"Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism" - by Paula Marantz Cohen
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"Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism"
- written by Paula Marantz Cohen
- published by University Press of Kentucky (2006)
- ISBN: 0813108500
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I thought this book would be an examination of how Hitch had handled various Victorian issues, esp. sexual repression and upper-class elitism. Actually, that's not what the book is about at all. Cohen is interested only in the switch from what she calls a "subjective narrative" -- literary fiction of the Victorian age -- to film narrative of the modern era. She claims literary fiction in the 1800s had developed a female-centered subjectivity and that cinema came along to "re-orient" the public to a male-focused sensibility. She hammers this over and over again throughout her book, and spends way too much time examining gender roles, until you could swear there was nothing else that mattered about Hitchcock's films. Of course, this is always the problem with any tightly-focused scholarly analysis ("When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"); so it's not terribly objectionable, and fortunately the book does have quite a number of interesting insights, esp. about Hitch's relationship with his daughter and the roles he cast her in as those roles reflect the development of their father-daughter dynamic. While I disagree with much of what Cohen says, I found her book a catalyst to some very interesting thinking about Hitch. In particular, she has quite a fascinating perspective on his last films, which are often viewed as failures; she thinks they're just exericses in post-modernism. Whatever you think about the book, I continue to be amazed at how many people feel compelled to ransack Hitchcock's work; it's as though no serious film fan has any choice but to address what he did. This book is another interesting step in the process....
Joseph W. Smith III (Montoursville, PA United States)