Alfred Hitchcock

Born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, a London neighborhood, Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was the third child of William and Emma, ​​who ran a vegetable store. He received a Catholic education, at St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school. He ended up enrolling in the school of Naval Engineering, but had to abandon his studies as a result of the premature death of his father, which left him and his mother in a difficult financial situation.

For a time, young Alfred started working for a telegraph company, until he was offered a job in the movie industry, wrapping signs for silent movies. He proudly remembered the Rockefeller banker who started out as a bellhop, a journey similar to Hitchcock’s, who rose through the ranks from the bottom, at Famous Players Lasky, a Paramount subsidiary, from editor to art director and assistant director. When one of the house directors fell ill, Hitchcock was offered to complete Always Tell Your Wife and direct Number 13 , although the latter was unable to complete it because the studio closed. He immediately signed with another company, which put him in charge of his first official film, The Garden of Joy., melodrama starring Virginia Valli . The filmmaker himself considered the first “typically Hitchcock” film to beThe enemy of blondes , which inaugurated the theme of the false culprit, since it revolves around a boarding house tenant mistaken for a killer of blondes, inspired by Jack the Ripper. Here, the director made the first of his famous cameos, a practice that led to the fact that over the years, viewers were aware of the director’s appearances in his films.

From the filmmaker’s silent period, he highlightsThe ring , a boxing drama about two men in love with the same woman, andThe farmer’s wife , a light-hearted comedy. In 1926, the filmmaker married Alma Reville , an editor and screenwriter who would collaborate with her husband, co-writing titles such asThe shadow of a doubt .

Hitchcock went down in film history for making the first British sound film,Blackmail (The girl from London) , and for being the first to use the voice-over to express the thought of a character, inMurder , where an actress was wrongly accused of manslaughter. Despite some forays into other genres, she ended up specializing in suspense, a genre cultivated in literature by romantic authors such as Edgar Allan Poe . “It was the audience that pigeonholed me into suspense. I would have liked to rollCinderella , but the public would be waiting at all times for there to be a corpse”, joked the teacher.

He himself explained in a didactic way what the genre consisted of, to Truffaut, in the interviews that gave rise to the book ‘Cinema according to Hithccock’. “Right now we are talking. If there was a bomb under the table, no one would have known. Our conversation is nondescript, nothing special happens. If we filmed it like this, suddenly there would be an explosion. The public would be surprised, but before they were, he would have witnessed a boring, uninteresting scene. The suspense consists of filming it in another way, giving privileged information to the viewer. For example, he is shown an anarchist placing the bomb under the table, with a clock indicating that it will go off at one o’clock. A clock on the set reports that it is five to one. The same nondescript conversation becomes more interesting, as the audience gets nervous.

Remaining faithful to this scheme, the Londoner’s cinema was gaining in popularity, with increasingly well-rounded titles, such as The Man Who Knew Too Much ,39 steps , Sabotage ,Innocence and youth andAlarm in the express . One of the keys to his success is that he always minimized the plot excuse, which he called McGuffin, to focus on interesting sequences full of tension. The American David O. Selznick , historic producer ofGone with the Wind , which brought him to Hollywood.

“Last night I dreamed that I was going back to Manderley.” Thus began Hitchcock’s first American work, the evocative film Rebecca , which adapts a novel by Daphne Du Maurier , with many elements from O. Selznick’s cinema, as it was a lavish period show. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine starred in this unforgettable film, marked by the chimerical presence from beginning to end of the woman alluded to in the title, despite the fact that she has died. And for the housekeeper, a nightmarish character played by Judith Anderson , who seemed to move like a ghost, since Hitchcock does not show her feet. The film earned eleven Oscar nominations. But John Ford would take that year the relative to the best director for his masterpieceThe grapes of wrath , snatching it from the British, who would never win a statuette, except for the Irving Thalberg award, of an honorary nature.

In the 40s, Hitchcock became very popular with the public, with great hits like Sabotage ,special envoy ,Remember , the shadow of a doubt ,The Paradine process andShipwrecked , which took place entirely on a raft lost in the middle of the sea. InSuspicion would coincide for the first time with Cary Grant , one of his two favorite actors and with the second, James Stewart , inThe rope , shot in complex sequence shots. Especially memorable isNotorious , one of the great movies of all time, with that tense ending, in which Cary Grant rescues Ingrid Bergman from the house of the Nazi Alexander Sebastian, one of the great characters of Claude Rains .

With the arrival of 50, Hitchcock was depressed, due to his excess weight (he came to weigh 135 kilos), becauseScene Fright failed, and had been widely criticized for including a false flashback, and because his beloved Ingrid Bergman had left Hollywood to marry Roberto Rossellini . But it ended up being one of the best decades for the Briton, who in 1951 shot one of his greatest hits,Strangers on a train , shortly before his daughter’s marriage and the birth of his first grandchild. He substituted Ingrid Bergman for Grace Kelly , a graceful actress for whom he came to feel a true fascination during the filming ofperfect crime ,rear window andCatch a thief . But she left the cinema prematurely, to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, becoming Princess Grace, which apparently irritated Hitchcock. In 1955, the television broadcast ofAlfred Hitchcock Presents . In 1956, he made a remake of one of his own films, The Man Who Knew Too Much , with James Stewart and Doris Day , even better than the original. In But… who killed Harry? , he worked for the first time with the composer Bernard Herrmann who would compose scores as memorable as the one for the film De entre los muertos ( Vertigo) , one of the maestro’s great works. It is an adaptation of the novel ‘D’entre les morts’, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, on the two fundamental themes of the history of Art: love and death. Despite its lyrical and thoughtful content, Hitchcock manages to make the story intriguing and entertaining.

Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint starred inWith death on our heels , with sequences as memorable as the one on the plane. One of Hitchcock’s greatest hits wasPsycho , from 1960, one of the most surprising and unpredictable films in the history of cinema. Hitchcock had the audacity to make the protagonist, Janet Leigh , a star, die in the middle of the plot, in the famous shower scene, leaving the public baffled. Tippi Hedren starred inLos pájaros , a celluloid landmark, and repeated with the director inMarnie the thief . According to the blonde actress, the director became excessively obsessed with her. Apparently, he came to hire detectives to follow her and keep her under control.

Whattorn curtain andTopaz were an absolute failure, Hitchcock decided to return to England, where he would shoot his last films.Frenesí , similar in structure to El enemigo de las rubias , is very well received, as well as his posthumous work,The plot , shot when his health was going through a delicate moment. After being appointed ‘Sir’ by the Queen of England, Hitchcock died on April 29, 1980, as a result of kidney disease.