Efficient Alfred
Murray Pomerance · 2025
Abstract The auteur theory invites us to revisit not only minor films by major directors, but to assess underexamined, seeming minor aspects of a major auteur’s signature. In the transition era, Hitchcock directed eighteen films, including several of his most famous: Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). While each of these titles supports the director’s moniker as the “Master of Suspense,” they also evidence a “genius pioneer” in special visual and aural effects involving rear projection, optical printing, composite photography, and matte technique. Hitchcock employed these effects in an unusual way, this chapter asserts, using FX not to show us the otherwise unimaginable (as we see such effects so often used in action films today), but instead to suggest that what we see is—or at least could be—actually there.