Alfred Hitchcock remains the quintessential cinematic auteur - the director as hero. Fifty years of debate over his status as an obsessive and dictatorial artist has raised increasingly pressing questions about the relation between individual authorship, on the one hand, and contexts, influences, an[...]

This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces[...]