hitchcock at war: shadow of a doubt, wartime propaganda, and the director as star.

Between 19, Hitch made films for England’s Ministry of Information as well as several excellent movies featuring plots that centered on the war ( Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent, the remarkable Lifeboat and others).

Acknowledged movie masters like Frank Capra, John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Huston and others made documentaries and films that exhorted “the free people of the world.”īut perhaps no filmmaker provided richer fare for the Allies during the war itself than Alfred (later Sir Alfred) Hitchcock.

However, where the Axis had legendarily shrill and, at times, unhinged characters like Joseph Goebbels in charge of their “messaging,” the far-more-fortunate Allies could and did call on the greatest propagandists of all time: Hollywood filmmakers.

By the summer of 1942, the conflagration sparked by Germany’s swift and brutal aggression against its neighbors and by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had spread far and wide enough that the conflict could legitimately be seen as a second “world war.”Īs in all wars, propaganda played a central role in the mission and the strategies of the combatants.

Hitchcock at war: shadow of a doubt, wartime propaganda, and the director as star.