Hitchcook (2004)

2.15am, Sunday, Channel 4

“She won’t be nude, she’ll be wearing a shower cap”

The credits for Sacha Gervasi’s fascinating drama reveal that the story is based on Stephen Rebello’s superb and exhaustive 1990 study, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. In truth, it uses that study as a MacGu n to get to the real story: the relationship between the great director (an infamous moulder of screen blondes) and his equally talented wife, Alma, here played by Helen Mirren. While The Girl (2012), co-starring Sienna Miller and Toby Jones, focused on the director’s less than savoury predilections for voyeurism and obsessive control, Hitchcock, as portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in a fat suit, is a more benign, Pooteresque gure. He may have been a genius when it came to creating suspense, but without his wife’s editing skills and ear for dialogue, Hitchcock’s reputation would not have been so assured. Gervasi’s drama is an entertaining yarn which looks at a key moment in the career of the great director. Hitchcock had just enjoyed tremendous success with North By Northwest (1959) but the industry was still concerned he might be getting too old and too comfortable a TV presence to continue to dazzle audiences. Hitch rolled the dice and backed himself (even mortgaging his own home) to turn a controversial, best-selling novel, Psycho, into a movie he hoped would get him back to the top of his profession. That it did, but it was also a moviemaking experience that strained his marriage to the very limits.

Though Hitchcock boasts a strong supporting cast (Scarlett Johansson plays Janet Leigh, Jessica Biel is Vera Miles), the stand-out characters are Hitch and Alma and, as you would expect, the performances of Hopkins and Mirren are top-notch. Kudos, also, to production designer Judy Becker who superbly captures the look and feel of the period.