Hitchcock’s British Films

282 Pages·2010·4.725 MB·English

by  Maurice Yacowar

HITCHCOCK'S BRITISH FILMS '
SECOND
EDITION
HITCHCOCK’S BRITISH FILMS
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Contemporary Approaches to Film and Tele vi sion Series
A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online
at wsupress.wayne.edu
General Editor
Barry Keith Grant
Brock University
Advisory Editors
Robert J. Burgoyne
Wayne State University
Caren J. Deming
University of Arizona
Patricia B. Erens
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Peter X. Feng
University of Delaware
Lucy Fischer
University of Pittsburgh
Frances Gateward
Ursinus College
Tom Gunning
University of Chicago
Thomas Leitch
University of Delaware
Anna McCarthy
New York University
Walter Metz
Southern Illinois University
Lisa Parks
University of California– Santa Barbara
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HITCHCOCK’S BRITISH FILMS
SECOND EDITION
MAURICE YACOWAR
WITH A FOREWORD BY BARRY KEITH GRANT
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
DETROIT
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© 2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
First edition published by Shoe String Press/Archon Books 1977, © Maurice Yacowar
1977.
All photos are courtesy of the British National Film Archive.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yacowar, Maurice.
Hitchcock’s British fi lms / Maurice Yacowar. – 2nd ed.
p. cm. – (Contemporary approaches to fi lm and television series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8143-3494-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899–1980. I. Title.
PN1998.A3H59 2010
791.43'0233'092–dc22
2010016188
ISBN 978-0-8143-3703-5 (e-book)
118-44452_ch00_3P.indd iv 7/10/10 4:55 PM
To Ruth, with love and thanks
For happy memories
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Contents
Foreword by Barry Keith Grant ix
Preface to the Second Edition xi
Ac know ledg ments to the First Edition xv
Introduction 1
The Plea sure Garden (1925) 9
The Mountain Ea gle (1926) 18
The Lodger (1926) 20
Downhill (1927) 29
Easy Virtue (1927) 37
The Ring (1927) 41
The Farmer’s Wife (1928) 47
Champagne (1928) 58
The Manxman (1929) 64
Blackmail (1929) 76
Elstree Calling (1930) 90
Juno and the Paycock (1930) 92
Murder! (1930) 98
The Skin Game (1931) 111
Rich and Strange (1932) 116
Number Seventeen (1932) 124
Waltzes from Vienna (1933) 130
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Contents
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) 135
The 39 Steps (1935) 146
Secret Agent (1936) 155
Sabotage (1936) 164
Young and Innocent (1937) 173
The Lady Vanishes (1938) 184
Jamaica Inn (1939) 197
Conclusion: Hitchcock’s Imagery and Art 204
Appendix: Hitchcock’s Appearances 217
Notes 227
Index 257
viii
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Foreword
With the republication of Maurice Yacowar’s Hitchcock’s British Films,
both traditional Hitchcocko- Hawksians and younger post- whatever
turks will have cause to rejoice. This, the fi rst book devoted to the
twenty- three fi lms directed by Alfred Hitchcock in his native En gland
before he came to the United States at the invitation of David O. Sel-
znick, was originally published in a limited cloth run by a small New
En gland press more than three de cades ago and has long been out of
print. Since then, of course, there have been other books on this period
of Hitchcock’s work, notably Tom Ryall’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Bri-
tish Cinema (1986) and Charles Barr’s En glish Hitchcock (1999), not to
mention numerous book chapters and journal articles on such indi-
vidual fi lms as Blackmail. But Yacowar’s was there before them.
As such, it was the fi rst book to challenge the orthodox opinion of
the time that Hitchcock’s “mature” period in Hollywood, from the late
1940s to the early 1960s, constituted the director’s best work. In his pio-
neering and highly infl uential Hitchcock’s Films (1965), Robin Wood
fl atly dismissed Hitchcock’s British fi lms as “little more than ’prentice
work” and did not discuss any of them, asking, “Who wants the leaf-
buds when the rose has opened?” His conclusion that “the notion that
the British fi lms are better than, or as good as, or comparable with the
later Hollywood ones seems to me not worth discussion” became the
prevailing view, despite Wood’s retraction of this judgment more than
twenty years later in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (1989) as “completely
indefensible.”
But Yacowar’s Hitchcock’s British Films is important not simply be-
cause it was the fi rst on the subject. As a traditional auteurist analysis,
it is as perceptive and as well argued as Wood’s more widely known
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