The Books of My Life: The Art of Alfred Hitchcock

For Donald Spoto (The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, New York: Anchor Doubleday, second edition, 1992) criticism has two functions. Criticism, Spoto argues, should tell us something about the critics emotional and intellectual attachment and it should draw readers of criticism back to the films being criticised (p. ix).

So how does Spoto's book, a revision of a book originally published in 1976, draw readers like me back to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and what does it reveal to us about Donald Spoto? Spoto's book explores, generally in four to ten pages or so save in the case of Vertigo, which runs to 35 pages, the plots, the themes--the theatre, theatrical illusion, voyeurism, doubles, appearance versus reality, the dual character of protagonists, the dark and chaotic underbelly of nature--visual motifs--birds as chaotic--and the tone or genre--black comedy and suspense--of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. I found the chapters interpreting each film in Spoto's book, save for that on Vertigo, both far too brief and far too wordy at the same time. It seemed to me that about half of this 400 plus page book could have been profitably pared down to around 200 pages without any loss of substance. In fact, by books end I thought that the book might have been even better had it simply been a twenty to thirty page paper rather than a 471 page book. I found Spoto's use of celebratory phrases like "wholeness of feeling", "overt tenderness", "sheer poetry", and "his...fervid sensibility" far too vague and impressionistic rather than analytical and systematic. As to why we readers should take his impressionistic criticism seriously, Spoto seems to suggest that it is because when he showed his work to Hitchcock, the master gave him his imprimatur (p. viii). This justification of authority might be even better than St. Paul's justification of his apostleship on the basis that he had seen the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus in the spirit, since Spoto spoke to Hitchcock in the flesh.

Rather than taking me back to Hitchcock's films, I found that Spoto's prose and his wordiness circled me back to Donald Spoto. So too did Spoto's limited attention to the production details of Hitchcock's films and his extremely limited references in the text to sources he used in his analysis of Hitchcock. Spoto, for example, argues that Hitchcock was influenced by Victorian literature and Victorian art but he provides no sources for this intellectual pedigree. Since Spoto, who has a doctoral degree in Biblical Studies or Theology, is not, as far as I can tell, a specialist in Victorian Studies, I presume he got this information on Victorian culture and its influences from Victorian specialists. He does not, however, cite these scholarly sources nor do they make a cameo appearance in the brief bibliography at the back of the book. This general lack of references to sources throughout Spoto's book is, at least for me, unforgivable in someone with a scholarly background.

Because of all this I simply cannot recommend Spoto's book on Hitchcock. I found the book rather lacking, particularly in comparison to, for example, Robin Wood's earlier seminal book, Hitchcock's Films (1965), one of the first books in text oriented film studies I ever read and still one of the best interpretive film studies I ever read. So, if you are looking for an introductory book on the art of Alfred Hitchcock, I suggest you look elsewhere.