My Name is Alfred Hitchcock (2024)

Safe to say that no filmmaker in the history of the medium had a better understanding of his audience than Sir Alfred Hitchcock.  Hitch had us by the throat.  He famously said that he played his audience like a piano, and mercifully, he played tunes worth listening to.  His films were approachable perhaps in the manner of tapping a fresh bruise.  We couldn’t help ourselves.

Forty-Five years after Sir Alfred’s passing, this approachability has needless-to-say, bred a vast grummet of experts and scholars who attempt to understand and analyze his work right down to the bone.  What did this shot mean? What did that shot mean? What does this character represent?  Is Jimmy Stewart’s fall into the void in Vertigo representative of his fall into obsession?  Was the body in the fruit cellar in Psycho symbolic of the decay of American society?  And let’s not look too deeply into the train entering the tunnel in North by Northwest.

All of that is, perhaps, on the mind of Mark Cousins, a Northern Irish director and film lover who, in 2011, created the 15-part series The Story of Film: An Odyssey one of the greatest analytical bibles of the history of this medium that any documentarian has yet devised.  It worked because of his insights, his knowledge of film, his love of film, and his soothing narration brought to us with his quiet brough which made it sound like he was sitting next to us in a theater giving us insights into the world of the moving image.

In My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, the insights are there, but I’m afraid the approach feels a bit off.  The film is a journey through Hitch’s work, and what he supposedly thought of it.  We hear Sir Alfred’s voice imitated by actor Alistar McGowan with an impression that isn’t entirely spot-on.  There’s something a bit off.  His rendition of Hitch is a little friendlier, far less aloof, far less of the trickster that we caught in the opening monologues of his TV show.  He also takes us into the world of his films by breaking them down into categories; themes of love, of obsession, of heights, of private traps that I think he might have been fit to explain through individual films but not in his overall work.  I’ve read countless interviews with the great director, and I don’t think he really saw his work that way.

It is interesting to hear an analysis, but I might have preferred if it came from someone else.  Perhaps if Cousins had narrated film himself with the same quiet intellect that he did with The Story of Film.  The approach of having an actor give Alfred his voice back and stuff words into his mouth that he never said, feels dishonest.  What is it trying to tell us?  Whose analysis is this anyway?