My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock review – Mark Cousins’ cheeky and insightful study

Only a cinephile as passionate as Mark Cousins could have got away with this film, in all its hilarious presumption and cheek. It is a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s work, illustrated with clips chosen with tremendous insight and connoisseurship – and supposedly narrated from beyond the grave by Hitchcock himself, pointing out techniques, resonances, images, meanings and occasionally breaking off to check something with Cousins who will answer, off-mic: “Yes Mr Hitchcock.”

However, the script is Cousins’ own and the master himself is faked by the comic Alistair McGowan, whose vocal impersonation is just so eerily good that after a while I thought Cousins really had made this by sitting alone in some darkened Edwardian parlour with his tape recorder and Ouija board. But of course the voice is pure Cousins – which is to say, marvellously well-informed and critically agile. (He did something similar with his film The Eyes of Orson Welles, in which Welles (voiced by Jack Klaff) is imagined to have written a supportively nice letter to Cousins. It is also possible he was influenced here by the Hitchcock doppelganger mashup movie Double Take by Tom McCarthy and Johan Grimonprez. As I say, with anyone else, this kind of insouciant appropriation would be jarring. With Cousins you buy it, though there is some naivety, of which more in a moment.

With great elan, Hitchcock/Cousins breaks the movies down to six themes: escape, desire, loneliness, time, fulfilment and height. You see characters escaping from danger or unhappiness, desiring pleasure or sex (the escape impulse running the opposite way) in an infinitely deferred consummation, declaimed in ecstatic closeups, which is shrewdly called chaste-arousal. You see Loneliness, although sometimes Cousins conflates solitude and loneliness a bit too easily: the single figure of Marnie – stylish Tippi Hedren on a railway platform – is not exactly “lonely” in the same way as the second Mrs de Winter, played by Joan Fontaine in Rebecca.

Then there’s time, and particularly time running out, the race against the clock: Janet Leigh in Psycho high-pressuring the salesman to part-exchange her automobile before it is recognised, and Ray Milland in Dial M For Murder realising that his watch has stopped and desperately looking for an empty phone booth to make his fatal call. In fulfilment, we look at Hitchcock’s apparently placid home life, and in height we are shown the director’s great love of stratospheric overhead shots, not merely for the dizzying euphoria-slash-terror of Vertigo, but for the pure pleasure involved in the mastery and power of the shot itself.

Hitchcock/Cousins sheepishly apologises for the cumbersome psychiatrist speech at the end of Psycho (though not for the cheesy back-projections in The Birds). But having made Hitchcock’s private life and his happy marriage part of the story in the fulfilment section, the film gets a bit sucrose. It is now well known that Hitchcock became obsessed with Hedren and sexually assaulted her. Maybe there is no easy way for McGowan’s jovial cod-Hitchcock to confess to that here, but when he had earlier talked about the darker side of desire and desire becoming rage in Jamaica Inn as Charles Laughton threatens Maureen O’Hara … well, it has to be said there’s an obvious and relevant real-world parallel. The loneliness section might have been the point to discuss it.

Well, point-by-point, clip-by-clip, this film remains brilliant. As ever, there is real evangelism in Cousins’s work and in My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock there is so much to learn and enjoy. You come away from it with your senses fine-tuned.

• My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock is released on 21 July in UK and Irish cinemas.