Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

First published in 1986, this standard account of Hitchcock's British films and film-making is now available again in a Second Edition with a new Introduction and Bibliography. It will be welcomed by all students of the film and admirers of Hitchcock.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Ryall studies the influences and contexts that help readers appreciate Hitchcock's formative years from 1925 to 1939, and the 23 British films he directed in that period. Well aware of the critical controversies over treating famous directors as single unified auteurs, Ryall suggests the many Hitchcocks that emerge when Hitchcock is set in the many contexts in which he belongs. There is a Hitchcock who both admires American cinema and is familiar with possible alternatives to it, a man caught up in British economic, ideological, and artistic opposition to American hegemony. There is also the Hitchcock influenced by John Buchan, Somerset Maugham, and the British spy thriller film tradition, as well as by American classical conceptions of film, who pulls all of these and other traditions (such as minority art and British documentary traditions), into his own unique blend containing strong oppositional elements to the very traditions on which he draws. The book is unique for its analyses of events, processes, traditions, and films, which help us understand what Hitchcock was working with in his formative years and what he made of what he was given. Students and general readers.-I. Deer, University of South Florida