The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

the lazy old river was a superhighway of possibility. During the filming of Frenzy he recounted to the critic Charles Champlin that as a child of about nine, back in the days when his father supplied fish and poultry to ocean steamers, he was allowed to ride the steamboats all the way to Gravesend, at the mouth of the river, before climbing down the rope ladder with the pilot. Returning to the city had rekindled his old feelings for the ships: “The Royal Albert Docks, now there is romance.” In a similarly nostalgic mood a year later, he told the journalist Margaret Pride that as a boy he became so obsessed with ships from all over the world that he could recognize them in silhouette, and would track their movements with pins stuck into a world map he kept in his bedroom.

Hitchcock beside the River Thames with Ingrid Bergman, October 1948.

Once Hitchcock entered the movie business, his horizons grew even wider, and his social circles ever more cosmopolitan. It was, after all, at the London branch of the American firm Famous Players-Lasky that he got his first job in the film industry, working alongside the American women who dominated the writing department. Michael Balcon, the man Hitchcock credited with launching his career, was the son of east European–Jewish émigrés and was married to a South African woman of Polish ancestry. When Balcon gave Hitchcock his chance to direct, it was in Germany not England that he did so, gaining a grasp of the German language along the way. Around this time, Hitchcock was part of the London Film Society, recently established by (among others) his friends and sometime collaborators Ivor Montagu and Sidney Bernstein as a forum in which to exhibit and discuss the best cinema from across Europe and to promote “the production of really artistic films” in Britain, “those which the trade deemed uncommercial or which the censor refused.” The society announced itself to London on the front page of the Daily Express in May 1925, the same month that Hitchcock left for Germany to begin shooting his debut feature film. For Montagu, too, Germany was a beacon of cinematic art, and his initial aim was to screen titles that are now considered modernist classics, including Murnau’s Nosferatu. Over time, though, it was Soviet cinema that really enthused him, and it was through Montagu and the Film Society that Hitchcock got to examine the “pure cinema” techniques of Russian filmmakers including Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

Montagu was also the man whom Balcon brought in to help refine The Lodger, the film in which Hitchcock took all that he had absorbed in Germany and made a film in London about London, its people, and its menacing “fog,” literal and metaphorical, under which this enormous beast of a city spluttered. It is a vivid projection of London, full of its humor, its dangers, and its folklore, and it provided a template for the Hitchcockian city: the glitter of civilization resting on a cesspit of human frailty. Decades after The Lodger, Hitchcock outlined the idea of a film he’d always wanted to make: “twenty-four hours in the life of a city . . . full of incidents, full of backgrounds.” Uniting his ambivalent feelings about people, consumption, and urban life, the film would be “an anthology on food, showing its arrival in the city, its distribution, the selling, buying by people, the cooking, the various ways in which it’s consumed. . . . So there’s a cycle, beginning with the gleaming fresh vegetables and ending with the mess that’s poured into the sewers. . . . Your theme might almost be the rottenness of humanity. You could take it through the whole city, look at everything, film everything.” The film was never realized—though aspects of it appear in Frenzy—because Hitchcock couldn’t find a way of hanging a story on the structure that would appeal to not just “the first row in the balcony or for a few seats on the aisle. It would have to be geared toward two thousand seats in the theater.” Raised in a family of London merchants, Hitchcock knew full well the importance of catering to the customer.

The reaction to The Lodger from the British press could not have been more effusive. Hitchcock was lionized as the great hope of British cinema, “an English director of genius.” The film elevated to the status of “mystery and magic what might easily have proved merely a sordid record of crime,” wrote one reviewer. But what most enthused critics was that the setting for this dark fantasy was a place they recognized as home—the pockmarked capital of the British Empire. The apparent lack of authentically British subjects in British films was a constant source of worry in the interwar period. In December 1925, the film section of the Daily Herald reported on Hitchcock’s trip to Germany to make The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle. In the same article, it was noted that Hitchcock’s peer, the director Adrian Brunel, was slated to begin work on a film called London, “which will centre around life in the metropolis. It is good that at last someone should exploit the material in our own back-garden.”

It wasn’t only critics who were chomping for more homemade fare. The Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 was one of many measures designed to spur the production of more British films and wean the nation’s picturegoers off Hollywood imports. The effort was part of a broader, existential panic about Britain and its empire in an age of rapid American growth. One of the several polemics about the threat of Americanization published in Britain in the 1920s was Americanism: A World Menace, published in 1922, the same year in which the BBC was founded, itself a project designed, in part, to inoculate its colonies from American culture, which was talked of as a virus.

Hollywood films were regarded as especially dangerous. Four weeks after The Lodger was