In 1920 Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount Pictures) opened a studio in London and hired Hitchcock immediately as a part-time title designer for their first project. He eventually designed the title card drawings and lettering styles for all the Famous Players-Lasky films produced in England, and quickly became a man of all trades around the studio. In 1924, Gainsborough Pictures, a newly formed British company headed by Michael Balcon, took over the facility, where Hitchcock was now employed as an assistant director.
During an assignment in Germany, Hitchcock saw the filmmaker F.W. Murnau at work--an experience that made a lasting impression on him.
This was also an important time in Hitchcock's personal life, as he became engaged to the film editor Alma Reville, whom he had met at the studio in 1921.
In 1925 Balcon gave Hitchcock his first feature film to direct, The Pleasure Garden. Hitchcock also directed a second film that year, The Mountain Eagle, and a third, The Lodger, the following year. By the end of 1926, he found himself "the most sought-after" British director, despite the fact that none of the three films he had made so far had actually been released. However, earlier that year, a special screening of The Lodger (significantly, his first "thriller") had been held exclusively for the press and film exhibitors.
It was a huge success. Ecstatic trade reviews acclaimed The Lodger as possibly "the finest British production ever made" (Bioscope, September 16, 1926) and "one of the first real landmarks in the coming advance of British pictures" (Kinematograph, September 23, 1926).
After the success of this trade show, the distributor decided to schedule release dates for all three of Hitchcock's completed films. In December of this busy year, Hitchcock and Alma were married. A daughter, Patricia, was born in 1928.
The first Hitchcock film to be shown publicly was The Pleasure Garden, which opened in London on January 24, 1927. However, it was The Lodger, premiering just three weeks later on February 14, that audiences, aroused by the early rave reviews and commentaries, really wanted to see. Attracting huge crowds during its initial run, The Lodger marked "the first time in British film history," says Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, "that the director received an even greater press than his stars" (Spoto 1983). The Lodger was the first film in which Hitchcock made a cameo appearance, something that became a trademark of his films over the next fifty years.
Hitchcock's reputation as a thriller director evolved more slowly than his reputation as England's finest director. During his first decade of filmmaking, he worked in whatever genres were popular at the time in England, including theatrical adaptations (e.g. Easy Virtue, 1927; Juno and the Paycock, 1930; The Skin Game, 1931), romances (Rich and Strange, 1932), and even a musical (Waltzes from Vienna, 1933). While he made thrillers, including the aforementioned The Lodger and Blackmail (1929), that were among his most critically acclaimed films from this period, he also had great success with a number of nonthrillers, including The Ring (1927), a boxing melodrama based on an original story by Hitchcock, and Juno and the Paycock (1930), a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the Sean O'Casey play.
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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Blackmail, 1929
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