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> <p>1. Background 2. Hitchcock's heritage: class, culture and cosmopolitanism 3. Authorship and reputation 4. Fascinating design: image, nothingness, sound and silence 5. Realism and <em>The Wrong Man </em>6. Hitchcock and women 7. Delirium of interpretation? The uses and abuses of psychoanalysis 8. Audiences and identification 9. Hitchcock's legacy: <em>Psycho</em> and after </p>