This is the first sustained and comprehensive critical study of Anthony Asquith. Ryall sets the director's work in the context of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, and examines the artistic and cultural influences within which his films can be understood. Asquith's silent films were compared favourably to those of his eminent contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, but his career faltered during the 1930s. However, the success of Pygmalion (1938) and French Without Tears (1939), based on plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, together with his significant contributions to wartime British cinema, re-established him as one of Britain's leading film makers. Asquith's post-war career includes several pictures in collaboration with Rattigan, and the definitive adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1951), but his versatility is demonstrated effectively in a number of modest genre films including The Woman in Question (1950), The Young Lovers (1954) and Orders to Kill (1958).

Blackmail owes its place in film history to the fact that it was the first major British sound film. It exists in two quite separate versions, one sound, one silent, and is one of the first films to have the Hitchcock touch, as in the chase sequence around the British Museum. Tom Ryall examines the film's unusual production history, and places it in the context of Hitchcock's other British films of the period.

First published in 1986, this standard account of Hitchcock's British films and film-making is now available again in a Second Edition with a new Introduction and Bibliography. It will be welcomed by all students of the film and admirers of Hitchcock.