When we think of Alfred Hitchcock,
we think of the big, successful American movies he made
later in his career - Rear Window, Vertigo, The Birds
and of course, Psycho.
But this son of a greengrocer
was raised in Leytonstone, in the East End of London,
which coincidentally is where I spent my childhood.
He spent the first 40 years of his life making movies in London.
I wanted to find out to what extent this Hollywood legend,
this master of cinema, the most famous director
in the history of movies, is actually made in Britain.
How do you do? I am Alfred Hitchcock.
Alfred Hitchcock is unique in cinema history,
in that his career began in the era of silent films,
he consolidated his work during the early talkies,
then went on to create masterpieces during the golden age of Hollywood.
Even today, his influence, his style, his ideas can be found everywhere.
Thanks to him, everyone knows what 'vertigo' means.
Vertigo - a feeling of dizziness, a swimming in the head.
And because of him, birds have a terrible reputation.
They're coming. They're coming!
I deal in nightmares.
Although his films were designed to be popular with a broad audience,
there was a darkness to them I've always found fascinating.
Beneath the surface
he was always interested in the more sinister side of life.
The best thing about Hitchcock is how much he hates the police,
which is what I look for in any film-maker.
Hitchcock stands out
as one of the most successful film directors of all time,
and his personality is almost as famous as his movies.
# Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom-bom #
In total, he made 53 feature films,
but 23 of those were made before he went to America.
I'd like to take a look at those movies
and at Hitchcock's life in Britain to see where it all started.
The French say the early English period
is quite different from the American period.
Where better to start than my and Alfred's old tube station?
I used to walk down this underpass every day
on the way to school for about 12 years.
It didn't look like this.
It was the same, but had posters everywhere.
That was the big department store here,
the fancy one you'd go to for big Christmas presents
or when you wanted to buy furniture.
We didn't get a lot from there.
It was the destination place, an incredible building.
I bet that was here when Hitchcock lived here.
They knocked it down in the late '60s.
It's great to see that sign. It's great to be back here.
Leytonstone has commemorated its most famous son
in a series of mosaics.
Walking down here gives just a hint of what this local hero achieved.
Beautiful, isn't it? Look at that.
Really nice.
To make over 50 films in a career
is a feat that not many other directors have come close to.
They've chosen well.
They've chosen key moments
that didn't necessarily happen in the movie, but sum up the film.
That is the essence of Birds, right there.
Look at this.
Have you got a tissue?
I want to get rid of this chewing gum on his nose. Very disrespectful.
On Vertigo.
That's Jimmy Stewart. You can't leave a bit of...
There. Get that?
There you are. That's better.
Can't have chewing gum on James Stewart's nose!
Leytonstone yout', eh?
The only real difference, apart from the mosaics,
was the fact that there used to be movie posters all the way down here.
On the days they replaced the posters,
that was how we'd know what was coming up.
It was so exciting.
This is The Skin Game from 1932.
These are the movies I want to find out about.
These films formed the foundation of Hitchcock's career,
when he was living, working, making movies in London.
These were hits. That's what helped him become the master.
That's what people have forgotten about, which is a shame.
With so many films to choose from, it's hard to know where to start.
First, I want to know what led an East End grocer's son
into the fledgling film industry in the first place.
I suppose it must have all started when I was in my mother's arms
at the age of six months, and she said to me, 'Boo!'
Leytonstone High Road 1899, where Alfred Hitchcock was born
above his father's greengrocer's shop.
Boo! (LAUGHS)
Hitchcock's childhood was part of his legend.
Whenever he talked about his time in the East End,
he'd cite experiences from his youth
which he felt explained how his outlook developed.
He described an encounter with a grotesque auntie
in his cot as being one of the most horrible experiences of his life.
I remember the first time I became aware of Alfred Hitchcock.
It's when Psycho was going to be shown on TV.
That's the house I lived in all my childhood.
My bedroom upstairs, I shared with four brothers.
Downstairs, we had the television.
We were told we couldn't see this. It was too scary for children.
I decided I knew better. When my parents, my brothers were asleep,
I crept out of bed and watched it on my own in the dark -
cos I didn't want anyone to know - on our black-and-white television.
Scared the life out of me.
I'd like to say to my parents, you were right. I'm sorry.
I shouldn't have done that, but part of me is glad I did.
Fear was a big part of Hitchcock's life and early development.
He loved to tell the famous story, which he repeated
to the extent people questioned whether it happened.
You've given a lot of audiences shocks sitting in the stalls.
You frightened me to death with Psycho.
What frightens you? Policemen.
His father gave him a note
and told him to take it to the police station.
The young Hitchcock did this and was locked in a cell
for a few minutes, or longer,
depending on who he told the story to.
The policeman let him out and said,
'This is what we do to naughty boys.'
That's why I won't drive a car.
If I don't drive a car, I can't get a ticket.
I can't bear the suspense.
I'm really quite distressed about it.
Hitchcock was the first director to become a celebrity.
As such, he gave hundreds of interviews,
often repeating the same stories from childhood.
Although I enjoy them, I've come to the conclusion
that some should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Stories he told were what journalists wanted to hear.
They're all terribly convenient, terribly well constructed.
They're part of a narrative that fits the persona
he's invented for himself.
If there's a pinch of salt to be taken
with stories from his early childhood,
there's no doubt that adolescence was tricky for Alfred.
1914 was the beginning of the First World War.
It was also the year in which he got his first job
at the Henley Telegraph Company, summer 1914.
Soon after, his father died,
which must have had a profound effect on the young Hitchcock.
Hitchcock also attributed the First World War
as giving him his first real experience of true fear.
We think about the Blitz and the terror of bombing over London,
but during the First World War, London was being bombed.
This was a new, shocking experience for the population.
Hitchcock painted vivid pictures
of what happened during some of these raids.
He talked about his mother cowering under the table.
Young Alfred found refuge in books and theatre,
as well as the latest form of entertainment - cinema.
As a child, I was a great first-nighter of the theatre -
I used to go alone - and also to the movies.
It was obvious that
what interested the young Hitch was storytelling.
He liked the middle-brow popular fiction of the period -
authors like John Buchan, who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps,
Arthur Conan Doyle,
Mrs Belloc Lowndes, who wrote a novel called The Lodger,
that would be very important in Hitchcock's career.
Even as a young man, Hitchcock knew he wanted to work in film.
I'm standing on the site of what was Famous Players-Lasky movie studios
that became the Gainsborough studios.
Hitchcock got his first job working for them at 20,
designing the inter-titles
that appeared on screen with silent movies,
the same silent movies he would be directing in five years.
He ends up as an assistant director to one of the big directors there,
a man called Graham Cutts.
He becomes the secret power behind Graham Cutts's throne.
Graham Cutts is a womanising, erratic figure.
He begins to rely upon Hitchcock,
so slowly, the servant becomes the master.
According to legend, you became a director
because the director you'd been assisting
would no longer work with you. Is that fair?
I don't think he'd no longer work with me.
He didn't want me to work with him.
In some ways, you were breaking into his territory?
I not only broke into his territory,
I gave him the shots and where they should be taken.
I built the set in such a way,
he couldn't take them from any other angle.
There were many people Hitchcock worked with time and again -
actors, cinematographers, composers.
But there was only one constant in his career - his wife Alma.
He married Alma Reville in 1926,
and she became his closest collaborator,
credited with working with him on 22 movies
and informally assisting on many more.
Hitchcock was a big star director from the very early years.
He would have been surrounded by people
who wouldn't dare tell him what the truth was.
She was the only person who was honest with him.
Hitch and Alma settled down to married life in Kensington,
with a weekend retreat in Surrey.
In 1928, their adored daughter Pat was born,
to give Hitch a happy home life to add to the burgeoning film career.
His first film as a director was The Pleasure Garden.
Even there, you see the classic Hitchcock themes emerging -
voyeurism, betrayal and of course, murder.
But it didn't take long for Hitchcock to deliver a film
which is almost a blueprint
for what would become the classic Hitchcock movie.
Hitch's third picture, The Lodger,
was considered even at the time to be a masterpiece of British film-making
and established Hitchcock as the top British director at the age of 28.
The Lodger is a Jack The Ripper-like story
about a killer lurking in a sinister, foggy London,
murdering curly-headed blondes.
The lodger is played by Ivor Novello,
a musical idol and heart-throb of the time.
He lodges with a family
in a house at the heart of where the murders are happening,
and the strange character is quickly suspected of being the killer.
Hitch hints at his guilt throughout the film,
but the lodger is our first example of a favourite Hitchcock character -
a man wrongly accused.
There are all kinds of ideas in The Lodger
that Hitchcock would return to time and again.
There is the blonde in peril.
There is the figure of the accused man
who may or may not be guilty, but who is living in a guilty way.
You also get that interest in the moment of murder.
When you watch a film like The Lodger today, some of it seems stagey.
But even now you can sense
how innovative and bold it seemed to that audience.
I get the feeling that this was a modern film-maker
working at the cutting edge of what was possible in cinema.
It's also our chance to see the first of Hitchcock's legendary cameos,
even if it is just the back of the great man's head.
Incidentally, when I had finished The Lodger,
it was seen by the distributors,
who thought it was so bad that it shouldn't be shown.
It stayed on the shelf for two or three months.
They said, 'We have an investment in this.
We'd better look at it again.'
They finally agreed to show it.
It was acclaimed
as the greatest British film made to that period.
The Lodger's box-office success
marked Alfred Hitchcock as the British director to watch,
and of course, it was just the beginning.
I've lived in London all my life,
and one of the exciting things about driving round
isn't just being in the heart
of one of the most iconic cities in the world,
it's going past locations I recognise from some of my favourite movies.
Of course, that includes a lot of Hitchcock's movies.
Like any director, a lot of his movies are shot on sound stages.
But if you're working in a city as vibrant as this
and setting your films here,
you would be crazy not to make the most of the locations.
The excitement I feel watching those early movies
and seeing not just the beauty of London
but London as it was and no longer is, adds an extra something.
These are the buildings where murders take place,
the streets killers walked, where they were chased -
those long, tense chase sequences.
You've got the buses, one of which has that long sequence
where the little boy is carrying the can of film with a bomb in it.
I don't to spoil it for anyone, but it does go off.
Piccadilly Circus is virtually unrecognisable
when you look at the Piccadilly Circus used for that key scene
in Blackmail, when the woman is walking home
after murdering the man who attempted to have his way with her.
There's a shot of the neon, which must have been an incredible thing.
It's still exciting for tourists now.
Hitchcock does something which must have been so bold -
you see the flashing of a cocktail shaker,
then he dissolves to a knife being stabbed down into the victim.
That's the woman's troubled, guilt-ridden thought coming out.
He obviously had a love of the city
and a love of this place being an iconic backdrop
that people all over the world wanted to see. He used it brilliantly.
At the age of just 28, Hitch was in the driving seat as a director.
It's as if Hitchcock used the British film industry
as his personal film school.
The ten silent films he made over the next ten years
allowed him to develop and refine his technique,
the technique he took to Hollywood.
In Hitchcock's hands, the camera gained a new life.
Its movement and changing perspective
brought a new way of seeing things to his films.
He exposed his audience to the full potential of the medium.
To Hitch, cinema was so much more than just a way to record theatre.
Hitchcock absorbed a lot of influences from European cinema,
particularly Russian and German cinema. He went to Berlin.
He immersed himself in those expressionist techniques.
He was obsessed with cinema. He thought cinematically.
He lived, breathed and slept cinema.
He was keen to always insert these incredible Hitchcock touches
into his films, clever visual tricks
that the press would pick up on and talk about.
This helped raise his status and profile
amongst British directors of the time.
The language of the camera
is the same as the language of the writer.
He called it pure cinema -
unleashing the camera's full potential to tell the story
and manipulate the audience's emotions.
And no-one did it better than Hitch.
I wanted a director's perspective on Hitch,
so I sought out fellow Hitchcock fan, Richard Ayoade.
Take a seat. I've got popcorn in case we fancy it.
Thank you for finding time to talk to me.
I admire you as a film-maker. You're very kind, and wrong.
No. And I know you're a fan of Hitchcock.
I am, yes.
What are the things about Hitchcock's work or style or talent
you most admire or strike you as being Hitchcockian?
I can't think of many other directors
who are as memorable as him
in terms of the number of sequences from films
and camera movements and how inventive he was.
Also, he's one of the most entertaining film-makers
there's ever been.
What I love so much about it is the subjectivity.
He was amazing at subjective camerawork.
His idea of pure cinema, it was essentially - you show something,
you show someone watch it, you see their reaction.
He's the best director to learn from in terms of how to make films,
in that he really is a masterclass in the grammar of film-making.
One of the things I love about Hitchcock's early movies
is the playfulness and inventiveness.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in his use of special effects,
using techniques very much in their infancy then.
I'm talking to a modern special-effects supervisor,
Mike Tucker, to tell me how Hitchcock did what he did back then.
Hi, Mike. Hello there.
I'm hoping you're a Hitchcock fan. Indeed.
Tell me about the early techniques he used.
You're aware of them when they're happening,
which maybe wasn't the intention. I guess it was because they were new.
They don't have the option of post-production
the way we take for granted.
There was no green screens.
If you're doing something that's a big set
or you want to put people into a set,
you have to do it in camera.
It means using an awful lot of mirrors.
This is a classic mirror technique called the Shufton process.
Shufton? What they're doing here is...
..you place the mirror at 45 degrees to the camera.
So you're reflecting your model.
The camera is seeing the mirror, which is seeing that.
But what you've done is, in a predetermined position,
you've scraped the silvering off the back of the mirror.
What you're left with is clear glass.
That's got an angle at the bottom
because the doorway is supposedly at an angle? Right.
You've made it harder for yourself? Yeah.
We've got the model there.
Which is being reflected in this mirror.
It's seeing through to a background which you can put live action in.
This set, we can anything with.
The advantage would be, you're doing it in the studio.
It would cost a fortune.
If you replaced the model with a projection screen
and project onto that screen previously shot live action,
you can combine actors into stuff that has been shot before.
A crowd scene or an action sequence.
An action sequence that was too dangerous to have an actor there.
I don't know that Hitchcock, like many great directors,
was bothered about the safety of actors. It was a cost thing.
How widely used was it when Hitchcock used it?
I know he used it in Blackmail. Very early, 1929.
He used it when they run into the British Museum.
He didn't have permission to shoot in the British Museum.
He faked it with this.
It's the statue reflected into that shot.
How surprising would this be for an audience then?
Now, even if we don't know how it's done, we're aware of special effects.
It was the magician's art back then.
People must have been going, 'How on earth did they get that shot?'
That's lovely. We've got the mirror in place.
Yeah. There's the model.
I'm going to ask you to go round.
This could be your big break in movies, you know that?
I know that. OK, stop there.
I'll cue you in.
I didn't say go yet.
Back we go. Actors! You ready?
Yeah. That isn't a cue, by the way.
OK. And... action!
Then vome towards me.
You're very, very sad.
The effect will probably be blown by about now.
You're to big. That's it.
So it only really works there?
There's an optimum position where the scale of the actor
is in scale proportionately with the model.
The statue looks bigger than you,
but you walk forward and we lose that.
You see how it's working.
On holiday, I might take this stuff with me
so I can put the kids in a different location.
Or just don't take them on holiday.
Take the photographs at home, lock them in, crack the window,
go on my own.
You may go now. If I were you, I'd work on my award-acceptance speech.
That was exceptional.
It was clear that the future of movies
would include sound as well as pictures,
and even though he'd begun work on his latest silent, Blackmail,
Hitchcock was more than up to the challenge of transforming it
into Britain's first talkie.
There. Hooray!
All ready for the academy. I'll go and get those drinks.
Right you are.
It's the tale of a blonde in peril, played by Czech star Anny Ondra,
who kills her potential rapist in self-defence,
and is then blackmailed.
She's one of Hitchcock's more complicated heroes -
innocent, yet guilty.
She's killed a man, but only to save herself.
Blackmail is a landmark film in British cinema.
It exists on this borderline between the silents and the talkies.
There's been a murder last night, round the corner.
They tell me the police are round there now.
Hitchcock, who'd always been experimental and inventive,
saw this as an opportunity
to take his storytelling in a new direction.
What's wrong, Alice? You don't look very chirpy this morning.
You look a little peaky, I must say. Dad, Alice - breakfast.
While other directors who made talkies,
even a few years after this, struggled with the medium of sound,
made it in some way seem like a step backwards,
Hitchcock is absolutely sensitive to its possibilities
from the first moment he starts using it.
It's one thing to buy chocolates out of hours,
but quite another to stick a knife into a gentleman.
The fact that within the first sound film,
he was already experimenting with sound
to trigger a subconscious reaction is amazing.
Knives.
No, knives is not right.
I must say, that's what I think and that's what I feel.
Whatever the provocation, I could never use a knife.
Mind you, a knife is a difficult thing to handle.
I mean, any knife.
(VOICE FADES AWAY) ..knife...
..knife...
Like the moving camera, we take sound on film for granted,
even though providing sound effects has become a massive industry.
Back in 1929, everything you wanted on a picture
had to be record at the same time.
If you wanted a couple talking in the background while an orchestra played,
you had to capture it for real.
Frank, you...
..you can't do this.
The main problem concerned the fact that I had a Czech film star
playing the part of an English girl.
I had a young actress, Joan Barry, sitting on the side
with her own microphone
while Miss Ondra on the set, playing her scene,
just mouthed her words.
The girl on the side had to follow her very closely.
This was a brilliant achievement,
and Anny Ondra's sound test gave us the first glimpse
of Hitch the director at work.
You asked me to let you hear your voice
on the talking picture. (LAUGHS)
But Hitch, you mustn't do that. Why not?
Because I can't speak well.
Do you realise the squad van will be here any moment?
Really? God, I'm terribly frightened.
Why, have you been a bad woman?
Not just bad like this.
But you've slept with men? Oh, no! (LAUGHS)
Come here, stand in your place,
otherwise it will not come out right,
as the girl said to the soldier.
That's enough.
Pretty saucy stuff for the time,
but it didn't appear to get him into trouble.
What is does reveal is a man with a wicked and eccentric wit.
Hitchcock was so notorious for playing practical jokes
in the studios that when he was at Gainsborough,
he was disciplined for it, hauled up and told
this wasn't the sort of thing a director should do.
His fellow director Val Guest said that
Hitchcock once asked him to lend him a tenner, which he did.
He paid him back in brass farthings - over 9,500 coins -
that a pageboy from the studio dragged into his dressing room.
When people think of Hitchcock, they think of this master of suspense,
the more visceral moments of later movies.
But when you watch early films, I'm struck by the amount of comedy in it.
He was of the mind that you needed these moments of humour
to lighten things between the more suspenseful sequences.
But they're not really the things I...
If there was a reel of all of them in a row,
I probably wouldn't sit down to watch them.
Hitchcock's macabre sense of humour is absolutely British.
It's a vein that runs thickly through British culture -
that juxtaposition of murder and comedy.
Strangled.
Nice work.
Neat, very neat.
Someone very much did not want we should speak to him.
That's what it looks like.
It's something he absorbed from tabloid newspapers of the day -
that lurid, lip-smacking interest.
That's something that Hitchcock really imports into cinema.
One of my favourite sequences in any Hitchcock movie
is also my favourite sequence from any thriller.
He obviously liked it as well, cos he remade the film -
The Man Who Knew Too much.
The Man Who Knew Too Much is the story of a couple
whose daughter is kidnapped to stop them revealing a murder plot.
They learn that an assassination will take place
at the precise moment the cymbals clash
during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
That's where one of the tensest climactic sequences
in modern cinema takes place.
(WOMAN ON STAGE SINGS)
We the audience know what's planned, what going to happen.
The blonde, of course, cos Hitchcock loved blondes in his movies,
she knows what's going to happen.
Then tension grows and becomes almost too much to bear.
(SCREAMS)
Sounds as if it went off all right.
I hope so, for all our sakes.
It was one of those sequences which set the bar for other thrillers
and wrote the book, introduced the grammar,
of those sequences,
that's influenced anyone else who's made a movie.
Mr Hitchcock, why do you always make mystery films?
Life is a big mystery, isn't it? It always has been.
The 39 Steps is probably the most enduring and celebrated
of the films Hitchcock made during the 1930s.
Based on a novel by one of Hitch's favourite writers, John Buchan,
it contains many familiar elements - a murder, a wrongly accused man,
plenty of suspense, a chase sequence or two,
handcuffs and of course, a blonde.
There he is.
Hitch returns with one of his favourite characters -
the innocent man on the run.
Accused of murder, Richard Hanay escapes to Scotland,
pursued by police and a ruthless band of spies
from an unnamed country.
A key characteristic of Hitchcock's films
is the concept of the wrong man,
the man wrongly accused of murder or some other crime.
You see it from the beginning in films like The Lodger in 1926
through to North By Northwest,
where Cary Grant is suspected of being a murderer.
The 39 Steps, coming in the middle of Hitchcock's career,
is a quintessential film in this respect.
May I come home with you?
What's the idea?
Well, I'd like to.
It's your funeral.
I'm struck sometimes by the modernness of some sequences.
This is one of my favourite moments in 39 Steps.
How do you do? We're all waiting for you.
Pamela's gone to meet you. This way.
Handcuffed, he finds himself forced to speak
on behalf of a soon-to-be local politician,
and wins over the crowd.
Where everybody gets a square deal and a sporting chance,
where people try to help and not hinder,
a world from which suspicion and cruelty and fear have been banished.
That's the sort of world I want. Is that the sort of world you want?
It's a comic moment, an unexpected moment, brilliantly modern.
You see the echoes even today.
It's one of the scenes in which he's at his best and most charming.
Scottish strangers. The hardest kind of stranger.
The toughest stranger of them all. Toughest in the business.
Yet the one person we want to see him win over
is resolutely against him.
Tell him an enormously important secret...
That'll do. ..has been taken out of this country by a foreign agent.
I can't do anything because of this fool of a detective.
Has that penetrated? To the funny bone. Tell me another.
One of the best sequences in his films
is another great Hitchcock dinner scene.
Sanctify these bounteous mercies to us miserable sinners.
You see Robert Donat's character
notice that he has the paper
and that he's about to be revealed.
Then she notices the paper, and they exchange looks.
Then John Laurie's character looks up and thinks they're flirting.
Then he goes out.
I forgot go lock the barn.
The camera goes with him, then you see what he sees.
You know they're talking about how he's going to get away.
He thinks that they're plotting.
In a very short period of time,
you see someone who knows exactly where to put the camera.
That's classic Hitchcock,
in that we the audience know more than the people on the screen.
That was the thing he was so good at -
making you lean in and participate in the action that's happening.
What are the 39 Steps?
Come on, answer up! What are the 39 Steps?
The 39 Steps is an organisation of spies
collecting information on behalf of the Foreign Office...
(GUNSHOT)
Hitchcock was great at using a comic counterpoint to everything.
It's a funny scene even at the end when it's tragic.
You see someone go, 'Get the dancers on!'
And the dancers are on in the background.
Then they hold hands.
Yeah, and he's still got the handcuffs on his hand.
It's an incredibly complex shot.
You're aware of that because you're directing.
I wasn't. I'm just aware of it being a lovely moment.
That's the real mastery. Yeah.
There's so much going on, yet it didn't take me out of the moment.
In 1939, after 23 films as a director,
Hitchcock moved with his family to Hollywood
to pursue his career there.
Even though the British film industry was more robust than today,
it was clear that that's where the future of popular cinema lay.
By the late '30s, Hitchcock had outgrown the British film industry,
and the move to Hollywood offered him resources and opportunities
he couldn't get in Britain.
He would have wonderful studio technology,
access to the biggest stars, the best literary properties.
Announcing the return of the most glamorous motion picture ever made.
How do you?
His first Hollywood movie was an instant smash.
There is mystery, love and laughter in Rebecca,
the motion picture still unsurpassed for suspenseful romance.
It won producer David Selznick the Oscar for Best Film.
It was an explosive start to this latest chapter
in Hitch's legendary film-making career.
Hitchcock repaid his adoptive country with a string of classic movies -
Rear Window, Psycho, To Catch A Thief, Vertigo, The Birds
and Marnie, to name just a few.
Hitch's fingerprints were all over his movies.
Tonally and thematically, the films were all his.
He was also becoming better known for his cameo appearances.
It was as if he began to suspect he could be as big a star
as the films themselves.
Accordingly, he started using his name as a marketing tool
to sell the films.
How do you do?
I'm Alfred Hitchcock.
I want you to know about my latest motion picture
which will be coming soon to this theatre.
It is called The Birds.
For that reason, we thought it would be appropriate
if a bird informed you about the details. Go ahead.
When Hitchcock signed his autograph,
you used to draw a caricature of himself.
That caricature became his trademark.
It's something we still know.
He was very careful to look the same wherever he went -
that black suit, that black tie, the famous walk.
Hitchcock is aware of how marketable he is personally.
His name had been used to sell his films since 1927.
The idea of Alfred Hitchcock is in everybody's heads.
In that window on the second floor, the single one in front,
that's where the woman was first seen.
Let's go inside.
As part of creating a brand out of his own persona and skill,
humour played a part as well.
People knew there would be quirky, Hitchcockian jokes in his films
as there were in the trailers.
He always spoke with great wit when he discussed his movies,
delivering those early sound bites - memorable nuggets which were funny
and often undercut the seriousness of what he was doing on screen.
Although most of the films he made for the rest of his career
would be shot in Hollywood with American money,
I still think of him as a British director.
He would use British actors,
make films based on stories by British writers
and they would always be essentially Hitchcockian.
The Birds and Rebecca were based on books
by English writer Daphne Du Maurier.
Marnie was also from an English novel by author Winston Graham.
It seems Hitchcock was happiest
with source material that came from Britain.
With North By Northwest,
Hitchcock was going to make the ultimate Hitchcock film.
Him and his writers decided to go back to The 39 Steps as the model.
I'm an advertising man, not a red herring.
I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives
and several bartenders dependent upon me.
I don't intend to disappoint them by getting myself slightly killed.
Cary Grant becomes a secret agent against his will.
The man on the run in North By Northwest
is the ghost of Robert Donat in The 39 Steps.
Those interests in the psychological, in the chase,
those things are refined and developed in the American films,
but they're rooted in what he was doing in Britain in the '30s.
At the height of his Hollywood success,
Hitchcock was an international brand,
but Britain was never far from his thoughts.
For all his gratitude to America,
recognition in his home country mattered to him.
Keep quiet, please.
In 1971, he returned to Britain for his penultimate movie.
Hitchcock was now 72, and his status as a box-office wizard
was somewhat in decline.
His last couple movies had been flops.
Perhaps it's not surprising he returned to his home town,
to the city where he'd enjoyed his early successes,
to try to refind that magic.
Take three.
Frenzy is a kind of homecoming for Hitchcock.
He goes back to his sources,
back to the things that terrified him as a child.
Frenzy is a News Of The World, sleazy murder mystery.
We're back to the world of The Lodger and the Ripper.
There's a real murderer at the heart of Frenzy,
a man called Neville Heath.
He was a terrible sadist, a killer.
Hitchcock was strangely obsessed with him.
This isn't the first murderer Hitchcock has this obsession with.
There are details of real British crimes
salted away in the most unusual places in Hitchcock's films.
He made Frenzy in the final decade of his life.
It gave him the opportunity to revisit the London of his youth.
Lots of it was shot in Covent Garden,
a fruit-and-vegetable market at the time.
He remembered this from when he was a young man
and his father had been a greengrocer.
I wouldn't go so far as to claim I have an affinity with Hitchcock
because he was the son of a greengrocer
and I worked in a greengrocer, cos I also worked as a delivery boy
and in a newsagent's and as a milk boy.
I had all those jobs people had back then
and young people today don't because they're pampered
and they all have Xboxes.
Not that I'm bitter, but you don't know how lucky you are.
Me and Hitchcock, we had it tough. Well, he probably had it tough.
I had it less tough, but I had it tougher than you.
Someone who experienced Hitch first-hand was actress Jean Marsh,
one of the stars of Frenzy,
who I was lucky enough to take a drive with.
Let me ask you about Frenzy.
It was one of the first Hitchcock films I was aware of.
I'd seen Psycho as a kid, then I remember seeing on TV
that this legendary figure was returning to make a movie.
I didn't understand what it meant.
What did it mean to you and contemporaries of his
when he came back to the UK?
I thought, 'That's nice - he's coming back here.
Oh, I've got a part in it! That's quite nice.'
Then I thought, 'Wait a minute, this is special.'
How was he when directing you?
How specific was he in what he wanted from you?
How much did he give you about your character,
or did he let you work it out?
He definitely knew exactly what he wanted.
When you didn't get what he wanted, he would wait endless takes.
He said, 'Why do you keep doing this one thing over and over again?'
All I'm doing is walking to the flat.
He said, 'It just doesn't work.'
I thought, 'What can I do to make it work?'
I wondered, 'I'll think that I want to rush
because I want to pee.'
So I did that and he said, 'That's fine. What did you do?'
I said, 'I'll tell you later.'
I told him later, and he said, 'I'm glad you didn't tell me.'
When you were filming out with him, did it cause a stir?
One thing that fascinates me is,
unlike almost every other director, he was a star.
Oh, huge, of course. Yes.
People - it was quite infuriating -
people looked at you in the street.
They would go...
And I would think, 'What about me? I'm Jean Marsh.'
Forget it.
He was a big, big star.
Bigger than most of the stars in his movies.
There was no-one like him.
Even Spielberg isn't a star.
He was a star.
If Spielberg put on about 200lbs, he might be a star like Hitchcock.
As it is... I've met him.
He's a great talent, but more or less instantly forgettable.
I imagine... Stop it.
I bet you carried a meeting with Hitchcock with you.
He liked the two sides of himself.
He enjoyed playing Hitchcock as well as being him.
Apart from Frenzy, do you have a favourite Hitchcock movie or moment?
Vertigo.
It was really creepy,
and yet suddenly, little flashes of humour. Wonderful.
Let me drive you. Where would you like to go?
To your place. OK, let's do it.
It's somewhat fitting that Frenzy was to be Hitch's last hit.
He completed one more film, Family Plot,
but with illness dogging his final years,
he walked away from his movie in the planning stages.
He was knighted in 1980,
but died in hospital in April of the same year.
There have been a lot of people telling the story
of their relationship with Hitchcock.
A couple of movies have come out - a TV film and a cinema film.
I'm wary of their version of the truth.
They knew Hitchcock. I never met Hitchcock.
But when someone says he was this or that,
that's based on working experience with him for a short time.
You have to assume they didn't see the whole man.
Some people have said he saw himself like his leading men inside -
he wanted to be Cary Grant, he saw himself as Cary Grant.
I can't help but think that must be bullshit.
I don't think he was an idiot, self-delusional.
He was also an incredibly aware commercial film-maker.
Sir Alfred Hitchcock travelled an awfully long way
from Leytonstone High Road,
propelled by talents Britain couldn't ultimately contain.
By leaving these shores, he became a legend.
Hitch is buried in America, but I'm now even more convinced
that Britain made him what he was
and shaped his talent to scare the world,
something that he never forgot.
Hitchcock is one of the most important figures in all of cinema,
one of the greatest directors who ever lived.
There are very few director who, you can use their name
and it immediately conjures up an image
of what their films are all about.
I think he's an incredibly emotional film-maker,
and really got into the guts of things so brilliantly.
He's a director who speaks to things inside us that are very dark,
very strange, and that we don't really like to talk about.
How do we Brits pay tribute
to the life and career of our greatest director?
We knock down the house he was born in and put a plaque on a garage.
I'm joking, because his British brilliance needs no other tribute
than the body of work he left behind.
If you could only make one more picture, what would it be about?
I think it would be about murder, mayhem, violence, sex
and a joke or two.
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