Becoming Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock stacks up his oeuvre.

In a photograph taken toward the end of his career, Alfred Hitchcock stands next to a tower of neatly piled binders, each with a film title boldly printed along its spine. The director, penguin-like in shape and dress, stands on tiptoe to place the binder for Torn Curtain, one of his last films, on the very top.

An impressive career is piled up in this chronologically arranged stack, representing a lifetime of scripts and carefully thought-out storyboards. And on the very, very bottom of the 50-film tower—underneath the cineastes’ obsessions Vertigo and Marnie, the audience pleasers To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest, and the ultimate suspense flick, Psycho—sits The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock’s first film, released 79 years ago today.

At the time, the director was 26 years old and a newlywed, recently married to his assistant director, Alma Reville. He had risen from title-card illustrator, responsible for drawing the cards that narrated the story in a silent film, to director in five short years. Certainly the film industry was young too, but Hitchcock’s quick rise underscored his ambition and confidence.

During production, though, his future looked decidedly less assured. The Pleasure Garden had been a fiasco to film. The story of two chorus girls, Patsy and Jill, who are engaged to two men stationed in British colonies, it becomes a tale of murder, mayhem, and betrayal when Patsy’s husband tries to kill her after she discovers him in an affair. In addition to figuring out how to film the hectic plot, which had been assigned to Hitchcock by his boss, Michael Balcon, the director had to smuggle equipment and film into Germany, where the movie was being shot, to avoid paying duties at the border. Of course he was caught, and the film confiscated. He lost his wallet, and he had to pay for a train window he accidentally broke. His star, Virginia Valli, meanwhile insisted on staying at the best hotels. All this left him in the embarrassing position of having to borrow funds from the cameraman and Valli, and barely able to pay for his own hotel room.

After the movie was finished, it sat for months as the distributor refused to release it, considering it unsuitable for English audiences. Hitchcock meanwhile worked on his second and third films. Finally, on January 24, 1927, The Pleasure Garden was released, to positive notices.

The response was mild, though, compared to the enthusiastic response given to his third film, The Lodger. Released just three weeks later, The Lodger was the movie that established him as a rising star. Complete with what would become his trademark cameo appearance and a plot he had chosen himself, The Lodger is considered by many, including its creator, to be the first real Hitchcock film.

But The Pleasure Garden was important for other reasons. Hitchcock denied any aspiration to being an auteur, blandly telling the French director François Truffaut years later that “I was very happy doing the scripts and the art direction; I hadn’t thought of myself as a director.” His words were contradicted by his actions. He had always worked with an eye on the director’s chair. His daughter, Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, described a family anecdote that revealed both his ambition and his marital dynamics:

Before their marriage, Hitchcock and Alma Reville worked together for two years, during which Hitch, as he was called, rarely spoke to his future wife. Reville, a day younger than her future husband, had worked in the industry longer and was considered a possible future director herself. It was not until he became an assistant director that he acknowledged her, calling her to inquire whether she would be interested in working as a film editor for him. “Mama,” O’Connell recalled, “had a simple explanation for Daddy’s behavior towards her: It was unthinkable for a British man to admit that a woman had a better position, and Hitch waited to speak to her until he had a better job than she did, until he was in a position of power.”

Hitchcock’s relationship with Alma Reville and his confidence as a director were cemented on the set of The Pleasure Garden. Reville was the one who had to coax Valli into lending Hitchcock some money, and Hitchcock sought Alma’s reassurance and opinion on the set constantly. Her role as his closest advisor and helper continued until the end of his career. Their marriage and collaboration lasted over two continents, 54 films, one daughter, and his many intense infatuations with his leading ladies.

His career as a director, despite the bumpy start, was to prove equally long and fruitful. The Pleasure Garden’s opening shot of leggy chorus girls coming down a spiral staircase, its depiction of voyeuristic men watching through their opera glasses, and even the suggestiveness of its title (which was a reference to both a theater in the movie and the Garden of Eden)—all introduce themes that would show up again and again in later movies. Even at 26, Hitchcock knew clearly what the future would hold.

—Claire Lui is an editorial assistant at American Heritage magazine.