The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

back on his own early years, it might explain the lack of sentimentality with which he put childhood on screen. Cruelty to innocent children is a recurring theme in cinema, as it is in so much other folk and popular culture. When Hitchcock was growing up, in the very earliest days of motion pictures, there was a rash of wildly popular films of babies and toddlers caught candidly by the camera, sometimes in moments of distress. One was When Babies Quarrel, essentially a silent precursor of “Charlie Bit My Finger.” Another was Cry Baby, in which, as an advertisement for the film explains, a “pretty little fat baby boy is seated on a high chair. The expression on his little round face shows that he is expecting something very good to eat. When he finds out he is not going to get it, his expression quickly changes from disappointment to grief. As he cries, he rubs his eyes with chubby hands and the big tears roll down his cheeks. Very realistic.” Hitchcock was plugged into the urge within audiences to see childhood innocence undermined, the crux of every Brothers Grimm tale. The Birds is the stellar example: the elementary school pupils of Bodega Bay being chased through the streets by a murder of demented crows is perhaps cinema’s most famous depiction of children being hurt or terrorized, and one of its most disturbing; the Child Catcher locked his victims away but didn’t attempt to peck out their eyes.

Hitchcock had a history of putting children in harm’s way. In 1934, he made The Man Who Knew Too Much; the Day-Stewart version was a Hollywood remake, also directed by Hitchcock. Both versions revolve around the kidnapping of a child, but only in the original do we see the act of capture, when Hitchcock gives us a close-up of the face of twelve-year-old Betty (Nova Pilbeam), her eyes wide and desperate as a man’s hand smothers her mouth, as bracingly unsettling an image today as it was in 1934. In both films, the children are sucked into the adult world of deceit, betrayal, and violence. But neither is portrayed sentimentally as a vessel of purity and goodness. Indeed, as soon as the opening titles are complete, they create havoc. In the original, Betty causes an accident at a ski-jumping competition, leading to a pile-up of adult bodies on the snow. In the American version, Hank’s transgression is less spectacular, but more shocking. On a crammed bus traveling through Morocco, he accidentally pulls off a Muslim woman’s veil, sparking outrage among the other passengers and instigating his parents’ first encounter with the spy who will tear their lives apart. In every film that features a child in a prominent role, Hitchcock uses them as spinning tops of trouble. They cause complication and insult, spearing adult perspectives, or saying things the grown-ups would rather leave unsaid. One might think of them, per the critic Michael Walker, as Puck to Hitchcock’s Oberon; cheery, free-floating sprites sprinkling chaos into their master’s otherworldly kingdom. In one of the many cameos that Hitchcock made in his own films, he appears in Blackmail (1929) as a passenger on a London Underground train who has his hat yanked down over his eyes by a small boy. Exasperated, Hitchcock flails around but has no idea what to do—he can’t strike the child, and he can’t appeal for the boy to observe an adult sense of decorum—so is left to harrumph, his dignity diminished. More often, though, the nuisance caused by Hitchcock’s children is unintentional, making them more like Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, whose mischief is born of naivete not malice.

Hitchcock admires their pluck, appreciates their potential for comedy, and knows they are naturally sympathetic—yet he’s wary of children’s capacity to scratch off the veneer of our adult, “civilized” selves. In a cameo in Torn Curtain (1966), a grandfatherly Hitchcock holds a baby in the lobby of an elegant hotel as the child appears to urinate on his lap. Considering how Hitchcock worried over the small details of life, and worked hard to remove as much uncertainty as he could from his personal and professional environments, it’s not hard to see how the unpredictability of children might have made him wary of them. Only occasionally did he stray over the line between blowing raspberries at the sanctity of childhood and being cruel or unpleasant. In a 1972 interview with Rex Reed, a film critic who is himself no stranger to saying the supposedly unsayable, the conversation turned to serial killers. “I loved the tapes I heard made by the moors murderers,” Hitchcock said, referring to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who killed five children in Lancashire during the 1960s. “They made tape recordings of children screaming as they were buried alive . . . jolly good stuff.” Aiming to shock the wholesome Walton within us all, on this occasion his mordant joking came off as callous and juvenile.

Thirty-six years earlier, he had been accused of something similar, this time in his film Sabotage (1936, retitled The Woman Alone on its US release) in which a boy of twelve named Stevie is killed by a bomb he is unwittingly carrying on behalf of his sister’s husband, who is, unbeknownst to Stevie, a terrorist. In a trick he wouldn’t try again until Marion Crane got hacked to pieces in the shower a quarter of a century later, Hitchcock bumps off a delicate, sympathetic character shockingly early in the film, and with it goes the very idea of childhood innocence.

Stevie is handed the bomb, disguised as a reel of film, and is told to take it to Piccadilly Tube station before 1:45 p.m.—the time at which the bomb will detonate. He sets off on his fatal errand like a Labrador retrieving a tennis ball, all bouncy eagerness as he works his way through central London. But his innate childishness—blithe, distracted, unpredictable—leads to turmoil. Rather than hurrying straight to his destination as he’s been