Big Hitch and little revelation

Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto, £12.99)

The world doesn’t lack either scholarship or anecdote on the subject of Alfred Hitchcock. His whole oeuvre is tilled and retilled by film academics; university presses are kept ticking over with annual anthologies. To scan the bibliography for Peter Ackroyd’s slim new book is to be reminded of all the other writers who have weighed in before, from Peter Bogdanovich and François Truffaut to Donald Spoto, Patrick McGilligan, Peter Conrad, Slavoj Žižek and Robin Wood.

The unique selling point of Ackroyd’s 279-page biography, other than the fact that it’s by him, is hard to discern. The author’s expertise on the subject of London certainly makes for a vivid start — the smells and sounds of late-Victorian Leytonstone, where Hitchcock was born in August 1899, come easily. But as it whips through a legendary career without any specific angle, there’s a want of novelty, a feeling of being peddled a précis. The cover jacket makes claims that we’ll discover “what lurks in the corner of the shot”, but Ackroyd barely lingers long enough on any element of Hitchcock’s life to make such revelations feasible.

The stories we get here are all repurposed from earlier accounts. Rarely are these sources credited: it’s disappointing to see a writer of Ackroyd’s stature content to turn in such a cut-and-paste job. When he tells us “Hitchcock once summarised the difference between his English and American periods as one between spontaneity or instinct, and calculation”, the lack of a footnote (it’s from a 1964 interview with Huw Wheldon) makes it sound like something Ackroyd vaguely remembers hearing once.

The director’s obsessions with his female stars (Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Vera Miles, Tippi Hedren) must count as especially well-trodden ground by now, after two 2012 screen treatments — Hitchcock and The Girl — which broached the topic. Ackroyd makes a valid and rarer point about the leitmotif of homosexuality in his films. “It would be an interesting parlour game,” he writes, “to name any of his principal characters who were not intimated to be bisexual.” We’d go further with the two killers in Rope (1948), the cross-dressing culprit in Murder! (1930), Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), Martin Landau’s henchman in North by Northwest (1959) and Bruno in Strangers on a Train (1951) — which Ackroyd stops short of pointing out.

There are undercurrents here of a deep sexual unhappiness in Hitchcock’s psyche, despite his doting, lifelong companionship with Alma Reville. Ackroyd also implies that the salacious rape-and-murder sequence in his penultimate film, 1972’s Frenzy, was a long-harboured ambition put on screen. Alas, though, discussion of the director’s artistry feels so sketchy and second-hand that no credible portrait knits together. When Ackroyd posits that Jimmy Stewart’s immobile, pervy voyeur in Rear Window could “even” be interpreted as Hitchcock’s “image of himself”, it comes across as a curiously proud deduction for something undergraduates in 1954 could probably have had a stab at.

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