An at times confusing mess of a book; it is an extremely poor use of the talents of those involved in the various films. Spoto's aim was to do a critical and artistic analysis of the various movies themselves but he often lets his own biases - for favorite / not liked performers or genres as an example - color his reviews. Instead of looking at things with an open and unbiased mind he comes across as more like writing whiny fanfiction. And yes...fiction it is. For the weirdest attribution of this book is its tendency for it, written by a supposedly knowledgeable critic of Hitchcock, to get several major (and I mean major) key plot points wrong. I'll leave things spoiler free here but as an example without giving anything away when I got the book I had just seen 'Strangers on a Train' and flipped to that section...and Spoto literally got several major points including segments of the ending wrong. In reading the book further he made quite a few mistakes like that. Just wondering how on Earth someone was able to get a book published with so many errors in it on such noted films.