In this critically agile film, Hitchcock supposedly narrates from beyond the grave, using movie clips to reveal techniques and meanings in his work
Only a cinephile as passionate as Mark Cousins could have got away with this film, in all its hilarious presumption and cheek. It is a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s work, illustrated with clips chosen with tremendous insight and connoisseurship – and supposedly narrated from beyond the grave by Hitchcock himself, pointing out techniques, resonances, images, meanings and occasionally breaking off to check something with Cousins who will answer, off-mic: “Yes Mr Hitchcock.”
However, the script is Cousins’ own and the master himself is faked by the comic Alistair McGowan, whose vocal impersonation is just so eerily good that after a while I thought Cousins really had made this by sitting alone in some darkened Edwardian parlour with his tape recorder and Ouija board. But of course the voice is pure Cousins – which is to say, marvellously well-informed and critically agile. (He did something similar with his film The Eyes of Orson Welles, in which Welles (voiced by Jack Klaff) is imagined to have written a supportively nice letter to Cousins. It is also possible he was influenced here by the Hitchcock doppelganger mashup movie Double Take by Tom McCarthy and Johan Grimonprez. As I say, with anyone else, this kind of insouciant appropriation would be jarring. With Cousins you buy it, though there is some naivety, of which more in a moment.
