Volume 23, Number 11 · June 24, 1976
Hitchcock Laughs
By Michael Wood
The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock
by Raymond Durgnat
MIT Press, 419 pp., $15.00
The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
by Robert A. Harris, by Michael S. Lasky
Citadel Press, 248 pp., $14.00
Family Plot
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
When he was very small, Alfred Hitchcock was sent down to the local police station with a note from his father. The superintendent read the note and locked young Alfred in a cell for five or ten minutes, saying, 'That is what we do to naughty boys.' The incident was probably not as dire as it sounds, and Hitchcock himself is offhand enough about it. Still, the collusion of paternal and civil authorities must have been unsettling, and the flavor of the story persists into many of Hitchcock's films, where more or less well-meaning representatives of order regularly commit, or are on the edge of committing, horrible injustices in the name of reason and probability.
Review, 2949 words
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