MoMA.org | Exhibitions | 1999 | Alfred Hitchcock

Murder (1930)

Murder was the first important who-done-it picture I made. It's the first time I ever used the voice over the face--without the lips moving--for stream-of-consciousness. Before O'Neill. And there was a scene where Marshall was shaving, and he had the radio on and I wanted to have the Prelude from Tristan playing. I had a thirty-piece orchestra in the studio, just for this little radio he's playing in his bathroom. You see, you couldn't add it later, it had to be done at the same time and balanced on the stage.

The Skin Game(1931)

I didn't alter the Galsworthy play very much. It opened up a little bit more than Juno. Not too much, though. Photographed theatre, really.

Rich and Strange (1932)

It wasn't a thriller. It was just an adventure story. A young couple take a trip around the world. I actually sent a crew around the world to cover everything. There was an amusing sequence at the end. Their cargo ship is wrecked and abandoned in the South China Sea, and they are rescued by some looters on a Chinese junk. Then, after it's all over, they meet me in the lounge. This is my most devastating appearance in a picture. They tell me their story, and I say, "No, I don't think it'll make a movie." And it didn't.

Number Seventeen (1932)

That was just another stage play that they'd bought and it just didn't transfer. It was a very cheap melodrama. The only good thing in that picture was a chase between a motorcoach and a train at the end--that's all.

Lord Camber's Ladies (1932) [Produced but not directed by Hitchcock.]

By that time, British International Pictures were drawing in their horns, and they decided to make what are called "quota pictures." They asked me to produce a couple and I did one. Quota pictures were made very cheap, you know. This was a poison thing. I gave it to Benn Levy to direct."

Waltzes from Vienna (1933)

This was my lowest ebb. A musical, and they really couldn't afford the music. You know, they say a man is no better than his last picture. But, ironically enough, prior to making Waltzes from Vienna and reaching this low ebb, I had written The Man Who Knew Too Much with a couple of other writers. But it was on the shelf. When I made The Man Who Knew Too Much, it was acclaimed, and it looked as though I had recovered. But the irony was that it was made, in my mind, anyway, before Waltzes from Vienna.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
You've said that you could get away with a lot more things in the early days than you can now. What did you mean?

I suppose that's why there's a certain amount of nostalgia, especially in England, for the Hitchcock English period. Around that 1935 period, the audience would accept more, the films of the period were full of fantasy, and one didn't have to worry too much about logic or truth. When I came to America, the first thing I had to learn was that the audience were more questioning. I'll put it another way. Less avant-garde. In the first Man Who Knew Too Much, the characters jump around from one place to another--you're in a chapel, and you've got old ladies with guns--and one didn't care. One said, "An old lady with a gun, that's be amusing." There was more underlying humor, at least for me, and less logic. If the idea appealed to one, however outrageous it was, do it! They wouldn't go for that in America.

The Man Who Knew Too Mcuch. 1934

Do you prefer the old Man Who Knew Too Much to the new one?

No, I don't really. The old one is fairly slipshod structurally.

What was the purpose of the unraveling sweater towards the start?

It's the thread of life that gets broken. One could still get pretentious in those days. It was also comic. You combine a little comic action with a break in the thread when the man falls dead.

The final street fight is based on a true happening, isn't it?

It was a very famous incident, called the Sydney Street Siege. There were anarchists holed up in a house there, and they had to bring the soldiers out because the police couldn't handle it. Winston Churchill went down and directed operations. I had great difficulty getting that one on the screen because the censor wouldn't pass it. He called it a black spot on English police history. He said, "You can't have the soldiers." And I said, "Well, then we will have to have the police do the shooting." "No, you can't do that. The police don't carry firearms in England. If you want to do those Chicago things, we won't allow it here." Finally the censor relented and said I could do it if I had the police go to the local gunsmith and take out mixed guns and show that they're not familiar with the weapons. Silly. I ignored it, and I had a truck come up with a load of rifles.

How did you do the Albert Hall sequence?

Schufftan process again. I photographed about nine angles around the Albert Hall when it was empty, with the same type of lens that we would use ultimately, using long exposures to get clear, sharp pictures, which were then blown up to 14 x 18. I gave them to a famous artist, Matania, who did pictures that were completely representational. I asked him to paint the audience into each photo. The reason I chose more than one angle was so that I didn't have to repeat myself, otherwise the audience would have gotten used to it and realized that the people were not moving. I had the photos made into transparencies and we went back to the Albert Hall and set up the Schufftan in exactly the same spots where the original photographs were taken--lining it up exactly. Now the mirror reflected this little transparency with a full audience, and we scraped the silvering here and there, a box near the entrance, and the whole of the orchestra. Then in the box we had a woman opening a program, and so forth, and the eye immediately went to the movement. All the rest was static. We had to do it this way because we had no money.

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935)
In all your chase films, why do you have the hero fleeing from both the police and the real criminals?

One of the reasons is a structural one. The audience must be in tremendous sympathy with the man on the run. But the basic reason is that the audience will wonder, "Why doesn't he go for the police?" Well, the police are after him, so he can't go to them, can he?

Isn't it his sense of guilt that makes him so fervent?

Well, yes, to some degree. In Thirty-Nine Steps maybe he feels guilt because the woman is so desperate and he doesn't protect her enough, he's careless.