Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic

I teach Hitchcock films - mostly Rear Window and Vertigo, with occasional other selections - as part of an introductory film course for community college students, and I recently went looking for a '90s-style "pop history" book that would tell me more about Alfred Hitchcock's work (and hopefully, help me interpret specific movies) a little better. This is what I found - almost accidentally, in fact. It satisfies every criteria I had for such a volume, except that I was expecting something a little bit bigger; this is an odd size but not taller than a standard hardback, whereas I expected a coffee-table book, with more glossy photos. However, those are purely aesthetic considerations. The actual content of the book is strong - though show more purely factual, not analytical.

It's a very linear volume, following pre-production, production, post-production, and legacy, with the longest section on the second of these. Frankly, most readers are going to be best served by skim-reading and choosing to focus on certain sections, because the most interesting material tends to show up in a handful of pages: the development of the original book into the early screenplays, the location scouting for a mission with a tower, Kim Novak's thoughts on her grey suit, Jimmy Stewart's notes on an early cut of the film. Only die-hards or quick readers will really want to read all the minutiae; not that it's terribly detailed, but it doesn't always enhance your appreciation of the film - sometimes, especially during the production section, it can just feel like data as opposed to the narrative. Some of the book is a little outmoded, too; I didn't mind the appendix talking to the team behind the 1996 restoration, but that's obviously no longer very relevant.

I don't mean to sound negative about this book: it's exactly the sort of thing I went looking for. I just want potential readers to understand its limitations; pop culture studies, and mainstream literature on films, was very different 20 years ago. This is the perfect sort of book for a teenager or college student who is just getting into the "making of" classic movies; for more advanced readers, it only offers one, specifically production-oriented approach. It does work wonderfully in tandem with Charles Barr's intensely analytical monograph on the film for the BFI Film Classics series, and using selections from both works is proving the perfect solution for me and my students. show less

I was hoping for more discussion about the film itself, its plot, its quirks, but instead this really gets into the nitty-gritty of the filming process - if you want to know what footage was shot on which day and how many takes, this is the book for you. It's clear the that author REALLY cares about this movie, but he doesn't really analyze it. Oh well. Still interesting!

All the information you would ever want to know about Hitchcock's masterpiece.