Queen Victoria was still on the throne when Sir Alfred Hitchcock was born in London a hundred years ago this month. A massively fat man of relentlessly old-fashioned demeanor, schooled by Jesuits and formal to the point of paralysis, he spent his entire adult life working in a medium that barely existed in 1899, but has since come to be regarded as the very essence of modernity. From 1939 until his death in 1980, he lived in Hollywood, a city that inverts every value of the lost world into which he was born. He made movies about secret agents and serial killers, and peopled them with debon…
