Hitchcock’s British Films

Foreword

Foreword With the republication of Maurice Yacowar’s Hitchcock’s British Films, both traditional Hitchcocko-Hawksians and younger post-whatever turks will have cause to rejoice. This, the first book devoted to the twenty-three films directed by Alfred Hitchcock in his native England before he came to the United States at the invitation of David O. Selznick , was originally published in a limited cloth run by a small New England press more than three decades ago and has long been out of print. Since then, of course, there have been other books on this period of Hitchcock’s work, notably Tom Ryall’s Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (1986) and Charles Barr’s English Hitchcock (1999), not to mention numerous book chapters and journal articles on such individual films as Blackmail. But Yacowar’s was there before them. As such, it was the first book to challenge the orthodox opinion of the time that Hitchcock’s “mature” period in Hollywood, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, constituted the director’s best work. In his pioneering and highly influential Hitchcock’s Films (1965), Robin Wood flatly dismissed Hitchcock’s British films as “little more than ’prentice work” and did not discuss any of them, asking, “Who wants the leafbuds when the rose has opened?” His conclusion that “the notion that the British films are better than, or as good as, or comparable with the later Hollywood ones seems to me not worth discussion” became the prevailing view, despite Wood’s retraction of this judgment more than twenty years later in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (1989) as “completely indefensible.” But Yacowar’s Hitchcock’s British Films is important not simply because it was the first on the subject. As a traditional auteurist analysis, it is as perceptive and as well argued as Wood’s more widely known x Foreword book, offering imaginative discussions of every film Hitchcock made through 1939. Rereading it after many years has given me renewed admiration for Yacowar’s work. Virtually all of his readings remain illuminating , and some—on Downhill, Champagne, and Waltzes from Vienna— are still practically the only extended interpretations of these films. Yacowar is a critic who writes not only with insight but also with marvelous attention to textual detail and a welcome wit. Readers will particularly appreciate the chapters on both lesser films like The Pleasure Garden, Downhill, The Ring, and The Manxman, and important works such as Murder!, the first The Man Who Knew Too Much, Secret Agent, The Lady Vanishes, and Blackmail. Yacowar’s ability to read ethical and metaphysical meanings out of some of Hitchcock’s technical tours de force is both impressive and convincing, and the conclusion is one of the best overviews of Hitchcock as auteur ever published. Yacowar also is especially informative regarding Hitchcock’s use of the novels and plays that were the sources of most of his screenplays. Yacowar may have had to argue more than is necessary today that Hitchcock’s films are worthy of revaluation and close attention, just as Wood felt compelled to begin his book by asking, “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” Such defensiveness is reflective of the time when these books were first published, but as with Wood, Yacowar’s analyses admirably provide the answer. Yacowar would subsequently publish auteurist studies of the films of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, but in my view his first book on Hitchcock was his best work. Hitchcock ’s British Films remains the most illuminating and comprehensive discussion of Hitchcock’s work before he moved to California, and much of the work that has followed has extended and expanded on insights first offered in it. Barry Keith Grant 2010 ...