Today, however, his place in the cinematic pantheon is secure, and his work continues to exert an overwhelming influence on upcoming generations of film-makers. For better or worse, Hitchcock's most lasting impact may prove to have been the floodgate of still-escalating violence which he unleashed on screen in his 1960 masterpiece,
Psycho.
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in suburban London on August 13, 1899. Raised in a Catholic household by an emotionally repressed father, he was a painfully shy child. Years later, he would often repeat the story of how his father had instructed the local police to place the boy in a cell for a short time in order to demonstrate what happens to bad little boys who misbehave. A recurring theme of his films is a fear of the police. Young Hitchcock developed an interest in art, but his first job was as a technical clerk in a telegraph company. In 1919, he joined the Islington branch of the Famous Players Lasky film company as a designer of title-cards. He was hired as an assistant director for the production company run by Michael Balcon and Victor Saville in 1923, where he met Alma Reville, a petite film editor whom he married three years later.
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