ABSTRACT
When Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith began their careers in the early 1920s the film was silent and it was scarcely to be imagined that it would ever break into sound. Few careers in British films are so well documented as Alfred Hitchcock’s. No other director has suffered such a spate of intellectual analysis and reverential gush and emerged from it undamaged. The subdued lighting and the heavily dramatised treatment of the stranger, played by Ivor Novello, show Hitchcock’s skill in building up an atmosphere of mystery and tension and his susceptibility to German influence. More interesting than any technical gimmicks is Hitchcock’s awareness of dissolving ethical standards, of the whole atmosphere of moral and psychological change. He confronts homosexual and other issues in a manner considered bold at the time. Asquith was praised for his boldness in opening the story with a flashback without any indication to the audience that it was one.
