“My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” is Mark Cousins‘ latest cine-essay, and it’s legitimately a film that can make you see the Master of Suspense’s work in a new way. Working not chronologically but thematically, Cousins finds connections among films made decades apart around the ideas Escape, Desire, Loneliness, Time, Fulfillment, and Height.
This is no Wikipedia-like film documentary as all too many are made these days. This is genuinely a film about looking: About seeing things you didn’t see before in some of the most watched films ever made. It’s a sensory and cinematic experience, and I wrote, when it premiered at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival, that it’s “what film documentaries should be.” And it’s all the more unique for having it feel like Hitchcock himself is narrating this, with impressionist Alistair McGowan delivering a remarkable voiceover performance that makes you think the director, who died in 1980, is sending us a message from the grave.
“My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” is now opening in theaters thanks to Cohen Media Group, and IndieWire is proud to present an exclusive clip from the film that shows Cousins’ approach. Here, he shows how a kiss can mean two very different things.
First, there’s Grace Kelly’s provocative kiss goodnight to Cary Grant in “To Catch a Thief.” This American heiress summering in Cannes has just met Grant’s former cat burglar. “Now, most of us would be shy,” McGowan’s Hitchcock says. “But her class, her beauty, youth, and insolence give her the confidence to kiss.” The scene ends with Kelly closing the door on Grant. “A glimpse of coming attractions,” as Kelly puts it in “Rear Window,” but nothing more.
Then, Cousins cuts to a scene of Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman first kissing in “Spellbound.” Incredibly different vibe. He’s impossibly handsome but freaks out inexplicably whenever he merely sees wrinkles in a tablecloth. She’s impossibly gorgeous but doesn’t want to be defined by her beauty and is trying desperately to be taken seriously by the all-male staff of the sanitarium where she works as a psychiatrist. But she knows she can fix him. Instead of a door closing, when these two kiss, Hitchcock symbolically shows doors opening in both their minds. The opposite of subtlety! But who needs subtlety?
Check out this exclusive clip from “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” below.
“My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” opens in theaters October 25 from Cohen Media Group.
