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00:30Despite being dead for over a quarter of a century,
00:32English director Alfred Hitchcock still reigns supreme
00:36as cinema's master of suspense.
00:39He directed his first silent film,
00:41The Pleasure Garden, in 1925.
00:43And by 1929, while other directors were still struggling
00:46with the challenges of using sound,
00:48Hitchcock was already experimenting with it.
00:51In his first talkie, Blackmail,
00:53he distorts a conversation
00:54so that all the paranoid killer hears is the word knife.
00:58Knife.
01:03Knife!
01:06His first acknowledged masterpiece, The 39 Steps,
01:09set up a theme of the innocent, ordinary man
01:12thrown into an extraordinary set of circumstances
01:14that he doesn't understand,
01:16which Hitchcock repeated throughout his career.
01:18His first Hollywood film, Rebecca, in 1940,
01:21won him his only Oscar for Best Picture.
01:23Based on Daphne du Maurier's novel,
01:25it stars Joan Fontaine as the second Madame de Winter.
01:28He attributed the popularity of his scary films
01:31to our perverse appetite for fear.
01:33At what they call the midway of a fairground,
01:37you'll find places on each side of you
01:40where you pay money to be scared,
01:43whether it's the roller coaster or the switchback
01:46or the haunted house or the whip.
01:49People go on these things, you see, to enjoy fear.
01:54Another psychological thriller, Rope, made in 1948,
01:58was an extraordinary technical achievement.
02:00Shot in seven unedited takes of ten minutes each,
02:03it followed the dastardly exploits of a murderous gay couple.
02:09The 1950s saw the emergence of the so-called
02:11frigid blonde beauty in Hitchcock's films.
02:14Famously disgusted by his own looks,
02:16he cast the period's most handsome leading men,
02:19such as James Stewart and Cary Grant,
02:21to star opposite the likes of Grace Kelly,
02:23Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint
02:25in films like Rear Window and North by Northwest.
02:29He made his next popular shocker in 1963, The Birds.
02:33The film marked the big-screen debut
02:36of his favourite frigid blonde, Tippi Hedren,
02:39whom he'd spotted in a diet drink commercial.
02:41In one of the film's most terrifying scenes,
02:44where his leading lady is being attacked by killer crows,
02:47Tippi was said to have endured live birds
02:49being hurled at her by prop men for a week,
02:52during which she became hysterical and collapsed.
02:55Her jittery denials of mistreatment
02:57at the hands of the director rang a little false.
03:00Is Mr Hitchcock a difficult man to work with?
03:02Not at all. I've never heard him raise his voice or temperament.
03:09He has no great show of temperament whatsoever.
03:12He's wonderful to work with.
03:13The man himself did little to quell rumours
03:15that he had little consideration for his stars.
03:18I've always said that acts are a cattle, actually.
03:22But at least the birds do as they're told.
03:26Two months after he was knighted in the New Year's Honours of 1980,
03:29Sir Alfred Hitchcock died of renal failure in his ballet home.
03:33And at a Universal Studios ceremony in 1999,
03:36leading ladies Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren
03:39turned out to unveil a bronze bust
03:41and paid tribute to the master of suspense.
03:44And very often we would be at the same dinner party,
03:47and if you were lucky enough to be at his table,
03:49which we very often were,
03:51you had the best time because he was charming
03:54and witty and entertaining.
03:57And he was not at all the persona that he loved to have people think of.
04:02He was a showman.
04:04I mean, he deliberately had that image.
04:07He put forth that image because he was a showman.
04:10He was Barnum, you know.
04:12Sir Alfred, I promise you, you will never be forgotten.
04:16Your works, your talent,
04:18will be entertaining audiences from here to eternity.
04:463, 2, 1.
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