The scene is not among those that have burned themselves on the cultural retina, but it is crystallized Hitchcock, a devastatingly constructed moment of slow-building suspense of the sort that provides a direct link from Hitchcock films of eighty years ago to Hollywood blockbusters of today. Reviews in Britain made a great deal of the bomb sequence. There were those who viewed it through a Hitchcockian lens and praised the director for having the guts to shake us up with something genuinely beastly. “The bomb is exceedingly ‘bombish,’ ” wrote one critic of the scene of Stevie on the bus, and all the characters “happily ignorant. . . . What more does the lover of film suspense wish?”
Hitchcock, however, took more notice of those who thought he had committed an unforgivable crime. C. A. Lejeune, the leading critic of her day, said, “there is a code in this sort of free-handed slaughter, and Hitchcock has gone outside that code” by exterminating a child with whom the audience had complete sympathy. Perhaps influenced by Lejeune, who was usually a great fan of his, Hitchcock looked on Stevie’s death as an egregious error. But for him the problem was not moral but technical. He had confused suspense with surprise. As Hitchcock explained countless times to countless interviewers, suspense is what you get when, as in Sabotage, the audience knows there’s a bomb in the parcel; surprise is what happens when a bomb detonates without warning. “Had the audience not been informed of the real contents of the can, the explosion would have come as a complete surprise. As a result of a sort of emotional numbness induced by a shock of this kind, I believe their sensibilities might not have been so thoroughly outraged.” As it was, Hitchcock had robbed the audience of the relief of suspense they expected and needed. Stevie’s death, said Hitchcock, was not so much ill-judged as badly executed: “The boy was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful. The way to handle it would have been for Homolka [Oscar Homolka, the actor playing the terrorist] to kill the boy deliberately.”
That Hitchcock didn’t treat children like children might explain why he was so popular with them. Starting in the 1950s, and largely thanks to his television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became an early iteration of the trend for the shared cultural interests of adults and children—though, unlike today when childhood passions for wizards and superheroes are carried into adulthood, Hitchcock was a decidedly adult figure who found a way of communicating with kids. The director Gus Van Sant is linked to Hitchcock through his 1998 remake of Psycho, but his interest began as a little boy in the 1960s, watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He and his sister were beguiled by Hitchcock’s wry, sometimes cartoonish appearances that opened and closed each episode, and riveted by the suspense stories at their heart. Although Alfred Hitchcock Presents was never intended as a children’s show, many of its episodes possess qualities common to a lot of the most enduring works of children’s literature. Six of its episodes were adapted from Roald Dahl stories, and many more of the Hitchcock television shows contain the key ingredients of Dahl’s children’s novels and his Revolting Rhymes short stories: fantastical wickedness running riot, but ultimately defeated by an extreme dose of moral justice, which Hitchcock often delivered himself in his closing monologues—the teacher speaking directly to his pupils.
From the television shows, Van Sant became a reader of the Hitchcock anthologies of mystery stories and the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. It wasn’t until much later that he explored Hitchcock’s filmography. Judging from the fan mail Hitchcock received from the 1950s onward, this was a path traveled by many young fans. The publishers of the Hitchcock magazine received so many letters from children that an official fan club was established. For fifty cents, each member received an eight-by-ten photograph of Hitchcock, a brief biography (which featured the story of his childhood incarceration), and a bulletin of the latest Hitchcock news every quarter. Such was his crossover appeal that Hitchcock was approached to lend his name to a series of children’s books. Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators ran for thirty volumes in the United States, and was published with success in Europe and Asia. Like an anti–Santa Claus, Hitchcock received missives from children all over the world. Some wanted to point out continuity errors in his films; others asked for explanations of plotlines. Many wanted signed photographs, which the Hitchcock office sent out in large quantities. Others, in the grip of their hero’s influence, delivered vignettes of gruesomeness that must have tickled and disturbed the secretaries who opened Hitchcock’s mail. One fifteen-year-old boy from Texas wrote to say that he had designed gallows on which to give Hitchcock a spectacular send-off. He had even done the sums to ensure the apparatus did its
