Alfred Hitchcock

<p>Nicholas Haeffner provides a comprehensive introduction to Alfred Hitchcock's major British and Hollywood films and usefully navigates the reader through a wealth of critical commentaries. One of the acknowledged giants of film Hitchcock's prolific half-century career spanned the silent and sound eras and resulted in 53 films of which <em>Rear Window</em> (1954) <em>Vertigo</em> (1958) and <em>Psycho</em> (1960) are now seen as classics within the suspense melodrama and horror genres. </p><p>In contrast to previous works which have attempted to get inside Hitchcock's mind and psychoanalyse his films this book takes a more materialist stance. As Haeffner makes clear Hitchcock was simultaneously a professional film maker working as part of a team in the film factories of Hollywood a media celebrity and an aspiring artist gifted with considerable entrepreneurial flair for marketing himself and his films. </p><p>The book makes a case for locating the director's remarkable body of work within traditions of highbrow middlebrow and lowbrow culture appealing to different audience constituencies in a calculated strategy. The book upholds the case for taking Hitchcock's work seriously and challenges his popular reputation as a misogynist through detailed analyses of his most controversial films.</p>