performing arts

McGilligan has written a solid biography of Hitchcock. His work shows the results of extensive viewings of all the director's films. His notes show extensive research over many years. The basic problem of the book is not the research. McGilligan has collected so much information that he just does not know where to stop.

A good biographer or historian can weave the facts into a narrative. McGilligan can compile fact after fact but he cannot create an overview of what is going on.

He is so also extemely timid at making any personal assertion of the importance - or otherwise - of Hitchcock. His conclusion or coda constantly quotes other people such as Scorcese, Paglia, Ebert, French and others. He does not set out what he thinks.

Clearly the book is - in part - a rebutal of the claims made in Spoto's biography, but even here McGilligan does not attempt to refute Spoto, except by quoting other people. He is too cautious to make any conclusions, to say what he thinks. After reading the book, I was almost screaming at the author to tell me what his views were. Was Hitchcock a populist or an artist or both, If so why? What does Mr McGilligan actually think. I know he can research. He can write in a workmanlike fashion, but I wanted a great deal more.

In short, it is a good source book for Hitchcock, but it falls short as a masterly biography. You will learn a lot about the man. It is definitive to the extent that it is most extensive, but a first class biography of Hitchock needs still to be written.

The footnotes are lamentable. I know that they are seen as popular poison, but if you are going to write a serious book, it needs a proper system of footnoting to properly direct the reader to the source. In some cases, I simply do not know where the author got his information.

This is clearly meant to be a definitive biography of Alfred Hitchcock, one that answers some of the nastier published works out there, and it does have a lot to say about one of the world's great filmmakers. The level of detail is fairly astounding - the author has something to say about just about everyone who ever met the man - and he covers all of his films thoroughly. Unlike Hitchcock, however, Mr. McGilligan is not expert at pacing. The book never becomes a chore, but it is not always the most entertaining book.

As with John Ford, Orson Welles and a few other monument-like auteurs, one wonders if there is anything else to add when library shelves already groan under the weight of books about these great directors. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, a proverbial household name, the challenge for a writer seems to double. And yet McGilligan as he did with Fritz Lang, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood has pulled it off. In addition to seamlessly blending new research with a compelling narrative, this biography allows the reader to rediscover the familiar. McGilligan humanizes the director in the best way. Hitchcock is neither the repressed almost deviant sadist that Donald Spoto painted back in his controversial bio nor a droll, almost Santa Claus-like teller of ripping yarns, as mytholgized in Time-Life articles, but a highly talented man, a flawed, but essentially decent husband and father, and a complex artist caught between serving the demands of mainstream Hollywood and fulfilling his creative instincts. This is a big book, but it reads as briskly as one of Hitch's best films. Essential for any serious film book library.