Twenty-two years after his death, Alfred Hitchcock remains the most famous director in movie history. In a career spanning more than half a century, he made fifty-three feature films, including such certified classics as The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho. Only a few years younger than the medium in which he excelled, he worked in both the British and American film industries, in silent pictures and in sound, in black and white and in color. Some of the twentieth century's best-known actors—John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, James Stewart—exercised their talents on his sets. He was called the Master of Suspense, and indeed the movie thriller was practically his invention.
Although his name, in the opening credits of his films, began appearing above the titles in the 1940s, Hitchcock didn't truly become a household word until the 1950s. With his stints as host of the popular television shows Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), his double-chinned visage, distinctive British drawl ("Good eeve-ning!"), and macabre, deadpan humor made his persona as familiar to the public as that of any of his glamorous stars. Who can forget those droll monologues about murder, mayhem, and the tiresome necessity of having commercial sponsors?
But Hitchcock's fame is hardly limited to his popularity with mass audiences. His status among critics and scholars has long since shifted from Mere Entertainer to Serious Artist. "Hitchcock studies" began with a few scattered monographs in the 1950s and '60s and are now an academic cottage industry. Each new year, it seems, brings another thirty or forty articles and another three or four books. The English-born critic Robin Wood, a pioneer in the field, opened his 1965 study, Hitchcock's Films, with the question: "Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?" Some skeptics might think the current question should be: "Is there anything new to say about the guy?"
Well, of course there is. As highbrow film analysis has veered away from dissections of theme, character, plot, and style into ever more esoteric considerations of culture and ideology, appreciations of Hitchcock the auteur have given way to commentaries that use Hitchcock as a means of exposing and critiquing various social concerns and undercurrents. Marxism, semiotics, feminism, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Queer Theory—all of these, and more, have had their go at him. And it's pretty safe to say that whatever new critical fashions await us, Hitchcock will receive the treatment.
As one might imagine, getting a handle on both the director's long career and the explosion of writings about it can be daunting. For that reason the appearance of Thomas Leitch's hefty new volume, The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, is especially welcome. Using an A–Z format, Leitch has compiled a reference work that is both a feast for the trivia buff and an invaluable resource for the serious Hitchcock scholar.
The entries range from biographical sketches of actors and collaborators with virtually any connection to Hitchcock (whether on the big screen or small) to more extended expositions of individual films. Writers of books on Hitchcock, along with a few other critics who have made substantial contributions to the study of the director, get their own entries. There are also discussions of virtually every theme and motif that define a Hitchcock film: "blondes," "cameo appearances," "death scenes," "eating and drinking," "guilt," "mothers," "suspense vs. surprise," "voyeurism," you name it.
Leitch, head of the film studies program at the University of Delaware and author of Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (1991), writes on these topics with the authority of someone who has seen every film and read everything of relevance. And amazingly, with the exception of some of the introductory material (more on that later), he did all the writing himself. Occasionally, his need to cram as much meat as possible into the confined space of an encyclopedia entry results in sentences of almost Faulknerian length and density, but that's a small price to pay for the wealth of information and insight he offers.
Consider his articles on individual films. Leitch might have been tempted just to provide plot summaries, in the manner, say, of the literary volumes in the Oxford Companion series. But he gives us a lot more than that. Typically he begins with a brief recounting of the film's production history—how Hitchcock came to make the film, what novel or play he based it on (and how he departed from that source), what screenwriters he used, what happened during filming—before moving on to the crucial plot details and some acute critical observations. We learn, for example, that Vertigo (1958) went through three screenwriters before Samuel Taylor was finally able to provide the "compelling psychological motivations that strung together the tableaux the director envisioned"; that Shadow of a Doubt (1943) "incontestably brings one of Hitchcock's major themes, the doubling of villain and victim, to its first full blossom"; and that Frenzy (1972) "recycles more Hitchcockian motifs than any other Hitchcock film, as bits from Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Notorious, and Dial M for Murder, surface and subside in the film's brilliantly unpleasant stew."
One unexpected pleasure of the book is the attention Leitch devotes to Hitchcock's television work. In addition to overview essays on the two versions of the long-running series, he includes separate entries on the seventeen episodes Hitchcock directed himself as well as entries on the various talents who contributed to the series, most notably James Allardice, who wrote the witty introductions to the show that so indelibly established Hitchcock's public image.
Another valuable feature is an extended "Foreword" by the veteran film teacher and writer Gene D. Phillips. Excerpted from Phillips's own monograph on Hitchcock, it's a handy overview of the director's career and principal preoccupations and nicely complements Leitch's introduction, which includes an incisive survey of the changing ways in which critics and scholars have seen Hitchcock.
As with any book of this sort, one can always find a few things to quibble about. The illustrations are a bit sparse (and not especially well reproduced), and there are a few additional entries I would like to have seen—for example, an article on the London Film Society, which, according to some scholars, contributed significantly to Hitchcock's early education as a filmmaker. And along with such technical entries as "subjective camera," "montage and decoupage," and "long takes," an extended discussion of Hitchcock's use of camera movement would have been a definite plus.
But these, indeed, are minor complaints about an otherwise exemplary resource. Leitch's book is one of the first in a new series published by Facts on File. Another volume, The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick, is already available (though I haven't yet perused it), and The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles is due out by the end of the year. Leitch sets an exceptionally high standard for the series, and his work should join Robin Wood's aforementioned critical study, Donald Spoto's biography, The Dark Side of Genius, and François Truffaut's interview compilation, Hitchcock, as one of the essential books on this master filmmaker.
The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock by Thomas Leitch
448 pages
Checkmark Books/Facts on File
$60.00 hardcover, $19.95 paperback
This review originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the online magazine Retroplanet in 2002. I'd like to extend a word of thanks to Todd Duren, the publisher of that Web site, for permission to post the article here. Todd tells me he might revive Retroplanet at some point. I hope he does.
