Few are the girls who never dreamed of becoming an actress, a movie star, a Hollywood icon. Even fewer are the girls who never swooned over a hot movie star. Whether we like it or not, Hollywood is still the film-making capital of the world, and if you look at many of today’s starlets you would believe that all it takes is a nice face and a lot of well-placed silicone. However, Hollywood became the stuff of dreams decades ago when the movie stars were larger than life. This series is about the Golden Era of Hollywood and the legends on whose blood, sweat and talent the success of the modern film industry was built upon.
With a film career spanning six decades, director Alfred Hitchcock is widely considered the father of two of today’s most appreciated movie genres - thriller and horror, some of the themes he first employed in his masterpieces forming the basis of many modern productions.
Born in England in 1899, Hitchcock grew up as a lonely child, partly due to his obesity, but also because of his strict Catholic parents. His father once sent him to the police station with a note asking that the boy be locked up for ten minutes as punishment for misbehavior. His mother made him stand for hours at the foot of his bed also as punishment. At the age of 11, he was sent to a Jesuit school where priests used rubber canes to instill discipline and the boys spent most days dreading the corporal punishment which would undoubtedly follow at the end of the classes. Hitchcock later said it was there he learned about fear. Critics consider such motifs as the domineering mother, people being wrongfully accused or mistreated for no reason, which are recurrent in his movies, stem from his childhood frustrations.
Alfred Hitchcock’s first contact with the film industry came in 1919 when he began working as a title-card designer for silent movies. His first assignment was for a horror movie (quite awful, apparently) called ‘The Sorrows of Satan’. The job wasn’t much, but it offered the chance of getting hands-on experience in movie-making and in just a few years, Hitchcock is trusted with directing movies. After a couple of flops, in 1927, Hitchcock releases his first thriller ’The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog’, a silent movie telling the story of a man wrongly accused of being the famous London killer Jack The Ripper.
While working on his earliest movies, he met a script-girl Alma Reville, whom he married in 1926. She became his most trusted assistant and collaborator throughout his life.
Hitchcock made history by directing the first British ‘talkie’, ’Blackmail’ (1929), whose action revolves around the British Museum, the first of his movies to use famous landmarks as background. Still in this early British part of his career he directed ’The 39 Steps’(1935), a spy thriller which made him famous in the US, paving his way for a Hollywood contract. The film uses what will become one of Hitchcock trademark motifs, that of the innocent man getting involved in a dangerous plot and being forced on the run. The film also introduces the iconic ‘Hitchcock blonde’, ice-cold, elegant and hard to get, portrayed by Madeleine Carroll. Later on, movie stars like Ingrid Bergman or Kim Novak will embody this recurrent character type.
This fragment of a 1938 ‘New York Times’ article described the fame Hitchcock enjoyed even before making his greatest movies.
"Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Carta, Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world."
One year later, Alfred Hitchcock moves to Hollywood and starts delivering one masterpiece after the other.
’Rebecca’ (1940), based on the Daphne du Maurier best-seller and starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, was a triumph, earning an Academy Award as Best Picture.The gothic tale revolves around the twisted story of Rebecca, which however is dead and does not appear in the movie not even in a flash-back. The viewer learns her story through the eyes of the movie’s naive leading lady, who lives in awe of her husband’s first wife. While in the book, Max De Winter shoots his adulterous wife, in Hitchcock’s version her death is an accident, he just pushes her and she hits her head. The reason behind this alteration was that Laurence Olivier was one of the studio’s main assets and his reputation could not be tarnished by playing a murderer. The same thing happened in Hitchcock’s next film, ’Suspicion’ in which he was not allowed to have Cary Grant be a killer, so the movie gets an ambiguous ending, leaving the viewer wondering whether he poisoned his wife or not.
One of Hitchcock’s famous cameo appearances, here with Cary Grant in ‘To Catch a Thief’
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’Spellbound’(1945) explores psychoanalysis and famously features a dream-sequence created by Salvador Dali. The dream, essential for solving the male protagonist’s mystery, is full of “psychoanalytic symbols – eyes, curtains, scissors, playing cards (some of them blank), a man with no face, a man falling off a building, a man hiding behind a chimney and dropping a wheel, and being pursued by large wings.”
Almost all of Hitchcock’s films during the 1950s are now considered classical suspense movies, but his most acclaimed film is the 1960 masterpiece ‘Psycho’, which had such a tremendous success it became a franchise with several sequels and a 1998 remake.
Anthony Perkins as crazy Norman Bates
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Loosely based on the story of Ed Gein, a Wisconsin killer and grave robber, Hitchcock’s protagonist Norman Bates is a solitary murderer, obsessed with his deceased domineering mother, having a room turned into a grotesque shrine to her. And then, of course, there’s the famous shower scene, Bates holding a knife in front of the curtain behind which the female protagonist is washing, the psychopath’s sudden appearance being as shocking today as is was to cinema-goers sixty years ago.
No article about Hitchcock could be complete without a mention of ’The Birds’, his 1963 block-buster. ‘The Birds’ is an excellent example of Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense building. The movie begins with a young woman carrying a cage with two innocent lovebirds. Over the course of the day, more and more black birds appear around town. If at first they appear to be simply watching, soon enough there’s an attack, then antoher, until the finale where the house is surrounded by furious killer birds. The movie was quite challenging from a technical point of view, for at that time special effects were not what they are today. Hitchcock did not have access to computer generated birds, so the scenes were filmed using mechanical birds as well as real ones. At one point, filming was suspended as leading lady Tippy Hedren become overwhelmed by the birds that were literally thrown at her and she sustained a cut of her eyelid. Over the years, there have been dozens of movies using the unexplained animal attack motif, featuring bees, rodents or wild beasts instead of birds.However, none of these can even compare with the Hitchcock original.
After more than 50 feature films, countless awards and a knighthood, Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980 at his home in California.
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References: Famous Biographies - Alfred Hitchcock, Wikipedia.
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