The inspiration for Norman Bates? Alfred Hitchcock pictured in a dress and play-acting in the sea in recently unearthed album

Incredible collection put up for sale by book dealer Christian White

It shows Hitchcock as a young assistant director just beginning his career

Candid pictures date from the early- to mid-1920s



'Hitchcock disguised as Molly': The director before he was famous, wearing a figure-hugging dress on the tennis court in Shoreham-by-Sea

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It could have been the inspiration for Norman Bates. Or perhaps it's just a case of Hitchcock holiday japes.

Whatever the story behind these remarkable pictures, they show the Psycho director in an entirely different light to the troubled genius whose legacy has been sullied by his reputation for cruelty.

The previously unpublished album is believed to have belonged to director Graham Cutts, for whom the young Alfred Hitchcock worked as an assistant early in his film career.

Dating from the early to mid-1920s, many of the pictures show Hitchcock, Cutts and others, including Hitchcock's future wife Alma Reville, in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, the location of a small film studio.

They appear to be living a happy-go-lucky existence, play acting by the beach, rough housing in the sea and devouring film magazines, as they meanwhile work on pictures.

These images date from just after the making of Cutts's hit film Woman To Woman, which brought him together with Hitchcock as assistant director in the Balcon-Saville-Freedman company.

Notably, one captioned 'Hitchcock disguised as Molly. Shoreham. 1923' shows a young, moustachioed Hitchcock wearing a figure-hugging dress while gurning at the camera during a game of tennis.

Cross-dressing killer Norman Bates was later to become one of the director's most-famous characters in the 1960 movie Psycho, a film which has come to define Hitchcock's style of psychological horror.

Patrick McGilligan, a Hitchcock biographer, said that the dressing was probably just for a laugh. He told the Sunday Times: 'I know that Hitch did occasionally like to put on women's clothes, but just for fun at parties.

'These photos humanise Hitch, particularly as people now tend to think of him as a fat sadist.'

Play acting: Hitchcock frolics with a woman called Ada and Graham 'Jack' Cutts, his then boss and mentor

Hard at work: The gang sit out on a late summer afternoon, reading issues of Kinematograph Weekly

Later photos in the collection show Hitchcock, Cutts and the others as they travelled Europe, searching for location for their next film, and in Germany as they shot the Anglo-German collaboration The Blackguard.

By this time, Hitchcock was increasingly beginning to dominate over his old boss, making the acquaintance of luminaries of the German expressionist movement which was later to strongly influence his work.

One amusingly glum image is that of 'Hans. Hitch, Alma, Jack, Ada. a Hun Germany 1924 Oct' pictured on a pleasure barge, seemingly on a day trip away from the film set.

They appear to be not overly impressed by their escape from cosmopolitan, permissive Berlin and its manifold attractions.

'Hans. Hitch, Alma, Jack, Ada. a Hun Germany 1924 Oct': The gang on a day out in Germany, where they were filming the The Blackguard and Hitchcock began making connections with German expressionist filmmakers

Book dealer Christian White, who unearthed the photographs, has placed them on sale on Modernfirsteditions.com for £15,000.

He said: 'This remarkable photographic collection, housed in a small domestic photo-album, documents in the most intimate and psychologically revealing manner the defining professional and personal relationships of Alfred Hitchcock's earliest years as a film-maker.'