My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, 2022.
Directed by Mark Cousins.
Starring Alistair McGowan.
SYNOPSIS:
I imagine that hardcore Hitchcock fans may have various polarizing reactions to My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, Mark Cousins’ documentary that has Alistair McGowan imitating the director’s trademark voice in a narration written by him, but I found it a fascinating, illuminating look at a prolific career. It’s now out on Blu-ray in the United States with a handful of extras.
I’ll confess to being a casual Alfred Hitchcock connoisseur. As I noted in my review of the recently released Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection, I hadn’t even seen Vertigo and To Catch a Thief before then.
But I consider myself a lifelong learner of all kinds of things, and one of the reasons I do these reviews is to help educate myself on a medium I’ve loved since I was a kid. Movies have always been magical experiences to me (as an avid reader too, I’m not trying to compare the two media), so I relished the opportunity to take in Mark Cousins’ intriguing documentary, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock.
It’s intriguing because, rather than interview people about Hitchcock’s 50+ feature films (holy cow, he was more prolific than I realized), Cousins decided to write a script that had Hitchcock discussing his movies according to six categories — escape, desire, loneliness, time, fulfillment, and height — and then had Alistair McGowan do the voice-over in the director’s voice.
Cousins is a self-described Hitchcock aficionado, according to the 26-minute interview with Chuck Rose included on this Blu-ray disc, so you have to take him at his word when he says this is probably how the director would have talked about his movies today. My understanding is that he based his script on things Hitchcock said in the many interviews he did during his life, as well as the many volumes written abut him, while taking some liberty with things like how he might describe modern technology.
The end result is a two-hour tour through the master’s entire filmography, from his early days in silent films to his final work, 1976’s Family Plot, that ties his movies together in various thematic ways, even ones released decades apart. (I don’t recall seeing any clips from his 1950s era TV series.)
As Cousins explains in that aforementioned interview with Chuck Rose, he watched all of Hitchcock’s movies during COVID lockdown and chose his categories for the documentary by thinking about those films in less-obvious ways. For example, you’ll notice that “suspense” isn’t one of the categories, even though that would probably be the first one mentioned by most film buffs when asked to provide labels for Hitchcock’s films.
McGowan does a pretty good job of capturing the director’s trademark British drawl, although, yes, you do get yanked out of the experience when you hear “Hitchcock” talk about modern cell phones. I assume that the observations made about many of Hitchcock’s movies, such as why certain kinds of shots were used at different parts of the story, are mostly, if not all, based on either things he said or things people said about his creative decisions.
In the end, there may be additional creative liberty beyond the talk of modern technology, but that’s something other Hitchcock aficionados can quibble over. I found this documentary fascinating and illuminating.
In addition to the interview I previously mentioned, the extras on this disc are pretty sparse. There’s an alternate version of the trailer with voice-over by Cousins (yes, the original trailer with McGowan’s narration is included too), a voice test with McGowan, animation tests for the graphics used in the film, and an introduction by Cousins to the films Notorious, Rope, and Saboteur. That last one was presumably filmed for an event where the three films were screened, perhaps with his documentary too.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
