Project MUSE®: Hitchcock Annual - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Hitchcock Annual.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 21 (2017) through current issueLatest Articles: Hitchcock AnnualTWOProject MUSE®Hitchcock Annual2689-41491062-5518Latest articles in Hitchcock Annual. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Rethinking Hitchcock as Catholic Auteur
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968229
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It has become almost an article of faith in Hitchcock studies that the French critics, especially the young French critics writing for the monthly Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and early 1960s, are responsible for today’s nearly universal recognition of Hitchcock as a major film auteur. The gradual process of this recognition has been charted in particular by Antoine de Baecque, a historian and himself a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, in his La Cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944–1968 [Cinephilia, or The Invention of a Way of Looking at Motion Pictures and the History of the Creation of a Specific Film Culture 1944–1968].1 Chapter 3 is devoted to “L’affaire Hitchcock” [“The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallRethinking Hitchcock as Catholic Auteur2025-08-21text/htmlen-USRethinking Hitchcock as Catholic Auteur2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®525882026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21Cahiers and Beyond: The Reception of I Confess in the French Press
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968230
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I Confess (1953) was at the core of the Politique des auteurs developed during the mid-1950s. The young critics of Cahiers du cinema (Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and others) demonstrated how deep and meaningful Hitchcock films are (along with those of Hawks, Lang, and Welles), primarily because of their directing. Each film became a test case for their critical method. Their responses to I Confess have been very influential. The film is the perfect illustration of the recurrent themes of the transfer of guilt and the search for grace through confession, and Catholicism is clearly foregrounded, all wrapped up in a cinematic staging that is as precise as it is symbolic. But there are also many
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallCahiers and Beyond: The Reception of I Confess in the French Press2025-08-21text/htmlen-USCahiers and Beyond: The Reception of I Confess in the French Press2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®728672026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21A Comparative Look at Hitchcock’s Murder! and Mary
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968231
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There is a void at the center of Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930) and its German-language counterpart, Mary (1931). In the mind of a young actress, a short span of time has gone missing that could either incriminate her or exonerate her of the charge of murder, and in a rare whodunit move for Hitchcock, the audience is kept in the dark as well. This vacuum becomes the plot’s gravitational center, pulling characters and events toward its abyss. In the English version, the accused is Diana Baring (Norah Baring), who, while dining alone with a rival actress, suffers a mental blackout. When she comes to, the other woman is lying dead at her feet, a bloodied fire poker beside her. A crowd gathers. Seeing Diana in a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallA Comparative Look at Hitchcock’s Murder! and Mary2025-08-21text/htmlen-USA Comparative Look at Hitchcock’s Murder! and Mary2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®1179722026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21Rebecca and Hitchcock’s Gothic Foundations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968232
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While terms like “female gothic” and “gothic romance” are frequently deployed in relation to Rebecca (1940), very little attention has been paid to the film’s foregrounding and embodiment of the broader category of Gothic genre, a crucial dimension of Alfred Hitchcock’s creative work. Rebecca is the Hitchcock film that most thoroughly inhabits and indexes the genre, but several of his most pivotal, defining films similarly evoke it: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), Strangers on a Train (1951), Psycho (1960), and Frenzy (1972). Each of these films marks the start or the culmination of a crucial period in Hitchcock’s art.The Lodger is frequently described as the “first true Hitchcock film”; Rebecca is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallRebecca and Hitchcock’s Gothic Foundations2025-08-21text/htmlen-USRebecca and Hitchcock’s Gothic Foundations2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®941522026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21Much Ado About Nothing: The Significance of 0 in North by Northwest
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968233
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Throughout my life I’ve seen North by Northwest more than any other Hitchcock film, possibly more than any film. You might even say it’s my true north, the degree 0 on my personal film compass, the template against which I measure all other films.I had probably seen it on television six times by the time I went to college and read Brian Rotman’s Signifying Nothing in a class that focused on Shakespeare’s King Lear (a play that meditates extensively on “nothing”).1 Rotman’s book—which broadly explores the importance of the concept of zero in the emergence of mathematics, linear perspective in art, and money in Renaissance Europe2—made me immediately think of North by Northwest, and in particular the exchange between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallMuch Ado About Nothing: The Significance of 0 in North by Northwest2025-08-21text/htmlen-USMuch Ado About Nothing: The Significance of 0 in North by Northwest2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®489892026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21Staying with Annie Hayworth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968234
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I want to stay with Annie Hayworth.I do not mean that I wish to follow Melanie Daniels and request a room for the night at Annie’s house in Bodega Bay. I want, rather, to stay with her as a viewer of The Birds, keeping my focus upon her when the critical convention is to move away in the more obvious direction of others. When it comes to character, discussions of Hitchcock’s film have tended to privilege Melanie, Mitch, and Lydia. This is perfectly understandable: those three figures are at the center of the narrative, while Annie features in only a handful of scenes. There is no doubt that she is a marginal figure, and we might well borrow Rachel Bowlby’s description of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to note more generally
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallStaying with Annie Hayworth2025-08-21text/htmlen-USStaying with Annie Hayworth2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®891432026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21Not So Pure After All
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968235
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Explaining why they have called their collection of sixteen new essays One Shot Hitchcock, Luke Robinson and Melanie Robson begin their Acknowledgments by recalling: “One morning Luke awoke with a title in his head—One Shot Hitchcock. It was early, the sun was out, he felt that he was on to something. He texted the title to Melanie. It was way too early to be texting on a Saturday, but Luke couldn’t wait. ‘Yes!’ was Melanie’s reply!” (vii).It’s easy to see why one of the editors was so excited about the other’s inspiration. It’s high-concept, it’s economical, it’s catchy, and it’s likely to raise lots of intriguing questions for anyone who comes across the book, or even its title. Is Hitchcock uniquely suited to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallNot So Pure After All2025-08-21text/htmlen-USNot So Pure After All2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®600582026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21Noir Films, Noirish Films, Hitchcock Films
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968236
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In graduate school I wanted to fulfill an assignment by writing about Rope as a film noir in color, à la John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945) or various films by Claude Chabrol, but was nixed on the grounds that Rope isn’t shadowy enough to qualify as noir. Maybe so, but the minor classic of 1948 has one of the most noir-worthy narratives of any 1940s film, and it comes up more than once in Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir: The Darker Side, the new collection edited by R. Barton Palmer and Homer B. Pettey, who themselves call Rope both a film noir and a “noir-ish” film in their epilogue to the book. Indeed, the essay by Bruce Isaacs, about films traversing borderlines between stage and cinema, puts Rope front
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallNoir Films, Noirish Films, Hitchcock Films2025-08-21text/htmlen-USNoir Films, Noirish Films, Hitchcock Films2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®219972026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21Telling Stories Visually
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968237
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British filmmaker, creative director, mystery novelist, and Alfred Hitchcock aficionado Tony Lee Moral adds a fourth title, Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards, to his previous works about Hitchcock that include Alfred Hitchcock’s Moviemaking Master Class (2013), The Making of The Birds (2012), and Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie (2013). Through illustrations, photography, and prose, Moral argues for the importance of storyboarding to Hitchcock’s pre-visualization, screenplay writing, and filmmaking stages for eleven of the master’s films made from his British silent period up to and including his final film, Family Plot (1976). The format is a handsome 10¼ x 13-inch-sized “coffee table” book aimed at both a general
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/760/image/coversmallTelling Stories Visually2025-08-21text/htmlen-USTelling Stories Visually2025-08-212025TWOProject MUSE®277122026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-21