Hitchcock Style
by Jean-Pierre Dufreigne
Editions Assouline £22.55, pp196

'Suspense is like a woman,' Hitchcock once said. 'The more room she leaves to the imagination, the greater the emotion and the expectation.'

This desire to conceal rather than display, the antithesis of modern popular cinema, is the key to Hitchcock's signature aesthetic. Terror grows incrementally, fed by the promise of what might lurk beneath the elegant surface.

Jean-Pierre Dufreigne, cultural correspondent of L'Express, has attempted in this sumptuously illustrated volume to dissect the layers of Hitchcock's style by following his development more or less chronologically and anatomising the obvious components: sets, leading men and women, the visual expression of fear or desire.

Unfortunately, the text is heavily coloured by Dufreigne's vision of Hitchcock's vision, which he presents as if it were the sole and authorised interpretation. 'In his mind, undoubtedly this is what it was'; the text is littered with such assertions unsubstantiated by Hitchcock's own words. Nevertheless, he offers some interesting background to Hitchcock's choice of actors, in particular his cast of icy blondes and his own, often destructive, infatuation with them.

Melanie Griffith, whose mother Tippi Hedren starred in Marnie and The Birds is quoted as saying: 'Hitchcock stole my mother from me. She obsessed him and he shattered her career because she didn't want to let him have his way.'

During shooting of The Birds, Hitchcock failed to tell Hedren he intended to film the attack scene using real birds instead of the planned mechanical ones; Dufreigne suggests this deliberate inflicting of injury was revenge for Hedren's spurning of his advances.

Whether the prose suffers from poor translation or was always this purple is unclear, but for Hitchcock buffs the photo archive will make it worthwhile.