MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK - Mark Reviews Movies

My Name Is Alfred Hitchock, Cohen Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2024

Can a documentary based on a lie work? A few have pulled it off to one degree or another, most notably a cinematic titan whose name ranks alongside that of Alfred Hitchcock as one of the indisputable greats of the art form. We'll just say, though, that director Mark Cousins is no Orson Welles—a fact one assumes he wouldn't debate. Cousins' My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, however, does seem to show the filmmaker presuming that he can speak with the same authority on the Master of Suspense's film as the man himself.

The gimmick here is that this cinematic essay has been written and narrated by Hitchcock. That would be a neat trick of editing and an even neater trick of reality. It's neither of those things, though—first, because the task of parsing through Hitchcock's many interviews during his life to assemble an in-depth essay would be quite the feat of meticulous research and, second, because the director has been dead for 44 years.

We know early into Cousins' movie that the narrator's voice does not belong to Hitchcock. He speaks of life in the 21st century, a statue of his head in his honor that was made in the early 2000s, and cellphones. Oh, to imagine what the man would have done with that technology in one of his movies is quite the thought experiment. The fake Hitch here refers to them as little devices holding all of a person's secrets and sins in everybody's pocket.

The idea of Hitchcock in modern times is an enticing one, so it's not as if there's something inherently wrong with Cousins' desire to imagine that scenario. The problem is that his documentary isn't really about that notion. It's about putting Cousins' thoughts and opinions about Hitchcock's films into the mouth of someone who broadly sounds like the man.

The movie's too obvious about its fakery to call it dishonest, but it is disingenuous and, maybe, more than a bit prideful. Does Cousins not trust his own ideas enough to just put them out there as his own, or does he think so highly of them as to think that they could belong to his subject?

One hopes for the former, because some of the insights into an array of Hitchcock's works and through lines among them are intriguing and worth considering. One almost has to the assume the latter, however, because Cousins maintains the attempted illusion until the very end of the movie. His faux Hitchcock even makes a joke about the existence of a lie within the documentary's narrative, and it's not the fact that the narrator isn't who he says he is.

Instead, the voice belongs to Alistair McGowan, who's a skilled mimic and gets Hitchcock's well-known speech patterns more or less right. Some might be fooled, in fact, until that voice does start talking about society in our modern times as if he's a first-hand witness to them. Cousins, of course, penned the lengthy essay-as-monologue with some of Hitch's go-to phrases, such as his delight in toying with an audience, and terms, such as dropping the term MacGuffin without a second thought as to explaining it. The imitation here, in other words, isn't just McGowan's breathy impersonation.

It's somewhat a convincing trick, but it is a trick, nonetheless. Therein lies the problem.

The crux of the visual essay is dividing Hitchcock's oeuvre into several broad themes—among them escape, desire, and heights, with that last one not even touching upon the one Hitchcock film with a title that almost demands it belongs in that section. Some of the segments are more compelling than others, especially since there are so many examples of themes like escape and desire running through and intersecting within so many of the man's films. That thing about heights almost feels like an afterthought compared to the others.

Cousins clearly has done a lot of research and probably even more thinking on the topic at hand, and the focus on Hitchcock's form—how he used the camera in ways to communicate story, character, and idea—is certainly more engaging than a simple discussion of what happens in the films and what they mean in some vague sense. The plots of these films come across secondary or irrelevant thoughts to Cousins, and that's probably the way an in-depth analysis of an inherently visual medium should be.

Within this weird bit of trickery is a fine amount of inquiry into Hitchcock's work, drawing lines between themes, specific shot compositions, and similar camera movements. The trick of My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock is such an unnecessary and phony distraction, though, that we keep waiting for some reason that Cousins takes his impersonation so far. There is none, except that he could do it and felt uncertain or boastful enough of himself to do so.

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