A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. Author Christopher McKittrick makes a persuasive case for celebrating the consummate professional Miles became rather than mourning the icon she never was….” It says a lot about the fickleness of celebrity that an actress who has worked with some of the industry’s biggest […]
To Love the Uncanny – Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. The book’s eleven chapters approach the master’s film from broad, yet intersecting angles, allowing the reading and cinematic audience into the colourful patterns that weave the filmic narrative threads into a magnetically composite unity.” “Scottie, do you believe that someone out of the past, […]
Notes on “The Women Behind Hitchcock”
By Robert K. Lightning. Seeking to identify signature elements in Joan Harrison’s and Alma Reville’s work but also intertextual correspondences between their independent work and their collaborations with Hitchcock….” In August of 2021, New York’s Film Forum resumed its pre-closure series “The Women Behind Hitchcock”, a series devoted to examining […]
Checking the Master, Film by Film: Hitchcock and the Censors
A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. Some criticisms noted, John Billheimer’s book is still very helpful for teaching history of regulation/censorship and their effects on authorship….” Hitchcock continues to compete with Welles as the “Shakespeare” of film studies in the sense that he’s the most analyzed in the medium, […]
British Cinema Talks – and Screams!: Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) and Murder (1929)
Murder! By Tony Williams. Kino Lorber has continued to fill the gap left by other boutiques by providing both classic and popular films with informative audio-commentaries and features unlike its once prestigious competitor. Despite technological developments that have resulted in far better viewing copies than occurred when the films were […]
An Invigorating Romp: Murray Pomerance’s A Dream of Hitchcock
August 24, 2019
A Book Review by John W. Fawell. The title of Murray Pomerance’s latest book on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, A Dream of Hitchcock (SUNY Press, 2018), refers to both the book’s content and its form. Pomerance means this book to be a study of the recurring motif of dreams […]
It’s All About the (Many) Details – 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
By Elias Savada. I can’t remember the first time I saw Psycho. I was a 10-year-old kid when Alfred Hitchcock’s menacing tale made more than a few people start avoiding motels. (Keep telling yourself: It’s only a motel! It’s only a motel!) The film wasn’t the kind of thriller my suburban […]
A Master and a Masterpiece: Hitchcock/Truffaut
December 11, 2015
By Robert K. Lightning. The historic 1962 interview of Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (ironically tape recorded and photographed, but apparently unfilmed) that led to the publication of Truffaut’s landmark Hitchcock in 1966, is examined in Kent Jones’s fine new documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut. That the interview was a singular moment in […]
In Defense of Hitchcock and Serious Criticism
By Robert K. Lightning. “It follows that the critic should read without inappropriate bias. We cannot properly object to The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, because we think that John Bunyan’s theology is false: it is not a valid criticism of a work that it disagrees with the critic. What we […]