The director Alfred Hitchcock is one of the rare filmmakers whose surname has become an adjective. If something is dubbed “Hitchcockian”, it usually means it will be surprising, tense, and entirely gripping. Not for nothing was Hitchcock known as the Master of Suspense. And the major films that he made, from Psycho and Vertigo to The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca, stand the test of time admirably, and remain vastly influential in film, television and literature alike. 

Yet a century ago, Hitchcock was not the long-established maestro of mystery that he later became. Instead, the young east-ender had begun working in the then-nascent motion picture business in 1919, as a title-card designer for Islington Studios. Hitchcock later described his work in this silent era as being both menial and vital to the success of the film. “In those days, it was possible to completely alter the meaning of a script through the use of narrative titles and spoken titles. Since the actor pretended to speak and the dialogue appeared on the screen right afterwards, they could put whatever words they liked in his mouth.”

Hitchcock concluded knowingly that “many a bad picture was saved in this way”, because “one could really do anything – take the end of a picture and put it at the beginning – anything at all!” For a director who would later become notorious for his apparently cavalier treatment of those around him, and who believed that actors should be treated like “cattle”, this opportunity to exert control, even from his apparently lowly position, was one well worth taking. He worked on eight films between 1920 and 1921, with titles such as The Princess of New York, Dangerous Lies and The Mystery Road, and he became known for imbuing his title cards with literary flair. A typical one read: “Birds flying, hearts breaking, candles guttering.” 

The ambitious young man was promoted to art director in mid-1921, which gave him a chance to research the intimate details of filmmaking, encompassing everything from finding real-life locations that could be used for production, to some second unit direction of his own, doing what he later called “odd jobs of going out to shoot odd little entrances and exits on interiors”. Before long, the art director was all but controlling the films he was working on. As he later said: “I was quite dogmatic. I mean, I would build a set and say to the director, ‘Here’s where it’s shot from.’” 

Subsequently, Hitchcock liked to give the impression that his first work as director proper came on a 1923 short comedy called Always Tell Your Wife, which starred a well-known music hall performer called Seymour Hicks. In a 1962 talk with fellow director François Truffaut, he recalled: “One day, [Hicks] quarrelled with the director and said to me, ‘Let’s you and me finish this thing by ourselves.’ So I helped him and we completed the picture.”