Hitchcock's America

by Freedman, Jonathan; Millington, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780195119060
• ISBN10: 0195119061
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-02-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Hitchcock's American films are not only some of the most admired works ofworld cinema; they also offer some of our most acute responses to the changingshape of American society in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. The contributors to thisanthology--scholars of film, history, and literature--show how famous films likeStrangers on a Train, Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window along with more obscureones like The Trouble with Harry and Family Plot register the ideologies andinsurgencies, the normative assumptions and cultural alternatives, that shapedthose tumultuous decades. The Hitchcock that emerges in this volume is notmerely the inspired technician and master of abnormal psychology that criticshave justly hailed. He is also a cultural critic of remarkable insight andundeniable prescience.

Author Biography

Jonathan Freedman is Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
Richard H. Millington is Associate Professor of English at Smith College.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Love, American Style: Hitchcock's Hollywood

Unveiling Maternal Desires: Hitchcock and American Domesticity

American Shame: Rope, James Stewart, and the Postwar Crisis in American Masculinity

From Spellbound to Vertigo: Alfred Hitchcock and Therapeutic Culture in America

Hitchcock's Washington: Spectatorship, Ideology, and "The Homosexual Menace" in Strangers on a Train

Dana Brand: Rear-View Mirror: Hitchcock, Poe, and the Flaneur in America

Hitchcock and American Character: The Comedy of Self-Construction in North by Northwest

Hitchcock's Revised American Vision: The Wrong Man and Vertigo

Fearful Cemetery

Filmography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.