Mark Cousins’s documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock steers a careful course between low and high culture, the crass, “did you know” approach to the great director and the earnest film studies route. Hitchcock understood the importance of fun.
The result is an engaging, interesting, entertaining and enlightening 120 minutes, not the last word in Hitchcock, but a lively addition to a library which, in my view, could not get full enough.
“A showman, a daredevil, a fun fare,” says Hitch in a film entirely written and narrated by him, or so it’s claimed at the outset. In fact that’s all a bit of a lie. Cousins wrote the script that impressionist Alistair McGowan brings to life and Cousins comes clean, with a Hitchcockian wink and a shrug at the end, in case you hadn’t spotted that the voice you can occasionally hear in conversation with “Hitch” is Cousins’s own. Since Hitchcock died when Cousins was still at school, it had to be trickery of some sort.
Using a vast quantity of clips and stills, Cousins takes a thematic approach, swerving the usual Hitchcock topics like the wrongly accused man, the blonde and the Maguffin (though they all get a mention) to come at the director from what he sees as bigger, more timeless themes, ones which sustained the director from his first films in the silent era right down to the last one – Escape, Control, Desire, Loneliness, Time, Fulfilment and Height (not Hitch’s own, 5ft 7in/170cm, but the use of the camera from on high).
The archive has been not so much plundered as scraped clean and even the diehard Hitchcock fan will probably find something to investigate further once Cousins is done with them. There are clips from a host of silent films I’ve never seen – The Pleasure Garden and Downhill, for instance. Less expected were gaps from the later period. For some reason I’ve never seen The Paradine Case or Under Capricorn, for instance. I also hadn’t quite realised that as well as a film called Sabotage there’s another one called Saboteur. And while I knew Hitchcock had shot footage in the death camps, I hadn’t realised how carefully he’d approached his task – no cuts, he insisted, the camera must be a beady and pitiless eye, resulting in footage as grimly straightforward as the film’s title – German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.
Look elsewhere for dirt, this is Hitchcock the film-maker rather than the man. Cousins also stays away from technical language, film theory and psychology but that doesn’t mean he’s lacking in rigour. By piling clip on clip and observation on observation, he is burrowing towards something – attempting to lay bare the ineffable, the stuff even Hitchcock didn’t quite realise he was doing.
There’s no real examination of aesthetics, which is a slight pity. Amid all the brouhaha that often surrounded his films, especially once he’d been dubbed the Master of Suspense, the gorgeousness of Hitchcock’s images was often overlooked. Did anyone ever look as glamorous as Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest?
Others have been there, of course, and that’s the point of this documentary. Not to walk the well worn path but to try and say something fresh. Cousins has succeeded, and the fact that he’s succeeded without disappearing into esoterica or fanboy excitement is something to celebrate.
As is his documentary, the sort of thing you can sit down and watch alone, rolling around in its lightly worn research and its fabulous imagery. Hitchcock told stories visually – as many a director from the silent era did – and Cousins is alive to the charge that you don’t want to get too wordy about his work. As the great man once said: “If it’s a good movie the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what’s going on.”
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
