A five-year-old boy is sent by his father to the local police station with a note. The desk sergeant reads it, walks him down a corridor, locks him in a cell for several minutes and then warns him that this is what happens to bad boys. That boy was Alfred Hitchcock, and this episode traces how a lifelong terror of the police, a Jesuit school that delayed punishment until the end of the day, and an analytical mind obsessed with timetables and engineering became the raw material for the master of suspense.

From designing title cards for silent films in 1919 to Munich and German Expressionism, from the customs disaster on The Pleasure Garden to the studio mandate on The Lodger that accidentally created the wrong man trope, this is a chronological look at how Hitchcock built his cinematic language. It also examines Alma Reville's role as his es ...