Alfred Hitchcock in England
Alfred Hitchcock never went out of his way to correct the oversight by critics and the press when it came to crediting his writers. In all fairness to Hitchcock, he was not alone, this was and largely remains, with a few exceptions, standard in the industry. Yet, while a number of the writers who worked with Hitchcock in Hollywood have been able to make their contributions known - simply because they were still around to do so - many of the writers who wrote scripts for the director in England have been all but ignored. That is until Charles Barr, a renowned authority on British cinema, turned his attention to Alfred Hitchcock.
I had the pleasure of meeting Charles and hearing him speak at the Hitchcock Centennial conference in New York in October 1999. At the time, Charles's wonderful book English Hitchcock (Cameron & Hollis, 1999) had just been published in the UK, and mine had just been accepted by FSG. Little did I know then, how closely our work had paralleled. I, of course, had been concentrating on the period in which Alfred Hitchcock worked with John Michael Hayes, in addition to digging into the director's unproduced projects.
Charles, on the other hand, had delved into an unchartered territory all his own—championing screenwriters who worked with Hitchcock in England, such as Eliot Stannard and Charles Bennett, the only writers, in addition to Hayes, with whom Hitchcock had a sustained collaboration of more than two consecutive films.
Stannard wrote nine successive films for Hitchcock during his silent period. Bennett was the chief writer on five successive films for Hitchcock at Gaumont-British (in addition to providing the source material for Blackmail and collaborating on the screenplay for Foreign Correspondent in Hollywood). And Hayes wrote Hitchcock's first four films for Paramount in the 1950s.
The mark that Stannard and Bennett left on Hitchcock's work is undeniable, and Charles Barr presents the evidence persuasively in English Hitchcock. In the case of Stannard, Charles followed up his fine work in an essay in the anthology Young and Innocent?, where he traces Stannard's first years in the British film industry, through a series of essays the scenarist penned for the trade magazine of the day, Kine Weekly. So much of what Stannard wrote, while Hitchcock was still a student, sounds remarkably like the director's "own" theories on cinema, about which he would be widely quoted and canonized.
I do not easily recommend books on Hitchcock, especially since so much that is out there is written by academics for academics, and seldom takes into account the cultural, political, and economic factors at play within the movie industry. Moreover, these theorists only seem able to approach Hitchcock in a vacuum, as if he created his films completely on his own, and was not part of the motion picture business. Charles Barr skillfully analyzes the films Hitchcock made in England, giving full credit where it is due to the young director's collaborators (especially the writers), putting the films into historical context within the British film industry, and pointing out countless instances where the films' very "Englishness" cropped up again and again in Hitchcock's American films. The last book to attempt a serious film-by-film assessment of all Hitchcock's British films was Maurice Yacowar's Hitchcock's British Films and that was a quarter century ago. If you're going to discover or rediscover the films Hitchcock made from 1926 to 1939, look no further than Charles Barr's English Hitchcock.
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