‘My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock’ is devious genius

“My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” — 3 stars

In the 44 years since his death in 1980, Alfred Hitchcock has become a cinematic cottage industry, with almost as many movies ABOUT the director as movies made BY him. (More if you count the entire oeuvre of Brian De Palma.)

The worst is probably Sacha Gervasi’s “Hitchcock” (2012), with a gruesomely miscast Anthony Hopkins in the lead. The best is a toss-up between Kent Jones’ “Hitchcock/Truffaut” documentary (2015), about the meeting of those two filmmakers and the classic 1966 book that came out of it, and Alexandre O. Philippe’s “78/52” (2017), which puts the famous shower scene of “Psycho” under a microscope.

Those two gems now have an audacious competitor in “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” a two-hour essay in movie form that has been written and is narrated by the late Sir Alfred himself. Well, not really, as the final credits admit; the script and direction are the handiwork of Mark Cousins, the Northern Irish documentarian who made the 15-hour “The Story of Film” in 2011, and the voice of Hitchcock is supplied by the British comic and impressionist Alistair McGowan in a fair imitation of the master’s plummy diction.

Cousins and McGowan’s Hitch is a cheeky monkey, playfully posing questions to the audience about his movies and our desires in the dark. “Do you trust me? You do know that films are lies, don’t you?” he asks early on, knowing that we love to be lied to when the lying is done this well.

“My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” is a glorified clip show, but the clips are as essential to the medium of movies as any in its history, and they cover the gamut of a 50-year career. Not just the greats (“Psycho,” “Vertigo,” “Rear Window,” “Notorious,” “The 39 Steps,” “Strangers on a Train,” “Shadow of a Doubt”) but the near-greats (“Rebecca,” “Foreign Correspondent,” “The Birds,” “Marnie”), misfires (“Jamaica Inn,” “Under Capricorn”) and oddities (“German Concentration Camps Factual Survey 1945,” a suppressed British Ministry of Information documentary on which Hitchcock served as adviser).

The film’s faux Hitchcock leads us through the themes and obsessions of the filmography in six chapters. The first is “Escape,” by which Cousins means not only a Hitchcock hero’s need to escape a villain’s traps (or, in the case of “North by Northwest,” a crop duster) but his characters’ need to escape themselves and an audience’s need to escape reality. For the director, it also meant an escape from the usual way movies did things. “I wanted salt and sweet,” he says of his cinematic grammar. “I wanted you to be delighted by the unexpected.”

Other sections of “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” are devoted to “Time” (“When your character wants time to speed up, you slow down,” we’re told, and here’s Ray Milland sweating away in “Dial M for Murder” to prove it), “Height” (all those omniscient crane shots with their damning details), “Fulfillment” (the resolutions of his punishing plots) and “Loneliness.” This last gets close to the heart of the matter and the man himself — his darker urges, as attested to by many of his actresses (but largely ignored here) and his metaphysics of fate, of small humans at the mercy of a grinding, indifferent universe.

The richest parts of this documentary, though, come in the second section, “Desire,” a subject that is surely the primary engine for movies in general and Hitchcock’s movies in particular. “My camera was itself a desirous thing,” Cousins’ Hitch confesses as he breaks down the many kinds of cravings on a screen and in our hearts. “I studied desire like Darwin studied earthworms.”

There are tricks of the trade here: the long-lasting kiss in “Notorious” made all the more intense by Cary Grant’s and Ingrid Bergman’s heads taking up the entire frame; the stop-stutter of Grace Kelly smooching James Stewart in “Rear Window.” “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” is sharp enough to get you to find fresh things in films you’ve watched a dozen times. I hadn’t noticed that Stewart finally *sees* Kelly in “Rear Window” — wakens to love and lust — only after she’s crossed over to the murderous “movie” across the way and become the object of his voyeurism. (Male gaze, indeed.)

This section explores the desire to kill, too — all those charming chatterbox murderers in his filmography — and the way desire can turn so quickly to rage. “The movie moguls didn’t always want me to show the poison — the dark side of desire,” the director says. “But I did.”

The analyses of individual scenes and their hidden meanings are as adroit as the self-examination is coy: This Hitchcock is telling us only what he wants to. That’s a flaw in “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” and so are the handful of modern-day images that open the various chapters, including an unexplained woman in a mustard-yellow shirt who gazes at the lens like the brunette descendant of a Hitchcock blonde. She intrudes on this sly, deadpan confessional, but Cousins succeeds at his main task. He brings back a genius in all his contradictions, and his movies in all their deadly delights.

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At Landmark at The Glen in Glenview and Wayfarer Theaters in Highland Park. Unrated. 120 minutes.