The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Edward White (best way to read e books .TXT) 📖

others the opportunity to look. In his old age, the rights to five of his films returned to him, including Rear Window and Vertigo. Never voicing his reasons, he withdrew these movies from public circulation. In the seventies, academics and administrators from grand institutions asked to have prints of the films, for scholarly use only. Most times, Hitchcock refused, without explanation. Perhaps he sensed that depriving the world of his masterpieces while he lived would ensure that their fame continued after his death. Three years after Hitchcock’s passing, both Rear Window and Vertigo were re-released by the Hitchcock estate, and subsequently subjected to vital restoration work. Thirteen years later, Vertigo was re-released in cinemas across the US and the UK. The reviews back in 1958 had been lukewarm, at best; now they were rapturous. In 2012, Vertigo was named the best film ever made by a poll in Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, knocking Citizen Kane off its perch for the first time in fifty years.

Yet it is Rear Window that speaks most eloquently to the twenty-first century. Hitchcock had an instinctive appreciation for the sleight-of-hand trick that cinema plays on us, zooming in on the lives of others while simultaneously reinforcing the solitude of watching. “Our lives are lonely but not private,” is how Raymond Durgnat boiled down the fundamental message of Rear Window. That seems truer now than ever before. As we observe Jeff gazing across his courtyard, we could replace the glass pane of his window with the black mirror of an iPhone, his sleep-deprived eyes peering into each one of his neighbors’ lives through the aperture of social media. “We’ve become a race of peeping Toms,” says Stella to Jeff as she walks in on him prying on the neighbors. “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” A sound piece of advice, maybe, but one that Hitchcock doubted we’d ever follow.

* This, of course, is following another of Hitchcock’s favorite tricks of allowing the audience to stay half a step ahead of the protagonist, replacing mystery with suspense.

† His quickfire sketches were highly effective; he even used them to communicate with the deaf artist A. R. Thomson, when sitting for his portrait. “Language in Pictures,” Gloucestershire Echo, April 26, 1933, 4.

9

THE ENTERTAINER

“Good evening.” With that bland but unmistakable greeting, Hitchcock began a new life on the night of October 2, 1955, as the star of his own television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Each week, he appeared before millions of families like a comic-strip character come to life. Against a stark white background, he popped into the camera’s eye in a little world of his own and began his introduction to that week’s story. Roughly half an hour later, when the episode had finished, Hitchcock reappeared, said his sardonic goodbye, and the cameras cut away. There, it seemed, he stayed in stasis until the cathode tubes awoke him seven days later to perform his next turn, perhaps armed with a tea set, or a deerstalker cap, or a giant pipe that blew bubbles from its chamber.

His stint on television with the thirty-minute episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62), followed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), coincided with what is often described as Hitchcock’s “golden age,” the years between 1954 and 1963 in which he made Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. But it was television success that elevated him to new heights of fame, where he was stopped in the street by children in search of autographs, and he became a recognizable face, voice, and body in most households in the United States and beyond. In his weekly turns before the camera, Hitchcock exhibited many parts of his public and private identities: his Englishness, his dandiness, his fatness, his devilish lust for murder and disorder. Most clearly, they showed Hitchcock the comedian and the people pleaser, a Hitchcock whose only intention was to raise a smile, albeit without offering one himself. It was what he referred to as “that degrading side of me—the actor.” The television Hitchcock was a show-off whose adventure in film had been a prelude to the moment when all eyes were fixed on him, the acclaim of the audience filling his ears.

Hitchcock the entertainer.

Some of those who had toiled alongside Hitchcock on his greatest movies, who knew how much of himself he gave to his film work and who appreciated the depth and breadth of his talents, were a little disappointed to see him play a pantomime version of himself on the small screen. Most understood his reasons for doing so. First, television had Hollywood running scared. According to figures from the US Census Bureau, weekly attendance at the movies dropped from ninety million in 1946 to forty million in 1960. To stem the flow, studios lurched to gimmicks, including 3D movies. Hitchcock was handed one of these in 1953, Dial M for Murder, and found shooting for 3D a waste of time and effort. The film performed well at the box office, though, as Hitchcock predicted, most screenings exhibited the film in two dimensions.

An alternative way of engaging with the threat of television was to embrace its possibilities. Hitchcock was persuaded of this approach by Lew Wasserman, his agent and the president of MCA, the media company that represented a roster of stars and had already made great inroads into the new medium. Wasserman arranged a deal that Hitchcock couldn’t resist: $129,000 per episode in return for his opening and closing monologues and minimal involvement in production, directing two or three shows each season. After years of feeling underpaid—in Britain because the business there lacked the resources of the United States; in Hollywood because moguls such as David O. Selznick had the power to strike deals in their