Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony

By Richard Allen

(Columbia University Press, 2007) 

Is Alfred Hitchcock a brilliantly superficial entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director’s work, Richard Allen, professor and chair of the cinema studies department in the Tisch School of the Arts, argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive world view—the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete.

      Discussing more than 30 films from the director’s English and American periods, Allen explores the filmmaker’s adoption of the idioms of late romanticism, his orchestration of narrative point of view and suspense, and his distinctive visual strategies of aestheticism, expressionism, and surrealism.
      Allen is the author of numerous essays on Hitchcock and the co-editor of two anthologies, and with Sidney Gottlieb he edits the Hitchcock Annual for Wallflower Press.