In March 1939, Hitchcock, Alma, and Pat sailed for America on the Queen Mary. He would reside in Los Angeles for most of the rest of his life, although he would not become a U.S. citizen until 1955. He had elected to sign a long-term contract with Selznick International, thus alienating his most ardent critical supporters, the British press, which would continue for years to malign Hitchcock's American work as being inferior to his output in Britain. He was welcomed warmly in America, however, as his first film for Selznick, Rebecca, was both a popular and a critical success, winning the Oscar for the best film of 1940.
While Hitchcock continued to have his greatest popular and critical success in the 1940s making thrillers, such as Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Notorious (1946), he still attempted to step outside the genre on several occasions, with a screwball comedy (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 1941), a costume drama (Under Capricorn, 1949), a war film (Lifeboat, 1944), and a theatrical adaptation (Rope, 1948). He also made a modest contribution to the British war effort with two short propaganda films shot in London with a refugee troupe of French actors: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (1944).
It was during this period that Hitchcock began his fruitful professional relationships with Cary Grant (in Suspicion) and James Stewart (in Rope), each of whom would star in several of the director's most critically acclaimed (and commercially successful) films, as well as with Ingrid Bergman (in Spellbound), his favorite female star during the forties.
Hitchcock returned briefly to England in 1940, when he tried but failed to persuade his mother to join him in America. She died in 1942, while Hitchcock was filming Shadow of a Doubt. His brother William died shortly afterwards.
After the spectacular success of the spy thriller Notorious in 1946, Hitchcock hit a lull in his career. The last of his films made under Selznick, The Paradine Case (1947) disappointed both critics and fans. By that time, Hitchcock and a business associate and friend, Sidney Bernstein, had set up an independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, which produced his next two films, Rope (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949). Neither film did particularly well at the box office or with the critics (though Rope, at least, provided an opportunity for an interesting technical experiment), and Hitchcock found the difficulties in running his own company unmanageable. However, he continued thenceforth to act as producer of all the films he directed.
He enjoyed somewhat more success during his four-year stint at Warner Bros. (1949-53), especially with the release of Strangers on a Train (1951). Still, his filmmaking activities during this time were often punctuated by long stretches of relative inactivity.
But beginning in 1952, Hitchcock entered the most productive period of his career.
The text in the Chronology section has been adapted from "Alfred Hitchcock" by Robert E.
Kapsis, from American National Biography, edited by John Garraty. © 1999
by the American Council of Learned Societies. Used by permission of Oxford University
Press, Inc.
Adapted by Robert E. Kapsis, Kathie Coblentz, and Amy Stoller.
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Saboteur, 1942
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