Alfred Hitchcock was born in London in 1899 to devoutly Catholic parents, who reportedly instilled in him a fear of punishment and authority. For a trifling misdemeanour, the story goes, the boy Alfred was locked up at his own fatherâ??s request in a police cell. His most distinguished biographer, Donald Spoto, claimed that the â??Master of Suspenseâ? rejected religion in the late 1970s as death approached. Nevertheless, in Catholicism Hitchcock had found a sense of melodrama â?? an atmosphere of good and evil â?? that served him well as a film-maker.
In this brief biography, Peter Ackroyd highlights Hitchcockâ??s Jesuitical secondary school education at St Ignatius College in north London. From the Jesuits Hitchcock believed he learnt the virtues of order, control and precision as well as, no doubt, a strong sense of fear. The anxious Catholic priest played by an alcoholic Montgomery Clift in Hitchcockâ??s noirish masterpiece I Confess (1953), is blackmailed into keeping silent about a murder, yet, as a Catholic, he fears damnation, and Hitchcock establishes our empathy for him. Graham Greene, a fellow Catholic, was asked to write the script for the film, but he turned Hitchcock down.
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