Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir

Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir explores Alfred Hitchcock's major influence on the development and flourishing of film noir. His noir films became an inspirational foundation of the neo-noir movement starting in the 1970s, with directors like Brian de Palma creating mash-up homages to Hitchcock originals such as Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984). These works, alongside the dark political thrillers of the era exploring the underside of American life, owe a substantial debt to Hitchcock.

Despite this, the central role of Hitchcock in the long history of film noir has seldom been acknowledged in work dedicated to his career and noir criticism more generally. Instead, there has been a tendency to consider Hitchcock's many dark thrillers and crime melodramas as sui generis—"Hitchcock films" that are somehow separate and distinct from industry trends. Such perspectives underestimate Hitchcock's substantial contributions to film history by taking a narrow view of his accomplishments.

Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir will be the first book-length treatment to explore the impressive corpus of Hitchcock noir films, considered explicitly as a part of the noir genre. This work extends to examine his connection to the emergence and flourishing of this important cinematic trend.