Alfred Hitchcock by Patrick McGilligan Read Free Book Online Page A

an inveterate “first-nighter,” and the West End plays he saw during the years before he entered the film industry and in the 1920s made a lasting impression.
    He saw
The Lodger
onstage in 1916, and John Galsworthy’s
The Skin Game
a few years later. He always remembered that
Jolly Jack Tar
had a suspenseful bomb in the plot. The people in the theater were nervous about the bomb going off. A woman stood up in the gallery and shouted to the actors: “Watch out for the bomb!” More than one Hitchcock film could have had that as its advertisement: “Watch out for the bomb!”
    He was bewitched in 1920 by James M. Barrie’s
Mary Rose
, a sentimental ghost story set in a haunted English manor and on a mysterious island. He never forgot Fay Compton’s stirring lead performance, and for the rest of his life he would dream of filming the play.
    He often saw plays alone, and because neither his mother nor his sister had the same fascination with “pictures” (as he stubbornly called them for most of his life), he now went to many films alone too. “I did not miss a single picture,” he later boasted to interviewers.
    The British film industry was falling apart during World War I, and it would take a decade to recover its vitality. American pictures and stars dominated Hitchcock’s calendar, and later, his memory: asked his opinion of the greatest chase ever filmed, Hitchcock would consistently cite the icefloe sequence with Lillian Gish in D. W Griffith’s
Way Down East
, from 1920, along with Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
(“the ride of the hooded men”) and
Intolerance
(“the chase to save a man from the gallows”). He loved Chaplin, whom he would come to know personally, and fifty years after seeing
The Pilgrim
(1923) he could describe certain scenes shot by shot.
    He grew to admire the “technical superiority” of American films. “While British films presented a flat image, background and foreground figures blending together,” he noticed, thinking for the first time about the camera work and pictorial quality, “the American films employed backlighting which made foreground figures or characters stand out in relief against the backgrounds.”
    Shuttling back and forth between plays and pictures, Hitchcock felt the first stirrings of ambition and a personal aesthetic. Attending the theater, he thought about film; attending pictures, he thought about stage plays. Although he adored theater and in his career adapted a number of plays into very good films, Hitchcock began to feel that film should be a different experience, almost “anti-theater.”
    Most film directors rely heavily on master shots and dissolves, but to Hitchcock these would come to feel like stage-bound techniques—like curtains opening and closing. He began to develop his own ideas about howto tell a story visually, how to fill up what he called “the white rectangle.” He even had his own musical language: High shots were like tremolos. A quick shot jumping in was a staccato movement. A close-up of a person (or the “big head,” as he liked to call it) was for shock impact, or emotional value; that was more of a loud note, a sounding of brass.
    Unusual for his time, Hitchcock rarely resorted to “camera coverage”; he rejected the safe convention of opening on a proscenium-type view, then shifting to a medium shot, before cutting to a close-up. Hitchcock wanted to control the perspective; he preferred to open with the big head, perhaps close with the master shot. And his camera hovered over the action—
he
hovered—as though he were onstage with the actors, breathing down their necks.
    Plays depended on interesting talk and music. Film was silent, and depended on images—interesting pictures. Watching plays and films as he practiced and studied art, he found himself thinking more and more in pictures, and of how the “orchestration” of pictures might tell a story.
    Although he remained responsible and attentive to his