H. Marshall Leicester

Hitchcock’s Social Class: The British Silent Years

Everything in Britain is somehow about class, so this paper looks at some of Hitchcock’s silent British movies that foreground class. The characters in these movies don’t display much class consciousness because they mostly understand their lives as individual feelings or generic character relations like romantic melodrama. While they are canny in negotiating the vagaries of classed life they stumble over, the characters do so without quite noticing—but the movies do. And they share a focus on monetization: the profit that haves extract from have-nots. This talk will cite examples from Hitchcock’s early films to show how.

About
Marshall is a Professor Emeritus of Literature, UC Santa Cruz and author, What Ought to Scare You: Affect and Horror in the Hollywood Studio System, 1922-1968 (2025, McFarland).