Alfred Hitchcock - Inter-war British Career

Inter-war British Career

Hitchcock's last collaboration with Graham Cutts led him to Germany in 1924. The film Die Prinzessin und der Geiger (UK title The Blackguard, 1925), directed by Cutts and co-written by Hitchcock, was produced in the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam near Berlin. Hitchcock also observed part of the making of F. W. Murnau's film Der letzte Mann (1924). He was very impressed with Murnau's work and later used many techniques for the set design in his own productions. In his book-length interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967), Hitchcock also said he was influenced by Fritz Lang's film Destiny (1921).

Hitchcock's first few films faced a string of bad luck. His first directing project came in 1922 with the aptly titled Number 13. The production was cancelled due to financial problems and the few scenes that were finished at that point were apparently lost. In 1925, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave Hitchcock another opportunity for a directing credit with The Pleasure Garden made at UFA Studios in Germany; the film was a commercial flop. Next, Hitchcock directed a drama called The Mountain Eagle (possibly released under the title Fear o' God in the United States). This film was also eventually lost. In 1926, Hitchcock's luck changed with his first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. The film, released in January 1927, was a major commercial and critical success in the United Kingdom. As with many of his earlier works, this film was influenced by Expressionist techniques Hitchcock had witnessed first-hand in Germany. Some commentators regard this piece as the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man".

Following the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock hired a publicist to help enhance his growing reputation. On 2 December 1926, Hitchcock married his assistant director, Alma Reville, at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington, London. Their only child, daughter Patricia, was born on 7 July 1928. Alma was to become Hitchcock's closest collaborator, but her contributions to his films (some of which were credited on screen) Hitchcock would discuss only in private, as she was keen to avoid public attention.

In 1929, Hitchcock began work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was still in production, the studio, British International Pictures (BIP), decided to convert it to sound. As an early 'talkie', the film is frequently cited by film historians as a landmark film, and is often considered to be the first British sound feature film. With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of the British Museum, Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences. It also features one of his longest cameo appearances, which shows him being bothered by a small boy as he reads a book on the London Underground. In the PBS series The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film, emphasising the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman suspected of murder. During this period, Hitchcock directed segments for a BIP musical film revue Elstree Calling (1930) and directed a short film featuring two Film Weekly scholarship winners, An Elastic Affair (1930). Another BIP musical revue, Harmony Heaven (1929), reportedly had minor input from Hitchcock, but his name does not appear in the credits.

In 1933, Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success and his second, The 39 Steps (1935), is often considered one of the best films from his early period. This film was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the "MacGuffin", a plot device around which a whole story seems to revolve, but ultimately has nothing to do with the true meaning or ending of the story. In The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of design plans. Hitchcock told French director François Truffaut:

There are two men sitting in a train going to Scotland and one man says to the other, "Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?", "Oh", says the other, "that's a Macguffin.", "Well", says the first man, "what's a Macguffin?", The other answers, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.", "But", says the first man, "there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.", "Well", says the other, "then that's no Macguffin."

Hitchcock's next major success was his 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, a fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Bandrika.

By 1938, Hitchcock had become known for his alleged observation, "Actors are cattle". He once said that he first made this remark as early as the late 1920s, in connection to stage actors who were snobbish about motion pictures. However, Michael Redgrave said that Hitchcock had made the statement during the filming of The Lady Vanishes. The phrase would haunt Hitchcock for years to come and would result in an incident during the filming of his 1941 production of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, where Carole Lombard brought some heifers onto the set with name tags of Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and Gene Raymond, the stars of the film, to surprise the director. Hitchcock said he was misquoted: "I said 'Actors should be treated like cattle'."

Lauded in Britain where he was dubbed "Alfred the Great" by Picturegoer magazine, by the end of the 1930s Hitchcock's reputation was beginning to soar overseas, with a New York Times feature writer stating; "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not. Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world." Variety magazine referred to him as, "probably the best native director in England." David O. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in March 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood.