The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock

This book is a collection of critical essays that examine Alfred Hitchcock as an American filmmaker. Having long thought of Hitchcock as a quintessentially British filmmaker, I find myself fully disabused of this spurious notion. As it turns out, Hitchcock aimed himself on a trajectory towards a target of being hired into and working within the American movie “studio system” of the 1940s and 1950s. It was during that period, and working with the administrative and creative frameworks set up by Paramount Pictures, that Hitchcock was able to define his greatest commercial and critical successes.

The essays that follow the...