Whodunit? In search of the lesser presented Alfred Hitchcock

Mark Cousins, our busiest chronicler of the cinematic imagination, has made a film called My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. Why would he not? Over the past 40 years or so the impish Northern Irishman has shot actual weeks of footage on the seventh art. It is about time he got around to the Colossus of Leytonstone. Alistair McGowan impersonates Hitchcock in a film apparently consisting of the great director’s musings on life and work.

But is McGowan really giving us a version of Hitchcock? Is Cousins’s script genuinely ventriloquising the private individual? The question is worth asking, as we have a public, partially contrived, semifictional Hitchcock standing between us and the man himself. There are few other film-makers – those who also acted aside – about whom this can be said. Orson Welles, subject of a fine Cousins film from 2018, certainly honed a creation for the media, but he was more often in front of the camera than behind it.

Hitchcock was alone in setting himself up as his own brand representative. He takes a cameo in 40 of his 53 films. More resonantly, from 1956, he drolly introduced each episode of his popular television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He almost always wore the same black suit. The vowels of east London still shaded his macabre allusions to impending perversion. He made a virtue of a physical hugeness about which he was otherwise sensitive. “Hitchcock had a deep-seated desire to be seen,” Edward White writes in the recent book The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock. “He invested creative effort in publicising his face and body, and appreciated that his distinctive looks could be made to work to his advantage.”

I knew a lot of people who knew Hitchcock ... and the overall impression was how much fun he was and how much he enjoyed life

—  Mark Cousins

Just look at the famous trailer for Psycho. Hitchcock walks the audience around the set as he delivers a monologue more arch and peculiar than anything in the film itself. “I won’t dwell upon it,” he says in shivering disgust when addressing one of the murders he himself engineered. Imagine David Fincher or Christopher Nolan putting on a uniform and poking ironic fun at their own creation. They would be as likely to take a job selling ice cream in the foyer.

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All of which brings us back to that interesting question about My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. Is this the private man or the public persona?

“But I love the fact that he had a persona!” Cousins says, enthused by the question. “His voice in particular was well known. But what I really liked about that persona was that it was playful – that lovely English word ‘ludic’. That playfulness appealed to me. I wanted to do a sort of playful version of him. I knew a lot of people who knew Hitchcock. I was good friends with Sean Connery. I knew Janet Leigh ... and the overall impression was how much fun he was and how much he enjoyed life.”

We live in a different world from the one Hitchcock left in 1980. Personal behaviour is increasingly wound in with artistic achievement when evaluating the worth of a film, play or book. Yet, even back then, something of a backlash set in.

“I remember when he died, the Daily Mail went after him,” Cousins says. “But that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Ingrid Bergman loved him. He and Carole Lombard were drinking buddies going way back. I think of that playful, slightly dangerous person. He made jokes when he invited people up to the north of California where he lived. But mostly there was a kind of sincerity that isn’t really part of the public persona.”

And yet. Later allegations from Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds and Marnie, have damaged the director’s reputation. Published in 2016, the year before #MeToo broke, the actor’s memoir featured a disturbing description of an incident in Hitchcock’s office. “He suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me,” she wrote. “It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and repulsed.” There was more.

“As you know, I’m a passionate feminist,” Cousins says. “I’ve done some considerable pieces of work about women and cinema.” (True enough. Cousins’s Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, from 2019, tells the story of female film-makers over some 14 hours.) “So the first thing when I decided to make a Hitchcock film was to look for any evidence. I’d read Tippi Hedren’s book when it came out. I was appalled at the two incidents that she described. And, of course, I’d read the feminist critics in the 1980s who called him misogynist. I’d also read the ones who had countered that. But, as far as I can see – and I’ve read everything and I’ve talked to lots of people on and off the record – there are no allegations, beyond the Tippi one, about inappropriate behaviour.”

He has thought deeply about the Hedren story.

“I think the way he behaved towards her – which is appalling and inexcusable – is partly because he had a sense of being a Svengali, of ownership of her,” he says.

At any rate, retrospective considerations of both Hitchcock the man and “Hitchcock” the self-construct have done little to dull the reputation of the films themselves. It remains an extraordinary yarn. Born in east London to working-class Catholic parents of Irish extraction, he began doing odd jobs in British silent films before moving on to direct early classics such as The Ring and The Lodger. Cousins rewatched all available films and, through the voice of his pseudo-Hitchcock, includes fascinating observations on underappreciated silents such as The Farmer’s Wife. Following British hits such as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, the director was spirited away to Hollywood. There was never a lull. Rebecca won the best-picture Oscar in 1941. The run from 1958 to 1964, which took in Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and Marnie, has never been equalled in world cinema.

“A lot of people have said to me something like, ‘Okay. The Lodger was serious. But he was mostly funny in England. Then he went to the US and the films became Freudian,’” Cousins says. “That seems to be the received opinion. But actually those early films have shades of Vertigo in them. So Vertigo feels like a return to the Freudian, voyeuristic world that Hitchcock was already in before the lightness of The Lady Vanishes.”

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Perhaps the 1960s ultimately did for the director. In My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, Cousins talks about his gift for “chaste arousal”. As the swinging decade progressed, chasteness rather fell out of fashion. Cousins will defend Torn Curtain, from 1966. But Topaz, in 1969, was a dud. Frenzy and Family Plot, his last two (very different) films, have their virtues, but his contemporaneous work was no longer at the centre of the conversation.

“Loads of artists who learned to disguise their erotic imagination, or turn it into metaphor or poetry, suddenly were flummoxed in the 1960s, because it was uncool to hide,” Cousins says. “You had to show. That happened to our generation when Facebook came along. You listed all your sexual credentials on the front page. It certainly happened to Hitch. The subtext became the text. And he was brilliant at the subtext.”

Yet the work survived. That persona Cousins and I have been chewing over for the past half-hour remains rooted in popular perception. And, if anything, the films’ reputations have grown. In 2012 Vertigo finally tipped Citizen Kane from the influential decennial critics poll in Sight and Sound magazine. Last year it was nudged into second place by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, but, despite vote splitting among a dozen other Hitchcock titles, it remains ahead of the Orson Welles film.

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“We think of cinema as a social medium, but it’s as much a dream medium,” Cousins says. “Every time someone like David Lynch or Apichatpong Weerasethakul comes along – someone interested in the dream state – we are back to valuing Hitchcock. That’s why his films are lasting. They’re not washed away by social change.”

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock in cinemas from Friday, July 21st