The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

silent films abound with trick shots and visual inventiveness. Easy Virtue opens with a shot of what looks like a crop circle but is slowly revealed to be the top of a judicial wig. As the judge looks wearily across the courtroom, we see what he sees: his hand bringing his monocle slowly to his eye, the magnified image of the barrister getting ever larger in the screen. Something similarly convoluted was applied to the start of Champagne, in which the disembodied arm of a waiter holds a champagne bottle at the camera, the cork staring at us as if the barrel of a gun. The cork pops, and champagne runs over the lens, at which point Hitchcock cuts to a close-up of the wine being poured into a glass that is then instantly tilted back, as though the audience is downing the contents. In a single bubble at the bottom of the glass, a distant scene is magnified: a jazz band playing on stage, while a couple spins on the dance floor. It’s a delightfully clever sequence, if rather empty. As Hitchcock matured, such set pieces would become more integrated into the story of the film; there are moments in his silent films that resemble the show reel of a director of commercials, rather than the work of a feature film storyteller. Unlike the authorship of Hitchcock’s stories and scripts, there is little doubt from whose mind such visual sequences came; this, ultimately, is the essence of the Hitchcock touch.

As soon as sound was introduced into Hitchcock’s armory, he sought ingenious ways of incorporating that, too. Blackmail was already in production as a silent film when its producers decided they wanted it to be a talkie. Hitchcock saw the problems this presented as an opportunity, and he found ways to use sound that few other filmmakers of that generation even attempted. Shortly after Alice kills her attacker in self-defense, we hear what she hears when her family discusses reports of the man found stabbed to death in his own bed. To Alice, guilt-ridden and panicking, the dialogue becomes babble in her ears, apart from the word “knife,” each sharp utterance of which is a reminder of the stab with which she killed her attacker. Eight years after the film’s release, a respected critic watched it again and was moved to write that “there is a freshness about the approach to sound in it that is positively startling in these days of stereotyped dialogue and balanced background.”

The Skin Game is one of Hitchcock’s most prosaically shot films, reverting to lengthy single takes with a static camera as though the action is taking place beneath the proscenium arch of a theater stage–the type of film that Hitchcock himself frequently derided as “pictures of people talking.” Even here, though, he found moments to experiment: a montage of sound in the opening scene in the marketplace is followed by a shot of the darkened doorway of a house, out of which spills a conversation we can hear but cannot see. Overhearing and conversations out of earshot are a motif of the film, used to stress various social divisions in 1930s England: north and south, town and country, old money and the nouveau riche. As the film reaches its climax, Chloe Hornblower, the female protagonist, hides behind a curtain, terrified that a shameful secret from her past is about to be exposed, and eavesdrops on her husband denouncing her—but Hitchcock shoots it in such a way that the voices seem to be in the woman’s head, her guilt and shame tearing her apart from the inside, driving her to suicide.

Hitchcock (with Anny Ondra) working with the latest technology on the set of Blackmail.

Undoubtedly, many of the stylistic trills that ornamented his films, whether in London or in Hollywood, stemmed from Hitchcock’s search for novelty, or his desire to create a problem in order that he could find its solution. It was also a means of keeping himself on screen while remaining behind the camera. At first, so he claimed, he laid his clever touches and in-jokes for critics to pick up. Later, when he was a household name and much less reliant on critical appreciation to carry his public reputation, these were things he felt duty bound to include for paying customers who had certain expectations about what constituted a Hitchcock movie. Other filmmakers weren’t always impressed. For Orson Welles, the elaborate shots were clever but hollow, stunts to distract from Hitchcock’s essential vacuity. “His contrivances remain contrivances,” said Welles in 1967, “no matter how marvelously they’re conceived and executed. I don’t honestly believe Hitchcock is a director whose pictures will be of any interest a hundred years from now.”

Welles’s criticism was uncharitable, but not without foundation. There are certainly examples of Hitchcock putting on film clever bits of business mainly because it had never been done before. Equally, there are many stunning moments in Hitchcock when his thirst for novelty meets the needs of storytelling and characterization, resulting in the visceral expression of physical and emotional experience. At some point during the twenties or thirties, Hitchcock attended the Chelsea Arts Ball in London, where he drank too much and experienced the peculiar “sensation that everything was going away from me.” For years he thought about how he might express that feeling with the camera. He’d wanted to incorporate it into Rebecca as a means of communicating the disorientation and fear experienced by Joan Fontaine’s character, but he and his crew were unable to find a way of achieving the shot. The idea sat with him for a further fifteen years until he began planning Vertigo and wanted to express Scottie’s sudden wooziness when looking down. At last, a solution was found: by moving the camera away from James Stewart’s face at the same time as zooming in on him with the lens, that strange, dizzying sensation that Hitchcock had first experienced when drunk could be achieved. The only problem, Hitchcock’s