Alfred Hitchcock

Part of James Atlas’ Icons series, a filmic and biographical assessment of the twentieth century’s greatest filmmaker, by one of our most versatile critics.

Alfred Hitchcock presides over the history of film with a magisterial authority expressed in the silhouette that has made him recognizable around the world. No director has produced a more familiar body of work. From North by Northwest to Rear Window, The Birds to Psycho, his films are classics of the genre. In 2012, Vertigo was named the greatest film of all time by the British Film Institute.

Michael Wood, one of our most versatile critics, has given us a compact study of Hitchcock that deftly melds biography and criticism. He gives us the life, from a provincial suburb of London to the most posh precincts of Los Angeles, and a fabled career that began as a designer of title cards in the silent film era. He reads the films as visual texts, studying their plots to tease out their sometimes elusive meaning. And he reminds us that what we see is a Hitchcock film isn’t always what we think we see, that menace and murder lurk just beneath the surface. Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much is a virtuoso performance by a critic who knows everything.