Kennedy Koehler
James Denny
History of Film
November 1, 2018
Alfred Hitchcock and World War II
Alfred Hitchcock was a famous film director and producer known for his suspenseful
and thriller films. During his life, he directed over 50 films. Hitchcock was born in England but
moved to Hollywood to pursue his film career. When World War II started, Hitchcock decided to
take action and use his films for propaganda. From Foreign Correspondent. to Forever and a
Day, Hitchcock used his unique directing approach to inform and promote his political views.
Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in London England. Growing up, he described
his childhood as lonely. His mother and father would give him unusual and cruel punishments,
but he, later on, used these memories as moments in his films. He studied at the Roman Catholic
Salesian College and St. Ignatius College, but later left to study and the London County Council
School of Engineering and Navigation. His first job was at a telegraph company. The innovation
of film started around this time and Hitchcock became interested. He started to watch and study
films. Hitchcock was also interested in joining the army but wasn't accepted because of his
weight. So, he began writing short stories that were published in the telegraph company’s
in-house magazine. In 1920, he got a job as a title card designer for a company. Later on, this
company was known as Paramount Pictures. Five years with them, Hitchcock started producing
films. After traveling to Germany in the 1920s and picking up modern expressionist techniques
for filmmaking, he made his first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog in
1927. Within a two year span, he produced ten films, including Blackmail, which was his first
film with audio. Hitchcock started building his reputation in Britain with successful films such as
39 Steps in 1935, Sabotage in 1936, and The Lady Vanishes in 1938. Soon after, Hitchcock
moves to Hollywood, California after being approached by David Selznick, an American film
producer. His first film in Hollywood, Rebecca, received an Academy Award for Best Picture in
1940. During World War II, Hitchcock went back to England and produced two French films. In
1945, he was a film editor for a Holocaust documentary on the concentration camps. It was never
published because of how graphic it was. But, the film was re-released in 2014. He returned to
California after the war and continued on with his film career. In the 1950s, he produced Dial M
for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. Psycho became his
best-known film. On April 29, 1980, Hitchcock passed away from renal failure in his sleep
(Pettinger).
World War II was the largest war in history. From 1939 to 1945, forty to fifty million
people died. The two sides were the A...
