By this stage of the game we’ve probably had more movies about Alfred Hitchcock than the portly provocateur actually made over the course of his long and celebrated career. Well, here comes another one! My Name is Alfred Hitchcock is screening in cinemas from July 21.
You know Alfred Hitchcock, of course. One of the most acclaimed and popular filmmakers of the 20th century, the British auteur gave us a wealth of top-notch, archly comedic suspense classics, including Rear Window, North by Northwest, and the immortal proto-slasher, Psycho. And even if you’ve never seen his stuff, he influenced absolutely everyone who came after him.
This one comes to us courtesy of documentarian Mark Cousins, who also gave us the indispensable The Story of Film. But the twist here is that Hitch is actually narrating My Name is Alfred Hitchcock—or, at the very least, British impressionist and comic Alistair McGowan is, doing a pitch-perfect take on the old Master of Suspense as he takes us through his filmography.
That’s an interesting conceit right there, but in the wrong hands it could be disastrously twee. Lucky for us, then, that Cousins uses it to create a playful commentary around Hitchcock’s 50-year body of work. It’s a bit of showmanship that the legendary filmmaker might have appreciated himself—he was always fond of a bit of carny-style huckstering, and used his own image to tirelessly promote his work.
And rather than taking us through the Hitchcock canon chronologically, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock instead follows a number of key themes through his filmography, grouped into six 125-minute chapters: Escape, Desire, Loneliness, Time, Fulfillment, and Height, giving us a critical interrogation rather than a rote biography. So even if you know your Vertigo from your Saboteur, and have every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents committed to memory, this new documentary might shed some new light on the old master.
