Alfred Hitchcock acted as a Nazi agent provocateur before and during WWII to advance his own career

Suspense cinematic master Alfred Hitchcock always seemed just a little bit creepier than he really had to be, in order to sell  his suspense films.  Like, maybe it wasn't entirely an act, you know, or some kind of artificial sales pitch.  Like, just maybe, Alfred Hitchcock really was a very, very creepy guy!  This was to some extent confirmed towards the end of his career, when he systematically destroyed the career of his favorite leading lady, Tippie Hendron -- mother of Melanie Griffith -- because she wouldn't sleep with him. However, much earlier in his career, decades before, when he was just getting started, Alfred Hitchcock got involved with something that may have been even creepier than this.  Alfred Hitchcock tended to focus on criminal activity for his suspense films, for most of his career.  After all, for most of us, crime is the most frightening thing we are likely to have affect us, so, it is a natural source for material for suspense films in our culture.  He occasionally departed from crime to accommodate popular taste -- for example, in 1966, he veered into science fiction with his highly successful "The Birds" -- but crime was his natural milieu.  The one big exception to this pattern occurred during the mid-1930's, when he developed a deep interest in espionage as a basis for suspense films. This is hardly surprising. With the rise of Adolf Hitler, the British were absolutely terrified of falling into another holocaust like WWI.  And, it was even worse than that. To fully appreciate just how frightened the British were in the mid-1930's, you have to understand the full geopolitical situation.  The British saw themselves facing off against Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Josef Stalin in the USSR!  All at once!  And, Britain's natural anglo-saxon ally in the US was totally prostrate, an economic wreck, overrun with heavily armed gangsters and virtually without any military at all!  If you are interested, you can see this terrifying situation very elegantly sketched and illustrated in the world's first mass market paperback, the immensely successful "Lost Horizon", which I like to call "Lost Empire"!  It is, of course, about an imaginary kingdom of Shangri-La, in a hidden part of the Tibetan plateau, in which people are totally isolated from the rest of the world, and live in perfect peace, to immense ages.  See where the British were coming from here? So, it was perfectly natural for Alfred Hitchcock to become interested in espionage in the mid-1930's as a means of creating true suspense in Britain.  Or, was it?  After all, everyone was totally terrified already, why try to scare them further?  It's one thing to be frightened of something as a change of pace, quite another to be exposed to more of a terrifying situation you've already had quite enough of, already.  What's the attraction?  So, unlike his Hollywood career, or earlier British career, at this particular time, Alfread Hitchcock wasn't really creating fear, he was merely observing and analyzing fear, which is really quite different, you know.  Of course, being Hitchcock, he did a very good job of it!  But, really, "The 39 Steps" comes across more as almost a contemporary documentary, than as a suspense thriller!  Albeit, a documentary about a terrifying, suspenseful  situation. So, instead of scaring people for fun, Hitchcock was scaring people for real here.  Why?  Just to make money, and a name for himself?  Maybe.  But, just maybe, there was a little more to it than that.  Bear in mind, both Britain and France desperately wanted to avoid a repetition of WWI.  If there was going to be another world war, they were perfectly happy to let Russia and Germany fight it out, with France and Britain on the sidelines, watching to see the winner. Hitchcock undoubtedly wanted to be a rich and famous Hollywood director with starlets fawning at his feet.  Supposing he could scare the British people enough of Nazi Germany, that they would simply run away from every confrontation, because they were too terrified to fight?  Then the Russians and Germans would have to fight it out, the US would eventually get involved, because the war was unavoidable, they would win, and brilliant Alfred Hitchcock would be hailed as a film director war hero in Hollywood, and all his dreams would come true! The fact is, the British did run away from every confrontation.  They did nothing when Hitler occupied the Rhineland.  They did nothing when Hitler invaded Austria.  They betrayed and abandoned Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference.  They declared war when Hitler invaded Poland, but, did little or nothing to help them.  Then they ran away when Hitler's forces invaded France!  Then they hunkered down in their island for the rest of the war, suffering a mere tenth the casualties they had in WWI.  They let the Russians and Americans do most of the fighting for them.  If they had confronted Hitler earlier, there probably would have been no WWII, at all! To what extent was Alfred Hitchcock personally responsible for all of this?   Hard to say.  Almost certainly to some extent. Would Alfred Hitchcock have willingly precipitated WWII and all its disastrous consequences merely to further his personal career ambitions as a film director?  You bet he would have! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzhIlFGdjeU&list=PLgGlTguenMthdLWIE-ugT16w224UcL7TH&index=15&pp=iAQB #cinema #film #movies #classiccinema #classicfilm #classicmovies #alfredhitchcock #suspensefilms #39steps #history #wwii #adolfhitler #philosophyofhistory #suspense #psychology #psychoanalysis #philosophyofart #revisionisthistory #revisionism #britishhistory #sociology #losthorizon #geopolitics #filmdirectors