There was Alfred Hitchcock the lower–middle-class lad from the East End of London who from earliest days was obsessed by the shadow play of three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional screen, and then there was “Alfred Hitchcock,” a balding fat man in a double-breasted suit with a protruding lower lip and an instantly recognizable profile, who made a fortune in Hollywood by playing to, and playing upon, our deepest fears and phobias. Which was the real man, if there was one?
John Banvillle says in this piece that “It’s unlikely that he held on to his faith.” But a Jesuit priest, Mark Henninger, who got to know Hitchcock when the director was an old man recounted in a Wall Street Journal article some years ago that “Hitchcock had been away from the church for some time, and he answered the responses in Latin the old way. But the most remarkable sight was that after receiving communion, he silently cried, tears rolling down his huge cheeks.” He certainly had a Catholic funeral.
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