[Note.  To go to our Index and/or News & Comment pages (both containing links to the remainder of this website), click one of the following: Index page, News & Comment page.]

This page was last revised on July 14, 2008.  Most-recent changes and additions are coloured.  Note: several reviews will appear here in July-August.

• First, books/journals received. We're happy to review or mention some publications sent to us:

The 'Hitchcock Annual', 2006-07 (which includes "Hitchcockian Narrative" by Michael Walker).

+Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzáles's 'Hitchcock: Past and Future' (Routledge, 2004).  Guest-review below.

+ 'Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences' (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2000), edited by Dominque Païni and Guy Cogeval.  Guest-review below.

+Steven Jacobs's 'The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock' (010 Publishers, Rotterdam).  Review coming.

+ Will Schmenner and Corinne Granof (eds), 'Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film' (M. and L. Block Museum of Art; Northwestern University Press).  Review below.

+ William Hare's 'Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense' (McFarland).  Brief review below.

+Jack Sullivan's 'Hitchcock's Music' (Yale University Press).  Review below.

+ The 'Hitchcock Annual', 2005-06 (which includes "Hitchcock on Griffith" by Sid Gottlieb).

+ Joe McElhaney's 'The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli' (State University of New York Press).  Brief review below. 

+ Dr Alan Taylor's 'Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock & Google Culture' (Peter Lang).  Guest-review coming.

+ Gary Giblin's 'Alfred Hitchcock's London: A Reference Guide to Locations' is published by Midnight Marquee Press in Baltimore.  We review it below.

+ Lesley Brill's application of the theories of Elias Canetti to film, 'Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema' (Wayne State University Press), includes a chapter on North by Northwest.  The book is reviewed below.

+ Nicholas Haeffner's 'Alfred Hitchcock' is published by Pearson Education Limited, Harlow, Essex.  Review below.

+ From Wallflower Press (London & New York) comes John Orr's 'Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema' (hb and pb).  The book is reviewed below.

+ Murray Pomerance of Ryerson University in Toronto has written 'An Eye for Hitchcock',  published by Rutgers.   Guest-review below.

+ Slobodan Mijuskovic's 'Alfred Hickok: Upotreba slikarstva'/'Alfred Hitchcock's Usage of Painting' (103 pp) is published in the Serbian language but may eventually be translated into English.  It contains many carefully chosen b/w frame-stills and reproductions of paintings.  Slobodan Mijuskovic is a Modern Art Historian in Belgrade. 

• Next, briefly, books and journals we're looking forward to ...  Barbara Straumann has written 'Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov' for publication by Edinburgh University Press in December, 2008.  Two books about Hitchcock's relationships with his actresses are scheduled for publication this year.   Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto has written 'Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies' - the UK edition is already published, while the (we understand slightly different) US edition is coming in November.  Meanwhile, John Hamilton's 'Hitchcock's Blonde' (Hemlock Books, UK) deals with Hitchcock's relationship with Grace Kelly, and is scheduled for August publication.  Paul Gordon's 'Dial "M" for Mother: A Freudian Hitchcock' (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) is now out.  Possibly the most ambitious book on Hitchcock yet conceived is 'A Companion to Hitchcock Studies', edited by Leland Poague and Thomas Leitch for publication by Blackwell (UK) in late 2009.  It will have over 30 contributors, all experts in their individual fields.  Don't confuse the title of Laurence Simmons's 'Everything You Wanted to Know About Slavoj Zizek (But Were Afraid to Ask Alfred Hitchcock)' (Routledge, 2007) with a similar title by Zizek himself of a few years ago.  Laurence Simmons teaches at the University of Auckland.  His book devotes successive chapters to key concepts used by Zizek, and each chapter is keyed to a particular Hitchcock film.  David Thomson is said to have signed to write a book on Psycho.  More details soon.  Now out in Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy series is 'Hitchcock and Philosophy' (pb) editedby David Baggett and William A. Drumin.  Continuum will issue a revised, paperback version of Dr Phil Skerry's 'The Shower Scene in Hitchcock's Psycho' for October 2008 publication.   Richard Allen's 'Hitchcock's Romantic Irony' (Columbia University Press; hb and pb) has been published.  The recently-published 'Looking for Alfred: The Hitchcock Castings' (Hatje Cantz, 2007; hb) has contributions by Patricia Allmer, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom McCarthy, and Johan Grimonprez.  Another book by Marc Raymond Strauss (whose 'Alfred Hitchcock's Silent Films' is reviewed below) is now out; it's called 'Hitchcock Nonetheless: The Master's Touch in His Least Celebrated Films' (McFarland).  Several books with chapters on Vertigo are already appearing (in 2008 Vertigo will be 50 years old). One is Alice Rayner's 'Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre' (University of Minnesota Press).  Another book featuring Vertigo is Norman Holland's 'Meeting Movies' (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), which also has chapters on Freud, Persona, et al.  Quentin Falk's 'Hitchcock' has been published by HausBook.  After several years' work, Marilyn Fabe at the University of California is reportedly nearing completion of a 'psycho-biographical' study of Hitchcock's films.  R.Barton Palmer (another of whose books, co-edited with David Boyd, is listed below) is editing two volumes of essays on Hitchcock's sources.  (Dr Barbara Creed of Melbourne will write on Vertigo.)  Prof. Brigitte Peucker's 'The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film', from Stanford University Press, includes a chapter on Hitchcock - the director's films are examined with regard to modernist and realist effects in painting.  Robert J. Yanal's 'Hitchcock as Philosopher' is one of several books on Hitchcock being published by McFarland, and probably the best from what we've seen.  Prof. Yanal's book looks at twelve of the director's films, drawing on ideas of Descartes and Wittgenstein, et al.    'Hitchcock: The First Three Minutes' (Legenda), by Rembert Hüser, is cleverly-titled: it analyses the title sequences of the American films.  The author is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Minnesota.  As at December 2007, publication has been delayed.  Another recent book of interest: 'Style and Meaning: Studies in the detailed analysis of film' (Eds John Gibbs & Douglas Pye), Manchester UP, 2005.  It was prompted by a conference on Style & Meaning at Reading University in 2000.  The book has two Hitchcock pieces: Ed Gallafent on the long take in Under Capricorn, and Neil Potts on 'Character interiority' in Vertigo.    (Other books are in the works, and we'll print details as we receive them.  Note: further information on several of the above books may be obtained from the publishers' websites.)
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Now to our reviews of other Hitchcock-related books, journals, and articles that we (or our guest-reviewers) have read lately ...

• All power to the team at Northwestern University's Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art who have produced the splendid catalogue called 'Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film' (edited by Will Schmenner and Corinne Granof; 155pp; pb).  Its parent exhibition travels this month to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California, and will open from January 18 to April 20.  Our Californian readers should not miss it.  For the rest of us, though, the catalogue itself has reproduced about a third of the objects in the exhibition - drawings, sketches, storyboards, and documentation from archives in England and the United States - and contains stimulating introductory material as well as essays.  The latter include Scott Curtis on "Images in Hitchcock's Working Method", Tom Gunning on "Paintings in Hitchcock", and Jan Olsson - punning prolifically - on "Hitchcock à la carte" (described as an 'irreverent' look at 'the intersection of the televisual and culinary realms in marketing and reception discourses').  But the standout essay is Bill Krohn's on "I Confess and Nos deux consciences".  Krohn does two things.  First, having tracked down the 1902 French play on which I Confess is based (or anyway having read it in the English translation Hitchcock commissioned for his own use), he speculates about its influence on Hitchcock's films starting with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).  As he notes, Hitchcock claimed to have first seen the play 'some time in the early '30s', and to have been 'haunted' by it.  Krohn can therefore argue that the characteristic 'scapegoat' plot of several early Hitchcocks (e.g., Downhill and Blackmail, where a character is blamed for someone else's crime) now evolved into a more elaborate 'confession' plot.  The Man Who Knew Too Much has Jill both carry the knowledge of a crime she dare not talk about (her daughter has been kidnapped to silence her) and then finally 'confess' it publicly by her scream in the Albert Hall.  In due course, this plot would further evolve into the celebrated 'transference of guilt' motif in Hitchcock, whereby a character becomes in effect a Christ-figure.  The other thing that Krohn accomplishes is to show how I Confess ingeniously reproduces, or improves on, many of the ideas in the original play: for example, the opposition of secular and sacred viewpoints (the 'two consciences') and the motif of hamartia or 'missed aim' as when Ruth Grandfort in the film attempts to alibi Father Logan but only succeeds in giving the police the motive they have been seeking.  (It is surely significant, notes Krohn, that such a motif occurs in other Hitchcock films of this time, such as Under Capricorn.)  Krohn's thoughtful essay is sufficient reason to obtain a copy of 'Casting a Shadow'.  The catalogued sketches and storyboards, by various hands across the years, are numerous and beautifully reproduced - though it's true that similar material has already appeared in Dan Auiler's 'Hitchcock's Notebooks', 'Cinefantastique' magazine, and elsewhere.  KM

• [The following review of 'Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences' (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2000), pb, edited by Dominque Païni and Guy Cogeval, is guest-written by Professor Tony Williams.  We understand that the book is currently back in print.]

Eighteen essays appear in this 486-page production, many by well-known people such as Henri Langlois, Donald Spoto, Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, and Gérard Genette along with others well versed in areas of art criticism. But the major highlight of this book is its collection of reproductions, black and white and color, that form half the book. These not only supplement the various essays but also suggest many art/film parallels for readers to explore after they finish the book.

Pierre Gras’s short essay “Hitchcock: Eating and Destruction” covers things we have all noticed in the director’s films. But Gras proceeds to suggest a significant opposition across the films between human waste and Platonic idealism. For example, Bab's's dead body amongst the potatoes in Frenzy opposes Scottie's idealized image of Madeleine in Vertigo.  Hitchcock, of course, often spoke about his project to make a documentary showing  24 hours in the life of a city beginning with fresh food arriving at market and ending with effluent flowing down sewers.  Roughly the other side of the coin was his abortive Mary Rose project in which the heroine escapes bodily corruption by disappearing from the human realm only to reappear in spiritual form and then vanish forever in a burst of light.  Although no art reproductions accompany this essay, it does evoke Hitchcock’s lifelong interest in surrealism.  Julia Tanski’s slightly longer essay, “The Symbolist Woman in Alfred Hitchcock’s Films”, also draws on known elements in order to reveal a significant dimension of the director’s work.  Depicting the deepest colors of the human soul, the Symbolist movement in literature and art represented a humanistic response to industrialization and the rise of a complacent middle-class.  Classical, spiritual, and everyday elements were combined in protest. 'Symbolism was an all-encompassing phenomenon in the years from 1886 through 1905. It was all-encompassing in the sense that, willfully Wagnerian, it touched on a number of artistic media, from literature to the decorative arts to painting to photography.' (148-149)  'It was art as the final bastion against loss of meaning, art for art’s sake as the ultimate response to the emptiness of appearances.' (149)  Tanski includes several stills from The Lodger, The Paradine Case, and The Birds and refers to the influence on Hitchcock of Symbolist paintings such as Fernand Khnopff’s 1891 'Who Shall Deliver Me?' where the woman's empty gaze anticipates that of several women in the director's films.  Tanski of course also notes relevant connections between Vertigo and Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 symbolist novella 'Bruges-la-Morte'.  Nathalie Bondil-Poupard’s “Alfred Hitchcock: An Artist in Spite of Himself” complements her other essay in this book, “Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On: Hitchcock and Dali, Surrealism and Oneiricism.”  In the former, she draws attention to Hitchcock’s lifelong interest in art both as a collector (of Paul Klee in particular) and as art lover.  And her study of the surrealist influences on Spellbound not only places that film against its relevant art-history background but also examines the issue of Dali’s lost scenes for that film and contemporary questions about the sincerity of Dali and Cocteau to the surrealist cause.  Importantly, Bondil-Poupard affirms Hitchcock’s formative role in attempting to make the first experimental art film in Hollywood in the face of producer Selznick’s interference.  Spellbound's final dream sequence as we have it today only hints at what could have been.  Nonetheless, Hitchcock continued his surrealist experiments in Vertigo and North by Northwest, the latter being possibly 'the most Dalian of Hitchcock’s films' (171).  Hitchcock admitted that North by Northwest represented one long dream sequence for him and compared it to a painting by Christopher Nevinson.  The film reaches an appropriate oneiric climax in its Mount Rushmore sequence.

The second part of the book contains abundant reproductions of paintings often juxtaposed with stills from Hitchcock’s films.   The act of seeing here becomes paramount, and this book is essential towards exploring such an aspect of Hitchcock’s art.  TW

• [The following review of 'Hitchcock: Past and Future' (Routledge, London and New York, 2004; pb, 284 pp), edited by Richard Allen and Sam Ishi-Gonzáles, is also guest-written by Professor Tony Williams.]

This collection of essays contains material from the 1999 Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Conference, complementing 'Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays' (1999) published by the BFI.  At this point of time, Robin Wood’s original question, 'Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?', has seemingly been abundantly answered by the academic world.  But forty years later, issues remain, namely a danger of Hitchcock’s confinement within too-rigid definitions or, in Allen’s terms, threats 'by certain contemporary scholars who seem intent on reducing the study of film to an analysis of how they are received by audiences, circulate in culture, and reflect or resonate with other kinds of cultural forms and social processes'. (2)  This collection attempts to counter contemporary skepticism 'about textual meaning, about the objectivity of value judgments, indeed about the possibility of human agreement itself that underlies the denigration of the study of cinema in the university just as it threatens human understanding in general...' (2)  It provides different evaluative approaches.  Not all are entirely successful but they equally attempt to celebrate Hitchcock’s cinematic achievements in the light of new contemporary approaches.

Four essays in this collection show innovative approaches to understanding Hitchcock's vital legacy.  Others have their own plusses and minuses: my intention is less to slight them than to highlight those most approximating Allen’s goal in his cogent introduction. These four essays combine valuable close readings with relevant philosophical, musical, political, and psychoanalytic approaches to the director’s films.  Sam Ishi-González’s “Hitchcock with Delueuze” reminds us that Deleuze places Hitchcock at the juncture between classical and modern cinema as noted in 'Cinema I: The Movement Image'.  Ishi-González develops this idea in terms of innovative close readings of Hitchcock films such as Rear Window and the mostly neglected The Wrong Man that represent the director’s idea of 'pure cinema' involving not just emotions 'but also the mechanisms of thought.' (136)  Defining the latter film as part of a trilogy also including Vertigo, Ishi-Gonzáles specifically sees this group as spanning classical and modern cinema.  But Ishi-Gonzáles emphasizes their modernity, noting how they exhibit elements of interrogation and lack of closure.  Such devices are often exclusively associated with the European art films of Antonioni and others.  This is a remarkable essay combining close reading with the stimulating implications of the work of Deleuze.  Daniel Antonio Srebnick’s “Music and Identity: The Struggle for Harmony in Vertigo” provides another rigorous example of close analysis but this time in musical terms: Herrmann’s score, we're told, represents a contest between harmony and dissonance echoing those within the film’s characters.  James Morrison’s “Hitchcock’s Ireland: the performance of Irish Identity in Juno and the Paycock and Under Capricorn” opposes apolitical interpretations of Hitchcock’s work by examining these two neglected films.  He sees them as much more intellectually challenging than usually thought: the first film is no mere stage adaptation and the second is not just a costume period drama.  Juno and the Paycock and Under Capricorn really reflect 'national identity as a form of performance that undermines essentialist notions of nationality and therefore implicitly … subjects the colonial discourses of British imperialism to critique'. (195)  Rather than focusing on distracting notions of stereotypes, Morrison sees the presence of folk culture and convict labor in these films as contradicting the dominant idea of nation state.  The final essay, “Is There a Proper Way to Remake a Hitchcock Film?”, by Slavoj Zizek, is the gem of this collection.  Its implications extend far beyond its title subject matter in responding to Allen’s contemporary aim of taking Hitchcock seriously.  Zizek asks: what gives Hitchcock films their unique flair?  He finds this in their meaningful innovations.  Zizek sees Hitchcock’s artistic strategy according to ideas contained in Jacques Lacan’s final seminar.  It involves the creation of a pattern of flowing meanings that invite constant reinterpretation rather than being confined to one particular concept.  Zizek's use of Lacanian concepts necessitates some effort on the part of the reader.  But the effort is worth it since Zizek provides several new theoretical approaches towards understanding Hitchcock and his legacy. This is a stimulating conclusion to a diverse body of essays.  TW

• I have beside me two books by friends.  I shan't review them in the normal way.  Both are tours de force of a kind.  Joe McElhaney's 'The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli' (State University of New York Press, 2006; pb; 255pp) looks at three 1960s films by 'classical' directors whose respective careers had by then entered their 'late afternoon' phase and, in the eyes of many critics, been overtaken by modernist filmmaking trends in both Europe and America.  The films are Fritz Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960), Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), and Hitchcock's Marnie (1964).  McElhaney's broad position is that these directors still had a few expressive things to show audiences and colleagues, and in particular that their work was integral to the current European film scene whose touted directors included Godard, Fellini, Antonioni, and Resnais.  Overall, it's a sustained high-wire act from McElhaney - few big moments perhaps, but rather a succession of insights and hypotheses and summations - and he is tremendously passionate and well-informed about cinema and writings on it in journals and scholarly books.  And don't misunderstand me: there are splendid descriptions, as when McElhaney notes of Marnie (pp. 116-17) how its resolution has 'a constant on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand structure' (meaning both optimistic and pessimistic inflections, in profuse and quick succession).  I concluded that the book is very suitable for a film course called specifically 'The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli'!  I'll let you decide, gentle reader, if you're comfortable with that.  Now to Wiliam Hare's 'Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense' (McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, and London, 2007; pb; 351pp).  To be perfectly honest, this is  Raymond Durgnat's 'Plain Man's Hitchcock' (the subtitle of Durgnat's 1974 book, 'The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock') told straight - this really is a (very) plain man's guide to fifteen Hitchcock films, and a prolix one at that.  I'm sorry, Bill, but I personally found it rather predictable, what with your seeming conviction that paraphrases of the films, plus extensive asides about the actors and other matters of doubtful relevance, is any sort of coverage of the topic of 'Hitchcock'.  Towards the end, though, it was nice to have film writer Robert Kendall's account of the 1975 press conference via television hook-up that Hitchcock gave to launch Family Plot.  (It included Hitchcock's answer to the question, 'What's your favorite reading?': 'Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, John Buchan and Agatha Christie.')  KM

• Jack Sullivan's 'Hitchcock's Music' (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006; hb, 354 pp) contains many stimulating passages of musical description and analysis, and has worthwhile things to say, historical and analytic, about most of Hitchcock's sound films, often at length.  (However, Under Capricorn regrettably gets only a couple of pages.)  One of the stand-out chapters is on Notorious, in which Sullivan praises Roy Webb's self-effacing score keyed to Brazilian rhythms and 'imperceptible suspensions in the syncopation' (p. 127).  This, with 'no south-of-the-border clichés' (p. 126)!  Sullivan is a cultured fellow, who studied with revered man-of-letters Jacques Barzun and is director of American Studies at Rider University, New Jersey.  I've long admired 'The Penguin Encyclopedia of Magic and the Supernatural' (1986) which Sullivan edited and to which Jacques Barzun was a principal contributor.  Now, after reading 'Hitchcock's Music', I'm happy to report that my ears respond to the films' soundtracks in ways that were, at best, intermittent before: to Hitchcock's obsession with waltzes, for example, to his frequent use of chimes, drum solos, ambiguous chords, characters singing or humming or whistling a film's leitmotiv, 'jazz as an emblem of life's precariousness' (p. 320), not to mention all forms of ambient sounds for effect - Hitchcock told Truffaut that he imagined every sound as possible dialogue, even the deadly avian cries in The Birds (p. 315).  Here's a revealing instruction that Hitchcock gave composer Ron Goodwin for the climax of Frenzy as a vengeful Blaney (Jon Finch), wrench in hand, climbs the stairs to Rusk's apartment: '[I]n an abstract way ... we don't want the music to be loud enought to awaken his intended victim' (p. 306).  This of course is Hitchcock being 'subjective': we're very much with Blaney in his ascent.  But as Sullivan notes, there's also a dreamlike, irrational logic at work here that runs deeper than a particular character's viewpoint (p. 307).  Further, the historical material that Sullivan provides is often fresh.  Roy Webb was probably the real composer of Mr and Mrs Smith (rather than Edward Ward, whom the film itself credits); he also worked uncredited on Spellbound.  However, Hitchcock hadn't initially wanted him for Notorious, and only hired him after Bernard Herrmann proved unavailable.  (This wasn't the first time Hitchcock had tried to get Herrmann.  But not until The Trouble With Harry would the fruitful Hitchcock-Herrmann collaboration begin.)  Also, most of us know of Hitchcock's treasured memories of the original stage production of J.M. Barrie's 'Mary Rose' which he had seen in London in 1920.  But did you know that he tried at the time of Rebecca to unearth the play's original music?  In particular, he specified "The Call" connected with the heroine's disappearance and which he remembered as 'celestial voices, like Debussy's "Sirènes"' (p. 66).  Unsuccessful at the time, he had only marginally more success seventeen years later, during preproduction of Vertigo, when Paramount found for him a couple of old recordings, 'scratchy and ghastly', containing two excerpts (p. 225).  Meanwhile, Hitchcock had employed a 'celestial voice' effect in I Confess, and would do so again in Family Plot (at which time he sent out for a recording of 'Sirènes' - p. 312).  And he would undoubtedly have heard and admired Dimitri Tiomkin and Bernard Herrmann's use of Debussy in William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie (1948), an exquisite film which certainly influenced Vertigo.   Unfortunately, Sullivan never mentions Portrait of Jennie, and that must bring me to the remainder of this review.  Sullivan's excellent book would have been better if he were more of a film buff.  (I have made a similar criticism of Christopher Morris's book on Hitchcock, with its stuffy academic horizons, and although Sullivan is a better writer than Morris, my readers are welcome to extrapolate from my earlier review!)  Sometimes Sullivan appears merely ignorant: for example, that Waltzes From Vienna derived ultimately from an original story in German which in turn yielded German and French films (both directed by Ludwig Berger) as well as the British stage musical, written by Guy Bolton, on which Hitchcock's film was directly based.  (The German film was called Walzerkrieg [1933].  Critic David Shipman considers it 'infinitely superior' to Waltzes From Vienna!)  Sometimes, too, Sullivan appears unresponsive to the film's nitty-gritty whose accompanying music he is describing.  About Rope, it is all very well to tell us that it opens with a warm "Pastorale" (though Sullivan is mistaken in thinking that Hitchcock appears soon afterwards, walking along the street) followed by an orchestral rendering of Poulenc's minimalist "Mouvement Perpétual No. 1" (but no mention by Sullivan of Poulenc's gayness, which would surely have been relevant) followed by a tense 16-second cue called "Mood" followed by a scream - which cuts off the music (p. 145).  I feel that this musical enumeration needs keying more closely to the no-less interesting visuals.  For example, "Pastorale" accompanies a high-shot of what is obviously an exclusive residential area, seen in early morning sunlight which a nanny is enjoying as she wheels a pram.  But then, with the onset of "Mouvement Perpétual No. 1", something strange happens: (practically) all movement ceases!  This serves both as an implied time lapse (as the main credits unwind) and as a prolepsis of the eerie world we're about to enter.  Many Hitchcock title-sequences are like this: suggesting an unseen power or force, and not necessarily that of just the director.  So there is a dreamlike, irrational quality to Hitchcock's films. Sullivan's best attempt to define it comes at the end of the book, when he mentions 'pure cinema': 'In a Hitchcock picture, sound and image conspire to create an alternate reality beyond words.' (p. 319)  Sullivan had earlier quoted Poe on the 'supernal' force represented by music (p. 307).  (My own regular readers know that I would indeed take matters beyondmusic - unfortunately, Sullivan never once references Schopenhauer whose ideas on music, not least Wagner's, have always been admired ...)  Likewise, when Sullivan quotes Poe and Melville apropos the 'whiteness' motif in Spellbound, and associates it mainly with terror (p. 112), I think that this professor of English is being remiss for the sake of his American Studies bias (not the only time in the book)!  The 'whiteness' in Spellbound, a film which at one point makes fun of 'the poets' and their glorifying of love, is in fact keyed to an English poetic tradition encompassing Milton and Henry Vaughan but notably including Shelley with his 'white radiance of eternity'.  The motif also picks up on associations of white in various religions.  And then there's 'pure cinema' ...    KM

The groundbreaking Psycho fused elements of  the 'old dark house' and serial-killer genres to create a radical new 'pornography of death.' By now, Hitchcock's film has been (psycho-)analyzed nearly out of existence. So how can one craft a new critical take on the style, themes, tropes and smashed taboos of this masterpiece? The answer, in the case of Robert Kolker’s 'Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook', appears to be that you can’t. For rather than offering us his own 'long hard look' at the film, à la Durgnat's 2002 book on it, Kolker has provided what might be described as a Psycho primer - an anthology that takes the curious but not yet jaded film student on a chronological journey from the inception of the film to some of its more recent scholarly exegeses. Along the way, Kolker introduces each excerpt/essay - explaining the perspective of each author and helping the reader out with some of the more arcane terminology (but more on that below) - then wraps it all up with his own balanced synthesis. The first excerpt is from Truffaut’s 'Hitchcock' (1984), in which the director explains that in Psycho he was really directing the audience itself, 'playing them like an organ.' Hitchcock’s manipulation of the audience proves to be one of the central concerns of the anthology. After the obligatory 'behind-the-scenes' excerpt from Stephen Rebello’s indispensable 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho' (1990), Kolker gets down to critical business. Lucidly-chosen excerpts from Robin Wood’s 'Hitchcock’s Films' (1965) and Raymond Durgnat’s 'The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock' (1974) exemplify insightful film analysis. Here's Wood, apropos Marion’s flight to California, discussing how she forfeits 'her powers of conscious will': 'Hitchcock uses every means to enforce audience-identification - the staging of each scene, the use of subjective technique, [and] the way in which each subsidiary character is presented to us through Marion’s eyes….' The result is that, '[l]ike her we resent, with fear and impatience, everything … that impedes or interferes with her obsessive flight, despite the fact that only interference can help her…. As Marion drives on … we share her hopelessness and weariness. The film conveys a sense of endless journey leading to nowhere, or into darkness: as the imagined voices become more menacing, darkness gathers.' Wood (as does Durgnat) rightly marvels at the way Hitchcock then manipulates us into identification with the man who covers up for Marion’s ostensible murderer. By the time we finally know the truth, we are complicit with Norman, having come to accept him 'as a potential extension of ourselves. …[T]hat we all share in a common guilt, may  be, intellectually, a truism; the greatness of Psycho lies in its ability, not merely to tell us this, but to make us experience it.' More often than not with authors of this caliber, one finds oneself marveling at both their insights and the prose with which they elucidate them. Whether one agrees with them - as when Linda Williams (“Discipline and Fun: Psycho and Postmodern Cinema”) claims that Psycho 'needs to be seen … as an important turning point in the pleasurable destabilizing of sexual identity within what would become the genre of slasher horror,' or disagrees - as when (the 1974) Durgnat describes the shower drain simply as an eye, when it is so much more (e.g., the actualization of a metaphor - a life down the drain) - there is ample reward. Far less rewarding are the psychoanalytic essays of Jean Douchet and Robert Samuels. These writers follow Freud himself (and I dare say Lacan) in making pronouncements without evidence (e.g., Samuels's claim that Norman is so-named because he represents a 'normal man') and pollute their prose with exclusionary jargon. For example, in “Epilogue: Psycho and the Horror of the Bi-Textual Unconscious,” Samuels writes of the film’s putative MacGuffin: 'Hitchcock highlights the way that this object is the material residue of all Symbolic exchanges by having the letter [sic] full of money always sticking out of Marion’s purse. Like the object (a), this part of the Real that has been submitted to the Symbolic order refuses to be completely negated.' Perhaps, or perhaps not. Where's the proof? And where does such commentary get us? Shouldn't we rather remember that Hitchcock, like any good trickster/showman, may simply have wanted us to keep our eye on the stolen money so that he could shock the hell out of us when the thief, Marion, is abruptly and brutally murdered? Ultimately, what it comes down to with writers like these is that you either buy Freud and his heirs or you don’t - and I don’t. Theirs are faith-based (as opposed to empirically-based) propositions, and I gave those up years ago. To me, there is little value or validity in proclaiming that Norman = normal man, then proceeding from that premise as though it had been established by something other than fiat. It’s not argument or reasoned discourse; it’s just wishful thinking. And while it’s hard for me to fault Kolker for including these pieces (they do, after all, represent a common - and often comical - strain of film analysis, a particularly virulent form of which has attached itself to Hitchcock), their omission might have allowed him to expand on some of the more intriguing themes elsewhere alluded to. One, in particular, suggests itself, namely, the nature of the unseen 'force' that seems to shape the destinies of the film’s central characters. [But aren't Samuels & Co., however clumsily, or unconvincingly, trying to show that? - Ed.]  Everyday logic, the logic that conforms to natural law, dictates that Marion should have stayed in the safety of her home while Norman should have run like hell from his. Yet, like characters in an H. P. Lovecraft story, neither behaves rationally. One character is compelled to remain in darkness, the other impelled to confront that very darkness. The fact that source novelist Robert Bloch was both a student and protégé of Lovecraft suggests an interesting line of future inquiry. Otherwise, I only regret Kolker's inclusion of Royal Brown’s piece on the film’s score, which will be incomprehensible to any but music specialists.  In sum: this 'Casebook' is a more than worthy 'start-up' guide to Psycho, all the more so if it inspires readers to acquire the by-now classic works of Rebello, Wood and the early Durgnat.  GG

• I read Gary Giblin's 'Alfred Hitchcock's London: A Reference Guide to Locations' (Midnight Marquee Press, Baltimore, pb, 326pp) from cover to cover, though that's not necessarily how the author intended it to be read.  Note the subtitle, 'A Reference Guide'.  The various entries proceed systematically from Bayswater, Belgravia, and Bloomsbury in Central London through to Outer London (starting with Battersea and Brixton) and then to Outside London (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, etc.); and for every locale the nearest railway station is given.  Care to go and see HM Prison, Brixton?  (Giblin adduces a couple of Hitchcockian reasons for doing so, one of them being that the title character in No Bail for the Judge was going to be remanded there.)  Then simply follow these thoughtful instructions: 'Exit L [from Brixton station] into Brixton Hill - and walk till you drop.  Or better, take a bus - [the prison] is nearly a mile from the station, on the R.'  You can't miss it, I should add, because the book includes a suitably moody b/w photograph of the establishment - and indeed on nearly every page there's at least one b/w photograph (theatres, hotels, shops, government buildings, schools, film studios, et al.), each in some way Hitchcock-connected.  The text itself is very informative - Anglophile Giblin is also the author of 'James Bond's London' (2002) and he knows both Hitchcock's movies and the books on which they were based.  Plus he visited such places as the Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, where he consulted screenplays and production notes, and he interviewed people who worked with Hitchcock or were close to him.  This is a valuable book for fans and scholars alike, with insights into all of the relevant films.  Frenzy is especially illuminated.  Hitchcock called the Porters (Johnny and Hettie) 'a couple of shits' for letting down fugitive Dick Blaney, who had been a comrade of Johnny's in the Air Force.  (Note, by the way, a rough parallel with buddies Jefferies and Doyle in Rear Window.)  Giblin explains astutely that such a betrayal of a wartime pal would be unthinkable in the novel by Arthur La Bern, 'Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square', where the war in question had been World War Two and La Bern 'esteems the old order and its values and repudiates the new'.  Hitchcock, by contrast, in pre-production moved further and further away from the novel, introducing the Covent Garden setting that he knew from his boyhood and making London something of an anachronism (traditional pubs and references to Jack the Ripper, for example).  'Thus, since he has no axe to grind with the modern age (which, for all intents and purposes, does not exist), Hitchcock has no "old order" to uphold ... and can thus engineer Porter's abandonment of his old comrade [from Suez days].'  (p. 128, with accompanying photo of the Royal Air Force Club in Piccadilly)  Another highlight of the book is certainly Giblin's uncovering of the real-life murder case behind the memorable AHP episode called "Arthur" (in which Laurence Harvey plays a New Zealand chicken farmer who has fed his would-be bride to his birds).  The case was that of Norman Holmes Thorne, who lived in Sussex - to confuse matters further, the short story version is set in South Africa.  (Here let me allay another potential confusion.  Norman Holmes Thorne is not the same person as Fred Thorn, resident of New York, who murdered his girlfriend's husband, cut up his body in the bath-tub, and then distributed the pieces around town, including in the Harlem River - the likely inspiration, you might say, for the murderer Thorwald in Rear Window.)  But if what you want is actual information about shots on the screen, then Giblin delivers the goods with his entries on the Cumberland (Cumbria) exteriors in The Paradine Case.  With diligence and care, he has found the location of just about every shot brought back by a second unit and used in the film.  As he says, the shots are 'literally all over the map', 50 miles apart in some cases, but convincingly edited together for the continuity Hitchcock required.  Some shots are of Keane's train coming and going.  On one occasion, however, a shot was repeated in reverse to show the train's departure from the same station where we had earlier seen it arrive (only now a framing tree, specified by Hitchcock, was on the right of screen when previously it had been on the left).  Keane's buggy ride to 'Hindley Hall' (which was actually, and is still, the Langdale Chase hotel) incorporated several picturesque landmarks, such as the Yew Tree Farm (you can rent a cottage there for £18 per day).  This is a book that you should own if you are serious about Hitchcock's films.  And if you can make the trips to the locations themselves, so much the better!  Giblin and I don't have many disagreements, but here's one, perhaps.  He thinks that a possible precedent for the giant head (of Ramses II) we see in the British Museum in Blackmail comes from G.K. Chesterton's novel 'The Man Who Was Thursday' (1908) in which the hero, Mr Syme, remembers 'that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was ... so large.'  (Giblin, p. 35)  I think it's more likely that Hitchcock was remembering a scene from the end of Mrs Belloc Lowndes's novel 'The Lodger' (1913) in which the hounded Mr Sleuth is suddenly afrighted upstairs in Madame Tussaud's by 'those curious, still, waxen figures which suggest so strangely death in life'.  (Giblin has an entry on Madame Tussaud's, on pp. 104-05)  But I'll allow him the last word, which he so richly deserves.  Did you know that James Bond's creator Ian Fleming was a casual acquaintance of Hitchcock's and gave North by Northwest a plug in 'Thunderball'?  For that and related facts, see Giblin, p. 200.  KM

• John Orr's 'Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema' (Wallflower Press, London & New York, hb and pb, 207pp) covers mainly familiar ground (e.g., the bisexual subtexts of several Hitchcock films), but often with a sharp eye and a fresh comment.  Orr is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh.  He has written several books and articles on film, including 'Cinema and Modernity' (1993) and the concluding essay for 'Screening the City' (2003), edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, an essay called "The City Reborn: Cinema at the Turn of the Century".  His latest book, 'The Cinema of Roman Polanski', comes out this year.  As you might expect, he can be superficial, waving us towards a vista that he thinks (or hopes) is relevant to Hitchcock, then retreating into a show of little more than general knowledge of the topic and its texts/films.  For example, he notes (pp. 96-97) that Grahame Greene's 'Brighton Rock' (1938) has its own take on the double chase pattern used by Hitchcock in The 39 Steps (1935), but Orr's ensuing description of Greene's novel is essentially just that: description.  Our appreciation of either Greene or Hitchcock stays much as it was previously.  (Orr's Bibliography is illuminating as much for its omissions as for its inclusions.  Books by Gene D. Phillips, S.J., on Greene and on Hitchcock respectively - 1974, 1984 - are not listed there.  I happen to think that Phillips's book on 'Grahame Greene: The Films of his Fiction' is rather good, more so than his Hitchcock book.  As for Orr's bibliographical omissions, I'll return to those shortly.)  But equally, you'd expect Orr to be adept with generalisations, and so it often proves.  One I particularly liked was this formulation: 'In any key transaction [in a Hitchcock film] everything is clear and ambiguous at the same time.'  (p. 40)  Orr makes good use of that insight when he comes to explicate I Confess (1953) at the end of his book.  The formulation itself, though, comes in the chapter called "Lost Identities: Hitchcock and David Hume".  So too does the neat observation that characters played by James Stewart in the actor's four films for Hitchcock, starting with Rupert in Rope (1948) and ending with Scottie in Vertigo (1958), effectively represent a movement from Enlightenment rationality to post-Enlightenment romantic nemesis.  (p. 50)  Unfortunately, the chapter on Hume is a big disappointment overall.  Per se, I have no quarrel with Orr's citing of Hume apropos Hitchcock's very British 'empiricist' (non-abstract) filmmaking, nor with the adducing of James Stewart's Scottish-Irish lineage and the fact that the names of two of the characters played by Stewart for Hitchcock (Dr Ben McKenna in the 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much, Scottie/John Ferguson in Vertigo) have Scottish names.  'The MacGuffin' has often pointed these things out!  Hitchcock himself told Truffaut: 'Directors who lose control are concerned with the abstract.'  In 'The MacGuffin' #29 we quoted from Peter Ackroyd's 'Albion' (2002): 'The history of English philosophy is also the history of empiricism ...' (Ackroyd, p. 384).  In turn, we made Ackroyd's further point: 'The empirical temper [is] no less prominent in the art and music of England.'  (Ackroyd, p. 392)  Further, we have noted more than once that Hitchcock had many Scottish friends, not least the fine screenwriter Angus MacPhail.  Back in 'The MacGuffin' #11 (February-May 1994), we noted the passing of another friend, Dr Charles Oakley, the Scottish author of 'Where We Came In: The Story of the British Cinematograph Industry' (1964), and the likelihood that, in a Hitchcock joke, Oakley had given his name to the villainous Uncle Charlie (Oakley) in Shadow of a Doubt (1943).  (Cf Hitchcock's joke in Rear Window [1954] of making the villainous Lars Thorwald physically resemble David Selznick.)  Above all, apropos Scottie in Vertigo, we have had occasion (e.g., 'The MacGuffin' #1) to quote the Scottish art historian Sir Kenneth Clark (someone, incidentally, referred to in two Hitchcock films): 'The Scottish character ... shows an extraordinary combination of realism and reckless sentiment.  The sentiment has passed into popular legend. ...  But it's the realism that counts and that made eighteenth-century Scotland ... a force in European civilisation. ...  [For example,] Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature, succeeded in proving that experience and reason have no necessary connection with one another.  There is no such thing as a rational belief.'  ('Civilisation' [1969], pp. 258-59)  After reading that, we could infer that Scottie's quest in Vertigo for philosophical certainty ('If I could just find the key ...') is doomed from the outset!  What is so disappointing about Orr's chapter on Hitchcock and Hume is its sprawling nature, and, ultimately, lack of philosophical overview.  Naturally, I'm only grateful when Orr quotes from the 'Treatise' - 'It appears that the belief or assent, which always attends the memory and senses, is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present' (my italics) - and observes that 'Hitchcock makes the vivacity of those perceptions that induce belief the fount of his moving image ...'  (p. 27)  But Orr struggles to convincingly show how his observation applies to such films as Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo.  Moreover, he never mentions, apropos 'vivacity', what is surely the seminal Hitchcock text in this context, The 39 Steps (1935), based on the 'shocker' novel by Scottish author John Buchan, albeit the novel is much changed by the film.  I apologise if I again advise the reader to consult what 'The MacGuffin' has already said about the matter, including on this website (and also on the 'Screening the Past' website of Latrobe University).  In essence, we have shown how The 39 Steps is about a 'quickening', or vivifying, of the audience's mind and senses, whereby the audience comes to feel more alive.  Of course, there's a deal of the philosopher Henri Bergson in this: in the 1920s and 1930s, Bergson was very much 'in the air'.  Orr's book does refer to Bergson, with perfect orthodoxy, apropos Alain Resnais in the chapter about Hitchcock's influence on the French New Wave.  (p. 134)  But Orr makes no connection to Hitchcock's films themselves.  Moreover, my point has always been that Hitchcock's essentially Schopenhauerian position, so evident in the Symbolist-influenced Vertigo, subsumes cultural influences from earlier thinkers, such as Hume, while opening the director to key vitalist ideas, including ones of Nietzsche and Bergson.  Schopenhauer admired Hume, and the German philosopher's valuation of percepts above concepts may be attributed to his reading of his predecessor.  Meanwhile, Hitchcock was always a Romantic-eclectic filmmaker.  Okay.  I've only space left to mention one more matter.  Orr provides some useful cross-references to other films that may have influenced Hitchcock's (e.g., the likely influence of Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive [1947] on Frenzy [1972]), but characteristically overlooks many more.  (Apropos Frenzy, et al., Orr should definitely check out the page on Lawrence Huntington's Wanted for Murder [1946] on this website.)  Equally, his thoughts on the French New Wave and on the bisexual subtexts of films from The Manxman (1929) to I Confess, and beyond, are somewhat vitiated by his evidently not having read works by James Vest and Theodore Price, respectively.  More on Orr's book in "Editor's Week" soon.  KM                                                        

• An enjoyable read, '"It's Only a Movie": Alfred Hitchcock - A Personal Biography' (Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 2005/2006, hb and pb, 349pp), by Charlotte Chandler, has the definite virtue of being informative for those who haven't read much else about the director except in the press.  It's biography, not criticism, though each film gets a mention and a synopsis, typically with comments by Hitchcock himself and by stars or writers or crew who had been involved.  It seems to have begun when Chandler once dined in Paris with two over-sized gentlemen, viz., Hitchcock and Henri Langlois, founder and curator of the Cinémathèque Française.  Also present was Alma Hitchcock.  Following that occasion, written up in the book's Introduction - including mention that Hitchcock much admired Visconti's Death in Venice (p. 6) - Chandler kept in touch with the Hitchcocks, more than once visiting them at home in California.  Always her tape-recorder came with her.  As well, Chandler, a professional 'friend of the stars', spoke over the years with scores of top Hollywood people about working with Hitch.  I'm going to be generous and say that 10% of Chandler's book is new - but that is certainly worth reading.  For example, we get Jay Presson Allen's assessment of Alma as 'very, very, very bright' (p. 274).  Alma hadn't found the novel of The Trouble With Harry amusing, yet Hitch went ahead and filmed it anyway (p. 225); then, when he proposed making The Birds, from Daphne du Maurier's short story, again Alma was against it.  As Hitchcock told Chandler: 'She didn't think there was enough story there.'    And he added: 'Well, she was right.  Not enough story, too many birds.'  (p. 272)  Arguably, Alma was right both times; however, in the first case, Hitch had ignored her misgivings because, as he remarked (in Alma's presence), one of the few things he didn't share with his wife was a similar sense of humour (p. 226).  Afterwards he blamed the film's poor box-office on the film's distributors and exhibitors - 'my natural enemies' - who hadn't liked it either (p. 225).  As for The Birds, Chandler notes that although it received mixed reviews and was disappointing at the box office, 'later it came to be held in much higher esteem' (no doubt helped by repeated screenings on television); nonetheless, it does seem to some of us to be lacking something 'authentic' for the individual viewer - sending Melanie up to the attic doesn't quite save the day!  Marnie fared even worse on first release, yet may indeed have the 'authentic' note.  Jay Presson Allen, though she calls her script for that film 'not ... terribly accomplished' (p. 275), reminds us that Hitch 'was a very Edwardian fellow ... possibly a little carried away by Tippi [Hedren]' (p.276).  (She feels that there was no more to the reported rift with Tippi than that, though others quoted in the book see it differently - to this day Tippi's actress daughter, Melanie Griffith, calls Hitch 'a motherfucker': p. 272.)  Diane Baker, who played Lil, provides a valuable account of the close attention Hitch gave the shot of her listening at the window, of how he positioned exactly both the curtain and her hair (p. 279).  But Hitchcock's own words throughout the book are typically most insightful of all, and there are plenty of them.  I value this formula, from the Langlois occasion, and almost worthy of another Henri, the philosopher Bergson: 'The experiencing of passion, as with fear, makes you feel alive.  In the film, you can experience these very extreme feelings without paying the bill.'  (p. 7)  Mind you, Hitchcock, in speaking about psychiatry, told Chandler revealingly that he could not imagine telling anyone his own innermost fears and desires, 'not even ... myself' (pp. 157-58).  Which is undoubtedly why he was, in every way, such a masterful filmmaker, and such an imaginative one.  Because the house in Rebecca 'was dying', he had a chill wind blow Joan Fontaine's hair (p. 129) - something that later runs like a leitmotiv through a succession of Hitchcock films from Psycho to Torn Curtain and beyond.  Hitchcock readily admits to Chandler his debt to the Symbolists: 'Very early, I was immensely struck by the Symbolists.  For a time, I had Symbolist dreams.'  (p. 19)  And, speaking of influences, a valuable observation comes from Bryan Langley, who had been an assistant camera operator on both Murder! and its back-to-back German version, Mary, in 1930.  Of Hitchcock's often-criticised fondness for practical jokes, he notes that such joking was very popular in England from the end of the Victorian era, and that its continuing popularity there after the First World War was 'really a reaction from' recent events (pp. 115-16).  Unfortunately, the book has little slips throughout (e.g., that After the Verdict, in 1927, for Henrik Galeen, was Alma's last screenplay for a director other than her husband [p. 69] - actually, such a distinction goes to The Passing of the Third Floor Back, in 1936, for Berthold Viertel; that Hitchcock directed the student short An Elastic Affair made at BIP in 1930 [p. 76] - in fact he only supervised it; that Robert Donat was scheduled to play Verloc in Sabotage [p.105] - he was of course scheduled to play Ted, the character eventually portrayed rather boringly by John Loder).  Still, I'm only gratified by Chandler's conviction that the character Tisdall in Young and Innocent had been one of Christine's lovers (p. 107): the film couldn't actually say that, and Tisdall denies it to the police, but the accusation by Christine's husband - before he murders her - that he's tired of Christine's 'boys' always hanging around lingers on  ...  KM

• [Here's a guest-review by Bill Krohn, the Los Angeles correspondent for 'Cahiers du Cinéma, of Murray Pomerance's 'An Eye for Hitchcock' (Rutgers University Press, 2004, pb and hb, 307 pp).  Publisher's website: Rutgers University Press.]

Like other notable Canadian intellectuals, Murray Pomerance is no follower of the intellectual fashions. His introduction to 'An Eye for Hitchcock', a blast of chill northern air, blows away the cobwebs festooning the Hitchcock Memorial that has been erected in the US in recent years, garlands spun by spiders in whom the radioactive rays emitted by a few French geniuses have induced bizarre mutations.  At the same time, Pomerance's habit of breaking off communication every now and then to assume the mien of an oracle reminds one more of Marshall McLuhan than it does of Northrop Frye and Donald Harman Akenson, whose recent history of the Bible and the Talmud, 'Surpassing Wonder', is a wonder itself because of its commitment to reason, which carries over to its style. The orphic flights in 'An Eye for Hitchcock' pose an occasional problem for the reader, but not an insurmountable one. And they are a small price to pay for the riches the book contains.  Continuing the Canadian comparisons for a moment: Akenson is a Professor of Irish History at Queen's University; Pomerance is chair of the department of sociology at Ryerson University. Nothing in their academic job descriptions promised major contributions to biblical scholarship and Hitchcock criticism, yet that's what they have produced. Blame it on Canada. In ways that mystify us bumpkins to the south, many things are done better there than they are here.  Murray Pomerance is the first sociologist to write on Hitchcock, and his knowledge of this little-understood discipline yields stunning revelations in every chapter. (There are six: one each on North by Northwest, Spellbound, Torn Curtain, Marnie, I Confess and Vertigo.) Hitchcock, Jay Presson Allen told the author, was always observing what went on around him. Pomerance believes that this position of the observer, coupled to the director's previous experience of English class society, gave him more than a layman's understanding of the world to which he transplanted himself in 1939, and this book convinces us that it was so.  Pomerance's step-by-step analysis/appreciation of Roger Thornhill's campaign of calculated boorishness during the auction in North By Northwest - four pages as funny as what they describe - is one of many passages where his trained eye (portrayed on the book's cover) explores scenes and leitmotifs that critics have neglected: the scene leading up to the first kiss between Constance Peterson and 'Dr. Edwardes' in Spellbound; the scene at the blackboard in Torn Curtain; the leitmotifs of bathroom and automat in Marnie (which were going to come together in one shot before Hitchcock decided to loop different off-screen dialogue); the 'play within the play' when Keller announces Villette's death in I Confess while Father Logan is perched on a ladder, painting the sitting room of the rectory.  In the North By Northwest chapter, Pomerance tracks the riddles of identity propounded by the 'George Kaplan' MacGuffin through many surprising examples of how 'Roger isn't himself,' coming finally to the paradoxical conclusion that 'he is quite wrong about not being George Kaplan' (author's italics). Roger's existential crisis comes upon him in Room 796 of the Plaza, when he begins to realize 'that he is at least the sort of person who could easily be mistaken for Kaplan by everyone in the hotel: he is Kaplanesque.' This delightful word means, among other things, 'rank consumer,' a role that Roger, the master of marketing, has always considered himself to be above. Leading us back through the film, Pomerance then demonstrates that Roger is defined by his charming pretense that he is a bit above being a consumer, one of the suckers.  Films about the advertising business were a genre in the late 50s, the American version of the European art films made in conformity to what Jean-Pierre Oudart calls 'the Bresson model' ('Cahiers du cinéma' 232), in which the hero, no revolutionary, is sympathetically 'out of it,' refusing participation in society's rituals of exchange (economic, sexual or linguistic). Here, however, the Man in the Gray Silk Suit is himself seen as suffering from a form of alienation that is finally nothing but an ideological feint (to use a term that Pomerance wouldn't). The turning point for Roger comes when he haughtily refuses the wise (and free!) advice of the farmer to get on the bus, is strafed by the crop-duster and escapes in a stolen pickup. Once he steals the pickup, Roger is finally 'in the world' - on the way to a hopeful outcome that is, ironically, not unlike that of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (also released in 1959), in which the hero is saved by love and rejoins the human race.  In a groundbreaking article on North By Northwest, Raymond Bellour argued that the mechanism by which Thornhill is obliged to identify with Kaplan, a fiction created by the CIA, exposes in an exemplary way the mechanisms of seduction used by what was then known as 'classical cinema.' Pomerance turns this reading on its head by arguing that Thornhill, by becoming Kaplan, becomes authentic, beginning to give 'a live performance that until this moment has been nothing but a hollow rehearsal and a game.' The demonstration of this idea is compelling enough to remind us that Roberto Rossellini made yet another film that was released in 1959 with the same theme: General della Rovere, in which a no-good becomes a hero by being obliged to play one. A little sociology (Erving Goffman's 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life', which also appeared in 1959, was one of the main sources of inspiration for this chapter) does indeed seem to go a long way in illuminating Hitchcock.  Each chapter has a different focus: The brief one on Spellbound offers fresh perspectives on Hitchcock and Freud; the discussion of Torn Curtain peels back the spy thriller façade to expose a study of hierarchy and rituals of interaction in academia; Marnie turns out to be a film about class, not hysteria; I Confess is illuminated by historical considerations concerning the conflict between Church and State in Quebec in 1953; and the chapter on Vertigo leaves social commentary behind for a difficult but rewarding investigation of vertigo and verticality, past and present, sight and sound (and their synesthetic exchange) in a film whose mysteries lie in another realm altogether.  Rereading individual chapters with the whole in mind is, of course, quite rewarding: The terrible moment when Roger and Eve discover that they are on top of the Monument, for example, exemplifies Pomerance's definition of vertigo, developed at greater length in its own chapter, as the discovery that one is higher up than one thought - an experience that the spectator of Hitchcock's cinema, where ideas of verticality are viscerally important, constantly risks encountering.  My favorite chapter is the one on Marnie, where Pomerance, a fan of Stanley Cavell, implicitly reinterprets the film as a variant on Cavell's famous schema for comedies of remarriage without ever alluding to his predecessor, and in the process greatly improves on his performance as a Hitchcock exegete. The much-maligned Mark Rutland is rehabilitated as a class-bound sexual predator who drops his blinders enough to finally be a friend to Marnie; she in turn is revealed to be another character like Roger Thornhill, radically displaced in childhood and chasing after an ever receding, ever beckoning phantom. In a final pirouette, Pomerance demonstrates that Marnie is not only a revolutionary at odds with a society dominated by men and money, but 'an avenger from below the Mason-Dixon line, redeeming its losses by single-handedly and with the greatest of dignity pilfering the vaults of the great northern cities and businessmen.' This surprising conclusion suggests another cinematic analogy, this time to a film made a decade later: John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, whose feuding couple, as novelist Pierre Rottenberg commented in 1974 ('Cahiers du cinéma' 273), seem to be re-fighting the Civil War in their living-room. Throughout 'An Eye for Hitchcock' Pomerance demonstrates an understanding of people that is anything but clinical. He is at his most un-clinical whenever he is putting paid to stereotypical ideas about Hitchcock, as when he questions Evan Hunter's testy piety about refusing to write the honeymoon rape scene in Marnie, which led to his dismissal. 'I suspect Hunter's middle-classness could not bear to write the officially-sanctioned husband as a rapist,' Pomerance observes, 'yet had no problem countenancing Bernice Edgar's violation (since, unmarried to her attacker, she was fair game).'  The most important sentence in the book is an aside about the techniques used to make the spectator identify with little Marnie's own interpretation (and not the cliché Freudian one) of her primal scene: 'all of Hitch's work is about sympathy.' It is no accident that at this point Pomerance, a canny observer of the signals by which Hitchcock's characters read and write one another, permits himself for the only time in the book to use the nickname 'Hitch.'  BK

• Michael Walker's 'Hitchcock's Motifs' (Amsterdam University Press, pb and hb, 490pp) describes some forty motifs, themes and clusters from Hitchcock's work including both all of the extant feature films and several of the Hitchcock-directed episodes from his TV series.  If the book has a single great virtue it's Walker's dedication to avoiding rash generalisations and to detailing, for example, just how Patrick McGilligan gets 'spectacularly wrong' (p. 207) his claim that when Hitchcock's villains die they do so contritely: 'Far from confessing, as McGilligan maintains, what most Hitchcock villains do is evade guilt, deny it, blame someone else, try to kill the person who knows that they are guilty.' (p. 209)  Of the motifs in general, Walker says that they 'reveal a much bleaker world than is usual in mainstream culture' (p. 52); discussing "Public Disturbances" in Hitchcock, Walker notes how - in showing responses of 'fear, shock, panic, excitement, anger, outrage, amusement, embarrassment, confusion, sympathy, distress' - the director reaffirms 'his mastery of "the cinema of emotions"' (p. 343).  Walker is a punctilious writer and one who cares about being understood by his readers (contra, say, 'postmodernist' Tom Cohen, whose execrable 'Hitchcock's Cryptonymies' we've reviewed here), and so I'm grateful for many particular things from this book.  Here are just a few instances of those.  The public disturbances may be classified as either 'centripetal' or 'centrifugal' - p. 336; Willi (Walter Slezak) in Lifeboat 'seems to emerge out of the sea itself' - p 391; Slezak was probably first seen by Hitchcock in Carl Dreyer's Mikaël (1924) which seems to have influenced the Hitchcock-scripted The Blackguard (1925) - pp. 329-30; a salient line from the latter film is St Peter's advice to the hero: 'You will be the greatest violinist in the world, as long as you love only your art [and aren't distracted by the flesh]' - p. 352; bromides, which feature in Spellbound, had been used during the recent war to reduce male libido - p. 187; Hitchcock enjoyed exploring 'the elasticity of food as a metaphor: [that is,] the sheer range of possible associations' - p. 193; etc., etc.  Just how Walker treats a particular motif, that of "Confined Spaces", you may judge for yourself (before, hopefully, ordering the book) by visiting the EXCERPTS feature on this website.  Also, I intend to discuss several of Walker's points in special items for "Editor's Day" soon.  But I have some criticisms of the book, both in its conception and its execution, and I'll try to at least suggest their nature here.  The book is slow to hit its stride, something exacerbated by the inclusion of two superfluous diagrams (pp. 47-48) whose only point seems to be, pace George Orwell, that all the motifs are connected though some are more connected than others.  But with the entry on "Blondes and Brunettes" (pp. 69-86), things liven up; for instance, it's nice to see Walker quoting from Marina Warner's 'From the Beast to the Blonde' (1995) which we once discussed in "Editor's Day" and which notes the paradox that traditionally blondes could symbolise either fertility or virginity.  Both traits are seen in Hitchcock's blondes, even in the same character, perhaps because 'fertility' (that is, active sexuality!) must usually only be implied!  (Not so implicit, it's true, is the case of Grace Kelly's desperate Lisa in Rear Window who announces she's literally prepared to stay overnight in bachelor Jeff's apartment - of course, his broken leg serves to appease the Hays Office.)  Nonetheless I suspect that blondes for Hitchcock, from The Lodger onwards, were often as much markers - visual counterpoint to darkness (compare Hitchcock's fondness for neon signs) - as fetish-figures, which isn't something Walker considers.  Indeed, he repeats approvingly John Russell Taylor's suggestion that in Vertigo Scottie's make-over of the brunette Judy into the blonde 'Madeleine' (both characters played by Kim Novak) meant something 'extremely personal to Hitchcock'.  Questioned about this by Charles Thomas Samuels ('Encountering Directors', 1972), Hitchcock said explicitly, 'No, there's nothing in that.'  (Walker's Bibliography shows that he hasn't read Samuels.  Nor, in particular, has he read Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval's 'Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences' [2000] whose pictorial emphasis is a corrective to much over-speculative Hitchcock criticism.)  Which brings me to the lesson I would draw - it's my major criticism of Walker's approach.  Committed, consciously or unconsciously, to a variant of his mentor Robin Wood's thematic way of 'taking Hitchcock seriously', Walker follows an old-fashioned line and never appreciates what I see as Hitchcock's detached and protean - not to say pragmatic - relation to his work and to his audience.  Most certainly, Hitchcock wouldn't have gone as far as Louis MacNeice who asserted, 'A poem [read: film] should not mean but be', but I nonetheless commend to Walker the Prologue in the Theatre of Goethe's 'Faust' with its significantly three-way dialogue between The Poet, The Producer, and The Clown.  I have to say that Walker seldom shows appreciation of the sheer showman's brilliance and gestalt achievement of the films' many set-pieces, nor of those films' sensuous qualities (in this respect, Walker's "Water and Rain" entry is one of lost opportunities), nor of Hitchcock's wit and playfulness.  In turn, Walker's otherwise often splendid book is full of little absurdities, especially when he attributes whole gay subtexts where some of us see only fleeting shadings or humorous inversions or even just inadvertent nuances.  Twice (pp. 110, 163) Walker asks what Ted (John Loder) and young Stevie in Sabotage are up to back of Mr Verloc's cinema; and apropos the "One More Mile to Go" episode of the TV series, he speculates (pp. 412-13) why the cop trailing the David Wayne character is seemingly so keen to insert his 'nifty crowbar' into the car's trunk.  99% of the time Walker covers himself by saying things like 'a case could [at least] be made' (p. 413) or 'there are always exceptions, variations, complications' (pp. 234-35) to what he wants to assert.  But my case is much more than I've been able to set down here, and so I'll take it up this coming week in "Editor's Day", probably over several days.  A final point for now.  Asked who 'Hitchcock's Motifs' is directed to, I would say: to undergraduates and to their instructors taking a Major course in the director's films (and, of course, to Walker's fellow authors writing on Hitchcock who can now quickly remind themselves of all the permutations of a particular motif).  KM

• Prof. Tom Cohen's 'Hitchcock's Cryptonymies' (University of Minnesota Press, pb and hb) is a two-volume expansion of his earlier 30-page essay called "Hitchcock and the death of (Mr.) Memory (technology of the visible)" (1994).  As such, it includes the tenet (derived ultimately from Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and no doubt Jacques Derrida, another notable influence on Cohen) that 'memory' is a trap that Hitchcock's films 'mark' and 'efface' and warn us against.  Well, something like that!  It's hard to know! &nbs