Alfred Hitchcock: Dickens of cinematic storytelling

A new biography of Alfred Hitchcock focuses on the director’s creative drive.

Alfred Hitchcock

Shelves of serious biographies have been written on Alfred Hitchcock, but perhaps none as pleasurable as Peter Ackroyd’s, with its flowing prose and insightful appreciation of the director’s screen storytelling. While recent scholarship and two somewhat cheesy biopics have focused on Hitchcock’s voyeuristic and sadistic relations with his leading blondes, including Tippi Hedren of The Birds and Janet Leigh of Psycho, Ackroyd takes a less simplistic and sensational point of view. This new biography is keen to show the man in full (all 133kg), but Ackroyd’s main fascination is with the dark stirrings of the creative imagination and his Stakhan­ovite work ethic.

Coming from gay, literary London — and having written biographies of Londoners such as Charles Dickens and JMW Turner — Ackroyd immerses himself in Hitchcock’s east London roots. From the first paragraph on the director’s birthplace in 1899, we feel the connection: “Leytonstone was a soft forgetful suburb, sweltering in summer and sullen in winter. It was marked by a sense of vac­ancy.” Somehow, because this is loaded Hitchcock territory, that word “vacancy” recalls the neon sign of the Bates Motel, in the middle of nowhere.

We soon have a sense of Hitchcock’s dull but oddly terrifying world as the son of a greengrocer, always fearing the police (as a child, after he had committed a minor misdemeanour, his father conspired with a local policeman to have him locked up in a cell for a few minutes), his Jesuit teachers, physical punishment and the shadows of the city. “He had a horror of life which could only be assuaged by his imagination,” Ackroyd notes.

As for Hitchcock’s self-description as “celibate” (he married fellow British filmmaker Alma Reville and had one child, Patricia), Ackroyd points out that Hitchcock once said that if he had not met Alma he might have become a “poof”, and he also wrote in a letter to Joan Crawford about “my very rare homosexual moments” when leafing through Vogue. His obsessive interest in his leading ladies’ wardrobes, either shopping with them in Bergdorf Goodman, or bringing in designer Edith Head, showed good taste and a delicate sensibility. For his wife Alma, who favoured mannish trouser suits, he ordered bespoke tailoring from Austin Reed.

Ackroyd’s assertion that it would be “an interesting parlour game to name any of his principal characters who were not intim­ated to be bisexual”, is a bit of an exaggeration, but look at Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho, James Stewart as the handsome, impotent observer in Rear Window and even Ivor Novello, who was homosexual, playing the suspected ladykiller in The Lodger.

Those once-unmentionable undercurrents fascinated and discombobulated audiences of Hitchcock’s thrillers, whether they knew it or not. Like the “fat boy” in The Pickwick Papers, whose motto was “I wants to make your flesh creep”, his horror always had a comic twist. Indeed, Ackroyd believes that Hitchcock bears a strong resemblance to that other London visionary, Dickens: “They were both fantasists who insisted upon meticulous detail in the unravelling of plots; they were both poised between art and commerce, with a keen taste for making money. They were also great showmen in front of their respective audiences.”

The book explores the scaffolding underpinning more than 50 films that Hitchcock directed, sometimes two a year. Ackroyd details the scripts and novels behind each movie. Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho was adapted by Jos­eph Stefano, who claimed that Hitchcock was mostly uninterested in characters or motivation, and all he cared about was how the story played on screen, often detailed in hundreds of ­storyboards. He seemed to have a cinema inside his head.

The creation of North by Northwest came from a series of surreal, dreamlike images suggested by Hitchcock: the chase across the presidential faces of Mount Rushmore, the attack in the cornfield, the meeting of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint on the train. Writer Ernest Lehman was put to work to join the dots, making the sensible suggestion that it was unlikely a villain could cause a tornado (Hitchcock’s original idea) to attack a man in the middle of nowhere, and that a crop-dusting plane might be better.

Ackroyd understands that while words matter, Hitchcock’s genius lies in the “golden rhetorical prose of the camera”. The section on the director’s silent films, his fascination with European and Russian movies, and learning the art form at the feet of FW Murnau in Germany, explains much about Hitchcock’s style: the montages, the cuts, and the camera moving as fluidly as a character.

His leaning towards the macabre is less easy to explain, although an early acquaintance with the work of Edgar Allan Poe may have helped.

It took Francois Truffaut, whose interviews with his fellow director are often drawn on here, to sum it up, saying that Hitchcock filmed scenes of murder as if they were love scenes, and scenes of love as if they were murder.

Hitchcock was never one to give credit where credit was due, other than to himself — his writers, cinematographers and set designers were rarely lauded — while his “Master of Suspense” brand and TV series made him a public figure, his baggy silhouette instantly recognisable.

His actors, however, were lucky to be given the silent treatment. Rather as Woody Allen does now, he left them to get on with it, and “do nothing” was often his best advice. They, however, complained that he had once said that “actors are cattle”.

While many of his leading ladies from Grace Kelly to Marlene Dietrich could stand up for themselves, even as Hitchcock tried to make them uneasy to further verisimilitude on screen, first-time actresses such as Hedren found themselves victims of Hitchcock’s obsession and control. His half-joking appreciation of the words of playwright Victorien Sardou — “Torture the women!” — made for brilliantly unsettling cinema and very unhappy actresses.

This book is for the general reader, not the Hitchcock aficionado, who could turn to The Dark Side of Genius by Donald Spoto (1999) or Patrick McGilligan’s 864-page Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (2003). Ackroyd’s shorter effort is more of an audience-pleaser and thus would be appreciated by Hitchcock, who once said: “I don’t make pictures to please me. I make them to please audiences. It all comes to this: how do you apply glue to the seats?”

The Times

Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd is published by Chatto & Windus.