How trips to the Kent seaside opened Alfred Hitchcock’s eyes
It’s often the places we travel when we’re younger that leave the biggest impact on us, whether that be the local town centre and witnessing an unusual array of characters gathered, or perhaps a trip somewhere inspiring something unforgettable.
If you’re an artist, you can probably pinpoint some seemingly unrelated moments that have taken shape in your mind, maybe from a lingering memory of witnessing an interaction at a petrol station or a beach or a supermarket; the moment could be anywhere and anything, but it lingers, subconsciously affecting your view on life.
For Alfred Hitchcock, it was his trips to Kent as a child every summer that left a mark on him, inadvertently coming to inform a major part of his filmmaking career. The director might have been born and raised in the metropolitan area of Leytonstone in East London, but he got a dose of the seaside every year when his uncle rented a house by the sea in Cliftonville.
The place also inspired one of the greatest pieces of poetry ever written, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, so clearly, there was something in the air in this unassuming district of Kent that inspired great artists. Thus, taking to the sandy shores as a kid, Hitchcock would witness the tourists and the locals mingling, no doubt buying ice creams and flooding the streets with overwhelming footfall.
According to Patrick McGilligan’s Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, the filmmaker discovered class consciousness during these trips, coming to understand the clash between those who are just trying to live and those who are visiting an area, destroying the peace, and driving up prices.
With this knowledge brewing in his young head, Hitchcock kept his memories of his Kent trips and the class divide he witnessed in the back of his mind, and you can see the influence on his films. Sure, he wasn’t particularly known for delving into class issues in the same way that someone like Mike Leigh, for example, does, but it’s there, laid out pretty plainly.
Look at Rear Window, with its gaze into the lives of others, quite literally through their windows, and there are class divides between characters, like James Stewart’s Jeffries and Grace Kelly’s Lisa Fremont, which causes tension, even if reasons of class go unspoken.
Strangers on a Train, meanwhile, has class at the heart of its murderous narrative, with middle-class Guy desperate to ascend into the upper ranks of the social order by marrying someone richer and well-connected. It’s this dichotomy between wanting to be comfortable and higher class while doing something so heinous to get there that makes the film so fascinating.
And it’s all thanks to those annual trips to Kent that these subtle references and critiques of the social order and class system were first planted in Hitchcock’s mind.
