Film Quarterly (2002) - English Hitchcock

Details

• book review: English Hitchcock
• author(s): Sidney Gottlieb
• journal: Film Quarterly (01/Oct/2002)
• issue: volume 56, issue 1, pages 54-56
• journal ISSN: 0015-1386
• publisher: University of California Press
• keywords: "English Hitchcock" - by Charles Barr, "The Hitchcock Murders" - by Peter Conrad, "Writing with Hitchcock" - by Steven DeRosa, Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Blackmail (1929), Cahiers du Cinéma, Charles Barr, Charles Bennett, Claude Chabrol, Eliot Stannard, François Truffaut, Graham Cutts, J.B. Priestley, Jeffrey Richards, John Buchan, John Galsworthy, John Michael Hayes, MacGuffin, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Michael Balcon, Number Seventeen (1932), Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Conrad, Robin Wood, Sarah Street, Secret Agent (1936), Sidney Gilliat, Sidney Gottlieb, Steven DeRosa, The Birds (1963), The Farmer's Wife (1928), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Manxman (1929), The Pleasure Garden (1925), Waltzes from Vienna (1934)

Links

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Abstract

Review of "English Hitchcock" - by Charles Barr

Hitchcock criticism, one of the largest mills in the industry, betrays many blind spots, prejudicial emphases, and wellsprings of misinformation, especially when it comes to assessing how and when Hitchcock became Hitchcock and where we should gravitate to when we study his career of more than 50 years and more than 50 films. Barr's foundational argument is that the elevation of Hitchcock's American films, championed by his most influential enthusiasts, such as the Cahiers du Cinéma critics, Peter Bogdanovich, and early Robin Wood, has been at the expense of his English films, which are often unjustifiably denigrated, neglected, or otherwise insufficiently appreciated. These latter qualities characterize not only approaches to early Hitchcock but approaches to British film history in general, an unfortunate predisposition that Barr and a new generation of scholars, including Pam Cook, Andrew Higson, Jeffrey Richards, and Sarah Street among many others, are energetically and successfully contesting in an ongoing series of books and articles. In the present book Barr returns muchneeded attention to each of Hitchcock's 23 English films, and not only brilliantly interprets and reevaluates them through a skillful combination of close reading, thematic and structural analysis, and contextual elucidation, but also convincingly demonstrates the many ways that Hitchcock's "English roots" are "a source of nourishment," rather than "a handicap that he had to struggle to overcome" (6).