The name Hitchcock has become synonymous with motion-picture suspense. From the silent era through the mid-1970s, Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock directed more than 50 films, and although his resume includes a handful of non-thrillers, it's for such films as North by Northwest, Rear Window, Rebecca, Vertigo and Psycho that he's become a household word and cinematic legend...as The Master of Suspense.

It's not that Hitchcock ('Hitch' to his friends) was typecast as a director of a certain kind of movie he needed to produce to meet audience expectations; rather, the thriller genre was a perfect outlet for his filmmaking skills and psychological temperament.

Alfred Hitchcock was born August 13, 1899, to a working class, greengrocer father who passed away when Hitch was in his mid-teens. Raised Roman Catholic, Hitchcock attended St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school, but transferred to an engineering school and learned draftsmanship; by 1920, he was working for American studios in London (mainly Paramount) designing title cards for silent films. Over the next five years, he climbed the studio ladder; by 1922, he was an assistant director for the Gainsborough studio, studying in Germany. In 1925 he completed his first film as full-fledged director, The Pleasure Garden, filmed in Munich.

His third film, The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (1927), was his first thriller and his first commercial and artistic success; Ivor Novello dons a hat and scarf (and looks just like The Shadow) to skulk around London on Tuesday nights, the very night of the week that a serial killer is on the prowl, killing young women.

The Lodger had been a popular novel (by Marie Belloc Lowndes) and play. Nearly everything great about this movie would show up in Hitchcock films for the remainder of his career (he was 26 when he made this), from the wrongly-accused man escaping in handcuffs to the juxtaposition of sex and death (just LOOK at the position in which the bodies are found); in fact, the ending of the novel was changed to make Novello innocent (he was a heart-throb, you see), not for the last time in Hitch's career. The film's celebrated for its creepy use of shadows and fog, and for a sequence in which the ceiling turns to glass so we can see Ivor nervously pacing, but the best sequence has the guy creep up on the landlady's daughter while she's taking a steamy bath. There's no doubt but that this scene is directed by the guy who would do Psycho more than thirty years later. Alma Reville (soon to be Mrs. Hitchcock) is the assistant director and editor, and contributes greatly to the film, as she would in her husband's pictures for many years to come.

At this point in our story, let's break for an aside to help understand why Hitchcock was so good at making suspenseful pictures. First, here's Mr. Hitchcock himself, defining suspense in part of his celebrated interviews with Francois Truffaut, collected into a definitive volume of the mind of Hitch:

'There is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise and yet many pictures continually confuse the two, I'll explain what I mean. We are now having an innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens and then all of a sudden, 'Boom!' There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence.'

'Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is quarter to one. In these conditions the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene.'

'The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen, 'You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There's a bomb beneath you and it's about to explode!'

'In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.'


One other Hitchcock of the silent era is worth revisiting as a masterpiece: The Ring (1927), the only film of his entire canon credited as 'Written and Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.' Carl Brisson and Ian Hunter are two boxers trying to bash each other's brains in for the love of Lilian Hall Davis. It's a terrific boxing picture that's very much a human drama, with some definite Hitchcock skill involved.

Based on the success of The Lodger and his other films, Hitchcock was becoming a hot commodity, and the newly-formed British International Pictures (BIP) offered him a hefty salary, bigger budgets, and a chance to have his films more widely distributed throughout the world. He left Gainsborough and signed with BIP; this was their very first production, and they poured everything into it. The crowd scenes in the climactic fight, a mixture of real people and matte paintings, are impressive for the time. This is a great movie ripe for rediscovery.

By the time of Blackmail (1929), the Master of Suspense had at last arrived. With this, his first talking picture (heavily advertised as the first all-talkie made in England), he takes what he learned in silent films and adds what he can do with sound to create, in his tenth film, his third masterpiece.

A young woman argues with her boyfriend, a Scotland Yard assistant detective, and allows herself to be picked up by a handsome artist; when he tries to rape her in his studio, she panics and stabs him to death. Petrified with terror and guilt, she flees, but drops a clue and even worse, a bill collector hanging around outside sees them go in together. The detective boyfriend finds and hides the clue and confronts his sweetie, but the bill collector has a devilish blackmail plot up his sleeve, so Mr. Scotland Yard reluctantly decides to frame the blackmailer for the murder. The plot results in a chase across the roof of the British Museum; guilty consciences, a chase across a landmark, moral ambiguity, a brutal stabbing, a woman who isn't nearly as innocent as we expect our leading ladies to be...quintessential Hitch. The film is filled with fascinating flourishes and brilliant touches, both visual (a moving neon sign of a cocktail shaker becomes a knife plunging into its target over and over) and aural (an old buzzard prattling on about the murder becomes a blur to the killer; she can only hear 'knife... knife... KNIFE!' from the speech).

Although The Jazz Singer had premiered to acclaim a few months earlier, Hitch began Blackmail as a silent film, signing Anny Ondra, the Czech actress who had starred in The Manxman (and whose English was poor) for this one. While spending weeks filming it as a silent, though, Hitchcock always suspected BIP was going to ask him to turn Blackmail into a talkie, and sure enough, they did. Joan Barry, a British actress, was brought in to stand off-camera and speak Anny's lines into a microphone while Anny mouthed the dialog. Nevertheless, Ondra gives a terrific performance; she's the first of many unforgettable blondes in the Hitchcock canon. There's also a nice bit of whimsy in this first British talkie: during the scene in which he's investigating the artist's loft, the detective whistles Al Jolson's 'Sonny Boy'!

Blackmail was not the hit BIP expected or needed, not helped by the fact the film was rejected by American distributors (the dialog was deemed 'too British' and would be hard for Americans to understand) and several British territories rejected it because of the lurid subject matter and skimpy outfit on Miss Ondra during the murder sequence. The changeover to equip BIP with sound had been quite expensive, and by the end of 1929 BIP would let go a huge number of employees, suggesting to Mr. Hitchcock that he try to be less artistic and more commercial (although what's more commercial than a beautiful blonde in a silk slip hacking an artist to death on his bed is hard to imagine). His next several projects were adaptations of plays, with a couple of murder mysteries (Murder and Number Seventeen) in the mix. The films were not successful enough, and in 1932 the studio let Hitchcock go: he was renowned even then as England's best director, but his films were considered 'too artistic' and not commercially-pleasing enough.

Hitch free-lanced and was making a musical (!) called Waltzes from Vienna in 1933 when producer Michael Balcon visited the set; Balcon had just been put in charge of Gaumont and was looking for new ideas. Balcon, who had promoted Hitchcock to full director to make The Pleasure Garden all those years ago, asked Hitch if he had anything coming up. Well, no. Any ideas? Hitch pitched him a thriller...BIP held the rights to the Bulldog Drummond series, and Hitch and writer Charles Bennett (Blackmail) had been working on one before they’d been let go. In their treatment, when Drummond stumbles on a spy ring while on vacation in Switzerland, his child is kidnapped to keep him from interfering in the spies' plot. It was called Bulldog Drummond's Baby, and Balcon was intrigued. Would BIP sell the treatment? Hitch thought so, and purchased it himself for 250 English pounds, with the studio stipulating that the Bulldog Drummond character not be used.

'I think you'll find the real start of my career was The Man who Knew too Much.' - Alfred Hitchcock.

Next: the British Masterpiece years!

Clifford Weimer is a writer and film historian in Sacramento, CA. He can usually be found lurking about the dark corners of a movie theatre at inthebalcony.com.