Alfred Hitchcock’s influence still looms over 21st-century cinema

Alfred Hitchcock got a decade, but just the one. In 2012, Sight and Sound magazine’s 10-yearly poll of film-makers and critics named Vertigo the greatest film ever made. Citizen Kane had held the title for 50 years before Hitchcock’s masterwork of identity crisis became the gold standard. Until last year. In the poll of 2022, the prize went instead to Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the quotidian epic written and directed by Chantal Akerman. Vertigo came in second. Hitchcock proved to be a one-term president. 

The strange moment in which he finds himself is underscored by the release of a new film, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. A documentary by the prolific Mark Cousins, it finds the maestro seemingly appraising his own films via impressionist Alistair McGowan. Oh, you think, as if an iffy great-uncle had arrived uninvited at the house: Hitchcock. What do we think of you in 2023?

His genius so long a given, his place in modern culture can now feel limbo-ish, loosened by time and changing norms. To get to the obvious issue first, the latest Sight and Sound poll came after a period in which film history has been reconsidered through the prisms of race and gender. And whatever one might say of Hitchcock, no one would say he was ahead of his time in terms of inclusion and professional ethics.

So if his time were now, where would he be? In disgrace is the short answer, though less for the troubling nature of his films than for his reported behaviour while making them. In 2016, actress Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds and Marnie, wrote in her autobiography that Hitchcock subjected her to a long campaign of what would now be called coercive behaviour, including physical abuse.

Her account wasn’t new. It had surfaced in 1983, in Donald Spoto’s Hitchcock biography The Dark Side of Genius. In 2012, the same year that Vertigo was named film of films, BBC/HBO drama The Girl told the story on screen. But the grim implications only seemed to register with film lovers after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein in 2017. By 2019, when an interviewer compared gifted American film-maker Jordan Peele to Hitchcock, the director of Get Out was not instantly flattered: “He was kind of a creep, right?”

And yet in 2023, Hitchcock is also still right here with us. The man might be controversial; the film-maker remains a wellspring. He hides in plain sight like one of his on-screen cameos, his style endlessly channelled by modern directors. 

For all that he flinched at the likeness, Peele’s movies have rippled with jittery Hitchcockian energy. (As Peele himself acknowledged in that same interview.) Whenever David Fincher goes near a camera, Hitchcock’s ghost is his consultant. The most richly seductive film of the past year, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, came with countless traces of Vertigo. The Korean director regularly talks of first falling for film through Hitchcock. Another precision engineer, Wes Anderson, stitched a Hitchcock motif into his new film Asteroid City: Scarlett Johansson glimpsed as a black-and-white blonde on a fast-moving train. (Johansson played Psycho’s Janet Leigh in the broad-strokes 2012 biopic Hitchcock.) 

Women directors too are dealing with the knots of admiring Hitchcock now. Justine Triet, who won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes festival, did so with a courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall, that brought forth instant comparisons. They didn’t come from nowhere. Triet again credited her whole relationship with film to stumbling as a child on a VHS copy of Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) owned by her grandparents.

The influence is unkillable. Disquiet around his conduct puts barely an asterisk against his actual films. Having brought Hitchcock back from the grave, Mark Cousins’ new project has him focus on cinematic language and his feelings for the art form, the rest largely left out of frame. The announcement this year of a mooted remake of Vertigo (with Robert Downey Jr in the role played by James Stewart) provoked spluttering at the temerity rather than outrage that the man behind the original remained uncancelled. With Hitchcock, it seems, the eternally vexed question of great art vs ugly artist is allowed, for once, to be settled. Creep and genius simply coexist. 

Maybe given the nature of the films, a certain caution was always priced into our feelings towards him. Was anyone truly surprised that the man who made a movie like The Birds in the first place (or Psycho, or Rope, or any of them) might be badly flawed close-up?

The thing is, there can be no redacting Hitchcock even if you wanted to. His visual ideas are so much the stuff of cinema that you could no more unpick him from it than write The Beatles out of pop. He has been everywhere for generations, from the self-invented shots to the story staples — wrong men and Madeleines — to the whole notion of the brand-name director. Some of that was down to the 1950s critics who rigged up auteur theory around him, but a lot was his own instinctive sense of how to sell a movie off his own fame, a trick still used today. In a recent interview, Martin Scorsese said that in his early career — when Hitchcock was still calling “Action!” — he shaped his public persona as a knowing means to get his films made. It was pure Hitchcock.

The older man was then in the final act of life. But the model he passed down was one of making movies as — in the best sense — a young person’s game. The cinematic lexicon he created came from a radical drive to innovate, to hone and revolutionise, hooking up the screen directly to his mind using whatever came to hand. The rising star who made brilliant mischief with sound in his very first talkie, 1929’s Blackmail, shot Dial M for Murder in 3D a quarter of a century later. Many things scared Hitchcock, but technology was not one, and neither were the trashy associations that genteel directors would run a mile from. (Witness Psycho: the low-budget slasher movie that changed history.)

Hitchcock in 2023 would be all over streaming, however much film snobs might shudder, and he’d be making expansive, full-fat cinema. (Vertigo clocked in north of two hours; his own cut of Topaz 143 minutes.) Stripped-back or deluxe: one of the pleasures of his career is the variety of Hitchcock you get. And yet the films were all so very of a piece as well, delivery systems for the recurring themes he was obsessed by: perversity, voyeurism, misogyny, obsession itself.

And here we finally get to the plot twist, the moment where Hitchcock does fall out of step with 21st-century film. Because whatever the truth about the man, his stories were sick. That was their whole point. And that kind of sickness — at least in mainstream movies — is now all but disappeared. Relatability rules. Major directors still ape Hitchcock’s vibe, but a far shorter list openly share his fixations with sex, violence and the darkest side of personal power.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Perhaps this side of #MeToo, people — men — really are better now. But perhaps not entirely. And if not, we might find that Hitchcock, despite or precisely because of his own flaws, still offers us much more than mere style guide or history lesson.

‘My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock’ is in UK cinemas from July 21