My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock film review — a masterclass on his art from the man himself

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Documentary essayist Mark Cousins could legitimately have trademarked the term “indefatigable” by now, and here’s the latest of his highly personal accounts of cinema history. Previously, Cousins has given us takes on Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles and indeed the entire phenomenon of cinema (his monumental The Story of Film); now it’s the turn of the Leytonstone-born master of suspense in My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. You might think that Hitchcock’s art had been thoroughly covered in documentary — in recent years alone we’ve had Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut and Alexandre O Philippe’s 78/52, about the Psycho stabbing scene.

But Cousins offers a novelty, a film “written and voiced by Alfred Hitchcock”, as the credits cheekily announce. Not quite: the premise is that Hitch is giving a wry masterclass on his art, voiced by impersonator Alistair McGowan, who offers a fairly uncanny approximation (despite the faintest overtone of Michael Caine with ill-fitting dentures).

Built ingeniously around six themes — escape, desire, loneliness to name three — the film can’t be faulted on comprehensiveness. Crammed with clips from the oeuvre, it has all the classics, but also the less discussed greats, plus oddities such as 1939’s Jamaica Inn and a 1930 Juno and the Paycock, even an extract from the documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (“Sometimes,” says Hitchcock ruefully, “you have to see with your own eyes.”). While seasoned Hitchockians may find nothing radically new here, this is an insightful, entertaining study with a light touch. 

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas now