by DENNIS DRABELLE
IMAGE/Nan E. Talese
I’m a sucker for brief lives. Not people dying young, mind you, but short biographies of prominent artists, thinkers and politicians. Among several fine sets have been Viking Modern Masters, the Penguin Lives (both now defunct) and the American Presidents series, which is nearing completion. The best entries in these series can sharpen our perception of a familiar figure by focusing on the essentials.
The prolific British writer Peter Ackroyd is becoming a one-man progenitor of his own brief lives. Last year, he published a scintillating volume on the father of the mystery novel, Wilkie Collins. Now he has taken on another English-born purveyor of suspense (and a great admirer of Collins): Alfred Hitchcock.
Ackroyd reminds us what an outsider Hitchcock was. Raised Roman Catholic in Protestant England, he was perennially unhappy with his appearance, especially his spherical figure, and beset by multiple fears: of heights, policemen, imprisonment and, simply, other people. Even after he was well-established in a job with quasi-dictatorial powers — movie director — he “still did not like to cross the studio floor in case a stranger came up to him.” Such a cluster of neuroses would send many of us running to a shrink, but instead Hitchcock harnessed them to his talents. He was, Ackroyd sums up, “a superb fantasist of fear.”
After starting in the British film industry as a writer of title cards, Hitchcock quickly rose in the ranks: designer, art director, assistant director, director. More than most biographers, Ackroyd emphasizes his subject’s German phase, and makes a good case for doing so. While working on two Anglo-German productions in the 1920s, Hitchcock came under the sway of F.W. Murnau, who had directed “Nosferatu,” the great silent version of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula.” “From Murnau,” Hitchcock recalled, “I learned how to tell a story without words.” Ackroyd also argues that the milieu depicted in the cinema of Weimar Germany “unlocked the door of Hitchcock’s imagination. This world is hazardous and uncertain; it is tremulous and frightening; it is deadly and unpredictable. It elicits anxiety and disorientation. It is always precarious.” It’s a world in which cops are apt to arrest the wrong man, in which an affable jokester on a train proposes an exchange of murders — except he’s not really joking, and a repentant woman is murdered while showering in her motel room.
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