A MASTER OF SUSPENSE

Southland Times, Issue 24228, 11 September 1940, Page 8

A MASTER OF SUSPENSE

ALFRED HITCHCOCK IN AMERICA

Alfred Hitchcock, the British director, has won extraordinary success since he went to Hollywood, and is now earning £lOOO a week, writes a correspondent. People are saying that his name will soon be billed with the stars, a distinction which only a few directors enjoy.

, All-important as they are to a good movie, directors seldom get bill-board attention. Names such as. Cecil B. De Mille and Frank Capra exert strong influence on the sale of movie tickets, exhibitors say, but it is merely waste of time and space to advertise the names of most directors.

American movie-goers realised the merit of such pictures as “Thirty-Nine Steps,” “The Lady Vanishes,” and “Jamaica Inn;” but they never displayed any desire to ascertain who directed them in England. When David O. Selznick called upon Hitchcock to do the screen version of “Rebecca,” studio executives at once recognized a master in their midst. “Rebecca” is proving the second best money-making picture of 1940—headed only by “Gone With the Wind”—and credit for its success is given to the short, rotund Englishman who built such tremendous suspense into a love story that everyone in Hollywood said was not “movie.”

De Mille is known for spectacle, Ernst Lubitch for subtlety, and Frank Borzage for tenderness, Hitchcock is a master of suspense. For some reason Hitchcock always plays one scene in his pictures. In

“Rebecca” he slumped near a doorway as a menacing character. In “Foreign Correspondent” he plays a deaf mute.