The Spectator (2015) - A profile of the worlds’s most famous film director... with the most famous profile
Details
- magazine article: A profile of the worlds’s most famous film director... with the most famous profile
- author(s): Christopher Bray
- journal: The Spectator (18/Apr/2015)
- journal ISSN: 0038-6952
- publisher: The Spectator Limited
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Cahiers du Cinéma, David O. Selznick, Family Plot (1976), Marnie (1964), Notorious (1946), Peter Ackroyd, Sabotage (1936), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), Tippi Hedren
Links
- http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9498822/a-profile-of-the-worldss-most-famous-film-director-with-the-most-famous-profile/
- Google Scholar
- search.proquest.com
Abstract
- review of Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (2015) by Michael Wood and Alfred Hitchcock (2015) by Peter Ackroyd
Article
Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much Michael Wood
New Harvest, pp.129, £14, ISBN: 9780544456228
Alfred Hitchcock Peter Ackroyd
Chatto, pp.279, £12.99, ISBN: 9780701169930
'Do it with scissors' was Alfred Hitchcock's advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us that scissors are also the chosen implement of the silhouettist. Hitchcock's profile — beaky nose, protuberant lips, conjoined chin and neck — emblazoned on both dustjackets like a logo.
A logo is what it was. You don't get to be the most famous movie director in the world merely by directing movies. Hence the wordless walk-ons Hitchcock made in almost every one of his 53 pictures. Hence the city gent uniform (blue suit, white shirt, black tie) worn throughout even the most stifling Californian summers. Hence, one sometimes suspects, the pendulous jowls and gargantuan gut — trademarks made flesh. Long before the marketing boys, Hitchcock knew all there was to know about brand creation.
Certainly he knew how he didn't want to be labelled. Happy to be called the Master of Suspense, he was rather less pleased with any suggestion that he might be some kind of artist. Peter Ackroyd says that when, in the mid-Fifties, Cahiers du Cinema started talking about Hitchcock as some kind of moralist visionary, this son of a cockney greengrocer rolled his eyes in bafflement.
There was commercial logic behind that reaction. Thrills merchants are pretty much bound to reach a bigger audience than moody threnodists — and Hitchcock never made any bones about the need to get punters on seats. Yet disparage the heavyweight exegetes though he might, Hitchcock...
