The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

year 1899, when Hitchcock was born, fell in the middle of what have been described as the thirty most transformative years in London’s history. Between the mid-1880s and the outbreak of World War I, the city experienced a rush of self-conscious modernity: “electrification, motorization, socialism, secularism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, family planning, suburbanization, mass entertainment, modern retailing, democracy, state intervention,” as well as the arrival of London’s notorious tabloid press, and panics about the uncontrollable spread of moral turpitude. The most obvious symptom of this rapid change was the thicket of humanity that clogged London’s streets, particularly in the East End in which the young Hitchcock grew up and the West End in which he sought entertainment as an adult. During these three decades, the population soared by two and a half million; there were more than seven million Londoners in 1914, rising to eight and a half million by 1939—the year Hitchcock moved to Los Angeles—a figure unsurpassed until 2015. One East End resident of the early 1900s recalled its profusion of markets that “swarmed with people . . . you could have walked on the people’s heads all the way from Commercial Road to Cable Street.” That Hitchcock remembers the dense throng is viscerally evident in almost every film he set in London—down by the Thames in The Lodger; under the neon dazzle in Blackmail; in an overcrowded train on an unpleasant commute in Rich and Strange; amid the bustle of hustlers, hawkers, and shoppers in Sabotage.

In the 1950s, Hitchcock reflected on the impact of England’s high-density population on the national character, and he concluded that it fostered an “inordinate regard for personal privacy.” That was something he knew intimately well; Hitchcock, the inveterate self-publicist, performed a conjurer’s trick of disappearing in plain sight, being constantly present while remaining aloof. Like Londoners of both his day and ours, he learned the trick of guarding his privacy in a pack, living cheek by jowl with countless people but connecting with barely any of them. It’s a long-standing English style of disengagement, raised to Olympian heights in London, what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “stony neglect, each of every other.” Emerson observed that a happy product of this obsessive minding of one’s own business was the English tolerance of eccentricity, but it made chipping through the cladding to reach the human being beneath a fearsome challenge. “In short,” he wrote, “every one of these islanders is an island in himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of strangers, you would think him deaf; his eyes never wander from his table and newspaper.” Aloofness and secrecy were part of Hitchcock’s DNA, and he passed that on to his most intriguing urbanites. The inscrutable Roger Thornhill; the chic, mysterious drifters played by Tippi Hedren; the Manhattanites in Rope with their scandalous, secret lives; Jeff and his neighbors in Rear Window, all together and all alone in Greenwich Village. Islanders, these city dwellers, every one.

The need to keep oneself to oneself in the world’s most populous city could result in explosions of indignity of a sort that fascinated, and horrified, Hitchcock, who was chilled by the prospect of public embarrassment. In his movies, he favored scenes of what one might term “an ecstasy of fumbling,” to borrow Wilfred Owen’s description of the panicked rush of bodies in the trenches of World War I. The climax of The Lodger, with a baying crowd squashed together in violent pursuit of a man they believe to be a murderer is the earliest example. Away from London, the awkward pressing of bodies is used for comic effect in the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, when a sudden accident on a Swiss ski slope knocks over a dozen people, creating an undignified jumble of limbs, noses in armpits, boots up arses. In a moment of tension rather than comedy, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews are pulled this way and that in Torn Curtain by an amorphous panicking crowd, rushing from a cry of “Fire!” in a crowded Berlin theater, a reprisal of a scene in The 39 Steps when a gunshot causes a stampede from an East End music hall of the type Hitchcock frequented as a child.

Sudden, shocking violence was a feature of the East End. The district was notorious for its pub fights and street brawls. An exact contemporary of Hitchcock’s named Eileen Bailey recalled that in their neighborhoods violence broke out so frequently that locals “developed a kind of instinct, an embryo ability to tell when a fight was going to peter out or flare up into a scrap worth watching.” Sometimes the fights were between women, who would “use their long hat-pins on each other’s eyes.” On the walls of his second home in Santa Cruz, Hitchcock hung five pictures by Thomas Rowlandson, an eighteenth-century artist who depicted the most scabrous, frenzied scenes of London life, two of which detail women grappling and clawing at each other in the street. Here is a London Hitchcock recognized: a rowdy place of endless entertainment in which an act of spontaneous violence was only ever a dodgy look away.

The London neighborhoods of Hitchcock’s youth showed a double face to the world. On the one hand, they were insular and guarded, filled with intensely parochial communities that were conscious of a certain separateness, even from the rest of the city. On the other hand, the East End was the opening to a world beyond England. Limehouse had prodigiously busy docks and was home to many ethnic groups, including London’s Chinatown, an enclave that inspired the fictional character Fu Manchu and D. W. Griffith’s movie Broken Blossoms in the 1910s. Stepney was the center of the East End’s Jewish community, one of the largest populations of Jews in western Europe. In the vicinity of both places ran the River Lea and the Thames, the historic conduit between London and the rest of the globe. If his recollections can be trusted, Hitchcock the child was acutely aware that