Alfred Hitchcock, according to his latest biographer, Edward White, “was very widely read and could talk with authority on matters of psychology, politics, and philosophy, as well as almost any field of the arts.” It’s likely, therefore, that he knew, or at least knew of, Freud’s essay. Certainly he made a career out of exploiting our fascination with, and fear of, the uncanny. In his own case, he manufactured a sort of Doppelgänger in whose ample shadow he could hide in plain sight. There was Alfred Hitchcock the lower–middle-class lad from the East End of London who from earliest days was obsessed by the shadow play of three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional screen, and then there was “Alfred Hitchcock,” a balding fat man in a double-breasted suit with a protruding lower lip and an instantly recognizable profile, who made a fortune in Hollywood by playing to, and playing upon, our deepest fears and phobias. Which was the real man, if there was one?
His professional life also was divided in two parts, geographical and imaginative. So famous is he for the movies he made in Hollywood, from Rebecca in 1940 through to his last film, Family Plot, in 1976, that it is easy to forget he spent the first half of his career in England, making English films, more than a score of them, and that, when he left for America, he was already an established, indeed a revered, name in world cinema. No wonder he was so close for so long to Cary Grant, another riven Englishman, who at the outset had been the less than dashingly named Archie Leach. It might be said that these two dream-figures, Hitchcock and Grant, were their own body doubles, the one comically grotesque, the other superhumanly handsome.
Hitchcock was 80 when he died, in 1980, but one has the impression that he lived for twice that long. The “English” Hitchcock is essentially a creature of the late nineteenth century—he could be a character out of Dickens, or an impresario of the English Music Hall in its heyday. He never lost his accent, a curious mixture of East End Cockney and the plummy vowels to be heard in the West End gentlemen’s clubs. Though he became an American citizen in 1955, following his wife’s example and perhaps encouraged to it by her, he had his doubts. According to Edward White, he was nervous of relinquishing his official status as an Englishman, observing to a friend that “the Hitchcock name goes back almost to the beginning of the British Empire. It isn’t easy giving up a lifetime surrounded with British tradition and history.” Yet as David Thomson has suggested, Hitchcock’s Psycho marked the true start of what would become known as The Sixties, not so much a decade as an epoch.