The British Hitchcock

From 1929 to 1939, before launching his Hollywood career, Alfred Hitchcock directed sixteen sound films in Britain. While Hitchcock fans and film scholars lavish more attention on his later work, many of his themes, motifs, and techniques emanate from this decade. Moreover, during this politically pitched era, England collectively suffered from the post-traumatic shock of the First World War, and turned a deaf ear to the growing signs of international upheaval. Quite naturally, the country was caught up in the economic and social fallout of the Depression. A decline of the Empire and an erosion of a Victorian way of life had begun to sink in. By 1935, knowledge of both Germany’s massive rearmament and its atrocities against Jews and other ‘undesirables’ became commonplace. Bewailing the ‘unteachability of mankind’, Churchill urged without effect for the House of Commons to work with other European nations ‘to build up an adequate deterrent force’. 1 Danger as well as apathy heightened as the decade went on. The fantasy that England was safely insulated persisted alongside the fears of those like Hitchcock who imagined more uncomfortable scenarios, such as violent incursions into the British Isles, from the twin threats of communism and fascism. By 1933, Hitchcock rarely travelled outside England until he went to Hollywood. 2 This period marked the shift from silent film to the ‘talkies’. In 1924, the British company Gainsborough Pictures sent Hitchcock, a seven-year veteran of the silent era, to Germany to cut his directorial teeth. The British film industry was then in a deep financial and aesthetic crisis; its ticket sales lagged far behind those of American and German productions. 3 In Munich as an assistant director in the same studio as the Expressionist F.W. Murnau, Hitchcock watched the fi lming ofThe Last Laugh (1924), which he considered ‘an almost perfect film’. There he also absorbed the techniques of, among others

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• A History of the Twentieth Century, Volume Two

  G John Ikenberry, Martin Gilbert et al.•Foreign Affairs•1999

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