The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

the 1960s when he stormed out of a projection room when a film that had been recommended to him featured an unexpected scene of animal cruelty, something he considered beyond the pale. Many of those who worked with him testified that his aversion to conflict was so great that he would go to remarkable lengths to avoid “causing a scene,” a horror that could be added to his index of phobias. He told, with pride it seems, the story of how he responded when Ingrid Bergman lost her temper during the complex filming of Under Capricorn (1949): “I did what I always do when people start to argue. I just turned away and went home.” Such tales were intended to evince his imperturbability; he told anyone who would listen—usually journalists—that he never lost his temper because he had no temper to lose. It wasn’t true. Hitchcock’s capacity for anger made itself apparent on any number of occasions, though it was generally stifled with fits of sulking and brooding. Flouncing away from arguments wasn’t a sign of an even temper, but an inability to deal with complex emotions, whether his or other people’s, that manifested itself throughout his life.

Frequently he claimed that he would love to make films that weren’t edged in suspense and tethered by corpses, but his audience wouldn’t allow it. He couldn’t make a film of Cinderella, he said, because “people will immediately start looking for the corpse.” Yet the notion that violence and murder were purely the by-product of his nine-to-five day as a filmmaker, no different to him than coal to a coal miner, is clearly untrue. Naturally, he had no designs on being a serial killer himself, but Hitchcock had a lifelong fascination with cruelty and violence that fueled his creativity.

Most of his understanding of violent crime, as with so much else in his life, came from reading, fantasizing, and silent observation. “I’ve spent so much of my life fascinated by crime and the administration of justice,” he said in 1977. By fourteen, he was reading G. K. Chesterton and John Buchan, the cream of British crime writing, as well as “all the real-life crime stories I could get hold of.” Over the years, he built something of a crime library and developed an in-depth knowledge of several notorious serial killers; he gave copies of relevant books to a number of his writers for inspiration, and to leading men when preparing to play murderers in his films. As a young man, he was also a frequent visitor to the public gallery of the Old Bailey, an extension of his innumerable trips to the theater and the cinema. “I would have liked to have been a criminal lawyer,” he said. “Think of the opportunity I would have had to be a great man in court.”

Several of his films feature characters who share his armchair enthusiasm for true-crime tales, and who, like Hitchcock, enjoy murder as escapist fantasy. In Suspicion (1941), there’s Isobel, a bluff crime novelist who talks Cary Grant through the execution of the perfect murder; in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Herb and Joe unwind at the end of the day with amiable chats about poisoning and bludgeoning, as others might talk about baseball or celebrity gossip. Hitchcock made a joke about the link between fictional murders and the inner desires of their creators in “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret,” an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in which a sunny, suburban writer of murder mysteries expresses her thoughts about her latest victim: “Poor woman. Such a shame I had to kill her off that way. A psychiatrist would probably say I had some hidden homicidal tendencies. . . . Who knows, if I didn’t get it off my chest by writing mystery stories I might end up committing a few murders myself.”

Rather than expressing anything particular to his own psychology, Hitchcock tended to frame his interest in murder as an inevitable expression of his cultural heritage. As he explained in his conversation with Dr. Wertham, “Many great English literary figures have always interested themselves in crime. . . . The whole thing is examined on a very high plane. Now, this is indigenous, it seems to me, to the English.” He believed there to be a “crime mystique in England, and it rubs off on everyone,” evidenced by the ubiquity of violence in the English popular culture of his youth. As a boy he likely would have been exposed to the penny dreadfuls and half-penny periodicals, which conveyed gruesome stories of supposed real-life murder and malice to a readership of adolescent boys and young men.

The war brought devastating violence right up to Hitchcock’s front step. Immediately after, there was a nationwide panic, nurtured by the popular press, about an apparent surge in everyday violence. “Much perturbation appears to have been caused among the public by the wave of crime which is reported to be sweeping over the country at the present time,” ran one story in the Guardian in January 1920, which referred to “a series of particularly cruel and ghastly murders and violent robberies which have occurred during the last few weeks.” This was the world in which Hitchcock began his movie career. Indeed, he claimed to have a personal link to Edith Thompson, one of Britain’s most notorious murderers of the 1920s, from whose father he had taken dancing lessons. Thompson was executed in 1923 for manipulating her lover into murdering her husband, the type of strange, complex tale that absorbed Hitchcock. Her case received saturation news coverage at the time, though today her conviction is regarded as an outrageous miscarriage of justice.

Hitchcock as victim and murderer, 1955.

Hitchcock believed that not only were the English—whom he often conflated with the British—powerfully drawn to murder, the nature of English violence was a locus of national identity and experience. The first talkie he made, Blackmail, features a memorable scene in which a family discusses news of a stabbing. One character