Referencing Hitchcock

Click here for a book review I wrote about eight years ago.

I originally penned this piece for a now-defunct online magazine called Retroplanet. The book under review was Thomas Leitch's The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, a 400-plus-page reference volume published by Checkmark Books/Facts on File. Sadly, it's now out of print, although you can still get used copies from the usual online sources (Amazon, ABE, etc.). Anyone seriously interested in Hitchcock should have it. A professor at the University of Delaware, Leitch is a thoughtful and meticulous film scholar, not just a buff, and he put together a remarkably solid work, writing all the entries himself. See my review for details.

The book was part of a short-lived Facts on File series called Great Filmmakers; it produced only two other volumes, one on Orson Welles and one on Stanley Kubrick. While I never acquired the Kubrick tome, I do have The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles, an edited volume with multiple contributors. That book has its uses, but, unfortunately, in terms of accuracy and insight it's much inferior to Leitch's solo work on Hitchcock, which should be better known than it is.