Join the dots

Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much. By Michael Wood. Amazon/New Harvest; 129 pages; $20 and £8.99.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK, the unchallenged master of suspense, had surprisingly little time for mystery. “In the usual form of suspense,” he told François Truffaut, a French director, “it is indispensable that the public be made aware of all the facts involved.” The uncertainty lies in how information is revealed, or re-revealed. The same might be said for any biography of Hitchcock himself, of which Michael Wood’s volume is the latest. The director of such cornerstones of the genre as “Psycho” and “Vertigo” (voted the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine in 2012) has been so amply scrutinised by film scholars and film-makers that most new studies can only aim to reconfigure existing insights with subtly different implications.

At its most elegant, this slim contribution to the Hitchcock library, by a professor of literature at Princeton, surprises with the splintered connections it makes between individual films and other points of culture and politics. In one exhilarating chapter Mr Wood unapologetically breaks academic form for a free-associative join-the-dots game between the lush film-star swoon of “Notorious”, the postmodern appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard and “Memory of the Camps”, a little-remembered Holocaust documentary on which Hitchcock advised. As the author races through such shifting mini-essays the reader starts to wish for a longer format than that permitted by the publisher’s snappy new Icons series; its subjects have run the gamut from Jesus to J.D. Salinger.

At the very least, Mr Wood seems eager to be released from the project’s biographic obligations: Hitchcock’s working-class, East End upbringing and 54-year marriage to Alma Reville, his creative collaborator, are dutifully sketched out, but rarely link up the book’s more resourceful passages of criticism. The need for brevity also steers Mr Wood into skimpy armchair psychology, and he deduces his subject’s state of mind from file photographs. Even without such content, 129 pages would scarcely be enough to discuss Hitchcock’s oeuvre. As it is, a title as canonised as “Rear Window” barely rates a mention. Still it is the films themselves that yield the richest discussion—an extended analysis of “Strangers on a Train” is a particular pleasure—in a book that is less a primer than a post-viewing companion.