The Times (16/Feb/2008) - 'A loveable monster'

Details

• article: 'A loveable monster'
• author(s): John Russell Taylor
• newspaper: The Times (16/Feb/2008)
• keywords: "Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock" - by John Russell Taylor, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, John Russell Taylor, Hitchcock: The British Years - Network (UK, 2008), Peggy Robertson, Torn Curtain (1966)

Article

'A loveable monster'

As a new Alfred Hitchcock DVD set appears, his biographer, John Russell Taylor, explains Hitch's genius

Alfred Hitchcock was truly alarming for a critic to meet, because he seemed to know, in appalling detail, everything you had ever written about him. Of course, this was part of his technique for life, as well as for art: by his own admission a timid man who was frightened of everything, he had learnt early how to arrange things so that everything round him, personal and professional, became a game played by his rules. It was not that he wanted to terrorise people, but he needed for his own protection to have them always at at least a slight disadvantage.

He prided himself on not being able to lose his temper, and Peggy Robertson, who had been his personal assistant for more than 20 years when I first knew her, said that in all that time she had seen him really ruffled only twice. I once asked him what would happen if he had spent a whole day setting up a peculiarly long and complicated shot and then, when all was finally going completely to plan, someone behind the camera dropped a hammer at a crucial moment. Wouldn't he be furious? "No," he replied weightily, "I would simply look round and expect that whoever had done it NOT TO BE THERE ..."

Anyway, when I first met him, in London publicising the imminent release of Torn Curtain, I was duly intimidated because I had recently written an essay on him as "The Last Great Silent Film Director", and the first thing he said to me was "I gather you see me as the last dinosaur of the silent screen." Later, I would have known that he would never refer to this if he disagreed with me, as he hated confrontations like the plague. As it was, before I could stutter out some sort of response, he went on: "I'm glad you think that: one is, after all, making Moving Pictures."

In the Seventies, when I was teaching in Los Angeles, we got into the habit of having lunch together most weeks. Cary Grant once told me that he thought he got on well with Hitch right from the start because "at least I knew what Liquorice Allsorts were," and I think my evident Englishness worked well in the same way for me. Also that I knew a lot about films in general and his in particular without having an axe to grind, while practically everyone round him outside his extended family circle had some kind of hidden agenda. And then, improbably, I passed for an expert on early 20thcentury British theatre, which was one of his areas of passionate interest.

In many ways he remained a Victorian in the late 20th century. His film technique was essentially silent, with words merely an occasionally convenient adjunct. His personal morality was based on trust and the honouring of gentlemen's agreements.

His dramaturgy went back to William Archer's Playmaking and the Edwardian well-made play: he liked to quote Eugene Scribe's recipe for drama: "Torture the heroine", and all his films are based on a cunning pattern of building up tension, relaxing it (usually with a touch of humour), and then, once the audience's defences are completely down, zapping them with the full force of the knife through the shower curtain or the crop-duster raking the open field with gunfire.

It always rather irritates me that everyone I meet who has read my biography (Hitch: The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock) sooner or later asks me "But what did you really think of him?"

The answer, as I hope is evident from what I wrote, is that he was possibly a monster, but a very loveable monster. If he had not been, he would never have retained the loyalty of the innumerable actors and technicians who went from film to film with him. He had the memory of a computer, and was intensely amusing company, always being (or managing to seem) as interested in the people around him as they were in him.

And then he was, after all, a genius: every now and then, when you least expected it, he would come up, in life as in his films, with something so amazing and out-of-sight that you were left reeling. As one of his writers once said to me: "How you feel about Hitchcock depends on how you feel about film."

A 10-DVD set Hitchcock - The British Years, featuring his earliest work, is released on February 25. This makes all of his major films available on DVD for the first time