In The 39 Steps, a charwoman comes upon a dead body, and her scream turns into the shriek of the Flying Scotsman bearing Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) northwards on his flight from the police. A quarter of a century later, Hitchcock did it visually when, in North by Northwest, Cary Grant pulls Eva Marie Saint to safety on the face of Mount Rushmore. "Up you come, Mrs Thornhill," he says, and in a daring sight-gag he is hoisting her into an upper berth on a train, which then - and phallic symbolism can get no more impudent - plunges into a tunnel. In the first three decades of sound pictures, Hollywood had only a few - a very few - directors-as-stars. There was the begetter of the "Lubitsch Touch", and there was Frank Capra, the laureate of Mr Deeds, Jefferson Smith and George Bailey, who wished he had never been born. For a short time, with such horror movies as Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, Universal punned on the name of the director with their slogan: "It's a (James) Whale of a Picture!" At 20th Century Fox, there was the slow apotheosis of John Ford; and, at Paramount, the doyen of kitsch employed a mixture of bombast and vulgarity which inspired Dilys Powell's clerihew:
Much against his will,
Cecil B. De Mille
Was persuaded to keep Moses
Out of the Wars of the Roses.
In Britain in the 1930s, there was Alfred Hitchcock first and the rest of the field nowhere. To those of us who grew up with the "talkies", a director was stereotypically a man with a megaphone, a sola topi and a riding crop. Then, and for all time, the image abruptly changed to that of Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, an unlovely fat man in a business suit. Again in The 39 Steps, we were shown a genteel upper-crust family which had impeccable manners, even when the nice husband (Godfrey Tearle) shot Richard Hannay through the heart - or so we thought. In Young and Innocent, we knew that the murderer had a nervous tic, and the camera in one magnificent crane-shot glided over a dance-floor, towards the black-face orchestra and into an enormous close-up of the twitching eyes of the drummer. We would see this reprised - and to not such electrifying effect - in one of Hitchcock's best films, Notori- ous. Here, we became joyously aware, was a way of telling a story which made us as conscious of the story-teller as if he were a Maugham or a Maupassant . . .
It was fun. In The Lady Vanishes, Basil Radford - one of a group of beleaguered travellers - hoists a pocket handkerchief as a flag of truce. We hear a gunshot off-screen, and his face, shown in close-up, is merely puzzled . . . Then he lowers his hand into frame and we see the blood. Long before we ever became cineastes and looked for what O'Casey would call "magnificent meanins", we had a good time, and so did Hitchcock.
We had little thought then for the lightning-sharp pace of the story - Hitch cut "in the camera", leaving a minimum of spare footage for an editor to play games with. Wiser today, we marvel at the sequence in Sabotage, in which a boy (Desmond Tester) on an errand unwittingly carries a timebomb, dawdling on his way as the suspense mounts, until finally - and fatally - he is sitting on board a London double-decker while Hitchcock cuts to clocks along the bus route as they tick the seconds away. Talking films had no sooner come in with Blackmail (1929) than Hitchcock was playing tricks with the new toy: sound. The heroine has stabbed a man, and next day when her family discusses the killing over the breakfast table, their talk becomes an inaudible babble, with only the single word, "knife", leaping out clearly. We loved Hitchcock's gimmickry, his token walk-on appearances, and his use of actual locales - the British Museum in Blackmail, the Forth Bridge in The 39 Steps, Westminster Cathedral in Foreign Correspondent, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, Quebec's Breakneck Stairs in I Confess, and the Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much. And there was his startling sexuality. One wonders if the knickerless Sharon Stone could have come within a light-year of Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps - surely the perfect thriller - when, while handcuffed to Robert Donat, she peels off her wet silk stockings. "My God, that's erotic!" I heard my 14-year-old daughter gasp.
And in the same film, when the spies want to smuggle a secret formula - the famous McGuffin - out of England, they do not put it in an envelope and simply send it by post. Instead, it must go abroad tucked inside the brain of Mr Memory (the superb Wylie Watson), a music hall performer. Hitchcock had a showman's contempt for logic. In Shadow of a Doubt, when the serial-murderer, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), wants to get rid of his suspicious niece (Teresa Wright), he saws through a wooden step that anyone else in the family might, fatally, have used instead of her. In Spellbound, a hand points a pistol at Ingrid Bergman, then turns through 180 degrees until the gun is pointing at us, the audience: a feat that is all but physically impossible. And why Tippi Hedren should go into that attic in The Birds
- except to frighten us to death - is beyond all reason Another hallmark was that his villains were never villainous. In Notorious, Claude Rains ("Mother, I am married to an American spy!") is virtually a dote. And in Sabo- teur, the heads of the Nazi spy ring are a loving grandfather and a society dowager; their henchmen sing cannibalised Chopin ("Tonight we love") and scrupulously give the correct change when the heroine sends out for an ice-cream.
Hitchcock, the son of an East End poultry and fruit dealer, had begun his career in Islington Studios as a designer of titles for silent films. By the end of the 1930s, British films could no longer contain him; he went to America and made Rebecca for David O. Selznick. With this - apart from a close-up of the monstrous Florence Bates stubbing out her cigarette in a jar of cold cream (in the later To Catch a Thief, which was in colour, it was a fried egg!) - he was like a small boy on his best behaviour: beyond criticism and a trifle boring. He reverted to impishness with his next film, Foreign Correspondent. This was Hitchcock at his most devilish: an assassination in a sea of umbrellas; the sails of a Dutch windmill turning against the wind; a fall from the tower of Westminster Cathedral (Edmund Gwenn's murderous hands rushing at us are unforgettable); a mid-air shot in which the camera moves up to a flying boat and then, magically, seems to enter through a window, tracking along the aisle. And, as if by way of an encore, there is the crash of the clipper into the Atlantic as seen from the flight deck.
Hitchcock would set himself challenges, as if boasting: "Look, no hands!" There was a cramped location, as in Lifeboat, a single viewpoint (Rear Window), and the self-defeating "10-minute takes" of Rope and the moribund Under Capricorn. He accepted the shooting schedule and budgetary constraints of a TV film to make Psycho, which, perhaps to his own surprise, became a template for all that followed.
In his book, The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto, the author of several fly-on-the-wall biographies, argues with surprising conviction that many of Hitchcock's films were - consciously or not - essays in autobiography. He was a physically unlovely man, deterred from sexual adventure by a Jesuit upbringing, a marriage rooted in a respectability that was as stultifying as Noel Coward's Fumed Oak, and a fear of rejection. He attempted to play Svengali to a succession of icy blondes: Madeleine Carroll, Joan Fontaine, Vera Miles, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint and Tippi Hedren. A portly Pygmalion, he tried to possess Hedren, putting himself in control of her appearance, her persona, her private life. Then, it is said, he made a pass, which was rejected, and he revenged himself by rubbishing his film-in-progress, Marnie, starring Hedren and an apparently embalmed Sean Connery.
Hitchcock's attitude towards women was not for the squeamish. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman is made to pay dearly for her moral delinquency; and Cary Grant's behaviour towards her is so darkly paranoid that, when he rescues her from Claude Rains, she seems to be escaping from frying pan to fire. In Psycho, the heroine pays for her sins in a shower cubicle of the Bates Motel. In Vertigo, the Kim Novak character - a catspaw in a murder scheme - falls to her death. In Frenzy, two women - one an emasculating wife, the other a girl who enjoys casual sex - are raped and strangled. In this - Hitchcock's penultimate film - he uses nude body doubles for Anna Massey and Barbara Leigh-Hunt, and there is shocking imagery that suggests an old man's drooling enjoyment.
The later films are afflicted with elephantiasis - in his remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the early bus conversation, done against a wobbling piece of back-projection, is almost amateurish and threatens to be endless. As if to compensate, there are explorations of guilt and duality, and Hitchcock makes us, the audience, his accomplices in voyeurism. In Rear Window, James Stewart is a photographer confined to one room because of a broken leg. He spies on his neighbours in the apartments opposite, and, since we see them through his eyes - and the eye of his zoom lens - there is an uneasy complicity. What draws the sting is the apple-pie normality of the Jimmy Stewart image.
In Vertigo, too, the same actor's homespun persona waters down the theme of sexual obsession. Stewart is hardly a convincing Hitchcock-substitute as he attempts to remake the red-headed Judy into the blonde Madeleine, who, he believes, is dead. With respect to those who hold Vertigo to be Hitchcock's masterpiece, I am in a dissenting minority. It seems contrived, from the ludicrous coroner's inquest at which Scottie (Stewart) is pilloried, to the silliness of the ending, where the sudden appearance of a nun causes Judy/Madeleine to leap to her death. And one could argue into the small hours about the timing of the revelation that the two women are in fact one. There are, to be sure, moments of vintage Hitchcock, such as the stunning "dolly-out, zoom-in" shot of the staircase; and the film is a startling and audacious personal confession - as close as the director ever came to baring a most peculiar soul.
Hitchcock seems to me to be at his best in his depiction of dual identity, as in Strangers on a Train. Here, it is as if the tennis star, Guy, taunted by a sluttish wife - who is fated to become yet another of the director's female victims - finds his alter ego in the smiling Bruno, who suggests that they should "swap murders". It is a schizoid echo of the telepathic link that exists between Young Charlie and Uncle Charlie in the earlier Shadow of a Doubt. In both films, as in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, only the death of one of the "halves" can break the connection.
Hitchcock's films were so minutely planned in advance, with the shots and effects set out in detail on story-boards, that he claimed to be bored by the actual business of studios, locations, cameras and actors. It was already a case of "been there, done that". It had all previously happened - rather like his sexual relationships - inside his head. As in the case of other directors who, like Federico Fellini, cultivated a public image, he was an incorrigible inventor of himself, but this, spoken to Francois Truffaut, is almost certainly the truth: "I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. They were aroused by pure film."
There was much more to it than that, of course. In his best work, there is an emphasis on how "reality" overlaps with illusion; and there is the dark morality of the creator and an obsession with the nature of guilt. But in a career that spanned 50 years, the groundlings always came first: the films were pure cinema, pure entertainment, before ever they aspired to profundity. First of all, like another fat boy - the one in Pickwick - he wanted to make our flesh creep. In North by Northwest, there is a scene in a cafeteria at Mount Rushmore when, for reasons of plot, Eva Marie Saint pretends to shoot Cary Grant. As she points the gun, we can see a small boy - an extra, who knows what is coming - stick his fingers in his ears. Hitchcock could perpetrate the most glaring oversights - the street backdrop in Marnie, for example - but I like to think he deliberately allowed this moment to stand. It is his dream come true: actors and audience, celluloid and life, all on screen and within the same shot.