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

done so much to nurture Hitchcock’s talent, took out space in a London newspaper to flay his former protégé for apparently deserting his country in its hour of need, referring to him haughtily as a “plump young junior technician.” Most refrained from making the issue personal, but the critic C. A. Lejeune observed that a lot of her peers believed Hitchcock “had sold his soul to Hollywood. . . . There would be no more Hitchcock pictures, only Hollywood pictures made by Hitchcock.” London Hitchcock, so the thinking went, had been a bespoke maker of exquisite Swiss watches, each with his hallmark engraved on the back; Hollywood Hitchcock was bound to be a factory foreman, churning out Model Ts on a relentless production line. Both were remarkable objects, but only one was a thing of beauty bearing the soul of its creator.

There is merit in that argument, as Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie, Rebecca, shows. In many ways, the film was a professional triumph. Lejeune said Hitchcock’s detractors in London would have to eat their words: “his first Hollywood picture is in every way his best.” Although Hitchcock’s opinion on the film’s quality vacillated, he recognized that it was a crucial step in developing his career. In his words, it was “a completely British picture,” with an all-English cast, set mainly in England, and based on source material by an English author. Yet it was not like the depictions of England that audiences back home had come to expect from Hitchcock. Finely observed authenticity had slunk to the background, replaced by a more generic sense of Englishness, all stately home sternness and patrician hauteur. Hitchcock put this down to the demands of Selznick, and the influence of the film’s American screenwriter Robert Sherwood, who gave the script a “broader viewpoint than it would have had if made in Britain.” In fact, Rebecca was of a piece with Hollywood fashions. English and British films, such as the ones Hitchcock had been making since the silent days, tended to do modest business at the US box office, but romantic American fantasies about life across the Atlantic—almost always set in the past—were hugely popular with the public and the critics. Britons themselves could be unkind about these films. Graham Greene mocked Twentieth Century-Fox’s Lloyd’s of London (1937) by remarking that the “name of England is so freely on the characters’ lips that we recognize at once an American picture.” According to one scholar, between 1930 and 1945, Hollywood churned out more than one hundred and fifty “British” films. Hitchcock made a significant contribution to the genre: three of his first four Hollywood films were set in his homeland, including Foreign Correspondent, in which a straight-shooting American journalist battles an anti-British spy ring as the grip of war tightens on the sceptered isle. The movie helped bolster the wartime myth of London’s “Blitz spirit,” and was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1941, a category won by Rebecca.

Eighty years later, it seems little has changed. Britain’s place in the film world is still to present tales of kings and queens, a vanished past, or fantasy worlds that have never existed. The first British film to win an Oscar was The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933. The travails of English aristocrats remain Academy Award catnip—The Queen, Darkest Hour, The King’s Speech, The Favourite, all spring to mind. The chances of a British version of Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri receiving the same attention are remote. Those from communities whose lives are underrepresented on British screens—Idris Elba, John Boyega, Thandie Newton, for example—often leave for Hollywood in order to reinvent themselves as on-screen Americans. In Hitchcock’s day, the Londoner Charles Chaplin made the same journey, as did Bristolian Archie Leach, metamorphosizing into a magnificent, rootless alien who went by the name Cary Grant.

So much of what Hitchcock learned and developed during his two decades in the London film industry he took with him to America, and repurposed it for Hollywood with stunning results—from the narrative formula of the Hitchcock chase thriller and the MacGuffin plot device to his manipulation of the press. One thing he left at home was his sharp take on place and the characters who inhabit them. Shortly before he left for Hollywood, Hitchcock said, “You’ve got to live twenty years in a country before you can express its idiom.” It didn’t take him that long to engage with American society in his films, but when he did, it came from the perspective of a perceptive outsider, not from somebody whose pores had been clogged with the place since the day he was born.

In front of American audiences, Hitchcock exploited his Englishness. The displays of deadpan reserve—almost flamboyant in their denial of emotion—the sharp-tongued drollery, the fastidious attention to doing things properly, these all played upon his Old World origins. At times, it was knowing parody: he appeared on television with a bowler hat and umbrella, and posed for photographs reading The Times or taking tea on set. In interviews and articles he explained himself, often rather plausibly, in terms of his nationality. His understanding of violence, sex, food, humor, art, literature, clothing, child-rearing, home furnishings, sports, politics, world history, all derived from the central, inescapable fact of his Englishness, he said. Curiously, in her biography of her mother, Pat Hitchcock wrote that while Alma kept her native accent, Hitchcock lost his. Perhaps she meant that the glottal stop and rounded vowels of East London became diminished in his speech over time. Or, maybe in private, as an off-duty professional Britisher, he sounded more American. Either way, most who heard him speak on late-night talk shows or in the weekly skits on his television programs would identify him as he encouraged them to: a gray, old-fashioned Englishman amusingly out of place in the ceaseless sunshine of California.

Even as he wore his Englishness on his sleeve, Hitchcock resisted unalloyed patriotism. As with his