Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much by Michael Wood

 There is a sense in which Vertigo is so purely a movie -- so purely involved in what movies do -- that we can almost let the plot go.  I don't mean its subject is the movies or moviemaking.  I mean it beautifully and scarily exploits the possibilities of the medium, makes our dependence on them something like an addiction.

-- Michael Wood, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest, 2015)

There have been many books written about Hitchcock since Rohmer and Chabrol published their important book in French in 1957 and Robin Wood published his influential book in English in 1969, calling Hitchcock an artist.  Michael Wood's book is short and personal, with keen insights into 20 of Hitchcock's 55 films:  The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rope. North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and Family Plot.  Michael Wood does what the best writers on film do:  make one want to see again the films he writes about, no matter how many times one has already seen them, as he spins his theories and his own intelligent observations about the layered tricks, motives and behaviors that Hitchcock puts into his films.