Join the dots
A life in film
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.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Join the dots"
From the March 14th 2015 edition
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