The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

he had built. A month later came a story detailing the various glamorous places Hitchcock had shot, such as the polo ground of the exclusive Roehampton Club. In publicity for Downhill, British critics raved about a scene in which Ivor Novello’s character travels glumly down an escalator into the London Underground, symbolic of his descent into existential despair. Anticipating the stir that would be caused by this use of a landmark of modern London, Hitchcock made sure that several reporters and critics were invited to witness the scene being filmed. The shoot took place at night and attracted a large crowd of onlookers, many excited to see Novello, a bona fide star of the British stage and screen. Not to be outdone by a mere actor, Hitchcock made the grandest entrance of the evening, dressed in white tie and tails, as he’d come straight from the theater. Around this time, Ivor Montagu, the film’s editor, was rapped on the knuckles for playing the footage to people unconnected to the production. The studio reminded Montagu that only Hitchcock had the privilege of showing rushes to those he deemed useful for publicity purposes.

Using his set as a hub of publicity was a key feature of so many Hitchcock films, including Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window, all of which were reported on as being technologically groundbreaking in one way or another. Here again, the practice was precedented by Hitchcock’s pre-Hollywood career, on films such as The Farmer’s Wife and The Ring, both of which attracted publicity for their ambitious and novel set designs, and the farsightedness of their pioneering director. The Ring featured a clever reproduction of the Albert Hall and a working fairground, which was constructed solely for the shooting of the film’s opening scenes but which was made open to the public, in order that the director could capture authentic footage for the start of the film. A couple of weeks before the shoot took place, Hitchcock swore to one journalist that to ensure he remained incognito, he planned to be “thoroughly disguised as a showman wearing the traditional frockcoat, red silk handkerchief and ebullient silk hat.”

Over the coming years, the line between publicizing a Hitchcock film and publicizing Hitchcock could be hazy, at least for those who oversaw the budgets. In the summer of 1935, Hitchcock received a terse letter from H. G. Boxall at the Gaumont-British studio complaining about an article Hitchcock had written that had been accompanied by a photograph of Alma and him on the set of The 39 Steps, none of which had been authorized and was therefore an obvious breach of contract. Not that Hitchcock was always keen for outsiders to come and see how the magic happened. The photographer Michael Powell had to finagle his way onto the set of Champagne to take publicity stills, because Hitchcock was so unhappy with the script that he didn’t think there was anything to publicize. “I don’t wish my name to be associated with this film,” he said as he sat glumly in his chair. “I think this film is shit.”

The older he got, the more Hitchcock professed that for him filmmaking was about the perfection of form. “As far as I’m concerned,” he avowed in the 1960s, “the content is secondary to the handling; the effect I can produce on an audience rather than the subject matter” was the chief interest. This line helped him dodge questions about whether the increasingly strange subject matter of his films—from Vertigo onward—revealed anything about him as a person, though it’s also indicative of the pleasure he took in grappling with intractable technical problems in a way not shared by all film directors. When he chose to reinvigorate his career by breaking from Selznick to make Rope and Under Capricorn through his own production company, the long-take filming method he adopted on both films posed an unwieldy bundle of complex challenges. On Rope, the interior of a Manhattan apartment was built, with sliding walls and props and furniture on rollers, allowing the camera to glide around on floors designed to silence the noise of all these enormous moving pieces. Each scene had to be painstakingly choreographed, leading James Stewart to complain that “the only thing that’s been rehearsed around here is the camera.”

In Under Capricorn, the same challenges presented themselves, though on a larger scale: instead of being set entirely in the reception rooms of a Manhattan apartment, the movie took place in a range of locations in colonial-era Australia, including a sprawling mansion through which the camera roamed, occupying as many as six rooms in one scene. In one of Hitchcock’s most memorable dining scenes, a special table had to be made, a jigsaw of fourteen pieces that could be whipped out of shot, allowing a crane to move unfettered. Recalling how the actors in the scene were required to double as stage hands, the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said it was “positively weird to see them suddenly grab a section of a table, with a candle or a plate of food fixed on to it, and fall wildly out of picture into the perspiring melee with their own parts of the table clutched in their hands.” Despite the inevitable stresses entailed in such an ambitious and minutely choreographed production, Hitchcock—who also chose these two films to be his first foray into Technicolor—was energized by the technical complexity. At the time of its release, he proclaimed Rope “the most exciting picture I’ve ever directed.”

Hitchcock prided himself on knowing more about each department on a film set better than anyone other than the department heads. He enjoyed telling people that it was he who taught Jack Cox, the cinematographer on several of his British films, how to shoot on the job, as they made The Ring. When Cox called in sick one day, it was Hitchcock, so he claimed, who lit the day’s scenes himself. It was that firsthand knowledge that spurred him to approach sequences in novel ways. Hitchcock’s