One movie sent Alfred Hitchcock into Hollywood exile: “It showed in his work”
Hollywood is the home of movie-making, and it has been since the start of the 1900s and since films became big business.
Through the golden age starting in the 1920s, its stake there only got more and more solid, but by the time Alfred Hitchcock was a titan of the very industry it housed, he had to leave.
The question of ‘why Hollywood’ is a tricky one as there are a lot of different factors at play. Some are simple, like the fact that having year-round good weather gets rid of any rain risking production. California’s vast landscapes also mean that within a small area, films could be set in cities or mountains or sunny beaches, giving filmmakers options without having to travel far.
There were also political reasons: a base in Hollywood allowed filmmakers to stay away from wartime destruction in Europe, but it also kept them a good distance away from cinematic destruction as the Edison Trust was crippling the industry with lawsuits and intense licensing demands to force filmmakers to use Edison technology. In Hollywood, movie makers were free and safe, and could work in a way that seemed to make them most productive and least stressed, with the sun shining down and plenty of help at hand. So naturally, in 1939, when the offer came to Alfred Hitchcock to move to Hollywood and undertake a studio contract, he grabbed it with both hands.
From the start, Hitchcock’s feelings towards the place were conflicting. The British director had no interest in celebrity parties and glamour; he simply wanted to make his films, and he did enjoy the culture there, along with the bigger budgets and easier access, which made that far simpler. He liked the food and the people, he liked doing his work, but as his films continued to carry a distinct Englishness, there was always a struggle to adapt.
From the outside, Hitchcock got everything he wanted and needed from Hollywood. Within only a month or so of living there, Time Magazine called him the “greatest master of melodrama in screen history”, and from then on, he basically had an open run to do what he wanted, creating masterpieces like Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho.
However, a pattern began to emerge that the prouder Hitchcock himself felt of his work, the less he felt like his peers understood it or respected it. Especially as the golden age of Hollywood was coming to an end by the mid-to-late 1960s, the filmmaker still felt like he was doing good work, but doing it in the wrong place.
As a Hitchcock devotee, Martin Scorsese studied this, stating, “What’s important is to go back to film and create your own little universe there, you know, be like some folk artist away in the corner working where nobody bothers you.” In his eyes, Hollywood can become too imposing on the creative mind as he said, “Sometimes that could mean going to Europe to work where filmmakers like Don Siegel and Orson Welles felt that they could get appreciation for their new work”.
Hitchcock, similarly, ended up doing the same getaway. In the final years of his life, as he was working on his movies, he made the decision to uproot his life in America and move back home to the UK to create Frenzy. It was less about a homecoming in his sundown years, and more a move to keep his creative mind buzzing, as Scorsese said, “He became disappointed with Hollywood in the late ’60s and it showed in his work”.
