Alfred Hitchcock

Books

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            No figure in motion pictures has had more volumes written about him than the most popular and esteemed director Alfred Hitchcock.  We shall strive to make this page as interesting and informative as possible.  It is not our intention to editorialize - simply to present.  Almost without exception comments about the books are from the books themselves.  Some of the books will be available for purchase.  Order the books using the red number and our order form.  We will advise of the shipping charges.  You may pay with a credit card using PayPal.  We also accept money orders and personal checks.  Your books may be combined with other products on the Hitch2001 website for shipping savings.  Enjoy!  PayPal welcome or send money order or check to:  Al Chafin, 116 Bay Hill Ct, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL 32082-3602.

Alfred Hitchcock   by Paul Duncan.   H1  Pocket Essentials is a fresh new series of film books that are short, snappy, and easy to read. Packed with facts, and backed up by opinion, each book has all the key information you need to know about the world's most celebrated film directors and film genres. What's in a book? As well as an introduction to the subject, each film by a director or each genre is individually analyzed and reviewed. In addition, the director or genre's impact on the film industry is explained, and a handy reference section lists all the far weightier (and more expensive) books on the subject. for movie buffs and students, these are great little entry-level books that build into an essential film library.  © 1999. Pocket Essentials. "There are succinct and to-the-point plots, subtext and 'making of' sections for each of Hitch's 50 odd films. It's author Paul Duncan has fitted it all in considering the size of the book, and at this price you can't go wrong! The author has peppered the text with his own opinions and has the nerve to rate the films - quite accurately pointing out that Hitchcock made bad films as well as good ones. I can see how this irreverent attitude to Hitchcock could get up the noses of some academics, but I found it refreshing. His opinions, I find, are also good starting points for discussions about Hitchcock. At the back, there is a reference section where Paul Duncan gives his opinion about other reference books - something I have not seen done elsewhere." - Jill Fay.

Alfred Hitchcock   by Serge Kaganski.  H2  "The Birds and Marnie are certainly key sources for anyone who seeks to catch sight of the links between the director's private life and his work.  The key is to be found in one name: that of Tippi Hedren.  No doubt she was not the only actress Hitchcock ever fell for, but she was the only one to whom he made an open declaration of love.  Today, on revisiting The Birds, that masterpiece of pure, primitive terror, we begin to sense that Hitchcock made it for one reason and for one reason only: to abuse Tippi Hedren, to scare her, to push her to the edge, to lacerate those pellucid features, to spoil that maddening beauty.  It seems like the work of a sadist who so resents his position of emotional inferiority to his own star that he goes out of his way to assail and humiliate her"... and so says Kaganski.  Pocket Archives Hazan. © 1997. 199 pages Color & B&W photos galore.

        Serge Kaganski, born 1959, edits the film section of the French arts magazine Les Inrockuptibles.  He was the paper's Los Angeles correspondent, 1986-1990, and is currently a regular contributor to a major film program on French radio.  (Background info as of 1997).

BUY IT  H2SC1 Small Soft Cover, excellent condition, minor cover wear, no writing, tight. $10.

The Alfred Hitchcock Album   by Michael Haley.  H3  Prentice-Hall, USA.  177 pages. Michael Haley's The Alfred Hitchcock Album captures both the awesome professional career and the jealously guarded private life of this shy and retiring award-winning director.  From Hitchcock's imaginative and solitary childhood to his first film job as a title-card designer in the silent era to his rising success as a feature film director in Hollywood, Haley reveals the private man behind the movie legend.  Everything from Hitchcock's outrageous pranks and phobias to his filmic foibles and innovations is brought vividly to life.  Over 150 photographs show all of Hitchcock's films (including the silents), rare glimpses of his life behind the camera and at home, plus all the famous cameo appearances with which he signed his films.  A complete filmography, listing all the titles, release dates, and screen credits of each of Hitchcock's 53 films, is also included.  Visually entertaining, and above all an enlightening tribute,  The Alfred Hitchcock Album provides insight into the complexities, artistic sensitivity, and magnetism of this mischievously creative, self-proclaimed "poet of civilized suspense."

             Michael Haley is a professional actor and free-lance writer.  He has published travel and entertainment features for newspaper syndicates and travel magazines across the country.  This is his first book. (Bio notes as of year of publication.

Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema   by Tom Ryall.   H3B   University of Illinois Press. © 1986 Tom Ryall. 193 pages.   "Hitchcock's American films have been the subject of sustained critical work for many years whilst the films from his British period (1925-39) have received much less attention.  Yet, these were made in the important formative years of his career during which he directed 23 of his 53 films and established himself as the foremost British film director of the time.  this study positions the British films in a variety of contexts including the minority film culture of the period, the British cinema that emerged in the wake of the 'quota act' of 1927, the thriller genre with which Hitchcock cam to be identified, and the web of stylistic traditions in the cinema to which his films relate. Although the departure point of the book is the strong authorial figure of Hitchcock, the underlying and implicit argument is that the films are best understood in relation to the network of influences which combined to produce them. The contexts of film culture, the film industry, the thriller genre and the models of film style available to film makers of the period constitute a powerful constellation of determinations which need to be specified before the significance of Hitchcock's British films can be assessed."

        Contents:  Introduction - Hitchcock and Criticism; British Film Culture in the Interwar Period; The British Film Industry in the Interwar Years; A British Cinema? The British Entertainment Film of the 1930's; Hitchcock and the British Cinema; Hitchcock and Genre - "The Classic Thriller Sextet'; Hitchcock and Classical Cinema; Conclusion - Hitchcock's British Films.

        Tom Ryall is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies in The Department of Historical and Critical Studies, Sheffield City Polytechnic.  (Bio notes as of 1986).

The Alfred Hitchcock Movie Quiz Book   by Bryan Brown.  H4  Published by Putnam, a Perigee Book. © 1986, 176 pages.  "Challenging, fascinating questions on all of Alfred Hitchcock's 53 motion pictures, plus vintage stillls, complete answers, and a scoring key to rate your expertise!"

The Alfred Hitchcock Triviography & Quiz Book   by Kathleen Kaska.  H5  In honor of what would have been Mr. Hitchcock's 100th birthday, The Alfred Hitchcock Triviography & Quiz Book asks and answers over one thousand challenging questions about the master of suspense.  It includes true/false, multiple choice, and matching quizzes on fifty-three of Hitchcock's films, his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and his personal life.  Each chapter also contains a trivia section with behind-the-scenes anecdotes, casting choices, quips and quotes, and awards and achievements.  A filmography, videography, and a chronology of his life round out this entertaining and unique quiz and reference book.  Renaissance Books Los Angeles. © 1999. 222 pages. 

            Kathleen Kaska  is a teacher and author.  Her first book, What's Your Agatha Christie I.Q.? was published in 1996.  Kathleen is a die-hard mystery fan, and when she is not teaching and writing nonfiction, she is working on her own mysteries.  Entering the world of fiction is a nice balance between dispersing factual information and letting the imagination run free.  Ms. Kaska lives in Austin, Texas, where she teaches seventh-grade science and freelances for various magazines.  (Bio notes as of 1999).

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho   by Stephen Rebello.  H6  "Meticulously researched and irresistible... required reading not only for Psycho-philes, but also for anyone interested in the backstage world of movie creation." - Anthony Perkins.  Here is the complete inside story on the making of Psycho, the forerunner of all psycho-thrillers.  Rebello takes us behind the scenes at the creation of one of cinema's boldest and most influential films.  From Hitchcock's private files and from new in-depth interviews with the stars, writers, and technical crew we get a unique and unparalleled view of the master at work.  Dembner Books. © 1990 by Stephen Rebello. 224 pages.

        Stephen Rebello is the author of Reel Art - Great Posters from the Golden Age of the Silver Screen.  A contributing editor of L.A. Style, his articles on films and their makers have appeared in Premiere, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Movieline, Playboy, Interview, Cinefantastique, and many other publications.  He lives in Santa Monica, California.  (Background info as of 1990).

Alfred Hitchcock's  Psycho   The Film Classics Library   H6B   Edited by Richard J. Anobile.  "Presents the most accurate and complete reconstruction of a film in book form. Over 1,300 frame blow-up photos shown sequentially and coupled with the complete dialogue from the original soundtrack, allow you to recapture this film classic in its entirety -- at your leisure."  A Darien House Book. Flare Books/Published by Avon. © 1974. 256 pages.  From the Introduction by Richard Anobile: "Most film historians and buffs will argue against considering contemporary films as classics. But I view this attitude as unnecessarily shortsighted and fail to understand the reluctance of some individuals to recognize films produced today which will be classics thirty or forty years from their release.  Alfred Hitchcock directed his first feature in 1922 (Number Thirteen) and is still active today. He has transcended several generations of film audiences and his career has been marked by many hallmark films, one of which is Psycho.  A close look at Psycho reveals many of Hitchcock's secrets of film suspense. Storywise, the film is simple. But Hitchcock gives his audience a grand runaround and systematically catches the viewer off guard.  Here then is Psycho. Over 1,400 frame blowups have been coupled with the original dialogue for a complete reconstruction of the film as released."

The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion   by Martin Grams, Jr. and Patrik Wikstrom,  with a Foreword by Patricia Hitchcock.  H7  © 2001, Martin Grams, Jr. and Patrik Wikstrom. 656 pages.  "For more than a decade Alfred Hitchcock hosted a macabre television series that bore his name, and became a staple in the fabric of our living rooms. From the opening theme to Hitchcock's signature "Good evening...", viewers tuned in each week to watch the master at work... chilling television audiences, both old and young alike.   Hitchcock's involvement with Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was minimal - to say the least. He hosted over 360 episodes, but he didn't even direct twenty. Yet, the director whose name would become synonymous with film students and modern-day film-makers, found himself a world-renowned celebrity, and even his private life was often in turmoil.

        Under the arrangement of Universal Studios, you now hold in your hands a complete guide to the television series/ this book includes a "behind-the-scenes" look at the making of many of the episodes, and why the program left the air after ten years on network television. This book also includes the 1980s remake series, a chapter documenting all the Alfred Hitchcock Presents collectibles (including paperback anthologies), and over 100 photos. Various chapters by experts include insight into the Hitchcock spoofs, comic books, the Hitchcock-produced Dark Intruder, Psycho, and the Suspicion television series.

        With exclusive interviews with Fess Parker, Ray Bradbury, Henry Slesar, Norman Lloyd, Gordon Hessler, Hazel Court, Vincent Price, Elliott Reid, Marian Seldes, Sydney Pollack, Ann Robinson, Julie Adams, Wayne Heffley, Marc Richman, Warren Stevens, Hilton A Green, Arthur Ross, Joseph Pevney, and many more."

            Martin Grams, Jr.  is the winner of the 1999 Ray Stanich Award.  Martin is also the author of: "Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills", "The History of the Cavalcade of America", "The CBS Radio Mystery Theater: An Episode Guide and Handbook, 1974-1982", Radio Drama, American Programs, 1932-1962", "The Have Gun - Will Travel Companion".  He also contributed chapters for:  "Vincent Price" and "The Alfred Hitchcock Story" edited by Ken Mogg.   Patrik Wikstrom  is a dyed-in-the-wool Alfred Hitchcock fan and contributed substantially to this book.  He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.  (Bio notes as of 2001).

The Alfred Hitchcock  Quote Book   by Laurent Bouzereau.  H8  What he said - Memorable lines from his films - What others said about him...  This book reflects the involvement and expertise of the director, who was famous for his innovative style and unusual camera angles, in suiting dialogue to action.  "Hitch" worked tirelessly with his writers, guiding them to create more vivid dialogue for a visual medium.  The result, the fusion between Hitchcock and his writers, was seamless.  Whether Cary Grant was making love to (or frightening) Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Joan Fontaine, or Eva Marie Saint, the dialogue, though written differently for each film, dealt with the same subjects.  Yet the Hitchcock team always made the material seem fresh and original.  This book presents the great director in his own words, in the words of those who worked most closely with him, and in the dialogue of the characters in his movies.  A Hitchcock filmography is included.  Here is a treasury of delight for every lover of Hitchcock's films.  Citadel Press. © 1993 by Laurent Bouzereau. 230 pages.

             Laurent Bouzereau  is the author of The De Palma Cut.  He has worked in many areas of the film industry, including publicity and feature development.  Bouzereau wrote essays for special laser-disc editions of Brian De Palma's Carrie and Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail and made the new English subtitle adaptations for eight films by Francois Truffaut.  Born in France, he lives in California.  (Background info as of 1993).

The Alfred Hitchcock Story    by Ken Mogg.  H9  Foreword by Janet Leigh.  Taylor Publishing Company, US.  © 1999 by Ken Mogg. 211 pages. Contributions by Dan Auiler, David Barraclough, Steven L. DeRosa, Martin Grams, Jr., Philip Kemp, J. Lary Kuhns.  The definitive illustrated history of the Master of Suspense.  The authoritative guide to the world's best-lived and most respected film director, The Alfred Hitchcock Story combines complete story synopses, insightful commentary, and a stunning collection of photographs to capture the essence of the acclaimed "Master of Suspense."

        Starting with his early silent movies like The Lodger, through the classic British period of The 29 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, to the evergreen Hollywood successes of Rebecca, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and beyond, Hitchcock was unquestionably the movie public's favorite director.  In later years, Hitch himself became an instantly recognizable celebrity through his own long-running TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the great director's birth, The Alfred Hitchcock Story presents the most lavishly illustrated celebration ever of his work, featuring an amazing collection of over 400 rare posters, movie stills, behind-the-scenes photographs, lobby cards, press books, book and magazine covers, and even board games.  Film historian Ken Mogg skillfully analyzes the life and work of Hitchcock, including an incisive commentary on each and every film he directed, complete with little-known details and tales from behind the camera.

        Ken Mogg is a life-long admirer of Alfred Hitchcock's work, corresponded with the great director, and even spent some time on the set of his last movie, Family Plot.  Mogg edits The MacGuffin, a widely read journal covering all aspects of Hitchcock's life and work.  The publication's web site www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin provides regularly updated discussion and news on Hitchcock-related topics.  Mogg has also written extensively on Hitchcock for film journals and the Hitchcock Annual.  He lives in Victoria, Australia, where he has taught Film Studies at the College of Advanced Education, Melbourne University.  (Background info as of 1999).

The Art of Alfred Hitchcock   Fifty Years Of His Motion Pictures    by Donald Spoto.  H10  "The most comprehensive study of Hitchcock yet to appear.  A most valuable achievement in film scholarship" - Andrew Sarris.  "Working with Hitch is a fascinating experience, and reading this book will be just that for his many admirers and fans... Donald Spoto has done a remarkable job of research" - Princess Grace of Monaco.  "Spoto is a man of independent judgment, spicing his account with unexpected valuations.  He sends us back to the films stimulated and ready to see them in a new light" - John Russell Taylor.  Hopkinson and Blake, Publishers, New York. © 1977. 523 pages. 

        Donald Spoto  first came under the Hitchcock spell at the age of nine when he saw Strangers On A Train at RKO Proctor's on Main Street in his native New Rochelle, New York in 1951.  He has logged 1,300 hours at Hitchcock films since that time, but the addiction hasn't inhibited a wide-ranging scholarship.  A graduate of Iona College (B.A.) and Fordham University (M.A., Ph.D.), he has taught Greek, Latin, French, theology, and English and American literature at Fairfield University, the College of New Rochelle, and City University of New York.  He currently teaches film at The New School, in New York, where his course on Hitchcock enjoys a special popularity.  Dr. Spoto considers France a second home and travels there whenever teaching and lecture assignments allow.  (Bio info as of 1977).

BUY IT  H10SC1 Soft Cover, excellent condition, no writing. $15.

The Art of Looking in Hitchcock's Rear Window   by Stefan Sharff.  H11  © 1997. Limelight Editions.  "Readers who agree with Stefan Sharff that "the voyeuristic drive is an  unavoidable  art of watching a film," will find much food for thought in this book. Sharff contends that the hero of Rear Window, played by James Stewart, is himself a voyeur, and that through him Hitchcock replicates and satirizes the experience of movie watching itself. The author further argues that Hitchcock use a cinematic "high vernacular" to convey his complex ideas. As he reveals the relationship between the film's visual style and meaning, its form and its content, Sharff walks through it no fewer than three times. In the chapters that make up the heart of this book, he summarizes the movie's plot, then comments on each of its shots in succession, and finally provides a sequential shot list for easy reference. The result is one of the most meticulous analyses of a single film available in print. It should hold a special interest for Hitchcock fans who own Rear Window on video - putting the film in the "pause" mode as they read along with Sharff will give them the opportunity to follow, absorb, and argue with the analyses of a famous film critic and Hitchcock fan." - Raphael Shargel.

Before The Fact   by Francis Iles.  H12  The story on which the movie "Suspicion" was based. © Doubleday, Doran, 1932. 279 pages.  "Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer." Johnny was delightful -- and Lina loved him desperately. But his devastating charm was combined with a complete lack of both morals and income. Slowly Lina discovered what such a combination led to. The first indications seemed trivial, especially since, in his childish way, Johnny loved her. Not for a long time did she realize that he had killed, and was planning to kill again.

            Made into the famous Cary Grant-Joan Fontaine motion picture Suspicion, this story has seldom been surpassed for sheer, blood-curdling suspense. As one reviewer said, "it induces such a There-but-for-the-Grace-of-God sensation that one remains shivering for hours."

BFI's Blackmail   by Tom Ryall.  H13  Cinema is a fragile medium. Many of the great classic films of the past now exist, if at all, in damaged or incomplete prints.  Concerned about the deterioration in the physical state of our film heritage, the National Film and Television Archive, a Division of the British Film Institute, has compiled a list of 360 key films in the history of the cinema.  The long-term goal of the Archive is to build a collection of perfect show-prints of these films, which will then be screened regularly at the Museum of the Moving Image in London in a year-round repertory.

    BFI Publishing has now commissioned a series of books to stand alongside these titles.  Authors, including film critics and scholars, film-makers, novelists, historians and those distinguished in the arts, have been invited to write on a film of their choice, drawn from the Archive's list.  Each volume will present the author's own insights into the chosen film, together with a brief production history and a detailed filmography, notes and bibliography.  The numerous illustrations have been specially made from the Archive's own prints.  Thus, Blackmail by Tom Ryall. British Film Institute. BFI Publishing. © 1993. 64 pages.

         Tom Ryall teaches Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and is the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema.  (Author background info as of 1993).

BFI's The Birds   by Camille Paglia.  H14  Another in the BFI series described above.  The Birds (1963) was the film Alfred Hitchcock made after Psycho.  Drawn from a Daphne du Maurier story as well as contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, The Birds featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role.  A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock.  Camille Paglia, in a virtuoso study, draws together the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations.  This is an elegant, highly readable book which will delight students and fans of The birds, and which confirms the reputation of one of America's most exciting intellectuals.  BFI Publishing. © 1998. 104 pages.

         Camille Paglia is Professor of Humanities at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia.  She is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Sex, Art, and American Culture, and Vamps & Tramps: New Essays.  (Author background info as of 1998).

CINEFANTASTIQUE:  Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"   by Kyle B. Counts.  H15   Additional Interviews by Steve Rubin.  "The complete story behind the precursor of modern horror films."  An exhaustive 22-page retrospective in color and B&W in Cinefantastique magazine discussing in minute detail the making of "The Birds".  Features interviews with art director Robert Boyle, bird trainer Ray Berwick, make-up artist Howard Smit, screenwriter Evan Hunter and - of course - Alfred Hitchcock himself.  Fall Issue, 1980. This article was written only months after the death of Mr. Hitchcock.  The following homage was contained in the issue by the author:  "Alfred Hitchcock  1899-1980.  Alfred Joseph Hitchcock died on Tuesday, April 29, 1980 at his Bel Air, California home. His wife, Alma, and his daughter, Patricia, were at his bedside.  In a career that began in 1921 and spanned 53 feature-length films, Hitchcock will long be remembered for his supreme technical mastery, his cynical, lugubrious sense of humor and, of course, his fine works as a director.  This writer -- and those everywhere interested in the art of motion pictures -- owes him a debt that can never be repaid.  To paraphrase a comment made by William Wyler upon the death of Ernst Lubitch:  "No more Hitchcock."  "Worse than that - no more Hitchcock films."

            Kyle B. Counts is a graduate of the University of Michigan, now living and writing in Los Angeles.  he first saw The Birds at the age of 11 during its original engagement at the Admiral Theater in Detroit, in April, 1963, and credits the picture for sparking his interest in films.  (Bio notes as of 1980).

Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear   Some Key Film-Makers Of The Sixties   By John Russell Taylor.   H15C   © 1964 John Russell Taylor. Hill and Wang New York. 294 pages.  Discussed are Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Bunuel, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais.  Also Filmographies, Bibliographies, Errata.  "The appearance at all of Alfred Hitchcock in a book devoted to cinema since 1950 and the dominating figures of that period may seem at first glance decidedly incongruous.  But what of Hitchcock, who was born in 1899, began directing his first film (the unfinished Number Thirteen) in 1922, and has been directing almost without a break since 1925, with a total of forty-eight feature films to his credit up to and including his most recent, The Birds (1963)?  Evidently he can hardly be claimed as a discovery of the 1950s.

        "To begin with, quite simply, he has made his best films since 1950.  While virtually every other director who has been making films since silent days has declined in this period (witness Clair, Pabst, Wyler, Capra, even, though less disastrously, Ford; Renoir is perhaps the only important exception), Hitchcock remains as masterly and unpredictable as ever, with no sign of stiffness in the joints and always ready to experiment, to conquer fresh territory.  Then, almost equally important, it is only in the last few years that Hitchcock's influence on other film-makers has really taken full effect; there have always been occasional pseudo-Hitchcock films, as we would expect with a director so commercially successful, but it is only since 1950 that he has become the god of young film-makers, had his films anatomized in exhaustive detail (sometimes, especially by the French critics connected with the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, rather dementedly, but always with devotion), and exercised real influence on the films of serious directors.  Whichever way you look at it, Hitchcock is a man of here and now, and a more commanding figure in world cinema now than ever before."

        John Russell Taylor was born in Dover, England, in 1935.  A film critic for the London Times, Mr. Taylor is the author of Anatomy for a Television Play, The Angry Theatre: New British Drama, and The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play.  He has also written for the Times Literary Supplement, Encore, World Theatre, London Magazine, and Sight and Sound.  (Bio notes as of 1964).

The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock   by Peter Bogdanovich   The Museum of Modern Art Film Library.   H15B   © The Museum of Modern Art, 1963. Distributed by Doubleday & Co New York. 48 pages.  From The Introduction by the author:  "In the history of the cinema, Alfred Hitchcock holds a unique position: he is the only director (with the possible exception of DeMille) whose name conjures up a specific image in the average filmgoer's mind (again excepting such actor-directors as Chaplin, whose public appeal is based on their performances rather than their work behind the camera). Today, he is the only director whose movies are sold on his name alone - a name that has become synonymous in everyone's mind with a certain kind of film. The phrase, "a Hitchcock picture," has become less a noun than an adjective."  Thought provoking questions presented to the great director in the book include: "You never watch your films with an audience. Don't you miss hearing them scream?"... "Do you feel that the American film remains the most vital cinema?"..."How would you define pure cinema?"... "How do you work when you are shooting?"... "What is your technique of working with actors?"..."You've said that your pictures are finished before you set foot on the set - that is, once the script is completed. What is your working process with the writers?"

        Discussed are Hitchcock's movies to date of book's publication and the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "Alfred Hitchcock Hour" television shows personally directed by Hitchcock.

        Peter Bogdanovich, a superb director in his own right, also has written The Cinema of Howard Hawks (1962) and The Cinema of Orson Welles (1961).  This book was published in conjunction with the film cycle, "The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock," May 5 to November 16, 1963, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Complete Films Of Alfred Hitchcock   by Robert A. Harris & Michael S. Lasky. H16 "This book attempts to cover the more than 50 years Alfred Hitchcock spent as a film director.  In a showcase of stills from his many films and in a text which examines the background of each production, how it was critically received and what it was about, we have tried to illustrate the genius of the artist and the humaneness of the man."  Citadel Press / Carol Publishing Group New York. © 1976, 1993. 248 pages.  Table size.  Book sections:  The Early Films, 1922-1933; Becoming The Master Of Suspense, 1934-1939; The Selznick Years, 1940-1947; The Technicolor, Vistavision, 3-D Years, 1948-1959; The Television Interlude, 1955-1962; The Mature Years, 1960-1975.

The Complete Hitchcock   by Paul Condon and Jim Sangster.  H17  "The Complete Hitchcock is a thorough, welll-nigh encyclopedic look at Hitch's work, with a brief chapter on each major film. The chapters include complete cast and credits - including "uncredited cast" - plus a synopsis, and sundry comments on each film under such headings as "cruelty to animals," "mysogyny," "ice maidens," "roots," and a "final word" with a critical appraisal including a rating on a scale of 1-10. While examination of each film is necessarily brief, it's quite thorough and absolutely chock-full of cool trivia. Every now and then there are sidebars on stars with who Hitch worked; there's also an amazing appendix listing every single episode from Hitch's TV shows (not just the ones he directed - but all of them). This book is THE place to start for the Hitchcock novice, and a real treasure trove for the seasoned fan." - Joseph W. Smith III.

The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock   by Donald Spoto.  H18  Little Brown and Company Boston Toronto. © 1983. 594 pages.  The intensely private, secretive Hitchcock eluded the serious biographer until now.  Donald Spoto, author of the acclaimed study The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (the only critical work praised by the director himself for its impressive scholarship, clarity, and sensibility), fully traces the origins of Hitchcock's incomparable, bizarre genius and reveals the elements in his subject's family background, his education and early social life in London, his apprenticeship in Germany, and the golden years in America that helped to inspire a half-century of popular motion pictures.  Some of Spoto's richest material comes from the scores of interviews with Hitchcock's writers, actors, and longtime associates, and from the recently discovered data of the David O. Selznick archives, covering the years Hitchcock was under contract to the producer of King Kong and Gone With the Wind.  Studio production files, private correspondence, court records, and family registries all yielded important new information for this major biography, as did Hitchcock's fascinating relationships with the great stars - Gielgud, Bergman, Olivier, Carroll, Grant, Clift, Dietrich, Stewart, Kelly and many more.

        Donald Spoto  grew up in Westchester County and Connecticut, and now lives in New York City.  He earned the Ph.D. degree in theological literature from Fordham University and has taught a wide variety of subjects, from Latin to film, at several American universities and across Europe.  In addition to a busy writing lecturing schedule, he continues his volunteer work with the very ill.  Since 1975, he has taught regularly at the New School for Social Research, near his home in Greenwich Village.  (Bio notes as of 1983).

Directors In Action  Selections from ACTION the Official Magazine of the Directors Guild of America    H18B    Edited by Bob Thomas. Introduction by Frank Capra.  The Bobbs Merrill Company. © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973 by The Directors Guild of America. 283 pages.  Contents: Orson Welles and Citizen Kane;  Directors At Work - Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Roger Corman, Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, John Schlesinger, Robert Altman, George Stevens, Richard Lester, Gordon Parks, Mel Brooks;  The Director-Actor;  The Western; John Ford and Stagecoach;  Anatomy Of A Chase - The French Connection;  The World Of The Assistant Director;  The First Feature.  Contents of the Alfred Hitchcock segment:  Beginnings - "My first directing job was in Munich and I had to direct some of the actors in German.";  First Direction - "My first picture was The Pleasure Garden and it was filmed in Munich. When crossing over into Austria they confiscated 10,000 feet of shot film";  The Visual Medium - "I don't decry dialogue, but I feel that the technique is not necessarily cinematic. I did a dialogue film, Dial M for Murder, which was taken from a successful play. I could have phoned that one in";  Films Vs. Theater - "Dissolves and fade-outs are theater techniques - curtains. Nowadays we use more of the quick cuts, and that is probably good";  Writing - "Writers are creative people, but they don't necessarily take the audience into account";  Silent-film Directing - "Acting was much more elemental. We always had a 3-piece orchestra on the set to provide the proper mood when a mother was bending over a cot to look at her dying baby";  Murder - "I think murder should be done on a lovely summer's day by a babbling brook... The liveliest fellow at a party might well be a psychopathic killer";  Backgrounds - "I make it a rule if I am going to use a theater, I will integrate it into the plot, not just use it as a background. For instance, in Torn Curtain I made the ballerina the catalyst for the story";  Audiences - "Audiences are funny. In Psycho I had a scene in which Tony Perkins tried to dispose of a body by pushing a car into a swamp. When the car did not sink under the water, the audience was pulling for it to do so, even though Perkins was the murderer";  Mystery vs. Suspense - "If you touch off a bomb, your audience gets a ten-second shock. But if the audience knows that the bomb has been planted, then you can build up the suspense and keep them in a state of expectation for five minutes";  Suspense - "The point is to give the viewers information which the cast doesn't have. If you see a man with a club coming up behind an innocent person, you know more than the innocent person does, and suspense is created". - From an interview with Mr. Hitchcock  in 1968.

English Hitchcock   A Movie Book    H18C   by Charles Barr.  "In 1925, in a studio in Bavaria, a young Englishman, still in his twenties, directed his first feature film.  It was the start of a career that would, fifteen years later, take him to Hollywood, where he became one of the very few directors whose reputation often eclipsed that of his stars.  Although Alfred Hitchcock achieved his greatest success and fame in America, he was inescapably English, and the films that he made in his native country before taking up a contract with David O. Selznick are very much more than apprentice work. The Lodger, Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes are films of enormous wit and sophistication - masterworks in their own right. However, Hitchcock's critical reputation has so far been firmly founded on the American films, while his English period has been underestimated and relatively neglected. English Hitchcock rectifies this critical imbalance by providing in an entertaining and elegantly written text a detailed and well-documented reading of the films.  Published by Cameron & Hollis, Cameron Books, Scotland © 1999, 255 pages.  Book chapters: English Hitchcock, The Silent Films, Conversion To Sound, Close Adaptations, The Thriller Format, The Last of England, Epilogue.

        "Charles Barr  is Professor of Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. A leading authority on the British cinema, he wrote Ealing Studios, now in its third edition, which is widely acclaimed as the finest book ever written on British films. Here he examines each of the 23 films that Hitchcock completed before his departure for the United States on the Queen Mary in March 1939. Not only does he pinpoint the achievement of these films, he also looks at the contribution of their writers - notably Eliot Stannard for the silent pictures and Charles Bennett for the 'thirties thrillers - which was scarcely acknowledged by Hitchcock, and at the importance of the source material, whether plays or novels, previously ignored or written off by other critics. The text is illustrated throughout with over 200 well-chosen stills and frame enlargements, and an extensively annotated filmography offers more factual detail than has been assembled before on Hitchcock's English output."

The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood   by Ezra Goodman.   H19   Simon and Schuster New York © 1961. 465 pages.   "What -- another book about the movies?  Why?  On my bookshelves are well over a thousand books about the movies, ranging from the zoetrope to Zanuck, from the camera obscura to the obscure camera -- an odd hobby, particularly in Hollywood, where books are collected by the interior-decorating yard rather than by the intellectual yardstick.  Very few books about the movies are either readable or reliable and hardly any are both. Most of them have been inadequately researched and are the result of second- and third-hand reporting.  One theory recently put forth has it that what often passes for news and fact is really pretty much hearsay and gossip. If so, then there is a good deal of "news" coming out of Hollywood.  Too many volumes about the movies are composed by dilettantes, weak-wrist aficionados, ghostwriters and assorted rewrite men. Perhaps the people in the movie business who are in a position to know are too busy to write or find it impolite to note down what they know.  

        "This volume -- largely as its reason for being -- is a reporter's book. These notes are based on twenty or so years as a publicist, free-lance writer, columnist, correspondent and critic on the western front. This book was written on the journalistic firing line, so to speak.  In these pages I have tried, within the bounds of fairness and fact, to name names wherever possible. Any resemblance between these paragraphs and actual personalities and events is calculated."

        Ezra Goodman was born and educated in New York City. In the past twenty years he has worked as publicity and advertising director of the 55th Street Playhouse, New York, as publicist for Warner Brothers studio, Hollywood, as Hollywood columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, and as Hollywood columnist and motion-picture critic for the Los Angeles Daily News. In the early 1950s he became cinema critic for Time Magazine in New York, then Hollywood correspondent for the same publication. He has written feature articles on the movies for many other newspapers and magazines. In 1958 Mr. Goodman took a six-month trip around the world. His subsequent time has been spent writing this book, which is his first. He is now writing a novel set in Los Angeles.  (Bio notes as of 1961).

Film Crazy  Interviews with Hollywood Legends   by Patrick McGilligan.   H19B   The acclaimed biographer of George Cukor, Robert Altman, Jack Nicholson, and Fritz Lang interviews many of Hollywood's biggest stars and most important directors.  McGilligan shares some of his finest interviews with film luminaries from his salad days as a young journalist working the Hollywood beat.  He rides the presidential campaign bus with Ronald Reagan, visits Alfred Hitchcock during the making of the Master of Suspense's last film, Family Plot, meets George Stevens at the Brown Derby, and conducts the last interview with the director of Shane and Giant.  Other interview subjects captured for posterity include rough-and-ready pioneer directors William Wellman and Raoul Walsh, likable actor Joel McCrea, actress - and the only female director of her era - Ida Lupino, French legend René Clair, and lowly-contract-writer-turned-studio-mogul Dore Schary.  Film Crazy is a must for film students, scholars, and professionals.

        Among the interesting stories in the Alfred Hitchcock interview:  "There were minor skirmishes during the making of Family Plot.  Roy Thinnes, originally cast in the movie, was replaced shortly after shooting began on the vague complaint from Hitchcock that he was not "strong enough" (which may mean that he was, in fact, too strong).  Hollywood wags point out that Hitchcock at his press conference in the local cemetery earlier in the month kept referring to Thinnes as Roy Scheider.  The director said it was a slip of the tongue, but more whimsical observers saw malice aforethought!"  St. Martin's Press, New York. © 2000 by Patrick McGilligan. 279 pages.

        Patrick McGilligan is the editor of the popular Backstory series.  A resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he is also the author of several biographies on noted filmmakers George Cuckor, Robert Altman, and Fritz Lang, the last of which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.  (Bio notes as of 2000).  (In listing other titles by the author is:  Forthcoming:  Darkness and Light: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock). 

The Film Director   by Richard L. Bare ~~~ Foreword by Robert Wise.   H19A   A Practical Guide To Motion Picture & Television Techniques.  A Hollywood director tells the aspiring filmmaker not only how to direct but - more importantly - how to get a job directing.  © 1971 Richard L. Bare. The Macmillan Company. 243 pages.  "So rapidly is film overwhelming all the other art forms of our age that practically every kid with a creative urge and the price of an 8 mm camera dreams of becoming a director. And not just the kids: taxicab drivers, insurance salesmen, artists in other media, you name it. Whether planning a short for friends or school, or a major career, at the top of the novice's list - even before he buys his first roll of film - should be this book.

        At a time when there are already two hundred colleges offering degrees in cinema, and hundreds more colleges and high schools giving classes in film appreciation, it is astonishing that there has been not one practical, step-by-step handbook written by a full-time successful director.  At last that omission stands corrected. Dick Bare is a pro's pro - a student filmmaker (USC) turned professional - who has been an award-winning television and movie director for the past two decades. In these pages he takes the beginner carefully through every stage of his development, from the fundamentals of camera angle, sound synch, lighting, and editing, right on up to what a beginning director's salary scale is and what he can expect to make on reruns of his films.  But it is much more than a solid, nuts-and-bolts textbook; it is a fascinating, behind-the-kliegs look at the director's world, filled with firsthand examples from the direction of all the giants, including Alfred Hitchcock, Wilder, Kubrick, Nichols, Stevens, Wise, and Vidor. And for this reason it will also appeal to all flick addicts who love the medium but have no desire to create in it.  Finally, in addition to the mechanics and techniques of staging and handling the camera, the book delves delightfully into all the dramatic and emotional processes involved in coaxing the best performances from actors and actresses, and keeping the story moving.  As the author himself puts it: "Admittedly one of the world's toughest professions to break into, film-directing can be one of the most rewarding - not only financially but in doing work that is fulfilling, exciting, sometimes important, but always fun."

        Three times nominated for the Academy Award for directing and producing short subjects, and winner of the Directors Guild Award for Best TV Director in 1958, Richard L. Bare is presently director of the TV series Green Acres. Mr. Bare has also taught photography and directing at the University of Southern California, where, as an undergraduate, he won the Paul Muni Award for Best Amateur Film.  (Bio notes as of 1971).

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock   by Robert A. Harris & Michael S. Lasky.   H20   The Citadel Press. © 1976. 248 pages.  From the Preface:  "An entertainer at heart, Alfred Hitchcock delighted millions of TV viewers with his choice words and unabashed hamming before the camera in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By accident he had begun a custom of appearing in a cameo in each of his films. It finally became necessary for him to appear as early as possible so audiences wouldn't be distracted from the plot while watching for him. And the originality of his appearances was just one small manifestation of his devotion to understatement and his abhorrence of cliche. As he has said repeatedly, his films are not slices of life but pieces of cake -- they are made strictly for us to enjoy. He likes to tell a good story, both on the screen and off, no matter how absurd it may be, but for Hitchcock it must be dramatic, moving, and human to be worthwhile. So for him content has never been as important as the accent on technique to make the content more interesting. Hitchcock thoroughly understands his craft and its varied uses. He knows that rhythm and beauty are important but that they are worthless if not coordinated to specific purposes. He is a consummate director and an engaging personality as well, both reflected in his work and his style of living.

        "The Films of Alfred Hitchcock attempts to cover the more than fifty years he has spent as a film director. In a showcase of stills from his many films and in a text which examines the background of each production, how it was critically received and what it was about, we have tried to illustrate the genius of the artist and the humaneness of the man."

BUY IT  H20SC1 Very good. Book - no writing, tight. Some wear on cover. $15.

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock   by Patrick Humphries.   H21  Hitchcock made a scintillating string of thrillers in England, including the first British talkie Blackmail (1929) and the perennially popular The Thirty Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938).  He came to to Hollywood in 1939 and his first American film Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture.  His first decade in America was a period of technical experiment and refinement of techniques.  He worked with some of Hollywood's biggest stars and attracted serious critical acclaim as well as a huge popular following with films like Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963).  This book shows both sides of Hitchcock - the entertainer and the artist.  His films reveal a master storyteller, a technical wizard and a joker of genius.  Hitchcock reconciled complexity with commercialism, giving his films a universal and enduring appeal.  Illustrated with over 250 black-and-white and color photographs The Films of Alfred Hitchcock is a fascinating insight into both the 'Master of suspense' and his films.  Table size. © 1986 Brompton Books.192 pages.

        Patrick Humphries was born in London in 1952.  He went to Dulwich College, the same school as Boris Karloff!  After a colorful career as a brush salesman and civil servant, he now devotes all his energies to being a freelance journalist and author.  (Background info as of 1986).

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock   by Neil Sinyard.  H22  "Alfred Hitchcock made murder into an art  form.  His thrillers are the most profound and widely imitated in films, not only because of the ingenuity of the plotting but because of his remarkable understanding of violent passion.  Hitchcock reveled in the label of 'Master of Suspense', but he was master of much more than that.  Hitchcock would not talk about his films on a thematic level, preferring to reveal the methods by which he created fear in an audience.  He was certainly a technical master, experimenting with ten minute takes in Rope (1948), and with a simple but stunning montage of seeing and reacting that constitutes the entire action of Rear Window (1954).  But the peerless technique always seemed a means to an end more than the end itself.  It locked us into Hitchcock's world of dark psychosis and dual identity.  The mask of our genial host sometimes slips to reveal a romantic anguish and an almost religious obsession with guilt and punishment.  Vertigo might not make sense as a thriller, but it is one of the most unusual and mesmerizing love stories in movies. © 1986.  Gallery Books New York.  Table size. 159 pages.

        Neil Sinyard writes and lectures on films and film making.  He is the author of Billy Wilder: Journey Down Sunset Boulelvard (1979), Directors: the All-Time Greats (1984) and The Films of Richard Lester (1984).  He is also deputy film critic of the Sunday Telegraph and contributes regularly to programs at London's National Film Theatre.  (Background sketch as of 1986).

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge Film Classics).   by David Sterritt.  H23  "Sterritt's book is somewhat modest compared to the many other tomes on cinema's Grand Wizard; he tackles only a dozen or so of the films in a few unassuming essays - but he does a brilliant job, adding to the wealth of insights on such classics as Shadow of a Doubt.  His piece on Psycho is outrageous, claiming that it's actually a film about MONEY, and that money is equated with human excrement - and he proves his case! (Marion flushes her calculations down the toilet; Cassidy says, "She sat there while I dumped it out"!) The introductory essay is also very insightful, especially about Hitch's oversight of his own films.  (Sterritt claims that H's cameos are signs that he is ever-present and always monitoring his creation.) I love Hitch, I have practically every book written about him and his work, and I can recommend this book unreservedly." - Joseph W. Smith III.

Find The Director  and Other Hitchcock Games   by Thomas M. Leitch.  H24  University of Georgia Press. © 1991. 296 pages.  "Developing a model of narrative based on game theory, Thomas Leitch offers a compelling new explanation for the distinctiveness and power of Hitchcock's films. Games such as the director's famous cameo appearances, the author says, allow the audience  simultaneously to immerse itself in the world created by the narrative and to stand outside that world and appreciate the self-consciously suspenseful or comic techniques that make the movie peculiarly Hitchcockian.  A crucial aspect of the director's gameplaying, Leitch contends, emerges in the way he repeatedly redefines the rules. Leitch divides Hitchcock's career into key periods in which one set of games gives way to another, reflecting changes in the director's concerns and the conditions under which he was making movies at the time. For example, the films of his late British period (the original Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes) pivot on witty situational games that continually surprise the viewers; the American films that followed in the next decade (Rebecca, Notorious, The Paradine Case) depend more on drawing the viewer into a close identification with a central character and that character's plight. these films in turn are followed by such works as Rope and Strangers On A Train, in which cat-and-mouse games -- between characters, between Hitchcock and the characters, between Hitchcock and the audience -- are the driving force. By repeatedly redefining what it means to be a Hitchcock film, Leitch explains, the director fosters a highly ambivalent attitude toward such concerns as the value of domesticity, the loss of identity, and the need for -- and fear of -- suspenseful apprehension."

            Thomas M. Leitch is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation and Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography.  (Bio notes as of 1991).

Focus On Hitchcock   Edited by Albert J. LaValley.  H25  "The Film Focus series presents the best that has been written about the art of film and the men who created it. Combining criticism with history, biography, and analysis of technique, the volumes in the series explore the many dimensions of the film medium and its impact on modern society."  © 1972 by Prentice-Hall, A Spectrum Book. 186 pages.  "Alfred Hitchcock's ability to penetrate the primitive instincts of man to completely control his audience's emotions has made his name a legend. "He is," states LaValley, "probably the only director whose name can draw the general public into the theater."  In this volume LaValley presents the most comprehensive look at Hitchcock to date, examining the man and his films from a three-fold approach; Hitchcock on Hitchcock, the Hitchcock Controversy, and the Hitchcock films. Five articles, including both interviews and articles written by the director, reveal his own conception of himself as a film-maker. The diverse reactions of the critics - from Lindsay Anderson's praise for the early British films and dislike of the American ones to Cahiers du Cinema's worshipful admiration of the American films - are brought out in a whole section of articles on Hitchcock the director. In the third part, such masterpieces as Rear Window, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, and Psycho are examined by a variety of critics, among them James Agee, Pauline Kael, Andre Bazin, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Raymond Durgnat, and Andrew Sarris, providing a rare opportunity to see all sides of Hitchcock through the diversity of responses he evokes.

            Albert J. LaValley is Associate Professor of English at Livingston College, Rutgers University, where he devised a film studies program and teaches history of film. He is the author of Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern and editor of Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.  (Notes as of publication date, 1972).

Frenzy   a novel by Arthur La Bern.  H26   Stein and Day Publisher New York. © 1966 by Arthur La Bern. 218 pages. Formerly published as "Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square". 214 pages.  The book upon which the Hitchcock movie "Frenzy" was based.  "The cards seem stacked against Dick Bamey. He meets his ex-wife for lunch -- she's found murdered the same afternoon. A bar waitress befriends him, and she winds up dead. Both women are the victims of a sex maniac. And now the hunt is on for Bamey. This utterly gripping novel carries you from one memorable scene to another: a matrimonial agency where Ramey fills out an application form with amusing crudity; an overnight stay in a flophouse -- and, on another night, a seedy hotel room to which Ramey has taken on amorous barmaid; a meeting in a London park that leads to a cover-up flight to Paris; a second murder, which is discovered through a sack of potatoes that has legs."  

        Arthur La Bern is the author of eight previous books; his It Always Rains on Sunday became an international bestseller and also a major film. A Londoner, Mr. La Bern was for many years a Fleet Street reporter and feature writer; during World War II he was the Pacific correspondent for the London Evening Standard. A script writer today, he is a work on his tenth novel.  (Bio notes as of 1966).

The Genius of the System   Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era    By  Thomas Schatz.  H26A   Pantheon Books  New York. © 1988 by Thomas Schatz. 514 pages.  Film historian Schatz gives us the definitive book on the business and art of the Hollywood studios.  Working from industry documents, Schatz traces the development of house styles, the rise and fall of careers, and the making - and unmaking - of movies, from Frankenstein to Spellbound to Grand Hotel.  Richly illustrated and highly readable, this is the first full account of studio filmmaking in Hollywood's Golden Age.

          From the Alfred Hitchcock segment of the book (relationship with David O. Selznick and "Rebecca"):  "One aspect of Hitchcock's working method that posed a real threat to Selznick's control of the picture was the director's ability to 'cut with the camera.'  This had implications for Hitchcock's control of not just shooting but postproduction as well, and that genuinely disturbed Selznick.  The standard procedure of most directors was to shoot a 'master scene,' usually a wide shot including all the principal action in a given sequence, and then to 'cover' the sequence from various angles in medium shots, medium close-ups, and tight shots.  During the editing process the shots would be assembled and reassembled to satisfy the demands of dramatic, temporal, and spatial continuity.  Thus the amount of 'coverage' shot during production - often called 'protection,' for obvious reasons - determined the range of options available during editing.  Because Hitchcock so carefully conceived and preplanned his pictures, he shot very little coverage, getting only what he envisioned as essential to the final cut."  This made it very difficult for Selznick to edit Hitchcock's making of "Rebecca" and it drove Selznick nuts.

        Thomas Schatz  is professor of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas in Austin.  He is the author of Hollywood Genres, the definitive text on Hollywood's most popular story forms, and his writing has appeared in Wide Angle, Cineaste, and Premiere.  A regular lecturer for the American Film Institute, Schatz also writes and consults for various PBS programs on American fil and television.  He lives in Austin with his wife and three children.  (Bio notes as of 1988).

The Highly Unlikely Celebrity Cookbook   by Frank Jacobs.  H27  Illustrated by Mort Drucker.  © 1964 New American Library. 64 pages.  "As you riffle through these pages you are reasonably sure to discover that this is no normal cookbook and that it is something less than a reference work for the kitchen. Despite this disappointment, I think you should know that each of the recipes has been tested in the author's mind and that each, with the exception of those attributed to Jack Benny and Casey Stengel, will work if you really want it to. In case you have any doubt as to the authenticity of this book, I suggest you visit the homes of the celebrities featured. There you will see them proving daily their love of fine cooking as they prepare to depart for a meal at a good restaurant."  Contributing celebrities include Elizabeth Taylor, Alfred Hitchcock (Stewed Chicken), Jimmy Hoffa, Abigail Van Buren, Nikita Khruschev, Ogden Nash, Jack Benny, Grace Kelly, Barry Goldwater, Charles Goren, Ian Fleming, Carl Sandburg, Dorothy Kilgallen, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Henry Luce, Maria Callas, Ed Sullivan, Mickey Spillane, Charles de Gaulle, Howard Hughes, Casey Stengel, Cole Porter.

Hitch   The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock   by John Russell Taylor.  H28  The only authorized biography of one of the world's most private public figures.  John Russell Taylor, former film  critic for the London Times, researched and wrote this book with the full cooperation of  Hitchcock and his family, as well as various movie stars, writers, and designers who worked with Hitchcock.  As a result, though there are a number of critical studies of Hitchcock's films, this book is the only serious biography of the man himself.  The book is illustrated with over thirty photographs, including previously unpublished shots from the Hitchcock family albums.  Pantheon Books New York. © 1978. 320 pages.

        John Russell Taylor, film critic for the London Times from 1961 through 1973, is currently a professor in the University of Southern California's film division, and American cultural correspondent for the Times.  He has also written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous film magazines.  He has had nine books on theater and film published in the United States, the latest being Graham Greene on Film.  He lives in Los Angeles, California (Background info as of 1978).

HITCHCOCK    by Francois Truffaut,  with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott.   H29   "A definitive study of Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut."  A Touchstone Book Simon and Schuster New York. © 1966, 1967. 256 pages.  This extraordinary book - a unique document of cinema - is a series of dialogues between two immensely gifted men: Hitchcock himself, and his admirer and questioner, Francois Truffaut, a former critic and himself the director of such internationally famous films as Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows and Fahrenheit 451.  Together, they probe, dispute, analyze, the work of Alfred Hitchcock from the beginning of his career to the present.  With the help of 472 photographs taken directly from Hitchcock's films, the reader can understand, perhaps for the first time, the way an idea is transformed into a cinematic image, and the way a great director imposes on a given story the imprint of his own personality.  In this book, the complex art of the film is made clear by two masters of the medium, but above all, the genius of Alfred Hitchcock is brilliantly illumined.

Hitchcock and Homosexuality   by Theodore Price.  H30  © 1992 The Scarecrow Press, USA & London.  416 pages. Alfred Hitchcock's "50-year obsession with Jack The Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute - A Psychoanalytic View."  Chapters include  1. The Homosexual Triptych: Murder!, Rope, Strangers on a Train and The Paradine Case.  2. Hitchcock and Homosexuality: Film by film.  3. Hidden Meanings in Vertigo.  4. Hidden Meanings in Rebecca.  5. Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute: The Birds.  6. Hidden Meanings in Marnie.  7. The Father-Daughter Theme: The Father/Hitch, Daughter/Pat "Trilogies," and Psycho.  8. Hidden Meanings in I Confess.  9. The German Silent Films of the Weimar Era as Clues to Hitchcock's films: Jack the Ripper and Homosexuality.  10. Four Special Sequences as Clues to the Homosexuality Component: Strangers on a Train, The Paradine Case, To Catch a Thief, and Frenzy.  11. Hitchcock and Homosexuality: Torn Curtain.

Hitchcock and Selznick   by Leonard J. Leff.  H31  The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood.  Hitchcock and Selznick is the story of one of the oddest partnerships in Hollywood history, the union of a reticent, overweight Englishman with a flair for striking detail and a penchant for the perverse, and a dynamic movie mogul with a keen eye for successful entertainment on the grand scale.  It began in 1938, when producer David O. Selznick agreed to bring director Alfred Hitchcock from England, where he was already gaining widespread acclaim for his "little thrillers," and it resulted in the making of such masterpieces as Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious.  Hitchcock was softspoken and meticulous; Selznick was confrontational and chronically disorganized.   They were, moreover, two geniuses with wholly different approaches to filmmaking.  The sparks that flew between them over the next eight years ignited into some of Hitchcock's most memorable achievements, but made collaboration impossible in the end.  Drawing on unpublished documents, early drafts of script treatments, and humorous production anecdotes -- and including a wealth of previously unseen photographs -- Leonard Leff has written a book for specialist and layman alike, a fascinating behind-the-scenes portrait not only of two great Hollywood figures but of the film industry itself.  "Despite the persistent legend that producers always stifled the talents of those artists in their employ, Hollywood's past is littered with examples to the contrary. Hitchcock and Selznick is a compelling chapter in that largely ignored story. " - Stephen Harvey, New York Times Book Review.  University of California Press. © 1987 by Leonard J. Leff. 383 pages.  

        Leonard Leff, who teaches film and literature in the English department at Oklahoma State University, has published three books as well as essays in PMLA, The Georgia Review, and Premiere.  Hitchcock and Selznick was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and recipient of the British Film Institute Book Award. (Bio notes as of 1987).

Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie   by Tony Lee Moral.  (Pre-Publication - August 2002).  The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series #95.  240 pages.  "The name Alfred Hitchcock is synonymous with great film.  Now his most controversial film - Marnie - is explored in detail from its conception to its reception and to the influence it has exerted over the generation since its release.  Marnie's merit is the source of great dispute; while some critics see it as Hitchcock's last masterpiece, others view it as the beginning of his artistic decline.  Using interviews with the production team, archived material, and Hitchcock's personal notes, author Tony Lee Moral delves into this dichotomy, as well as the cultural and political factors governing the film's production.

           Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie makes a strong case for the film's relevance in today's society. With careful examination of the notorious rape scene and the overwhelming atmosphere of censorship predominant at the time, Moral investigates the causes of Marnie's critical failure and explains why those issues actually serve to make the film stronger.  Chapters chronicle the making of Marnie through every stage of the production, with biographical sections on the author, director, leading lady, cast, and crew.  Of particular interest is the attention paid to Hitchcock's 'psychological' directing style, the use of conspicuously fake backdrops through the movie, and the consideration of the film from a feminist perspective.

            In many ways, Marnie is the antithesis of Hitchcock's obsession with control and the loss thereof.  For a perfectionist who valued order above all else, the production of Marnie was fraught with personal failures for its director, who lost not only public acceptance, but also control over the final product.  The author addresses Hitchcock's fears in light of several contributing issues, and comes away with a work ideal for film scholars and students, film buffs, and any fan of the man himself."

            Tony Lee Moral has worked for 6 years as a producer for BBC Television and 2 years in the same capacity for National Geographic.  He is experienced in all aspects of film and television production, screen writing, and editing and has written numerous articles on film.  "Tony Lee Moral has conducted a definitive investigation into the making and meaning of Marnie, which, for fans and scholars of Hitchcock, remains the suspense master's most enigmatic, controversial film." - Patrick McGilligan, author, Alfred Hitchcock: Darkness and Light (forthcoming).  "Who better than a film lover trained in zoology as well as psychology to write a book on Hitchcock's great, if controversial, Marnie?  Tony Lee Moral fits the bill perfectly." - Ken Mogg, Editor, The Macguffin.

Hitchcock At Work   by Bill Krohn.  H32  A comprehensive, behind-the-scenes examination of the work of director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). fully illustrated throughout in color and black & white, this book examines all of the director's career, from the early films made in the UK in the 20s and 30s, to his move to Hollywood where he became co-producer as well as director of his films. It therefore provides an overview of his movies as well as being a visual celebration of one of the world's most renowned directors. Many of the illustrations are published here for the first time and include film stills, shots from film sets, storyboards and reproductions of Hitchcock's annotated scripts. The book also includes a complete filmography.  © 2000.  Phaidon Press. 288 pages.  "In 1982 I organized a round-table discussion at Universal with some of Alfred Hitchcock's main collaborators on The Birds. Hearing them talk about the amazing adventure of making that groundbreaking film, I began to get a sense of Hitchcock seen through the eyes of his closest collaborators, and the man they were describing wasn't the man I thought I knew. Hitchcock at Work is my attempt to get closer to the filmmaker I encountered for the first time that day, and to understand him better." - Author Bill Krohn.

Hitchcock Becomes Hitchcock : The British Years   by Paul M. Jensen.  H33  Alfred Hitchcock's comments in his frequent interviews have encouraged many critics to assume that the director's true career began in 1934 with the Man Who Knew Too Much, the first in a long, almost unbroken string of thrillers. Then, having defined Hitchcock as a specialist, these critics select from his earlier work only those films that anticipate his later career: The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), Murder! (1930), and Number Seventeen (1932). Such a perspective, mired in the confidence of hindsight, results in a highly misleading view of the director, one that dismisses his 12 other early features - eight silent and four sound - and implies that he was merely marking time until his "true" creative personality emerged. Hitchcock was, in fact, a major director from the very start of his career in 1925 and for 10 years he made substantial, mature features that reveal an impressive consistency in content and form. This book examines those all important films.  © 2000. Midnight Marquee Printers. 224 pages.

         Paul M. Jensen is a Professor at the State University of New York at Oneonta. A member of the Communications Arts Department, he teaches courses in film history, appreciation and production. After graduating from SUNY - Albany, Mr. Jensen received his M.F.A. in Film, Radio and Television from Columbia University. He is the author of four books - The Cinema of Fritz Lang (1969), Boris Karloff and His Films (1974), The Men Who Made The Monsters (1996) and Hitchcock Becomes Hitchcock.  (Bio notes as of 2000).

Hitchcock: Centenary Essays   by S. Ishii-Gonzales, Richard Allen, Sam Gonzalez.  H34  "No director has so captured the attention of scholars as Alfred Hitchcock, whose 50-year carreer spans virtually the entire history of cinema. These essays provide a unique purview of the field, engaging with Hitchcock's characteristic formal and aesthetic preoccupations; his relationship with modernism, politics and issues of sexuality; and his use of television and romance."  © 1999. British Film Institute (BFI). 288 pages.  "If you're looking for more information about the films, versatility, and lasting impact of Alfred Hitchcock, this book should sate your hunger. Acclaimed critics and theorists like Slavoj Zizek, Peter Wollen, Brigitte Peucker, William Rothman, Susan White, Raymond Bellour, and Lee Edelman contribute essays on famous films like Vertigo, Psycho, and The Thirty-Nine Steps, as well as lesser-known works like Stage Fright, Rope, Foreign Correspondent, and Marnie." - Raphael Shargel.

Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation   by Robert E Kapsis.  H34B  University of Chicago Press, 1992. Paperback.  From the beginning of his career, Alfred Hitchcock wanted to be considered an artist. Although his thrillers were immensely popular, and Hitchcock himself courted reviewers, he was, for many years, regarded as no more than a master craftsman. By the 1960s, though, critics began calling him an artist of unique vision and gifts. What happened to make Hitchcock's reputation as a true innovator and singular talent?

    Through a close examination of Hitchcock's personal papers, scripts, production notes, publicity files, correspondence, and hundreds of British and American reviews, Robert Kapsis traces Hitchcock's changing critical fortunes. Vertigo, for instance, was considered a flawed film when first released; today it is viewed by many as the signal achievement of a great director. According to Kapsis, this dramatic change occurred because the making of the Hitchcock legend was not solely dependent on the quality of his films. Rather, his elevation to artist was caused by a successful blending of self-promotion, sponsorship by prominent members of the film community, and, most important, changes in critical theory which for the first time allowed for the idea of director as auteur.

    Kapsis also examines the careers of several other filmmakers who, like Hitchcock, have managed to cross the line that separates craftsman from artist, and shows how Hitchcock's legacy and reputation shed light on the way contemporary reputations are made. In a chapter about Brian De Palma, the most renowned thriller director since Hitchcock, Kapsis explores how Hitchcock's legacy has affected contemporary work in - and criticism of - the thriller genre.

    Filled with fascinating anecdotes and intriguing excerpts, and augmented by interviews with Hitchcock's associates, this thoroughly documented and engagingly written book will appeal to scholars and film enthusiasts alike.

    "Required reading for Hitchcock scholars... scrupulously researched, invaluable material for those who continue to ask: what made the master tick?" - Anthony Perkins

Robert E Kapsis is Professor of Sociology and Film Studies, Department of Sociology, Queens College, Flushing, New York (CUNY) and teaches courses on research methodology, mass communication and popular culture, sociology of the movies, the American gangster film, New York in the movies, and on Hitchcock and his legacy.  He is also on the faculty of the Film Studies Certificate Program, Graduate Center (CUNY), and has taught film at New School University. Kapsis has appeared in two television documentaries on Hitchcock (including "Dial 'H' For Hitchcock: The Genius Behind the Showman," and consulted on a third one produced for the BBC.  Away from the rat race, Kapsis enjoys playing the piano, listening to classical music and jazz, and hanging out with his family.  He is married, has two "grown" sons, and two granddaughters.

HITCHCOCK IN PRIME TIME   Edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. & Martin Harry Greenberg  H35,  with an introduction by Henry Slesar.  © 1985. Avon Books. 356 pages.  "For ten seasons Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour kept viewers tuned to tales that chilled them and thrilled them with unsurpassed TV entertainment. Introduced by the grand master of mystery himself, each show promised a story whose surprise ending became as much a trademark as the great director's famous profile.  Now this superb collection presents the best stories aired during that unforgettable decade.       

        Adapting works written by top contemporary mystery authors, the Hitchcock television programs dramatized outstanding published fiction to create the haunting shows so many of us remember with a delicious shiver. From the opening 1955-56 season, with Ray Bradbury's eerie And So Died Riabouchinska where a ventriloquist becomes so obsessed with his talking doll that he believes it's real - and perhaps she is - to the final show before the series ended in 1965, Edward Hoch's Winter Run, a spine-tingling drama of a policeman whose trigger finger points to his own ruin, these are stories as gripping to read as they were to watch.

        But more than an anthology of televised fiction, each selection is followed by a listing of the original cast, scriptwriter, and director for that episode - and a commentary about the production by many of the authors themselves. Seasoned with Henry Slesar's inside look at the Hitchcock series as it was being shot in Hollywood, Hitchcock In Prime Time gives us a rare opportunity to rediscover this classic mystery program - and the unique genius of Alfred Hitchcock that created it."  Hitchcock suspense from  Ray Bradbury, Stanley Ellin, Cornell Woolrich, Richard Deming, Thomas Burke, Fredric Brown, Clark Howard, Lawrence Treat, Henry Slesar, Harold Q. Masur, Harry Muheim, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, John D. MacDonald, Charles Runyon, Robert Bloch, Ellery Queen, Jack Ritchie, James Yaffe, Helen Nielsen, Edward D. Hoch.

Hitchcock On Hitchcock   Edited by Sidney Gottlieb.   H36  Selected Writings and Interviews.  "A treasure for the Hitchcock connoisseur." - American Cinematographer.  "From beginning to end, pure wicked delight." - Lawrence Schubert, Detour Magazine.  University of California Press. © 1995. 339 pages.  Groupings: A Life in Films; Actors, Actresses, Stars; Thrills, Suspense, the Audience; Film Production; Technique, Style, and Hitchcock at Work.  Gathered here are Alfred Hitchcock's reflections on his own life and work.  In this ample selection of largely unknown and formerly inaccessible interviews and essays, Hitchcock provides an enlivening commentary on a career that spanned decades and transformed the history of the cinema.  He brings the same exuberance and originality to his writing as he did to his films.  Wry, thoughtful, witty -- as well as brilliantly informative -- this selection reveals another side of the most renowned filmmaker of our time.  "Simply having this much out-of-the-way material at one's fingertips makes this a must for Hitchcock scholars... This is an editing job worthy of the director himself." - Ina Ray Hark, Hitchcock Annual.

Hitchcock Poster Art  From the Mark H. Wolff Collection.  Edited by Tony Nourmand and Mark H. Wolff.   H37   The Overlook Press . Woodstock New York. © 1999. 127 pages.  "Alfred Hitchcock's style was unmistakable, and his films are now more than ever revered the world over - any list of the greatest films of all time is sure to include titles like Psycho, Dial M for Murder, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. For the Centenary of the director's birth, renowned Hitchcock specialist Mark Wolff and Tony Nourmand, the owner of the Reel Poster Gallery, offer this extraordinary look at the way Hitchcock's influence reached even to the art of graphic design.

        In full color layouts, Wolff and Nourmand survey the promotional art - including posters, lobby cards, and other promotional materials - of Hitchcock's entire career, including material so rare that the copy photographed for this book is the only one known to have survived. Among the treasures displayed: an American poster for Woman to Woman, the 1923 film for which Hitchcock wrote the screenplay and served as assistant director and art director; a poster for the first film he directed, The Pleasure Garden of 1925; and material from classic films like Strangers on a Train and To Catch a Thief. The collection consists of at least one item for each of the 39 movies Hitchcock directed and includes not only art from America and Britain, but also Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, and Spain, among others. Hitchcock Poster Art is an indispensable reference for all enthusiasts of Hitchcock and film in general, providing a fascinating look at the international scope of the master's influence and appeal."

        Mark H. Wolff, from whose collection many of the featured posters come, has been avidly collecting Hitchcockiana for over 22 years and is the proud owner of many unique posters.  Tony Nourmand, the owner of the Reel Poster Gallery in London, is a recognized authority on film posters and travels the world in search of rare and desirable material. Together with Graham Marsh, who also designed this book, he is the editor of Film Posters of the 60s and Film Posters of the 70s.  (Bio notes as of 1999).

The Hitchcock Romance   by Lesley Brill.   H38  Was Alfred Hitchcock a cynical trifler with his audience's emotions, as he liked to pretend? Or was he a profoundly humane artist? Most commentators leave Hitchcock's self-assessment unquestioned, but this book shows that his movies convey an affectionate, hopeful understanding of human nature and the redemptive possibilities of love. Lesley Brill discusses Hitchcock's work as a whole and examines in detail twenty-two films, from perennial favorites like North by Northwest to neglected masterpieces like Rich and Strange.  312 pages. © 1991. Princeton University Press.  

Hitchcock - The First Forty-Four Films   By Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol  H39  (Translated by Stanley Hochman - Ungar Film Library).  © 1979 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 178 pages.  "Here at last is the book on Hitchcock - the underground classic of film criticism that has shaped all subsequent studies of this cinematic giant. It was first published in France in 1957, and its authors were two young contributors to Cahiers du Cinema, the influential film periodical. They were both soon to become directors of international renown."  

            Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol analyze chronologically all of Hitchcock's films - "the first forty-four" - spotlighting recurrent motifs, the most famous of which is the "exchange." with keen cinematic insight they show the slow growth of a varied but unified body of work - vital to an understanding of Hitchcock's later achievements.  Besides the now recognized masterpieces - The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Notorious, Rear Window, among others - Rohmer and Chabrol have enlightening comments on such earlier works as The Lodger, Blackmail, and Murder! as well as the later much-neglected Under Capricorn, and Hitchcock's only "screwball" comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.  An advance review in Library Journal sums it up: "Now finally available to English readers in a crisp and engaging translation, this seminal study of Hitchcock remains a classic deserving inclusion in all film collections. Highly recommended." 

        Eric Rohmer is best known here for his justly praised films The Marquise of O-, My Night at Maud's, and Claire's Knee. His Perceval was released in 1978.  Claude Chabrol has built a list of distinguished films, among them Les Cousins, Le Boucher, La Femme - Infidele, and This Man Must Die.  (Bio notes as of 1979).

Hitchcock's America   by Jonathan Freedman & Richard H. Millington.  H40  © 1999. Oxford University Press. 224 pages.  Hitchcock's American films are not only some of the most admired works of world cinema; they also offer some of our most acute responses to the changing shape of American society in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. The contributors to this anthology - scholars of film, history, and literature - show how famous films like Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window along with more obscure ones like The Trouble With Harry and Family Plot register the ideologies and insurgencies, the normative assumptions and cultural alternatives, that shaped those tumultuous decades. The Hitchcock that emerges in this volume is not merely the inspired technician and master of abnormal psychology that critics have justly hailed. He is also a cultural critic of remarkable insight and undeniable prescience.

Hitchcock's Films   by Robin Wood.  H41   © 1965 & 1969 by Robin Wood.  "A complete critical guide to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Fully Illustrated."  Part of the International Film Guide Series.  Castle Books, New York. 204 pages.  "Alfred Hitchcock's more than fifty films have given him the reputation of being the master of suspense. Yet to the film buff, Hitchcock's films are more than mere suspense-thrillers. They are examples of "pure cinema." For Hitchcock not only makes his audience "see" -- he makes them "feel." It is for this reason -- his unusual and total technique -- that Hitchcock deserves serious study by every student of cinema art." - Robin Wood.  "Hitchcock has expressed repeatedly his belief in pure cinema"; to appreciate his films it is necessary that we grasp the nature of the medium. We are concerned here with much more than is normally meant by the word "technique".  This is the widely acclaimed groundbreaking volume on Alfred Hitchcock.  Originally written in 1965 and enlarged in 1969.  After the Introduction movies treated include Strangers On A Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie and Torn Curtain.  Also included is a Filmography of Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock's Films Revisited   by Robin Wood.  H42  "This is really two books in one. It contains the entire text of Robin Wood's groundbreaking Hitchcock's Films and supplements it with articles and commentaries on Hitchcock that Wood wrote from the time of that book's publication until today. Tracing the trajectory of Hitchcock's career, Hitchcock's Films Revisited also allows us to follow the intellectual and emotional development of one of the cinema's major critics. Wood's close readings are always revelatory and exciting, and this volume contains probably the best single essay ever written on a Hitchcock movie, Wood's analysis of Vertigo."  © 1989. Columbia University Press. 395 pages.  "It is impossible not to be impressed by the richness, justice, and eloquence of Wood's readings like Rope, Notorious, Under Capricorn, and The Man Who Knew Too Much... If there are still any doubters about Hitchcock's central place in the canon of 20th century artists, they should address themselves to this wonderful study, where they will find the case for the defense magisterially outlined and argued with sustained, fiery conviction." - London Times Saturday Review.

Hitchcock : Suspense, Humour and Tone  (Distributed for the British Film Institute).  by Susan Smith.  H43  Susan Smith analyzes the key elements of suspense, humor and tone across the whole of the director's career. Hitchcock is an accessible and important new study of the director's distinctive style.  © 2001. Indiana University Press. 162 pages.  

        Susan Smith is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sunderland. She is a contributor to Slfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, edited by Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales (BFI, 1999).  (Bio notes as of 2001).

Hitchcock - The Murderous Gaze    by William Rothman.  H44  "No reader of this challenging book will ever again view a Hitchcock film in quite the same way.  By a close analysis of five representative films documented with more than 600 frame enlargements, Rothman shows how Hitchcock composed his films, and how each frame bears his imprint."  "Rothman's book is the best treatment of Hitchcock to date.  It addresses what is unique about Hitchcock's films... (in order) to establish the centrality of Hitchcock to the art of making films... Rothman's book is clear, passionate, and witty" - American Film.  Harvard University Press Cambridge Massachusetts. © 1982. 371 pages. Films studied in this work are The Lodger, Murder!, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Shadow Of A Doubt, Psycho.

Hitchcock's Notebooks    by Dan Auiler.  H45  "An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock."  Avon Books New York. © 1999. 567 pages.  With the complete cooperation of the Hitchcock estate and unprecedented access to the director's notes, files, and archives, Dan Auiler takes you from the very beginnings of story creation to the master's final touches during post-production.  Actual production notes from Hitchcock's masterpieces join detailed interviews with key production personnel, including writers, actors and actresses, and his personal assistant of more than thirty years.  Delicious tidbits---  On Suspicion: "My dear, George, please do not call Before The Fact, Suspicion.  It is such a cheap and dull title and makes it sound like a B-picture.  What about calling it Johnnie"?  On being the Master of Suspense:  Mary sent me the London notices of I Confess - not too bad on the whole.  By God, I am typed though, what with the label "thriller" and the search for "suspense."  Chapter headings:  Beginnings, Building The Screenplay, Preparing The Visual, Production Gallery, Putting It All Together: Postproduction, Kaleidoscope and Other Dreams Deferred, Fade Out.

        Dan Auiler  is the author of Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, the Los Angeles Times bestseller which The Washington Post called "savvy and mesmerizing" and Entertainment Weekly awarded an "A-."  He began as a film critic for a Texas weekly and has taught cinema and drama courses for more than a decade.  He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.  (Bio notes as of 1999).

Hollywood Anecdotes   by Paul F. Boller, Jr.  H46   An entertaining treasury of anecdotes, essays, and stories -- from Hollywood's heyday and today.  Ballantine Books New York. © 1987 Paul F. Boller, Jr., and Ronald L. Davis. 460 pages.  "Hollywood - the lush, glittering movie capital of the world... a fantasy-filled, dream-inspired state of mind.  Since the first flickering of the crude nickelodeons, movies have captured the imagination and defined the American spirit as no other entertainment ever could.  Year after year, page after delightful page, Hollywood Anecdotes travels through those golden years of moviemaking and movie watching right up until today.  Here are fascinating essays, wonderfully classic, and first-time-told tales on such topics as: Studio Heads - Producers - Directors - Writers - Editors - Composers - Craftspeople - Film genres - B Movies - Life on and off the set - Publicity and Promotion - Theaters - Audiences - Censorship - and more...  Whether you read it from cover to cover, or just dip in for a heavenly sample, Hollywood Anecdotes takes you behind the glittering silver screen for a unique and revealing glimpse into glorious Hollywood and her shining denizens."  

        Many pages were dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock - a selection:  "Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, was a highly technical director, meticulous in planning every move for his actors, sketching each scene in advance for camera angles.  "When the screenplay is finished," Hitchcock often said, "the picture is finished. Because from then on it's merely a matter of putting it on the screen." He shot a film so sparingly that it couldn't be edited except the way he shot it. Part of his genius was that he forced viewers to use their imaginations; audiences were never sure what they saw. Personally Hitchcock was enigmatic, ranging from sadist to sweet, gentle fat man. "Emotionally," actress Tippi Hedren claimed, "he had all kinds of frustrations and neuroses.... He thought of himself as looking like Cary Grant. That's touch, to think of yourself one way and look another." time and again he put his heroines through trials that bordered on cruelty, taking a self-assured actress and deliberately breaking her down."

        Paul F. Boller, Jr., Ph.D., author of Presidential Anecdotes, Presidential Campaigns, Presidential Wives, and other books, has been a film buff all his life.  In addition to teaching American intellectual and cultural history at Texas Christian University and elsewhere, he enjoys playing the piano for revivals of old films from the Silent Era.   Ronald L. Davis, Ph.D., author of a three-volume history of American music, heads the Oral History Program on the Performing arts at Southern Methodist University.  He has taped more than 450 interviews with film, stage, and concert performers, all of which provide the basis for much of this book.

Hollywood Babylon   by Kenneth Anger.   H45B   © 1975 Kenneth Anger. Straight Arrow Books - Distributed by Simon and Schuster. 292 pages.  "Hollywood Babylon is much more than a Who's Who of the movie capital. Its basic thrust is Who did What to Whom - and When and Where - and how much the piper had to be paid. Through these illustrated pages flitter and glitter, whirl and twirl, in public paradise and private hell, the faces and forms of fantasy figures - who may have been born in Squeedunk, Iowa as Norma Jean Slurp, Bertram Wartfish, and the like but who as Movie Stars were pressed into the service of our dreams by the great Hollywood Studios, the variegated caterpillars emerging as Jean Harlow, Ramon Navarro, Wally Reid, Rudy Valentino, Mabel Normand or Lana Turner. This fascinating books is not merely another expose, rather an affectionate and bittersweet backward glance at the fabled and foibled stars in their orbits, its intermittent black humor nearly always tinged by rose-colored glasses. Yet Hollywood Babylong is not nostalgia. Originally written in French and published in Paris in an edition long since out of print, the book was conceived years before the current nostalgia craze engulfed us in a neurotic flight from harsh realities. 

        "Kenneth Anger's first public appearance on the Hollywood scene was in the role of the little Changeling Prince in the Warner's Max Reinhardt superproduction of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Today, in both Europe and the United States, Anger is considered the most original, influential, and truly independent of all American film artists. From Fireworks (made when he was still a teenager) through Scorpio Rising, which branded an entire generation with its white hot and blood red images, to his current Work in Progress, Lucifer Rising, Anger has become, as Jonas Mekas put it, "one of the most complex personalities working in cinema today. Whatever he does, be it cinema or life, he does it fully, to the bottom... Kenneth Anger, the True Cosmic Explorer."

Hollywood Babylon II   by Kenneth Anger.   H45C   © 1984 Kenneth Anger. Published by E. P. Dutton, New York. 331 pages.  "Here, at last, is the all-new sequel to Kenneth Anger's controversial, classic movie book, Hollywood Babylon. Here is more down-and-dirty Tattletale Talk from Tinseltown, illustrated with hundreds of hitherto unseen photographs, by the man who turned filmland gossip into an art form.  In Hollywood Babylon II you will read about "Closely Watched Blondes" which reveals some naughty going-on between Alfred Hitchcock and one of his favorite stars, Grace Kelly. Not merely another expose, Hollywood Babylon II, like its famous predecessor, is a bittersweet glance, past and present, at the fabled and foibled stars in their orbits. The dazzling pictures alone are worth the price of admission."

Hollywood Directors 1941-1976   edited by Richard Koszarski.   H45E   © 1977 Oxford University Press New York. 426 pages.  When Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood to film Citizen Kane he discovered a town still top-heavy with glamour. Legendary stars looked down from every screen, and fabulous moguls ruled over a studio system that had been growing in strength for two decades or more.  But even as Welles made his first wondrous four of the RKO lot the handwriting was on the wall. In the decades since, Hollywood has become a staging area for multinational talent packages, and the only real stars are inlaid along the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard.  This books is a history of these crucial years told by those who made it happen: the directors who led the cinema revolution as well as those who perished in it. The questions, opinions, fears and desires are those written down in the heat of battle by fifty of Hollywood's most outspoken directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Kubrick, Renoir, and Capra. Their topics range from Ben Hur to B-pictures, from cartoons to film critics.

        The Alfred Hitchcock part of the book is "Production Methods Compared", reprinted from The American Cinematographer, May 1949.  Excerpt:  "The filming of each picture is a problem in itself. The solution to such a problem is an individual thing, not the application of a mass solution to all problems.  Something I do today makes me feel that the methods I used yesterday are out of date, and yet tomorrow I may be faced with a problem which I can best solve by using yesterday's methods. That is why I try to make my first rule of direction - flexibility.  Next, I try to make it a rule that nothing should be permitted to interfere with the story.  The making of a picture is nothing but the telling of a story, and the story - it goes without saying - must be a good one.  I don't try to put onto the screen what is called 'a slice of life' because people can get all the slices of life they want out on the pavement in front of the cinemas and they don't have to pay for them."

        Richard Koszarski has a Ph.D. in Cinema from New York University. He teaches film history at the School of Visual Arts, and is the editor of Hollywood Director, 1914-1940.  (Bio notes as of 1977).

Interviews With Film Directors   by Andrew Sarris.   H45D   Candid conversations on the art of film with forty key film-makers. Edited, and with an introductory essay on the relation of the director to cinema art. Avon Books. © 1967 by Andrew Sarris. 557 pages.  The directors: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Peter Brook, Luis Bunuel, Claude Chabrol, George Cukor, Clive Donner, Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Buster Keaton, Akira Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, David Lean, Joseph Losey, Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian, Max Ophuls, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sam Peckinpah, Abraham Polonsky, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Satyajit Ray, Leni Riefenstahl, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, Roberto Rossellini, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Preston Sturges, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles.  "More inside information on film directing than has ever been previously assembled in a single volume. The Interviewers' exceptional familiarity with the medium visibly stimulates the director to greater articulateness about his craft." - Film News.  Sample of a question and answer from the Hitchcock segment: "You're going back to using big stars?" "Not necessarily. Sometimes I think big stars are useful but today they don't help a picture any more. They help it if it's good, but if it's not good the public won't go." "And Psycho showed you could get along without them..." "Yes".

Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism   by Paula Marantz Cohen.  H46  © 1995 The University Press of Kentucky. USA.   This provocative study traces Alfred Hitchcock's long directorial career from Victorianism to postmodernism.  Paula Cohen considers a sampling of Hitchcock's best films - Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho - as well as some of his more uneven ones - Rope, The Wrong Man, Topaz - and makes connections between his evolution as a filmmaker and trends in the larger society.  Drawing on a number of methodologies including feminism, psychoanalysis, and family systems, the author provides an insightful look at the paradox of a Victorian era.  His career, she argues, can be seen as an attempt to balance "the two faces of Victorianism": the masculine legacy of law and hierarchy and the feminine legacy of feeling and imagination.  Cohen argues that Hitchcock's films reflect his Victorian legacy and serve as a map for ideological trends.  She charts his development from his British period through his classic Hollywood years into his later phase, tracing a conceptual evolution that corresponds to an evolution in cultural identity - one that builds on a Victorian inheritance and ultimately discards it.

        Paula Marantz Cohen, professor of humanities and communications at Drexel University, is the author of The Daughter's Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel and many articles on literature and culture.  (Background info as of 1995).

It's Only A Movie   Alfred Hitchcock a personal biography   by Charlotte Chandler.  H46-B  © 2005  Applause Theatre & Cinema Books. USA.   I remember Ingrid Bergman coming up to me in a terrible state," Alfred Hitchcock told me.  "Worried, miserable, high-strung, romantic, idealistic, sensitive, emotional.  Dear Ingrid.  She took life very seriously, and fiction even more seriously.  She said, her voice pregnant with feeling, almost trembling, ' Hitch, there's something I must ask you about my part.  I don't feel it.  I can't find my motivation...'
    "I said to her, 'Ingrid, fake it.  It's only a movie.'
    "That seemed to satisfy her, but then, a few weeks later, Ingrid was back standing to the side, shyly waiting for me to be free.  I turned to beckon her over.  It was interesting, because Ingrid is many things, but shy isn't one of them.  I asked her what was bothering her.
    "'Oh, Hitch, I've been thinking...'
    "I thought, 'Oh, dear.'  I said, 'Please go on.'
    "She did.  I couldn't have stopped her.
    "'I've been feeling that what I do isn't worthwhile.  Movies.  Being an actress.  I'm not doing enough to help people.  Of all the worthwhile things you can do with your lifie, I feel I should be doing something more.'
    "'Well, Ingrid,' I said, 'have you thought about going to a hospital and emptying bedpans?'
    "When the actors were taking themselves too seriously," Hitchcock told me, "I hoped the light touch would give them some perspective.  I found it rather successful.  There was only one person on whom my little diversionary technique didn't work.
    "Whenever I found myself getting overwrought over problems with one of my films, I would say to myself, 'Remember, It's only a movie.'  It never worked.  I was never able to convince myself."

        Charlotte Chandler's  first book, Hello, I Must Be Going, was a national bestseller about Groucho Marx. Her Second book, The ultimate Seduction, includes conversations with Mae West, Tennessee Williams, Henry Fonda, Henry Moore, and others. The Tennessee Williams section became the basis of the successful stage play, Confessions of a Nightingale, and The Penguin Book of Interviews selected her section on Mae West as one of the best interviews of all time. Her next book, I, Fellini, was selected as a New York Times notable book and has been published in more than 25 foreign editions. Her book Nobody's Perfect: Bill Wilder, A Personal Biography (Applause) has been optioned for a Broadway play and her latest work is the acclaimed The Girl Who Walked Home Along: Bette Davis, A Personal Biography. She lives in New York City.

Memo From David O. Selznick   Selected and edited by Rudy Behlmer  H47,  with an introduction by S.N. Behrman.  © 1972 by Selznick Properties.  "The creation of Gone With the Wind and other motion-picture classics - as revealed in the producer's private letters, telegrams, memorandums, and autobiographical remarks."  David O. Selznick was one of Hollywood's towering figures for over a quarter of a century.  His films - notably Rebecca, The Prisoner of Zenda, A Star Is Born, A Tale of Two Cities, Intermezzo, Since You Went Away, and above all Gone with the Wind - remain enduring testimony to his taste, showmanship, and vision.

        For years, his impassioned and eloquent memorandums to directors, writers, stars, and studio executives have been as famous as his films, noted for their rage and impatience as much as for their wit. Now, the most colorful and revealing of the legendary producer's memos, letters, and telegrams, skillfully selected and edited by Rudy Behlmer, have been gathered together in one volume.  Helping make this work a rich and immediate experience for the reader are Selznick's autobiographical remarks, culled from personal letters sent through the years to friends and interviewers and her woven throughout the text.

        Rudy Behlmer   has had a strong interest in the history and evolution of motion pictures since chidhood, when he began directing and photographing his own miniature dramas.  Beginning in 1952, he directed television shows and, following "Movies' Golden Age," a TV special he wrote, produced, and directed in 1961, Behlmer started researching and writing articles on various aspects of film history.  One - a definitive career piece on David O. Selznick - led to his work as editor of this book, the contents of which he selected from over two thousand file boxes. For the past nine years a commercial film producer in Los Angeles, Behlmer has been a weekly lecturer on film at the Art Center College of Design there for six years and a long-time member of the Directors Guild of America.  He also recently served as co-author of The Films of Errol Flynn.  (Bio notes as of 1972).

BUY IT  H47HC1 Excellent condition. Mint. $15.

The Men Who Made The Movies   by Richard Schickel.  H47B   © 1975 The Educational Broadcasting Corporation.  Atheneum Books. 308 pages.  "The Men Who Made the Movies evolved from the memorable television series that was named by the New York Times as one of the outstanding television programs of 1973.  Eight directors were encouraged by Schickel to reminisce about their working lives, which spanned the most intriguing decades of American film. In speaking with them, he found in these men a special quality: "They felt in their bones the character and quality of a vanished America." There was something valuable to be learned from them, not merely about the cinema, but about the conduct of life. They would, as Schickel says, be worthy of study even "if they had been engaged in the manufacture of widgets, let alone something as intrinsically interesting as movies."  Each director created a canon of work that even today sustains critical analysis without sacrificing popular appeal. Moreover, each maintained his artistic integrity while working in an atmosphere generally credited with ruining rather than nurturing talent - Hollywood.

        "The format of these interviews allows the directors to talk about preplanned issues without interruption. And the topics discussed deal with the directors' lives and attitudes rather than with the technical nature of their work; in fact, any questions which seemed too specifically technical were often greeted by them with snorts of contempt. The book is rich in behind-the-scenes stories about such modern classics as It Happened One Night, Dawn Patrol, The Champ, Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Roaring Twenties, as well as in anecdotes about the lives of men who not only "made the movies" but who made Hollywood the glamour capital of the world.  Interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, Raoul Walsh, Frank Capra, Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, William A. Wellman, King Vidor."

        Richard Schickel was the producer of the television series, The Men Who Made the Movies, which was nominated for an Emmy and named one of the outstanding television programs of 1973 by the New York Times. He was the movie critic at Life magazine from 1965 until lits demise in 1972 and is currently a reviewer of films, television and other matters for Time. In addition, Mr. Schickel is the author or coauthor of thirteen books, including the highly acclaimed The Disney Version, His Picture in the Papers and The Stars, has written extensively for periodicals and lectured in the history of art at Yale University. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the novelist Julia Whedon, and their two children, Erika and Jessica.  (Bio notes as of 1975).

The Movies Of Alfred Hitchcock    By Judy Arginteanu.   H47F   © 1994 Lerner Publications Company. 80 pages.  "Alfred Hitchcock, the 'master of suspense,' directed some of the scariest movies of all time. With his famous cameo appearances in his films and the popular television show 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents,' Hitchcock became a familiar face to millions of fans.  In this book, film critic Judy Arginteanu examines Hitchcock's amazing career, starting with his early British films, such as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, and moving on to his American thrillers, including Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt. She also discusses his masterpieces North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds.  You'll learn about the themes Hitchcock explored in his movies as well as techniques he used to create suspense. Discover why Hitchcock -- more than any director before or since -- could keep movie audiences on the edge of their seats."

        Judy Arginteanu writes film and art reviews for several Minnesota publications. She has worked as a copy editor, translator, and French teacher. She holds a master's degree in French literature from the University of Minnesota and has studied film theory and art history at the University of California's campus in Paris. Arginteanu lives in Minneapolis.  (Bio notes as of 1994).

Mrs. de Winter   The Sequel to Daphne Du Maurier's "Rebecca".   By Susan Hill.  From the very first moment of Rebecca ("Last night I dreamt I went Manderley again"), readers were immersed in the claustrophobic world of Maxim de Winter, his innocent child bride, and the memory of the malevolent beauty, Rebecca.  At the end of Rebecca, Manderley is burning and Maxim and Mrs. de Winter are on their way to the Continent to try to build a quiet, safe life for themselves away from the passionate, violent excesses that nearly destroyed their souls.  But could this be possible?  Could the de Winters escape or did they ever return home to England to confront the past?  What, for that matter, happened to the despicable housekeeper, Mr. Danvers, and Rebecca's creepy cousin, Jack Favell?

        Susan Hill, a distinguished novelist writing at the top of her form, has imagined brilliantly, and wholly convincingly, precisely what happens after the de Winters journey back to England.  Daphne Du Maurier would approve; so too will innumerable readers of Rebecca, and the huge number of people who appreciate the joining of a great novelist to a wonderful story.  The original Rebecca is in many ways the first and finest example of the romantic suspense-thriller.  A gigantic best-seller when first published more than fifty years ago, it was also the basis of the Alfred Hitchcock movie starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1940.  © 1993 Susan Hill. William Morrow & Company New York. 349 pages.

        Susan Hill is the winner of England's Whitbread Prize and was a nominee for the Booker Prize for her novel The Bird of Night.  She is also the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.  A long-standing admirer of Daphne du Maurier, Hill treasures a correspondence she had with the author regarding an article that Hill wrote about Rebecca.  Hill lives in England with her husband, a Shakespearean scholar, and their two daughters.

My Most Exciting Picture   By Alfred Hitchcock, as told to Favius Friedman.   H47E   Article in Popular Photography, November 1948.  "One of Hollywood's top directors tells all about the revolutionary techniques and tricks which were employed during the production of Warner Brothers' sensational and recently released murder mystery in Technicolor - "Rope".  "Shooting Rope was a little like unpuzzling a Rube Goldberg drawing.  A long time ago I said that I would like to film in two hours a fictional story that actually happens in two hours. I wanted to do a picture with no time lapses -- a picture in which the camera never stops.  In Rope I got my wish. It was a picture unlike any other I've ever directed. True, I had experimented with a roving camera in isolated sequences in such films as Spellbound, Notorious and The Paradine Case. But until Rope came along, I had been unable to give full rein to any notion that a camera could photograph one complete reel at a time, gobbling up 11 pages of dialogue on each shot, devouring action like a giant steam shovel.

        "As I see it, there's nothing like continuous action to sustain the mood of actors, particularly in a suspense story. In Rope the entire action takes place between the setting of the sun and the hour of darkness. There are a murder, a party, mounting tension, detailed psychological characterizations, the gradual discovery of the crime and the solution. Yet all this consumes less than two hours of real life as well as "reel" life. (Actually, it took us 35 days to wrap up the picture.)"

        "Rope was probably the most exciting picture I've ever directed. Observers called it 'the most revolutionary technique Hollywood had ever seen.' Some of our problems seemed, at first, totally insurmountable. James Stewart, our star, couldn't sleep nights because of his role in the picture. It wasn't so much the suspenseful drama as it was the bewildering technique that made him worry. Head grip Morris Rosen still was operating the camera boom in his dreams at four o'clock in the morning and wound up at the finish of the picture 12 pounds thinner. Once, Joe Valentine, our cinematographer, had the 6000 pound camera dolly roll on his foot when he didn't move fast enough. Still another time, the roving camera rolled too far and smashed one wall of the apartment."

North By Northwest Script   The MGM Library Of Film Scripts.   H47C   Written by Ernest Lehman.  © 1959 by Loew's Incorporated. Viking Press New York. 148 pages. "Ernest Lehman's screenwriting credits include The Sweet Smell of Success, The King and I, From the Terrace, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Hello Dolly, which he also produced. A two-time Oscar-winner, with his original screenplay for North by Northwest (1959) he won a nomination for an Academy Award and provided Alfred Hitchcock with one of the major triumphs of his American film-making career. A fantastic adventure/ espionage tale that starred Cary Grant, James Mason, and Eva Marie Saint, this film begins on Madison Avenue and ends at Mount Rushmore with so many twists and turns that one can be terrified by it one moment and fully enjoying its sparkling wit the next. An unforgettable cliffhanger that Alfred Hitchcock has called the epitome of all his work in this country."

Original Story By   by Arthur Laurents  A Memoir Of Broadway and Hollywood.    H47D   Published by Alfred A Knopf Publisher New York. 420 pages. © 2000 by Arthur Laurents. "This is an Uncorrected Proof - It should not be quoted without comparison with the finished book."  Chapters:  I) Home of the Brave.  II) Hollywood University; Mrs. Selznick, Messrs. Litvak, Hitchcock, Cukor and ophuls. III) Master Class; With Harold and Stella, Shirley and Kate, Steve and Dick.  IV) Change of Direction; I Can Get It for You Wholesale with Stark and Merrick vs. Streisand.  V) The Hunting Season; The Way We Were and the Way They Were.  VI) Informing Revisited; Jolson Sings Again and Other Betrayals.  VII) The Moon Comes Out; West Side Story, Gypsy, and Tom.

            "Alfred Hitchcock was fun to work for and fun to be with. He was a tough businessman; otherwise, he lived in the land of kink. Initially, I thought he was a repressed homosexual. Repression was necessary: he was a Catholic; being grossly overweight and thus unattractive made it easier. Bad breath helped, too. The actual word homosexuality was never said aloud in conferences on Rope or on the set, but he alluded to the subject so often -- that he seemed fixated if not obsessed. Which indeed he was because he was obsessed with what Alfred Hitchcock was always obsessed with: the subject of whatever movie he was making. Homosexuality was at the center of Rope, its three main characters were homosexuals. This the seeming obsession.  Sex was always on his mind; not ordinary sex, not plain homosexuality any more than plain heterosexuality. Perverse sex, kinky sex, that fascinated him. In Rope, not just homosexuals and not just murder but a murder committed by homosexuals for a bizarre reason. He himself didn't strike me as ever having much sex or even wanting sex. Those cool blondes he was supposedly so mad for -- I doubted he wanted them for himself. I thought he wanted to put them with a man sufficiently ambiguous to provoke a perverse situation. The Hitchcock who was reputedly berserk about Tippi Hedren was not the Hitchcock I knew. But then, no one knows for a certainty all the contours of someone else's sexual landscape. There were probably other Hitchcocks I didn't know; I was happy with the one I did."

            Arthur Laurents  has been the recipient of awards from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the Writers Guild of America, the Golden Globes, the Drama Desk, and the National Board of Review, and is an emeritus member of the Council of the Dramatist Guild. He lives in New York City and on Long Island.  (Bio info as of 2000).

Alfred Hitchcock Presents   An Illustrated Guide To The Ten-Year Television Career Of The Master Of Suspense   by John McCarty and Brian Kelleher.  H48  Foreword by Robert Bloch.  St. Martin's Press New York. © 1985. 338 pages.  Contents:  "My Hitch with Hitchcock" by Robert Bloch; The Story Behind the Series; Alfred Hitchcock Presents - An Episode Guide to All 266 Shows; The Alfred Hitchcock Hour - An Episode Guide to All 93 Shows; Major Awards and Nominations; Appendix - Suspicion and Ford Startime.

        A graduate of Boston University with a degree in broadcasting and film, John McCarty is a lifelong aficionado of the work of the late Alfred Hitchcock.  "As all the books about Hitch's film career have been written, " he explains, "I decided to examine his work in television instead, which no one has written about.  Unlike most TV series, the Hitchcock show had a lot of personality.  And that personality belonged very much to Hitchcock himself."  Over the years, Mr. McCarty has contributed articles and reviews to film magazines as diverse as Cinefantastique, Filmmaker's Newsletter, Fangoria, and Classic Images.  The author of four previous books on film and broadcast media, including Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen.  He is married and lives in upstate New York.

        Brian Kelleher holds an undergraduate degree in journalism from Suffolk University in Boston and a graduate degree in film from Emerson College, also in Boston.  He most recently worked as a corporate publicist for the General Electric Company and now writes full-time on sports and entertainment subjects.  An inveterate tube-watcher, Mr. Kelleher considers the Hitchcock series to be a milestone in television history, and writing about it has been a long-time goal.  This is his first book.  (Bio notes for both authors circa 1985).

The Last Days Of Alfred Hitchcock   by David Freeman.  H49  Featuring the entire screenplay of The Short Night, the Hitchcock movie that was written but never filmed.  The Overlook Press New York. © 1984. 281 pages.  The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock is a penetrating account and a human story, seen through the eyes of the last screenwriter to work with him.  In the course of their labors on what would have been his fifty-fourth film, Alfred Hitchcock detailed his celebrated working techniques and candidly revealed a side of himself rarely seen by even those close to him.  David Freeman was a privileged witness to the final working months of the great director's life.  In the time they spent together, collaborating on the thriller, The Short Night, "Hitch" was constantly in pain and suffered from severe depression about his health and that of his wife, Alma.  Nevertheless he worked steadily and reminisced about his life, his films, and the people he knew including Ingrid Bergman, Howard Hughes, Cary Grant, and Kim Novak.  "A perceptive, often startling glimpse of the great director, gracefully written by his last collaborator" - California Magazine.

        David Freeman, a screenwriter and journalist, is the author of U.S. Grant In The City, a collection of stories, and the play, Jesse And The Bandit Queen.  Freeman divides his time between Los Angeles and New York.  (Bio notes as of 1984).

Me and Hitch   by Evan Hunter.  H50  Renowned for his bestselling novels such as The Blackboard Jungle and the popular 85th Precinct series (written under the name Ed McBain), Evan Hunter also worked with  Alfred Hitchcock, writing film scripts for The Birds and Marnie. In telling about working with Hitchcock, Hunter is as frank as he is entertaining.  © 1997. Faber & Faber. 96 pages.  "More of an extended essay with unrelated anecdotes, this tiny book concerns the brief partnering of author Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) and Alfred Hitchcock over a few years on the films The Birds and Marnie. Dropped in the midst of these alternately bitter and fond memories are totally unrelated anecdotes about Hitch. Nifty, but so short you should read it in the bookstore." - T. Ross.

Personal History    H50A   By Vincent Sheean.  The novel upon which Alfred Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent", starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Robert Benchley  was based. " The wind blows one way... but the windmill turns another. To a group of Fifth Columnists, it's a signal. It's also a signal for someone not supposed to be there. It confirms newspaperman Huntley Haverstock's hunch that he's stumbled across the biggest story in prewar Europe."  © 1934, 1935 Vincent Sheean.  403 pages.  Printed at the Country Life Press, Garden City, NY.  Doubleday, Doran & Company, Garden City, New York.

Psycho : Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller   by Janet Leigh and Christopher Nickens.  H51  "The fascinating, behind-the-scenes saga of the making of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece. This is the richest and most revealing portrait of a movie classic in-the-making ever compiled, from casting decisions to personality clashes, from anecdotes about one of Hollywood's most celebrated - and feared - directors to the truth about why the FBI needed to protect Janet Leigh after the opening of the film!"  © 1995. Harmony Books.  "Not only is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho hugely popular and influential 35 years after its release; it also remains the main claim to fame of Leigh, who portrayed murder victim Marion Crain. Leigh here offers her memoirs of filming Psycho, including the famous shower sequence, to which she accords an entire chapter. Although she provides some fascinating glimpses of Hitchcock's on-set technique and other behind-the-scenes details, Leigh devotes too many pages to gushing about her coworkers and other inconsequential matters, to diverting but essentially trivial passages on how Psycho changed her life, and to her rather banal thoughts on the effects of today's even more violent films. Fortunately, coauthor Nickens is on hand to supply informative "intermissions" in which he fleshes out Leigh's comments, provides technical information, and offers background on Hitchcock. Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making Of Psycho (1990) is a much better all-around resource on the film, but libraries where that work has proved popular should also see demand for Leigh's more personal account." - Gordon Flagg.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho - The Comic Book   Felipe Echevarria, Matt Thompson, Vickie Williams.   H51B   The Innovative Corporation.  Three comic books adapting the classic motion picture. February 1992.

                          BUY IT  H51B1  #1 (Top Left): Excellent condition. $10.

 BUY IT  H51B2  #2 (Middle Left):  Excellent condition. $10.

Reel Gags   All The Inside Jokes   By Bill Givens.   H51C   "Gags, Pranks, Secret Messages, Cameos, Code Words, Double Meanings from Your Favorite Films."  © 1998 by Bill Givens.  Renaissance Books Los Angeles 176 pages.  From the Alfred Hitchcock section:  "The cinematic equivalent of artist Martin Handford's intricately illustrated Where's Waldo? puzzle books is the search for Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in most of his films.  There is a common misconception that he appeared in all of his films.  However, of his 54 film oeuvre, Hitchcock shows up in only 39. Oddly enough, only once did he carry the gimmick over to his long-running TV show, even though he personally introduced the episodes. In the "Dip in the Pool" episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965), he shows up on the cover of a magazine.

        It is said that the cameos began early in his career when he needed more extras, but couldn't afford them. The easiest thing was to appear in the scenes himself.  The gimmick began to take off in Blackmail (1929). Hitchcock shows up sitting in a subway car reading a book. A small boy annoys him , and he swats at the kid with the book.  Perhaps the most original was in Lifeboat (1944). There was no way the pudgy director could slip into the boat with Tallulah Bankhead and the rest of the cast out in the middle of the ocean. So, playing on his ample physique, he shows up in an advertisement for men's corsets, the "Ruduco Obesity Slayer," in a newspaper held by William Bendix. The before and after shots in the ad are both Hitchcock, as he had recently gone on a crash diet (he has said that he lost 100 pounds during the filming of Lifeboat).  Lifeboat also produced one of the most enduring Hitchcock anecdotes. After cast members complained the uninhibited Tallulah Bankhead wasn't wearing undies and they were seeing a bit too much of her as she climbed in and out of the soundstage boat, he is reported to have said, "I don't know whether this is a matter for the costume department or the hairdresser."

        Bill Givens is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and television writer.  He is the author of seven books and a regular contributor to a variety of entertainment publications. His articles have been syndicated by the New York Times Feature Syndicate and by Universal Features.  He is a popular college lecturer and radio talk-show guest.  

Alfred Hitchcock's  Rope   M81B   From the Famous Play by Patrick Hamilton.  "The Strange Story of a Strange Murder."  A Warner Bros. Release.  This is a Dell "Map" book from Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller "Rope".  Dell Publishing Company New York.  © 1948 by Transatlantic Pictures Corp. 188 pages.  Persons this story is about:  Brandon, suave, wealthy, good-looking, and arrogant, is convinced that his talent and position entitle him to live by his own laws;  Morgan, a gifted pianist, whose fingers are stronger than his character. He follows where Brandon leads, until it is too late; Kenneth, a fellow student of Brandon and Morgan, is more than just an acquaintance and less than a friend. He is a handy man to fill out a party; Janet, young career girl, member of the same set as the others, casually almost engaged, at one time or another, to several of them; Rupert Cadell, who taught Brandon, Morgan, and Turner at prep school. Cynical when he was a schoolmaster, he returned from the war with a limp and a wry disregard for convention. He is one of the few people Brandon regards as an equal; Henry Kentley, collector of rare books, cherishes kindly thoughts about human decency. Janet Walker is engaged to his son David; Alice Atwater, Kentley's sister-in-law, who adores parties and astrology and fads, but doesn't get in anybody's way; Mrs. Wilson, Brandon's middle-aged housekeeper, watches over her employer as well as his house.

Schickel On Film   'Encounters - Critical and Personal - with Movie Immortals'.   By Richard Schickel.   H51D   "Critically challenging, intensely personal, marked by high-risk speculation and a wide-ranging knowledge of American movies and American popular culture, Richard Schickel's provocative portraits of these immortal figures are controversial, deeply felt, addictively readable.  Taken together, they also constitute an impressionistic history not only of Hollywood from the silent era to the present but of a nation's, a century's, dreamworks.

        Long known for his influential reviews of current movies in Time (and before that in Life), Richard Schickel here gathers his thoughts on some of the people who have most profoundly shaped our sense of our times and ourselves, presenting them in richly detailed, emotionally evocative essays that are marked by speculative wit, high intellectual energy, and a determination to seek out, at every turn, the daring critical connection, the bold historical synthesis.  the result is an invaluable addition to the literature of film, and a book that will delight, instruct, and stimulate everyone who cares about the movies.  Or about the fantasy life of the American mind and the people who have stirred and shaped it."  William Morrow and Company New York.  © 1989 by Lorac Productions, Inc. 312 pages.  Artists discussed:  Woody Allen, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, James Cagney, Charles Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Preston Sturges, Harold Lloyd, Ronald Reagan, The Hollywood Ten.   The Alfred Hitchcock part of the book cover twelve pages and took place when he was 73.  Frenzy had just opened and he was planning Family Plot, which would be his last picture.  Hitchcock had agreed to appear in the pilot episode of "The Men Who Made The Movies".  In the book Schickel is very critical of Donald Spoto's treatment of Hitchcock after his death in "The Dark Side of Genius."  He once asked Hitchcock what his idea of happiness was, and he replied, "Nothing.  An empty sky."

        Richard Schickel  has reviewed movies for Time since 1972.  Before that he was the film critic for Life.  He is the author of The Disney Version (called by one critic "the single most illuminating book on America and the movies"), D. W. Griffith: An American Life (winner of the British Film Institute Book Prize), and Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, among other books.  He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and is also a producer-writer-director of documentary films, mainly about movie history.  He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Carol, and has two daughters, Erika and Jessica.

Selznick   by Bob Thomas.  © 1970 by Robert Joseph Thomas. Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York. 381 pages.  "In the days when Hollywood films were being cranked out by the big studios the way Detroit turned out automobiles, one man clung to the belief that a motion picture was like a painting which had to be painted and signed by a single artist.  In 1939 David O. Selznick justified his belief.  He was 37 years old when Gone With the Wind was released to thunderous accolades.  It was the triumph - and the tragedy - of his like.  As a producer he had reached the pinnacle of success; there was nowhere else to go...

        In this biography, Bob Thomas tells the story of the stormy career of a man who personified the label "legend."  It tells of the women he loved and the fortunes he amassed and lost; of the great stars he made and the magnificent motion pictures he created.  Her is the man himself - the author of endless memos, the compulsive gambler, the driving perfectionist.  Selznick's life is also a kaleidoscopic reflection of Hollywood's golden era when movies were meant to entertain, when the word star was synonymous with glamour and the word "damn" violated the production code.  Bob Thomas has captured it all in the same swift, colorful narrative and remarkable photographs which distinguished his last book, Thalberg."

        Bob Thomas attended UCLA before joining the Los Angeles bureau of the Associated Press.  He became, at the age of twenty-two, Hollywood columnist for AP - drawing on a long-standing interest in entertainment that stems from his father's work as a publicity man for the major studios.  Mr. Thomas lives in Encino with his wife and three daughters.  (Bio info as of 1970).

Showman   The Life of David O. Selznick   by David Thomson.  H52  Alfred A. Knopf. © 1992. 791 pages. With 108 phographs.  "David O. Selznick, the legendary producer and maker of Gone With the Wind, is brilliantly portrayed in this full-scale biography by the first writer to be given complete access to Selznick's voluminous and revealing papers -- everything from script notes, production reports, and contract memos, to letters rich in intrigue, gambling accounts, and financial records. No other Hollywood giant ever had so much to say; no other was brave and reckless enough to leave so much on the record.  Selznick was the most charming, best-read, most insanely workaholic (and most easily diverted), most talented, arrogant, hopeful, amorous, insecure, and self-destructive of all the geniuses of American moviemaking. His story is the history of the picture business, from immigrant nerve to cafe society. It is, as well, the story of the chronic romantic who married first the princess of the kingdom (Irene, daughter of Louis B. Mayer) and then a young beauty -- Jennifer Jones -- whom he made a princess.

        Around him was a cast of vivid supporting players: his father, Lewis J., who made and lost fortunes in silent films; his two brothers -- Myron, a pioneering (and boozing) agent, and Howard, whose mental condition overshadowed the rest of the family; Irene, David's scourge and his last comfort, as well as the person who taught him about power in Hollywood; Jock Whitney, fabulously rich, a great friend to David, and crazy about the movies; George Cukor; Alfred Hitchcock; Orson Welles; Vivien Leigh; Alexander Korda; William Paley; Ben Hecht; and John Huston.  We see Selznick making such films as What Price Hollywood?, King Kong, David Copperfield, A Star is Born, Rebecca, Since You Went Away, Spellbound, Duel in the Sun, Portrait of Jennie, The Third Man, and A Farewell to Arms. And we are given the fullest possible account of the chaos, good fortune, folly, and glory of the making of Gone With the Wind.  This superb biography uncovers the private lives and business maneuverings of Hollywood as no other book has done. It chronicles the Golden Age as seen from deep inside the gold mine and from behind locked doors where the spoils were divided, filched, or gambled away. In its rich sense of the wonders, ironies, and delusions inherent in "showmanship," this is a book about America in this century, turning from reality toward the glamour, the legend -- the fantasy -- of the movies."

        David Thomson was born in London, has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, and now lives in San Francisco. He is the author of several other books, including the acclaimed A Biographical Dictionary of Film, the novels Silver Light and Suspects, and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. He also wrote the screenplay for the documentary film The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind. (Bio notes as of 1992).

Sixty Years of Hollywood   by John Baxter.  © 1973 A. S. Barnes & Co. New Jersey. 254 pages.  "This is an exciting survey of an exciting world: the phenomenal community of Hollywood, past and present. Sixty Years of Hollywood takes you on a year-by-year tour of the history of the American film, from the early days of the silents through today's era of change and crisis.  Virtually every film star and director of importance appears in these pages. In addition, this book contains more than 150 of some of the best stills ever to be found in a book on the cinema. They will certainly please you, and sometimes, as in Walt Disney's extraordinarily vivid depiction of the witch's offering the poisoned apple to Snow White, will astonish you.

        Here, too, you will find all the high points in the development of the American motion picture - D. W. Griffith's Intolerance and Birth of a Nation, the "screwball comedies" of the 1930s and 1940s, precedent-shattering westerns on the order of High Noon, The Magnificent Seven, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, unusual sports films such as Downhill Racer, and such recent precedent-breaking films as Easy Rider.  For each year the author has supplied a quick summary of the important events, plus carefully selected reviews, designed to bring back to mind films that were either the best of their type or that have started new trends in motion picture making.  The illustrations feature your favorite stars of yesterday and today:  Mary Pickford, William S. Hart, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson all appear in action scenes from their best films.  Great Directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles are seen as Well.  The book's strict adherence to chronological order makes it easier for you to find films than is usual in books of this kind, and to glimpse patterns of film making that might otherwise be lost.  Altogether, Sixty Years of Hollywood will prove to be your handy companion - one that will heighten your enjoyment of movies, and serve you well, whether you read it straight through or use it for reference."

        John Baxter, an Australian, is a veteran author with several film books to his credit.  Of his Science Fiction in the Cinema, T.V. Picture Life wrote in praise: "This profusely illustrated little book... fills a real need.  It is complete and accurate in coverage and entertaining in its treatment."  Of his Hollywood in the Thirties, Film Society Review commented, "... you will enjoy Baxter's ability to provide a solid contact between the films of today and the Thirties."  The Gangster Film received praise from Movie Digest for "its valuable index of films and dates."  The New Haven Register was most enthusiastic about Mr. Baxter's The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg.  Reviewer James Childs termed it "... a well-structured study... Baxter's appraisal is... intelligent, even-handed, and well worth the reading."  (Bio info as of 1973).

Spellbound   by Francis Beeding.  (Originally published as "The House of Dr. Edwardes").   H53 The novel upon which Hitchcock's classic thriller was based.  © 1927, 1928 by Little, Brown & Company. 192 pages.  "A story of madness and terror, from which the Alfred Hitchcock film was made, with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck."  Notation on jacket: "Send this book to a boy in the armed forces anywhere for only 4 cents postage."  From the dust jacket: "The house was a huge sprawling castle set in a circle of rock high in the desolate mountains of Switzerland. At night it looked like a crouching black shadow set in the road. The townspeople said it was inhabited by the Devil.  Constance Sedgwick, M.D., came to the castle as assistant Dr. Edwardes, a famous mental specialist who ran this "House of Rest" for the insane. But Dr. Edwardes was gone when she arrived -- away for a much-needed rest -- and Constance found the asylum under the leadership of the strange Dr. Murchison, who read books about the Devil and flinched when the shadow of a cross fell on his body.  From the moment when Constance's auto brought her near the castle, things began to happen. There was, for instance, the solemn funeral procession winding along the dusty country road, bearing a coffin containing the body of a man lately murdered by one of the inmates of the "House of Rest." And there was the tale the villagers told of blood on the stone in the black wood.  Then Constance herself saw the Devil -- a great, hulking shadow crawling along the castle wall; and she learned of the next victim to be sacrificed on the white stone: Herself."

The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock  or  The Plain Man's Hitchcock   by Raymond Durgnat   H54  The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. © 1974. 419 pages.  All of Alfred Hitchcock's films, from The Pleasure Garden (1925) to Frenzy (1972), are reviewed in this book, which consists of a short prologue, a long introductory essay on "The 13 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock" (his 13 producer periods), and summaries of every one of his films to date.  These are discussed horizontally, in chronological order, and vertically, by genres and themes with cross-references throughout.  Durgnat's Hitchcock is a fascinating mixture of contrarieties.  He tends to admire Hitchcock for his ability to tell a story and control and manipulate  order so that he can play his audience with suspense, for his "rare sense of how far dramatic conflicts can be complicated and which ways," and for the conjunction or layering of elements in films like Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho, which constitutes the real Hitchcock "touch."

        English critic Raymond Durgnat is the author of many works of film criticism.  (Bio notes as of 1974).

Vertigo : The Making of a Hitchcock Classic   by Dan Auiler.  H55  "Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and perhaps his most personal film. To view it once is to be devastated. With each subsequent screening, most viewers notice bits of business, depths of thought, and stunning ironies that had previously eluded them. Vertigo is a riveting experience, haunting its fans in the same way that Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is haunted by the mysterious Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak)." - Raphael Shargel.  © 1998. St. Martins Press. 240 pages.  "Congratulations to Dan Auiler, film collector, teacher, and Buddhist, living in Los Angeles, whose book on the phenomenon that is Hitchcock's Vertigo has the breath and grasp that were needed... Not a critical text, and with nary a footnote for unwary readers to stumble over, 'Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic' nonetheless is both amply-researched and evocative. Auiler accessed the Hitchcock production files and interviewed key surviving personnel who had worked on the film (and, in a final chapter, messrs Harris and Katz, who restored it on 70mm in 1996)... a final note says: 'In all of the interviews and conversations that went into the preparation of this book, those who worked with Hitchcock were consistent in projecting... an overall admiration for the man and the artist'. My impression is that the book is a healthily-conceived and written one." - Ken Mogg's review from The Maguffin (Sept. 17, 1998). 

Vertigo   by Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac.   H55C   Bloomsbury Film Classics - The Original Novel.  First published as The Living and The Dead in Great Britain in 1956.  This edition published 1997. 170 pages.  © Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac.  Translated from the French D'ENTRE LES MORTS by Geoffrey Sainsbury. The moral right of the authors has been asserted - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 38 Soho Square, London, W1V 5DF.  Limited edition for Sight and Sound.

Who The Devil Made It   by Peter Bogdanovich.   H55B   Conversations with Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh.  Alfred A. Knopf  New York  © 1997 by Ivy Moon Company. 849 pages.  Peter Bogdanovich, director, screenwriter, actor and critic, interviews sixteen legendary directors of the first hundred years of film - from Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh to Leo McCarey, Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Lumet.  The conversations brought together in this book give us a history of the movies. they are the stories of pioneers who came to the picture business from many worlds. Some were adventurers (running away to sea; joining Pancho Villa) before finding their place in the movies. Some were football stars, some electrical engineers, lawyers, auto mechanics, airplane designers. Some were trained in silent movies (Dwan, Walsh, Lang, von Sternberg, Hitchcock). Many of them were men who lived to the hilt and brought to their work the residue of their earlier experiences.  The Alfred Hitchcock headings are:  A Synonym For Suspense; Young Man With Master Mind.

            Peter Bogdanovich is the author of ten books, including This is Orson Welles and John Ford. He is also the director of eighteen films, including The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc, Texasville and Mask. He lives in Los Angeles and New York City.  (Bio info as of 1997).

Wills Of The Rich and Famous   By Herbert E. Nass, Esq.   H55C   A Fascinating Glimpse at the Legacies of Celebrities.  © 1991 & 2000 Herbert E Nass  Gramercy Books New York  564 pages.  "Carlos Astenada's special 'visions' didn't mean much in the end... Frank Sinatra was generous, specific, and controlling, in life and afterward...  These are just a sampling of the 100 people represented in this compilation by Herbert E. Nass, an attorney who specializes in estates and wills."  "Alfred Hitchcock was Master of Suspense until the end... An undisputed master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock often turned the world upside down or inside out in his movies. But despite plots filled with international intrigue, suspicion, violence, or sexual obsession, Hitchcock himself appears to have had a stable and serene personal life, especially by Hollywood standards. He married his assistant Alma Reville in 1926, and they remained married for the next 54 years until the day he died. Alma worked on many of his films as his general assistant or as a writer. The couple had one child, Patricia, who appeared in several of Hitchcock's films and on his television shows, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and the "Alfred Hitchcock Hour," broadcast during the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

    Like the intricately woven plots that deliberately and methodically unfold in his films, Hitchcock signed his Will in 1963, and then proceeded to make six sets of changes to that Will during the next seventeen years. The last codicil was signed only one month before he died. The signature on that final codicil shows the serious effects that his arthritis had on his ability to sign his name. His Will is rather dry with very little of his personality showing through. Not one of his great films is mentioned, nor any particular items from his large collection of art or other memorabilia. Essentially, the entire estate is left to his wife, outright and in trust, with the remainder passing to his daughter and then grandchildren. One wonders whether Hitchcock might have enjoyed a battle royal over his estate. Also unusual about the Will is that Alma signed a "waiver" that was attached to the Will and also admitted to probate. This unusual waiver states in part:

    I, Alma Reville Hitchcock, wife of Alfred J. Hitchcock, have read the foregoing Will of my husband... I am fully convinced of the reasonableness and wisdom of the provisions of this Will, and I hereby elect to accept and acquiesce in the provisions of his Will, waiving all claims to my share of any community property and all other claims that I may have upon any of the property disposed of by his Will...

    Draw you own conclusions of Hitchcockian intrigue on that one!  The most significant and startling change that Hitchcock subsequently made in his Will was made in the final codicil he signed about one month before he died - removing his wife, Alma, his friend and previous agent Lew Wasserman, who was then the chairman and chief executive officer of Universal Studios, and an attorney named Citron as his executors and trustees. He retained his longtime attorney Samuel Taylor and added his daughter, Patricia, as a co-executor and co-trustee with Hitch's Taylor. We can only speculate about the reasons for this radical change shortly before Hitchcock died at the age of eighty."

        Herbert E. Nass, Esq. is head of his own private practice in New York City, where he specializes in Wills, Estates, Trusts, and Visual Artist Representation. He lives in Westchester, New York with his wife and two children.  (Bio info as of 2000).

The Women Who Knew Too Much   Hitchcock and Feminist Theory    by Tania Modleski.  H56  "Although Alfred Hitchcock's films have been central to the formulation of feminist film theory, and to the practice of feminist film criticism, there has never been a book-length feminist study of a director whose cinematic treatment of women has been notoriously controversial. In The Women Who Knew Too Much, Tania Modleski claims that critical approaches to Hitchcock have falsely fallen into two camps: either he is seen as a misogynist, or he is seen as sympathetic to women in his demonstration of women's plight in patriarchy. In opposition to these positions, Modleski asserts that Hitchcock is deeply ambivalent towards his female characters. The Women Who Knew Too Much examines both the director's complex attitude towards femininity, and the implications of that attitude for the audience. The book represents a significant contribution to the debates in film theory around the issue of gender and film spectatorship; in particular, it seeks to complicate the view that women's response to patriarchal cinema can only be masochistic, while men's response is necessarily sadistic. Applying the theories of psychoanalysis, mass culture, and a broad range of film (and) feminist criticism, Modleski offers compelling readings of seven Hitchcock films from various periods in his career."  Methuen Books New York & London. © 1988 Methuen, Inc. 149 pages.

            Tania Modleski is Professor of Film and Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Loving With A Vengeance (Methuen Books). (Bio notes as of 1988).

Writing With Hitchcock : The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock & John Michael Hayes    by Steven DeRosa.   H57  © 2001. Faber & Faber. 336 pages.  "Alfred Hitchcock: The name conjures up incredible suspense, mordant laughs, the surprise ending. But Hitch's unique vision was not his alone. In this detailed analysis of the filmmaker's collaboration with screenwriter Hayes, DeRosa reveals how Hitchcock's basic artistic instincts were often radically reshaped and transformed by Hayes's nimble writing. The Hitchcock-Hayes collaborations - Rear Window, To Catch A Thief, The Trouble with Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much - form a transitional period in the director's career, with the writer contributing a kinder vision of the human condition, highly sophisticated dialogue and a sense of humor to Hitchcock's works. "

        "Steven DeRosa's book eloquently reminds us, someone actually had to sit down and write the scripts. Writing With Hitchcock offers not only entertaining biographical sketches of both men, chockful of anecdotes, but a thorough illumination of the Hitchcock/Hayes collaboration: how it worked, who contributed what, and how it ended." - Variety review by Allison Burnett, screenwriter Autumn in New York.    "John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplays for a quartet of Alfred Hitchcock's perennially popular film classics. Steven DeRosa skillfully shows just how the works took shape and why Hayes must be ranked as one of Hollywood's great writers." - Donald Spoto, author of The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.     "With diamond clarity, Steven DeRosa defines the art, the joy, the rewards - and the hazards - of screenwriting for a cinematic genius like Alfred Hitchcock." - Joseph Stefano, screenwriter of Psycho.     

        Steven DeRosa, a former film archivist, has soundly researched his subject and carefully compares the original versions of each film with its ensuing treatments, scripts and multiple revisions. Relying heavily on interviews with Hayes as well as on studio memos and production notes, DeRosa gives us not only an in-depth portrait of this working relationship but a comprehensive look at the industry in the late 1950s, when it was struggling to reassert itself after the emergence of television. The author also engagingly describes the cultural politics of the time (Joseph Breen and the Production Code were vigilant in attacking Hayes's edgy, urbane representations of sexuality). DeRosa also brings convincing drama to Hayes and Hitchcock's breakup and charts Hayes's later career writing such films as Peyton Place and The Children's Hour. While overly specific for the general reader, this is an important study for film and Hitchcock scholars. - Publishers Weekly.

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