Hitchcock’s British Films

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the Second Edition I have mixed feelings as I reread my thirty-three-year-old book for reissue. There are bits I almost suspect someone else must have written. There my odd “Good point!” is outnumbered by “Where did he get that?” Is it still “my” Hitchcock? Yes, because when one of these films pops up I’m riveted afresh. Though I usually see what I saw then, I’m also struck by different details and connections. The films still reward re-viewings. Of course my current readings would be deepened by the mass of intervening scholarship, especially the biographies by Donald Spoto and John Russell Taylor; Dan Auiler’s work on Hitchcock’s notebooks ; the close individual film readings by—inter alia—Charles Barr and William Rothman; and especially Tania Modleski’s, Leslie Brill’s, and Robert Samuels’s explorations into Hitchcock’s treatment of women. I worked in a very different world then. But as I cannot redo the study, I offer this document of its time, its errors (I hope mainly) corrected, its prose smoothed, but nothing rethought. Happily, I still find these early Hitchcocks rich enough to justify my very close reading. I am not embarrassed by my enthusiasm. Nor by my unfashionable auteurism, which even in his 1977 review the late maestro Robin Wood declared “now generally regarded as obsolete.” For however vital a film’s social and historic contexts, I still believe in working out the organizing intelligence behind a film. If the function of art is to communicate, to make a human connection, then the social or political influences on a work surely should not disqualify the authorial voice. However symptomatic of its time and place, a work is also somebody’s story. Someone pulled together the disparate inputs, whether compositional, technical, or performative. We deny the work’s humanity if we don’t deal with what that motive intelligence has chosen xii Preface to the Second Edition to reveal. So long as someone tells a story—or the story is retold—the author is not dead. Nor is auteurism, though we may have a different form. In Andrew Sarris’s original import from the Cahiers du cinema critics, auteurism meant the tension between the dominant artist—usually the director— and the conventional material with which s/he—usually a he—worked, usually on assignment. So, for example, a Howard Hawks John Wayne differs tellingly from a John Ford John Wayne. Hitchcock’s British films show him this kind of auteurist, beaming a distinctive shiver and twinkle through a surprisingly wide range of familiar genres. Through his American classics and his television series appearances, his strong persona drew him toward the later notion of auteur, a maker of such personal films he seemed unfettered by genre or narrative conventions. He became less like Hawks and Ford and more like Chaplin, Bergman, Buñuel, Fellini, Godard, Ozu, Tati—names to conjure with still. In American film today Kathryn Bigelow and Oliver Stone typify the first form of auteur, working in tension with familiar material. The more personal cinema is maintained by Woody Allen, the Coens, Hal Hartley , and Gus Van Sant in America and, for example, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier abroad. Like auteurism, Hitchcock is enjoying a considerable resurrection. His brand has clearly erased any Best Before . . . date. University courses are dedicated to him. (When I last taught one all my students were younger than my book. I retired.) His television series is reviving on DVD, along with the feature canon. Newsletters, conferences, and websites are harvesting Hitchcock anew. In 2001 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts mounted a major art exhibition centered on his films. I am hardly alone in my ardor. I am embarrassed by my errors, enough to make me feel like the Ricky Gervais of film scholarship. In explanation not excuse, I was working on the savage frontier, that is, before the pause button and rewind of the videocassette. Again, it was a very different world. My writing was necessarily based on a single viewing and—usually—the foolhardy diligence of note taking in the dark. The video revolution has enabled multiple viewings, home/office screenings, checking one’s notes against the work itself, and access to supporting materials. Writing this book today, I could also access Hitchcock’s American films to supplement the xiii Preface to the Second Edition British—and more works from his cohort. Digital access provides the sharpest detailing, in image and...