Hitchcock undercut any tub-thumping jingoism by pointing out that in putting his homeland on screen in such a way, he was emulating his contemporaries abroad, especially in America, that supposed scourge of British culture. The key to developing first-rate, distinctively British films, he said, was to follow Hollywood’s lead in producing commercial films about ordinary, everyday people. He complained that London film culture focused almost exclusively on grinding poverty or the wealthy elite. Instead, he wanted to see people from his background, “men who leap on buses, the girls who pack into the Tube, the commercial travellers . . . the cinema queues, the palais de danse crowds . . . the fellows who love gardening, the chaps who lounge in pubs . . . girls who catch their fingers in doors and say what they feel.” Unlike “stodgy” British films, “Americans use imaginative backgrounds. They give us pictures about telephone exchanges, icemen, newspaper reporters, police cars, repair gangs,” all “with a freshness that is lacking in our drawing room school of drama.”
Hitchcock’s interest in social authenticity coincided with the British Documentary Film Movement of the 1930s. Unofficially led by the producer and director John Grierson, the movement was cinema’s iteration of a wider British trend of the interwar years, in which wealthy middle-class figures dedicated themselves to exposing the truth about the lives of working people. A documentarian, remarked one of those within the movement, “must be a gentleman, a Socialist, have a university education, [and] a private income.” This was not Hitchcock, who was only a couple of rungs up the ladder from the working-class people being documented. Within London’s cultural establishment, the documentary films of Grierson et al. came to be regarded as the gold standard of British cinema; Hitchcock’s thrillers of the 1930s were recognized for their inventiveness but dismissed as inconsequential. Grierson himself sneered at Hitchcock as “the best director, the slickest craftsman . . . of unimportant films.”
But Hitchcock’s influences, objectives, and achievements were closer to the highbrow, polemical documentarians than is often acknowledged. As with Hitchcock’s best London films, the documentaries Grierson directed—Drifters (1929); Granton Trawler (1934)—rely on montage and inventive use of sound, have an interest in juxtaposing tradition and modernity, and exhibit the inspiration of the “city symphony” film genre of the 1920s. Grierson, not averse to staging scenes in his documentaries, used fiction to underpin his portrayal of authenticity; Hitchcock used authenticity to underpin his fiction. The overlap between the documentarians’ interests and Hitchcock’s is smartly summed up by Housing Problems, a revelatory documentary produced by Ruby Grierson, John’s sister, about the slums of the East End, which featured working-class people talking candidly, straight to the camera, about their lives. Hitchcock had never lived in the slums, but he had grown up with them on his doorstep, and thirteen years earlier he’d attempted to make what would have been his debut feature, Number Thirteen, a work of fiction about the experiences of people living in a building created by the Peabody Trust, a philanthropic organization committed to tackling London’s housing crisis. It’s healthy to be skeptical of claims Hitchcock made in the thirties about earnestly wanting to work in documentary. This may have been a way of trying to assuage feelings of insecurity about his escapist fantasies when compared to the weighty, “serious” business of the documentarian intellectuals. However, it’s worth noting that, in 1969, Hitchcock hosted a Scottish television documentary honoring Grierson’s life and work, suggesting a genuine admiration for the aims and methods of the documentary movement, which sought to make British film distinctive by turning to the lived experiences of its population.
In his career as a director in London, Hitchcock did his best to put the world he knew on the screen: pet shops, theaters, buses, boxing matches, fairgrounds, museums, churches, cinemas, pubs, marketplaces, railway carriages, boardinghouses, dentists’ offices, prison cells, tearooms, tenement houses, and artists’ studio flats—all were intrinsic parts of his plots. He avoided addressing the meaty issues of the day head-on, yet his London had authenticity in both large ways and small. Raymond Durgnat, who grew up in London in the 1930s, thought Hitchcock’s projection of the city, despite its adventures and fancies, was sharper and more truthful than anything produced by the famous Ealing Studios’ films of the 1950s. In an age when one “couldn’t just point a T.V. camera in the street” to capture reality, Hitchcock’s gimlet eye brought details of contemporary urban England to life. “He had first to notice certain details, love them enough to remember and to recreate them, and lastly to slide them deftly into a thriller context. . . . They are in no sense pebbles; they are cherished like jewels.” Even among the relatively small but ardent batch of Hitchcock fans in America at the time, the evocation of this gray city of eccentric people and surprising jolts of action was part of the fascination. As Norman Lloyd remembered, “You would go to these little theaters in New York, you know, the Thalia or someplace and see a Hitchcock film in black and white on a rainy day in New York; you’d come out thinking you were wearing a trench coat and all of that.”
Having been so championed by the popular press, and even by some avant-garde outlets, as the embodiment of a great British cinema, Hitchcock’s move to America caused no little irritation, even some hurt. The timing of his departure, in 1939, just before Britain declared war on Germany, only exacerbated the sense of betrayal. Michael Balcon, the man who had
