Hitchcock's America
In this 100th-anniversary year of Alfred Hitchcock's birth, the director's work has inspired several movie remakes and a whole new crop of admirers. These two tributes to Hitchcock's art offer something new to fans. Hitchcock's America focuses on Hitchcock as cultural critic, with essays from film and literature scholars. The pieces are randomly arranged and comment on family values, gender roles, and American ideals as they are reflected in a wide array of Hitchcock's American films. While most followers hail the psychological power of his cinema, this anthology successfully shows his ability to record the changing expectations of American society in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The stark contrasts between big city and small town, sexuality and purity, hidden desires and social mores are explored as Hitchcock filmed them. Auiler (Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, LJ 5/1/98) returns with an ambitious look at the creative process of filmmaking, from the director's early German films through the golden decade of his work in the Fifties and Sixties. Using Hitchcock's own copious notes, plus copies of studio memos, hand-marked scripts, and plenty of production photos and stills, he re-creates the step-by-step production of a movie. Chapters on the screenplay, visual set-up, production, post-production editing, and unfinished projects provide fascinating insight into how movies were made, Hitchcock-style. Those with no knowledge of the "behind-the-scenes" activity of cinema will be fascinated by this detailed accounting. Auiler's book is for general audiences, while Hitchcock's America would be a good purchase for film collections in academic libraries.AKelli N. Perkins, Herrick Dist. Lib., Holland, MICopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.