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Pat Hitchcock O'Connell and Laurent Bouzereau, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man. New York: Berkley Books, 2003. 304 pp. $24.95.
By all accounts, Alma Hitchcock was her husband's severest critic and strongest supporter. She was often given properties to read before he would consider them as projects; she worked on most of the scripts that the director shot; and she provided detailed critiques of the dailies, sharpening the focus of Hitchcock's films and correcting minor errors in the final edit. Her work in the cinema preceded his own, and she was more successful earlier than he was. Yet, when they married, she largely gave up her own career to devote her talents to helping him in his. Most of this has been known by Hitchcock scholars for years, but no one until now has devoted a single study to this remarkable woman.
Alma Lucy Reville was born in Nottingham, England on August 14,1899, just a few hours after Alfred Hitchcock was born in London. Her father, Matthew, was a lace warehouseman and her mother, Lucy Owen, worked as a "lace hand." Shortly after Alma's birth the family moved to Twickenham, west of London, so Alma grew up just around the corner from the center of British filmmaking. Early in her life, she contracted Syndenham's chorea (more commonly known as St. Vitus's Dance) as a result of acute rheumatic fever. Because of this, she missed two years of school, and throughout her life she was self-conscious about her lack of formal education. In spite of her early illness and her size (she was only 4 feet 11 inches tall), Alma was a force to reckon with, both in her family and among her colleagues.
In 1916 she became a "rewind girl" for the London Film Company at Twickenham Studios, where her father worked in the costume department. As Pat Hitchcock O'Connell remembers, her mother was by then "film mad" with a full blown case of "filmitis," but she originally went into movies because she had no experience at anything else. Soon she was entrusted with the actual editing of films and later became a continuity girl, a skill she used when critiquing her husband's work. Like many during the early years of the cinema,...