Hitchcock at Work (2009)

Eschewing the popular portrait of Alfred Hitchcock as a control freak, Bill Krohn, Hollywood correspondent for Cahiers du Cinema, attempts to debunk the myths about his working methods with Hitchcock at Work. Apparently, the director's strict adherence to storyboards was copy dreamed up by studio publicity and propagated by Hitch himself (the blueprints for the crop-dusting sequence in North by Northwest, for instance, were drawn after the scene was shot). And contrary to legend, Hitchcock enjoyed improvisation on both sides of the camera. Devotees will relish the sumptuous illustrations, though many of the book's most intriguing visuals — like a series of stills of Tippi Hedren filming the phone-booth scene in The Birds and the correspondence between Grace Kelly and Hitch when she rejected the title role in Marnie — are reproduced at a frustratingly small size. B