Hitchcock’s London

When we hear the name Alfred Hitchcock, many people think of films that feature iconic American landscapes:  Jimmy Stewart wandering through San Francisco in “Vertigo” or Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint clambering down Mount Rushmore in “North by Northwest.” But before Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1939, he wrote, directed, and designed more than two dozen films in London, from the mid 1920s through the end of the 1930s. London is not just a backdrop in these films. Their plots and characters emerge from the distinctive neighborhoods of the city and dramatize the changing social conditions of the era. Hitchcock’s films engage with London. The characters roam the city’s streets, use public transportation, and enjoy London’s popular amusements. The stories often embroil these characters in England’s legal system and political movements and challenge prevailing norms of gender and morality. By representing London and its inhabitants so vividly on screen, Hitchcock created memorable stories and compelling images of the city.

Hitchcock’s London films are admired for their creative use of visual and narrative strategies. Our series highlights key elements of Hitchcock’s style and the different ways his films engage with London. We begin with “The Lodger” (1927), a thriller adapted from Marie Belloc-Lowndes’ popular novel that was inspired by the Jack the Ripper story. Hitchcock draws on stylistic elements from contemporary German cinema to create evocative spaces in which characters struggle to make sense of their environment and each other. Guilt is a central theme of both the novel and the film: Is the lodger guilty or not, and of what? Themes of guilt and detection are also prominent in “Sabotage” (1936), where a detective falls for a woman whose behavior challenges his understanding of right and wrong. The film draws on Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” (1907), a novel about spies and anarchists in the East End of London in the 1880s that Hitchcock updates to refer to the Nazi threat to England in the 1930s. Both films enable us to examine the stylistic and thematic qualities of Hitchcock’s films and to deepen our appreciation for the city he loved. I look forward to exploring them with you.

2 minutes