January 15 and 22 at 8pm | 11 Movies
Before Alfred Hitchcock became a worldwide sensation for directing some of the greatest and most recognizable thrillers ever made in Hollywood, he honed his craft and his cinematic obsessions in England. He rose from the ranks of set designer and graphic artist to the director's chair, eventually making his mark as Britain's most celebrated director with such classics as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). While these films are hardly unknown to American audiences—they have been revived in retrospectives and released on excellent home video editions—they are only the tip of the iceberg of his British output. The dozen features he made between Blackmail (1929), his first sound feature, and Jamaica Inn (1939), his final British production before heading to Hollywood, reveal a filmmaker constantly innovating, challenging himself, searching for new and different ways of cinematic expression in every arena, from revealing character to creating suspense to crafting haunting images that suggest terrors left offscreen.
Wednesday, January 15
Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail (2024) delves into this fecund, and often unexplored, period to examine and identify the origins of the style and themes that defined such films as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958) and North By Northwest (1959), to cite just a few.
Filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau spent decades documenting film and filmmakers both on screen and in print, from some of the most illuminating behind-the-scenes documentaries and featurettes produced for TV and special edition discs to the limited series documentary Five Came Back (2017) and feature documentaries Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020) and Faye (2024), with Oscar-winning actress Faye Dunaway. But he has always held a special interest in Hitchcock. His feature-length documentary The Making of 'Psycho' (1997) was the first of dozens of projects that explored the films by the Master of Suspense, and Bouzereau’s 2010 book "Hitchcock, Piece by Piece" is guided by the themes and ideas that recur through his long career.
With Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail, Bouzereau crafts a cinematic essay that delves into those early British films to identify key themes, stylistic elements and approaches to cinematic storytelling familiar in Hitchcock’s American classics. As Bouzereau explained in a 2024 interview, "Filmmakers of the caliber of Hitchcock…latch onto themes that interest them and, throughout their careers, they go back to these themes with different visual approaches."
To explore these roots fully, TCM accompanies the documentary with a festival of nine features spotlighting Hitchcock in England, beginning with Blackmail, the film that historians generally agree is the first full-length sound feature produced in England. It is the foundation on which Bouzereau's documentary is built. It features the first "Hitchcock blonde" in actress Anny Ondra (a role continued in his Hollywood films by such actresses as Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint), a seductively charming villain, a thrilling chase through a dynamic and distinctive location, an "innocent" painted in shades of gray and themes of guilt, sexuality, even food: all elements that recur throughout Hitchcock's career. And while it goes without saying that it's the director's first time working with synchronized sound, Blackmail shows an artist embracing this new dimension as an additional expressive element.
Blackmail was initially conceived as a silent film and Hitchcock began shooting without sound, yet he anticipated the probability that British International Pictures would follow the lead of Hollywood and cave to the demand for talkies. He shot elaborate scenes devoid of dialogue first, sequences that could be easily adapted to sound with the additions of music and sound effects, and he covertly shot separate takes for the eventual preparation of separate silent and sound versions. When the decision finally came, Hitchcock was already contemplating how to shoot dialogue scenes to drop into the film. Bouzereau compares key scenes from both the silent and sound versions to illustrate how Hitchcock reimagined his presentation to use the dimension of sound (and silence) as a distinctive dramatic element. TCM presents both versions of the film in the series, giving viewers the opportunity to experience the filmmaker's creative approach in context.
Murder! (1930) is one of the rare whodunits made by Hitchcock, a mystery set within a touring acting company. Stage actor Herbert Marshall made his talkie debut as a juror who turns detective to save a beautiful actress convicted of murder. Once again, Hitchcock challenged himself to push the possibilities of sound, this time experimenting with overlapping dialogue, atmospheric background noise and, in one key scene, an interior monologue. "We had to reveal his inner thoughts," Hitchcock told François Truffaut years later. "At the time, this was regarded as an extraordinary novelty." Less successful was his attempt at having the actors improvise on camera. "The result wasn't good," he later confessed. "The timing was wrong and it had no rhythm."
While we think of Hitchcock as the Master of Suspense, in the early 1930s he was still a contract director who could be assigned projects not of his choosing. The Skin Game (1931), adapted from the stage play by John Galsworthy (the credit reads "a talking film by John Galsworthy"), was such an assignment, a play about the clash between an old money family and a self-made industrialist battling over a piece of land. While the script remains stage-bound to some extent, Hitchcock turned an auction scene (a setting he would return to numerous times, including a memorable sequence in North By Northwest) into a tense battle of wills with a mix of increasingly rapid pans and a building momentum in the editing.
Wednesday, January 22
The second night of the series opens with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), the film Hitchcock once called "the real start of my career." The story of a British family tangled up in an assassination plot was Hitchcock's first international thriller featuring innocents caught up in the intrigue of spies and killers. He delivers two magnificent set pieces—an assassination attempt in London's Royal Albert Hall (which Hitchcock managed to create without ever taking the company into the venue) and a stand-off that snowballs into a massive shout-out on the streets of London. It's also the English language debut of Peter Lorre, who was newly arrived in England and hardly spoke a word of English when he was cast. You'd never know from his performance and Hitchcock was so taken with Lorre that he kept expanding the role during production. Not only was it a hit in England, it was Hitchcock's first sound film to find success in America, and he remade it 20 years later with a bigger budget, a larger canvas and two of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood: James Stewart and Doris Day.
The 39 Steps (1935) reteamed Hitchcock with The Man Who Knew Too Much screenwriter Charles Bennett. Though ostensibly based on the 1915 spy novel by John Buchan, Bennett and Hitchcock reimagined the characters and the plot, making his hero a civilian drawn into an espionage ring and pursued by both enemy agents and police as he tries to stop a spy ring. Essentially, the pre-World War I spy drama was reinvented as a fleet, romantic adventure. In many ways, it became a template for constructing what Hitchcock described as "a film of episodes." As he explained to Truffaut, "I made sure the content of every scene was very solid, so that each one would be a little film in itself."
Hitchcock was making a name as a craftsman of thrillers and spy stories, and for Sabotage (1936), adapted from the Joseph Conrad story "The Secret Agent," he was able to secure an actual Hollywood star for the lead. Sylvia Sidney traveled the Atlantic to play the oblivious wife of an older man, the owner of a struggling theater, who is also a foreign terrorist under surveillance by Scotland Yard. Hitchcock creates one of his most suspenseful sequences, and one of his most shocking, for the film. It was a little too shocking for British audiences, it turns out, who were put off by the bleak vision, and Hitchcock himself expressed regret over his handling of a key death. But in the U.S. (where it was released under the title The Woman Alone), it was lauded as yet another success for the rising talent.
Young and Innocent (1937) returns to the romantic thriller template: a murdered woman, a wrongly accused young man desperate to find the evidence to prove his innocence and a young woman reluctantly pulled into his odyssey as they slowly fall in love while they evade police. For the climactic scenes, Hitchcock executes one of his most memorable shots, opening on a long shot of a hotel ballroom from a crane positioned near the ceiling, which slowly creeps through the crowd until it ends in an extreme close up, the eyes of an actor filling the frame, all accomplished in a single, sustained take. A decade later, using the more sophisticated equipment and experienced technicians of Hollywood's RKO Studios, he revived the idea for a brilliant moment in the movie Notorious (1946).
The Lady Vanishes (1938) is remembered as a snappy, sophisticated thriller with a lively couple (Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave) that clash upon meeting before teaming up to solve a mystery. But just as many of Hitchcock's previous films hinted at the danger brewing just across the channel, this film takes his quirky cast (and the audience along with them) from an idyllic picture postcard of fantasy Europe to a nightmarish journey into the heart of the dark days of World War II that lay just ahead. To help create the tension between his stars, Hitchcock began production with the first meeting of the couple, before the actors had gotten to know one another. As Redgrave later recalled, "After some initial parrying, Margaret and I got along well, though we remained suspicious of the other for some time." The tension of those early scenes is palpable on the screen. The Lady Vanishes became the most successful British feature to date and, though distribution was limited to the big metropolitan centers in the U.S., it was both a popular hit and critical sensation in New York. It was enough to finally land Hitchcock a Hollywood contract.
While Foreign Correspondent (1940) is Hitchcock's second American film, it sends him back to England…in spirit if not in fact. Joel McCrea is the street-smart American reporter sent to get the "real" story of the brewing conflict in the days before World War II (as real as one can get when the studio insists that Germany not be mentioned). He clashes and then falls for plucky love interest Laraine Day along the way. It was Hitchcock’s first American couple, dropped into the romantic thriller template he perfected in his British films, and they traipsed around England and Holland without leaving the studio, where sets and backlot recreations suggested the continental settings. It also reunited the director with his Murder! Star Herbert Marshall, this time playing one of the director’s trademark charming villains. “I’m always trying to get different villains without putting a black mustache on them, you know,” he later told director Peter Bogdanovich. The film earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, but lost out to another Hitchcock film, his first American feature Rebecca (1940).
