As an adult, Alfred Hitchcock rigorously controlled the press's portrait of himself, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring all others out. Ackroyd reveals something more: a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashes a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. This biography wrests the director's chair back from the master of control and discovers what lurks just out of sight, in the corner of the shot.