Original subtitles

In February 1927, London audiences got their first real taste of an Alfred

Hitchcock film.

is now recognised as the first Hitchcock masterpiece.

But as the director himself liked to recall, the film, and with it his

was very nearly stillborn.

Unfortunately, when the film was finished, the distributors sent down two

representatives to view the film, and they came out and said it was awful.

And it was a dreadful picture.

Well, you know, this is a pretty low ebb to get.

And it was on the shelf for about two months. And then they decided to show it

after all. They felt they had an investment.

And it was shown.

And it was acclaimed as the greatest British picture ever made to that date.

So there you see is that thin red line between failure and success.

How do you do?

I am Alfred Hitchcock and I would like to tell you about my latest motion

picture, Marnie, which will be coming to this theatre soon.

In a 60 -year career that began with hand -cranked cameras and silent movie

stars and ended with widescreen technicolour and method actors,

taste both success and failure in pursuit of a simple goal.

He wanted fame, he wanted fortune, he wanted the right to make his own art in

his own way, and he got all those things.

Along the way, he would create a world as strange as his own personality.

Don't be afraid.

A Hitchcockian world where glamour and thrill were docked by fear and guilt.

How do you do?

My name is Alfred Hitchcock.

And I would like to tell you about my forthcoming lecture.

It is about the birds and their age -long relationship with man.

Oh, there were a lot of Hitchcocks involved with Mr. Hitchcock.

He used to think of himself as being a very simple man. He was extremely

complicated.

Extremely complicated.

That's a great question.

Is this man a technician, or is he a genius with soul and spirit, and if he

be the greatest filmmaker of all time?

This is Alfred Hitchcock speaking.

In the past, I have introduced you to many kinds of people.

Murderers, thieves, swindlers, many of them geniuses at the business of crime.

Cruelty, fear, loneliness, paranoia, dark feelings.

Big stars, outstanding supporting cast, brilliant color,

imaginative settings, great locations.

Murder, mayhem, violence, sex, beautifully

pictorially expressed.

Lovely costumes, perfect cutting.

And a joke or two.

Hitchcock's 1936 thriller, Sabotage, is set in a world of street markets,

shopkeepers, and bobbyed on the beat.

Don't you know that's very dangerous?

What? Leaving stuff like that lying about.

Supposing you or me were to break our leg on that? You'd be very pleased with

yourself, I suppose.

That would depend whether it was your leg or mine.

Can't tempt you, I suppose? Oranges. Very nice today. Good for the feet.

It was a world that Hitchcock knew well.

It was the world in which he had grown up.

Hitchcock is often described as having working -class company origins.

He wasn't really working class. I mean, his father was a greengrocer, wholesale

and retail.

And there was a very important distinction between being lower middle

having your own business, being a shopkeeper and something, and being

working class.

And Hitchcock was definitely on the middle -class side of this divide.

And I think they were always conscious of it.

Born in August 1899 above the family's high street shop in the London suburb of

Leytonstone, Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was the youngest of the three children of

Emma and William Hitchcock.

The father seems to have been, in certain respects, a fairly strict

disciplinarian, but his mother seems to have been the tougher of the two

parents, and he remained.

in awe of her throughout her life.

My grandmother, my father's mother, Emma, was a wonderful character.

I mean, absolutely.

She was very forceful.

You can imagine a young person would be scared of her, you know, a son, because

she, you know, she made them toe the line.

The Hitchcocks were devout Catholics, a fact that film critics of the future

would make much of.

Do you accept to be regarded as a Catholic

artist?

It does come in, it's true.

But perhaps the biggest influence on the future filmmaker was an incident that

became an essential part of the Hitchcock legend.

At a very tender age, I was frightened by a policeman.

I don't remember now what it was I'd done, but my father sent me along to the

police station with a note.

He locked me in a cell for five minutes and finally said, that's what we do to

naughty boys.

Hitchcock's education in the ways of the world continued at the age of 11 when

he was sent to St Ignatius College, a fee -paying school run by Jesuits.

The Jesuits were notorious for their approach to discipline, as a

of Hitchcock recalled.

We didn't get up and go straight away.

The wages of class ended.

Then, instead of going down into the playground, we went along the corridor

the end and joined a queue of about, what, ten or twelve boys, we think, I

suppose, coming from the different classes.

And you went in one by one.

Master, on duty that day, did set two.

Three, six.

Nine, twelve, twice nine, eighteen.

Nine on one hand and nine on the other, you see.

Going to the Jesuit school, you know, you're taught that you have to live life

in fear and guilt.

You're told that, you know, you have to be very cautious in life.

You have to be very cautious, because you have evil within you, other people

You know, good and evil are not separate, but they are inextricably

and the same person.

Hitchcock would stand up for himself, quite naturally, boys calling cocky.

He wouldn't have it. He would hitch.

I remember that quite well, because he punched a boy in the nose for going in

cocky.

In 1914, when Hitchcock was just 15, his father died.

Forth to lead, Prince Ignatius.

He found work in an engineering company.

But Hitchcock was never the average nine -to -five office worker.

When he was a teenager, I think he was working in the city, he didn't, at

lunchtime, he didn't go to a pub and stand around with a glass of beer in his

hand and a sandwich. He went to a proper restaurant, dressed properly, went to a

proper restaurant, ordered a proper lunch.

had a cigar afterwards.

In other words, he knew the kind of human being and the kind of character he

going to be even then.

Were you, or did you tend to be fairly solitary?

I was pretty solitary.

As a child, I was a great first -nighter, you know, to the theatre, used

alone, and also to the movies, theatre and movies, I suppose, were ones.

Hobby, more or less.

In 1920, Hitchcock's hobby took him to a former power station in Islington,

North London.

Alfred Hitchcock was about to enter the movie.

I heard that an American company were coming to London to open a studio.

So I applied for the job of designing their titles, because those were the

silent days, and titles were an important part of the picture.

It was at the Islington Studios that Hitchcock would meet the most important

person in his life,

Alma Revel, a talented film editor in her own right, and the future Mrs.

Hitchcock.

She was really smart and extremely knowledgeable

about film.

And they were...

They were so close.

They were, you know, they were a pair for all those years.

And, you know, they read each other's minds.

She actually was born in Nottingham.

And then I think the family moved to Twickenham.

When she was in school, I know she was afflicted with a disease called St.

Vitus's Dance and had to miss two years of school.

And, you know, she was so bright, too, that it was such a shame. And that's why

I think she went straight into the picture business.

I think when she went to work there, it became her life.

She was already in the quite important position of film editor, whereas he was

just a general dog's body.

And he was immediately attracted to her, but he said he didn't dare ask her to

come out with him until he was of a commensurate position himself. So as

he had become actually an assistant director, he dared to ask her out.

Sometimes she could be very sharp.

I mean, she...

Just said it right out.

If she didn't like somebody, you knew it and he knew it. And if she didn't like

something he did, she said it.

Never, she was never shrewish.

She was simply a woman with opinions that she voiced.

I liked her for that.

She was totally unpredictable, totally independent.

And I think he enjoyed this and rather feared it.

It was the most extraordinary image of sort of an elephant being martyred by a

sparrow Though he liked to say that he

had no particular ambition Hitchcock rose rapidly at the Islington studios

the film industry still in its infancy his innate self -confidence made him an

unstoppable force I was very content when

I was going to get the job in as assistant director.

Then they said, well, do you know of a good writer we can get? I said, I'll

write it.

And then my friend, who was going to be the art director on the picture, he said

he couldn't come.

He had another job.

He said, what are we going to do for an art director? I said, I'll do the art

direction.

But Hitchcock was still serving his apprenticeship.

In 1925, he received the education of a lifetime, but he was sent to work on an

Anglo -German co -production at the Ufa Studios in Berlin.

Ufa, the world's largest studio, was the home of German Expressionist cinema.

Watching the lives of Murnau and Lange at work, Hitchcock learned much about

power of the director.

And there were other lessons, too.

He learned so much about the use of shadow, the use of camera angles that

unconventional, off -center framing, shots from above, shots from below.

kind of things were part and parcel of the style of German Expressionism, and I

think Hitchcock adapted those very neatly into his cinematic grammar.

German expressionism may have exerted a stylistic influence on Hitchcock, but

the lessons of Soviet cinema went deeper.

Soviet filmmakers showed Hitchcock that meaning in a film could be conveyed by

the dynamic juxtaposition of images, a technique known as montage.

In a montage sequence, Acting becomes a matter of stylized gestures and

expressions, which become significant only when placed alongside other images.

It was a principle that Hitchcock would apply throughout his career to the

dismay of many of his actors.

The medium of pure cinema is what I believe in.

The assembly of pieces of film to create fright is the essential part of my

job.

He took me to dinner one night and he said, Ernie, what we're doing is we're

sitting at an organ and we're pressing this chord.

which makes an audience go, ooh.

And then we press this chord, which makes them laugh.

And we're just playing on them. And he said, someday we won't need the movie.

We'll be able to wire them so that we can just sit at the organ and make them

have all the sensations that they have seeing the picture.

And he believed that, create an effect on the audience.

Hitchcock created his first effects early in 1927, with the release of his

films The Pleasure Garden, The Mountain Eagle, and The Lodger.

The Pleasure Garden performed respectably, The Mountain Eagle less

Lodger was a sensation.

For once, British critics had a homegrown product to rave about, and for

public, there was a sensational storyline coupled with the charms of

idols, Ivor Novello.

But for Hitchcock, it had been a tough initiation.

All three films had been shelved for months, condemned by the distributor as

unshowable. The Lodger, in particular, was suspected of being arty, a kiss of

death in the British film industry at that time.

He used to tell me that when he first started in the industry, you actually

distributors on the doorsteps in Water Street shouting, have I got a film for

you, have I got a film for you?

And I think he realised early on, even if he wanted to be artistic himself,

you couldn't let this be seen too much, that it would be a great mistake because

people wouldn't take you seriously if you did.

Throughout his career, Hitchcock would grouse about the craftiness of

distributors and the stupidity of studio executives, but rarely would he rebel

against them.

He never felt comfortable asserting the claims of the artist over the

responsibilities of the businessman.

You can't indulge yourself for 5 .9 million.

A lot of people's jobs attach to this figure.

I used to look at the men lining up at Warner Brothers, carrying their dinner

pails, clocking on.

In a long line, I said to myself, is this an art form?

And that is, therein lies the whole problem between the artistic and the

commercial. It's the cost of expression.

What Hitchcock looked for from a studio was a simple understanding.

He would turn out popular films on time and on budget.

In return, he expected to be left alone to make his own films in his own way.

This was the deal on which his life as a filmmaker would be based.

But Hitchcock had more to offer studios than just his talent.

In the opening scenes of The Lodger, sharp -eyed critics spotted an extra who

looked strangely familiar.

It was the first of the celebrated Hitchcock cameos.

My mother wasn't born a Catholic, but she became a Catholic when she married

father, and they were married at Brompton Oratory in London.

We lived in London. We lived on Cromwell Road, number 153, and then on

weekends we would go down to Surrey near Guildford, a place called Shamley

Green, and we had a place called Shamley Cottage, and I had horses down there,

and I loved it.

He loved making the home movies and, you know, hammed it up all the time and had

a wonderful time. But that was his great sense of humour and that's what he had

in everything.

And the sort of staid person that everybody thought he was was purely an

Hitchcock's career, meanwhile, continued to blossom.

Wooed away from Islington by British international pitchers at Elstree,

Britain's hottest young director was the natural choice to direct the first

British talkie, Blackmail.

Every conceivable kind of problem happened, all of which Hitchy took in

stride. But he had one big problem, and that was Annie Ondra, who was

the little star of the picture.

Annie Ondra was supposed to be a little English girl, a little London girl.

the daughter of a tobacconist.

And Annie Ondra was Czech.

Czechoslovakian. And Annie Ondra had a very, very strong accent.

Now, Ondra, you asked me to let you hear your voice on the talking picture.

But, Heath, you mustn't do that.

Why not?

Well, because I can speak well.

Do you realize a squad band will be here any moment? No, really. Oh, my God, I'm

terribly frightened.

Why? Have you been a bad woman or something?

Well, not this bad, but... But you've slept with men.

Oh, no.

You have not. Come here. Stand in your place. Otherwise, it will not come out

right, as the girl said to the soldier.

That's enough.

Well, Annie Andre, naturally, with a Czech accent.

She couldn't possibly continue, but too much had been photographed.

So I got another young actress, whose name was Joan Barry, to sit on the

side with her own mic.

And Annie Under the Check Girl just mouthed her words so that they both

synchronized.

Frank, I've changed my mind.

What about?

About going to the pictures.

You mean you don't want to go again?

No, not particularly.

Blackmail was hailed as another Hitchcock triumph.

But after this, the director lost his way.

Leaving VIP at the height of the Depression, he ended up directing a

His first and only venture into the genre.

He was rescued by Michael Balkan, the producer who had given him his first

as a director at Islington.

The man

who knew too much was the first of the so -called thriller cycle.

Six films in four years.

which Hitchcock made for Balkan's Gaumont British Studio, and which would

him the title The Master of Suspense.

Suspense was the key to the Hitchcock thriller.

Working with screenwriter Charles Bennett and with Alma contributing to

treatments and continuity, Hitchcock turned suspense into an exact science.

The element of suspense is giving an audience information.

Now, you and I are sitting here.

Suddenly a bomb goes off.

Up we go, blown to smithereens.

What have the audience had watching this scene?

five or ten seconds of shock.

Now, we do the scene over again, but we tell the audience there's a bomb

underneath this table and it's going to go off in five minutes.

Now, this innocuous conversation about football becomes very potent. They say,

don't talk about football, there's a bomb under there. That's what they want

tell us.

then their anxieties will be as long as that clock ticks away.

But the bomb must never go off.

I once committed a grave error in having a bomb from which I'd extracted a great

deal of suspense.

And I had the thing go off, which I should never have done, because they

the relief from their suspense.

Somebody should have said, oh, my goodness, look, there's a bomb.

Pick it up, throw it out the window. Bang!

I made the mistake. I let the bomb go off and kill someone.

Bad technique.

In a Hitchcock thriller, the thing which seems to be of primary importance

generally turns out to be what he called the MacGuffin, the least important

thing of all.

a matter of days perhaps hours before the secret is out of the country

I don't care about content at all the film can be about anything you like so

long as I'm making that audience react in a certain way to whatever I put on

screen and if you begin to worry about the details of what are

the papers about that the spies are trying to

Well, that's a lot of knowledge. I can't be bothered with what the papers are,

what the spies are after in Kipling's day with the plans of the fort.

Well, how can you, you know, bring out the plans of the fort? Do you want the

public to measure them or something?

What are the 39 steps?

Come on, answer up! What are the 39 steps?

The 39 steps is an organisation of spies.

collecting information on behalf of the Foreign Office of...

Haven't

you seen anyone with a twitch yet? Too many people.

You must find him. Can't ask more if they twitches, can I?

He must be here somewhere.

Hitchcock was indifferent to content because what really interested him was

he called pure cinema.

An elaborate montage sequence or a complex camera move.

For him, these were the efforts of the filmmaker's heart. I'm right here to

you, sister, no one can like the drummer man.

Every man who plays in the band is wonderful too.

I've got to give credit where credit is due.

But when it comes to make that music up, make you give it all it's got, I'm

right here. to tell you mister no one can like the drummer man

The British thrillers gave Hitchcock an international reputation.

And by the end of the 1930s, he was ready for the biggest move in his

Between 1939 and 1945, the biggest audience for American movies thus far

happened.

80 million Americans were going to movies week in, week out.

And as far as technology goes, it was the best technology in the world that

Hitchcock came to.

Sound, which came in in 1927, was already licked.

Camera and projection equipment was refined.

And as for black and white, ah, ah, what the lacquers were developed, the dye

systems were developed to make the black velvety.

You saw a black and white movie, the blacks were velvety and the whites, I

it looked like the light was burning on the screen.

Hitchcock had been circling Hollywood for a number of years, tempted by the

resources that only the big American studios could offer.

He knew that a move to Hollywood meant giving up the autonomy he had won in

England. In return, he was looking for money, security, and prestige projects.

In 1938, he signed a seven -year contract with producer David O.

the following fateful year, 1939,

the Hitchcocks left England for America.

We always knew that it was a permanent move to coming over, you know. There's

gamble at all because he had a seven -year contract with David Selznick. So

knew, you know, he was going to be at least seven years.

And pretty much after that, you would live there.

Hitchcock's first American film was to be Rebecca, based on the popular novel

Daphne du Maurier.

It didn't take too long to discover what working for Selznick meant.

David O. Selznick was born in 1902 and he died in 1965 at the age of 63.

No wonder, for he was an obsessive, pill -popping workaholic.

He is a very dogmatic and imperious sort of man. He controlled his films.

No one else made them, no one else condemned them. He was always the

person.

And with Hitchcock, this didn't go over so well.

The two of them would fight about script mostly because David Selznick had great

respect for the original material that he used.

He demanded that the dialogue be from the book, that the settings should match

the descriptions in the book.

David insisted on...

lifting the book right into the film. And Hitchcock wanted to make the film

regardless of the book.

How could I ask you to love me when I knew you loved Rebecca still?

Whenever you touched me, I knew you were comparing me with Rebecca.

What is the mystery of Rebecca? What dread secret is hidden within the silent

walls of Manderley?

David thought that Hitchcock's idea of casting was all wrong.

The disagreements, of course, arose on the role of the young girl.

Miss She, they called her.

And she had a very important role to play in the success of the film. And the

people we had been considering, we were not happy with.

What do you mean?

What? What do you mean?

Well, I don't know. Why do you look at me that way? Who's been talking to you?

No one, no one at all. Why do you look like that, Maxine? What's the matter?

Why do you look like that?

What's the matter?

Why do you look like that? What's the matter?

Why do you look like that? Who's been talking to you? No one, no one at all,

Maxine. What's the matter?

We're back at test 16.

David Selznick at that time was truly in love with Joan Fontaine.

And he demanded that she go into the role, so Hitchcock finally gave in on

What do you mean?

What? What do you mean?

I don't mean anything. Why do you look at me like that?

Who's been talking to you?

No one, no one at all.

What's the matter?

She was just great.

And Selznick, he was very satisfied, but he didn't gloat.

Rebecca had one of Hitchcock's most popular pictures, but he felt it was

more Selznick's than his, a feeling confirmed when the film won the 1940

for Best Picture, an award that went to the producer, not the director.

It was to be the first of several near -misses for Hitchcock, and he would end

his career without a single Oscar to his name.

But Selznick had other lessons to teach Hitchcock about the powerlessness of the

contract director.

After Rebecca, he began to loan him out to other studios, charging them double

what he paid Hitchcock.

He lived on Hitchcock.

He had a seven -year contract with Hitchcock and sold him all over the

It was the profits from the Hitchcock contract that kept him alive. He didn't

have any money.

He didn't make any money on Gone with the Wind.

But he...

He had Hitchcock. That was his annuity for five or six years.

Do you know the world is a foul sty?

Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses, you'd find swine?

Of the ten films Hitchcock made while under contract, only three were for

Selznick. But the loan art films include some of his most powerful work, with

memorable performances from the stars with whom he would be most closely

associated.

How do you feel?

A little bit dizzy.

Take some deep breaths.

Hurry, hurry.

Now, just a minute. I must sit with her.

No room, Sebastian.

But you must take me there. Watch your back. It's your headache.

Please take me. Please.

Please. Please.

There is no telephone in her room to call the hospital.

Alex, will you come in please?

I wish to talk to you.

Hitchcock was by now a familiar, if rather unconventional, part of the

landscape.

On the home front, however, life at the Hitchcocks was, according to Alma,

anything but unconventional.

Our house is in Beverly Hills, no swimming pool.

He says that would be too obvious.

We have a very average home life, I should say.

Most days, even non -working days, we go to bed early, around 9 .30, and we wake

early. Hitch wakes about half past six, his masseur arrives at seven, pummels

him around.

When he gets home at night, we have dinner.

Sitting in our breakfast nook, then read for a while, before you know it, it's 9

.30 and time for bed again.

He was curiously a homebody who enjoyed...

his work, that was his life, and his wife, and he was mad about Pat.

My parents were not social.

They'd rather stay at home, and they would entertain, you know, at home. They

would go to, you know, a couple of parties, but only if they were very

friends.

If Hitch liked you, you were invited to dinner.

Family dinner, he said, and there I was in my 20s, and I go to family dinner,

and there's Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and Ingrid Bergman's husband

jitterbugging with Pat Hitchcock, Hitch's teenage daughter. It wasn't my

family life, but it was terrific.

Hitchcock's contract with Selznick was due to run out in 1946.

Selznick urged him to renew it.

but the director was already planning his bid for freedom.

In 1946, the trade papers announced the setting up of Transatlantic Pictures, an

independent production company headed by Hitchcock and producer Sidney

Bernstein.

Sidney was the producer, which I suppose meant that he took care of the

money and anything Hitch wanted.

was there before Hitch Aspert.

And the reason was he thought Hitch was a consummate artist.

He absolutely believed in him totally and thought he could never set foot

Bolstered by Bernstein and a $5 million loan from an American bank, Hitchcock

finally revealed the kind of filmmaker he was when left to his own devices.

The master of suspense announced plans for Under Capricorn.

a costume melodrama starring Ingrid Bergman, and a modern -day version of

with Cary Grant.

But first, claim rope.

One of the reasons that Hitch was interested in rope

was that he's interested in anything kinky.

He was fascinated with homosexuality because that was the subject.

Though the word homosexual was never used, I thought it was quite obvious.

He did like to know what he considered perverse things about anyone.

He had no moral judgment about it. He just kind of enjoyed knowing. He was

more interested in people who were off -center.

in every sense of the word.

Reveling in his newfound independence, Hitchcock also devised a radical

technique for Rope, the ten -minute take.

He wanted to make a film that had no editing in it.

He wanted to make it look as though it was all done in one take.

This was the first film he had done...

away from Selznick, who evidently he grew to loathe and despise.

And so I think he wanted to do something, you know, quite different and

interesting.

Rope was the antithesis of Hitchcock's tried and trusted montage method.

Rather than being made from the assembly of small pieces of film, it was shot in

continuous ten -minute takes, the length of a single reel of film.

To achieve this, the massive Technicolor camera had to be able to roam at will

through a specially designed set crowded with actors, technicians, props and

equipment.

The walls moved and stage and snatch chairs away. It was all about cameras

cables and moving walls all timed perfectly, except for the actors who

it fend for themselves.

We had to have a lot of prop men to move the furniture out of the way, or you'd

go over and start to sit down and hope that he was going to put a chair under

you, you know, if not you went on the floor.

Undeterred by Rope's disappointing box office performance, Hitchcock pushed on

with plans for Under Capricorn.

Still wedded to the ten -minute take, Hitchcock struggled to adapt it to a

sprawling costume drama.

I remember one day when we were working, Hitch threw down his pencil and stood

up and said, this film's going to be a flop.

Oy.

And he disappeared.

Now, this wasn't like him.

This really wasn't like him. It was like a temperamental outburst.

And that haunted me. This film is going to be a failure.

Yes. Bring it up here, please, quick.

In there.

On the end of my bed.

Where did you say it was?

There, on my bed. You can see it quite plainly. It won't move.

For all its technical virtuosity, the ten -minute take proved an expensive way

to make films.

One mistake, however trivial, meant reshooting an entire reel.

On Under Capricorn, Hitchcock finally admitted defeat, reserving the technique

for a few set pieces.

It won't worry you anymore.

Thank you.

I'm so sorry to bother you.

I'm very much obliged to you, Charlie.

You've been most kind.

Good night.

But by now the film was over budget.

It died at the box office.

And Transatlantic died with it.

Driven into bankruptcy.

You're bothered by rats, I see.

What prompted Hitch to do any particular film in any fashion,

I have no idea.

He would get what became almost an idée fixe, and he

would pursue it.

And if you didn't approve of it, then you were free to walk away from it.

if you wanted to be part of it.

This was, after all, Alfred Hitchcock.

The failure of Transatlantic was a watershed in Hitchcock's career.

Never again would he venture outside the studio system.

The system would make him one of the richest and most successful directors in

Hollywood.

It would support the creation of his most popular and enduring work.

It would turn him into an international star.

And ultimately, it would frustrate his ambitions and make him a prisoner of his

own success.

Tomorrow night, the Hitchcock blonde and box office flop.

Reputations continues here on BBC4 at 12 .45.

And before that, a murder mystery with great comedy performances from Alastair

Simm and Joyce Grenfell alongside Marlena Dietrich and Jane Wyman. Stage

is at 11.