Parky at the Pictures (DVD 29/11/2012)

Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone on 13 August 1899, the son of a disciplinarian greengrocer and the product of the Jesuit education system. At the age of five, his father William sent him to the local policeman with a note asking for the boy to be jailed for 10 minutes to see what it was like to be punished for wrong-doing and this sense of injustice and victimisation (which was reinforced by the taunting he endured because of his weight) came to be a key theme in Hitch's films.

Following a lonely, sheltered childhood, Hitchcock worked during the Great War as a technical clerk and a layout artist at the WT Henley Telegraph Company, where he began contributing articles and stories to the in-house publication, The Henley Telegraph. In 1919, he found work as a caption designer at Famous Players-Lasky's Islington studio and, within three years, he was cutting his directorial teeth with the uncompleted two-reeler Number Thirteen and he even completed the 1923 drama Always Tell Your Wife after star Seymour Hicks fell out with director Hugh Croise.

Gainsborough chief Michael Balcon was sufficiently impressed by the neophyte to hire him as an assistant to Graham Cutts, for whom Hitchcock wrote, designed and edited several films. Moreover, Balcon sent Hitchcock to Germany to study film-making methods and his time at the famous UFA complex in Berlin introduced him to FW Murnau and the Expressionism that would come to dominate his early visual style and remain in the noirish feel of his finest works.

Bouncing back from the commercial disappointment of his feature debut, The Pleasure Garden (1925), Hitchcock followed The Mountain Eagle with The Lodger (1926), a `story of the London fog' that he adapted from a Marie Belloc Lowndes tale with future wife Alma Reville. Starring matinee idol Ivor Novello, this was not only Hitchcock's first `wrong man' saga, but it also saw the first of his trademark cameo appearances (as both a man in the newsroom and a witness to Novello's arrest).

Identified as a rising talent, Hitchcock was signed to British International Pictures in 1927, where he confirmed his reputation with The Ring, a love triangle on a boxing theme that started a sequence of melodramas that ended with Blackmail (1929), which started out as a silent production, but was extensively reshot to incorporate dialogue passages including a dinner table conversation in which the word `knife' was clearly audible to emphasise Anny Ondra's guilt after stabbing rapacious artist Cyril Ritchard in self-defence. As well as containing one of Hitch's longest cameos (being pestered by a young boy on the Underground), this picture was also notable for containing the first climax staged at a famous landmark (in this case, the dome of the British Museum).

Although it was not, as is often claimed, the first UK talkie, Blackmail (which is showing here in both formats) confirmed Hitchcock's talent for the thriller genre, as well as his willingness to experiment, as well as entertain. Indeed, following Murder! (1930) - which he also made in a German version entitled Mary - he contributed a slapstick pie fight to the `Shakespeare' segment of Elstree Calling (1930) and ventured into the musical with Waltzes From Vienna (1933). But Michael Balcon recognised that his métier was suspense and, on bringing him to Gaumont-British, he coaxed him into concentrating on thrillers in which danger lurked in everyday situations and ordinary people became unwittingly embroiled in mystery.

Following the critical and box-office success of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Hitchcock proved his growing maturity with The 39 Steps (1935), a John Buchan adaptation in which plot continuity (and, to a large extent, credibility) were made subservient to the atmosphere generated through a deft mix of thrills and dark comedy. Indeed, Hitch considered narrative devices to be so secondary to the overall mood that he dubbed them `MacGuffins'. He also continued to demonstrate his technical mastery with astonishing set-pieces such as the 145ft tracking shot across a crowded dance floor to the twitching eye of a drummer in Young and Innocent (1937), which also saw him refine the so-called `suspense rule' by which `the audience is provided with information the characters in picture don't know about. Because of this knowledge, the tension is heightened as the audience tries to figure out what's going to happen next.'

It was only a matter of time, therefore, before Hollywood came calling. During the production of the espionage gem The Lady Vanishes (1938), Hitchcock was invited to make a film about the Titanic by independent producer David O. Selznick. The project was never realised, but a pair of Daphne Du Maurier adaptations - Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940) - saw the British phase of Hitchcock's career and his California sojourn begin.

Having earned the first of his five Best Director Oscar nominations, Hitchcock attempted to persuade American audiences of the rectitude of the Allied cause against the Axis with Foreign Correspondent (1940). Despite criticism from contemporaries that he took the easy way out in remaining in Los Angeles rather than facing the Blitz, Hitchcock would also make such flagwavers as Saboteur (1942) and Lifeboat (1943), as well as shooting Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (both 1944) for the Ministry of Information and serving as treatment adviser on Memory of the Camps (1945), the first documentary to reveal the appalling truth of the Holocaust.

But Hitchcock also knew the value of entertainment to boosting morale and he attempted the comedy Mr & Mrs Smith (1941) between such familiar thrillers as Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946), which saw him work with stars of the calibre of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. The latter also saw him fashion an anti-love story that was memorable for an audacious crane shot that starts with a wide-angle panorama and sweeps in to a close-up to a key in Bergman's hand. However, some accused him of putting technique before content with Rope (1948), which marked his first collaboration with James Stewart and his first experience of colour. But what was most notable about this version of Patrick Hamilton's macabre play was the fact that each take lasted the entire 10 minutes of a film reel, thus making it the first feature in screen history to be shot without interruption for different camera set-ups.

In 1950, Hitchcock switched to Warner Bros, where a return to Britain for Stage Fright (1950) was followed by pictures like Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953) and Dial M for Murder (1954), which have since acquired a classic status that was scarcely bestowed upon them on their initial release. The latter was filmed in Warnercolor and Naturalvision 3-D and marked Hitch's first liaison with Grace Kelly, who came to epitomise the cool blonde that became a feature of his later features.

Once Hitch moved to Paramount (to explore the long take potential of the VistaVision widescreen process), Kelly also excelled opposite James Stewart and Cary Grant respectively in Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955), whose playful sophistication recurred in The Trouble With Harry (1955) and a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Yet, following a return to Warners for the fact-based docudrama The Wrong Man (1957), Hitchcock began to exhibit a greater psychological complexity. In the disturbing study of voyeurism and the role of the movie spectator, Rear Window, for example, he used the windows of the apartment block surrounding Stewart's wheelchair-bound photographer to act as TV screens to be regarded through the long lens of his camera. But Hitchcock's technical and psychological masterpiece was Vertigo (1958), twisting tale of romantic obsession that was much misunderstood on its release and was considered such a commercial calamity that he almost seemed to make the rollocking road movie North By Northwest (1959) as proof that he retained his populist touch.

By now, he was also immersed in television, thanks to the 350 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-67) that he hosted and executive produced for CBS, as well as personally directing 17 of what he called `situation tragedies'. Indeed, he used a TV crew to shoot Psycho (1960) for a mere $800,000, which harked back to the montage editing style that had been so key to his silent outings. Containing 70 shots in just 45 seconds, the sequence in which Janet Leigh is murdered in the shower earned the film a notoriety that ensured it became one of the biggest hits of Hitchcock's career.
But the new darkness in his work led Audrey Hepburn to withdraw from No Bail for the Judge because of its rape scene and Disney to refuse him permission to shoot in Disneyland for The Blind Man. Undaunted, Hitchcock spent three years on his most technically complex project, The Birds (1963), with 370 of the 1360 shots in this final Daphne Du Maurier adaptation requiring post-production wizardry. He reunited with star Tippi Hedren for Marnie (1964), but this intricately constructed psychological study suffered from unconvincing scenery and sloppy back projection and it has only retrospectively been claimed as one of his more underrated efforts.

As the Hollywood studio system collapsed around him and he struggled to raise funding for cherished projects, Hitchcock proved a major influence on the nouvelle vague, with François Truffaut conducting a seminal interview about his achievement and Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer producing the critical appreciation that led to his installation in the auteur pantheon. He misfired with the spy thrillers Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) and had to wait four years after his last British picture, Frenzy (1972), before he could complete his final feature, Family Plot, in 1976. True to form, he continued to develop properties like The Short Night and Unknown Man: No.89 before deciding to retire in 1979. Sadly, shortly after he accepted a knighthood (despite becoming an American citizen in 1955), Alfred Hitchcock died on 29 April 1980.

THE LODGER (1926).
Notable as the feature that gave notice of Hitchcock's genius, this wonderfully evocative and melodramatic thriller was adapted from a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. But, for all its British bustle and the allusions to Jack the Ripper, Hitch's first commercial success had more in common with the Expressionism of the legendary UFA studio outside Berlin than the typical product of the Gainsborough facility located on the banks of the Regent Canal in Hoxton.

When news reaches June Tripp (billed here only by her first name) that the serial killed nicknamed `The Avenger' has slayed another blonde, she laughs at her fellow showgirls for covering their bleached tresses with dark wigs. Moreover, she dismisses the concerns of parents Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney, as well as policeman boyfriend Malcolm Keen, who has been reading the latest developments in the paper. Thus, she is not in the slightest bit suspicious when the dashing Ivor Novello arrives later that night to inquire about the room available for rent at the top of the family home. Indeed, unlike her mother, she is not overly concerned by his request that the pictures of blondes on his bedroom wall are removed or that he seems to spend the remainder of the evening pacing the floor.

As time passes, Tripp and Novello form an attachment that makes Keen jealous, particularly as he has not been able to devote much time to his sweetheart since being transferred to the Avenger case. In addition, Ault has become increasingly wary since waking to hear Novello leaving the house late at on the night of another blonde killing and since discovering that he has locked the cupboard in his room. As the murders are coming closer to their neighbourhood, Ault and Chesney order Tripp to stay away from Novello. But she defies them and breaks off her romance with Keen when he catches them together.

Stung by the betrayal, Keen obtains a warrant and finds a bag inside Novello's cupboard containing a gun, a map of the surrounding streets and a photograph of a pretty blonde. Despite Tripp's protest, Novello is arrested. But he manages to escape and explains to Tripp when she tracks him down that his sister had been the Avenger's first victim and that he had promised his dying mother that he would bring her killer to justice. However, in trying to warm the shivering Novello with a brandy in a nearby pub, Tripp succeeds only in attracting an angry mob and it takes the intervention of a plucky newsboy to prevent a tragic miscarriage of vigilante justice.

Having recently returned from making The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle (both 1926) in Munich, Hitch was keen to put into practice the Expressionist techniques he had picked up while watching FW Murnau directing The Last Laugh. The equation of the blacked-out windows of the van in the opening sequence with the vigilant eyes of the citizens and the voyeuristic gaze of the audience was typical of the Germanic influence, as was the dissolve through the ceiling to show Ivor Novello pacing above the inquisitorial Buntings. But, in fact, the brooding shadows and canted angles owed more to Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921) and Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) than Murnau's psychological realism.

Whatever its source, producer Michael Balcon was acutely disturbed by this foreign stylisation and the Freudian suggestions that The Lodger might be either homosexual or incestuously involved with his sister. So, he commissioned Soviet-influenced critic Ivor Montagu to take the curse off Hitchcock's amorality.

In addition to cutting down the number of captions from around 400 to 80 (and recasting them in a Gothic-Deco hybrid), Montagu also suggested some retakes, most notably for the climactic chase sequence. However, he agreed with the decision to ignore the book's guilty verdict (which was adopted by the 1932, 1944 and 1954 remakes; the latter being called Man in the Attic) and retain the air of ambiguous innocence that Hitchcock had concocted on being told that his preening matinee idol was not going to be allowed to play a killer.

Widely hailed as the finest British picture to date, this was Hitchcock's first study of a wronged man being judged by a hypocritical society. Moreover, it also contained his debut cameo appearance, as a reporter on the phone in the newsroom (a role he took solely because the hired actor failed to show up). But it was still very much the work of a hugely promising and highly ciné-literate beginner.

EARLY HITCHCOCK (1927-32).
This boxed set contains for films made around the transition from silent to sound cinema. Written by Hitchcock and Alma Reville, The Ring (1927) is a no-holds boxing melodrama that's packed with the deft details that made Hitchcock's films as credible as they're compelling. The story comes straight out of a penny dreadful, as Australian champion Ian Hunter challenges carnival pug Carl Brisson to a prize fight in order to make an impression on ticket seller, Lillian Hall-Davies. But the atmosphere that Hitch generates both at the fairground and in the boxing halls - as Brisson makes his way through the ranks to take a tilt at Hunter and win back his errant wife - is palpable and anticipates both the funfair and the sporting sequences in Strangers on a Train.

Brisson returned for another romantic triangle, The Manxman (1929). Based on a novel by Sir Hall Caine, this was Hitchcock's final silent and starred his Polish protégé, Anny Ondra, as the sweetheart of Brisson's strapping, but penniless fisherman, who goes to sea to make his fortune after Ondra's father (Randle Ayrton) disapproves of their union. But when news comes of Brisson's demise, Ondra embarks on a relationship with his lawyer friend, Malcolm Keen - only for Brisson to return and sweep her into a loveless marriage that becomes more complicated when she reveals the identity of her baby's father. Of course, this is novelettish nonsense. But Hitchcock slyly suggests the insularity of life on the Isle of Man and in Ondra's wronged woman creates the prototype for the suffering heroines of Rebecca, Suspicion and Notorious.

Ondra's presence proved more problematic in Blackmail (1929), however, as her thick accent had to be dubbed off-camera by Joan Barry after Hitchcock decided to turn his adaptation of Charles Bennett's play into Britain's first Talkie (a status that is hotly disputed, by the way). Yet, she still managed to deliver a harrowing display of suppressed guilt, as she conceals from cop boyfriend John Longden the fact that she killed Cyril Ritchard in self-defence as he attempted to rape her. Once again, the film presaged classics to come, including Murder!, Vertigo and Psycho. But it's best remembered for the desperation of the slaying and the ingenious use of sound as everyday occurrences grate on Ondra's frayed nerves. Watching the chase over the British Museum roof, it's hard to credit that this was only Hitchcock's second thriller.

Joan Barry got her moment before the camera in Rich and Strange (1932), a mediocre class drama, in which she and husband Henry Kendall break free from suburban ennui to embark on a luxury cruise that leads to romances with explorer Percy Marmont and adventuress Betty Amann and an unsatisfactory reunion.

JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK (1930).
Produced six years after Sean O'Casey's play shocked Abbey Theatre audiences with its topical references to the 1922 Free State treaty that had tipped Ireland into civil war, this is usually regarded as one of Hitchcock's more negligible works. Despite having seen the play several times in the West End, he only agreed to transfer it to the screen to fulfil a contractual obligation to British International Pictures. Yet he clearly saw the project as an opportunity to continue his experiments with the new sound technology and makes bold use of diegetic sound and off-screen speeches and effects that suggest a world outside the evocatively cramped set designed by James Marchant.

Captain Jack `Paycock' Boyle (Edward Chapman) lives with his wife Juno (Sara Allgood), daughter Mary (Kathleen O'Regan) and war-wounded son Johnny (John Laurie) in a Dublin slum. When not loafing around the house, he fritters his money in the local boozer with Joxer Daly (Sidney Morgan), to whom he confides the secret that Johnny has come to embrace the treaty dividing the island into two nations and has betrayed a former comrade in the IRA. However, this revelation seems quickly forgotten when lawyer Charles Bentham (John Longden), who has been courting Mary, informs the Captain that he has inherited a tidy sum.

Determined to show off to his neighbours, Boyle borrows heavily and splashes out on some new furniture and a Victrola phonograph. He also throws an impromptu party. But his good fortune doesn't last, as Bentham had lied about the money to seduce Mary, whom he promptly abandoned on discovering she was pregnant. Former fiancé Jerry Devine (Dave Morris) withdraws his marriage proposal on learning about the child and Juno urges her daughter to place her faith in God and the Blessed Virgin, even after news comes that Johnny has been murdered for being an informer for the Garda.

Opening with a speech specially written for the film by O'Casey and spoken over a blacked out screen by Barry Fitzgerald (who had taken the title role opposite Allgood on stage), this rather creaky talkie commendably captures the tension and mistrust that beset Ireland in the decade after the 1916 Easter Uprising. John Laurie does particularly well in conveying the guilt and terror he feels after becoming a turncoat, while John Langden matches his treachery with his cynical seduction of Kathleen O'Regan, whose Mary is markedly less militant than her theatrical counterpart.

Hitchcock would later tell François Truffaut that he considered the film to be little more than a talking photograph. But he and Reville retain the spirit of O'Casey and much of his famously salty dialogue, while the attempts to generate sounds inside and outside the mise-en-scene say much about his fascination with the mechanics of cinema and not just its artistic and psychological potential.

SABOTAGE (1936).
Having just rendered W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden as Secret Agent (1936), Hitchcock adapted Joseph Conrad's dense 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, as Sabotage. The story is fiendishly simple. Posing as a greengrocer, Scotland Yard sergeant Ted Spencer (John Loder) keeps tabs on East End cinema owner Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka), who is suspected of being a saboteur. However, he becomes fond of Mrs Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) and protects her from retribution after she stabs her husband following the accidental death of her younger brother, Steve (Desmond Tester).

Hitchcock never cared for film, which was the last he produced for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British, telling François Truffaut during their famous 1962 interview that he made too many mistakes in its execution. Yet, it remains an atmospheric London thriller, whose over-arching sense of pessimism reflected a world that had inched closer to crisis by the Nazi remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. His greatest regret seems to have been his inability to persuade Alexander Korda to loan him Robert Donat to play Ted Spencer. He clearly had little faith in John Loder and rewrote scenes in a bid to disguise his shortcomings. However, many contemporary critics applauded Loder's performance, along with Hitchcock's assured escalation of suspense through the aggregation of telling details.

Others, however, felt that he had laid on the psychology with a trowel at the expense of exciting action. Hitchcock himself felt he had wrongly encouraged the audience to side with Verloc by allowing Oscar Homolka to appear the injured party, as Loder made his less than subtle play for Sylvia Sidney. Moreover, by having him plead with his bomb-making handler, the Professor (William Dewhurst), to avoid a loss of life, Verloc seemed to be even less directly culpable for Steve's death (especially as the boy dawdled on his errand to Piccadilly Station).

However, Hitchcock considered killing a kid to be his most unforgivable error of judgement, which he compounded by having Sidney murder Homolka during a dinner table sequence that never quite conveyed her accidental design. Yet it was superbly staged, as was the devastating preceding scene in which Winnie watched the Disney cartoon Who Killed Cock Robin? having just learned of Steve's demise. Less subtle, however, was the inclusion of the poster for Graham Cutts's farce, Aren't Men Beasts?, in the background, as Ted tried to persuade her to run away with him.

MR & MRS SMITH (1942).
Humour had always been a key component of Hitchcock's cinema. In 1928, he'd directed the romantic comedy, Champagne, and even his darkest pictures were punctuated by macabre wit, for if a thriller was constantly played at fever pitch the audience would rapidly become emotionally shattered and incapable of responding to the intense psychological manipulation at which the Master of Suspense excelled. However, he agreed to do this screwball romp as much to accommodate his landlady, Carole Lombard, as from any conscious desire to explore new avenues in the tale of a Manhattan lawyer, David Smith (Robert Montgomery), who discovers that he was never legally married to his tempestuous wife, Ann (Carole Lombard), because their Idaho license was invalid in Nevada at the time of their wedding.

Hitch was still a relative newcomer in Hollywood and, conscious of the fate of such vaunted Euro-exiles as Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir and Max Ophüls, whose refusal to play studio politics had severely curtailed their careers, he reasoned that making a picture with Mrs Clark Gable could do him no harm. Admittedly, the comedy might have gained more momentum had Cary Grant been available to play David Smith. But Robert Montgomery, who was about to snare a second Oscar nomination for Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), was no comic novice.

However, there's no denying that Hitchcock's farce lacked the fizz of Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937) - the Cary Grant-Irene Dunne vehicle which shares several plot similarities with Mr & Mrs Smith, right down to its bouts of feigned drunkenness and its mountain chalet denouement. But it still takes a pop at Hays Code respectability by revealing that the Smiths having been living in sin for several years. Moreover, there are also occasional moments to savour, including Lombard's recurring threat to finish off Montgomery while he shaves with a cutthroat razor and the bleak Italian restaurant sequence, in which the food is so bad that the cat won't eat it, yet it still entices the gaggle of urchins who mournfully watch the uptown swells turning up their noses.

SABOTEUR (1942).
America had been at war for a less than a month when Hitchcock embarked on this flagwaving variation on The 39 Steps, which sees engineer Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) being falsely accused of an arson attack a Californian aircraft factory that was actually committed by Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd) on behalf of Fifth Columnist, Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger). But, as Kane seeks to track down the perpetrators, reluctant accomplice Patricia Martin (Priscilla Lane) is far from convinced of his innocence.

As was often the case, Hitch was less than enamoured with his principals, having failed to land either Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck or Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney. However, his biggest disappointment lay in losing Harry Carey as Tobin, as his wife felt the role would damage his avuncular image. But if Hitchcock was disgruntled with his actors, he was delighted to count the celebrated wit Dorothy Parker among a scriptwriting team that also included his longtime collaborator Joan Harrison and novelist Peter Viertel. Indeed, he considered Parker's disconcertingly comic sequence,  in which Cumming and Lane hide out on a train among some bickering circus performers, among the film's highlights.

Much less successful, however, was the encounter between the handcuffed Cumming and the blind man who offers him sanctuary. Already embarrassingly reminiscent of a similar two-way involving Boris Karloff and OP Heggie in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the scene was rendered almost unwatchable by the scenery-gnawing excesses of Vaughan Glaser. Yet Saboteur also contains two memorable Hitchcock moments, each of which turned on one of his trademark themes - terror within the everyday.

The first was the society ball, in which Cumming and Lane were surrounded by ordinary people in a public place, while simultaneously being menaced by Tobin's henchmen. The second was set in the cinema auditorium at the Radio City Music Hall and showed the audience continuing to roar with laughter at the action on screen, initially oblivious to the life and death struggle occurring within its midst. The haunted expression of Norman Lloyd was key to this sequence, as it was to the climactic cliffhanger. Hitchcock later suggested that he had made a mistake in having Lloyd cling to the Statue of Liberty's torch rather than Cumming, as the viewer was less likely to be concerned about the fate of the traitor. However, he more than made amends with the Mount Rushmore episode in North By Northwest.

LIFEBOAT (1943).
What is so fascinating about Hollywood features in the so-called Golden Age is their willingness to accept that not every American is a solid citizen. Indeed, modern viewers will doubtless be amused by the disapproving depiction of the rich and complacent at a time of economic strife. Yet, even during the Second World War, the studios continued to stress the darker side of human nature and, in Lifeboat (1943), Hitchcock shrewdly contrasts the petty and divisive concerns of the American survivors of a mid-Atlantic submarine strike with the single-minded determination of their German prisoner.

When a freighter bound from New York to London is attacked by a U-boat, the Allied crew retaliates and both vessels are destroyed. Alone in a lifeboat, journalist Tallulah Bankhead is relieved to be joined by oiler John Hodiak and radio operator Hume Cronyn. However, she is furious that Hodiak knocked her 16mm camera into the water on pulling Cronyn aboard and she remains testy as Army nurse Mary Anderson and wounded sailor William Bendix scramble into the cramped boat and only perks up when she recognises wealthy industrialist Henry Hull and African-American steward Canada Lee.

The mood soon darkens again, however, when Anderson realises that the baby newcomer Heather Angel is coddling has died and Cronyn explains that she is a shell-shock victim returning to her family in Bristol. But the survivors are quickly distracted by the arrival of Walter Slezak, a German who appears not to speak English. Given his Czech heritage, Hodiak wants them to cast him adrift, but Bendix and Hull recognise their duty to save a fellow human being and persuade the others to vote him aboard before coaxing Angel into letting her baby slip into the water.

The next morning, Angel has disappeared. But the discovery that Slezak was the captain of the submarine focuses everybody's minds, especially an argument with Hodiak breaks out as to who is in command of the boat. Having performed an impromptu operation on Bendix's badly injured leg, Slezak earns the trust of his fellow castaways and they continue to accept his stewardship - even after Cronyn realises he is steering them away from Bermuda and back towards the German convoy - after he steers them through a storm. But, while Hodiak and Bankhead and Cronyn and Anderson become romantically preoccupied with each other, Bendix notices that Slezak has a hidden water supply and, when he murders Bendix to keep his secret, all but the dismayed Lee turn on him.

Eventually, the desperate passengers spot the German ship in the distance. However, it comes under attack and Hodiak despairs when helpless seaman William Yetter, Jr. tries to pull a gun on them as he is pulled into the lifeboat. Lee disarms the youth and they await rescue contemplating the ferocity of the enemy and how long it might take to vanquish them.

Made to answer critics back in Blighty that Hitchcock was doing little or nothing for the war effort, Lifeboat was intended as a microcosm of the war and a summation of the director's changing attitude to the Germans he had feared as a boy, admired as a young man and now thoroughly detested. As he later told François Truffaut: `We wanted to show that at the moment there were two world forces confronting each other, the democracies and the Nazis, and while the democracies were completely disorganised, all of the Germans were clearly headed in the same direction. So here was a statement telling the democracies to put their differences aside temporarily and to gather their forces to concentrate on the common enemy, whose strength was precisely derived from a spirit of unity and of determination.'

However, few viewed the matter as straightforwardly as Hitchcock. The Office of War Information complained that `the group of Americans in the lifeboat paint a picture which the Nazi propagandists themselves would like to promote', while Bosley Crowther seethed in the New York Times that Hitchcock had `sold out democratic ideals and elevated the Nazi superman'. Even John Steinbeck, on whose story the screenplay was based, took exception to it. Amidst the benighted hubbub, only the great News Chronicle critic, Richard Winnington, recognised that Hitchcock had delivered some `good and timely propaganda' and he was rewarded for his efforts with an Oscar nomination.

Confining himself to a cameo in a photograph for a dietary aid on the page of a newspaper, Hitchcock reins in his natural tendency to combine suspense with mischief. Yet there is still plenty of gallows wit in this bleak tale, with Bankhead (a stage star suspicious of the camera) timing her quips to perfection, whether she is chastising Hodiak for his socialist stubbornness, berating Slezak for his ruthless cunning or siding with Lee, the ultimate outsider in the most enclosed of spaces. However, each performance is superbly judged, with Oxford-born Heather Angel underplaying disconcertingly as the woman protecting a baby that may not even be her own in a bid to find something to cling to amidst the madness.

The most significant turn, however, is Slezak's Nazi, who is not only intellectually superior to his fellow occupants, but he is also the most emotionally stable and nautically aware. Yet, even though he makes several wise decisions and displays heroic tenacity in weathering the storm, he is not quite clever enough to conceal his rank, his knowledge of English or his water bottle. Thus, even though Hitchcock presents him as a worthy adversary, he also reveals him to be flawed and beatable. Yet he also cautions against the mob mentality that overtakes the good guys in the rush to punish Slezak and it's typical of Hitchcock that the ringleader should be the prim nurse (who has actually been exposed as the mistress of a married man) and that the one looking on aghast is the God-fearing black man who would be no stranger to lynch law.

UNDER CAPRICORN (1949).
Hitchcock's second outing for his own Transatlantic Pictures company was adapted by the Scottish playwright James Birdie from a novel by Helen Simpson, who had co-written the 1929 thriller, Enter Sir John, on which Hitchcock had based Murder! (1930). Yet, despite the fact that this was Hitch's first British-made feature in a decade, it singularly failed to replicate the success of his recent Hollywood pictures.

Marking his first return to costume drama since Jamaica Inn, the action contains distinctive echoes of both Rebecca (which sees housekeeper Judith Anderson attempt to protect the memory of her late mistress by convincing Joan Fontaine that new husband Laurence Olivier doesn't love her) and Notorious (in which Cary Grant saves fellow spy Ingrid Bergman from being poisoned in the home of ex-Nazi Claude Rains). Set in Australia in 1831, it opens with Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) accompanying his governor uncle (Cecil Parker) to Sydney, where he promptly falls for Lady Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman), the neglected Irish wife of ex-convict Samson Flusky (Joseph Cotten) who is imprisoned in an imposing pile whose name `Minyago Yugilla' translates as `Why Weepest Thou?' and whose devoted housemaid Milly (Margaret Leighton) encourages her mistress's drinking in the hope of destroying the marriage.

No sooner had Hitchcock arrived at Elstree Studios than an electricians' strike broke out and lingering resentments were exacerbated by his decision to shoot in complex long takes that placed additional pressure on the crew. The loss of a further fortnight to bad weather scarcely improved tempers and Hitchcock was then forced to complete the final scenes to a rigid deadline caused by the imminence of an incoming production. Having returned to Hollywood, Hitchcock and his partner Sidney Bernstein then squabbled via telegram over the cutting of the picture, which ended up costing $2.5 million.

Worse was to follow, however, as within days of the film's US opening, news broke of Bergman's adulterous affair with Roberto Rossellini (whom she had met during the shoot) and Catholic pressure groups demanded its immediate suppression. However, it was the bad press that caused the movie to flop and revert back to the bank that had financed it. Yet, this acerbic historical is bleakly compelling. Jack Cardiff's Technicolor photography, Tom Morahan's sets, Roger Furse's costumes and John Addinsell's score were all splendid. Moreover, the action perfectly bore out Hitchcock's contention (which tellingly inverts Jean Renoir's belief that everyone has their reasons) that `everything's perverted in a different way'. Thus, Henrietta has both beauty and a tendency to self-destruct; Flusky possesses decency, but no passion; Charles combines civility and covetousness; while Milly takes loyalty to the point where she's prepared to kill to prove it. So, while this may not be a classic, it is long overdue a re-evaluation.

STAGE FRIGHT (1950).
Hitchcock had already explored the confluence of filmed life and theatrical artifice in Murder! (1930). However, he found several new ways of making the contrast in this diverting, if never exactly thrilling adaptation of Selwyn Jepson's 1948 novel, Man Running (known in the States as Outrun the Constable), which had been partly based on the infamous 1920s Thompson-Bywaters murder case.

When chorus dancer Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) is accused of killing his mistress's husband, his drama student friend, Eve Gill (Jane Wyman), poses as housemaid Doris Tinsdale to spy on actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich). However, her ruse is discovered by investigating detective, Wilfrid O. Smith (Michael Wilding), who has fallen in love with her.

In order to sustain his contention that everyone is an actor in their own drama, Hitch transformed Eve from a farm girl into a drama student (although this might also have been a fond allusion to the fact that his daughter, Patricia, was then at RADA). But rather than casting an ingenue, he opted for 35 year-old Jane Wyman, who had not only just won an Oscar for playing a deaf-mute in Johnny Belinda (1948), but who also had the presence to hold her own against the scene-stealing Marlene Dietrich.

Both Eve and Charlotte are born performers. But, whereas Charlotte can treat her widows weeds as just another costume and can play grande dame or vulnerable victim with the same practised ease, Eve keeps forgetting she's in character and the sequence in which she is supposed to announce the doctor's arrival feels like something from a bad amateur dramatics production (which she ends up watching from the wings).

Hitchcock's insistence that the story's entire world was a stage even results in Smith, Cooper and Eve's father, Commodore Gill (a fitfully engaged Alastair Sim), playing roles in her melodramatic enterprise. But the implication of façade was also carried over into the depiction of postwar London, as it sought to maintain a stiff upper lip in the face of austerity and the dwindling of Empire. Thus, St Paul's dome towers over the rubbled city and the locals make the best of the rain threatening the garden party for war orphans. However, few critics picked up on either the gleeful theatricality or the fact that the pacing was supposed to convey the uncertainty of a brave new Britain and Stage Fright has, perhaps unfairly, never really recovered from this initial indifference.

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (1955).
Adapted with remarkable fidelity by John Michael Hayes from a short fable by Jack Trevor Story, this was one of Hitchcock's favourite pictures. Yet, for all its macabre whimsy, it would be wrong to see this simply as a droll entertainment, despite the geniality of the leading quartet, Robert Burks's gleaming autumnal vistas and Bernard Herrmann's jaunty score. Nor should it be dismissed as a one-gag wonder, as the various burials and exhumations by Captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), prim matron Miss Graveley (Mildred Natwick) and new neighbour Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) of the latter's estranged husband are merely the Macguffin that allows Hitchcock to discuss the weightier themes of faith, justice, passion and mortality.

Some critics have identified this as a resurrection story and used its vague references to Christian iconography to claim it was Hitchcock's treatise on religion. But, in fact, it's more a comment on those who use belief as a means of social control. Hypocrites never fare very well in Hitchcock's canon and, although they're admittedly thin on the New England ground, they are, nevertheless, denounced by implication throughout the film by the unabashed (if occasionally sniggering) discussion of those taboos of puritanical society, sex and death.

Few Hitchcock pictures are so laced with innuendo. But even more striking is the casual attitude towards death - not just on behalf of the four principals, but also on that of  the director whose childhood terror of falling foul of the law is replaced by a barely suppressed glee at turning the disposal of a cadaver into a mischievous prank. Perhaps the city boy in Hitchcock embraced the countryside's more relaxed attitude to death as part of the cycle of nature and that Harry was his pastoral variation on the trademark theme of suspense (albeit in a mild form) within the everyday. Certainly the picture's only surprise was in revealing what the debuting Shirley Maclaine whispered to John Forsythe as her cherished wish after he offers to buy her a gift - and even that reinforces the link between carnality and fatality, as her request for a double bed is made just as her ex-husband's body is left in the clearing awaiting its last and legitimate discovery.

THE WRONG MAN (1956).
Stork Club bassist Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is wrongfully accused of twice holding up an insurance office. Yet circumstances and the incompetence of his lawyer, Frank O'Connor (Anthony Quayle), conspire against him and he's forced to face a trial alone after his wife, Rose (Vera Miles), suffers a nervous breakdown.

Robert Montgomery (who has headlined Mr & Mrs Smith) had produced an NBC teleplay about the plight of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero in 1954, with Robert Ellenstein in the lead. However, Hitchcock returned to Herbert Brean's 1953 Life magazine article, `A Case of Identity', for this sombre drama, which chimed in so precisely with his trademark theme of the vicitimised Everyman that he made the picture without a fee.

In addition to trusted stalwart Angus MacPhail, Hitchcock hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to collaborate on the screenplay, as he had based his 1935 hit Winterset on the injustices inherent in the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial. But the most significant influence on the film's mood and mentality was Charles Dickens's Bleak House, which not only contained an interminable law suit, but which also focused on the confounding caprices of fate.

Indeed, such was Hitchcock's preoccupation with the ethereality of Manny's situation that he used the dissolve at regular intervals to suggest the fragility and transience of life, liberty and sanity. The freakish disappearance of the witnesses who could have given him an alibi is anticipated in the opening Stork Club sequences, in which the patrons seem to melt away during the course of the evening. But Hitch resorted to a similar device at the moment of redemption, as he follows Manny's prayer to the picture of Christ (`Emmanuel' means `God With Us') with the superimposition of Henry Fonda's face on to that of the real culprit just as he is about to be apprehended by the courageous delicatessen owner.

Such religious overtones bind the film in to I Confess and To Catch a Thief . But Hitchcock was also keen to invert the conventions of the police procedural. Ever since his childhood, he had been terrified of the police and by presenting this true-life saga from the perspective of the protagonist rather than the interrogating officer, Hitch generated a new kind of suspense that revolved around a helpless individual waiting for mitigating evidence to emerge rather than a procactive hero who seeks out the real perpetrator. Unfortunately, audiences failed to respond and this remains an undeservedly minor outing.

FRENZY (1972).
Since his departure for Hollywood in 1939, Hitchcock had only made two films in Britain and neither Under Capricorn nor Stage Fright had been particularly impressive. So, the 73 year-old Londoner clearly set out to atone with what would prove to be his penultimate picture. Opening, like Young and Strange exactly 40 years earlier, with a body floating down the Thames, Frenzy follows murderous greengrocer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) as he tries to pin the notorious `necktie' killings being investigated around Covent Garden by Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) on ex-RAF hero Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). But this is no mere dark homage to the bustling city of Hitchcock's youth. It is also a scrapbook of the themes and stylistic traits that had become its director's trademarks over the previous five decades.

The title came from a discarded screenplay of the mid-1960s (aka Kaleidoscope) that Hitchcock had been developing with Howard Fast, before Universal decreed that no one would want to see a film about a gay psychopath. But the story of a strangler who stalks the backstreets of the famous fruit market was adapted from Arthur LaBern's novel, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square.

The emphasis on the mind, motives and methodology of a killer links Frenzy with Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951) and Psycho (1960). But the empathy with the innocent accused also recalled The 39 Steps (1935), I Confess (1953), The Wrong Man (1956) and North By Northwest (1959). However, Hitchcock managed subtle personality twists in both Bob Rusk and Richard Blaney to ensure that neither villain nor hero was as sympathetic as Bruno Antony and Norman Bates or Richard Hannay and Roger Thornhill.

Typically, however, Hitchcock couldn't resist some grim comedy, hence the crack of Anna Massey's rigor-mortised fingers being echoed by Vivian Merchant (the wife of detective Alex McCowen) carelessly breaking crispy breadsticks while discussing the case over dinner. Hitchcock was accused of misogyny for his comparison of Foster's first on-screen victim, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, with a quick lunchtime snack and his second, Massey, with a sack of potatoes. But such callousness chillingly reflects the dog-eat-dog society in which the film is set, as well as its all-pervading atmosphere of decline, decay and disappointment.

FAMILY PLOT (1976).
Fifty years after he made his directorial debut with The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock embarked on his final picture, in which fake medium Blanche (Barbara Harris) and her sidekick Lumley (Bruce Dern) stumble on to a murderous plot hatched by an oleaginous jeweller named Adamson (William Devane) and his mistress of disguise, Fran (Karen Black). It was somewhat apt that he transferred the action of Victor Canning's novel, The Rainbird Pattern, from the English countryside to California, as it symbolically marked his own journey from Leytonstone to Los Angeles.

The hunt for a missing person was a classic Hitchcock scenario and Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern's search for Eddie Shoebridge recalls the pursuits undertaken by Robert Donat in The 39 Steps, Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes, James Stewart in Vertigo, Cary Grant in North By Northwest and Vera Miles in Psycho. The latter film's obsession with the influence of the dead over the living also recurs in Family Plot, as it had previously informed Notorious and The Trouble With Harry.

Karen Black's confession that she feels a sexual charge when either kidnapping her victims or collecting the diamonds that she and William Devane demand as ransom echoes the attitudes of Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren towards illegality in To Catch a Thief, Psycho and Marnie. Moreover the latter shares Family Plot's preoccupation with a fateful childhood occurrence, a plotline that had its antecedents in Downhill and Spellbound.

What was unique for a Hitchcock narrative, however, was the decision to take two seemingly unconnected stories and allow them to run parallel for much of the action before allowing them to  converge. Hitch always insisted on warning his audience about what was going to happen, as he preferred to keep them in suspense waiting for the inevitable rather than shock them with the unexpected. But by playing out Harris and Dern's mission to locate a long-lost heir in a different plane to Black and Devane's abduction racket, Hitchcock was able to coax the viewer into jumping to their own conclusions, which he then proceeded to confound.