Near the storied climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 film “Saboteur,” the hero (Barry Kane, played by Robert Cummings) suddenly gets the upper hand on the villain (Frank Fry, played by the actor, producer, and director Norman Lloyd), and backs the Nazi fifth-columnist against a railing surrounding the torch of the Statue of Liberty. With his beady eyes locked on Kane’s gun, Fry pushes back with a suddenness that causes him to flip over the railing and leaves him dangling from Lady Liberty’s hand.

“I did that backflip,” Mr. Lloyd said on the phone from his home in California. “Of course, I was 26 years old. I’m now 93, so I wouldn’t try it again. I remember Hitchcock asking me, ‘Would you mind doing that?’ The reason he wanted me to do the flip instead of a stuntman was that he was close on Bob and I, and didn’t want to cut. He knew that if he cut, a sense of disbelief would occur in the audience. He was the master storyteller of all time.”

Mr. Lloyd’s life and work, encompassing some seven decades in front of the camera, behind it, onstage, and in the wings, is the subject of a breezy and engaging new documentary called “Who Is Norman Lloyd?,” which makes its premiere today at Film Forum. On-screen in the documentary and on the phone, Mr. Lloyd is no slouch in the storytelling department himself.

“Norman is the history of show business in the 20th century,” Mr. Lloyd’s longtime friend, Karl Malden, says in the film. Indeed, in conversation with Mr. Lloyd, who, despite his forswearing of backflips, still plays tennis twice a week, one gets the impression that he has an inexhaustible supply of nuanced and amusing anecdotes up his sleeve.

As anyone who has seen “Saboteur” (double billed with “Who Is Norman Lloyd?” for the Film Forum engagement) will remember, the word “sleeve” has direct bearing on the fate of his character in Hitchcock’s film. For a few heart-stopping, eerily quiet, and strangely intimate moments dangling from the statue, the only thing separating Fry from eternity is his sport coat.

“Hitch ran the picture for Ben Hecht once,” Mr. Lloyd said, conjuring the screenwriting master of suspense of Hollywood’s golden age. “If you recall, Hitch keeps cutting all through that sequence to the seams of my sleeves attached to my jacket. It finally goes, right? When the picture was over and the lights came up in the screening room, Hecht said to Hitch, ‘He should have had a better tailor.'”

Hecht’s indifference notwithstanding, “Saboteur,” with crackling dialogue written in part by Dorothy Parker and such marvelously devised and executed set pieces as the Statue of Liberty cliffhanger and a disturbing showdown in Radio City Music Hall, is a considerably better film than the “run-through for ‘North by Northwest'” reputation it has among movie buffs. For Mr. Lloyd, it is essential Hitchcock, if for no other reason than it marked the beginning of a relationship with the director that would climax with Hitchcock breaking the Hollywood blacklist on Mr. Lloyd’s behalf. Unemployable in the Red Scare 1950s due to his association with the pre-Word War II left-leaning New York theater scene, Mr. Lloyd was summoned by Hitchcock from East Coast exile back to Hollywood to co-produce the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” TV series alongside Joan Harrison and Hitchcock himself. “I cannot give you an accurate idea of how much I owe Hitch,” Mr. Lloyd said. “He brought me back into the business.”

Hitchcock also started Mr. Lloyd in the business: His choice of Mr. Lloyd to play the role of Frank Fry was the actor’s feature film debut. “He wanted an unknown in this part,” Mr. Lloyd said. On a tip from Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre partner, John Houseman, the director arranged to meet Mr. Lloyd, a Mercury Theatre alumnus, in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel in Midtown.

“I’ve never forgotten,” Mr. Lloyd said. “The appointment was for 8 o’clock in the morning!” Mercifully, instead of essaying the actor’s suitability with a pre-breakfast audition, Hitchcock himself took center stage. “I sleepily strode in,” Mr. Lloyd said, “and Hitch told me the whole story. For 45 minutes I was spellbound. The thing about Hitch was that if he was working on a picture he would hold you down and tell you the whole picture virtually shot by shot.”

Though the last half-decade before Hitchcock died in 1980 yielded no finished films, according to Mr. Lloyd the master of suspense remained a brilliant purveyor of fiction to the last. “At the end he was working on a story called ‘The Short Night,’ that he’d had on the shelf for 11 years,” Mr. Lloyd said. “He knew damn well it was no good.” Though hobbled by arthritis, on a pacemaker, and grossly overweight, Hitchcock kept a full staff, including Mr. Lloyd, busy preparing a movie he alone was sure he would not complete.

Said Mr. Lloyd, “Hitch said to me one day when we were supposedly writing together, ‘You know, Norm, we’re never going to make this picture.’ I said, ‘Hitch, why do you say that? You’ve got this whole staff, a chauffeur, everything.'”

Mr. Lloyd had of course stumbled upon the truth. “Those old fellas were such great foxes,” he said. “They knew how to tie up a studio.” Hitchcock, the man who invited Mr. Lloyd into the movie business and saw to it that he stayed there, put to rest the actor’s anxieties about the viability of a final film they would not make. They would never shoot a foot of the film, he told his friend and collaborator of some 38 years while essaying their plush digs on the Universal back lot, “because it’s not necessary.”

Through November 29 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).