Original subtitles

Good evening.

Tonight's programme is about Alfred Hitchcock's British films, the first

of his career.

Before he became the master of suspense, he made all kinds of movies, learning

his profession and honing his technique.

His later, much -loved American pictures are full of visual sequences which owe

a huge debt to his early days as a silent film director.

Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899 in Leytonstone.

He died in 1980.

In between, he became the most famous film director in the history of the

picture. But why put up with a mediocre impersonation when we have the great man

himself?

Mr Hitchcock, would you say that your films were more or less sensational than

real life?

Life is more sensational.

I would say that...

How does one describe drama?

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

Alfred Hitchcock is a very well -documented filmmaker, but his British

before he went to Hollywood is often overlooked.

He made 23 films here before going to America.

But let's not run ahead of ourselves.

When Alfred Hitchcock was six years old, the family moved to Limehouse on the

east end of London, just a stone's throw away from where Jack the Ripper had

carried out a series of brutal killings only 11 years before Alfred was born.

His parents were Catholic. That's Alfred Hitchcock, not Jack the Ripper.

And being Catholic in those days was a minority religion in Protestant England.

I was brought up in a Catholic household and sometimes it does lead to the

feeling of being a bit of an outsider.

Schoolboy contemporary of the young Alfred, Ambrose King, described the

Hitchcock as a big boy who sat in the corner. He said little and was not

engaged in conversation.

He stank of fish.

Perhaps there is a whiff of autobiography about this on -screen

Blackmail. Here, Alfred is being bothered by a child.

Another incident in Alfred Hitchcock's childhood has attained legendary status.

The story that he relied on as the all -purpose explanation of his interest in

crime and his fear of figures of authority and so on was that once his

who seems to have been quite firm and intimidating in himself, I think, and

Hitch had done something that he didn't approve of, and so he wrote...

a little note, and sent him down to the police station with it, because the

sergeant was a mate of his.

And the note apparently said, could you put him in a cell for five minutes?

Then when he was released, the policeman said to him, that's what happens to

naughty boys.

Alfred Hitchcock's fear of the police would have made an identity parade an

absolute nightmare for him.

If you think Alfred Hitchcock's head on a penguin makes him look like a Jesuit

priest, then there's a good reason for this. He was educated by Jesuits.

Mr Hitchcock, what influence would you say your Jesuit training had on your

filmmaking? I think it taught me some aspects of fear.

I think the Jesuits are pretty, I hate to use the word, hard -boiled educators,

but as far as I can remember, I was pretty scared when I was there.

This is a farewell.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, I too went to a Jesuit school, so I'm...

more than familiar with this.

The cruel psychological aspect of the Pharaoh was that you were allowed to

choose your own time of punishment, be it mid -morning, lunchtime, or after

school, so you can try and find out which teacher was administering the

punishment at those particular times.

I was once ordered six of these, three on each hand, for forgetting my maths

homework. I left it at home, having worked all night on it, and then forgot

bring it in with me the next day.

But despite this small but deep trauma,

I offer a fair and balanced view of the world of the Jesuit.

Alfred escaped the miseries of school with regular trips to the theatre.

In 1914, three momentous events

occurred in Alfred Hitchcock's life.

Firstly, the First World War started.

Then Alfred left school and joined the engineering firm Henley's, and then his

father died.

There is no connection between these three events.

At Henley's, the young Alfred came into his own. He'd been a bit of a loner as a

boy, but at the engineering firm, he joined in all the social events, and in

fact, here's a rare glimpse of the young Alfred enjoying a river trip on this

very river.

This photograph was taken in 1919.

His boss later said of Alfred, He was a natural humorist and clown.

He had a sparkling wit. But it was not only the things he said, but the

spontaneous and unexpected things he did.

Mr. Hitchcock, were you a keen moviegoer at this time?

I was a very keen moviegoer.

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

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

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

He went to get a job of drawing titles, like, and the sun set, and he would

draw the sun setting, and so on and so forth.

And when he went over there, my mother said she saw this young man come in with

this big portfolio.

But she didn't speak to him because he didn't have a job. And in those days, a

gentleman didn't talk to a lady, especially if she had a better job than

So that's where they met, was at the studio.

Alma Revel, born a day after Alfred in the same year.

had entered the film business in 1915 at the age of 16.

Alma was already a bit further up the rungs of the film ladder because she was

film editor.

I mean, in those days they called it a script girl, but what the script girl

was not only record what was shot, but also put the films physically together.

Alfred swiftly progressed from title card designer to art director.

Michael Balkan, a man fresh to film production, opened up a studio called

Gainsborough in 1923.

He was so impressed by the young Alfred Hitchcock, he made him an assistant

director on Gainsborough's first film, Woman to Woman.

Finally promoted to a position of some power, Alfred Hitchcock surprised a

colleague with the offer of editing the film.

The colleague's name was Alma Revel.

She also worked as a screenwriter.

Her knowledge and experience in film proved invaluable to Alfred.

He quickly learnt to rely on her judgement and expertise.

In 1924, Michael Balkan had signed a deal with Ufa, the prestigious German

company. Alfred was sent to Berlin with the director Graham Cutts to film The

Blagard.

In many respects, German silent cinema was far in advance of Hollywood.

There was greater experimentation with lighting and also expressionistic sets.

I had acquired a strong German influence by working at the Uwe Studios Berlin

in their heyday.

Tremendous technical achievements, eh?

were doing. And Jannings, they were working on Jannings' Last Laugh when I

there.

The director of The Last Laugh, F .W. Munau, was a keen advocate of the moving

camera. This wasn't easy at a time when cameras were so heavy.

Here he puts a camera in a lift.

Munau once said that what you saw on the set did not matter.

What counted was what you saw on the screen.

These cars in the background are miniatures designed to create a false

perspective of a massive street scene.

Before the invention of the zoom lens, there was only one way to get this shot.

The move back from the street musician was actually achieved by mounting the

camera on a purpose -built cable car.

Alfred Hitchcock would be influenced by the visual inventiveness of German

silent cinema throughout the rest of his career.

Having returned from Berlin, relations between Hitchcock and his director

Cutts became very strained.

Mr Hitchcock, perhaps another reason for the tension was that you were working

as an assistant director, an art director. Did you break into Graham

territory?

Oh, I not only broke into his charity, I gave him this shot somewhere there

should be taken. I built the set in such a way you couldn't take it from any

other angle.

Hitchcock designed this stairway to heaven set for the Blagard.

Balkan had recently broken a deal with a Munich -based firm called Emelker, and

Hitchcock got the job of directing their first co -production, The Pleasure

Garden.

This was the first of ten silent films that Alfred Hitchcock would direct.

Immediately, it shows two of his enduring themes.

Voyeurism.

And a love of theatre.

Alma Revel was hired as assistant director and editor.

She was also an invaluable support.

After every take, Alfred would turn to her and say, Was it all right?

My mother and father had a marvelous relationship because they worked

as well, and he never made, even to the end, he never made a move without her.

He would find a story, he would bring it home, have her read it. If she thought

it would make a picture, he'd go ahead.

If she said no, it won't, he didn't even touch it.

She had an unerring judgment, and he went right along with her judgment, and

that was from the very beginning.

The Pleasure Garden opened to rave reviews.

The Daily Express headline described him as the young man with a master mind.

The film also benefited from a screenplay by the hugely experienced

Elliot Stannard, who would co -write the majority of Hitch's silent films.

Hitchcock's second film, The Mountain Eagle, is now lost.

But his third film, The Lodger, was a huge success.

The Lodger was based on a very popular novel by Mrs Bellock -Lownes.

Hitch was a big fan of the book, which was about the true -life horror of Jack

the Ripper.

Ivan Novello plays a mysterious stranger whose odd behaviour throws suspicion

upon him.

That's the visual interpretation of the missing sound of those days.

In other words, a man is pacing a room up and down today.

We'd do it by sound and you would see the chandelier shaking.

Well, the substitute for that was a visual impression of the room above and

saw the soles of his shoes.

and the full length of his body, and the ceiling of the room beyond, as he paced

up and down.

And I did it by having a floor made of one inch thick glass.

Shots inspired by German expressionism severely worried the money men, who

thought the film was too arty.

When I had finished the lodger, the director that I had been working for

was looking at the rushes and reported to the producer. He said, I don't know

what the devil he's shooting. I don't understand a word of it.

And finally came an afternoon when the big shot was coming down to verify

his menial verdict on the picture.

And I remember my wife and I walked out of the studio.

and went for two hours. We found ourselves at Tower Bridge. I said, well,

must be over by now. Let's go back.

Hoping, of course, this is the most suspenseful moment I've ever had, to go

and find smiling faces. It's all right. He likes it. But not a bit of it. He

confirmed it, and they put the film on the shelf.

Stayed on the shelf for about two or three months.

They said, well, we have an investment in this.

We'll take a look at it again and finally agreed to show it. And then it

acquired as the greatest British film made to that period.

So there you see the fine line between failure and success.

Although the film was successful, there is a problem with the title role.

Ivan Novello is no -one's idea of a vicious serial killer.

In The Lodger, with his back to the camera, Hitchcock makes the first of his

cameo appearances.

Alma herself makes a brief appearance too, her first and last in a Hitchcock

film.

On December 2nd 1926, Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Revel celebrated a Roman

Catholic wedding at Brompton Oratory.

They honeymooned in Paris, Lake Como and Saint -Marie.

They would visit these same places virtually every Christmas for the rest

their lives.

Alfred's next film was another Ivor Novello vehicle called Downhill.

If Hitch was worried about the 34 -year -old Novello playing a teenager, he must

have had kittens at the sight of the supporting cast.

The opening of Hitch's 1927 film The Ring is a marvellous montage of

images which creates a very modern sense of movement and atmosphere.

Montage was a Russian theory of filmmaking that was very much admired by

Hitchcock.

Montage means the assembly of pieces of film which moved in rapid

succession before the eye.

create an idea.

Here is an extreme example of Russian montage from the film Man with a Movie

Camera.

Secondly, montage could also be used to illustrate the passing of time.

As the boxer climbs up the bill, notice how the seasons change.

Now the third way is the assembly.

Of film.

To create a different idea.

Now we have a close up.

Then we show what he sees.

Let's assume.

He saw a woman.

Holding a baby in her arms.

Now we cut back.

To his reaction to what he sees.

And he smiles.

Now what is he as a character?

He's a kindly man.

He's sympathetic.

Now. Let's.

Take the middle piece of film away, the woman with the child.

But leave his two pieces of film as they were. Now we'll put in a piece of film

of a girl in a bikini.

He looks.

Girl in a bikini.

He smiles.

What is he now?

The dirty old man.

He's no longer the benign gentleman who loves babies.

That's what film can do for you.

For The Ring, Alfred Hitchcock teamed up with cameraman Jack Cox, who

specialised in all kinds of trick photography.

Here we see what a drunk sees.

In his 1928 film Champagne, Alfred Hitchcock experimented with a camera

placed at a giant champagne glass.

At the end of filming, Alfred had a genuine cause for celebration.

Patricia Alma Hitchcock was born.

Across the Atlantic, Hollywood was also giving birth to talkies.

The huge success of Warner Brothers' film The Jazz Singer, which featured Al

Jolson singing and ad -libbing some dialogue, spelt deaf to the style of

Did the coming of sound bother you in any way?

No, it didn't bother me at all. I just took to it like a...

I won't say a duck.

takes to the water, and as it was said, as a duck takes to a quack.

Alfred Hitchcock was in the middle of making blackmail, but he faced a major

dilemma with his female star.

Annie Ondra spoke with a thick Czechoslovakian accent, mainly because

Czechoslovakian. Hitchcock arranged a voice test at the studio to see how her

voice recorded.

Miss Andra, 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 van 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 just 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.

Atalab!

This brief glimpse illustrates the studio atmosphere that was common during

Hitchcock picture.

Blackmail began as a silent film, but Hitch was clearly ahead of the game.

He'd already planned to put talking sequences into Blackmail.

Well, the main problem concerned the fact that I had a Czech film star

the part of an English girl.

So there the problem cropped up. How do we get around the problem of Miss Andra

speaking with a heavy foreign accent?

Now, in those days, we couldn't substitute voices with the ease which we

today. So I had a young actress, Joan Barry, sitting on the side.

with her own microphone, while Miss Andra, on the set, playing her scene,

mouthed her words till the girl on the side had to follow her very closely.

You and your Scotland yard.

It went for Edgar Wallace. Nobody'd ever heard of it.

Funny, aren't you?

Anyway, what's the hurry? We're only going to the pictures.

We've got all evening.

Well, I don't think I want to go to the pictures.

Oh, and why not?

I've seen everything worth seeing.

This is a very difficult thing to pull off.

For example, here I am miming to somebody else's voice. The effect can be

surprisingly convincing.

Oh, hello, Jo?

No!

No, she didn't!

I can't talk now.

I'll be home around eight or sooner if this idiot gets it right.

Yeah, yeah.

Love you.

Although sound was inevitable, Hitch was not about to abandon the visual style

he had so carefully honed.

Blackmail staged the climax in a landmark location.

In this case, the British Museum.

This was soon to become a Hitchcock trademark.

If we think of the Royal Albert Hall and the man who knew too much, the London

Palladium in the 39th Steps, north by northwest, of course, Mount Rushmore,

the fruit and vegetable market, Covent Garden, in frenzy.

Blackmail was based on the stage play of the same name by Charles Bennett.

But Alfred Hitchcock felt the third act was weak.

It was the young Michael Powell, himself a few years away from becoming a noted

film director in his own right, who came up with the idea of staging the final

chase in this very room.

I say, it's not me you want. It's him. Ask him why he don't...

Blackmail was a huge hit.

Its combination of visuals and dialogue made it Britain's first successful sound

film.

With the advent of sound, the camera suddenly stopped moving.

It now had to be placed in a soundproof booth.

so that the noise of the camera wouldn't be picked up by the new microphones.

And also the lights had to be changed. The old lights in silent days made a

humming noise.

The new lights were much hotter.

So you can imagine the working conditions for a cameraman inside one of

boobs. It was, well, it was probably akin to... And when you add the

of recording live music... Let's hope he didn't bring a piano.

What were the working conditions like in those booths? Awful.

They were full of earwigs, and operators used to break wind for

fun and laugh when they got out of the chair, and you'd be dead.

They were pretty awful, really.

And you'd shoot 14 ,000 feet of film in one day. I mean, you know, it was only

tough to save me a foot.

But... And there were a lot of mistakes with sound.

Awful lots of this. A lot of retakes.

When you say mistakes, people were bumping into microphones and they're

generally not used to sound equipment being there.

And shadows.

Shadows of lights and microphones.

Which they hadn't had to worry about before, had they? They hadn't had to

about.

Can you give us an example of the difficulties of working with early

Um... I had a scene in the following film after Blackmail, which was Juno and

the Peacock with the Irish players.

And the family had come into the room. They brought a phonograph and they were

playing a record. If you're Irish, come into the parlor.

And then there was a choir. They stopped the record.

The dialogue indicates there's a funeral procession going by.

and singing these Catholic hymns.

And it was a close -up of the son, the guilty son, who had betrayed his friend.

Now,

they couldn't find a record if your eyes come into the parlor,

so in one corner of this tiny studio, we had an orchestra with no bass to get

the tinny effect.

The prop man sang the song by holding his nose to get, again, the thin voice.

The rest of the characters played their dialogue.

Then in another corner of the studio was a choir for singing in the procession.

And there was more room taken up by the effects and by the camera than the

individual being photographed.

a very young John Lorry here at the beginning of his film career.

In the 1930 picture Murder, Alfred Hitchcock employs a theatre technique

film. Here he records Herbert Marshall's internal monologue, an ingenious use of

sound.

Save her soul.

Save her.

If I had stood out longer, I might have worn them down.

Why couldn't they see the girl as I did?

The rest of the fellow's on the jury.

Unusually for Hitchcock, who was a master of the special effect, there is

disastrous moment in the film. He wants to show a character walking through a

deep, plush carpet, but instead we get this.

Watching murder is sometimes murder.

The slow pacing, typical of very early talkies, makes for difficult viewing.

Watch how long it takes this actor to leave the room.

The two actors by the door have very little to do and lots of time to do it

Murder is unique because it is Alfred Hitchcock's only whodunit.

I've never made a whodunit since.

Very simple reason.

The whodunit contains no emotion.

The audience are wondering.

They're not emoting. They're not apprehensive for anyone.

When the film is finished and the revelation comes, well, you get two or

minutes.

of saying, ah, I told you so, or I thought so, or fancy that.

Another problem for the early talkies was the rather measured and artificial

sounding delivery of many stage -trained actors.

In The Skin Game, Jill Edmund, the first Mrs Lawrence Olivier, is very difficult

to listen to and notice the non -moving camera.

Like so many early sound films adapted from stage plays, the skin game is

overburdened with long, static dialogue scenes.

But in the auction room scene, Hitch remains true to the idea of the moving

camera.

Now then, now then. What shall I say? Think of all the possibilities.

What shall I say?

2 ,000. That won't hurt you, Mr. Spicer.

Why, it's worth that to overlook the Duke.

For 2 ,000.

For 2 ,000.

2 ,000. 2 ,500.

Thank you, sir. 2 ,500.

Come, come. Mr. Sandy, don't scratch your head over it.

3 ,000. 3 ,000.

For this desirable property. Why, you'd think it wasn't desirable.

Come on, a little spirit, gentlemen, a little spirit.

3 ,500.

Hitchcock's film Number 17 was based on a stage play from the mid -1920s. The

star from the original production, an eccentric character actor called Leon M.

Lyon, does appear in the film version. He plays a cockney type that no longer

really exists.

Quite sure you don't know anything about that.

What, me?

Good.

Number 17 is a bizarre film and at times Hitchcock is clearly having great fun

at the expense of the original play.

In this film, fist fighting goes on forever.

The most effective part of the film is the final chase.

These shots of a model bus and train are made with far greater care than the

rest of the film put together When

you

saw number 17 again recently, what did you think of the film? I thought it was

magic

We had these eight miles to track.

And I remember my last shot, I was tied off ankle to ankle from the top with a

camera.

And we were going a little bit too fast. We weren't slowing down. And I thought,

where's the next low bridge?

Because I'm on this top here, and I'm tied off.

So I shouted down below to the kids, my assistants, and I said, well, you pulled

the bloody cord.

And I said, I don't know where we're going.

And Jack Cox was on the footplate.

So he went and pulled the cord and the train stopped.

And he stopped about 300 yards from a low bridge which would have cut me in

half. Wow.

Wances from Vienna is just about the worst film that Alfred Hitchcock ever

At this period of time, my reputation wasn't very good.

A film about the Blue Danube, starring popular musical actress Jessie Matthews,

was unlikely to bring out the best in Hitchcock.

But by 1934, what was the best of Alfred Hitchcock?

Blackmail, his first big hit of the sound era, had been nearly five years

in 1929, and since then he'd made a series of talking pictures which were

or less adaptations of popular stage plays of the day.

His cinematic art had barely developed at all, if we discount the marvellous

chase sequence at the end of Number 17, and with his film in 1934, Waltz's from

Vienna, it could be argued that his cinematic technique was going backwards.

Alfred Hitchcock's career was in crisis.

But then the Hitchcocks began a new collaboration with the writer Charles

Bennett. The result in screenplay, the man who knew too much, also benefited

from discussions with other like -minded professionals at the Hitchcocks flat in

Cromwell Road.

The master of suspense was born.

Peter Lorre, star of Fritz Lang's controversial film about a child killer

imaginatively cast as the villain of the piece.

The early Germanic and Russian influences are integrated into one

style, and the Hitchcock movie as we know it has arrived.

An assassination is about to take place in the Albert Hall. This climactic scene

is played without dialogue.

When you choose a location, it must not be a background.

The goings -on in that location must be involved in the story. For

example, in the assassination, which is about to take place, when the cymbals

crash, that's the time for the shot to go off.

The leaps and bounds that separated the man who knew too much from its immediate

predecessors was carried on with the release of the 39 Steps.

Charles Bennett, Alfred and Alma fashioned an incredible screenplay.

Richard Hannay is on the run from both the police and foreign spies.

She was killed by a foreign agent who was interested too.

Did she tell you what the foreign agent looked like? There wasn't time.

No, there was one thing. Part of his little finger was missing.

Which one?

This one, I think.

Sure it wasn't this one?

As well as dramatically improve in his screenplays, Hitchcock also paid

meticulous attention to how each shot would look.

These drawings by Hitchcock show how closely the set designer followed his

instructions.

The film is one long pursuit.

Action sequences take place in iconic locations.

Jumping off a train on the fourth bridge.

Solving the mystery of the 39 steps at the London Palladium.

And the cast is superb.

Even small roles are impeccably handled.

The milkman is played by Frederick Piper.

It's quite true, listen.

They're spies, foreigners.

They've murdered a woman in my flat and now they're waiting for me.

Oh, come off it. Funny jokes at five o 'clock in the morning. All right, all

right. I'll tell you the truth.

You married?

Yes, but don't rub it in.

On the first day of filming, Hitch handcuffed the two stars, Madeleine

and Robert Donat, together and then pretended to lose the key.

This was a practical joke enabling his actors to experience the difficulty of

being handcuffed to a near stranger.

I tell you, I can't stand it any longer. I'm going to tell them the whole story.

You want to hang me for a murder I never committed? As long as they hang you, I

don't care whether you committed it or not. If they don't, you think I'm going

to spend the whole night with you in this room? Of course you are. What else

you do? Come on.

Come in.

Oh, we were just getting warm before the fire.

I can see that.

I thought maybe you'd like this in your bed, sir. Oh, thank you very much. You'd

like a hot water bottle, wouldn't you, my sweet? Yes, darling.

Yes, darling.

At one point, there is a lovely camera effect that you hardly notice.

This scene is shot in the studio showing passengers inside a supposedly moving

car with back projection.

Hitch then uses the black canvas of the car to cut to an exterior shot of the

Scottish Highlands.

Do London ladies look beautiful?

They do.

But they wouldn't if you were beside them.

You ought not to say that.

What ought he not to say?

Richard Hannay seeks refuge in an isolated cottage.

The wife is played by Peggy Ashcroft, the husband by John Lorry.

I just seen your wife and I prefer living in town than the country.

God made the country.

Is the supper ready, woman?

You mind if I have a look at your paper?

No, I don't mind. Thank you.

Hitch develops the scene in purely visual terms.

You didn't tell me your name.

Oh, Helen.

Well, Mr Hammond, if you'll fit doon that paper, I'll see I'll bless you.

Yes, of course.

Sanctify these bounteous mercies to us miserable sinners.

O Lord, make us truly thankful for them and for all thy manifold blessings.

And continually turn our hearts from wickedness and from worldly

things unto thee.

Amen.

Repeating the success of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock stages another

tense finale in a well -known London landmark, The Palladium.

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...

In his next...

picture secret agent, Hitch was reunited with the actor Peter Lorre, who, since

they'd last worked together, had developed an addiction to morphine.

Can you spot it in his acting?

The actor is not doing a very good job, and Hitchcock is said to have

turned to the unit and said, I brought him in the shop, put him on the

floor, wound him up, and he doesn't go.

Peter Lorre, like Alfred Hitchcock, was a great practical joker.

During the course of the filming, he sent the director 50 canaries.

Unfortunately, relationships soured between them, and at one point, Alfred

a cup of coffee over Peter Lorre.

On other, happier occasions, Hitch was rather fond of the practical joke.

He would throw his cup and saucer into the air to signify the end of the tea

break.

In Sabotage, Hitchcock made a dreadful mistake that would haunt him for

A boy is carrying a bomb on a bus but doesn't know it.

Neither does the puppy.

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.

Clock going, the time for the bomb to go off is such a time, and I drew this

thing out and attenuated the whole business.

Then somebody should say, oh my goodness, look, there's a bomb.

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

But everybody's relieved.

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

Bad technique.

Despite this rare error, there are many flourishes that are typical of the

former silent film director.

When Sylvia Sidney realises her husband is responsible for the bomb that killed

her brother...

No dialogue is needed.

Actress Sylvia Sidney was originally disturbed by the lack of dialogue in

crucial scene.

However, when she saw the complete sequence, she said with great

Hollywood must hear of this.

Hitch was indeed keen on a move to Hollywood. He wanted his films to be

the world stage.

His next picture, Young and Innocent, was full of imaginative and confident

of the moving camera.

You ought to order tea or something if you're going to stay here long.

What, sugar and beers?

In this situation, you have a young girl...

With a hobo, a tramp, you see. And he's the only man who could identify this

murderer. And all I know is that he has some vital stance in the eyes.

Haven't you seen anyone with a twitch head? And the old boy said, well, this

idiotic. In a big room like this, trying to find a man who has

twitching eyes.

And at that moment, I take the camera high up into the lobby of the hotel and

the longest dolly shot.

through the lobby, through the ballroom, through the dancers.

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. Through a minstrel.

blackface band right through the band to the drummer, to his head

and right to his eyes.

This is another variation.

of letting the audience in on something.

Hitchcock's following picture is among his best remembered, The Lady Vanishes.

Although he had very little to do with the excellent screenplay, which was

written by the celebrated team Frank Launder and Sidney Gilead.

Hitch was reunited with the cameraman Jack Cox, as these trick shots indicate.

The film director Roy Ward Baker worked on The Lady Vanishes and remembers

observing Hitchcock on the set.

His method of work was so carefully worked out

that everybody was well informed.

This was one of his great gifts which I took to heart.

When you're giving instructions to people, which the director is doing all

time... then you must know what you want, which is the first step. A lot of

don't. They say, well, I wonder what we should do here.

That's what you... That wouldn't do for the likes of Mr Hitchcock.

But he wasn't overbearing or in any way rude.

He was always very courteous, in fact, and scrupulous.

The Lady Vanishes was filmed in a tiny studio, but it feels far bigger.

Hitch achieved this effect with back projection and beautifully constructed

model shots.

The other trick thing that he got up to was over a glass of

wine.

There's a scene in the restaurant car, and he wanted to get a shot with the

glass of wine very strongly in the foreground, but there was some problem

those days.

of carrying focus between the two.

You could have it with a blurred glass.

Or a blurred actress.

Anyway,

he thought up the idea that the problem was the size of the glass, which was a

normal wine glass.

He thought, well, if we make one which is twice the size, which he did.

Somebody ran up and got some glass manufacturer to do a duplicate, but

twice the size.

And he stood that in the foreground and then it gave him the dramatic impact

that he wanted.

The Lady Vanishes enhanced his reputation in America.

It wasn't long before the Hitchcock family moved to the States.

Everything he'd learned as a British filmmaker was to help him conquer

Hollywood.

Here at the banquet for the 1940 Academy Awards... Alfred Hitchcock deliberately

places his head in front of Joan Fontaine, making Alma roar with

Throughout his Hollywood years, Hitchwood remained loyal to the visual

always taking precedence over dialogue.

In 1971, towards the end of his career, Alfred Hitchcock returned to London to

make one last British picture.

Alfred Hitchcock by this time was in his early 70s and he relished the chance of

coming back to make another film in London.

Frenzy begins with the discovery of a dead body beside the Thames, just as the

lodger had begun nearly 50 years before.

What's that round her neck?

She's been strangled.

Looks like a tie.

Yes, it's a tie, all right.

Another necktie murder.

Frenzy was shot here in Covent Garden. Then it was London's premier fruit and

vegetable market.

Entirely appropriate, of course, for Alfred Hitchcock to make a film here.

all, his father had been a greengrocer.

The building behind me, the one with the dark brick, that's where the murderer

lived. Some terrible things happened in there.

To create tension in one scene with actress Anna Mathey, Hitchcock

kills the sound.

Got a place to stay?

Oh, hello, it's you, Bob.

Yeah.

Well, I think the theme, particularly the theme when you first come out of the

pub and then, of course, unbeknownst, you're following Barry Foster through

doom and you go up the stairs and you go through the door and then it's

chilling.

I don't know if you know, Bud, but you're my type of woman.

I love the beauty of the camera just then coming away from the door, because

we've seen the horrendous scene earlier, so we don't need to see any more

horrors.

At the entrance to the street, Hitch employs an elaborate camera trick.

Could you explain how it was done?

We had the man in the potato, carrying a potato sack, in Covent Garden, in situ.

And we had him brought back to...

The studio where the staircase was rebuilt and we decided to put this scene

It was not scripted in the original script.

And it took a whole day to do.

And it comes back right down onto the pavement where you have the man with the

potato sack in the studio and you also have him in Covent Garden and he did the

cut there.

Because Alfred Hitchcock specialised in films filled with suspense, he has

sometimes been portrayed as a sadistic man who had a strange obsession with the

darker side of life.

Like all of us, he was light and shade, but he always believed that filmmaking

should be fun, and he was a very funny man.

Shall we invite some questions from the audience on what we've discussed so far?

Take the first one down there, sir.

Mr Hitchcock.

In your latter career, you've concentrated more on thrillers. Do you

make other types of film?

Well, no, it's not for me.

It's the public, you see. If I made, for example, a musical,

the public would wonder when will the moment come when

one of the chorus girls will drop dead.

In the trailer for Frenzy, Hitchcock is characteristically macabre.

Hey, what's wrong?

Look, she's wearing my tie.

How do you like my tie?

How do you like it?

My God!

The tie!

Mr Hitchcock, as we are coming to the end

of our documentary, would you care to make a random vowel sound?

Boo.

Mr Hitchcock, thank you for taking part in this documentary.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Delighted.

Alfred Hitchcock used these vast, expansive areas to create a large... Let

it again.

In the British Museum, Alfred Hitchcock used these vast, rich locations to

create a huge, dramatic backdrop.

But how did he manage to light these huge rooms at night?

Well, he didn't.

He used exactly the same technique for the Albert Hall sequences in The Ring

The Man Who Knew Too Much.

That was beautifully put.

In fact, after hearing that, there's nothing more I wish to add.

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