All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt James mclaughlin

Hitchcock, impersonated by Anthony Hopkins, is neither monster nor caricature, but a fish-out-of-water artist struggling to maintain his subversive vision in this strangely stodgy and repressed world. Gervasi, whose first film was the prizewinning rock-and-roll documentary Anvil!, sumptuously re-creates the Paramount “dream factory” of the late 1950s: the prefabricated stage sets and make-believe city streets, the executive conferences in mahogany suites, the cumbersome editing machines, the small army of lackeys and assistants. Hitchcock tries to answer this question, through a layered reimagining of the man that shows him rebelling against the lords of the studios in their waning days. As Gervasi puts it: “What kind of a person was he?” What remains is the mystery of Hitchcock’s true nature. He was one of the greatest geniuses in the history of the medium,” says Sacha Gervasi, the director of an ambitious, period-soaked new movie, Hitchcock about the filming of Psycho, the masterpiece for which Hitchcock is best remembered today, though in fact it signalled a sharp break from all that had gone before. These warring impulses shaped Hitchcock’s ceaseless striving “to manipulate an audience’s sensibilities to the utmost,” as Donald Spoto wrote in The Dark Side of Genius, his biography of the director. Perfection of the work versus perfection of the life is an age-old conflict, but in Hitchcock’s case the dichotomy resists convenient parsing, because the facts of his life are so tightly ravelled with the big themes in his work: the thwarted desire that darkens into monomania, the tense duality of inhibition and violence, the exalted vision twinned with the near-sadistic drive for total control, especially over the actors he said “should be treated like cattle”. But good news was followed by bad: at Christmas, The Girl, a 90-minute HBO biopic, depicted Hitchcock (Toby Young) as a sexual harasser who destroyed the career of a fresh-faced Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) after she refused to submit to his demand that she make herself “sexually available” to him when the two paired up to make The Birds.

This past August, 846 critics and professionals from the film industry voted Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the greatest film of all time, toppling Citizen Kane from its 50-year-long perch, in the prestigious Sight and Sound poll (conducted once a decade). The British Film Institute, in its largest-ever undertaking, has been diligently restoring eight of the nine films Hitchcock made in the silent-film era, when he was in his 20s.

All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt James mclaughlin