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Essay on Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born 13 August 1899 in London, the son of a grocer and fruit importer. Very little of Hitchcock's childhood is known and much that was told and retold by him was found, upon investigation, to be inaccurate. Hitchcock's parents, who were Roman Catholic, enrolled him in Jesuit schools and he was in mortal fear of corporal punishment. He was fascinated by geography and, even as a youth, he kept a chart of British merchant ships as they sailed about the globe and he was equally absorbed by railway time tables. After studying electrical engineering at the University of London, Hitchcock secured employment with the Henley Telegraph Company while simultaneously he studied art. When he read a newspaper advertisement that Famous Players-Lasky, later Paramount, was seeking to staff a British operation, he applied for a job in the art department, after readying a number of sketches he felt would be suitable for use on title cards illustrating silent films. He was hired and eventually became head of the title department. (Hotchner A. E, 1966).
With REAR WINDOW (Paramount, 1954), the first of Hitchcock's films under his new contract, he began his association with screenwriter John Michael Hayes with whom he would collaborate on a total of four films. Hitchcock's preoccupation with psychological and physical claustrophobia became more pronounced than ever in his Paramount productions and REAR WINDOW is certainly no exception. Based on a short novel by Cornell Woolrich, the plot contains all the elements of macabre suspense and tense entrapment which characterize Woolrich's best fiction. The story also gave Hitchcock the opportunity to throw back the curtain and reveal his view of human beings, how they live, or try to live, and how selfishly and sordidly they interact with each other. He had begun this process in LIFEBOAT but had been restricted by the times and the prevailing political mood....
