It's the story of Hitchcock the professional that McGilligan has chosen to emphasize. Moreover, as McGilligan points out, Hitchcock regularly tried stylistic experiments in films such as "Lifeboat" (1944), "Rope" (1948) and "The Birds" (1963), as well as pioneered as a television director and producer. But once you begin adding up the great ones - start, as most critics do, with "Rear Window" (1954), "Vertigo" (1958) and "Psycho" (1960) or, if you prefer British Hitchcock, "The 39 Steps" (1935) and "The Lady Vanishes" (1938), then add in your own favorites, such as in my case "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943) - you have one of the most remarkable career achievements in the first century of film. When he made his final film, "Family Plot," in 1976, four years before his death in 1980, he was the last working filmmaker from the silent era.Įven following a nasty split, the composer Bernard Herrmann said of him, "Many directors can make one or two good movies, but how many can make fifty great ones like Hitchcock?" "Fifty great ones" is pure hyperbole the grand total of his fiction features was 53, of which some were merely good and a few downright indifferent. After directing his first feature in 1926, he became a top figure in the British industry during the 1930s, and then left for Hollywood just before World War II. Born in England in 1899 to a family of greengrocers, Hitchcock found his vocation young, starting out in his early twenties as a title designer and art director for British films. McGilligan's Hitchcock is not entirely The Man Who Could Do No Wrong, but whenever the director gets into a battle - and there were a great many with producers, writers, performers and other collaborators over his half-century career - it's rare for the biographer to see merit on the other side. At times Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light takes the form of a "truth squad" against Spoto's assertions, pointedly rebutting the previous biographer for alleged exaggerations and false claims. Spoto's biography threw down 600 pages of accusation against Hitchcock like a bold poker player, McGilligan raises to 850 pages of defense. Such an audacious figure is Patrick McGilligan, a prolific researcher who has made invaluable contributions to film history and written a half-dozen previous biographies of actors and directors. It takes an intrepid biographer to swim against this tide, even two decades later. Hotly contested by the filmmaker's friends, Spoto's portrait of a diabolically clever man harboring barely repressed violent desires nevertheless became widely accepted, even outlandishly elaborated in the thriving academic industry of Hitchcock Studies. This shocking implication lay at the heart of The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto's controversial 1983 biography of the renowned Master of Suspense. Was Alfred Hitchcock so obsessed with serial killers that he might well have become one, had he not found, as a film director, a sanctioned way to torment actresses and murder their fictional screen characters, all in the name of art? By Reviewed Robert Sklar November 16, 2003ĪLFRED HITCHCOCK: A Life in Darkness and Lightīy Patrick McGilligan.
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