A great bio on one of the luminaries of our time, the British director Alfred Hitchcok. It is quite long at 745 pages though the index and filmography (includes tv work) are very complete

His childhood in England and pre-director days are the less interesting chapters, I skipped around a lot and skipped back later to read how he met his wife Alma Reville who would become his closest collaborator. Some highlights of his early years: he had a large family, his father was in the grocer trade and he had an early interest in horror and the macabre

Hitchcock would get his start in some kind of ad company and make a move to work on production and title designs in an era still dominated by silent films

I've had renewed interest lately fast forwarding to pages concerning movies I watched on dvd (Marnie, The Birds, Rebecca). In general I find his days post-Rebecca when he finally arrived in Hollywood more engaging

You come away with a sense of history and how grand the British director was. He was intimately linked to the writing of all his movies although he made it a point not to be credited. He always strived to get a big name that was established and recognized by others to work on his screenplays. I thought it was interesting how a script would take so many iterations to reach its final version. I also learned that Hitchcock enjoyed much more developing a movie, its screenplay, planning for shots (storyboard, design, scene selection) than actually shooting the movie. That would coincide with the famous adage attributed to the director about actors seen as "cattle". It would paint him as a director better known for his technical prowess but his movies were also filled with emotions (He is after all the "master of suspense")

I loved reading about the development process, how Hitchcock would in his glory years work on his next project as soon as he began shoowing his current film, the director's twisted sense of humor, his many relationships with writers and actors, his obsession with blonde starlets

A very minor part that I found interesting was how the studio system in the 40-70s worked and the rise of Lew Wasserman from powerful agent at MCA to studio mogul at Universal

The most exciting parts of course deal with movies I've watched or read about but sometimes I felt that McGilligan glosses over some of them quite fast (Notorious for example). Inherently the novel becomes less interesting on movies I've never watched as it goes to length on backstory and sometimes scenes and shot setups so it's hard to stay connected. Still the author was able to rope me in and I very much would like to watch these after reading this book: Shadow of a Doubt, Foreign Correspondant, Spellbound, Rope, Suspicion, Lifeboat, The 39 Steps, Dial M For Murder

There are some good pictures that retrace Hitchcock's life grouped in the middle of the book for printing reasons and I wish they were sprinkled around the biography though I suppose they could be distracting (it's the same idea as using footnotes, which are very good here by the way)

For reference, in chapter 16 (Citizen of the world, 1960-64), the author alludes to a top 10 of Hitchcock's greatest films from a panel of "top directors" assembled by British magazine Sight and Sound for Hitchcock's centenary

1. Pyscho
2. Vertigo
3. Notorious
4. The Birds
5. North by Northwest
6. Shadow of a Doubt
7. Foreign Correspondant
8. Frenzy
9. The Lady Vanishes
10. Marnie

The book's a little heavy on details, that's also its strong point. The hardcover is unfortunately a bit too big to lug around (and should go out of print, you'll save on the paperback). I sometimes question the base and validity of the work as McGilligan seems to be summarily collecting multiple accounts on an event (or incident) and leaving us to best judge what really happened, without much authority. On the whole a very strong work but being a fan of the movies and the author are probably a requirement

McGilligan also wrote about Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood and Fritz Lang