Hitchcock began to reminisce about his life in films at a fairly young age. “My Screen Memories” and “Life Among the Stars” were published while he was only in his late thirties, but by this time he had already spent more than seventeen years in the rather new industry, which qualified him to speak as one of the veterans. And in any event, at the time of these first reminiscences, Hitchcock was called on not so much as one of the old lions but as one of the bright stars among directors. In the late 1930s, Hitchcock’s reputation was at a peak, as was the British film industry in general, and there was a great demand for publicity information, behind-the-scenes tales of film personalities, and firsthand reports of how films were made. Hitchcock was a regular contributor to a variety of periodicals, especially Film Weekly, which seemed to take a kind of proprietary interest in him, perhaps because, as the introductory blurb to “My Screen Memories” explains, “his career . . . is, in its way, also the story of British films.”
Taken together, “My Screen Memories” and “Life Among the Stars” constitute Hitchcock’s most extensive commentary on the first phases of his career, ranging from his first directorial assignment to nearly the end of his “British” period and his move to the United States in 1939. There is some overlapping of material, but various stories become transformed as they are retold, and it is interesting to hear slightly (and sometimes markedly) different versions, for example, of Miles Mander trying to catch a train and, more significantly, how Blackmail was shot. Conspicuous by its absence is any detailed treatment of The Lodger, which most modern critics feel is his greatest early achievement. But he describes his apprenticeship as, in his own words, a “cub director” by lengthy (and often hilarious) recollections of the making of his first two films, The Pleasure Garden, rarely screened these days, and The Mountain Eagle, unfortunately perhaps lost forever.
These pieces add considerably to the already substantial storehouse of Hitchcock’s droll tales about, as he says, “the queer ways in which filmland sometimes works,” and we hear much of such assorted and amusing topics as John Galsworthy’s snooty pretentiousness, the essential contributions of a prop man to Juno and the Paycock and a slingshot artist to The Man Who Knew Too Much, Nita Naldi’s nails and underwear, and Hitchcock’s own penny-pinching. But alongside such entertaining stories he also gives a great deal of information that fleshes out and sometimes even revises our sense of his development as a filmmaker and his approach to filmmaking. For example, his later “biographical legend” often follows up on his simple assertion in “Life Among the Stars” that he became a director almost by accident: “Quite seriously, I had never thought of being a director,” he says, until Michael Balcon urged him on. In “My Screen Memories,” though, he notes that when Balcon approached him, “I was already toying with the idea of directing a film myself,” and he had in fact directed a film financed by some relatives. His description of the failure of this film introduces a recurrent theme in this memoir: his many insecurities as a beginning director, expressed in melodramatic images of filmmaking as causing “some of the nastiest shocks in my whole life,” “terrors” that haunt him constantly.
We may need to revise not only our understanding of Hitchcock’s “vocation” as a director but also our sense of his characteristic working method. Some of the descriptions in these essays are not entirely consistent with his later, often-repeated claims that meticulous preplanning was the essence of his art. “Life Among the Stars” begins by contrasting the “disciplined, departmentalized, efficient” production routines of the late 1930s with the much more hectic, exciting, and serendipitous methods of the 1920s, which he recalls nostalgically. And “My Screen Memories” highlights several examples of the kind of improvisation we do not normally associate with Hitchcock: Madeleine Carroll’s role in The 39 Steps was largely “built up” on the set, for which Hitchcock gives her a great deal of credit, a scene in Secret Agent that he praises highly originates not in inventive directing but spontaneous “bandying” by Carroll and Robert Young; and the appearance of the distinguished actor Michel Saint-Denis as the coachmen in Secret Agent was not the result of careful planning but sudden inspiration as Hitchcock chatted on the set with Saint-Denis, who was visiting with his friend John Gielgud.
The Film Weekly description of Hitchcock’s early recollections is not altogether inaccurate: “He tells of small beginnings and great achievements, of colorful people, humor and plenty of thrills.” But perhaps Hitchcock’s own words are more evocative: his focus is on “the emotional drama that was being enacted on the other side of the camera.” His writings, like his films, frequently have bright surfaces but somewhat darker depths, as is especially evident in the next two selections in this section. “The Woman Who Knows Too Much” is at first glance a characteristically rambling, light, anecdotal sketch of his wife, Alma, and their relationship, but even without overscrutinizing it we quickly realize that this relationship is complex, troubled, and troubling. Hitchcock both romanticizes and deromanticizes his attraction to Alma and in a remarkably honest fashion sets their relationship in the context of his deepest worries and fears, some of them obvious and familiar—of policemen and being alone, for example—but others somewhat more subtle and concealed, like his fear of being analyzed and thereby “demolished” by his wife. The silent or silenced woman is a recurrent theme in his films, and this essay is worth reading in the context of, among others, The Man Who Knew Too Much, especially the second version, a subtle battle-of-the-sexes film alluded to of course in the title here, and Psycho, a not-so-subtle battle-of-the-sexes film in which a silent woman speaks through a man, with pathological consequences. (Alma gets a chance to speak for herself in “My Husband Hates Suspense,” Family Circle 52, no. 6 [June 1958]: 36–37, 69–70, 72; and Joseph McBride, “Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock,” Sight & Sound 45, no. 4 [Autumn 1976]: 224–225.)
The “After-Dinner Speech at the Screen Producers Guild Dinner” was most likely ghost-written for him and used on a variety of occasions. Still, much of the wit and charm are Hitchcock’s own, as are the somewhat deeper concerns about the relationship between his self and his image. From the very beginning of his career he not only carefully crafted his public image but also felt and complained about the strain of this self-creation. In this speech, he characteristically projects and pokes fun at his own image, relating a fascinating series of fables of unstable personae, wandering simulations, and masks that will not come off, fables that link Hitchcock’s world with that of Pirandello, Ionesco, and Borges. Here as elsewhere, he confirms that he will tease his audience and never give a straightforward answer to “Who is the real Alfred Hitchcock?” But there is also some intimation that he cannot answer that question and that he is worried about the deeper question of whether or not there is a “real” Alfred Hitchcock. Find the director, to use Thomas Leitch’s wonderful phrase, is a game played by Hitchcock’s audience and by Hitchcock himself.
The end of Hitchcock’s life and career has been described in detail by David Freeman, in The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock, and also by Spoto, who paints a particularly grim picture of his final project, The Short Night, as the unfilmable culmination of Hitchcock’s obsessive fantasies about inescapable entrapment, murder, and sexual violence (574–583). All the more reason, then, to conclude this section with what may be taken as Hitchcock’s own valedictory statement. In perhaps the last important interview of his life, aptly titled “Surviving,” Hitchcock talks less about his pacemaker or his problems than his patience—“First and foremost, it’s a case of the cobbler sticking to his last”—and even his buoyancy as he continues to face up to the challenges of filmmaking. His brief self-analysis is candid and insightful: one could go a long way toward understanding his life and work by following up on his observations that he is characteristically “devious” (by which he means creatively indirect and adaptive rather than manipulative and confrontational) with others and “tough” with himself. And his last words are courageous and prophetic: “I warn you, I mean to go on for ever,” he warns us, and indeed, via his perennially engaging films, he continues to haunt us, as a master artist and, in the words of John Russell Taylor, a “champion survivor.”