Hitchcock, Alfred (1899-1980)
Universally acknowledged as "The Master of Suspense," the British-born film director Alfred Hitchcock reached the zenith of his accomplishments within the A...
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Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), was a film director famous for skillfully wrought suspense thrillers. He was essentially concerned with depicting the tenuous relations between people and objects and ren...
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"I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups," the late great film director Alfred Hitchcock once said back in 1936. The quote is taken from Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings a...
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In the following essay, Hemmeter reviews the textual antecedents of Alfred Hitchcock's film Sabotage, proposing that the director used both the novel and play versions of The Secret Agent by Jo...
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Critical Essay by Otis Ferguson
"The Lady Vanishes" is a typical work of that genius in the art of motion pictures, Alfred Hitchcock, the overstuffed and delightful gentleman from London...
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Critical Essay by Robert Hatch
Alfred Hitchcock might be grateful to us all if we would forget "The Lady Vanishes" and "The Thirty-Nine Steps." We pay him the compliment of...
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Critical Essay by Richard Winnington
When, nearly ten years ago, Alfred Hitchcock broke away from his Daphne du Maurier phase with Shadow of a Doubt, there were premature congratulations. He was first...
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Critical Essay by Derwent May
Gracelessness is the word one wants to describe the overall quality of Alfred Hitchcock's latest film, Rear Window; and no word could be sadder. For what are the q...
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Critical Essay by FranÇois Truffaut
I am convinced that [Rear Window] is one of the most important of all the seventeen Hitchcock has made in Hollywood, one of those rare films without imperfec...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Sarris
[Both To Catch a Thief and The Trouble With Harry] drag along from scene to scene without much inner motivation.
Of the two films, To Catch a Thief is much more success...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Houston
[The Trouble with Harry] opens with a characteristic flourish, an incisive transition from tranquility to violence…. Unlike The Ladykillers, which broke wholl...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Houston
A good deal of Alfred Hitchcock's interest in film-making seems these days to consist in setting himself technical problems for the satisfaction of overcoming...
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Critical Essay by James Agee
Notorious lacks many of the qualities which made the best of Alfred Hitchcock's movies so good, but it has more than enough good qualities of its own. Hitchcock has...
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Critical Essay by Ernest Callenbach
Hitchcock is said to be very pleased with [Psycho], and well he might be. In it he has abandoned the commercial geniality of his recent work and turned to out-and-o...
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Critical Essay by Charles Higham
At heart, [Alfred Hitchcock is] a practical joker, a cunning and sophisticated cynic amused at the French critical vogue for his work, contemptuous of the audience whi...
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Critical Essay by Franz Hoellering
Precise and without pretensions, ["The Lady Vanishes"] is the best spy thriller in a long time: growing suspense from beginning to end, no empty threat...
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Critical Essay by Peter Bogdanovich
The Birds could be called a hybrid of Shadow of a Doubt and Psycho. It combines the former's character-exploration with the latter's shock-effects, an...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Houston
What interests Hitchcock? Not precisely character: he creates it, and his flair for casting sustains it, but it is character directed to the ends of a limited dramat...
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Critical Essay by John Russell Taylor
Hitchcock's career to date falls neatly into four phases: the silent period (nine films); the 1930s in Britain (fourteen films); the 1940s in America and B...
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Critical Essay by FranÇois Truffaut with Helen G. Scott
To stay with the audience, Hitchcock set out to win it over by reawakening all the strong emotions of childhood. In his work the viewer c...
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Critical Essay by Leo Braudy
Hitchcock cares little about the minor springs of plot—what he calls the "MacGuffin," the gimmick—because he is dealing with more inclusive rhy...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Mcbride
What Hitchcock has done in Topaz is exciting to anyone who believes that an artist's work has coherence, a progression, and a deepening of fundamental themes. (...
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Critical Essay by Charles Thomas Samuels
Although Alfred Hitchcock is the most primitive of major directors, he belongs in their company. Those who emphasize his primitivism also dismiss his achieveme...
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Critical Essay by Harry Ringel
Like his painter in Blackmail … Alfred Hitchcock employs pointedly nonverbal methods—and not the expositional theatrics so common to most early sound films...
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Critical Essay by Robin Wood
To trace the creative drives behind Hitchcock's films to sources in psychopathology (possible, after all, to some degree with any artist) does not necessarily inval...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Sarris
Hitchcock provides only one of many possible approaches to cinema. He is not and never has been a raw realist. To enjoy Hitchcock's films, one must accept the fa...
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Critical Essay by Vincent Canby
Though Hitchcock's work remained out of the reach of fads, except to the extent to which he cast currently popular actors in his films, he absorbed as natural an...
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Many critics believe that a Hitchcock film can be identified even if his name has been taken off the credits. I will be looking at his films such as Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), The 39 steps (19...
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Hitchcock, Alfred (1899-1980)
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
