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was simple, he said: the audience must be informed. They’ve got to know something the characters don’t. If he were to have filmed that practical joke we’d have seen Hitch filling the flask with bourbon, pouring in the Ex-Lax, shaking it up. He would’ve shot it in close-up as he walked toward his victim, flask looming in the foreground. He’d have shown himself cuffing the poor bastard to the scaffolding and then pulled back as the cameraman took a long swig. ‘Bottoms up,’ Hitch would say. Then he’d pull away even farther to a high shot, showing the fellow was teeny-weeny now that the medicine was down his gullet. And he would’ve filmed the rest of the night from the victim’s point of view, always stretching for a bucket just out of reach, the one Hitch had placed there just to be gratuitously cruel … No music, of course, just the natural sounds.” Otto put the back of his hand to his mouth and made some wet raspberries.

Disgusted laughter. Howls.

“How could he have filmed it in the dark?” David called out.

“Excuse me?”

David raised his hand. The professor cupped his ear toward him, and Alice turned around.

“I said, how could he have filmed it in the dark?”

“Excellent question! What’s your name?”

“David.” He glanced over at Alice.

“Hitch would’ve overlooked that little detail. He used to say he wanted to tell a completely unbelievable story with inescapable logic.”

Otto ran another black-and-white montage: bridges spanning marshlands of what looked like New Jersey dissolving to Joseph Cotten lying on his back in a darkened room. And: more bridges—London Bridge this time, in color—and then a dead woman floating facedown and naked on the Thames, a tie around her neck. The Golden Gate Bridge: Jimmy Stewart beneath it, carrying a drowned woman in his arms.

“A couple of important biographical notes,” Otto said. “First, and this is probably the most famous Hitchcock anecdote there is: When he was a boy, his father, a grocer, told him to come along, then turned him over to the police for no reason whatsoever and had him locked up in jail for a while. ‘This is what we do to bad boys,’ his father said, leaving him there—not for long but long enough. I don’t go in much for psychological interpretations, but Hitch’s being a Catholic added to this little trauma, and he not only developed an extreme fear of police in particular and a hatred of authority in general but also, you can imagine, an exacerbated sense of original sin, convinced that punishment for something you thought or did was just around the corner. Because we’re all criminals anyway, aren’t we? You aren’t yet, of course, because you’re young and unmarried, whereas I’ve been married for years and regularly dream of murder!”

More chuckles. More images. Cary Grant taken at gunpoint by two men in the Plaza Hotel. Next, him running through Grand Central Station. With Eva Marie Saint now, on Mount Rushmore, sliding down Lincoln’s nose. A man hanging from the torch of the Statue of Liberty; another guy grabs him, a sleeve tears, he falls. A man—a mere speck seen from above—fleeing the United Nations.

“Speaking of marriage,” Otto said, “in 1921 Hitch meets Alma Reville, a young woman doing continuity—a film editor, in essence, though I love that old term, continuity. They start working on films together, date briefly, and he proposes. On a boat, no less. Romantic, you’re thinking, but he does so during a storm. While Alma’s seasick belowdecks. I’m not making this up. Wanted to ask while her resistance was low, he explained. Apparently after he asked her to spend her life with him, she puked. Ladies and gentlemen, if you ask someone to marry you and the person pukes, that’s a sign.”

He laughed and wiped his mouth.

“Needless to say, it wasn’t what you’d call a happy relationship. They were great working partners. She tightly controlled people’s access to him, including producers, friends, the public in general. Hitch was as shy as he was a showman. She kept him well fed—she was a great cook, evidently—and comfortable and productive. But they were more like brother and