Difficult pleasures: Writing the life of the world’s most thrilling filmmaker who kept us guessing
Featuring ordinary persons propelled into extraordinary situations, in toxic relationships or mistaken for someone notorious and plunged into danger, the films of Alfred Hitchcock kept the audience forward on their seats in suspense, thrill or horror with their complex but disturbing psychological themes. What inspired him?
As this simple but detailed biography — cum criticism — brings out, he often played a showman and was quite fond of practical jokes but was highly insecure and anxious, paid more attention to visual impact than script or actors, was more keen on commercial success than artistic, while nothing in his life seemed to be as traumatic as the effect he left on his film's viewers.
Ackroyd, a historian, novelist and biographer, whose subjects have included Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Chaplin, doesn't make any pretence to a comprehensive biography, choosing to only focus on Hitchcock's professional life, with personal details and fears only figuring to the extent they concern his films.
It is also not an analysis of his films though the conceptualisation, writing, filming and post-production of many of the major ones come up. So does Hitchcock's relations, usually tempestuous, with top producers in London and Hollywood, with stars like Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly and many others, but especially the back-room film personnel like editors and script-writers.
The story starts right from Lon- don where Hitchcock was born in a middle-class Catholic family in 1899, traces his childhood, schooling and early jobs, until he entered the world of cinema. And how he did is a story of determination, enterprise and diligence — and Ackroyd tells it well.
But the narrative really picks up pace when it begins with a break he got in film direction — and never looked back. It follows his initial days in England, a stint in Germany (where he was most impressed by German Expressionism), the move to Hollywood and making of the cinematic classics that have made him a legend, and the final disappointing and unproductive decade or so of his life and work. IANS