Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
Hitchcock – the man who brought our nightmares to life on screen
Alfred Hitchcock took scaring cinema audiences to a whole new level in movies like Psycho and The Birds. MARION McMULLEN looks at the world of the film director who was born 120 years ago
THE body count was likely to be high whenever Alfred Hitchcock was on the scene... even when it was his own floating corpse in the River Thames scaring passersby. The realistic replica of the British film director was created for movie thriller Frenzy in 1971 and the cadaver was originally intended to be used for one of the famous cameo appearances Hitchcock traditionally made in his own films.
When that idea was abandoned, the master of suspense simply used his body dummy to film a humorous teaser trailer for the movie.
He also enjoyed scaring onlookers who innocently wandered by the film location by sitting on a bench cradling his own head in his hands.
A watery end did not bother him, indeed he once said: “There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.”
Hitchcock’s cameo in Frenzy saw him as part of a crowd listening to a speaker on the river bank.
The man behind movie classics like Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo, Strangers On A Train and The 39 Steps was born in Essex 120 years ago on August 13, 1899. His father was an East End greengrocer, but Hitchcock’s interest was always movies and he was directing by the time he was in his 20s.
“Luck is everything,” he once pointed out. “My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.”
Hitchcock always dressed smartly in a suit when he was directing and one of his earliest appearances was in a 1927 film about Jack the Ripper called The Lodger.
He recalled: “My appearance called for me to walk up the stairs of the rooming house. Since my walk-ons in subsequent pictures would be equally strenuous – boarding buses, playing chess, etc. I asked for a stunt man. Casting, with an unusual lack of perception, hired this fat man!”
He later caused a stir in soapland in 1964 when he paid a visit to the Rovers Return on ITV’s Coronation Street set and enjoyed a pint.
Hitchcock is credited with directing the first British sound film, Blackmail, in 1929.
The movie, about a young woman who is blackmailed by someone who saw her kill a man in self-defence, was advertised in a trade papers as “100% talkie, 100% entertainment”.
It was originally made as a silent movie, but the success of Al
Jolson’s “talkie” The Jazz Singer in America led to dialogue being added so cinema-goers got to hear one of the movie’s characters coming out with the observation: “A good clean, honest, whack over the ‘ead with a brick is one thing. There’s something British about that. But knives? Nope. Knives is not right.”.
Hitchcock claimed the secret of his success was to “give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
Hollywood star Clint Eastwood said he learned a lot from the film-maker. “Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analysing a lot of things about his pictures, ‘Clint, you must remember, it’s only a movie.”
Hitchcock, who became an American citizen in 1955, was nominated for the best directing Oscar five times, for Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho... but never won.
“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out,” he observed, and in the late 1940s, he looked at filming a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Cary Grant in the title role. The project was scrapped over fears of a possible lawsuit from a professor who had written his own modern version of the Bard’s famous tragedy. Instead, Hitchcock continued to hone his talent for suspense with murder, mistaken identities and plot twists galore.
He went to great lengths to keep the ending of Psycho – starring Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins – a surprise and had lobby cards for cinemas reading: “We won’t allow you to cheat yourself. You must see Psycho from the very beginning. Therefore, do not expected to be admitted into the theatre after the start of each performance of the picture. We say no-one – and we mean no-one – not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)!”
But what used to haunt the nightmares of the master of suspense himself? “I’m frightened of eggs,” he once admitted, “worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes. Have you ever seen anything more revolting that an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid. Blood is jolly, red, but egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it.”