article_snippet.sent: With this nutritious, compact and superb critical biography, Peter Ackroyd emphasises the importance of Victorian and Edwardian London in the imagination of Alfred Hitchcock
article_snippet.sent: The logic and reason, coupled with a mood of anxiety, dread and paranoid suspicion, seeped into Hitchcock’s work:
article_snippet.sent: Alfred Hitchcock was never any oil painting.
article_snippet.sent: A 5 ft 7 in Humpty Dumpty, Alfred Hitchcock was the neurotic fat boy with piggy eyes, who was filled with ‘lavish and peculiar’ repressed sexual fantasies.
article_snippet.sent: Alfred Hitchcock entire oeuvre, Ackroyd suggests, was a study of voyeurism, violence and guilt with, on the one hand, the rape and murder of vulnerable women, and, on the other, the pursuit of a hero accused of crimes Alfred Hitchcock did not commit.
article_snippet.sent: Alfred Hitchcock very first work, in 1927, The Lodger, was about a man wrongly accused of being Jack The Ripper and, already, Alfred Hitchcock could whip up an atmosphere of ‘doubt and suspense’, the camera dwelling on ‘dark puddles shimmering with opalescent light’.
article_snippet.sent: Would Alfred Hitchcock have seen it this way?
article_snippet.sent: The shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (Janet Leigh pictured playing Marion Crane in the film) is one of the most recognisable shots in cinematic history .
article_snippet.sent: The brightness of California’s blue pools and red clay tennis courts was in marked contrast to London’s charcoal murk yet, as in he English films, Hitchcock found that, in the sunshine, ‘fear became an intrinsic aspect of daily life’.
article_snippet.sent: With the stars, Hitchcock was awkward, even contemptuous, calling the stars ‘cattle’.
article_snippet.sent: I didn’t like his’, and Hitchcock had an unfortunate fondness for cruel practical jokes
article_snippet.sent: Hitchcock (pictured with Hitchcock two granddaughters) was respected in the industry, but not liked. 
article_snippet.sent: Marlene Dietrich called Hitchcock
article_snippet.sent: I didn’t like Hitchcock’
article_snippet.sent: Then there’s Hitchcock’s clammy behaviour towards Tippi Hedren during the making of The Birds and Marnie —
article_snippet.sent: ’s control freakery by arguing that Hitchcock was doing nothing worse than deliberately trying to elicit a nervous and terrified performance for the cameras.
article_snippet.sent: I think I prefer Francois Truffaut’s observation that ‘Hitchcock filmed scenes of murder as if they were love scenes, and scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder’.
article_snippet.sent: Everybody remembers Psycho, with Anthony Perkins as the ‘excitable and sexually ambiguous’ Norman Bates — a thin version of Hitchcock himself, it seems.
article_snippet.sent: But a lot of those pecks look genuine — Hitchcock’s revenge, it is said, because Hedren had rejected Hedren advances.
article_snippet.sent: Hitchcock himself died in 1980 from ailments related to obesity and alcoholism: colitis, arthritis, gall stones, renal failure.
highlights_snippet.sent: But Alfred Hitchcock insecurities began to seep into Alfred Hitchcock cinematography .
  