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Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 218 pp. $46.00 cloth; $18.00 paper.
This new collection of Hitchcock interviews prepared by Sidney Gottlieb for the University Press of Mississippi's everexpanding "Conversations with Filmmakers" series is an important contribution to Hitchcock studies. In his lucid and rigorous introduction, Gottlieb states that this will be no ordinary interview book, if by "ordinary" we mean one whose aim is primarily informational. "Without discounting the informational value of the interviews that follow, " writes Gottlieb, "we should be alert to another dimension, in which Hitchcock's films make, as it were, cameo appearances as he pursues other goals beyond mere explanation and commentary. We should not be so preoccupied with matters of literal and factual truth . .. that we miss the subtle drama of a complicated artist not only talking about himself and his art but acting out in the fullest sense of the term, revealing (although not always directly) and creating himself before our eyes" (ix).
One of the real pleasures of this volume results from Gottlieb's shrewd decision to represent "the full range of 'types' of Hitchcock interviews, catching Hitchcock not only at different times in his career but in different moods and operating in different modes." Some interviews are primarily informational, some are largely anecdotal, and some are transparently self-promotional. More often than not, we observe Hitchcock "slip in and out of all these roles, sometimes within the space of a single interview" (xi), as, for example, during his multi-faceted conversation with Arthur Knight (1973) where, among other things, he elaborates on his theories of moviemaking, reminisces about the joy of working with Thornton Wilder on Shadow of a Doubt, and plugs his latest film, Frenzy. Throughout this volume, Hitchcock's great wit, charm, playfulness, intelligence, and, yes, sophistication are on display, leaving us with a manysided view of the director-a Hitchcock more enigmatic and elusive than ever.
The present volume complements Gottlieb's 1995 compilation of Hitchcock writings and interviews (Hitchcock on Hitchcock, University of California Press). The earlier work included interviews, essays, articles, book introductions, and lectures from all phases of Hitchcock's long career but contained only a single entry from the 1970s (a relatively brief 1976 interview with...