A wide-ranging, though eccentric, tour of Alfred Hitchcock's
agreeably scary cinema. Conrad (English/Christ Church, Oxford;
"Modern Times, Modern Places", 1999) will have no truck with the
extensive literature already published on the Master of Suspense,
which he dismisses as "pseudo-scientific" and "bogus cerebration."
Nor, evidently, does he have much patience with the division of
Hitchcock's work into discrete films from "The Pleasure Garden
"through "Family Plot. "Instead of considering the films one by
one, he has pulverized them all into a puree in which, for example,
an excursis about the director's preoccupation with bathrooms (in
which he set scenes in "The Lodger", "Number Seventeen", "Secret
Agent", "The Lady Vanishes", "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", "Spellbound",
"The Trouble with Harry", and "Psycho") can range freely over half
a dozen examples before moving on to films mysteriously "without
"bathrooms, from "The 39 Steps "to "Lifeboat. "Although his
determination to avoid earlier critics leaves Conrad spending a
fair amount of time reinventing the wheel, his investigation,
organized loosely around the question of how Hitchcock makes fear
entertaining, yields some piquant insights, such as Hitchcock's
affinity with Surrealists like Andre Breton to the self-portraits
he left in the fat men who peopled his films. But Conrad's cavalier
annexation of literary sources for the films to provide further
examples, as if Hitchcock had created Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca
"and Robert Bloch's "Psycho "as well as the films he based on them,
creates an unhappy confusion of boundaries, as if he could not
decide whether Hitchcock was remarkable because his films were so
distinctive or because they were so exemplary. In the end, all but
the largest contours of Conrad's analysis become blurred as well,
sunk beneath reams of absorbing detail. Even if the argument
sometimes seems like an endless series of digressions, however, it
never makes less than an entertaining and illuminating case for the
unity of Hitchcock's half-century of films. (20 b&w photos)
(Kirkus Reviews)
Alfred Hitchcock relished his power to frighten us and believed the shocks he administered improved our psychological health. But he could never satisfactorily explain our curiosity to see forbidden things or the perverse desire to experience anxiety and dread that made his work so popular.
In The Hitchcock Murders, Peter Conrad, one of Hitchcock's eager victims, undertakes the task on the master's behalf. At the age of thirteen, Conrad snuck into his first screening of Psycho. Now he sets out to analyze the nature of Hitchcock's appeal to both himself and the millions of moviegoers for whom Hitchcock is cinema's foremost auteur. Examining Hitchcock's use of religion, morality, conscience, culpability, and literary symbols, Conrad unveils a chilling Nietzschean universe—one in which there is no God and no moral standard, where humans are petty and disposable and the neutral hand of fate can take a life in the blink of an eye. A timid, respectable man with the imagination of a psychopath, a chubby jester whose practical jokes took merciless advantage of human insecurities, Hitchcock is revealed here as the man who knew too much—about all of us.
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