Welcome

Alfred Hitchcock was born one hundred years ago this summer, on August 13, 1899, and this year his birthday fell on a Friday the thirteenth. I suspect he would have enjoyed that.

My name is Theresa Alexander. I am seventy-three years old, and I was a high school librarian in San Francisco for thirty-one years before I retired. In the summer of 1954 my husband Edwin took me to see Rear Window, and I came out onto Market Street at dusk and looked up at every lit window on the block as if something terrible were happening behind it. Four years later we saw Vertigo, which was filmed right here, and I have never looked at my own city quite the same way since. Edwin passed away six years ago. We saw every Hitchcock picture together from 1954 on, and I have kept up the habit with the old ones on tape.

A librarian's instinct is to make a list and a bibliography, so that is what this page is. Below you'll find his life in brief, a word about the Academy Awards, my opinion of last December's Psycho, and a walk to the Vertigo locations you can still visit. On separate pages are my twelve favorite films, ranked, and a list for spotting his cameos.

His life, in brief

For further reading, I recommend the book-length conversation between Hitchcock and the French director François Truffaut, which any decent library will have and which is the best book about how films are made that I know. I made sure ours had two copies.

The Oscar he never won

It is one of the great embarrassments of the Academy that Alfred Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for directing. He was nominated five times, for Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho, and lost every time.

Rebecca did win Best Picture for 1940, but in those days the Best Picture award went to the producer, and so the statue went home with David O. Selznick. In 1968 the Academy gave Hitchcock the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, for his body of work, and he walked up and gave one of the shortest thank-yous ever made from that stage. I have always taken that as a very polite comment on the whole business.

I have nothing against the gentlemen who beat him. But I would trade the whole lot of their pictures for Vertigo, and I think most people would, now.

About last December's Psycho

Last December, Gus Van Sant released a new Psycho, in color, with Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche, copied from the original very nearly shot for shot, using the same Bernard Herrmann music. My friend Juanita and I went to a matinee the week it opened. We were two of perhaps eleven people in the theater.

My verdict: it is a tracing, not a drawing. Every line is in the right place and none of it is alive. The original frightened people in 1960 because nobody had ever seen anything like it, and because Hitchcock knew precisely how long to hold each shot. The new one knows what the old one did and does it again, a beat late. I will give it this: it sent a good many young people back to the video store for the real thing, and my branch library's copy of the original was checked out straight through January. So perhaps it did some good after all.

Juanita liked it better than I did. She is wrong, but she is still my friend.

A Vertigo walk

Vertigo is the great San Francisco picture. Forty-one years on, a good deal of what you see in it is still standing, and on a clear afternoon you can visit the three most important places in a day by bus. Here is the route Juanita and I took on his birthday last month. Bring a sweater. This is San Francisco, and it was August.

If you live in Ohio, the Friends of the Rialto in Corbett are showing Rear Window on a 35mm print as part of their fall classic film series, on Friday, October 15. Three dollars! See it on a big screen if you possibly can. I envy you.