Angus MacPhail: The Man Who Wrote a Lot for Hitchcock

This article is the first extended analysis of British screenwriter Angus MacPhail’s long-term, albeit intermittent, collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock between the 1920s and 1950s. It contributes to the debates about authorship which have been a feature of Hitchcock scholarship since the 1950s. MacPhail first worked with Hitchcock within the British studio system during the 1920s and 1930s and Hitchcock chose to continue their collaboration after he moved to Hollywood. The article explores MacPhail’s involvement in refining the intertitles for The Lodger (1927), often identified as ‘the first true Hitchcock film’, the implications of MacPhail’s conceptualisation of the MacGuffin, which still continues to be primarily associated with Hitchcock, his contribution to what Raymond Durgnat (1974 : 20) memorably described as Hitchcock’s 1930s ‘classic thriller sextet’ and his role as a conduit for the psychoanalytic scenarios and concepts which feature in Hitchcock’s later films. The article highlights how MacPhail was one of the sources of the humour in the films he worked on with Hitchcock and also explores how he fed British and London knowledge and cultural reference points into the projects he worked on after Hitchcock’s move to Hollywood. The question of gender is also explored in relation to the role played by another long-term Hitchcock collaborator, Joan Harrison. This article is a companion piece to ‘Angus MacPhail’s Frozen Credits: Film Authorship and Collaboration in British Middlebrow and Celebrity Culture’, published in Journal of British Cinema and Television, 21: 2 (2024).