Consequently, when Hitchcock began making imaginative and stylish films that dealt with life as lived on his home turf, he was lauded in some quarters as not just a wunderkind who had brought together the British, American, and German traditions in an exciting way but as a national hero; he was even name-checked by Lord Burnham in a speech in the Houses of Parliament about the importance of cinema to the continued strength of the empire. Downhill, the follow-up to The Lodger, appears risible today, with a thirty-something Ivor Novello playing a teenage schoolboy, but it drew praise from reviewers for its presentation of distinctive features of British life, including the London Underground and a public school. The following year, 1928, saw the release of The Farmer’s Wife, Hitchcock’s silent adaptation of a play about a rural widower in search of love. It’s a charming film of visual imagination, technical accomplishment, and gentle comedy—but some reviewers were struck by its potential as propaganda. “Americans, I am sure, would pay money to see the beautiful Devonshire woodlands” after seeing the film, wrote the Daily Mirror. “It’s been left to Alfred Hitchcock to put England on screen,” added London’s Evening Standard. “He has done so gloriously.”
When Blackmail arrived in 1929, it solidified Hitchcock’s status as a soldier at the front line in the battle against Americanization. Since the introduction of the talkies two years earlier, the threat from Hollywood was deemed to have worsened. From converting young Britons to the fashions and habits of Americans, the motion pictures were now encouraging them to ditch the King’s English. But in Blackmail, the nation’s brightest film talent had delivered a tale of modern London in accents and dialects that wouldn’t make one’s ears bleed. “Hear English as it should be spoken,” ran an advertisement for the film. Among the reviews in Hitchcock’s scrapbook were those by the Daily Mail, which declared his film a “British Triumph” and a “shock for the Americans,” while the London Evening News praised it for being “All British—and with a London setting” and judged it equal to “anything Germany or America has achieved.” A reviewer for The Times exceeded them all, congratulating Hitchcock for having made a British Tosca, and for “sweeping aside American traditions of speed and glamour.”
The irony was that Hitchcock had embraced the “speed and glamour” of American popular culture as gleefully as anyone in Britain. Indeed, as a filmmaker, he considered himself to be working in a furrow plowed by Americans, from Edwin Porter to Cecil B. DeMille, via D. W. Griffith. “I’m American trained. . . . I never learned in the British studios,” he told one interviewer, proudly recalling that a review of one of his early films praised it for its thoroughly American qualities. In the 1920s, Hitchcock was a member of the jokingly named Hate Club, in which he and others in the industry would gather to review—and usually lambast—the latest British releases.
Hitchcock riding the London Underground in Blackmail.
When we think of Hitchcock in this context, his cultural significance extends beyond film, and we can identify connections with other English or British popular artists whose work was a manifestation of, and a response to, American cultural influence. There’s an interesting parallel with the Beatles. Like Hitchcock, they served a creative apprenticeship in Germany at a time of cultural renewal following a cataclysmic war. Both injected their crowd-pleasing work with esoteric or avant-garde influences, greedily absorbed from around the world; and both used American popular culture as a means of circumventing the strictures of the class system at moments of imperial decline when old ideas about British identity were thrown into flux.
The introduction of sound immediately allowed Hitchcock to deepen his depiction of life in the British Isles. Though he always insisted that he remained, at root, a silent filmmaker, accents, jokes, rhythms of speech, and ambient noise enabled him to create more rounded characters and textured settings in his 1930s films that domestic audiences would instantly recognize—whether it was the jury room of a murder trial, a crowded market, or a family dining table. He tackled weightier themes, too, issues of pressing topicality. The Skin Game dealt with class dynamics in the industrialized north of England, and Juno and the Paycock adapted Sean O’Casey’s celebrated play about an impoverished Dublin family struggling its way through the Irish Civil War.
Neither of those films, however, quite have the brilliant flashes of social observation found in Hitchcock’s London-bound talkies, three of which were scripted by Charles Bennett, who helped Hitchcock use his eye and ear for authentic background detail as a storytelling tool. The action in The 39 Steps, for example, is catalyzed by a music-hall audience of wisecracking Londoners, smoking, smirking, and heckling as they shout out sarcastic questions to the performer Mr. Memory, who holds explosive secrets in the depths of his encyclopedic mind. When a gunshot suddenly turns the place into a scene of mass panic, a couple of young strangers, a man and a woman, are brought together and end up back at the man’s home, hinting at the kind of illicit, unexpected liaisons that can happen in a megacity at night. In the murky London of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the action leads us—with grinning irony—into a sun worshippers’ temple, and it climaxes in a scene inspired by the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, a dramatic event instantly familiar to Londoners of the time, in which Winston Churchill
