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The magpie genius of Alfred the Great
Could Alfred Hitchcock be the greatest movie director of all time? Well, he still sells in a notoriously fickle industry, writes Sunita Rappai
Alfred Hitchcock by Nicholas Haeffner
Pearson Books, £13.99 order this book
DARK genius or the master of light entertainment? When it comes to Sir Alfred Hitchcock – arguably the greatest director of the 20th century – the jury’s still out.
What isn’t in doubt is either his fame or his continued popularity with audiences. Fortyfive years after it was first made and some 25 years after his death, his seminal horror film Psycho – the grandaddy of modern horror flicks – is being re-released as a glossy, special edition DVD.
Films such as Rear Window, Vertigo, Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest meanwhile have all passed into the canon of greatness – iconic works endless dissected by legions of critics and film buffs alike.
For Nicholas Haeffner, senior lecturer in cultural studies at London Metropolitan University and author of the latest book on Hitchcock – a critical overview of his body of work – the contradictions are at the heart of the man.
“Hitchcock was a practical person,” he says. “He was a businessman – perhaps he was a businessman before he was anything else. He was working in a commercial film industry.
“You also have this extraordinary person who was quite deeply into art and culture and ideas and experimentation. And you have somebody who adopted the person of a showman – because the public would have found it very difficult to deal with the complexity of the real man.”
Born in 1899 into the family of an East End greengrocer, Hitchcock had a strict Catholic upbringing, attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits. In 1920 he got his first break into the film industry, designing titles for an American-owned studio in north London.
By 1926, he had directed his first film – The Pleasure Garden – and not long after, The Lodger, which proved a big hit with audiences. From there he went on to direct more than 50 films in a career that spanned the same number of years – an extraordinary feat by any standards.
Haeffner’s book was written originally, he says, as a guide for students trying to navigate their way through the maze of film theory surrounding the director. But he was also conscious of those who for whom the sometimes arcane theory of film might as well be another language.
“I wrote it as a book that didn’t assume any knowledge of film studies,” he says. “I went through and tried to explain what mise-enscene was, what the auteur theory was and I tried to put all this in a way that would be helpful for someone studying film.”
Mise-en-scene, for those who don’t know, is the director’s use of lighting, set design, costumes and movement within the frame – the way a shot is set up, basically.
The auteur theory, first propounded by French film enthusiast Andre Bazin in the 1950s, argued that great directors use the camera “to write” – leaving their own personal signature on the film in the same way as a painter or a writer.
Hitchcock, with his sophisticated signature style and recurring motifs – the wrong man, the cool blonde, the MacGuffin or ultimately pointless plot device – was a particular favourite of the auteur critics – leading to endless critical readings of his films.
Haeffner’s aim was partly, he says, to lift Hitchcock out of the morass of these increasingly theoretical and sometimes didactic discourses and embed him in a more practical dimension.
“I wanted to do something that wasn’t reductive,” he says. “One of the key things was that I tried to approach him as a practical person.
“If there is an angle, it is really that my Hitchcock is a down-to-earth Hitchcock.
“What the book does is peel away some of the layers of the onion and all the different thing that were going on in the films and the different ways you could approach them.
Haeffner makes a convincing case for influences as diverse as music hall and Edwardian theatre, Russian cinema, modernism, Freud and interestingly, propaganda, on Hitchcock’s work.
“I don’t think he was fantastically deep though he was into a lot of things,” he says. “He was a magpie – he saw all those things and he took something glittery from each that was appropriate to his films.”
Being a teacher, Haeffner believes studiously in objectivity – despite the fact that Hitchcock, as he later confesses, is his favourite director.
“I didn’t want to write a fan letter,” he says. “I take seriously people who say he could be the best film director in the world but I just wouldn’t be interested in saying that myself. It would be very demeaning to many other talented directors to rate them like that.
“But I do think there was something extraordinary going on in his head. A lot of people who worked with him said they’d never worked with another director like him.”
In the end, he says, Hitchcock endures partly because the notoriously fickle film industry knows he can still sell.
In the end, he says, Hitchcock endures partly because the notoriously fickle film industry knows he can still sell.
“Hitchcock’s films still deliver for people. He is oddly in tune with modern sensibility.”
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