The campaigns for Psycho and The Birds, inspired as they were in many ways, built on practices that Hitchcock, and those who worked to publicize his movies, had been developing for years. Even in promoting The Lodger, there were publicity stunts designed to bring the menace of the film out into the real world, and sound rather like the kind of marketing strategies we more readily associate with our own era. In various towns, men dressed up as the Lodger/the Avenger in shrouding capes and scarves, handed out flyers, and, in one case, acted as walking billboards, carrying suitcases bearing messages such as “BEWARE GIRLS!” and “MEET ME AT THE GRAND,” the name of the local cinema. The Balham Palladium in south London took things an inventive step further by arranging with a nearby shop to re-create a pivotal scene in the film in its window, complete with atmospheric Hitchcockian lighting. The scene caused a buzz along the High Street and “proved very successful as a business proposition,” according to a report from the time. It’s unknown whether Hitchcock had anything to do with such stunts, but he (or perhaps a clipping service in his employ) collected the press coverage of them and pasted them into his scrapbooks, evidence at least of his awareness of and interest in how his work was promoted.
One of Philippe Halsman’s famous publicity photos for The Birds.
Within a few years, “Hitchcock” was a big enough name in Britain to dominate marketing campaigns. The same wasn’t quite true in the United States until several years after his relocation, but the publicity staff at the studios found working with Hitchcock a delight; he was full of ideas, open to those of others, and happy to do as many interviews as could be scheduled. Other studio figures were sometimes less enamored of Hitchcock’s brilliance for publicity. As Leonard Leff has written, “feature stories on Spellbound (a David O. Selznick production) somehow became feature stories on Hitchcock (distinctly not a David O. Selznick production).” By 1959, when audiences turned up at their local movie theater to see North by Northwest in its opening weeks, they were confronted—just as they would be for Psycho and The Birds—by life-size cut-outs of Hitchcock, and his name and face were incorporated into much of the marketing paraphernalia that was sent out across the United States. The hero of that movie, Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, is a Madison Avenue advertising guru, a prototype of Don Draper from Mad Men, a devastatingly suave, cynical genius in the grips of a severe identity crisis. Ernest Lehman recollects that when he and Hitchcock were piecing together the ideas for the script, “advertising executive” was just one of dozens of occupations he had written down, but it seemed the perfect fit for a tale about a superficial nowhere man.
Advertising fascinated Hitchcock. It was modern, open to innovation, multidisciplinary, and it sought to manipulate human behavior by tapping into people’s hopes and fears, just as he did in his films. It was in the advertising department of W.T. Henley’s Telegraph Works Company that Hitchcock’s creativity was given its first professional outlet. There, his strong pictorial imagination and lively wit were put to good use, sketching clever, economical designs to sell electrical cabling. He considered his strongly visual imagination to be more attuned with the disciplines of poster design, photography, and advertising layouts than with many of the traditional, figurative painters he admired. It’s another reminder of the cultural environment from which he emanated. Hitchcock embodied a new type of Briton, an educated member of the urban lower-middle class thoroughly versed in new media—cinema, advertising, radio—that permeated the barriers between commerce, mass culture, and art. The material culture of that environment is strongly present in a number of Hitchcock’s British films—the ads on the train that make Fred yearn for a more exciting life in Rich and Strange; the advertisement for a brand of tea that facilitates a crucial plot point in The Lady Vanishes; and the neon signs in Blackmail, selling West End excitement to ordinary folks on a night out. The series of billboard advertisements that Dorothy Parker worked into the script of Saboteur, which cleverly address the unfolding action, brought the motif into Hitchcock’s American work for the first time.
The boldness and ubiquity of American advertising was of particular interest to Hitchcock. When he arrived in the US, he was fascinated to hear commercial spots on the radio; back in Britain, the BBC monopoly of radio that lasted until 1973 meant advertising was banned on the airwaves. On his television series, he gained a reputation for his withering remarks about commercial breaks, but the deprecation was deliberately crafted to draw more attention to the slots.
Hitchcock’s process as a director was folded into the marketing of his films almost from the moment his name was in the public consciousness. While making Easy Virtue in 1927, Hitchcock and his producer gave journalists extensive access to various aspects of the production process. One wrote about his trip to Nice where a portion of the film was shot; another described the exact replica of a London divorce court that
