Telluride Review: Mark Cousins’ Documentary ‘My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock’

deadline.com:

By this time, don’t we know just about everything there is to know about Alfred Hitchcock? Few, if any, other filmmakers have had their lives and careers examined, explored and analyzed as much as has the vaunted master of suspense.

So unless incontrovertible evidence were to be suddenly found that the director secretly fathered a dozen illegitimate children by as many women and personally supplied Churchill with an untraceable poison powder to drop into Stalin’s tea in Yalta, only to see the prime minister chicken out, it’s quite unlikely that much new will ever be added to his life story that we don’t already know.But leave it to the staggeringly prolific North Irish documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins to forge a new way to approach the subject with My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock; he engaged a skilled British impressionist and comic, Alistair McGowan, to give new voice to the late master of suspense by supplying him with witty and informative commentary that ruminates respectfully, and quite amusingly, over keenly chosen moments from the director’s half-century career (McGowan is said to be devastatingly good at imitating Prince Charles and former prime minister Tony Blair).

If this seems vaguely presumptuous on paper, it never seems so in practice, as the remarks are enunciated with, let’s say, 95 percent accent authenticity and a panache that holds its own with that of the subject.The two-hour piece, which is divided into six chapters, cheekily announces that it was “written and voiced by Alfred Hitchcock.” His initial commentary commences, disarmingly, from the grave as we behold a huge statue of his head in the gardens of a London housing project. “They made this monument to me after I died,” “Hitch” proclaims, adding