His light entertainments and his “gotcha” thrillers - “Shadow of a Doubt,””Foreign Correspondent,” “Strangers on a Train”, “North by Northwest,” and of course, the Holy Trinity - “Psycho,” “Rear Window” and “The Birds” - are as fresh as ever. And every passing year passes further judgment on the movies which endure, and those which fade. Having access to half a century of serious Hitchcock scholarship, and Youtube - for all those “screen test” clips, bits of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and the like - one can compile a fairly comprehensive biography of the filmmaker.
Here’s a birth to death tale that hits the highlights, dismisses some theories about the man (lifelong fear of the law, overt perversion), or at least gives them no more weight than they probably deserve.
Or at least, “not really.” British writer-by-assignment Peter Ackroyd, whose best known credits are quick “biographies” of Shakespeare and, um, London, isn’t breaking new ground and on occasion, gets his facts wrong in his new book “Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Biography.”īut get past his sometimes clumsy constructions and the general cut-and-paste-other-people’s research nature of his “Nice work if you can get it” assignment, and the breezy, fairly thorough brevity of “A Brief Biography” wins you over.
Does the world really need ANOTHER Alfred Hitchcock biography? After the hundreds of thousands of words by his more-or-less autobiographers (Francois Truffaut, Peter Bogdanovick, chief among them) who interviewed him in person and added analysis, of others from Robin Wood to Donald Spoto and William Rothman (“The Murderous Gaze”), is there anything new to say about the Master of Suspense?
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