In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender, and desire over his thirty-year American career.

Mark Padilla’s classical reception readings of Alfred Hitchcock features some of the director’s most loved and important films, and demonstrates how they are informed by the educational and cultural classicism of the director’s formative years. The six close readings begin with discussions of the production histories, so as to theorize and clarify how classicism could and did enter the projects. Exploration of the films through a classical lens creates the opportunity to explore new themes and ideological investments. The result is a further appreciation of both the engine of the director’s storytelling creativity and the expressionism of classicism, especially Greek myth and art, in British and American modernism. The analysis organizes the material into two triptychs, one focused on the three films sharing a wrong man pattern (wrongly accused man goes on the run to clear himself), the other treating the films starring the actress Grace Kelly. Chapter One, on The 39 Steps (1935), finds the origins of the wrong man plot in early 20th-century British classicism, and demonstrates that the movie utilizes motifs of Homer’s Odyssey. Chapter Two, on Saboteur (1942), theorizes the impact of the director’s memories of the formalism and myths associated with the Parthenon sculptures housed in the British Museum. Chapter Three, on North by Northwest, participates in the myths of the hero Oedipus, as associated with early Greek epic, Freud, Nietzsche, and Sophocles. Chapter Four, on Dial M for Murder (1954), returns to Homer’s Odyssey in the interpretive use of “the lay of Demodocus,” a story about the sexual triangle of Hephaestus, Aphrodite, and Ares. Chapter Five, on Rear Window (1954), finds its narrative archetype in The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; the erotic theme of Sirius, the Dog Star, also marks the film. Chapter Six, on To Catch a Thief (1955), offers the opportunity to break from mythic analogues, and to consider the film’s philosophical resonances (Plato and Epicurus) in the context of motifs coalesced around the god Dionysus/Bacchus.

Hitchcock was a masterful director, popular with audiences of all ages and critically acclaimed both during and after his unusually long career. What may have been sensed by many viewers but not fully articulated until now is the extent to which his works subtly engage philosophical themes: What is evil, and how does it shield and reveal itself? Can we know what is inside the mind of another person? What is at stake when one knows the truth but cannot speak of it or cannot persuade others? How is Hitchcock's loving critique of humanity manifested in his films? Why are Hitchcock's works so often ambiguous? What is the hidden purpose and theory behind his use of humor? Hitchcock employs cinematic techniques–from camera angles and use of light to editing and sound–partly to convey suspense and drama but also to engage and advance philosophical issues, ranging from identity crises to moral ugliness. Roche unlocks Hitchcock's engagement with philosophical themes, and he does so in a way that appeals to both the novice and the seasoned philosopher, as well as enthusiastic admirers of Hitchcock's films.

Alfred Hitchcock was a major figure in the development and flourishing of film noir. His noir films became an inspirational foundation of the neo-noir movement beginning in the 1970s, from Brian de Palma's mash-up homages to Hitchcock originals such as Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984) to the dark political thrillers of the era that explore the underside of American life, all of which owe a substantial debt to Hitchcock. However, the central role of Hitchcock in the long history of film noir has seldom been acknowledged in work devoted to his career and noir criticism more generally. Instead, there has been a tendency to consider Hitchcock's many dark thrillers and crime melodramas as sui generis, that is, as "e;Hitchcock films"e; that are somehow separate and distinct from industry trends. But this is to take a narrow view of the director's accomplishments that underestimates his substantial contributions to film history. Alfred Hitchc ock and Film Noir will be the first book-length treatment of the impressive corpus of Hitchcock noir films considered as such, as well as of his connection more generally to the emergence and flourishing of this important cinematic trend.

In One Shot Hitchcock, some of the best writers and thinkers in film studies have taken up the challenge of writing about a single shot from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Fifteen of Hitchcock's most engaging, horrifying, beautiful, sexual, and bizarre shots are interrogated and loved. Single shots are looked at from multiple angles, considering its importance for the film in question, and for other ways we can think about the cinema. This book is not only for people who enjoy watching and discussing Hitchcock's films, but for those who wish to discover new ways of writing about the films they love.

Classical Myth in Four Films of Alfred Hitchcock presents an original study of Alfred Hitchcock by considering how his classics-informed London upbringing marks some of his films. The Catholic and Irish-English Hitchcock (1899-1980) was born to a mercantile family and attended a Jesuit college preparatory, whose curriculum featured Latin and classical humanities. An important expression of Edwardian culture at-large was an appreciation for classical ideas, texts, images, and myth. Mark Padilla traces the ways that Hitchcock’s films convey mythical themes, patterns, and symbols, though they do not overtly reference them. Hitchcock was a modernist who used myth in unconscious ways as he sought to tell effective stories in the film medium. This book treats four representative films, each from a different decade of his early career. The first two movies were produced in London: The Farmer’s Wife (1928) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934); the second two in Hollywood: Rebecca (1940) and Strangers on a Train (1951). In close readings of these movies, Padilla discusses myths and literary texts such as the Judgment of Paris, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Aristophanes’s Frogs, Apuleius’s tale “Cupid and Psyche,” Homer’s Odyssey, and The Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Additionally, many Olympian deities and heroes have archetypal resonances in the films in question. Padilla also presents a new reading of Hitchcock’s circumstances as he entered film work in 1920 and theorizes why and how the films may be viewed as an expression of the classical tradition and of classical reception. This new and important contribution to the field of classical reception in the cinema will be of great value to classicists, film scholars, and general readers interested in these topics.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. In Hitchcock's Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock's body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcock's films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock's Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.

Children and youth perform both innocence and knowingness within Hitchcock's complex cinematic texts. Though the child often plays a small part, their significance - symbolically, theoretically, and philosophically - offers a unique opportunity to illuminate and interrogate the child presence within the cinematic complexity of Hitchcock's films.

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