of
Hitchcock's original introductions in a colourised form.[162]

Hitchcock's success in television spawned a set of short-story collections in his

name; these included Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology, Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do
on TV, and Tales My Mother Never Told Me.[165] In 1956 HSD Publications also
licensed the director's name to create Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, a
monthly digest specialising in crime and detective fiction.[165] Hitchcock's
television series' were very profitable, and his foreign-language versions of books
were bringing revenues of up to $100,000 a year (equivalent to $864,229 in 2019).
[166]

From To Catch a Thief to Vertigo

In 1955 Hitchcock became a United States citizen.[167] In the same year, his third
Grace Kelly film, To Catch a Thief, was released; it is set in the French Riviera,
and stars Kelly and Cary Grant. Grant plays retired thief John Robie, who becomes
the prime suspect for a spate of robberies in the Riviera. A thrill-seeking
American heiress played by Kelly surmises his true identity and tries to seduce
him. "Despite the obvious age disparity between Grant and Kelly and a lightweight
plot, the witty script (loaded with double entendres) and the good-natured acting
proved a commercial success."[168] It was Hitchcock's last film with Kelly; she
married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, and ended her film career afterward.
Hitchcock then remade his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956. This
time, the film starred James Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song "Que
Sera, Sera", which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became a big
hit. They play a couple whose son is kidnapped to prevent them from interfering
with an assassination. As in the 1934 film, the climax takes place at the Royal
Albert Hall.[169]

The Wrong Man (1957), Hitchcock's final film for Warner Bros., is a low-key black-
and-white production based on a real-life case of mistaken identity reported in
Life magazine in 1953. This was the only film of Hitchcock to star Henry Fonda,
playing a Stork Club musician mistaken for a liquor store thief, who is arrested
and tried for robbery while his wife (Vera Miles) emotionally collapses under the
strain. Hitchcock told Truffaut that his lifelong fear of the police attracted him
to the subject and was embedded in many scenes.[170]

Still image from the film Vertigo

Kim Novak by the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo (1958)[g]
While directing episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents during the summer of 1957,
Hitchcock was admitted to hospital for hernia and gallstones, and had to have his
gallbladder removed. Following a successful surgery, he immediately returned to
work to prepare for his next project.[171][151] Hitchcock's next film, Vertigo
(1958) again starred James Stewart, with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes. He had
wanted Vera Miles to play the lead, but she was pregnant. He told Oriana Fallaci:
"I was offering her a big part, the chance to become a beautiful sophisticated
blonde, a real actress. We'd have spent a heap of dollars on it, and she has the
bad taste to get pregnant. I hate pregnant women, because then they have
children."[172]

In Vertigo, Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from

acrophobia, who develops an obsession with a woman he has been hired to shadow
(Novak). Scottie's obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock does not opt
for a happy ending. Some critics, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert, agree
that Vertigo is the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the
Pygmalion-like obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires.
Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation
between sex and death, than any other work in his filmography.[173]

Vertigo contains a camera technique developed by Irmin Roberts, commonly referred

to as a dolly zoom, which has been copied by many filmmakers. The film premiered at
the San Sebastián International Film Festival, and Hitchcock won the Silver
Seashell prize.[174] Vertigo is considered a classic, but it attracted mixed
reviews and poor box-office receipts at the time;[175] the critic from Variety
magazine opined that the film was "too slow and too long".[176] Bosley Crowther of
the New York Times thought it was "devilishly far-fetched", but praised the cast
performances and Hitchcock's direction.[177] The picture was also the last
collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock.[178] In the 2002 Sight & Sound polls,
it ranked just behind Citizen Kane (1941); ten years later, in the same magazine,
critics chose it as the best film ever made.[8]

North by Northwest and Psycho

See also: Psycho (franchise)
After Vertigo, the rest of 1958 had been a difficult year for Hitchcock. During
pre-production of North by Northwest (1959), which was a "slow" and "agonising"
process, his wife Alma was diagnosed with cancer.[179] While Alma was in hospital,
Hitchcock kept himself occupied with his television work and would visit her
everyday. Alma underwent surgery and made a full recovery but it caused Hitchcock
to imagine, for the first time, life without her.[179]

Mosaic image from the film Psycho at Leytonstone tube station

Psycho mosaic in the Hitchcock Gallery at Leytonstone tube station
Hitchcock followed up with three more successful films, which are also recognised
as among his best: North by Northwest, Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). In North
by Northwest, Cary Grant portrays Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue advertising
executive who is mistaken for a government secret agent. He is hotly pursued across
the United States by enemy agents, including Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). At
first, Thornhill believes Kendall is helping him, but then realises that she is an
enemy agent; he learns that she is working undercover for the CIA. During its
opening two-week run at Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed $404,056
(equivalent to $3,543,793 in 2019), setting a record in that theatre's non-holiday
gross.[180] Time magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly
entertaining".[181]
Psycho (1960) is arguably Hitchcock's best-known film.[182] Based on Robert Bloch's
1959 novel Psycho, which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein,[183] the film was
produced on a tight budget of $800,000 (equivalent to $6,913,836 in 2019) and shot
in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from Alfred Hitchcock
Presents.[184] The unprecedented violence of the shower scene,[h] the early death
of the heroine, and the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became
the hallmarks of a new horror-film genre.[186] The film proved popular with
audiences, with queues stretching outside theatres as viewers waited for the next
showing. It broke box-office records in the United Kingdom, France, South America,
the United States and Canada and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief
period.[187][page needed]

Psycho was the most profitable of Hitchcock's career, and he personally earned in
excess of $15 million (equivalent to $129.63 million in 2019). He subsequently
swapped his rights to Psycho and his TV anthology for 150,000 shares of MCA, making
him the third largest shareholder and his own boss at Universal, in theory at
least, although that did not stop them from interfering with him.[187][page needed]
[188] Following the first film, Psycho became an American horror franchise: Psycho
II, Psycho III, Bates Motel, Psycho IV: The Beginning, and a colour 1998 remake of
the original.[189]

Truffaut interview
Further information: Hitchcock/Truffaut and Hitchcock/Truffaut (film)
On 13 August 1962, Hitchcock's 63rd birthday, the French director François Truffaut
began a 50-hour interview of Hitchcock, filmed over eight days at Universal
Studios, during which Hitchcock agreed to answer 500 questions. It took four years
to transcribe the tapes and organise the images; it was published as a book in
1967, which Truffaut nicknamed the "Hitchbook". The audio tapes were used as the
basis of a documentary in 2015.[190][191] Truffaut sought the interview because it
was clear to him that Hitchcock was not simply the mass-market entertainer the
American media made him out to be. It was obvious from his films, Truffaut wrote,
that Hitchcock had "given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his
colleagues". He compared the interview to "Oedipus' consultation of the oracle".
[192]

The Birds
Further information: The Girl (2012 TV film) and Tippi Hedren § Sexual harassment
File:The Birds trailer (1963).webm
Trailer for The Birds (1963), in which Hitchcock discusses humanity's treatment of
"our feathered friends"
The film scholar Peter William Evans wrote that The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964)
are regarded as "undisputed masterpieces".[151] Hitchcock had intended to film
Marnie first, and in March 1962 it was announced that Grace Kelly, Princess Grace
of Monaco since 1956, would come out of retirement to star in it.[193] When Kelly
asked Hitchcock to postpone Marnie until 1963 or 1964, he recruited Evan Hunter,
author of The Blackboard Jungle (1954), to develop a screenplay based on a Daphne
du Maurier short story, "The Birds" (1952), which Hitchcock had republished in his
My Favorites in Suspense (1959). He hired Tippi Hedren to play the lead role.[194]
It was her first role; she had been a model in New York when Hitchcock saw her, in
October 1961, in an NBC television advert for Sego, a diet drink:[195] "I signed
her because she is a classic beauty. Movies don't have them any more. Grace Kelly
was the last." He insisted, without explanation, that her first name be written in
single quotation marks: 'Tippi'.[i]

In The Birds, Melanie Daniels, a young socialite, meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod
Taylor) in a bird shop; Jessica Tandy plays his possessive mother. Hedren visits
him in Bodega Bay (where The Birds was filmed)[196] carrying a pair of lovebirds as
a gift. Suddenly waves of birds start gathering, watching, and attacking. The
question: "What do the birds want?" is left unanswered.[198] Hitchcock made the
film with equipment from the Revue Studio, which made Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He
said it was his most technically challenging film, using a combination of trained
and mechanical birds against a backdrop of wild ones. Every shot was sketched in
advance.[196]

An HBO/BBC television film, The Girl (2012), depicted Hedren's experiences on set;
she said that Hitchcock became obsessed with her and sexually harassed her. He
reportedly isolated her from the rest of the crew, had her followed, whispered
obscenities to her, had her handwriting analysed, and had a ramp built from his
private office directly into her trailer.[199][200] Diane Baker, her co-star in
Marnie, said: "[N]othing could have been more horrible for me than to arrive on
that movie set and to see her being treated the way she was."[201] While filming
the attack scene in the attic—which took a week to film—she was placed in a caged
room while two men wearing elbow-length protective gloves threw live birds at her.
Toward the end of the week, to stop the birds flying away from her too soon, one
leg of each bird was attached by nylon thread to elastic bands sewn inside her
clothes. She broke down after a bird cut her lower eyelid, and filming was halted
on doctor's orders.[202]

Marnie
File:Marnie (1964) trailer.webm
Trailer for Marnie (1964)
In June 1962, Grace Kelly announced that she had decided against appearing in
Marnie (1964). Hedren had signed an exclusive seven-year, $500-a-week contract with
Hitchcock in October 1961,[203] and he decided to cast her in the lead role
opposite Sean Connery. In 2016, describing Hedren's performance as "one of the
greatest in the history of cinema", Richard Brody called the film a "story of
sexual violence" inflicted on the character played by Hedren: "The film is, to put
it simply, sick, and it's so because Hitchcock was sick. He suffered all his life
from furious sexual desire, suffered from the lack of its gratification, suffered
from the inability to transform fantasy into reality, and then went ahead and did
so virtually, by way of his art."[204] A 1964 New York Times film review called it
Hitchcock's "most disappointing film in years", citing Hedren's and Connery's lack
of experience, an amateurish script and "glaringly fake cardboard backdrops".[205]

In the film, Marnie Edgar (Hedren) steals $10,000 from her employer and goes on the
run. She applies for a job at Mark Rutland's (Connery) company in Philadelphia and
steals from there too. Earlier she is shown having a panic attack during a
thunderstorm and fearing the colour red. Mark tracks her down and blackmails her
into marrying him. She explains that she does not want to be touched, but during
the "honeymoon", Mark rapes her. Marnie and Mark discover that Marnie's mother had
been a prostitute when Marnie was a child, and that, while the mother was fighting
with a client during a thunderstorm—the mother believed the client had tried to
molest Marnie—Marnie had killed the client to save her mother. Cured of her fears
when she remembers what happened, she decides to stay with Mark.[204][206]

The Hitchcocks with First Lady Pat Nixon and first daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower
in 1969
Hitchcock told cinematographer Robert Burks that the camera had to be placed as
close as possible to Hedren when he filmed her face.[207] Evan Hunter, the
screenwriter of The Birds who was writing Marnie too, explained to Hitchcock that,
if Mark loved Marnie, he would comfort her, not rape her. Hitchcock reportedly
replied: "Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her
face!"[208] When Hunter submitted two versions of the script, one without the rape
scene, Hitchcock replaced him with Jay Presson Allen.[209]

Later years: 1966–1980

Final films
Failing health reduced Hitchcock's output during the last two decades of his life.
Biographer Stephen Rebello claimed Universal imposed two films on him, Torn Curtain
(1966) and Topaz (1969), the latter of which is based on a Leon Uris novel, partly
set in Cuba.[210] Both were spy thrillers with Cold War-related themes. Torn
Curtain, with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, precipitated the bitter end of the 12-
year collaboration between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann.[211] Hitchcock
was unhappy with Herrmann's score and replaced him with John Addison, Jay
Livingston and Ray Evans.[212] Upon release, Torn Curtain was a box office failure,
[213] and Topaz was disliked by critics and the studio.[214]

Image of Hitchcock seated during the filming of Family Plot

Hitchcock at work on Family Plot, San Francisco, summer 1975
Hitchcock returned to Britain to make his penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), based on
the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square (1966). After two espionage
films, the plot marked a return to the murder-thriller genre. Richard Blaney (Jon
Finch), a volatile barman with a history of explosive anger, becomes the prime
suspect in the investigation into the "Necktie Murders", which are actually
committed by his friend Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). This time, Hitchcock makes the
victim and villain kindreds, rather than opposites as in Strangers on a Train.[215]

In Frenzy, Hitchcock allowed nudity for the first time. Two scenes show naked
women, one of whom is being raped and strangled;[151] Donald Spoto called the
latter "one of the most repellent examples of a detailed murder in the history of
film". Both actors, Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Anna Massey, refused to do the scenes,
so models were used instead.[216] Biographers have noted that Hitchcock had always
pushed the limits of film censorship, often managing to fool Joseph Breen, the head
of the Motion Picture Production Code. Hitchcock would add subtle hints of
improprieties forbidden by censorship until the mid-1960s. Yet Patrick McGilligan
wrote that Breen and others often realised that Hitchcock was inserting such
material and were actually amused, as well as alarmed by Hitchcock's "inescapable
inferences".[217]

Family Plot (1976) was Hitchcock's last film. It relates the escapades of "Madam"
Blanche Tyler, played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi-
driver lover Bruce Dern, making a living from her phony powers. While Family Plot
was based on the Victor Canning novel The Rainbird Pattern (1972), the novel's tone
is more sinister. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman originally wrote the film, under the
working title Deception, with a dark tone but was pushed to a lighter, more comical
tone by Hitchcock where it took the name Deceit, then finally, Family Plot.[218]

Knighthood and death

Toward the end of his life, Hitchcock was working on the script for a spy thriller,
The Short Night, collaborating with James Costigan, Ernest Lehman and David
Freeman. Despite preliminary work, it was never filmed. Hitchcock's health was
declining and he was worried about his wife, who had suffered a stroke. The
screenplay was eventually published in Freeman's book The Last Days of Alfred
Hitchcock (1999).[219]

Having refused a CBE in 1962,[220] Hitchcock was appointed a Knight Commander of

the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 1980 New Year Honours.
[11][221] He was too ill to travel to London—he had a pacemaker and was being given
cortisone injections for his arthritis—so on 3 January 1980 the British consul
general presented him with the papers at Universal Studios. Asked by a reporter
after the ceremony why it had taken the Queen so long, Hitchcock quipped, "I
suppose it was a matter of carelessness." Cary Grant, Janet Leigh, and others
attended a luncheon afterwards.[222][223]

His last public appearance was on 16 March 1980, when he introduced the next year's
winner of the American Film Institute award.[222] He died of kidney failure the
following month, on 29 April, in his Bel Air home.[122][224] Donald Spoto, one of
Hitchcock's biographers, wrote that Hitchcock had declined to see a priest,[225]
but according to Jesuit priest Mark Henninger, he and another priest, Tom Sullivan,
celebrated Mass at the filmmaker's home, and Sullivan heard his confession.[226]
Hitchcock was survived by his wife and daughter. His funeral was held at Good
Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills on 30 April, after which his body was
cremated. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean on 10 May 1980.[227]

Filmmaking
Style and themes
Main articles: Themes and plot devices in Hitchcock films and List of Alfred
Hitchcock cameo appearances
Still from The Lady Vanishes depicting Hitchcock
Hitchcock's cameo appearance in The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Hitchcock's film production career evolved from small-scale silent films to
financially significant sound films. His silent films between 1925–29 were in the
crime and suspense genres, but also included melodramas and comedies. Whilst visual
storytelling was pertinent during the silent era, even after the arrival of sound,
Hitchcock still relied on visuals in cinema. In Britain, he honed his craft so that
by the time he moved to Hollywood, the director had perfected his style and camera
techniques. Hitchcock later said that his British work was the "sensation of
cinema", whereas the American phase was when his "ideas were fertilised".[228]
Scholar Robin Wood writes that the director's first two films, The Pleasure Garden
and The Mountain Eagle, were influenced by German Expressionism. Afterward, he
discovered Soviet cinema, and Sergei Eisenstein's and Vsevolod Pudovkin's theories
of montage.[67] 1926's The Lodger was inspired by both German and Soviet
aesthetics, styles which solidified the rest of his career.[229] Although
Hitchcock's work in the 1920s found some success, several British reviewers
criticised Hitchcock's films for being unoriginal and conceited.[230] Raymond
Durgnat opined that Hitchcock's films were carefully and intelligently constructed,
but thought they can be shallow and rarely present a "coherent worldview".[231]

Earning the title "Master of Suspense", the director experimented with ways to
generate tension in his work.[230] He said, "My suspense work comes out of creating
nightmares for the audience. And I play with an audience. I make them gasp and
surprise them and shock them. When you have a nightmare, it’s awfully vivid if
you’re dreaming that you’re being led to the electric chair. Then you’re as happy
as can be when you wake up because you’re relieved."[232] During filming of North
by Northwest, Hitchcock explained his reasons for recreating the set of Mount
Rushmore: "The audience responds in proportion to how realistic you make it. One of
the dramatic reasons for this type of photography is to get it looking so natural
that the audience gets involved and believes, for the time being, what’s going on
up there on the screen."[232]

Hitchcock's films, from the silent to the sound era, contained a number of
recurring themes that he is famous for. His films explored audience as a voyeur,
notably in Rear Window, Marnie and Psycho. He understood that human beings enjoy
voyeuristic activities and made the audience participate in it through the
character's actions.[233] Of his fifty-three films, eleven revolved around stories
of mistaken identity, where an innocent protagonist is accused of a crime and is
pursued by police. In most cases, it is an ordinary, everyday person who finds
themselves in a dangerous situation.[234] Hitchcock told Truffaut: "That's because
the theme of the innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a
greater sense of danger. It's easier for them to identify with him than with a
guilty man on the run."[234] One of his constant themes were the struggle of a
personality torn between "order and chaos";[235] known as the notion of "double",
which is a comparison or contrast between two characters or objects: the double
representing a dark or evil side.[151]
According to Robin Wood, Hitchcock had mixed feelings towards homosexuality despite
working with gay actors in his career.[236] Donald Spoto suggests that Hitchcock's
sexually repressive childhood may have contributed to his exploration of deviancy.
[236] During the 1950s, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited direct
references to homosexuality but the director was known for his subtle references,
[237] and pushing the boundaries of the censors. Moreover, Shadow of a Doubt has a
double incest theme through the storyline, expressed implicitly through images.
[238] Author Jane Sloan argues that Hitchcock was drawn to both conventional and
unconventional sexual expression in his work,[239] and the theme of marriage was
usually presented in a "bleak and skeptical" manner.[240] It was also not until
after his mother's death in 1942, that Hitchcock portrayed motherly figures as
"notorious monster-mothers".[131] The espionage backdrop, and murders committed by
characters with psychopathic tendencies were common themes too.[241] In Hitchcock's
depiction of villains and murderers, they were usually charming and friendly,
forcing viewers to identify with them.[242] The director's strict childhood and
Jesuit education may have led to his distrust of authoritarian figures such as
policemen and politicians; a theme which he has explored.[151] Also, he used the
“MacGuffin”—the use of an object, person or event to keep the plot moving along
even if it was non-essential to the story.[243] Some examples include the microfilm
in North by Northwest and the $40,000 stolen money in Psycho.

Hitchcock appears briefly in most of his own films. For example, he is seen
struggling to get a double bass onto a train (Strangers on a Train), walking dogs
out of a pet shop (The Birds), fixing a neighbour's clock (Rear Window), as a
shadow (Family Plot), sitting at a table in a photograph (Dial M for Murder), and
riding a bus (North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief).[86]

Representation of women
Hitchcock's portrayal of women has been the subject of much scholarly debate.
Bidisha wrote in The Guardian in 2010: "There's the vamp, the tramp, the snitch,
the witch, the slink, the double-crosser and, best of all, the demon mommy. Don't
worry, they all get punished in the end."[244] In a widely cited essay in 1975,
Laura Mulvey introduced the idea of the male gaze; the view of the spectator in
Hitchcock's films, she argued, is that of the heterosexual male protagonist.[245]
"The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over
again", Roger Ebert wrote in 1996. "They were blonde. They were icy and remote.
They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They
mesmerised the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or
later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated."[246][j]

Kim Novak and James Stewart in Vertigo (1958)

The victims in The Lodger are all blondes. In The 39 Steps, Madeleine Carroll is
put in handcuffs. Ingrid Bergman, whom Hitchcock directed three times (Spellbound,
Notorious, and Under Capricorn), is dark blonde. In Rear Window, Lisa (Grace Kelly)
risks her life by breaking into Lars Thorwald's apartment. In To Catch a Thief,
Francie (also Kelly) offers to help a man she believes is a burglar. In Vertigo and
North by Northwest respectively, Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint play the blonde
heroines. In Psycho, Janet Leigh's character steals $40,000 and is murdered by
Norman Bates, a reclusive psychopath. Tippi Hedren, a blonde, appears to be the
focus of the attacks in The Birds. In Marnie, the title character, again played by
Hedren, is a thief. In Topaz, French actresses Dany Robin as Stafford's wife and
Claude Jade as Stafford's daughter are blonde heroines, the mistress was played by
brunette Karin Dor. Hitchcock's last blonde heroine was Barbara Harris as a phony
psychic turned amateur sleuth in Family Plot (1976), his final film. In the same
film, the diamond smuggler played by Karen Black wears a long blonde wig in several
scenes.

His films often feature characters struggling in their relationships with their
mothers, such as Norman Bates in Psycho. In North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill
(Cary Grant) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy,
murderous men are after him. In The Birds, the Rod Taylor character, an innocent
man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and struggles to free himself
from a clinging mother (Jessica Tandy). The killer in Frenzy has a loathing of
women but idolises his mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his
father, but has an incredibly close relationship with his mother (played by Marion
Lorne). Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious has a clearly conflicting
relationship with his mother, who is (rightly) suspicious of his new bride, Alicia
Huberman (Ingrid Bergman).[248]

Relationship with actors

... I told her that my idea of a good actor or good actress is someone who can do
nothing very well. ... I said, "That's one of the things you've got to learn to
have ... authority." Out of authority comes control and out of control you get the
range ... Whether you do little acting, a lot of acting in a given scene. You know
exactly where you're going. And these were the first things that she had to know.
Emotion comes later and the control of the voice comes later. But, within herself,
she had to learn authority first and foremost because out of authority comes
timing.
— Alfred Hitchcock (1967)[249]
Hitchcock became known for having remarked that "actors are cattle".[250][k] During
the filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), Carole Lombard brought three cows onto the
set wearing the name tags of Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and Gene Raymond, the
stars of the film, to surprise him.[250] In an episode of The Dick Cavett Show,
originally broadcast on 8 June 1972, Dick Cavett stated as fact that Hitchcock had
once called actors cattle. Hitchcock responded by saying that, at one time, he had
been accused of calling actors cattle. “I said that I would never say such an
unfeeling, rude thing about actors at all. What I probably said, was that all
actors should be treated like cattle...In a nice way of course.” He then described
Carole Lombard's joke, with a smile. [251]

Hitchcock believed that actors should concentrate on their performances and leave
work on script and character to the directors and screenwriters. He told Bryan
Forbes in 1967: "I remember discussing with a method actor how he was taught and so
forth. He said, 'We're taught using improvisation. We are given an idea and then we
are turned loose to develop in any way we want to.' I said 'That's not acting.
That's writing.' “[125]

Recalling their experiences on Lifeboat for Charles Chandler, author of It's Only a
Movie: Alfred Hitchcock A Personal Biography, Walter Slezak said that Hitchcock
“knew more about how to help an actor than any director I ever worked with”, and
Hume Cronyn dismissed the idea that Hitchcock was not concerned with his actors as
“utterly fallacious”, describing at length the process of rehearsing and filming
Lifeboat.[252]

Critics observed that, despite his reputation as a man who disliked actors, actors
who worked with him often gave brilliant performances. He used the same actors in
many of his films; Cary Grant and James Stewart both worked with Hitchcock four
times,[253] and Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly three. James Mason said that
Hitchcock regarded actors as "animated props".[254] For Hitchcock, the actors were
part of the film's setting. He told François Truffaut: "The chief requisite for an
actor is the ability to do nothing well, which is by no means as easy as it sounds.
He should be willing to be used and wholly integrated into the picture by the
director and the camera. He must allow the camera to determine the proper emphasis
and the most effective dramatic highlights."[255]

Writing, storyboards and production

Hitchcock planned his scripts in detail with his writers. In Writing with Hitchcock
(2001), Steven DeRosa noted that Hitchcock supervised them through every draft,
asking that they tell the story visually.[256] Hitchcock told Roger Ebert in 1969:

Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon not make the film at all. All the
fun is over. I have a strongly visual mind. I visualize a picture right down to the
final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I
don't look at the script while I'm shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an
orchestra conductor needs not look at the score. It's melancholy to shoot a
picture. When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you
lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception.[257]

Hitchcock's films were extensively storyboarded to the finest detail. He was

reported to have never even bothered looking through the viewfinder, since he did
not need to, although in publicity photos he was shown doing so. He also used this
as an excuse to never have to change his films from his initial vision. If a studio
asked him to change a film, he would claim that it was already shot in a single
way, and that there were no alternative takes to consider.[258]

Image of Hitchcock pictured under Mount Rushmore during the filming of North by
Northwest
Hitchcock at Mount Rushmore filming North by Northwest (1959)
This view of Hitchcock as a director who relied more on pre-production than on the
actual production itself has been challenged by Bill Krohn, the American
correspondent of French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, in his book Hitchcock at
Work. After investigating script revisions, notes to other production personnel
written by or to Hitchcock, and other production material, Krohn observed that
Hitchcock's work often deviated from how the screenplay was written or how the film
was originally envisioned.[259] He noted that the myth of storyboards in relation
to Hitchcock, often regurgitated by generations of commentators on his films, was
to a great degree perpetuated by Hitchcock himself or the publicity arm of the
studios. For example, the celebrated crop-spraying sequence of North by Northwest
was not storyboarded at all. After the scene was filmed, the publicity department
asked Hitchcock to make storyboards to promote the film, and Hitchcock in turn
hired an artist to match the scenes in detail.[260][verification needed]

Even when storyboards were made, scenes that were shot differed from them
significantly. Krohn's analysis of the production of Hitchcock classics like
Notorious reveals that Hitchcock was flexible enough to change a film's conception
during its production. Another example Krohn notes is the American remake of The
Man Who Knew Too Much, whose shooting schedule commenced without a finished script
and moreover went over schedule, something that, as Krohn notes, was not an
uncommon occurrence on many of Hitchcock's films, including Strangers on a Train
and Topaz. While Hitchcock did do a great deal of preparation for all his films, he
was fully cognisant that the actual film-making process often deviated from the
best-laid plans and was flexible to adapt to the changes and needs of production as
his films were not free from the normal hassles faced and common routines used
during many other film productions.[260][verification needed]

File:Alfred Hitchcock Extended Interview.ogv

Hitchcock interview, around 1966
Krohn's work also sheds light on Hitchcock's practice of generally shooting in
chronological order, which he notes sent many films over budget and over schedule
and, more importantly, differed from the standard operating procedure of Hollywood
in the Studio System Era. Equally important is Hitchcock's tendency to shoot
alternative takes of scenes. This differed from coverage in that the films were not
necessarily shot from varying angles so as to give the editor options to shape the
film how they chose (often under the producer's aegis).[261][failed verification]
Rather they represented Hitchcock's tendency to give himself options in the editing
room, where he would provide advice to his editors after viewing a rough cut of the
work.

According to Krohn, this and a great deal of other information revealed through his
research of Hitchcock's personal papers, script revisions and the like refute the
notion of Hitchcock as a director who was always in control of his films, whose
vision of his films did not change during production, which Krohn notes has
remained the central long-standing myth of Alfred Hitchcock. Both his
fastidiousness and attention to detail also found their way into each film poster
for his films. Hitchcock preferred to work with the best talent of his day—film
poster designers such as Bill Gold[262] and Saul Bass—who would produce posters
that accurately represented his films.[260]

Legacy
Awards and honours
See also: List of awards and nominations received by Alfred Hitchcock

One of Hitchcock's stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Hitchcock was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 8 February 1960 with two
stars: one for television and a second for his motion pictures.[263] In 1978 John
Russell Taylor described him as "the most universally recognizable person in the
world" and "a straightforward middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an
artistic genius".[223] In 2002 MovieMaker named him the most influential director
of all time,[264] and a 2007 The Daily Telegraph critics' poll ranked him Britain's
greatest director. David Gritten, the newspaper's film critic, wrote:
"Unquestionably the greatest filmmaker to emerge from these islands, Hitchcock did
more than any director to shape modern cinema, which would be utterly different
without him. His flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information
(from his characters and from us) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no
one else."[265] In 2002,Hitchcock was ranked 2nd in the critics' top ten poll and
5th in the director's top ten poll in the list of greatest directors of all time
compiled by the Sight & Sound magazine.

An English Heritage blue plaque marks where Hitchcock lived at 153 Cromwell Road,
Kensington, London.
He won two Golden Globes, eight Laurel Awards, and five lifetime achievement
awards, including the first BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award[266] and, in 1979, an
AFI Life Achievement Award.[11] He was nominated five times for an Academy Award
for Best Director. Rebecca, nominated for 11 Oscars, won the Academy Award for Best
Picture of 1940; another Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent, was also nominated
that year.[267] By 2018, eight of his films had been selected for preservation by
the US National Film Registry: Rebecca (1940; inducted 2018), Shadow of a Doubt
(1943; inducted 1991), Notorious (1946; inducted 2006), Rear Window (1954; inducted
1997), Vertigo (1958; inducted 1989), North by Northwest (1959; inducted 1995),
Psycho (1960; inducted 1992), and The Birds (1963; inducted 2016).[9]

In 2012 Hitchcock was selected by artist Sir Peter Blake, author of the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, to appear in a new version of
the cover, along with other British cultural figures, and he was featured that year
in a BBC Radio 4 series, The New Elizabethans, as someone "whose actions during the
reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and
given the age its character".[268] In June 2013 nine restored versions of
Hitchcock's early silent films, including The Pleasure Garden (1925), were shown at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre; known as "The Hitchcock 9", the
travelling tribute was organised by the British Film Institute.[269]

Archives
The Alfred Hitchcock Collection is housed at the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood,
California. It includes home movies, 16mm film shot on the set of Blackmail (1929)
and Frenzy (1972), and the earliest known colour footage of Hitchcock. The Academy
Film Archive has preserved many of his home movies.[270] The Alfred Hitchcock
Papers are housed at the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library.[271] The David O.
Selznick and the Ernest Lehman collections housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center in Austin, Texas, contain material related to Hitchcock's work on
the production of The Paradine Case, Rebecca, Spellbound, North by Northwest and
Family Plot.[272]

Hitchcock portrayals
Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock (2012)
Toby Jones in The Girl (2012)
Roger Ashton-Griffiths in Grace of Monaco (2014)