Hitchcock à la Carte

by Jan Olsson

Alfred Hitchcock: cultural icon, master film director, storyteller, television host, foodie. And as Jan Olsson argues in Hitchcock à la Carte, he was also an expert marketer who built his personal brand around his rotund figure and well documented table indulgencies. Focusing on Hitchcock's television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and the Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965), Olsson asserts that the success of Hitchcock's media empire depended on his deft manipulation of bodies and the food that sustained them. Hitchcock's strategies included frequently playing up his own girth, hiring body doubles, making numerous cameos, and using food—such as a frozen leg of lamb—to deliver scores of characters to their deaths. Constructing his brand enabled Hitchcock to maintain creative control, blend himself with his genre, and make himself the multi-million dollar franchise's principle star. Olsson shows how Hitchcock's media brand management was a unique performance model that he used to mark his creative oeuvre as strictly his own.

272 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2015

About the author

Jan Olsson is Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. He is the coeditor of Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Donna Gowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first fell in love with Hitchcock films when I studied Film as part of my university degree, and I have spent the last 20 years devouring any new works about him. Jan Olsson's book explores an area of Hitchcock's oeuvre all too often ignored in Hitchcock criticism; the correlation between his television work and the manufacturing and maintenance of the later Hitchcock image. There is much to be recommended in this book, some fascinating behind the scenes information on aspects of production and never before seen stills and photos from marketing campaigns for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I found the sections on the representation of women and the correspondence between Hitchcock and Roald Dahl particularly fascinating (Lamb to the Slaughter is my favourite Alfred Hitchcok Presents episode). The in-depth analysis of key episodes is well researched and insightful, exploring themes of corporeality,the grotesque, the double and mirroring. It is certainly a very welcome addition to the bookshelf and sits well alongside seminal works such as Tania Modleski's 'The Women Who Knew Too Much', Donald Spoto's 'The Dark Side of Genius' and Susan Smith's 'Hitchcock:Suspense, Humour and Tone'. My only slight criticism of the book is that it didn't really tell me anything new but then perhaps I'm a woman who knows too much!

[Jan]

I grew up fascinated with the Alfred Hitchcock shows. This book gives one an insite tot he man himself. I found it very interesting..