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Shadow of a Debt: Hitchcock's Literary Sources R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, eds. Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 20 1 1 . vii + 328 pp. Illustrations. Hitchcock's Films and their Sources. Contributors. Index. $90.00 hardcover. $29.95 paper.
As the title of their 2006 anthology implies, editors R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd's Afier Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality collects critical essays examining Alfred Hitchcock's influence on his contemporaries as well as recent Hollywood and world cinema. Essays covering Michelangelo Antonioni, Claude Chabrol, Pedro Almodovar, Kenneth Branagh, and Jonathan Demme testify to the early impact and enduring legacy of Hitchcock. Their highly readable anthology, Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor, however, reverses the direction by examining not Hitchcock's cinematic influence, but his literary influences. Twenty essays by prominent scholars in Hitchcock, film, and adaptation studies come together to present a career-spanning antliology that will surely prove indispensable to scholars and fans of Hitchcock.
The editors and several contributors make a point of noting Hitchcock's claim, "What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema" (8). The book proceeds as a deliberate revision of this playful misrepresentation on Hitchcock's part. As Thomas Leitch notes in the first chapter, "In a fundamental sense, of course, Hitchcock is always becoming Hitchcock" (17), and the early chapters chart Hitchcock's debt to literature. The book progresses from the early influence of popular West End drama to Hitchcock's turn to fiction, especially novels. Mary Hammond demonstrates the impact of Victorian melodrama on Hitchcock, Charles Barr underscores the influence of the director's early partnership with screenwriter Charles Bennett, and Mark Glancy argues for the impact John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps, had on Hitchcock's politicization of the thriller. Furthermore, Alan Woolfolk and Barbara Creed illustrate the presence of Freudian psychology in Spellbound and Vertigo, respectively. Combining readings of the...