Book of the week: The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White

White’s unorthodox biography ‘dismembers Hitchcock into a dozen parts’ 

Alfred Hitchcock
(Image credit: STF/AFP via Getty Images)

“Four decades on from his death, Alfred Hitchcock remains the most famous moviemaker of them all,” said Christopher Bray in the Daily Mail. The “tubby, lugubrious cockney in a banker’s suit”, with a walk-on part in all 50 of his films, is a figure everybody knows. Yet much about the man remains an enigma. Was he (as he wanted us to believe) a “serious business type who turned up on time, did his work and went happily home to his family”? Or was he (as his films suggest) a “leering pervert”, obsessed with humanity’s dark side? “Edward White’s answer to this conundrum is to dismember Hitchcock into a dozen parts.” He offers a series of thematic portraits, each focused on a different aspect of the director’s personality: Hitchcock the Dandy, Hitchcock the Voyeur, Hitchcock the Londoner, and so on. The conceit “largely works”: this is an original, absorbing study which captures the contradictory nature of “the Master of Suspense”.

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