The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

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СКАЧАТЬ more for the privilege or convenience of walking round the corner, holding a conversation with a shop assistant and never having to join a queue of trolleys.

      Within five years of the abolition of RPM, the number of supermarkets in Britain had reached 3,700 and the age of the battle between giants had begun. When Sainsbury retired as chairman in 1967, his business was established as the market leader. Tesco opened its first superstore in 1968 in Sussex, a harbinger of the future. It was nearly thirty years before it overtook its old rival, in 1995, and went on to claim a market share of more than 31 per cent. By 2006 it was able to use the extraordinary statistic that in that year Tesco’s tills swallowed up fully an eighth of all consumer spending in the whole country.

      The supermarkets’ dominance had come about by the exploitation in the seventies and eighties of relaxed planning laws, which gave birth to the retail parks, and marketing techniques that allowed supermarkets to be sure that the bigger they got the more vigorously they could apply their power to keep producers’ prices down, give shoppers ever-better offers, and fill their stores with anything and everything. By the end of the century that power became controversial because it sometimes seemed to be untrammelled, sweeping away everything in its path, even infiltrating high streets with their own versions of ‘local’ stores to make life even more difficult, or impossible, for little shops without their power to sell in bulk, and cheaply. Planners, local authorities, family businesses, farmers all struggled with a balance that seemed to tilt decisively towards the big battalions. The story of the fightback on the high street would be another chapter, but the world that Sainsbury left behind when he died in 1998 aged 92 was one in which the supermarket was king.

      He remembered a family firm started with capital of £100 that became the first of the giant supermarkets in Britain, and had seen a way of life transformed. He was proud of saying that part of him remained an outsider – he was the businessman who joined the Labour Party in 1945 and was never a Conservative – and he retained a strong belief that social responsibility should come with wealth. His family has continued that tradition with a notable commitment to arts and charities of all kinds. He always wanted to run a certain kind of shop. That often showed through. At the same time as he was campaigning for an end to RPM, knowing how much power it would give the supermarkets, he was fighting the introduction of trading stamps to lure customers into stores. In the early sixties he told a newspaper interviewer that Sainsbury’s wouldn’t use them. He told her, ‘You must go elsewhere for your temptation.’

      Yet temptation had always been his business. More food, better quality, lower prices, and supermarkets everywhere – on every high street and in every open space that Sainsbury’s and its rivals could find, where they’d continue their endless battle for supremacy: a battle in which Mr Alan had been the first general on the field. He relished the fight, and, in his time, he won.

Alfred Hitchcock

      Alfred Hitchcock was the fat man who wanted to make our flesh creep. Like Dickens’s fat boy, he could think of nothing better to do. Indeed, he devoted a lifetime to it and seemed never happier than when he was managing disturbance and alarm. That happiness, however, was never revealed: the bulbous, jowly, black-suited master of suspense never let the mask slip, and didn’t smile. The compact had to be secure: I scare you, because you want to be scared. And when I look for fear, I promise you that I will find it.

      Whereas the Hammer horror films of the fifties and sixties camped up the gore and the cobwebbed coffin lids, and gave us a keyboard of vampire incisors, they hardly bothered with genuine terror. That was Hitchcock’s business, and obsession: a prairie cornfield with no hiding place from the buzzing aeroplane, a window that couldn’t keep out the prying spy, a murderer’s eyes that never blinked, the shower stall that promised relief behind the curtain.

      Digging away at his past, people have found a solitary East London boy, born in the last year of the nineteenth century, who often felt alone, had an awestruck relationship with his mother, a father who once sent him to be locked up in the local police cell so that he would realize what it would be like if he strayed, and lots of Catholic guilt filtered through a Jesuit education. That is tempting material, of course. But remember the power of the early cinema, the movie business, which dragged him in like a magnet and gave him energy. By the time he was 21, having trained as a draughtsman, he had volunteered to work on silent movies in north London studios, and he was allowed to direct his first film within four years. Then he was off, working in Germany and absorbing expressionism, seeing the first directors working on sound stages, casting an eye over what the Russians were up to. He had grasped what film offered, and by 1929 he was directing the first British talkie, Blackmail. What else could the first Hitchcock film be called?

      And so, by the last thirty years of his life – he was knighted in 1980, the year he died – he was inseparable from the idea of suspense. You might have thought that he’d invented the idea, because the portrayal of lonely terror seemed to come naturally. Take two of his last, best films, The Birds, released in 1963, and Psycho from 1960.

      For a whole generation of cinema-goers, the jagged rhythms of Bernard Herrman’s score for Psycho take them back to the moment when they first saw the film – and, at Hitchcock’s insistence, had been there when the drapes were pulled back from the screen, because no one was allowed to come in after it had started. For it was then that they began the journey into a netherworld of fears, with the camera meandering and finally forcing its way from the sky towards a window for the first scene, and the set-up for tragedy. With Hitchcock there was never any doubt that the veneer of normality was a fake or a delusion: the interest from the first long, probing and inquisitive camera shot – some of them were astonishingly long – was in what it hadn’t revealed and what lay behind. He was naturally attracted to the idea that much of life was a deception. The excitement always lay in stripping away the layers, one by one, to show what lurked underneath. You knew before you started that the revelation was going to be troubling, and familiar.

      He was attracted to Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds because he remembered a story of a bird invasion in California, and knew she shared his understanding of fear. Her novel Rebecca, replete with menace and lust in the shadow of Manderley, its encroaching gardens and the greedy sea, had brought him his only Oscar for Best Picture in 1940 (with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine). He got the writer Evan Hunter to write the screenplay for The Birds – in another guise he was the sublime American crime writer Ed McBain – and together they created a picture of horror. From the moment the first gull settles on a fencepost, through the relentless gathering of wings in the sky, to the desperate struggle against the coming disaster, Hitchcock spins out the panic, refusing to let it become overwhelming and resolve itself too soon. There’s always hope, which is the worst thing of all.

      These films came after a few years in which he’d released, among others, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and North by Northwest. They all played with his knowledge that you could find fear in an open space as easily as in a locked room, and terror was never far away. For Rear Window he had thirty-one apartments built, into which Jimmy Stewart could spy from the wheelchair in which he was marooned. And before those, at the very start of the fifties, had come Strangers on a Train, where he’d explored guilt and responsibility between the two men who are drawn into a murder plot, an unconsummated homoerotic dalliance and an exchange of terrible intimacies. Who’s guilty? Hitchcock seldom says. He had Patricia Highsmith to thank for the idea, from her dark novella, and he repaid the compliment.

      In the history of British film-making he commands a lofty niche. He was making celebrated thrillers in the thirties – The Lady Vanishes, The Thirty-Nine Steps – and certainly into the sixties (Marnie was released in 1964) he still cast his spell. You can’t imagine cinema in that period without him. Quite apart from his happy and very lucrative years СКАЧАТЬ