Available:*
Library | Call Number | Material Type | Home Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Central Library | PN1997.I519 T54 1999 | Adult Non-Fiction | Central Closed Stacks | Searching... |
On Order
Summary
Summary
Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and other famous fans pay homage to the ultimate science fiction classic. Filled with photographs, interviews, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.
Reviews 1
Booklist Review
One of these anthologies presents academic papers by university professors; the other corrals journalistic articles by popular authors, such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and interviews with moviemakers and actors. That is, one is highbrow, the other at most middlebrow. Both are absorbing and thought provoking. In Hitchcock's America, each of the professors considers aspects and themes of one or more of the 30 features Alfred Hitchcock directed after moving to the U.S. in 1940: the nature of maternity in Shadow of a Doubt and the 1956 Man Who Knew Too Much, for instance; or the shamefulness of American masculinity in Rope, partly because of the star persona of James Stewart; or Hitchcock's attitude toward midcentury America's burgeoning therapeutic culture in Spellbound and Vertigo. Hitchcock's American films are to movies rather what Beethoven's symphonies are to music, and these essays, largely free of cinematic and critical jargon, forcibly make us appreciate that fact. If "They're Here . . ." were an academic tome, it would be called a festschrift instead of a tribute. The German word suggests the English festival, and festive is precisely the spirit here. Without the precedent and long-term popularity of director Don Siegel's 1956 low-budget film of pop novelist Jack Finney's realistic fantasy The Body Snatchers, about a stealthy invasion from outer space, there may never have been the recent TV phenomenon called The X-Files. Koontz and King fondly recall seeing the film as kids and expatiate cannily on the subtextual object of its paranoia--was it McCarthyism, Communism, consumer conformity, industrial proletarianization, or what, exactly? Other contributors delineate the relationships of the novel to the movie and its remake, of the novel to Finney's other fiction, and the interviews discuss the movies intensively. The book's acme is the long conversation between the original movie's star, Kevin McCarthy, and horror-movie maven John McCarty. --Ray Olson