How Lon­don became Alfred Hitchcock’s great­est character

“The sky was always grey, the rain was grey, the mud was grey and I was grey.” That how Alfred Hitch­cock once described Lon­don. It sounds dis­parag­ing, but the for­mer Eas­t­en­der clear­ly had a lot of affec­tion for his home­town: after all, it char­ac­teris­es so many of his films. His 1927 film The Lodger was even named after it; ​‘A Sto­ry of the Lon­don Fog’, high­light­ing the role the cap­i­tal plays in cre­at­ing the story’s sin­is­ter atmosphere.

For Hitch­cock, place was as impor­tant as the oth­er parts of the script. Rope, Rear Win­dow and Lifeboat all show the claus­tro­pho­bic ten­sion that can build up with­in one sin­gle loca­tion, but the director’s films are about expans­es as well as con­fines, events bal­loon­ing out into grand cli­max­es, usu­al­ly involv­ing a major landmark.

After The Lodger’s tit­u­lar mist, Hitchcock’s sight­see­ing trend began with Black­mail. The film ends with an exhil­a­rat­ing sprint across the roof of the British Muse­um. Smart­ly screened by the BFI in the museum’s own court­yard, we see Tra­cy (Don­ald Calthrop) dash down Great Rus­sell Street, nip through the gates, pause by a water foun­tain and then enter the build­ing. What fol­lows is an extrav­a­gant chase in between arti­facts and past rows of books. These back­ground details add a huge fris­son of excite­ment to events. Sit­ting in the court­yard, you could swear every­thing was tak­ing place behind the doors at that very minute. But, amaz­ing­ly, none of it ever did.

Instead, Hitch­cock sent in a team of pho­tog­ra­phers to cap­ture the var­i­ous rooms. These pic­tures were then reflect­ed onto 45-degree mir­rors for film­ing and parts of the sil­ver were scraped away to make room for door­ways or props. A bravu­ra bit of spe­cial effects work, but you’d nev­er know just by look­ing at it. Con­stant­ly flash­ing his lens about, Hitch­cock was no slouch when it came to such trick­ery. He used a sim­i­lar effect for Strangers on a Train years down the line, back-pro­ject­ing an image of that wild­ly spin­ning carousel – in real­i­ty a minia­ture – in front of which Guy (Far­ley Granger) and Bruno (Robert Walk­er) fight to the death.

But some­times you can’t sub­sti­tute effects for the real thing. Part of the car­ni­val cli­max uses a real mer­ry-go-round: when an onlook­er fran­ti­cal­ly tries to stop the whirling machine. ​“That lit­tle man actu­al­ly crawled under that spin­ning carousel,” Alfie con­fessed to Truf­faut. ​“If he’d raised his head by an inch, he’d have been killed.” He added: ​“I’ll nev­er do any­thing like that again.”

You can tell, though, that the mad dog want­ed to.

As the years went on, his loca­tion scout­ing became even more ambi­tious. In 1935, The 39 Steps zoomed from the Forth Rail Bridge in Scot­land to The Lon­don Pal­la­di­um for its on-stage finale fea­tur­ing Mr Mem­o­ry. (While the 1978 remake of the film got many things wrong, it end­ed in a sur­pris­ing­ly apt way, with Robert Pow­ell hang­ing off the face of Big Ben – exact­ly the kind of crazy stunt Hitch­cock would have pulled. It’s hard to believe he hadn’t tried it already.)

Go back one year and The Man Who Knew Too Much estab­lished Hitchcock’s rela­tion­ship with spies. The man in ques­tion? Bob (Leslie Banks), who stum­bles across a plot to assas­si­nate an ambas­sador while on hol­i­day in Switzer­land. His child kid­napped, his wife scared, they ven­ture back to old Lon­don Town to foil the murder.

Where on earth could such a sus­pense­ful show­down take place? The Roy­al Albert Hall, of course. The impos­ing loca­tion was so fit­ting, in fact, that Hitch­cock used it again in 1956 when he remade his own film star­ring James Stew­art. In the lean­er, supe­ri­or orig­i­nal, the Mas­ter of Sus­pense relied on pho­tos to recre­ate the inte­ri­or scenes in a stu­dio. In the remake, he had the chance to shoot more of it on loca­tion. He even begins it with a colour shot of the con­cert hall, eager­ly show­ing us where we will end up. But fake or not, the effect is the same: each dia­logue-free sequence, firm­ly root­ed in the music fill­ing the grand are­na, is nail-bit­ing stuff. No won­der, then, that the film act­ed as his call­ing card to Amer­i­ca: a show­case of the director’s tal­ent for craft­ing gems of cin­e­ma, loca­tions and all.

Once in Hol­ly­wood, Hitch­cock con­tin­ued look­ing for big­ger land­marks. In 1942, he made Sabo­teur, a film that cli­max­es with – you guessed it – some­one falling off the side of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty. That was anoth­er in-stu­dio job, but the extrav­a­gant sight of a bloke dan­gling from the lofty torch instant­ly ignit­ed inter­est from the press. ​“In the final five min­utes, he chas­es the sabo­teur through a howl­ing movie audi­ence, with pis­tols bark­ing on screen and off,” wrote The New York Times, ​“and fin­ish­es this wild and fan­tas­tic hue-and-cry atop – but hold! That’s a secret we won’t tell!”

Ver­ti­go took a sim­i­lar atti­tude towards San Fran­cis­co, play­ing on both the ris­ing and falling of its hills as well as shoot­ing scenes in the Palace of the Legion of Hon­or and, of course, at Fort Point. Here, the Gold­en Gate Bridge stretch­es into the dis­tance, an omi­nous back­drop as Madeleine tries to drown her­self in the riv­er. Oth­er loca­tions were far trick­i­er to snap. The Unit­ed Nations reject­ed Hitchcock’s advances dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of North by North­west. The crafty coot’s response? To hide a cam­era in a van and film Cary Grant enter­ing the build­ing any­way – that’s how keen he was to show the gen­uine arti­cle on screen.

And yet all that trou­ble pales into insignif­i­cance when we see where Grant’s man-on-the-run is head­ed. How does one top falling from the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty? Alfie actu­al­ly found the answer: clam­ber­ing over Mount Rush­more. A stu­dio the size of a ware­house helped Hitch­cock recre­ate this mon­ster, which soon became the base for one of the most famous movie cli­max­es of all time. Even Richie Rich imi­tat­ed the sequence in 1994 – when Macauley Culkin’s copy­ing your ideas, you know you’ve made it.

Rush­more. The British Muse­um. The Albert Hall. Why both­er at all? Because Hitch­cock knew what these land­marks add to a movie: real­ism. Just by see­ing a recog­nis­able place, audi­ences have a point of ref­er­ence, a shared piece of knowl­edge. It’s the same log­ic behind the track­ing shots that open his films, creep­ing from a known cityscape into an unknown inte­ri­or. What quick­er, more effi­cient way to anchor such far-fetched fiction?

Even away from the director’s chair, Hitchcock’s imag­i­na­tion was always look­ing for what a place could offer a plot. One sequence he dreamt up for North by North­west was a track­ing shot through a Detroit motor plant, fol­low­ing the pro­duc­tion line as a car is assem­bled, only for the fin­ished vehicle’s door to open and reveal a dead body. It’s that eye for loca­tions that makes his thrillers both so exot­ic and so believ­able. ​“Local topo­graph­i­cal fea­tures can be used dra­mat­i­cal­ly,” he observed mat­ter-of-fact­ly to Truf­faut, when dis­cussing the back­drop of Switzer­land in 1936’s The Secret Agent. ​“We can use lakes for drown­ings and The Alps to have our char­ac­ters fall into crevasses…”

Hitch­cock brought his rov­ing gaze back to the UK for his penul­ti­mate film, Fren­zy, fly­ing down the Thames with a cam­era in tow as he lapped up the Lon­don sky­line. Com­ing full cir­cle, his topo­graph­i­cal toy­ing shows how inno­v­a­tive effects and prac­ti­cal pro­duc­tion val­ues can keep every­thing root­ed in geog­ra­phy. Hitchcock’s films are typ­i­cal­ly about ordi­nary peo­ple in extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances. The rea­son they all work? Because they hap­pen in famil­iar loca­tions. And as his ear­ly films show, when it comes to loca­tion, there’s no place like London.