The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track

by Elisabeth Weis

As pictured/described. Hardcover in very good condition, dustjacket has shelfwear and some chipping along edges. No marks. Private Hitchcock collection. We ship daily from Wisconsin.

250 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1982

Reviews

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I found this a very interesting book, which deserves to be better-known--and not just to Hitchcock enthusiasts. The author seems to have started from an auteurist stance but then gone well beyond that, in terms of investigating and analyzing the specific techniques of sound manipulation Hitchcock used and how they evolved over the years. I find most auteur criticism a little tiresome, since it concentrates, predictably, on (a) the "personality" of the director as it shows up in his movies and (b) his thematic preoccupations. While Prof. Weis touches on the latter here and there, she generally steers clear of the "personality" kind of criticism that Andrew Sarris was given to.

I thought the chapter "Music and Murder," while interesting, did not deal with very much that was Hitchcock-specific. Most directors try to choose popular songs or tunes that they think appropriate to the particular scene, so I hardly think Hitch's choices in this area are that unique.

In her chapter discussing "The Birds" she gives us many instances of Hitch's imaginative use of sound, often in ways that are not really noticeable but have an almost subliminal effect on the spectator. Since the book provides little criticism in the traditional sense, I find this sentence in the chapter very revealing: "Hitchcock gives us a heroine, however shallow, and then a family with whom to experience the film." This was probably why a critic like Dwight Macdonald was so turned off by the film: its principal characters were, in comparison to literary equivalents, shallow and cookie-cutter. Which leads one to think that as Hitch "evolved," he rather lost interest in character as compared to technical experimentation and audience manipulation--which traditional critics have most often thought of as comparatively trivial and irrelevant to the film's worth. Prof. Weis doesn't discuss this explicitly but it is something to be borne in mind if you are not totally committed to auteurism.

I would like to point out that Devlin (the Cary Grant character) in "Notorious" could not have been the "CIA agent" that the author describes him as, because the CIA did not come into existence until 1947 and the film was released in 1946.