AND SUDDENLY EVIL ERUPTS

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THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. By Donald Spoto. Illustrated. 594 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $20.

HENRY KISSINGER'S favorite movie is Alfred Hitchcock's ''Psycho.'' But his son, David, age 21, is brimming with enthusiasm for Werner Herzog and allusions to R.W. Fassbinder. George Orwell once said that for a writer to be influential he must be read by people under 25 - a principle that would apply doubly to movie makers today since the median age of the entire film-going public is in the low 20's. So that, when it comes to movies, what Henry Kissinger likes doesn't count anymore, whereas what David Kissinger says goes. Henry, of course, is a board member of 20th Century-Fox, and David is not. But perhaps this is just another one of life's inequities.

It is now exactly 23 years since Hitchcock's last unchallenged triumph, ''Psycho,'' in which that nice Tony Perkins slashes Janet Leigh to death in the shower (Hitchcock quoted the popular late 19thcentury French dramatist Sardou: ''Torture the heroine.''). It seems to me that, among the young, his reputation has been sinking steadily ever since. His last six films made progressively poorer showings. Hitchcock retrospectives have become sadly scarce. The high-powered ''Still of the Night'' with Meryl Streep and Roy Scheider was made by the director Robert Benton (''Kra-mer vs. Kramer'') as an open hommage to Hitchcock but turned out to be last Christmas's most embarrassing nonstarter. What has happened?

Donald Spoto, author of ''The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of

Alfred Hitchcock,'' says with some felicity that the ''single most obvious situation in Hitchcock's films (is) the sudden eruption of chaos and disorder into a life of apparent security.'' This eruption is never presented realistically. As the director himself said late in life, his goal in his movies was the same as that of Edgar Allan Poe in his writings: ''a completely unbelievable story (my emphasis) told to the readers with such a spellbinding logic that you get the impression that the same thing could happen to you tomorrow.''

HITCHCOCK never made films about people whose lives are coarse and brutal - soldiers, policemen, criminals - but about gentlefolk, prosperous, refined, men in suits and women in pretty dresses. These people observe the proprieties of the bourgeoisie, engage in what the audience is apparently intended to take for amusing badinage -to make their lives seem even more safe - when suddenly evil erupts, in what seems so secure a world. And the source of the evil is within that world itself. That well-dressed, courteous lodger is (or appears to be) Jack the Ripper (Hitchcock's first silent film hit, ''The Lodger''). That well-mannered Gregory Peck skiing down the slope beside his psychiatrist, Ingrid Bergman, might suddenly turn and Freudianly murder her (his 1945 United States hit, ''Spellbound'').

Hitchcock had an extremely strict Jesuit upbringing in London's East End, and it is not hard to guess that one of the sources of his life-long artistic vision is the doctrine of original sin. His story sense was set for good by the popular literary fiction of England up to perhaps 1920, when he was 21, and for his entire life Hitchcock, like The Shadow, used ''what evil lurks in the hearts of men'' as his stock in trade. It was the Hitchcock formula. He rarely departed from it. There were many jumps in story logic and characters' psychological continuity, but man was always potentially evil - you, me, ordinary people, nice people. That was the thing.

Now during the 60's, and continuing through the 70's, if in somewhat sanitized form, there came upon the land a new set of beliefs, which, however clumsy or ill-expressed, had a distinctly utopian flavor, and often appeared as an ill-thought-out and halfbaked anarchism. Central to anarchist thought, however, is the conviction that man is naturally good and that he is corrupted only by such artificial institutions as the state. Hence a whole generation of the affluent American young - by now the heart of the movie audience - believed that evil could be easily located in soldiers, policemen, William Calley and Richard Nixon. But it had been quite eliminated from their operative thinking that they themselves could be evil in any way. And the link with Hitchcock gradually parted. Well, it is a theory, as good as most of Mr. Spoto's.

Film lovers therefore fall into roughly three camps regarding Hitchcock: (1) Those, like Mr. Spoto, who put him in a class with Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Joseph Conrad (he cites these names) and become quite incensed when people consider him just a thumping good storyteller. Many such people have captured film teaching posts at universities, from which positions they attempt to stem the anarchist tide. (2) The Henry Kissinger school, which considers Hitchcock merely good popular entertainment. (3) A heterogeneous ragbag of malcontents (but we are winning), including me and the youthful paraanarchists, France's Robert Bresson and Britain's Lindsay Anderson, who are somehow immune to Hitchcock's seductive powers. I myself hew entirely to the sentiments of Edmund Wilson's famous essay on mystery thrillers, ''Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?'' I find everything in Hitchcock so arbitrary, so contrived, so false, the dangers so mechanical, the paranoia so cozy, that I don't care who killed anyone - or why or how - in any film that Hitchcock ever made.

THIS said, for those who consider Hitchcock a dark genius Mr. Spoto's book is absolutely compulsory reading. It is interesting reading even for me. The Hitchcock that emerges from these pages is a figure of uncommon loathesomeness, a cruel, ungenerous, cowardly man, unable to thank or praise, filled with hate and fear. He had no friends. He gave extravagant presents to those more powerful than he. From those poorer and weaker, he borrowed money and would not return it. Almost everyone who worked with him seems to have described him as having a sadistic streak, and he was famous in the film business for his vicious jokes. In his early days, already London's most successful silent film director, he bet a humble property man a week's wages that he would be afraid to spend the entire night in the film studio, manacled to the camera. A good sport, ''Hitch'' gave the property man a beaker of brandy to help pass the night -but the brandy was laced with a powerful emetic. Hitch liked a good joke.

When Madeleine Carroll starred in ''The 39 Steps,'' Hitchcock apparently felt strong enough to inflict a not unrelated joke on her. At 8:30 in the morning of the first day's shooting he handcuffed her to co-star Robert Donat, whom she had never met, and then pretended to lose the key until the late afternoon, delighted to hear of ''the manner in which the humiliated couple had coped with details of a decidedly personal nature,'' writes Mr. Spoto. Hitchcock was notorious for ''taking the mickey'' out of actors (i.e., cutting them down to size). On his first American film, ''Rebecca'' (not a typical Hitchcock movie), he constantly told young Joan Fontaine, then relatively unknown, that no one on the set liked her, that no one thought she was any good, and that her co-star Laurence Olivier hadn't wanted her. When dealing with Hollywood giants like Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart or Paul Newman, of course, his manner was totally different, and he often left them quite undirected, to play their usual screen personae. I personally think he never cajoled a good performance out of an actor in his whole career.

When I first heard that Hitchcock called actors ''cattle,'' I thought there was a measure of geniality in the remark. The film was a ''director's medium,'' after all. I now see that it was an attitude based on envy and malevolence, for he displayed the same mean unwillingness to share credit with anyone, on any level: producer, screenwriter, production designer. He was reduced to a cold fury after the screenwriter of ''Rear Window'' won an award when he, Hitchcock, had not, and he never forgave him. According to Mr. Spoto. the number of one-time associates with whom Hitchcock was no longer on speaking terms was very extensive.

Hitchcock was an extremely hard worker. He also quite regularly took credit for things he had not done. He cultivated key London film critics assiduously, inviting them out to luxurious dinners, granting the wise truth of any negative criticism of his works, pointing out to them how intelligent they were. He was a relentless selfpublicist and became for decades the only film director whose name was known to mass audiences. It is curious to consider how much all this may have contributed to the French auteur theory, for it was the Cahiers du Cinema critics (who adored Hitchcock) who not only launched this mad theory on the world, but, via their American disciples, conferred on Hitchcock an intellectual respectability he had never had before.

Hitchcock was never very interested in people. Young, he was remarkably incurious. At 25, already a full-fledged British film director and engaged to be married, he instructed his leading lady to go into the water in a bathing suit on the Riviera. When told why she could not, he did not understand. He did not know that women menstruated.

AS for the French passion for Hitchcock, it is not generally realized that much as the inhibited, adolescent Hitchcock escaped from reality by reading G.K. Chesterton's detective fiction, so these inhibited, adolescent future French film critics escaped from reality by going to Hitchcock movies.

Hitchcock lied a lot. He maintained to his dying day, for example, that his family had been all-English ''for centuries.'' But Mr. Spoto found the marriage certificates, and three out of his four grandparents were Irish, one a woman named Ann Mahoney who signed both marriage and birth certificates with an ''X.'' So they were hanging men for the wearing of the green, but they weren't going to hang Alfred Hitchcock. Nor did he ever show any greater spirit in defense of the country in which he was born and raised. He was exempt from service in World War I for reasons of obesity (on a 5 feet 8 inch frame, he later rose to an average of 300 lbs). And as World War II approached, he left Britain for America. When war broke out, most other members of Hollywood's smart British set returned to their homeland in its hour of peril, but, again, not Alfred - an action for which he was much despised in Britain.

Mr. Spoto dutifully records all the meanness and malignity of Hitchcock's character - such as the strong signs of a sadistic attitude toward women - but, since he worships Hitchcock's art, he goes to sometimes desperate lengths to show how all these character failings ''enrich'' his work. While granting the director's fierce competitive resentment of such preeminent male stars as Grant, Stewart, Newman, Henry Fonda, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck and Sean Connery, and while detailing his vicious treatment of such female stars as Tippi Hedren of ''The Birds'' ( after her rejection of his sexual advances, he threatened to destroy her career and to ruin her, so that she would be unable to support her parents), he draws a parallel between Hitchcock and Hieronymus Bosch: ''Both were craftsmen steeped in personal guilt ... both perceived life as an effort to avoid the always imminent calamity and accident that was sure to befall the unwary.''

MR. SPOTO outdoes himself when he bewilderingly compares Hitchcock with Henry James, saying that Hitchcock (quoting Leon Edel on James) harbored ''within the house of the (artist's) inner world the spirit of a young adult female, world-wise and curious, possessing a treasure of unassailable virginity and innocence and able to yield to the masculine active world-searching side ... an ever-fresh and exquisite vision of feminine youth and innocence. For this was the androgynous nature of the creator and the drama of his (art).'' As an example of all this, Mr. Spoto offers the ''complex dualities'' of Kim Novak in ''Vertigo.''

Hitchcock died pitiably, at 80, afraid even to receive the priests. ''They all hate me,'' he said. His last words recorded by Mr. Spoto were during a visit by Ingrid Bergman. Tears streaming down his cheeks, Hitchcock said, ''Ingrid, I'm going to die.''

Then again he could always comfort himself by thinking of all the people of humble rank who had devoted their lives to serving him professionally, and whom he had promised repeatedly that he would provide for them after his death. When the will was read, he had left them nothing. It was Hitch's last joke.