The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema

Tom Ryall's Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) explores the history of British--British film historian Charles Barr prefers to call it English--cinema in the 1930s and 1930s. Ryall also uses the films of British or English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock to explore the economic, political, cultural, and geographic contexts of English cinema in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ryall explores the development of a bifurcated film culture in England in the 1920s and 1930s, a divide that, as Ryall notes, only a few crossed, between the English entertainment cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood, and the English art cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by German, French, and Soviet films and film theory with its network of film clubs, film journals, and art film houses. Ryall explores how the Quota Act of 1927 gave impetus to the development of an English cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood studio techniques and practises and drawing on English popular culture (the English music hall, the English theatre, English literature, English crime and spy novels). Ryall explores how the growth of the English cinema was limited-Britons continued to prefer Hollywood cinema--and its inability to regularly break into the American market, something necessitated by the small size of the English market compared to that of the United States.

Ryall places the films of Alfred Hitchcock into all these contexts. Ryall notes that Hitchcock was one of those few who straddled the divide between the entertainment cinema and the popular cinema, something evidenced, Ryall argues, in his films, films that are often simultaneously influenced by Hollywood and aimed at a mass audience, while also characterised by aural and visual experimentation that Hitchcock drew from Germany, France, and the Soviet Union. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's career benefited from the Quota Act and how the decline of the English film industry in 1937 led Hitchcock to move to Hollywood to make films. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's films reflect the popularity of certain British genres, particularly the thriller and spy genre, a genre with which Hitchcock became synonymous from the 1940s on, and explores how the theme of ordinary people impacted by extraordinary circumstances, a theme that became central to his thrillers, also became central to Hitchcock's auteurist image.

Ryall's superb book is essential to anyone interested in the relationship between society and film, culture and film, English society and culture in the early 20th century, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. It offers an approach to culture and film that is more sociological than psychoanalytic and is far the better for it and should be emulated by other film scholars far more than it has been.