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severely practical nature. Artistic pretensions were hardly thought of, much less encouraged, and the relation of the film to its audience—a large popular audience, since at this time in Britain films were still generally considered a diversion for the servants rather than the masters—was paramount. Hitchcock entered an
industry
, and an entertainment industry at that: he has often said that one of the great misfortunes was when someone had the bright idea of calling the place that films were made a ‘studio’, with all its artistic overtones, rather than a factory. And the attitudes inculcated then have been important in his life ever since. It should perhaps not need saying, since it is a commonplaceof practically every other kind of art criticism, that no necessary relationship exists between the declared artistic aspirations of a film-maker and his artistic performance. Whether or not, for instance, the classic Hollywood directors regarded themselves as artists—and several, such as John Ford and Howard Hawks, were vocally scornful of any such idea—had little or nothing to do with the aesthetic judgements one might pass on their work, and equally the films of various directors much touted by themselves and others as artists look very faded or quite dead now. It seems unlikely that Hitchcock, even in the secret places of his heart, regarded himself as an artist, or anything other than a practical movie-maker, yet his life has been one of total, obsessive dedication to the one activity, movie-making, which many professed artists might do well to emulate. That being so, the conflict between conscious intentions and a talent which could not be stifled began early—probably right back in the days of Famous Players-Lasky in a back-street converted power station in grimy Islington.
    Here, anyway, it was that he got his first opportunity to direct a film. It came about in the curiously casual way that so much happened in the early years of the cinema. The youthful Hitchcock had from the outset of his film career been working primarily with women—first and foremost the Hollywood ladies of the Famous Players-Lasky script department. It is, indeed, a curious thing for one who has so often been supposed, on the strength of his films, to be a misogynist, to observe how frequently and long throughout his career he has worked very happily and successfully surrounded by women. So it should probably not surprise us to discover him, at the age of twenty-three, getting the notice of a then somewhat powerful lady and through that, with nothing solid to show as a guarantee of talent and not even, according to his own account, any burning desire to become a film director, the opportunity to direct a film.
    The exact circumstances of how this film was made, and how far it was made (it was certainly never completed or released), remain obscure. Even its title presents something of a mystery. In the records of Islington Studios it is called
Mrs. Peabody
; Hitchcock refers to it as
Number Thirteen
—presumably no final title was ever decided upon. The lady who came up with the idea was Anita Ross, at this time a publicity woman for Famous Players-Lasky. She carried a certain weight because back in Hollywood she had worked with Chaplin, and this impressed everyone enormously. It must have been evidentby early 1922 that the writing was on the wall for Famous Players-Lasky British. The company had made eleven films, most of them disappointing critically and commercially. Moreover, defeated for the most part by British weather, they had not been making the most, as promised, of that distinctive British local colour, and the later films had been largely studio-bound—as contemporary critics smartly pointed out. Donald Crisp’s
Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush
, nominally set in Scotland, was shot mainly in Devon and might just as well have been made in Hollywood. Consequently, the company was cutting back its