Hitchcock's Stars

September 15, 2014
There's a well-known story about film director Alfred Hitchcock that says he believed actors were like cattle. In fact, he said they should be treated like cattlea subtle but important distinctionbut the big question is whether he actually believed what he said. As the author demonstrates in this perceptive look at Hitchcock's American films, the director definitely believed that actors should service the story, not the other way around, but, on the other hand, he could be almost infinitely patient, allowing a performer to ease into a scene (as he did with Ingrid Bergman), and he seemed to have a keen ability to match an actor with a character (the poor performances in Hitchcock's movies, Coffin notes, were usually due to casting choices imposed on the director by the studios). It would have been easy for Coffin to paint Hitchcock, as so many writers have already done, as a heartless director who thought actors were an inconvenient necessity, but the truth is rather more complex than that, and Hitchcock's legion of fans should be happy that Coffin is interested in finding it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)