Hitchcock's Films Revisited

On the rare occasions when they bothered to contemplate him and his work, arts intelligentsia relegated Alfred Hitchcock to the status of competent craftsman of popular thrillers--until the 1960s, when a few critics began a major re-evaluation of his work. Among the best known of these was Robin Wood, who published HITCHCOCK'S FILMS in 1965. It would be among the first critical texts to give Hitchcock the status of master artist.

Republished as HITCHCOCK'S FILMS REVISITED, most of the body of the book remains the same as the originally titled HITCHCOCK'S FILMS, a critical study of eight of Hitchcock's then most recent films: STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PSYCHO, THE BIRDS, MARNIE, and TORN CURTAIN. But then as now, the study is very problematic, and this has a great deal less to do with the films than with the fact that Wood is much like the Mother Goose nursery rhyme. When he is good he is very, very good, but when he is bad he is horrid.

Wood was among the first to rescue VERTIGO from the dismissive reviews and tepid audience response it received upon its debut, and his comments here are tremendously insightful; he is no less effective in his studies of REAR WINDOW and PSYCHO. His thoughts on STRANGERS ON A TRAIN are excessively pendantic and have a forced quality, but they are none the less interesting. He does not manage to convince me that I should regard NORTH BY NORTHWEST as a masterpiece, but even so he makes a good case.

In his opening remarks, Wood states that he is not among those fans for whom Hitchcock can do no wrong, and attempts to prove his point by citing several famous Hitchcock films that he considers weak. Indeed, he largely dismisses virtually every film Hitchcock made before 1940 and has a tendency to regard Hitchcock's films of the 1940s as developmental. But there is no two ways about it: he is completely off the mark when describes THE BIRDS and MARNIE as masterpieces and TORN CURTAIN as merely disappointing.

The basic problem is that Wood focuses on thematic elements to the virtual exclusion of everything else. It is true that Hitchcock tends toward certain themes--perhaps most obviously an ironic form of individual isolation--so it is hardly surprising that these also occur in THE BIRDS, MARNIE, and TORN CURTAIN. Indeed it would be a shock if they did not. But thematic presence does not necessarily qualify a film for the description of "masterpiece," and where THE BIRDS and MARNIE are concerned Wood throws the word around much too freely for my liking.

The great strength of both THE BIRDS and MARNIE is their numerous set pieces, many of which are very famous and all of which are highly watchable. In each instance, however, the film emerges as a premise in search of a viable plot, and whatever thematic interest may exist pales alongside this very fundamental fact. TORN CURTAIN has several interesting performances in the supporting cast and one truly spectacular Hitchcockian set piece, but it is chiefly remarkable for being among the handful of boring films that Hitchcock made, and no amount of thematic presence can alter this rather basic observation.

Wood has annotated his original text with subsequent articles, and the same situation holds true here as well: he tends to offer praise to those films that have something he can identify as a consistent thematic purpose and dismiss those that do not, all of it without regard to whether or not the film actually works as a film. His comments are not without interest, but in the end these are the musings of a literary scholar instead of an individual who has any real idea of the difference between "interesting failure" and "cinema masterpiece."

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

There are alot of cool insights and interesting ways of looking at the several of Hitchcocks's films in this book, but....Wood's prose is choppy and a real bitch to read. I feel like he is constantly making an exposition on some great insight into the films and then he sort of drops it, leaving the reader feeling a little cheated. The introduction is very long and not really applicable? Who cares that you are a gay marxist. The only real critique from a marxist perspective is the chapter on blackmail. this isnt your autobiography, and I don't really care to draw connections between your evolutuion in criticism and the events of your life. That said.. The second half is superior to the first. The first half reads like a high school english teacher wrote it. The second half has some gems. Specifically the chapters on Blackmail, Rope, The Man who knew too much

Forty years ago Robin Wood joined a then-small number of serious critics who urged that Hitchcock be taken seriously. Since many of those critics did not receive a wide reading, Wood's effort was of extreme significance in garnering Hitch the respect he deserved.

It's wonderful to note that Wood, still writing, has continued to update his first work without repudiating or diluting any of it. He made some highly daring observations in 1966, which so many writers ridiculed or dismissed. His originality and critical integrity is so notable, though, that it has weathered these attacks and survived to the present, in actually even better form.

Consider, for example, that Wood countered a then-contemporary tend in dismissing "Marnie" as a failure. Instead, in his first book and most recent edition, he insists that "Marnie" be counted in among films like Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo and North by Northwest as a masterly pairing of visual images addressing psychological elements. And who else before Wood saw the utterly original qualities of "Vertigo," or deconstructed them more effectively?

You won't be sorry to have this book in your library. It originated a critical lanugage of film, and celebrated one of film's greatest contributors in a unique way.

Most of the comments posted about this book are embarrassing in their refusal to engage properly with what Robin Wood is actually trying to argue. Previous readers appear to resent Wood's desire to take the cinema seriously, and suggest that we should look to Hitchcock's films for no more than "craft" and "technique". If that's all one is concerned with, I'm not sure why it would be worth reading a book on Hitchcock at all. Wood has always been firm in asserting that the experience of watching a film is both emotional and intellectual. Taking the cinema seriously doesn't mean one has to stop responding to it emotionally. Nor does Hitchcock's status as a consummate entertainer invalidate Wood's arguments that his films raise profound and troubling moral and political questions.

Wood writes beautifully. Complaints about his reliance on Freudian or Marxist terminology are wrongheaded - such terminology is in fact employed far more rarely than by most academic writers. Wood's use of language is magnificently precise and careful. It is true that he conducts his critique of Hitchcock, as of other filmmakers, from a leftwing viewpoint. One does not have to share his commitment to Marxism (a kind of reconstructed, humanistic Marxism, incidentally, which has nothing to do with the atrocities perpetrated by Mao or Stalin) in order to appreciate the strength of his analysis. Anyone who is prepared, as a reader, to engage in lively debate with a writer's ideological and moral assumptions, should be able to profit by reading Wood's book.

I certainly don't agree with everything Wood has to say either on a political or an aesthetic level. But no other writer on Hitchcock, or on the cinema, has the same depth, reach or passion for his subject. Hitchcock's Films Revisited, presenting in tandem Wood's earlier and later thoughts on one of the cinema's great masters, is not only great criticism; it is also a moving account of one man's personal and political evolution.

Wood's seminal book was first published in 1966 and he has revised it since then on a number of occasions. This latest revision allows Wood to revisit his past and comment on both his acute observations on Hitchcock's films and comment some of the sillier concepts that dotted the original book as well. It's appropriate that Wood cites Freud as often as he does; Hitchcock was fascinated with psychoanalysis and it figures significantly in a number of films in one form or another. On the other hand, Wood also revisits many of the same films in the newer material and while the observations are always interesting, they are, at best just as overblown as some of his original inflated claims for Hitchcock as well.

Hitchcock's Films still stands as an essential read for Hitchcock fans and film students but much of what Wood has to say should be taken with a grain of salt. Wood frequently becomes so anayltical that he loses touch with the power and joy in Hitchcock's craft. Hitchcock's films are as much about his technique as they are about the themes that fascinated him. Hitchcock's Films isn't a bad book; it's a book that needs to be read by someone who has already developed enough critical skills to recognize when the author's arguements have become as full of hot air as a balloon.

Like all the hyperbole written about an important artistic figure, Wood's book has a number of noteable insights but, again, he reads more into the material than is there sometimes. I much prefer Patrick McGilligan's fine biography of Hitchcock. McGilligan manages to mix his observations with comments from people who actually were involved in the making of the films. We get insight from the artist's that collaborated with Hitchcock vs. second hand observations from someone sitting in a darkened cinema.