And so, by the last thirty years of his life – he was knighted in 1980, the year he died – he was inseparable from the idea of suspense. You might have thought that he’d invented the idea, because the portrayal of lonely terror seemed to come naturally. Take two of his last, best films, The Birds, released in 1963, and Psycho from 1960.
For a whole generation of cinema-goers, the jagged rhythms of Bernard Herrman’s score for Psycho take them back to the moment when they first saw the film – and, at Hitchcock’s insistence, had been there when the drapes were pulled back from the screen, because no one was allowed to come in after it had started. For it was then that they began the journey into a netherworld of fears, with the camera meandering and finally forcing its way from the sky towards a window for the first scene, and the set-up for tragedy. With Hitchcock there was never any doubt that the veneer of normality was a fake or a delusion: the interest from the first long, probing and inquisitive camera shot – some of them were astonishingly long – was in what it hadn’t revealed and what lay behind. He was naturally attracted to the idea that much of life was a deception. The excitement always lay in stripping away the layers, one by one, to show what lurked underneath. You knew before you started that the revelation was going to be troubling, and familiar.
He was attracted to Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds because he remembered a story of a bird invasion in California, and knew she shared his understanding of fear. Her novel Rebecca, replete with menace and lust in the shadow of Manderley, its encroaching gardens and the greedy sea, had brought him his only Oscar for Best Picture in 1940 (with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine). He got the writer Evan Hunter to write the screenplay for The Birds – in another guise he was the sublime American crime writer Ed McBain – and together they created a picture of horror. From the moment the first gull settles on a fencepost, through the relentless gathering of wings in the sky, to the desperate struggle against the coming disaster, Hitchcock spins out the panic, refusing to let it become overwhelming and resolve itself too soon. There’s always hope, which is the worst thing of all.
These films came after a few years in which he’d released, among others, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and North by Northwest. They all played with his knowledge that you could find fear in an open space as easily as in a locked room, and terror was never far away. For Rear Window he had thirty-one apartments built, into which Jimmy Stewart could spy from the wheelchair in which he was marooned. And before those, at the very start of the fifties, had come Strangers on a Train, where he’d explored guilt and responsibility between the two men who are drawn into a murder plot, an unconsummated homoerotic dalliance and an exchange of terrible intimacies. Who’s guilty? Hitchcock seldom says. He had Patricia Highsmith to thank for the idea, from her dark novella, and he repaid the compliment.
In the history of British film-making he commands a lofty niche. He was making celebrated thrillers in the thirties – The Lady Vanishes, The Thirty-Nine Steps – and certainly into the sixties (Marnie was released in 1964) he still cast his spell. You can’t imagine cinema in that period without him. Quite apart from his happy and very lucrative years introducing spine-chilling stories on American television, in which he revelled in the persona of the seedy purveyor of gloom, he had become for film-goers the guarantee of menace. As he well knew, people sometimes needed it. Although he had taken US citizenship in 1955, and had lived there since the thirties, he still had the echo of the streets of London in that gravelly voice, with a distinctive plummy cockney roll, and it spoke of an understanding of the dark side. He played on it, with the deadpan relish that he used when he did his silent walk-on parts, lasting only a few seconds, in most of the films.
He was one of the earliest heroes of the British film industry. In the post-war era there were many others. David Lean, too, began in black and white and made the dazzling transition to colour and the big screen with epics that became some of the most celebrated films of the age. The home-based industry repeatedly produced directors who belied the weary arguments over the lack of money and the draining effect on creativity. Mike Leigh and Ken Loach have carved out distinctive arcs; a host of other craftsmen drew on the European tradition to try to resist Hollywood. And others, to great acclaim, joined in with Tinseltown and quite often beat it at its own game: the Merchant Ivory school and the social comedies of the nineties had massive success that, whatever anyone said afterwards, wasn’t expected when they started out.
Hitchcock’s story takes us back to an earlier era. He learned his craft at a time when, to our eyes, the films were jerky and the cutting crude. Yet his daring mobility with the camera – a lens seeming to probe into every corner in search of the real story – was a technique that would remain an indelible part of his director’s personality a generation later, like his love of the sharp, edgy contours of a black and white set, straight from an expressionist drawing. That lasting quality also came from his belief, quite a rigid one, in how you scared an audience. He never wavered.
That made him difficult for some actors and writers to work with. Tippi Hedren played the female leads in The Birds and Marnie a year later, and she found it hard. Hitchcock, married contentedly to Alma Reville for thirty years, seemed to have a fascination with cool blondes as vulnerable characters: their accounts suggest that it puzzled them because it was never explained, not least because it wasn’t the prelude to the sexual invitations that were associated with some directors, and which they might have expected from anyone else. In an interview with the French film-maker François Truffaut, who probed this sensitive area, Hitchcock said that he was celibate and wondered aloud whether the simmering sexual tension in many of his films was how he allowed the frustration a way out.
The trouble was that cruelty was his business. In his meticulous shooting scripts – improvisation on set was never his style – he was setting scenes that would reveal vulnerability, expose emotional double dealing, and bring out moral ambiguity like some restless motif deep in the double basses of an orchestra that works its way through the woodwind until it reaches the first violins and becomes the dominant theme.
He’d ask his audiences: who is really guilty? The nightmare in Psycho is one that Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates couldn’t escape from, even if he wanted to. It’s beyond him. Solitude, in madness or in terrible sanity, is often inevitable. Hitchcock had no interest in indulging in discussions about how his Catholicism kept him wedded to the theme of fallen human beings who were forced to struggle for a path to redemption. But it’s hard to look at his heroes and villains, and their companions along the way, and not see something of that acceptance in their predicament: that it is not their fault that they are walking through a vale of tears. There is nothing else for us.
The moral Hitchcock? It’s easier to think of him as the man who said there was no terror in a bomb going off, only in knowing that the explosion was going to come. He understood that watching a man stepping closer to the edge is only terrifying if you can see into the chasm and he can’t; and, above all, that disaster usually springs from innocence. Think of the chase on the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (with the camera seemingly caught up in it), Cary Grant on the stone faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, the first glimpse of the Bates motel in Psycho. They never pall or fade away. Each time there’s a tiny spasm of recognition: that is fear, that’s what danger means.
For all the technique, the tricks of the trade, his own psychological preoccupations, his love of the business, that what was made him great. We understood, always, that he knew.
Towards the end of his career Laurence Olivier made a