Hitchcock and The Cold War: New Essays on the Espionage Films 1956-1969
The eight essays collected in this volume make the case that Hitchcock’s spy films of the 1950s and
1960s are among his most important achievements because they contain his most salient political
views as well as revealing fully the complexity of his moral compass. The Cold War as the historical
setting for the second The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), North by Northwest (1959), Torn
Curtain (1966), and Topaz (1969) inspired Hitchcock and his screenwriters to create narratives
marked by a distinct moral ambiguity that, while present as a subtext in the spy films of the 1930s
and 1940s, now became the thematic core of the later works.
ISBN: 978-1-935625-30-8
Price: $40.00
Paperback, 2018 272 pages