Dir: Laurent Bouzereau | Doc 72′ 2024
A new documentary exploring the Hitchcock’s debut career in England during the 1920s and 1930s is directed by Laurent Bouzereau and narrated by American radio host and film critic Elvis Mitchell.
As the title suggests the first part of this dense doc is dedicated to the first British talkie Blackmail (1929) highlighting the English director’s predominant style as a visual filmmaker whose talents and enjoyment lay in setting up the scene and crafting the interplay between light and shadow. For Hitchcock image was king and drove the narrative forward with the dialogue coming second. By his own admission he found writing a task.
Blackmail, starring Andy Ondra as a woman who kills in self defence, was first released in 1929 as a talkie with the silent version following, even though the first part is largely silent with minimal dialogue.
Hitchcock always made an appearance in his own films suggesting he possibly wanted to be an actor, but this was far from the case. So he always staged these vignettes early on in the narrative so as not to draw the viewer’s attention away from the film as a whole.
Becoming Hitchcock moves steadily through its paces with a focus on lead actors and main themes: of violence, intrigue, blackmail and, of course, love, with the thriller being a particularly English passion. Hitchcock’s was also a master of psychology and his villains were invariably charming and often smiling as they inveigled their victims.
The spoken word was of lesser consideration for Hitchcock. But for Bouzereau this is the opposite. The narration is verbose and dominating. The celebrity talks continuously throughout the film as if reading from a prepared script, with plentiful images and black and white sketches added almost as an embellishment, clearly emphasising Mitchell’s talent for broadcasting. Becoming Hitchcock would perhaps work better as a radio broadcast. The criticism here is the lack of time given over for quiet reflection, let alone digestion, in a spare running time of 72 minutes.
A shame, also, that Bouzereau chose an American rather than an English voice to narrate, given that the Leytonstone-born Hitchcock spent a good fifteen formative year’s crafting his career in Blighty before moving across the pond in 1939 and taking US citizenship in 1955. @MeredithTaylor
NOW ON BLURAY FROM 13 DECEMBER 2024