CONTENTS
Preface to the Revised Edition
Introduction
1: Childhood
Behind prison bars
"Came the dawn"
Michael Balcon
Woman to Woman
Number Thirteen
Introducing the future Mrs. Hitchcock
A melodramatic shooting: The Pleasure Garden
The Mountain Eagle
2: The first true Hitchcock: The Lodger
Creating a purely visual form
The glass floor
Handcuffs and sex
Why Hitchcock appears in his films
Downhill
Easy Virtue
The Ring and One-Round Jack
The Farmer's Wife
The Griffith influence
Champagne
The last silent movie: The Manxman.
3: Hitchcock's first sound film: Blackmail
The Shuftan process
Juno and the Paycock
Why Hitchcock will never film Crime and Punishment
What is suspense?
Murder
The Skin Game
Rich and Strange
Two innocents in Paris
Number Seventeen
Cats, cats everywhere
Waltzes from Vienna
The lowest ebb and the comeback.
4. The Man Who Knew Too Much
When Churchill was chief of police
M
From "The One Note Man" to the deadly cymbals
Clarification and simplification
The Thirty-nine Steps
John Buchan's influence
Understatement
An old, bawdy story
Mr. Memory
Slice of life and slice of cake
5. The Secret Agent
You don't always need a happy ending
What do they have in Switzerland?
Sabotage
The child and the bomb
An example of suspense
The Lady Vanishes
The plausibles
A wire from David O. Selznick
The last British film: Jamaica Inn
Some conclusions about the British period.
6: Rebecca: A Cinderella-like story
"I've never received an Oscar"
Foreign Correspondent
Gary Cooper's mistake
In Holland, windmills and rain
The bloodstained tulip
What's a MacGuffin?
Flashback to The Thirty-nine Steps
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
"All actors are cattle"
Suspicion
The luminous glass of milk
7: Sabotage versus Saboteur
A mass of ideas clutters up a picture
Shadow of a Doubt
Tribute to Thornton Wilder
"The Merry Widow"
An idealistic killer
Lifeboat
A microcosm of war
Like a pack of dogs
Return to London
Modest war contribution: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache.
8: Return to America
Spellbound
Collaboration with Salvador Dali
Notorious
"The Song of the Flame"
The uranium MacGuffin
Under surveillance by the FBI
A film about the cinema
The Paradine Case
Can Gregory Peck play a British lawyer?
An intricate shot
Horny hands, like the devil!
9: Rope: From 7:30 to 9:15 in one shot
Clouds of spun glass
Colors and shadows
Walls that fade away
Films must be cut
How to make noises rise from the street
Under Capricorn
Infantilism and other errors in judgment
Run for cover!
"Ingrid, it's only a movie!"
Stage Fright
The flashback that lied
The better the villain, the better the picture
10: Spectacular comeback via Strangers on a Train
A monopoly on the suspense genre
The little man who crawled
A bitchy wife
I Confess
A "barbaric sophisticate"
The sanctity of confession
Experience alone is not enough
Fear of the police
Story of a ménage á trois
11: Dial M for Murder
Filming in 3-D
The theater confines the action
Rear Window
The Kuleshov experiment
We are all voyeurs
Death of a small dog
The size of the image has a dramatic purpose
The surprise kiss versus the suspense kiss
The Patrick Mahon case and the Dr. Crippen case
To Catch a Thief
Sex on the screen
The Trouble with Harry
The humor of understatement
The Man Who Knew Too Much
A knife in the back
The clash of cymbals
12: The Wrong Man
Absolute authenticity
Vertigo
The usual alternatives: suspense or surprise
Necrophilia
Kim Novak on the set
Two projects that were never filmed
A political suspense movie
North by Northwest
The importance of photographic documentation
Dealing with time and space
The practice of the absurd
The body that came from nowhere
13: Ideas in the middle of the night
The longest kiss in screen history
A case of pure exhibitionism
Never waste space
Screen imagery is make-believe
Psycho
Janet Leigh's brassière.
Red herrings
Directing the audience
How Arbogast was killed
A shower stabbing
Stuffed birds
How to get mass emotions
Psycho: A film-maker's film
14: The Birds
The elderly ornithologist
The gouged-out eyes
The girl in a gilded cage
Improvisations
The size of the image
The scene that was dropped
An emotional truck
Electronic sounds
Practical jokes
15: Marnie
A fetishist love
The Three Hostages, Mary Rose, and R.R.R.R.
Torn Curtain
The bus is the villain
The scene in the factory
Every film is a brand-new experience
The rising curve
The situation film versus the character film
"I only read the London Times"
A strictly visual mind
Hitchcock a Catholic film-maker?
A dream for the future: A film showing twenty-four hours in the life of a city
16: Hitchcock's final years
Grace Kelly abandons the cinema
More on The Birds, Marnie, and Torn Curtain
Hitch misses the stars
The "great flawed films"
A project that was dropped
Topaz made to order for the front office
Return to London with Frenzy
The pacemaker and Family Plot
Hitchcock laden down with tributes and honors
Love and espionage
The Short Night
Hitchcock is ill, Sir Alfred is dead
The end
The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Selected Bibliography
Index of Film Titles
Index of Names
