“Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
That quote by Alfred Hitchcock immediately gives people a little insight into his approach to filmmaking, even if they have never seen one of his movies before.
Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense, a title he clings to even now, more than half a century after his best works came out. His greatest movies are masterpieces that perfectly blend thrills, mystery, and romance to create a timeless viewing experience. There aren’t many classic directors whose filmography is still so well-regarded and popular in modern times, so today we are taking a look at the stunning career and the troublesome personal life of Alfred Hitchcock.
Early Years
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in London’s Leytonstone district, the youngest of three children of William Hitchcock and Emma Jane Whelan. His father worked as a greengrocer, like his father before him, and both his parents were devout Catholics who enforced a strict upbringing.
Later in life, Hitchcock, or Hitch as his friends called him, remembered his childhood as lonely and sheltered, not really having any mates growing up. He partly attributed this to his obesity, which he blamed on his mother who used food as a remedy for most problems. Meanwhile, Alfred’s father was a disciplinarian, and one story that Hitchcock recounted multiple times as an adult was one occasion when he was five years old and his father sent him down to the local police station with a note asking the sergeant on duty to lock young Alfred in a jail cell for a few minutes to show him what happened to naughty boys. This sort of worked…in a way, depending on what his father’s end goal was. Hitchcock developed a severe fear of having anything to do with the law and, as an adult, he wouldn’t even drive a car because he was terrified of getting a ticket.
The same strict education continued at school as Hitchcock attended St Ignatius College, a Jesuit secondary school in Stamford Hill where corporal punishment was the norm whenever the pupils acted out of line. Afterward, Hitchcock enrolled in night classes at a technical school where he studied engineering and navigation. His father died in 1914 and, with his older siblings out of the house, Alfred had to get a day job during this time to support himself and his mother.
He found one with the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company as a technical clerk. He was too young to join World War I and, when he came of age in 1917, he received a C3 classification, a low grade of fitness, and was excused from military service, instead enlisting in a volunteer group of the Royal Engineers.
Although, initially, Hitchcock displayed an interest in engineering, as the years went on, he quickly developed his artistic side, finding a talent for drawing as he became a draftsman who made technical plans and sketches. He continued his night studies, this time focusing on illustrations and graphic design, and this kind of dedication did not go unnoticed at his workplace. Hitchcock was promoted to Henley’s advertising department where he served as a jack-of-all-trades – he wrote and edited copy for the company’s newspaper and magazine advertisements, he arranged their layout, and he drew the graphic illustrations. He further expanded his artistic range by writing short stories and articles and drawing caricatures for the company’s new in-house magazine, The Henley, which started publishing in June 1919.
If he wanted to, Hitchcock could probably have had a nice, long career at Henley. He loved the job and the company made it pretty clear that he was a valued employee. But still, he chafed. The more he leaned into his artistic side, the more he wanted it to become his full-time job. He developed a strong passion for that exciting new art form called moviemaking and would spend many evenings down at his local theater, then back home where he would read all the latest trade magazines.
Then, in 1920, he saw an announcement that would change his life forever. Famous Players-Lasky, the American movie company that later became Paramount Pictures, was going to open a new studio in London. That was his golden ticket, thought Hitchcock, so that same year, he abandoned his safe, cushy job at Henley’s and embarked on the path to become a moviemaker.
Silent Hitch
The first movie that Famous-Players Lasky was supposed to film in London was called The Sorrows of Satan based on the Marie Corelli novel. So Hitchcock went home and drew a bunch of sketches that could be used for the title cards during the movie. This being the silent era, title cards were a pretty important part of the film and were often suggestive of the plot and intricately decorated. Afterward, Hitch went by the studio and just started showing them to people, hoping that someone liked them enough to give him a job. Just one problem, though – the studio had changed its mind and wasn’t making that film anymore. Instead, it was going to make a different movie titled The Great Day. Undaunted, Hitchcock went back home and did the same thing again, this time coming up with a bunch of sketches that were a bit more uplifting and inspiring and a little lighter on the fire and brimstone. The next day, he was back at the studio and, this time, his efforts paid off. The execs liked his work and his tenacity and hired the 20-year-old Hitchcock as a title card designer.
Over the next few years, Hitchcock worked on all the movies that Famous Players-Lasky shot in London, most of them now lost. From title card designer, he got promoted to art director, although he also dabbled in scriptwriting and set design. There were no unions back then, so anyone could pretty much do anything. Then, in 1922, came his big break – Hitchcock was asked to direct his first movie. At least, it was supposed to be his big break. Quite fitting for the Master of Suspense, Hitchcock’s first movie is shrouded in a cloud of mystery as not even its name is quite certain. Hitchcock called it Number Thirteen, although, in the studio records, it’s listed as Mrs. Peabody.
The movie was never finished and whatever bits were filmed are lost forever. The Hollywood studio’s British excursion had been a financial failure and it closed down its London offices while Hitchcock was still filming his directorial debut. As a small consolation prize, Hitchcock did get a chance the following year to finish directing an independent British production titled Always Tell Your Wife after the original director left. As a bigger consolation prize, Hitchcock’s skills, experience, and talent were good enough that he immediately found work with a trio of British producers who were trying to get a new film company off the ground and made him the head of their title department.
Like before, Hitchcock did a little bit of everything. He wrote a screenplay for a movie titled Woman to Woman, and the execs liked it so much that they also appointed Hitchcock as the art director and the assistant director for the picture. More importantly, this was the movie where Hitch met and fell in love with an editor named Alma Reville. They married in 1926 and stayed married until he died in 1980. The couple had one daughter named Patricia together, who had a few small roles in some of her father’s movies.
To top it all off, Woman to Woman was a success and helped found Gainsborough Pictures. Hitchcock’s status in the company grew steadily over the next couple of years, even traveling to Germany to work on a few movies there and gain some extra experience. Then, in 1925, Hitchcock had the opportunity to direct again – a British-German silent drama titled The Pleasure Garden. This was his true directorial debut, and the movie was received well enough that Alfred Hitchcock was already being hailed as one of Britain’s promising young directors.
Unsurprisingly, he got more directing gigs after that. He still worked as a co-writer on many of his screenplays, but the title-designing and art direction were left to someone else. The 1927 movie The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog gave the world its first taste of the thrills and suspense that Alfred Hitchcock was capable of. It told the tale of a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who preyed on young blondes at night. It featured a landlady who suspected her lodger of being the murderer, although he turned out to be innocent. Originally, Hitchcock would have preferred it if the lodger’s guilt was left ambiguous, but since he was played by Ivor Novello, Gainsborough’s biggest matinee idol, the studio wanted it made clear that their star was not a villain. Hitchcock would run into the same problem a decade-and-a-half later, in Hollywood, with Cary Grant in Suspicion. Despite this minor setback, The Lodger was still a hit and it featured many elements that would come to define Hitchcock as a filmmaker, including his very first cameo as an extra in the background.
The next few years represented a series of highs and lows for the director. There were bright spots such as The Ring, considered one of Hitchcock’s best silent movies, and there were a few stinkers such as Champagne and The Farmer’s Wife. His 1929 movie Blackmail is sometimes heralded as the first British talkie. While this isn’t quite true – there was a poorly made, unsuccessful short called The Clue of the New Pin before it, Blackmail was the movie that showed the British public that the sound era had arrived.
English Talkies
During the early 1930s, Hitchcock followed the success of Blackmail with a series of films that weren’t quite memorable. Feeling the need for a change, the director moved to a new studio and signed a contract with Gaumont-British in 1933.
Immediately, this new pairing led to success. Hitch’s first movie at Gaumont was The Man Who Knew Too Much starring Peter Lorre, not to be confused with the movie of the same name Hitchcock made two decades later starring James Stewart and Doris Day. His second effort was even better – a screen adaptation of John Buchan’s spy thriller novel The 39 Steps. Many fans and critics would argue that this was not only the first true Hitchcock classic, but also his best film made in Britain.
We cannot get around the fact that, although Alfred Hitchcock the director was brilliant, Alfred Hitchcock the person was a bit of an a-hole, to put it mildly. His behavior toward the people around him could range from mild-mannered japery to bullying to downright sadistic abuse. We’ll get to his conduct toward some of his blonde female stars, particularly Tippi Hedren, a bit later, but for now, let’s focus on the tricks he liked to play on people.
Hitchcock had developed a reputation as a prankster, both on set and in his private life. Some of these were harmless, like putting whoopee cushions on people’s chairs or loudly telling an interesting anecdote in a busy elevator and then leaving right before the punchline. Some of his antics straddled the border between unacceptable behavior and “Oh, go on, then.” Like throwing a dinner party where all the food had been colored blue, or sending a live horse to the dressing room of actor Sir Gerald du Maurier.
But some of the stuff Hitchcock did was abuse, plain and simple. He was particularly cruel if he knew you suffered from some kind of phobia. You could almost guarantee that he would work it into some sort of prank, which was pretty rich coming from a guy with ovophobia aka a fear of eggs.
The meanest trick Hitchcock ever played on someone was on a crew member who bet the director a week’s salary that he would not be afraid to spend a night alone in a dark studio, chained to a camera. At the end of the day, the handcuffs went on and Hitchcock left with the key, but not before gifting the man a nice bottle of brandy to keep him busy through the night. What the crew member did not know was that Hitchcock had laced the drink with the strongest laxative he could find, which led to predictable results since the other man could not move from his standing spot. The following morning, the rest of the crew came in and stumbled upon a completely humiliated and agonizing man who had crap himself, violently and repeatedly, throughout the night. As a slight consolation prize, he did win the bet.
Back to the movies, the second half of the decade saw Hitchcock make five more films – some of them were good, some of them were a bit “meh.” Sabotage and The Lady Vanishes are both regarded as some of Hitch’s best work in Britain, but his final film in the UK for the time being, a 1939 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, was met with a tepid reception.
Then, as a new decade dawned, so did a giant leap forward for the career of Alfred Hitchcock, as Hollywood came calling.
Early Hollywood
In 1939, Hitchcock was lured by the glitz and glamour of Hollywood (plus a big, fat check) and moved to Los Angeles where he signed a contract with big-shot producer David O. Selznick, who just a few years prior left MGM and started his own independent studio, Selznick International Pictures. It wasn’t around for long, but long enough to make Gone with the Wind and firmly establish Selznick as one of the most important men in Hollywood.
Curiously, even though Hitch’s previous film, Jamaica Inn, didn’t exactly set the cinematic world on fire, for his first Hollywood project, the director chose another adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel. This time it was Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, and it received a much better reception, to put it mildly. It was nominated for 11 Oscars that year, including Hitchcock’s first of five nominations for Best Director. Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture, the only Hitchcock film to do so.
His follow-up efforts were pretty good but unlikely to be included in Hitchcock’s highlight reel anytime soon – the spy thriller Foreign Correspondent and the comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But Hitchcock had another problem because Selznick simply didn’t have that much work for him to do. His studio was still small, comparatively, and only made a few films each year, so the producer loaned Hitchcock to other companies such as RKO Pictures and 20th Century Fox.
It was at RKO that the director made his next big hit – Suspicion, reuniting him with Joan Fontaine and representing the first of four collaborations with Cary Grant. As we mentioned earlier, this was a rare occasion where Grant played a sinister character, but the studio was adamant that he could not be the murderer, even though that was the case in the book the movie was based on.
Despite occasionally butting heads with studio execs, the 1940s were a successful and productive decade for Hitchcock. Not a lot of stinkers on his resume. Under Capricorn was probably his worst movie that decade, and The Paradine Case received mixed reviews, as well, but other than that, his filmography is looking pretty solid. In 1942, Hitch made the spy thriller Saboteur, which was followed by the classic Shadow of a Doubt in 1943. Fun fact – this was Hitchcock’s personal favorite and, according to his daughter, this was because the director loved the idea of taking a quiet, small town and injecting it with menace.
His next two movies were Lifeboat and Spellbound. Although, nowadays, they don’t immediately spring to mind when you think of Hitchcock, they both garnered him two more Oscar nominations for Best Director. They also featured interesting collaborations for the master of suspense. Lifeboat was based on a story written by John Steinbeck specifically for the movie, while Spellbound included a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali.
In 1947, Hitchcock’s contract with Selznick ended and he founded his own independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, to have more control over his projects. Before that, though, he ended his contract with a bang – the 1946 spy film noir Notorious, starring two of Hitchcock’s favorite actors, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. Again, it was another Hitchcock classic, although Selznick didn’t see it that way. First, he wanted to replace Grant with Joseph Cotten because he was cheaper. Then, he didn’t like the idea of a plot involving a uranium bomb because he thought it sounded like science fiction. This was just a few months before America dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ultimately, Selznick became so uninterested that he sold the whole production package (script, director, actors, and all) to RKO Pictures out of nowhere.
Hitchcock did not have a very good time with Transatlantic Pictures. In fact, many would argue it was the nadir of his career. The production company only lasted for a few years and it made a handful of movies that didn’t open to the kind of critical or commercial reception that was up to Hitch’s reputation. We should mention that two of those movies have received a more complimentary modern reassessment and are now regarded as underrated Hitchcock classics. One of them was Strangers on a Train, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, and the other was Rope, Hitchcock’s first collaboration with James Stewart, and also his first color film.
Hitch might’ve had a few missteps at Transatlantic, but, ultimately, that didn’t matter, because he was about to enter the absolute peak of his career that solidified Alfred Hitchcock as one of the greatest filmmakers in history.
Peak Hitch
Hitchcock kicked off his cinematographic zenith with his Grace Kelly trilogy – three movies starring the future Princess of Monaco: Dial M for Murder, To Catch a Thief, and last, but certainly not least, Rear Window. All of them great films, especially the last one which is frequently ranked as one of the best movies ever made.
Around the same time, the director produced and hosted a television anthology series dubbed Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was a big hit that went on for ten years and over 360 episodes, but it also turned Hitchcock himself into a celebrity. Normally, most people just saw directors as names on a screen at the start of a movie, but with his rotund physique, British accent, and dry delivery, Hitchcock became a memorable household figure.
The director followed up Rear Window with three more good, but not-great movies: The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Wrong Man. They still made for entertaining viewing, but had the misfortune of being sandwiched between Hitchcock’s Grace Kelly trio and a new trilogy that might genuinely represent the best career performance of any filmmaker…ever.
1958, 1959, and 1960 – three years, three movies. And those movies were Vertigo, North by Northwest, and freakin’ Psycho. How can you top that? Do we even have to go into detail about them or start listing off their countless accolades and awards? Should we mention how all three films are considered among the best ever made, how Psycho ushered in modern horror, or how Vertigo was named in a Sight & Sound poll by critics and filmmakers as the greatest movie in history? It’s been over half a century since they came out and they still hold up as masterpieces of cinema.
Obviously, once you reach the top, there’s nowhere to go but down, although, admittedly, it was a gentle slope for Hitch. His next movie was The Birds, which was not well-received when it came out, but its standing has improved with time, as with most of Hitchcock’s work. The most disturbing aspect of that production was the director’s obsessive relationship with its leading lady, Tippi Hedren, which continued in their next film together, Marnie. After Hitchcock’s death, she accused him of being cruel and abusive to her on set and sexually assaulting her in private. When she rebuffed his advances, he threatened to ruin her career. It’s undoubtedly a dark chapter in Hitchcock’s life that often spurs on that age-old debate of whether or not you should separate the art from the artist.
Back to the art, Hitchcock was entering the twilight of his career. He had been a prolific director, shooting, on average, one film a year since 1925. However, he was getting old and he had never been at exactly the peak of good health. However, his wife Alma was in even worse condition, having been left partially paralyzed following two strokes and Hitchcock didn’t want to leave her for extended periods of time. Between 1966 and 1976, he only made four films: Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot. Most reviews were mixed, with the occasional praise, especially for Frenzy which Hitchcock got to film back in his native London.
In his later years, the director’s health seriously declined, but he got to enjoy one last honor before passing away. In January 1980, he was given a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth, although he was too ill to travel to England to receive it. Hitchcock died a few months later, on April 29, aged 80, leaving behind a tricky legacy to define. If you look at it solely based on his filmography, then you are undoubtedly looking at one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. However, if you take Alfred Hitchcock the person into account and remember all the stories of abuse on and off set, then Hitchcock becomes a flawed, even sadistic figure who was really, really good when he sat in the director’s chair and pretty terrible when he was out of it.
