Still, lightening oneself of a little of that baggage could be liberating; he was quietly proud to be an American citizen, because, to him at least, it meant being a citizen of the world. He loved that America is a “polyglot country. I often tell people, there are no Americans, it’s full of foreigners.”
A world full of foreigners rather neatly describes a feeling that works its way through Hitchcock’s Hollywood canon, in which location and identity are regularly smudged to a blur, and accents roam freely, sometimes absurdly so. In The Birds, the first person Melanie meets in the tiny, insular Californian community of Bodega Bay sounds so much like a New Englander that it seems deliberately disorienting. In Foreign Correspondent, Laraine Day and Joel McCrea encounter the Latvian ambassador in London who, inconceivably, speaks not a word of English, German, or French, so Day talks to him in his mother tongue; handily she knows “just enough Latvian to get about.” Later in the film, a little Dutch girl assists some of her compatriots by translating English into their native language, but does so with such a strong American accent that one wonders whether she might be better off having a stab at Latvian herself. The Rutland family in Marnie is an upper-crust Philadelphian clan as old as the Liberty Bell, but its eldest son, played by Sean Connery, speaks like a born-and-bred Edinburgher. Ingrid Bergman had kittens trying to modulate her Swedish-American-English into an Irish brogue for the Australian-based Under Capricorn. Her on-screen husband, Joseph Cotten, didn’t bother; Hitchcock was happy for the script to be altered, switching the character’s origins from Dublin to Virginia, Cotten’s home state.
Topaz is a bad picture, but it’s the ultimate example of Hitchcock’s cosmopolitan and internationalist outlook, with its united nations of cast and characters. Indeed, the United Nations was a topic of great interest to Hitchcock. It was at the site of the UN building in New York that Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill—the apotheosis of Hitchcock’s unplaceable globalist—witnesses the murder that sends him on the run in North by Northwest. But Hitchcock had toyed with the idea of designing a film around the United Nations several years earlier, when he exchanged letters, and had at least one meeting, with Mogens Skot-Hansen, a UN representative from Denmark, about the ways in which Hitchcock could lend his talents to depicting the organization’s work on screen. Thirteen years later, in the spring of 1964, he agreed to direct one of six feature-length episodes of an ambitious television drama series designed to sell the United Nations to the American public. Press reports of the time suggest it was a surprising move for a commercial, nonpolemical director such as Hitchcock, on account of the “widespread organized opposition to the U.N. in this country.”*
Of course, Hitchcock did cling to his English cultural roots in the making of his Hollywood movies. He turned time and again to English source material, English screenwriters, and English actors. He also returned to London as a venue for production, and three of his 1950s movies were set in the city. In Stage Fright, a little of the Hitchcock feel for Londoners comes back: Kay Walsh is deliciously good as the sour, dyspeptic Nellie, a pub gossip and resentful maid for a sultry cabaret star (played by Marlene Dietrich), who seems like the kind of character that Hitchcock and Alma had encountered a hundred times before. But, on the whole, an authentic reflection of London ceased to be a key part of Hitchcock’s films and public image. Neither has Hitchcock’s take on London and England left much of a cinematic legacy. The best of the Bond films—an obvious heir to Hitchcock—have something of the wit of early Hitchcock, but the franchise has only ever offered a flattened, thinned-out version of Englishness, akin to Hitchcock’s Hollywood years, devoid of the beautifully observed gems that punctuate The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes.
Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that as Hitchcock’s Hollywood legend has mushroomed and obscured the earlier chapters of his career, acknowledgment of his role in the story of twentieth-century London has dwindled. Today, at the site of Gainsborough Studios, where he made some of his earliest films, sits an enormous bust of Hitchcock. But it’s not the head of the young Londoner who toiled to make his name, rather the older, jowly, glum-looking man from California who came to define the popular idea of Hitchcock. The importance of his London years, to Hitchcock’s career as well as to the history of the city, is consistently overlooked, even among those who know a vast amount about both. In recent social and cultural histories of interwar London, Hitchcock barely makes an appearance, despite being one of the city’s most famous, commercially successful, and influential creative figures of the last hundred years. Amid a galaxy of other Londoners—from Aldous Huxley and the Kinks to Peter Stringfellow and Leon Trotsky—Jerry White’s enthralling book, London in the Twentieth Century (2001), carries not a single mention of Hitchcock’s name. Juliet Gardiner’s equally riveting chronicle of British life, The
