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Film Quarterly (2009) - After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality/Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense

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Review of "After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality" - edited by David Boyd and R Barton Palmer and "Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense" - by William Hare

"With the massive attention given to Carson's best-seller," Hare argues, "along with the attendant international publicity concerning her well-publicized congressional testimony, interviews and lectures, it would be virtually inconceivable for her viewpoint and widely expressed concepts to escape Hitchcock's consciousness" (276). In How to Steal from Hitchcock, Thomas M. Leitch considers Brian De Palma, a director who has been variously characterized as a Hitchcock imitator, a creator of Hitchcock homages, an acolyte, an heir apparent, a parasite, a scavenger, and a thief (251)... take extraordinary pains to emphasize every point at which his material is stolen from Hitchcock ...

Article

After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (ed. David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer)

Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense (by William Hare)

In Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense, film historian William Hare considers the cultural contexts in which Alfred Hitchcock worked and how they may have affected the way he made his films. Aseries of anecdotal vignettes and production histories, this sprawling survey charts the creation of some of the director's best-known works, including Notorious (1946), North by Northwest (1959), and the underrated Family Plot (1976). Hare speculates, for example, that new concerns about the environment, popularized by the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, may have influenced Hitchcock and screenwriter Evan Hunter when they prepared their script for The Birds (1963). "With the massive attention given to Carson's best-seller," Hare argues, "along with the attendant international publicity concerning her well-publicized congressional testimony, interviews and lectures, it would be virtually inconceivable for her viewpoint and widely expressed concepts to escape Hitchcock's consciousness" (276). Too often, however, Hare devotes his attention to material which has been covered at length elsewhere, in particular the well-known story of David O. Selznick's strained relationship with Hitchcock and the manner in which the producer introduced his own interests and neuroses into films like Rebecca (1940), The Paradine Case (1947), and especially Spellbound (1945), which reflected Selznick's new fascination with psychoanalysis. Free of difficult theoretical concepts and claims, Hare's book may not be particularly groundbreaking, but it is readable and informative, making it a good resource for people coming to the director's films for the first time.

Hitchcock's ability to draw customers into theaters helped to make him one of the most admired and powerful figures working in Hollywood. And as a result, his films and his approaches to direction have been studied and copied by innumerable directors. For David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer, the extent of Hitchcock's influence on the style, structure, and content of other filmmakers' work, however, "is an often acknowledged, but as yet largely unexamined fact" (2). To correct this, they have published After Hitchcock, a collection of thirteen original essays that considers the ways in which the director's signature themes and techniques have been appropriated by directors as various as Jonathan Demme, Pedro Almodovar, and Kenneth Branagh.

The collection opens with an essay by Constantine Verevis that considers Psycho (1960) and its numerous sequels and knock-offs. The author focuses at first on Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot 1998 remake, a picture many reviewers dismissed as "an attempt to exploit the original film's legendary status" and "the defilement of a beloved classic" (15). But, as Verevis points out, imitations of Psycho have existed for nearly as long as the film itself. The "massive domestic and international success" (19) which the movie initially enjoyed at the box office prompted an immediate wave of imitative thrillers like William Castle's Homicidal (196...

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Copyright University of California Press Fall 2009

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