Post your articles online and promote your website for free! Boost your sites ranking by linking it from the ArticleZap database! Free Article directory and instant translation publishing!
Hitchcock, Alfred (b. Aug. 13, 1899, London), motion-picture director best known for suspenseful films, with humorous touches, of such immense popularity that his name became as great an attraction as a star’s. Critics probed his films more deeply than those of any other Hollywood director, often finding far-reaching philosophical implications in them, though he denied any intent beyond entertainment. Hitchcock’s influence on younger film makers was unparalleled—Francois Truifaut, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer in France, Lindsay Anderson in England, and Peter Bogdanovich in the U.S. All wrote extensively about him and acknowledged his influence on their own styles.
The son of a London poultry dealer, Hitchcock attended St. Ignatius College, London, a Jesuit school, and the University of London, where he studied engineering. By 1920 he began to work in films, designing title cards for silent motion pictures. He directed his first film in 1925 and, with The Lodger (1926), began making the “thrillers” with which he was to become identified. His Blackmail (1929) was the first successful British talking picture. After directing such classic films as The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), Hitchcock left England for Hollywood, where his first film, Rebecca (1940), won an Academy Award for best picture.
BR>
During the next three decades, he made an average of a film a year, flamboyantly demonstrating his mastery of technical means to build suspense. In Notorious (1946), for example, he had the camera make a majestic descent from the high ceiling of a crowded room to a close-up of the hostess’s fist, clenching a vital key. In the I 950s, in such films as Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), and Vertigo (1958), he virtually perfected suspense techniques, and in the I 960s he turned to thrillers of a new style. In Psycho (1960), for example, the leading lady is murdered—in one of the most explicit knifings ever shown— in the first third of the film; in The Birds (1963), he omitted, at the end of the film, the expected explanation of what motivated the birds to attack people; and in Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) he presented conventional espionage stories together with strong counterthemes suggesting that such activity does more harm than good. In Frenzy (1972) he successfully revived his former style.
Hitchcock, who made a fleeting appearance in each of his films, increased his owncelebrity through several popular television series in the 1 950s and ‘60s, which he introduced and sometimes directed. His name also appeared on a series of mystery-story anthologies.
