Why Westcliff made horror master Hitch nostalgic (From Echo)

Why Westcliff made horror master Hitch nostalgic

11:00pm Friday 21st January 2011 in Memories By Tom King

A NEW film about the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho will star Sir Anthony Hopkins and Southend-born Dame Helen Mirren.

But this is not the only connection between Hitchcock, the master of cinema suspense, and south Essex.

In late 1961, Hitchcock was living in Beverley Hills and working on post production for his film the Birds. One day, he took a lunch-break. Instead of heading for the studio canteen, he spent the break drafting a piece of correspondence.

This, though, was no ordinary pen-and- paper letter, but a short filmed message, spoken direct to camera from Universal Studios’ historic Stage 18. The reel of celluloid was then dispatched to England.

The recipients were a group of strictly amateur film makers 6.000 miles away – the members of Westcliff Film Society. Long before the age of video cameras, these were dedicated people who made short films on wind-up clockwork 8mm or 16mm cameras, cutting and editing their work in cupboards under the stairs at home. The films were mostly silent as sound was still too technically challenging and expensive for most amateurs.

Yet Hitchcock recognised these amateurs as fellow spirits, in more ways than one. Not only were they caught up in the magic compulsion of film making, but they were Essex film-makers, like Alfred Hitchcock himself.

Hitch was born above the family’s greengrocer’s shop in Leytonstone in 1899. At the time the town was still part of Essex.

Like so many living on the eastern fringes of London, the Hitchcocks felt a special affinity with Southend, heading there for summer and bank holidays. They also paid visits to relatives who had done well for themselves and moved to Westcliff. Those visits left their mark.

When Westcliff Film Society approached the illustrious film-maker to be a guest speaker, it was probably with little thought of success. Yet he responded immediately.

“I suppose some of you are wondering why I should be addressing such a particular society as that of Westcliff-on-Sea,” he told them. Promptly answering the question, he explained: “I was inspired by a touch of nostalgia.”

He went on to recall his childhood visits to Westcliff, which he recalled as “charming”. The normal route was via the Fenchurch Street line.“We usually came by what used to be known as the London Tilbury and Southend railway.”

On occasions the family also used “the Great Eastern Railway, getting off at a place called Prittlewell”.

Hitchcock then mused humorously on the difference between Southend and Westcliff.

“Westcliff seemed to me much more elegant than Southend-on-Sea. Was this the beginning of my class consciousness?”

So far, so bright and cheery. But then, as with his feature films, the mood darkened. He told society members about his taste for the dreary and the desolate, and how he sought out landscapes that reflected that sense. He says, intriguingly: “The inspiration to become a giant of the cinema was inspired by a dreary November day at Burnham-on-Crouch.” Sadly, that is all he tells us about this formative moment.

The taste for “seaside resorts looking their worst in the winter” stayed with him into adulthood. In his twenties, he was working as a scriptwriter in London. Whenever he ran out of inspiration he would get into his car and head east, “to get a kick out of the dreary waste of the Thames Estuary in winter and get some fresh ideas and inspiration”.

These had been his childhood holiday haunts, but he no longer saw Southend in terms of buckets, spades and candyfloss.

“Now I found it attractively dreary and good enough to put in a script,” he says.

One of the sights that most impressed him was a run-down hotel, alongside the railway and close to the shoreline. “I imagine the railway people had felt this would be a good place to start a new resort,” he says, “but for some reason or other it didn’t take.”

l Thanks to Nick Hallissey, from Spalding, Lincolnshire, for providing a transcript of Hitchcock’s film to the Westcliff Film Society