Alfred Hitchcock And Charles Bennett The Rise Of The Modern Thriller

Screenwriter Charles Bennett was Alfred Hitchcock''s inspiration and mentor. Between 1929-1940 Bennett wrote seven scripts establishing Hitchcock''s reputation as the "Master of Suspense." The first was Bennett''s 1928 play "Blackmail" (1929) adapted as Britain''s first "full length all-talkie super-film." This was followed by Hitch''s adaptation of "Bulldog Drummond''s Baby" (1931) as "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934). Then came "The 39 Steps," "Secret Agent," "Sabotage," "Young and Innocent," and "Foreign Correspondent." But because Hitchcock did not want his reliance known, he crafted a "Lie of Omission" to misdirect attention away from Bennett''s influence, successfully misleading journalists, critics, and historians to consider the director as the "auteur" (author), while Bennett became critically maligned, insulted, and disregarded. Part One of this study, "The Rise of the Modern Thriller: "The Partnership," corrects the film history by walking the reader through Hitchcock''s obfuscations to reveal how Bennett created the technically "Modern" mystery thriller and "hero''s Journey" construction. It explains that Bennett''s "one story" derived from his love of Jules Verne''s novels, coupled with theatrical knowledge accumulated through twenty years experience as a stage actor. After a successful start as an innovative London playwright (five plays produced before 1930), Bennett brought his Modern thriller into film by a set of experimental "quota quickies." In 1931 John Maxwell, Chairman of British International Pictures, contracted Bennett to write the "Bulldog Drummond" screenplay under Hitchcock''s supervision. There now came a chapter unknown to film history when Hitchcock was fired from B.I.P. owing to his too whimsical camera direction applied to a Bennett screenplay. And in a stroke of deception, Hitchcock denied Bennett a screenplay credit for its adaptation, "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934). When Bennett''s "wrong man" scenario became acclaimed in "The 39 Steps," Hitchcock countered he adapted the Buchan-inspired film. And though after the release of "Secret Agent," Bennett was designated as England''s top scenarist, film history mischaracterized him as Hitch''s stenographer. In two 1938 interviews Hitchcock undermined Bennett''s reputation, claiming responsibility for 99.44% of his films'' content, misappropriating Bennett''s journey construction as his own, and explaining how he preferred to work with inexperienced writers amenable to his instruction. Then, in 1940, the director misattributed Bennett''s Oscar-nominated screenplay "Foreign Correspondent" to his wife Alma and secretary Joan Harrison. Where Part One challenges scholars to correct the history, Parts Two and Three--"Hero''s Journey" and "Story Closeups"--drill deeply into Bennett''s narrative constructions. The volume explains how Bennett''s influential hero''s journey construction predated Joseph Campbell''s scholarship by twenty years. Analyses are made of Bennett''s stories, themes, and dramatic ideas, his contributions to the thriller subgenres (mystery, crime, terror, romance, comedy), and his character types and thriller motifs including: false accusation, forewarning, MacGuffin, time limit, double jeopardy and double chase, theme of the couple, joint quest, partners-on-the-run, doubt, and suspense. The study concludes on a study of the partners'' dialectic, exposing the director''s terror that his reliance on Bennett would be found out. In 1995 the Writer''s Guild of America-West honored Bennett with its Screen Laurel Award for lifetime achievement, particularly for the Hitchcock films; but his historic role as author of the technically Modern mystery thriller and hero''s journey construction remained undisclosed. "The Rise of the Modern Thriller" reveals the breadth of Bennett''s achievements, and answers a great many questions that have confounded Hitchcock Studies. The study is available in two separate volumes or in a single volume edition.

With a career that spanned from the silent era to the 1990s, British screenwriter Charles Bennett (1899--1995) lived an extraordinary life. His experiences as an actor, director, playwright, film and television writer, and novelist in both England and Hollywood left him with many amusing anecdotes, opinions about his craft, and impressions of the many famous people he knew. Among other things, Bennett was a decorated WWI hero, an eminent Shakespearean actor, and an Allied spy and propagandist during WWII, but he is best remembered for his commercially and critically acclaimed collaborations with directors Sir Alfred Hitchcock and Cecil B. DeMille. The fruitful partnership began after Hitchcock adapted Bennett's play Blackmail (1929) as the first British sound film. Their partnership produced six thrillers: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936), Secret Agent (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and Foreign Correspondent (1940). In this witty and intriguing book, Bennett discusses how their collaboration created such famous motifs as the "wrong man accused" device and the MacGuffin. He also takes readers behind the scenes with the Master of Suspense, offering his thoughts on the director's work, sense of humor, and personal life. Featuring an introduction and additional biographical material from Bennett's son, editor John Charles Bennett, Hitchcock's Partner in Suspense is a richly detailed narrative of a remarkable yet often-overlooked figure in film history.

FOX ON THE RUN is a masterful novel of intrigue by the author of seven films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. On a misty sea loch in the Scottish Highlands, rock superstar Glen Ross is fishing tranquilly with his young son when, through the mist-enveloped waters, a submersible surfaces to smuggle a shadowy figure ashore. Suddenly the loch turns terrifyingly alive with the spatter of deadly gun fire, and Glen's life will never be the same. He becomes the prime suspect in murders he never committed ... a pawn in a cold-blooded conspiracy ... and the one man who can stop an assassin's bullet from reaching its all-important target. Caught in a clandestine struggle for global domination, singer Glenn Ross holds the balance of world power in his hands.Charles Bennett (1899-1995) was the screenwriter whose mystery thriller construction established Hitchcock's international reputation in the 1930s. This second edition of FOX ON THE RUN (1987) presents a succinct edit by his son John Charles Bennett, author of ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND CHARLES BENNETT: THE RISE OF THE MODERN THRILLER (KDP, 2020). John Bennett has rereleased FOX ON THE RUN as the culminating expression of his father's hero's journey construction that became widely copied, analyzed, and misattributed after THE 39 STEPS. It is the purest distillation of Bennett's famed "Modern Thriller" construction, combining suspense elements of both THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934) and THE 39 STEPS (1935).

Film historian James Chapman has mined Hitchcock's own papers to investigate fully for the first time the spy thrillers of the world's most famous filmmaker. Hitchcock made his name as director of the spy movie. He returned repeatedly to the genre from the British classics of the 1930s, including The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, through wartime Hollywood films Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur to the Cold War tracts North by Northwest, Torn Curtain and his unmade film The Short Night. Chapman's close reading of these films demonstrates the development of Hitchcock's own style as well as how the spy genre as a whole responded to changing political and cultural contexts from the threat of Nazism in the 1930s and 40s to the atom spies and double agents of the post-war world

The adaptation of literary works to the screen has been the subject of increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, critical and scholarly attention in recent years, but most studies of the subject have continued to privilege literature over film by taking the literary sources as their starting point. Rather than examining the processes by which a particular author has been adapted into a diversity of films by different filmmakers, the contributors in Hitchcock at the Source consider the processes by which a varied range of literary sources have been transformed by one filmmaker into an impressive body of work. Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock transformed a variety of literary sources—novels, plays, short stories—into what is arguably the most coherent and distinctive (narratively, stylistically, and thematically) of all directorial oeuvres. After an introduction surveying the nature and diversity of Hitchcock's sources and locating the current volume in the context of theoretical work on adaptation, nineteen original essays range across the entirety of Hitchcock's career, from the silent period through to the 1970s. In addition to addressing the process of adaptation in particular films in terms of plot and character, the contributors also consider less obvious matters of tone, technique, and ideology; Hitchcock's manipulation of the conventions of literary and dramatic genres such as spy fiction and romantic comedy; and more general problems, such as Hitchcock's shift from plays to novels as his major sources in the course of the 1930s.

This book is a comprehensive study of one of the most popular genres in the cinema. From a perspective sympathetic to popular culture, this study analyzes a large number of primarily American and European films by a variety of distinguished directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol, John Frankenheimer, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Costa-Gavras. Indispensable to anyone interested in understanding how suspense thrillers work and what they mean, this book provides insightful analysis of hundreds of memorable films, while at the same time working as a virtual how-to manual for anyone trying to write a Hitchcock-like thriller. The first section of the book is primarily theoretical. It offers a bibliographical survey and then explains why we so profoundly enjoy these suspenseful films of murder and intrigue. A chapter on "Thrills: or, How Objects and Empty Spaces Compete to Threaten Us" explores the psychological concept of the thrill and relates it to the psyche of the spectator. To what extent does the suspense thriller represent a symbolic and vicarious experience of danger? A chapter on "Suspense That Makes the Spectator Take a Breath" explores the crucial narrative concept of suspense and relates it to the psychological mechanisms of anxiety incited in the spectator. Why do we like to be scared? A final theoretical chapter offers a dynamic definition of the suspense thriller derived in part from Edgar Allan Poe and based primarily on content analysis. The second section of the book is more of an historical survey and devotes one chapter to each of the suspense thriller's primary sub-genres. These chapters provide close readings of more than 150 major films and detailed analysis of the suspense thriller's conventions, themes, and recurrent iconography. Sub-genres include The Postman Always Rings Twice, Body Heat, The Manchurian Candidate, The China Syndrome, Missing, The Passenger, Spellbound, Obsession, Marathon Man and Blue Velvet. A final chapter explores areas for further research and offers concluding insights.

A tribute to the undisputed master of terror and suspense and the visionary who revolutionised the art of filmmaking, this book covers everything from his 1922 silent film The Pleasure Garden to his final 1976 film, Family Plot, including such masterpieces as Vertigo, Psycho, Rear Window and The Birds, and the years of his popular television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Complete with 450 b/w stills from his many films and a text that examines the background of each production, this is the ultimate portrait of the movie genius in all his cinematic glory.