In the spring of 1939, Alfred Hitchcock did something that, by every measure of common sense, he should not have done. He was forty, the most successful director in Britain, the biggest fish in a small and comfortable pond. His films were hits. His name was known. He had a home in London, a wife, a young daughter, and a career that any director in Europe would have envied. And he gave it all up to cross an ocean and start again at the bottom, in a town where he knew almost no one, working for a producer famous for interfering with his directors.
It was the bravest decision of his life, and it changed everything. Without it, there would have been no Rebecca, no Suspicion, no Shadow of a Doubt, no Notorious, no Rear Window, no Vertigo, no North by Northwest, no Psycho. There would have been a respected British director with a good career. Instead, there is the most influential filmmaker in the history of cinema.
The Biggest Fish in a Small Pond
By 1939, Hitchcock had earned international recognition, and he had earned it the hard way. He had come up through the silent era, designing title cards, assisting directors, learning the craft from the floor up. His breakthrough had come with The Lodger in 1927, a silent thriller about a lodger who might be Jack the Ripper, and he had followed it with a run of successes that made him the best-known director in Britain: The 39 Steps in 1935, and The Lady Vanishes in 1938, a witty, elegant thriller set on a train. He was, by the end of the decade, the master of the British thriller.
But Britain was a small pond. The budgets were small, the studios were small, and the audience was small. Hollywood was where the money was, where the stars were. Hitchcock knew it, and so did the man who had been watching him from across the Atlantic. David O. Selznick, the most powerful independent producer in Hollywood and the man behind Gone with the Wind, had decided that he wanted Hitchcock.
Selznick’s first offer was a grand one: a big-budget film about the sinking of the Titanic. Hitchcock was won over by the scale, by the chance to make something enormous. But the Titanic film fell apart, and Selznick turned instead to another property he owned: the rights to Daphne du Maurier’s bestselling novel Rebecca, which he had bought in 1938 while still finishing Gone with the Wind. It would be Hitchcock’s first American film.
The Offer from Hollywood
Selznick did not make small offers. He signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in April 1939, and offered him a four-film deal at roughly forty thousand dollars a picture, a fortune by the standards of British cinema. But the money came with a price. Selznick believed in control as fiercely as Hitchcock did. He had final say over the casting, over the script, over the cut. He wanted Rebecca to be a faithful adaptation of du Maurier’s novel, and he would not tolerate Hitchcock’s jokes, his humour, his little touches of the macabre. The two men were, from the start, on a collision course.
Hitchcock took the deal anyway. He wanted money, power, and prestige, so that he could make the kinds of films he wanted to make. He understood that Hollywood was the only place in the world where a director could have those things, and that the price of admission was working for a man like Selznick. He was forty, and he had decided that he would rather be a small fish in the biggest pond in the world than the biggest fish in a small one.
It was a gamble. Hitchcock knew it, and he went anyway, because he believed, correctly, that he was good enough to survive it.
The Crossing
On 4 March 1939, with his last British film, Jamaica Inn, finished, Hitchcock sailed for New York with his family. Alma came with him, and their ten-year-old daughter Patricia, and his assistant Joan Harrison. After a brief tour of the country and a stop in Cuba, they arrived in California in April, and Selznick had news for them: the Titanic film was shelved, and the first American film would be Rebecca.
It was not the welcome Hitchcock might have hoped for. He had uprooted his family and his life to come to Hollywood, and he arrived to find himself at the very bottom of the ladder. Selznick was in the middle of reshooting Gone with the Wind and would soon be overwhelmed by its post-production and publicity. He had little time for his new director, and what time he had, he spent arguing with him. Hitchcock had wanted Nova Pilbeam, the star of his Young and Innocent, for the female lead. Selznick wanted someone else. Hitchcock wanted to add humour. Selznick rejected every attempt.
And yet, in the midst of all of this, something remarkable happened. Hitchcock made the film anyway, under a producer who fought him at every turn, in a country he had only just arrived in, with actors he had not chosen, and he made it into a film worthy of winning Best Picture.
Rebecca: A Stranger’s House
Rebecca is, on its surface, a strange film for Hitchcock’s first in America. It is set in England, in Cornwall, in a great house called Manderley, and it is about a young, unnamed woman, played by Joan Fontaine, who marries a widowed aristocrat, Maxim de Winter, played by Laurence Olivier, and discovers that she is living in the shadow of his first wife, the dead Rebecca. The house is ruled by the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, played by Judith Anderson.
Selznick had bought the novel as a successor to Gone with the Wind, and he insisted on fidelity to du Maurier’s book. Hitchcock, who had built his reputation on suspense and surprise, found himself making a gothic romance, a film of atmosphere and memory rather than chases and murder. He did not like it, and in later years he disowned it, saying it was not his kind of film. Selznick had won the battles, and the film was Selznick’s as much as it was Hitchcock’s.
But look at the film today, and the battles hardly matter. Rebecca is a beautiful, haunting picture, and Hitchcock’s hand is everywhere in it: in the long, slow approach to Manderley, in the camera that drifts through the house like a ghost, in the way Mrs. Danvers seems to appear from the shadows. The film is about a woman haunted by another woman, in a house that will not let the past go. Hitchcock, who had just left his own country behind, understood that feeling very well.
The Night of the Oscars
Rebecca was released in March 1940, and it was a triumph. It earned rave reviews, took nearly three times its budget at the box office, and was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It won two: Best Picture, the statuette going to Selznick as producer, and Best Black-and-White Cinematography. Hitchcock received his first nomination for Best Director, the first of five in his career. He lost, to John Ford, for The Grapes of Wrath.
It was a strange victory. The film that won Best Picture was the only one of Hitchcock’s films ever to do so, and he did not even like it. He would be nominated five times and never win, while Ford, nominated five times, won Best Director four times out of five. Hitchcock griped about it for years, pointing out that Selznick had taken home the statuette while he had gone home empty-handed. But the nomination mattered more than the loss. It announced to Hollywood that the Englishman was here to stay.
There was one more irony that night. One of the films Rebecca beat for Best Picture was also directed by Hitchcock. His second American film, Foreign Correspondent, made for the independent producer Walter Wanger and based on Vincent Sheean’s memoir Personal History, had also been nominated for Best Picture. It earned six Oscar nominations and won none, but it proved that Hitchcock could work outside the Selznick system, and make a film quickly, cheaply, and well. He had arrived in Hollywood in April 1939, and within a year he had two films in the race for the industry’s highest honour.
Learning to Be American
The years that followed were Hitchcock’s apprenticeship in America, and he learned fast. Suspicion, in 1941, gave Joan Fontaine the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her portrait of a wife who begins to suspect her charming husband, played by Cary Grant, of planning to murder her. Shadow of a Doubt, in 1943, was the film Hitchcock himself often called his favourite: a quiet, unsettling story of a young girl in a small California town who discovers that her beloved uncle, played by Joseph Cotten, may be a murderer. Lifeboat, in 1944, and Spellbound, in 1945, brought him two more Best Director nominations, and Notorious, in 1946, gave him Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in one of the great romantic thrillers.
He was learning, film by film, how to be an American director, and he was learning it in the hardest possible school. Selznick still owned his contract, and when Selznick had no project for him, Hitchcock had to find work elsewhere, loaned out to other studios. It was humiliating, and it taught him the lesson that would define the rest of his career: that a director in Hollywood is only free when he owns his own films. He would spend the next twenty years working towards that freedom, and find it, at last, with Psycho, a film he financed himself.
In 1955, he became an American citizen. The man who had left Leytonstone at forty was no longer a visitor. He was an American filmmaker, and the films he would make in the next decade, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, would define American cinema for the rest of the century.
What the Move Really Changed
It is easy to say that the move to Hollywood changed Hitchcock because it gave him bigger budgets and bigger stars. That is true, and it is not the whole truth. The move changed him because it forced him to fight. In Britain, he had been the master, unchallenged, comfortable. In Hollywood, he was a contract employee, arguing with a producer over every scene, learning to get what he wanted by patience and cunning rather than by authority. Selznick taught him, against both their wills, how to survive in a system that wanted to own him, and Hitchcock learned the lesson so well that he eventually beat the system.
The move also changed what he could say. In Britain, his films had been clever, witty, elegant. In America, they became darker, deeper, more haunted. The innocent man accused, the woman who cannot trust the man she loves, the stranger who brings evil into a quiet town: these were American stories now, told in American places, with American faces. Hitchcock had left England behind, but he had brought England with him, in his eye, in his humour, in his sense of dread, and he had married it to Hollywood’s scale and glamour.
He never went back to live in England. His home was in Bel Air, his life was in Hollywood, and his films were American films. The crossing of 1939 was the single most important decision of his career. He wanted to be where the films were made, and he was willing to start at the bottom to get there. He started at the bottom, and within a year he had made the Best Picture of the year. Within twenty years, he had remade cinema. The biggest fish in the small pond had become the biggest fish in the ocean, and he never looked back.