The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock (Phillips)

Gene Phillips's Alfred Hitchcock (Twayne Filmmakers Series, Boston: Twayne, 1984) is a solid and succinct interpretive introduction to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. One of the biggest talking points of Phillips's book when it was first published, was that it was one of the first scholarly studies of Hitchcock to not only explore Hitchcock's 53 to 56 feature films, but also his 2 documentaries, save for the documentary on the Holocaust on which he served as "treatment advisor", Memory of the Camps (1955), and his 18 directorial efforts on his television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Alfred Hitchcock Hour (CBS and NBC, 1955-1965). It remains one of the few books to deal with the feature films, documentaries, and TV episodes even today.

Phillips's book follows standard auteurist film studies operating practise. It explores each of Hitchcock's films and each of his television directorial efforts in largely chronological order. It delineates the themes of Hitchcock's films--ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, the chase, the innocent pursued, people are not always what they seem, evil lurking in the ordinary, the fear of disorder, the dual nature of both hero and the villain, and guilt by association--the tone of Hitchcock's films--black comedy and suspense--and the visual aspects of Hitchcock's films--the noirish quality of Hitchcock's black and white feature films. Additionally, Phillips provides helpful information about production that some other books, emphasising interpretation, do not.

While I recommend Phillips's book--it is a very good introduction to Hitchcock's work in film and television--I do have a few concerns about it. I found Phillips's book too succinct when it came to Hitchcock's films of the 1950s. I think the films from Rear Window to Marnie deserved more than the two to four pages of analysis Phillips gave them. Phillips's book, while mostly chronological, wasn't fully chronological and I am not sure why. Phillips, for instance, dealt with Rope from 1948 and Under Capricorn from 1949 before Notorious from 1946 and Spellbound from 1945.