That master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, was famously obsessed with his ice-blonde leading ladies. In this biopic, director Sacha Gervasi focuses on Hitchcock’s two greatest love affairs: with cinema and with his wife and collaborator Alma.
It’s a wonderful premise, ripe for drama on and off the set. However, the frothy tale that unfolds is hugely uneven. Gervasi’s film is set in 1959, and sees Hitch (“Hold the ‘cock’,” Anthony Hopkins quips lasciviously) struggling with both the insecurity of old age and a lack of studio support for his next idea – a horror film based on serial killer Ed Gein, entitled Psycho.
The inner workings of studio negotiations are fun to watch, as aghast officials object that never before have they allowed a film depict nudity or – heaven forbid – a toilet.
Hitch’s hallucinations of Ed Gein are meaningless – a cheap Rorschach interpretation of his work. More successful is Helen Mirren’s warm and intelligent portrayal of Alma, a woman exhausted by the thankless job of being Hitch’s unacknowledged collaborator and neglected wife. Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel, tragically miscast as Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, are rather less successful. Talk about failing to do justice to a master...