BiographyDifficult as it normally is to detach the artist from their work, in the case of Alfred Hitchcock it is almost impossible.
It started, of course, with the Master of Suspense himself, a profligate giver of interviews and the source of innumerable gnomic utterances on the nature of film-making, the meanings of his films and the art of terror. His profile became inseparable from his productions, literally in this instance, since his silhouette must be the most widely recognised of all filmmakers'. Towards the end of his life, as Patrick McGilligan comments, Hitchcock became the embodiment of that image. Dressed always in a dark suit, he was massively overweight, and increasingly distant from the actors he famously described as "cattle". He could make an actor or technician's career, but one whose future often lay outside his own films, as he cyclically parted company with his collaborators from both behind and in front of the camera.
By his death in 1980, Hitch was riding the crest of a new academic wave of admiration. His films, with their dreamlike logic and frequent sadistic plot twists, were tailor-made for a generation of scholars intent on analysing artworks through the prism of psychoanalytic theory. There is no better way to illustrate the idea that cinema is constructed as a voyeur's paradise than by screening Vertigo; indeed, that film, more than any other in Hitchcock's massive oeuvre, sums up his own bizarre treatment of his female leads. When grooming Tippi Hedren, then an unknown actor in commercials, for the part of Melanie in The Birds, Hitchcock had her perform Grace Kelly's scenes from Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, making over the actress just as Mitch obsessively recreates his fantasy woman in Vertigo.
McGilligan meticulously charts this and other details of Hitchcock's long career, which lasted from 1921, when he left W.T. Henley's Telegraph Works, for a position as title artist with British Famous Players-Lasky to his final 1976 film, Family Plot. He brings his subject from London's East End and a family background in trade, through his early years in Britain's beleaguered film industry to his decision to move to the US in 1939 and his growing fame as a director of some of the greatest suspense thrillers of all time (for which the Academy never deigned to award him a Best Director statuette). He describes Hitchcock's battles with studio bosses, illustrating en route the unforgiving contract system that allowed the Hollywood moguls to own and trade actors and technicians rather in the manner of present-day football clubs.
Hitchcock had to fight his own battles on another front, as his films consistently and unsurprisingly clashed with the moral standards laid down in the self-regulatory censorship system administered by the Motion Picture Association of America.
In 1926, Hitchcock married Alma Reville, herself a talented script editor. Their relationship was, by all accounts, based less on sexual attraction (Hitchcock was probably impotent) than on a mutual love of film-making. They did manage one daughter, the doted-on Pat, but Alma's main role was to work on her husband's productions, particularly on their scripts, none of which he wrote himself. Did she in turn develop a crush on Whitfield Cook, a man whose own sexuality was at best ambiguous? McGilligan dangles this possibility before our eyes and moves on.
Hitchcock emerges as a mischievous, work-obsessed virtuoso whose greatest films came as part of a late-life flowering and who, once his career was over, simply turned his head to the wall and died, apparently of no medical cause and leaving behind him his now mentally impaired, wheelchair-bound wife. Great man or cruel genius? Here's where McGilligan's agenda differs from that of Hitchcock's most famous previous biographer. Three years after the director's death, Donald Spoto published The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius in which he argued that Hitchcock's films reflected his tortured personality, his social insecurities, his sense of his own ugliness, his frustrated desires for beautiful women. It is Spoto who is primarily responsible for Hitchcock's reputation as a sadistic tormentor of the female leads with whom he fell frequently and absurdly in love. McGilligan's book is an overt refutation of Spoto's assertions and here the writer lays his neck on the line. Are we really to agree that Hitch's practical jokes were indulged by his admiring entourage and thus harmless? In a deeply paternalistic age and culture, how could actors, shockingly insecure as they always were, respond to having their drinks spiked at parties (with alcohol, diuretics or both) or being humiliated on set? Is lifting an actress's dress and grabbing at her underwear mere Rabelaisian foolery?
McGilligan again and again defends Hitchcock's reputation, encouraging us to view his subject's films not as the constructions of a warped mind but as masterworks of craftsmanship and technical daring. A case of a good man wronged? Very intriguing.
Ruth Barton is O'Kane Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin. She is author of Jim Sheridan: Framing the Nation, published in 2002 by The Liffey Press
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light By Patrick McGilligan
Wiley, 850pp. £19.99