There’s no way Hitchcock couldn’t have been shaken by the onslaught of total war on his doorstep. A historian of the conflict has written that “Londoners almost without exception were caught up body and soul in its maw. The war utterly dominated the city’s life. It changed everything.” Most damaging was not the physical destruction, but four years of “relentless disruption and accumulating strain, built up night after night,” the very type of tortuous suspense and grinding anxiety that was the adult Hitchcock’s stock in trade.
To interviewers, including Taylor, Hitchcock gave the impression that the war “did not impinge much on him” and that he was relatively unaffected by his father’s death. This seems unlikely, especially for someone of Hitchcock’s nervous disposition. The Hitchcock household had several narrow escapes, though Hitchcock recounted such incidents for laughs. Downplaying what must have been an utterly terrifying experience, he recalled coming back home one day in the aftermath of nearby bombing and artillery fire, to find his mother in a state of sheer panic in her bedroom, desperately throwing on her clothes over her nightgown. He reprised that memory as a comedy scene in the film Murder! of 1930, in which a woman attempts to dress hurriedly as word ripples down the street that a neighbor has been killed and the police are on the scene. The Birds also can be viewed as Hitchcock reliving the terror of the air raids: the indiscriminate targeting of children at school and at play; the Brenners recoiling in their home as the assault rains down; the groundbreaking aerial shot of the birds hovering high above the fiery carnage they have caused in the town below; Melanie, in Hitchcock’s early draft, crying out for the comfort and protection of a parent who has abandoned her.
It’s impossible to think that a man so beholden to anxiety wasn’t deeply affected by the events of 1914 to 1918, entering the adult world as he lost his father and as his city was ravaged by an entirely new, utterly terrifying mode of warfare. The lasting impact that Mary Rose had on him, with its themes of dislocating death and youthful innocence shattered by inexplicable tragedy, suggests as much. It is surely more than coincidence that in 1964 he pressed ahead with his plans for adapting the play into a movie, immediately having finished a trio of films in which he had engaged with repressed childhood trauma. When viewed in this light, it makes sense that he swerved the topic of his war years, and instead repeatedly talked about his five minutes in a police cell as the source of his internal anguish. For a man who chose never to look too far inside himself, and who valued his “tidy mind,” diverting his feelings of abandonment and arbitrary injustice into other, neater tales would have been eminently sensible—especially when those stories were so visually arresting, tailor-made for his public image as the master of suspense.
Childhood evoked strongly mixed emotions in Hitchcock. It was a confounding place of fear, insecurity, at times isolation, a place of the occluded and the unresolved. Simultaneously, it was the fount of his creativity, a time of play, excitement, novelty, and discovery. Children had uninhibited potential but were vulnerable and unpredictable, a cause of joy and anxiety. The duality was expressed in his telling of the prison-cell incident, in which he suggested he’d been punished for embarking on an intrepid adventure, following the nearby tram tracks to wherever they might lead. The legacies of those experiences never left him. As a man of sixty-three, he recorded an eleven-minute message from Stage 18 at Universal City in Los Angeles, for the benefit of a tiny film society in Westcliff, an Essex seaside resort he remembered from vacations as a boy. His decision to take time out of a crammed schedule to perform this act of kindness was “inspired by a touch of nostalgia,” he explained with his customary blank expression. He reminisced about his youth, a time simultaneously close and distant, though he discouraged any attempt to work out just how long ago it had been. “Please don’t speculate,” he deadpanned; “I’m younger than I look.”
2
THE MURDERER
A desperate, wretched love has pulled the girl into the water. From the shore, it looks as though she’s making a threat on her own life, hoping that the man who spurned her will rush in, save her, and promise never to leave. For a moment, it seems her wish is granted. Seeing him wade out toward her, she beams and flings out her arms in expectation of a tender embrace. Then comes the violent twist. Holding her by the back of the head, his hands find their awful strength and push the girl under, until nothing but her hair and the fabric of her skirt move beneath the surface.
It was the summer of 1925, and Alfred Hitchcock had just committed his first murder, in his debut feature film, The Pleasure Garden, a melodrama about the love lives of two London showgirls. After beginning his full-time post at Famous Players-Lasky British in the spring of 1921, things happened fast for Hitchcock. He established himself at the company, which was based at Islington Studios in north London, and he used his spare time to draft outlines for his own scripts. There was an aborted attempt to make a film—Number Thirteen or Mrs. Peabody—with money scraped together from family, and he codirected a comedy short called Always Tell Your Wife when the intended director fell ill. At the studios, he also met Alma Reville, a young editor, who would eventually become his wife and chief collaborator.
When Famous Players-Lasky British folded, Hitchcock fell in with a group of young filmmakers at Islington, led by the producer Michael Balcon, who was impressed by the boy’s “passion for films and his eagerness to
