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The Times (05/May/2004) - Alfred Hitchcock

(c) The Times (05/May/2004)

Alfred Hitchcock

The Granddaddy of Hitchcock books, and the one that can claim justifiably to have transformed the critical perception of the director, is Hitchcock by François Truffaut (Simon & Schuster), first published in 1967 and revised in 1983 to cover Hitchcock’s last films. Like his nouvelle vague colleagues, Truffaut was obsessed with American films of the 1940s and 1950s, and particularly those of Hitchcock, whom he felt suffered from critics’ condescension towards his growing commercial success.

Despite his poor English, Truffaut contacted Hitchcock and in 1962 conducted a lengthy series of interviews through a translator. Truffaut’s perceptive questions drew on his experience as critic and director to probe Hitchcock’s career in depth. When published, the book depicted Hitchcock as a technical master whose ability to generate suspense amounted to genius — and it is as a genius that critics have tended to treat him ever since.

Biographies of Hitchcock now appear every few years. In writing Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (Da Capo), John Russell Taylor enjoyed Hitchcock’s full co-operation, interviewed him extensively, spent time on the set of his last film, and was granted access to sources denied to other biographers. The seamier side of Hitchcock was given full rein in Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (Plexus), which portrayed a director riddled with Catholic guilt who worked out his neuroses by maltreating some of his leading actresses, particularly Tippi Hedren in The Birds. The warts-and-all approach to Hitchcock was assimilated in Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan (John Wiley), which tempers a discussion of the dark side with expert analysis and the insights of a seasoned film biographer.

Alfred Hitchcock by Paul Duncan (Taschen) offers only a whirlwind guide to the films themselves, but is valuable for its excellent picture research and artwork. Here are fascinating shots of Hitchcock at work and innumerable stills from the early silent films, including The Mountain Eagle, the only lost Hitchcock film. Finally, along the same lines but in more detail with even more lavish photography, there is Hitchcock at Work by Bill Krohn (Phaidon), which sets about correcting some myths about his methods: that he storyboarded every angle and camera move, that he disdained improvisation, etc. Krohn, who writes for the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine, where Truffaut once worked, concludes with a refreshing lack of reserve: “Each film ... was a new adventure; the aim was not perfection, and the only method was the man. That is why the films are so beautiful.”

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