Alfred Hitchcockby Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Plot was the motor for Hitchcock. He liked audiences to gasp and the cash to flow in at the box office. He was corpulent and Catholic and ready with filthy jokes when he was filming, especially when a leading lady was poised for her big scene.
Plenty, both scurrilous and adulatory, has been published about the Master of Suspense, with several books already this year on the 35th anniversary of his death. Peter Ackroyd delivers both plot and character in a concise narrative, which is strong on novelistic detail. Anxiety is the key to Hitchcock: the Leytonstone greengrocer’s son who never cried grew up to become a deadpan Hollywood director. Hitchcock was sharp on detail and opportunity—whether learning moving camera technique from FW Murnau at the German UFA studios in 1924 or 30 years later establishing himself in television as cinema receipts dipped. He invented the Hitchcock legend that deliberately overshadowed his regular collaborators on scripts, design, cinematography, costume and music.
Ackroyd steers a compassionate if non-committal course through Hitchcock’s alleged proclivities: lewdness, horror of intimacy, repressed homosexuality. As you might expect, he was a contradictory figure: this is the man who derided theoretical analysis of his work in favour of technical discussion, and yet was content to be interviewed at length by François Truffaut and to be hailed as an “auteur.”
Hitchcock experts may well be exasperated by the brevity and breeziness of Ackroyd’s approach, but it makes for an engaging introduction and intriguing invitation to revisit the films.
