When I first looked at the dust jacket of A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock and saw the excellent photograph of Hitchcock in his typical pose known to TV viewers and film goers alike, I formed an instant impression of the book. I just knew it was going to be one of those cosy books which would go through each of the master's films from Blackmail onwards, full of film stills and pictures of the well‐known actors and actresses with whom he worked. How wrong I was! There is not a single photograph in this large (624 pages) book and any fan expecting to be able to easily go through each of Hitchcock's film titles is in for a shock. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock forms part of the Wiley‐Blackwell Companions to Film Directors series which already features Michael Haneke and Rainer Fassbinder. The series surveys key directors whose work together constitutes what the editors refer to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons. Each volume in the series comprises 25 or more new essays written by leading experts exploring a canonical, contemporary and/controversial auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multi‐dimensional capacity.
Leitch and Poague, editors of Hitchcock, begin with a reasonably substantial introduction (and they also contribute to the main body of the work). They observe that there is a rich tradition of Hitchcock commentary in hundreds of books and essays. Alfred Hitchcock and his films have been the subject of biographies, thematic surveys of his entire career, scholarly monographs, case studies of individual films and sequences from particular films (how many times have we seen the shower scene from Psycho analysed second by second?), catalogues of Hitchcockian motifs, reference books, quiz books and books for readers still too young to know what monster lurks in Norman Bates' fruit cellar. The introduction comments on a number of some of these works and then, given such a long and varied tradition of scholarship and anthologies, asks the question of why another volume? The editors note that earlier anthologies have been organized more or less explicitly around a controversy such as whether Hitchcock was an artist or an entertainer, whether his American films represented his crowning achievement or a falling off from a series of faster paced English films and other like questions. The current work provides a retrospective overview on some of the leading controversies that have shaped Hitchcock studies, establishing and confirming it as a discipline and marking the principal stages in its development.
The book is divided into nine parts which are background; genre; collaboration; style; development; auteurism; ideology; ethics; and beyond Hitchcock. It is well laid out, but, as has already been noted, there are no illustrations. Each essay concludes with a notes section and a very thorough list of works cited. There is a particularly thorough index as is needed in a work of this nature. I think I would still have liked to have seen a chronology of Hitchcock films, but the determined and knowledgeable reader can still track down all references to the films via the index. At the end of the introduction the editors say that they are proud to salute the achievements of Hitchcock scholars past and present, and, extremely modestly say “we are convinced that the most exciting work on Hitchcock has yet to appear, and we hope that this collection will play a part in bringing it to birth”. In my view this book is the most exciting work on Hitchcock and one which will become a prime source for Hitchcockian scholars. This book should be read by those who wish to study the life and work of the master of suspense. This book is a must for universities and colleges with film studies courses, and other institutions for scholars of the cinema. However, I feel that the general reader in the public library may find the book simply not what they were expecting. Some may stay and delve deeper, but not all.
