page_title: Alfred Hitchcock
section_title: Early sound films
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Hitchcock / Biography / Inter-war career: 1919–1939 / Early sound films
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Alma Hitchcock, Joan Harrison, Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Hitchcock dining in an American restaurant [1]
context_page_description: Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE was an English film director, producer and screenwriter. He is one of the most influential and extensively studied filmmakers in the history of cinema. Known as the "Master of Suspense", he directed over 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades, becoming as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing of the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His films garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and 6 wins.
  Born in Leytonstone, London, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer after training as a technical clerk and copy writer for a telegraph-cable company. He made his directorial debut with the British-German silent film The Pleasure Garden. His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, helped to shape the thriller genre, while his 1929 film, Blackmail, was the first British "talkie". Two of his 1930s thrillers, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century.
context_section_description: Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, Blackmail (1929), when its production company, British International Pictures (BIP), converted its Elstree studios to sound. The film was the first British "talkie"; this followed the rapid development of sound films in the United States, from the use of brief sound segments in The Jazz Singer (autumn of 1927) to the first full sound feature The Lights of New York (summer of 1928). Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. It also features one of his longest cameo appearances, which shows him being bothered by a small boy as he reads a book on the London Underground. In the PBS series The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film, stressing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman suspected of murder. During this period, Hitchcock directed segments for a BIP revue, Elstree Calling (1930), and directed a short film, An Elastic Affair (1930), featuring two Film Weekly scholarship winners. An Elastic Affair is one of the lost films.
  In 1933 Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success; his second, The 39 Steps (1935), was acclaimed in the UK and made Hitchcock a star in the US. It also established the quintessential English "Hitchcock blonde" (Madeleine Carroll) as the template for his succession of ice-cold, elegant leading ladies. Screenwriter Robert Towne remarked, "It's not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with The 39 Steps". This film was one of the first to introduce the "MacGuffin" plot device, a term coined by the English screenwriter Angus MacPhail. The MacGuffin is an item or goal the protagonist is pursuing, one that otherwise has no narrative value; in The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of design plans.
  Hitchcock released two spy thrillers in 1936. Sabotage was loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent (1907), about a woman who discovers that her husband is a terrorist, and Secret Agent, based on two stories in Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) by W. Somerset Maugham.
  At this time, Hitchcock also became notorious for pranks against the cast and crew. These jokes ranged from simple and innocent to crazy and maniacal. For instance, he hosted a dinner party where he dyed all the food blue because, as he claimed, there weren't enough blue foods. He also had a horse delivered to the dressing room of his friend, actor Sir Gerald du Maurier.
  Hitchcock's next major success was The Lady Vanishes (1938), "one of the greatest train movies from the genre's golden era", according to Philip French, in which Miss Froy (May Whitty), a British spy posing as a governess, disappears on a train journey through the fictional European country of Bandrika. The film saw Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director. Benjamin Crisler, the New York Times film critic, wrote in June 1938: "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world."
caption: Alma Reville, Joan Harrison, Hitchcock, and Patricia Hitchcock, 24 August 1937
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