Customer Reviews:
 Predigested Platitudes January 3, 2004
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
Occasional insights obscured by thickets of doctrinaire Freudianism. Let the reader beware!
 Long winded trype! December 9, 2002
0 out of 17 found this review helpful
I couldnt even get past the first chapter of this god-awful book. Full of homo-this and homo-that it just became a total and utter bore to read in 10 minutes. No talk of craft or anything constructive - beware!
 Not bad July 10, 2002
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
Robin Wood writes an excellent exposition on several of Hitchcock's later films in this book. I have to say though that I liked The Art of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto better, because it covers a wider range of Hitchock's films beginning in the 30's, whereas in this book Robin Wood discusses in depth only from late fifties or so onward. He had a very nice write-up on "Marnie", which I greatly appreciated. Much of the book discussed the homosexual angles of "Rope" and "Strangers on a Train", and I personally thought Mr Wood went a bit overboard there, since I don't see either of those films as very homosexual - particularly "Strangers". That aside, I would still recommend this book for anyone who is wanting to read lots of books on Hitchcock. But if you want one book that covers everything at least a bit, get Donald Spoto's book.
The occasional page is more or less sensible December 3, 2001
8 out of 13 found this review helpful
The first thing to get past is Wood's prose style - it's grammatical and clear, yet it leaves one with the impression that the Wood wrote the book in one long sulk (lasting from 1965 to 1988). The second thing is all that Freudian rubbish. (Not that Freudian rubbish is the only kind of rubbish present - merely the most obtrusive and irritating.) The section in which he outlines Freud's views, using success terms like "Freud discovered that" and "Freud realises that", is just embarrassing, as is the use to which he puts it (the broken leg in "Rear Window" signifies castration, and so does the missing finger in "The 39 Steps", and this doesn't even begin to convey the sheer battiness of what he has to say about these films). And while Wood seems to be of the opinion that Hitchcock's films can all but cure leprosy, he rarely has a kind word to say about anyone else's. He's particularly hard, in a blunt and imperceptive way, on Clouzot's "Les Diabolique" and Donen's "Charade", films which have committed the crime of being similar to Hitchcock's, and just as good. Wood doesn't have a critical viewpoint; he has a religion.But there's a difference between Wood's book and, say, Donald Spoto's "The Art of Alfred Hitchcock". The two are equally preposterous (sometimes inadvertently entertaining), but Spoto is shallow, has no ideas to speak of, and spends his time disguising the fact; Wood actually has ideas, lots of them, TRIES to argue for them - and by sheer chance, some of his ideas are good. He has intelligent things to say about "Lifeboat", for instance. A pity his account of that film lasts just two pages, while the utter guff he writes about "Strangers on a Train" occupies at least fourteen. THE book to get about Hitchcock remains the extended Hitchcock/Truffaut interview, which is a delight to read, and far more illuminating.
Well worth a second glance November 4, 2000
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Good news first. This book is very good on the films of Hitchcock's Great Decade (1954-1965, from Rear Window through Marnie). There are extensive analyses of all Hitchcock's greatest American films, and there's also a lot of interesting feminist stuff on works like Spellbound and, especially, Notorious and the American (1956) version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. A lot of this was in the original edition, and I'm not sure that the revisit has been greatly to the book's benefit, though Wood deserves credit for leaving the original as it stood and contenting himself with comment rather than alteration. It's frustrating, for example, that Wood admits the inadequacy of the original version as regards Hitchcock's career in Britain but, rather than repairing this omission, devotes considerable space to a strident and largely fatuous attack on David Lynch in general and Blue Velvet in particular (a film which, in some ways, curiously resembles Wood's beloved and to my mind vastly overrated Vertigo, though Blue Velvet, like DePalma's Obsession, is both gentler and more sympathetic). Wood also has the invidious habit of praising Hitchcock's films by denigrating the work of others - most notably (and idiotically, through a disgracefully shallow and superficial interpretation) Kubrick's Paths of Glory. On the whole, though, especially in the sections on such still-underrated works as Marnie and Rope (and perhaps even Psycho, whose reputation still seems more largely owing to sensationalism than to appreciation of its considerable sensitivity), and for as long as the author can stay down off his Marxist-Freudian hobbyhorses, this is an extremely valuable book.
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