The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock [Paperback]

Donald Spoto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 1999

This is the definitive life story of Alfred Hitchcock, the enigmatic and intensely private director of Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, and more than forty other films. While setting forth every stage of Hitchcock’s long life and brilliant career, Donald Spoto also explores the roots of the director’s obsessions with blondes, food, murder, and idealized love—and he traces the incomparable, bizarre genius from Hitchcock’s English childhood through the golden years of his career in America as one of the greatest directors in the history of filmmaking.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

How is it possible to paint a portrait of an artist who left behind none of the notebooks and journals that provide most biographers with important personal details? After exhaustive researching and interviewing, Donald Spoto came to the conclusion that "Hitchcock's films were indeed his notebooks and journals ... [they] are astonishingly personal documents." This account of Alfred Hitchcock's life reads the mind of the man through the making of his films. Spoto argues powerfully and convincingly that movies like Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho can be appreciated not only as masterpieces of entertainment but also as subtle, revealing autobiography. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Spoto's 1983 biography is being reproduced in honor of the famous director's centennial. The book was well received at the time of its publication, even managing to snag an Edgar Award. For this anniversary edition, Spoto has added a new introduction. The text is buttressed with numerous photographs and a detailed filmography.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 508 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (August 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030680932X
• ISBN-13: 978-0306809323
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #303,064 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of the Artist as a Dog, October 31, 2000

By 

Randall Ivey "Randall" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock (Paperback)

Spoto's life of Hitchcock, originally published in 1983, is one of the best biographies of a film director we have in English. It's a warts and all portrait, but instead of pitying or disliking Hitchcock for his idiosyncrasies and meannesses, we come to admire him even more for his singular dedication to the art of movies (and he was an artist, not merely "the master of suspense", to use an essentially narrow and insulting characterization). And as far as sheer technique goes, sheer mastery of the medium, Hitchcock probably was/is unsurpassed among modern day filmmakers.

Spoto gives us detailed accounts of the making of each of Hitchcock's major films. He really did dislike actors, calling them cattle, but he of course had a fascination with blonde actresses. The book's most poignant segment is the episode invovling Hitchcock's infatuation with Tippi Hedren (a mediocre performer at best who should have been grateful for a great man's attention and adoration), which ultimately ended in humiliation and unhappiness for both of them. Spoto is wrong, however, about MARNIE. It is one of the director's greatest movies, as moving and sad a depiction of desperation as has been committed to celluoid. It fully deserves its late revival in critical favor.

This is a clearly written, highly entertaining biography, and one of the closest glimpses we are liking to get straight from the director's chair.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating insight into the enigma, January 18, 2005

By 

Webhed (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock (Paperback)

"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."

...and here is the Master of Suspense. While Hitchcock happens to be one of the better-known directors of the 20th century, he surely is the only master of enigma. Spoto has done an admirable job in depicting the life of a man always shrouded in mystery.

The book follows Hitch from his childhood. A rather unattractive mother's boy, he was an outcast at public school. It continues his story from humble beginnings, through the discovery of genius, and ends at his death in 1980, at the age of 81. Throughout the pages, Spoto covers Hitchcock's life in detail, including his many quirks, obsessions bizarre sense of humour.

Hitchcock's life was indeed bizarre - his personality and obsessions manifesting themselves in his over-eating and his dry, often macabre sense of humour. However, as the author rightly points out, the director also revealed this side of himself through the images of his movies. This makes a fascinating study once you have read the book and you'll never view Hitch's films at face value again.

Because of her desire to protect her father's privacy, Hitch's daughter, Pat, refused Spoto any assistance in the writing of this book. He went instead to a veritable legion of actors and screenwriters who knew him and worked with him. The result is an extremely revealing and often very dark portrait of a man whose character was as shadowed as his films.

But not all is dark and foreboding. There are several amusing anecdotes, which highlight Hitch's macabre sense of humour. Like the time he had a dummy made in his own likeness and sent it floating on its back down the Thames river as a publicity stunt for his movie "Frenzy" in 1972.

My own personal favourite is the story of a woman who accosted him and complained that the "Psycho" shower scene so frightened her daughter that the girl would no longer shower. His laconic reply was, "Then, Madam, I suggest you have her dry cleaned."

He also did not suffer actors gladly. While he did have his stable of favourites that he worked with, he once claimed that actors were cattle. Later he said, "I didn't say that actors are cattle - I said they should be treated as cattle." Another story says that when an actress asked Hitchcock if her right or left profile was better, he told her, "My dear, you're sitting on your best profile."

Some of Spoto's claims I can't help but treat with a little scepticism. I do know that Hitch had a fascination with murder but the tender way in which he presents it in his films is classic Hitchcock. However, the author's statement that scenes in Hitch's movies reflect kind of voyeurism, I feel that with his trademark camera pans through windows, the director was trying to give the audience a bird's eye view of the scene - no more and no less. It is his way of allowing us to enter the private lives of his characters.

When all is said and done, this is a fascinating book of a fascinating man. A genius in his own time, but also a frustrated enigma, with a taste for the truly macabre. I highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in learning about the man behind the mystery, although it is a little heavy at times.

I'll leave the last word to the Master of Suspense himself:

"Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I can provide no explanation for the low ratings -- this is a marvelous biography, April 10, 2010

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock (Paperback)

I truly cannot explain why so many are giving this book low ratings. It is a critically acclaimed, deeply researched, well written biography. Nearly every aspect of Hitchcock's life and art is discussed, ably and literately. The only thing that I can think is that some people are upset that the book also explores the more disturbing aspects of Hitchcock's life, primarily his increasing obsession in the fifties and sixties with his leading ladies. These are disturbing to read about, but the problem is not Spoto's. Hitchcock was, like many highly creative individuals, a very complex, many-sided individual. Not everything about him was admirable and his weird, disturbing fixations on some of his leading actresses, in particular Tippi Hedren, can not be blamed on Spoto. As a biographer, he would have been remiss in not reporting this aspects of Hitchcock's life.

As far as claims that the book was dull or poorly written, this says more about specific reviewers than the book itself. I found it fascinating, a real page turner, and read through it in only a few days.

I will temper my review by pointing out that this is only one of the three major biographies of Hitchcock that one wanting to know more about Hitchcock should consider reading. If you want a superb but shorter biography, you could consider John Russell Taylor's HITCH: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK. If you are willing to read a biography much longer than Spoto's, you could consider Patrick McGilligan's outstanding ALFRED HITCHCOCK: A LIFE IN DARKNESS AND LIGHT. But the Spoto is definitely an elite biography, completely undeserving of the ill-considered low ratings some are giving this. It is meticulously researched, well-written, and hugely informative. This book will remain on the short list of the most crucial studies of the life and films of Alfred Hitchcock, and deservedly so.