Hitchcock Annual (1993) - Soul in Suspense / Hitchcock and Homosexuality
Details
- book review: Soul in Suspense / Hitchcock and Homosexuality
- author(s): Christopher Brookhouse
- journal: Hitchcock Annual (1993)
- issue: page 157
- journal ISSN: 1062-5518
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, Claude Chabrol, Ernest Lehman, Frenzy (1972), Homosexuality, Jack the Ripper, I Confess (1953), Kasey Rogers, Marnie (1964), Murder! (1930), Neil P. Hurley, North by Northwest (1959), Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Hitchcock, Psychoanalytic Analysis, Rebecca (1940), Religious Themes, Robert Walker, Roger O. Thornhill, Rope (1948), Stage Fright (1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Wrong Man (1956), Éric Rohmer
Links
Abstract
Reviews of Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock's Fright and Delight by Neil P. Hurley (ISBN 0810825260) and Hitchcock and Homosexuality: His 50-Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute - A Psychoanalytic View by Theodore Price (ISBN 081082471X)
Article
Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock's Fright and Delight. Neil P. Hurley. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993. xx + 364 pages. $47.50.
Hitchcock and Homosexuality: His 50-Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute - A Psychoanalytic View. Theodore Price. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. xvii + 416 pages. $49.50.
Discussing North by Northwest, Father Hurley passes the scene of Thornhill and the murderous crop-duster "through a sensitive religious filter," specifically Father Hurley's own mind, and concludes "that Hitch deliberately planted Christocentric clues in the famous cornfield scene" (150). Father Hurley admits that scenarist Ernest Lehman doesn't agree with him. Father Hurley wonders if he is "investing an overactive religious imagination into merely neutral matter. Of course Father Hurley thinks the answer is no. While most of us wouldn't consider scenes from any film as "merely neutral matter," many of us may feel uncomfortable with the extent to which Father Hurley often takes his argument and analysis of Hitchcock's work. Father Hurley suggests that "the religious undertones and Jesuit influences in Alfred Hitchcock's films may surprise Hitchcock fans and researchers" (1). Considering the influence of his family and three years attendance at Saint Ignatius College, as well as the broad social and cultural influences of the period, I see little reason to be surprised at the religious undertones in Hitchcock's work. I am a little surprised, though, how often Father Hurley promotes undertones to dominant ones thereby simplifying cause/effect relationships that may be otherwise. For example, Father Hurley suggests that the Ignatian observance of preparation, which Hitchcock would have learned from Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and the ratio studiorum, is respons...
