The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

to read Cornwell’s theories; at some point, he bought one of Sickert’s Camden Town Murder paintings, a series of melancholy depictions of the murder of Emily Dimmock, a London prostitute who had her throat slit by a customer, on her bed, in 1907. Hitchcock’s homes were generously decorated with art; this piece hung on a bedroom wall.

The Lodger rebooted East London’s murderer-as-artist tradition for the 1920s, and for the new medium of cinema. The first eight minutes of the film are among the most arresting Hitchcock ever made, and perhaps the highlight of his nine silent films. It begins, naturally, with a murder. The opening shot is a close-up of a woman’s face, her mouth wide open in a silent scream in the moment of her demise, foreshadowing that famous image of Janet Leigh in Psycho. A montage quickly puts us in a time and place, as police officers arrive on the scene and a horrified witness gives her description of the murderer. Nearly a hundred years later, it feels urgently familiar. A crowd gathers; rumors take flight; sick jokes spread within minutes of the corpse hitting the ground. Reporters scramble, and we track the news as it goes viral through the buzz of the latest technology. “MURDER wet from the presses,” read the intertitles, “MURDER hot on the aerial.”

Like any good murderer who creeps around popular culture, the Avenger leaves a calling card on the person of each of his victims. And, like any good modern artist, the card has a signature flourish: a single triangle, which is incorporated into the design of the film’s intertitles and reflects the tense love triangle between Daisy, her family’s mysterious lodger, and Daisy’s policeman boyfriend, who suspects the lodger of being the murderer. It’s as though the evil genius whose killing spree has brought us here is the same as the one behind the camera. The suggestion is reinforced as a man in a newspaper office leans into a telephone. This is Hitchcock in his first cameo, reporting that the Avenger has claimed his seventh victim. He asserted that his screen debut arose simply because there was nobody else to play the role, and in time the tradition of his cameos became part superstition, part running joke. Whether that’s quite accurate is debatable. Nevertheless, his appearance in The Lodger gives us another premonition of Psycho, this time of the publicity campaign in which he took center stage, using his face, voice, and body to disperse the message about his latest unhinged killer.

The murder of an innocent young blonde woman that opens The Lodger.

The link between murder and creativity was one Hitchcock played with for the rest of his career. Cinemas, music halls, performances of ballet and symphonies, are all sites of Hitchcock murders. Sometimes the killers, like Hitchcock himself, are those who see their whole campaign of violence in their head long before its execution, planning it with joyful meticulousness. Other times, they are performers, for whom role-playing, disguise, and transformation are their modus operandi. Young and Innocent (1937), a lesser-known Hitchcock film, is compulsory watching for any cinephile if only for the astonishing shot—adapted a decade later for a more famous sequence in Notorious (1946)—that takes the audience from the back of a large room right into the face of a jazz drummer, a white man in blackface whom the audience, but not the other characters, now realizes is the murderer we’ve all been searching for. Knowing that his pursuers are closing in, his anxiety gets the better of him: he loses his rhythm, his eyes begin to twitch, sweat erodes his face paint. His disguise ruined, he’s apprehended, given away by his own guilty conscience.

Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Psycho.

Hitchcock’s playful parallels between artists and murderers continue to hold our attention. In 2020, his fantastically silly album of easy listening, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Music to Be Murdered By, made a return in the form of Eminem’s Music to Be Murdered By, which references Hitchcock in its concept, on its cover, and in numerous samples of his voice. Speaking on his original 1958 LP, Hitchcock says that the record is intended for thousands of frustrated members of his television audience: “The program seems to have inspired them to murder, but did not furnish the proper atmosphere for it.” Hitchcock’s album was released before Psycho, but Eminem’s is unquestionably a post–shower scene record, his vitriolic rhymes intended to lacerate and outrage. That Eminem sees in Hitchcock—“the master, Uncle Alfred,” as he refers to him—a kindred soul is not as surprising as it might seem. Both have been accused of crude misogyny and gratuitous invocations of violence that could corrupt impressionable audiences; both insist it’s all humor, hyperbole, and role-play, lost on the po-faced and literal-minded. From De Quincey to Hitchcock to Eminem, the art of murder continues to inspire the most incongruous miscreants.

The dominating power of violence was made clear to Hitchcock throughout his life: in the popular culture of the communities in which he was raised, during the savage war in which he came of age, and in the conflagration that stirred just as he established himself as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.

Between 1934 and 1938, Hitchcock released five pictures that tapped into the violence and menace rippling through Europe, a world detached from its moorings. The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes (1938) were breakthrough pictures for Hitchcock, the first of the spy adventures after which many of his immortal Hollywood films would follow. “My parents were not political,” confirms Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, but that clutch of films reveals that while Hitchcock may never have been interested in ideology or party politics, he was interested in power, and the means by which people use it against others.

Shortly after the release of The Lady Vanishes—one of the great Hitchcock movies of romance and espionage set amid the creep of fascism