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Book SynopsisFrom early silent features like The Lodger and Easy Virtue to his final film, Family Plot, in 1976, most of Alfred Hitchcock's movies were adapted from plays, novels, and short stories. Hitchcock always took care to collaborate with those who would not just execute his vision but shape it, and many of the screenwriters he enlistedincluding Eliot Stannard, Charles Bennett, John Michael Hayes, and Ernest Lehmanworked with the director more than once. And of course Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville, his most constant collaborator, was with him from the 1920s until his death. In Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen, Mark Osteen has assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays that explore how Hitchcock and his screenwriters transformed literary and theatrical source material into masterpieces of cinema. Some of these essays look at adaptations through a specific lens, such as queer aesthetics applied to Rope, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho, while others tackle the issue of Hi
Trade ReviewOsteen’s collection should certainly interest the Hitchcock scholar (and anyone else that enjoys scholarly essays on film). Casual fans will also find a lot of interesting information. . . .A large percentage of the essays focus on Hitchcock’s film work, and it is here that the book blossoms into life. The essays offer many factual details to support the scholarly analysis, which makes the sometimes overreaching conclusions more digestible to the average reader. These factual details are what will interest many of the director’s fans. . . .If any of this sounds appealing, this book should be worth picking up. * HitchcockMaster *
In Hitchcock & Adaptation: On the Page and Screen, Mark Osteen has curated a number of essays that open up this crucial piece of Hitchcock’s directorial methodology and detail his creative approach that inspired his film masterpieces. . . . Readers of this compilation are in for a captivating read concerning the enduring thematic and stylistic relevancy of Hitchcock (conceptually speaking, not the Hitchcock) in adaptation film study today. . . .To put it simply, Osteen’s collection of essays is incredibly valuable to film and literary scholars as the collection covers a great deal of Hitchcock’s cinematic history in a manner that uncovers the complex relationship between Hitchcock and adaptation. * Film Matters *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Hitchcock and Adaptation, Mark Osteen I: Hitchcock and Authorship Chapter 1: Hitchcock the Author, Thomas M. Leitch Chapter 2: Wrong Men on the Run: The 39 Steps as Hitchcock’s Espionage Paradigm, Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick Chapter 3: The Role and Presence of Authorship in Suspicion, Patrick Faubert II. Hitchcock Adapting Chapter 4: Melancholy Elephants: Hitchcock and Ingenious Adaptation, Ken Mogg Chapter 5: Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Hitchcock’s Sabotage, and The Inspiration of “Public Uneasiness,” Matthew Paul Carlson Chapter 6: Stranger(s) Than Fiction: Adaptation, Modernity, and the Menace of Fan Culture in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Leslie H. Abramson Chapter 7: Reading Hitchcock/Reading Queer: Adaptation, Narrativity, and a Queer Mode of Address in Rope, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho, Heath A. Diehl Chapter 8: “Dear Miss Lonelyhearts”: Voyeurism and the Spectacle of Human Suffering in Rear Window, Nicholas Andrew Miller Chapter 9: “The Proper Geography”: Hitchcock’s Adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds,” John Bruns Chapter 10: From Kaleidoscope to Frenzy: Hitchcock’s Second British Homecoming, Tony Williams III. Hitching a Ride: The Collaborations Chapter 11: Hitchcock’s Diegetic Imagination: Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt, and Hitchcock’s Mise-en-Scène, Donna Kornhaber Chapter 12: “The Name of Hitchcock! The Fame of Steinbeck!”—The Legacy of Lifeboat, Maria A. Judnick Chapter 13: “What did Alma Think?”:Continuity, Writing, Editing, and Adaptation, Christina Lane and Jo Botting IV. Adapting Hitchcock Chapter 14: The Second Look, the Second Death: W. G. Sebald’s Orphic Adaptation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Russell J. A. Kilbourn Chapter 15: Dark Adaptations: Robert Bloch and Hitchcock on the Small Screen, Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm Chapter 16: Extraordinary Renditions: DeLillo’s Point Omega and Hitchcock’s Psycho, Mark Osteen Chapter 17: The Culture of Spectacle in American Psycho, David Seed Alfred Hitchcock Filmography About the Contributors About the Editor
