by Edmund Bertram

Created on: October 19, 2008

THE BRITISH YEARS:

Before coming to America, Alfred Hitchcock had eighteen years worth of filmmaking under his belt. The first few years of his career were spent as co-director. 1924's "The Pleasure Garden" marked Hitchcock's first film as solo director. It would be very difficult to tell from "The Pleasure Garden" that the director would become known as the Master of Suspense. This film was a typical lurid soap opera of romance and betrayal.

1927 marked the first film that in retrospect looks and feels like a Hitchcock picture. This film was "The Lodger" was an early example of superlative psychological thriller, showing the terror surrounding a serial killer who was a copycat to Jack the Ripper. It was the beginning of a genre, especially inspiring such classics as Fritz Lang's "M" (1931), Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), and Hitchcock's own "Psycho" (1960).

Hitchcock directed several more melodramas and some romantic comedies before making his transition to sound pictures. He made his first sound film (though not a "talkie;" there were sound effects recorded but no spoken dialogue) in 1929 entitled "Blackmail." The use of sound was a major of elevation for Hitchcock's career, as his use of simple sounds often made profound impact on his picture's quality (1946's "Notorious is the perfect example when the simple sound of Cary Grant walking up a staircase makes for one of the most tense scenes in film history). "Blackmail" utilized this through the music score dramatizing the murder much more than anything scene on the screen (just as the Bernard Herman scores did for "Vertigo" and "Psycho").

Hitchcock was making several movies per year in the early 1930s. A few notable ones include "Rich and Strange" (1931). It was his first successful venture into dark comedy, which would be utilized in almost every one of his classic thrillers, though never again (with the exception of "The Trouble with Harry") would he make a film successfully that was completely a comedy. Also notable were "The Man Who Knew Too Much," (an espionage thriller from 1934 that he later remade into the slightly more successful film of the same title with James Stewart and Doris Day) and "The 39 Steps" (1935) which is widely considered his first masterpiece-a story of deception, greed, and romantic/sexual obsession-the basic ingredients to every Hitchcock masterpiece.

"The Lady Vanishes" in 1938 was an important film in Hitchcock's

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next Page >>