Amazon.com Review
Dan Auiler is undoubtedly the luckiest Alfred Hitchcock devotee alive. With the permission of the director's family, he sifted through the Hitchcock archives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a multifaceted portrait of the artist at work. If this book has a fault, it's that the sheer mass of information makes it a little hard to digest; but taken in small doses, its richness becomes a virtue, offering unique insights into the complicated processes that led to some of the greatest movies ever made.
Auiler divides the creative act into three parts: "Building the Screenplay," "Preparing the Visual," and "Putting It All Together." In each section he provides documents, including memos, script excerpts, sketches, and storyboards from a selection of films. Most interesting are those relating to Kaleidoscope a project from the late '60s that, Auiler contends, would have been a groundbreaking film had the studio not forced Hitchcock to abandon it. This collection also gives full credit to Alma Reville, the director's wife and lifelong collaborator, and her influence on the development of Hitchcock's style is evident throughout. Other gems include a transcript of discussions between Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren about her character in The Birds and a set of production stills from an early, lost movie, The Mountain Eagle.
There's an enormous amount to take in, but what quickly emerges is a sense of Hitchcock's meticulous approach to crafting a film. He frequently sent script treatments to other writers and filmmakers, asking for their critical comments, and Auiler reproduces several of these correspondences, including François Truffaut's detailed analysis of Kaleidoscope. At the other end of the creative journey the book closes with the script for an unproduced Spellbound trailer in which Hitchcock playfully evokes the magic of movies: "That screen up there is like a mind ... we here in Hollywood can make anything happen there." Hitchcock's Notebooks is a testament to the powerful vision and sheer hard work that lay behind that magic. --Simon Leake
From Library Journal
In this 100th-anniversary year of Alfred Hitchcock's birth, the director's work has inspired several movie remakes and a whole new crop of admirers. These two tributes to Hitchcock's art offer something new to fans. Hitchcock's America focuses on Hitchcock as cultural critic, with essays from film and literature scholars. The pieces are randomly arranged and comment on family values, gender roles, and American ideals as they are reflected in a wide array of Hitchcock's American films. While most followers hail the psychological power of his cinema, this anthology successfully shows his ability to record the changing expectations of American society in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The stark contrasts between big city and small town, sexuality and purity, hidden desires and social mores are explored as Hitchcock filmed them. Auiler (Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, LJ 5/1/98) returns with an ambitious look at the creative process of filmmaking, from the director's early German films through the golden decade of his work in the Fifties and Sixties. Using Hitchcock's own copious notes, plus copies of studio memos, hand-marked scripts, and plenty of production photos and stills, he re-creates the step-by-step production of a movie. Chapters on the screenplay, visual set-up, production, post-production editing, and unfinished projects provide fascinating insight into how movies were made, Hitchcock-style. Those with no knowledge of the "behind-the-scenes" activity of cinema will be fascinated by this detailed accounting. Auiler's book is for general audiences, while Hitchcock's America would be a good purchase for film collections in academic libraries.AKelli N. Perkins, Herrick Dist. Lib., Holland, MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
