James Chapman

Hitchcock and Theatre

Given his reputation as the ‘master of suspense’ and his oft-expressed preference for ‘pure cinema’, it may seem surprising that Alfred Hitchcock was once regarded as Britain’s foremost director of film adaptations of stage plays. Hitchcock directed eleven feature films based on theatrical properties, seven of them between 1927 and 1932, and in hindsight tended to be disparaging about them. This paper – arising from my new research project exploring Hitchcock’s stage adaptations – argues that the familiar distinction between the ‘theatrical’ and the ’cinematic’ needs to be reconsidered and that Hitchcock’s theatrical adaptations, including films such as Downhill (1927), Blackmail (1929), Number Seventeen (1932), Rope (1948) and Dial M for Murder (1954), not only offer innovative approaches to adaptation but also demonstrate how the theatrical and cinematic modes co-exist within his films.

About
James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and author of Hitchcock and the Spy Film: Authorship, Genre, National Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2018).