Rating: 
Summary: A fascinating insight into the enigma
Review: "Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
...and here is the Master of Suspense. While Hitchcock happens to be one of the better-known directors of the 20th century, he surely is the only master of enigma. Spoto has done an admirable job in depicting the life of a man always shrouded in mystery.
The book follows Hitch from his childhood. A rather unattractive mother's boy, he was an outcast at public school. It continues his story from humble beginnings, through the discovery of genius, and ends at his death in 1980, at the age of 81. Throughout the pages, Spoto covers Hitchcock's life in detail, including his many quirks, obsessions bizarre sense of humour.
Hitchcock's life was indeed bizarre - his personality and obsessions manifesting themselves in his over-eating and his dry, often macabre sense of humour. However, as the author rightly points out, the director also revealed this side of himself through the images of his movies. This makes a fascinating study once you have read the book and you'll never view Hitch's films at face value again.
Because of her desire to protect her father's privacy, Hitch's daughter, Pat, refused Spoto any assistance in the writing of this book. He went instead to a veritable legion of actors and screenwriters who knew him and worked with him. The result is an extremely revealing and often very dark portrait of a man whose character was as shadowed as his films.
But not all is dark and foreboding. There are several amusing anecdotes, which highlight Hitch's macabre sense of humour. Like the time he had a dummy made in his own likeness and sent it floating on its back down the Thames river as a publicity stunt for his movie "Frenzy" in 1972.
My own personal favourite is the story of a woman who accosted him and complained that the "Psycho" shower scene so frightened her daughter that the girl would no longer shower. His laconic reply was, "Then, Madam, I suggest you have her dry cleaned."
He also did not suffer actors gladly. While he did have his stable of favourites that he worked with, he once claimed that actors were cattle. Later he said, "I didn't say that actors are cattle - I said they should be treated as cattle." Another story says that when an actress asked Hitchcock if her right or left profile was better, he told her, "My dear, you're sitting on your best profile."
Some of Spoto's claims I can't help but treat with a little scepticism. I do know that Hitch had a fascination with murder but the tender way in which he presents it in his films is classic Hitchcock. However, the author's statement that scenes in Hitch's movies reflect kind of voyeurism, I feel that with his trademark camera pans through windows, the director was trying to give the audience a bird's eye view of the scene - no more and no less. It is his way of allowing us to enter the private lives of his characters.
When all is said and done, this is a fascinating book of a fascinating man. A genius in his own time, but also a frustrated enigma, with a taste for the truly macabre. I highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in learning about the man behind the mystery, although it is a little heavy at times.
I'll leave the last word to the Master of Suspense himself:
"Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs.
Rating:
Summary: It's torturously and sadistically good!
Review: Awesome read! During the spring 2002 college semester I attended a film class where we, the students, had the opportunity to study Alfred Hitchcock the whole semester length. This was one of the books my teacher had us use as a resource book for our reports for the class. The book is well written and in depth. It covers it's bases through different perspectives/aspects of Hitchcock's life from birth to death. It's a good solid read for anyone. As Hitchcock would probably love to hear -- it's torture to give up such a good book.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely informative, interesting
Review: Donald Spoto has done a tremendous work in obtaining first-hand accounts from Hitchcock's friends, colleagues, family, and even Alfred, himself. There is not one iota of information about Hitchcock left out of this monumental work. He traces the ghosts of psychology that haunted Hitchcock from a very young child on until his pitiful death. Hitch's wants, desires, insecurities, and love affairs (one-sided) are intricately outlined and analyzed in a biography that has few contemporaries. This truly is the ultimate work on Hitchcock's life.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely informative, interesting
Review: Donald Spoto has done a tremendous work in obtaining first-hand accounts from Hitchcock's friends, colleagues, family, and even Alfred, himself. There is not one iota of information about Hitchcock left out of this monumental work. He traces the ghosts of psychology that haunted Hitchcock from a very young child on until his pitiful death. Hitch's wants, desires, insecurities, and love affairs (one-sided) are intricately outlined and analyzed in a biography that has few contemporaries. This truly is the ultimate work on Hitchcock's life.
Rating: 
Summary: "an extremely unpleasant book"
Review: For a one line summary of this work I am hard pressed to find anything better than Robin Wood's summary in his superb 'Hitchcock's Films Revisited'. Spoto's book is, without question well researched (although it does include a large amount of material already contained in John Russel Taylor's authorised biography). But the style of the book makes it incredibly hard to read. I will constrict myself to just two of the major sins of this book. Firstly Spoto looks at every fact or event and puts the most nasty spin he can find on it, leading to incredibly spurious interpretations of Hitchcock's life, and due to the lack of validity makes for very dull reading. The second point is that many of Spoto's readings of the films lead to a set list of doubles which appear in the film, these end up taking large amounts of space for very little gain, again draw your attention to how little enjoyment you are gaining from the book. There are some plus sides, as already mentioned, the book is very well researched, and there are a few nuggets of interesting information. But all in all not a very interesting or pleasant book, and all I can say is that we are still waiting for the definitive Hitchcock biography.
Rating: 
Summary: Todd A. Linn is right on!
Review: I am sorry I ever read this book. It is totally depressing. If you believe Mr. Spoto Alfred Hitchcock never had a happy day in his life. Anyone who has viewed his movies know that this is nonsense.
Rating: 
Summary: The Man Who Knew Too Little
Review: Spoto has done an admirable job at putting together 500 compelling pages of reading. Unfortunately, he mentions the fundamental problem with this book in the very preface...that Hitchcock left few records and let his guard down for few individuals. The Hitchcock most knew was no more personal than what we know from his television persona. So right away, we have a biography that doesn't have much basis. So Spoto tries to compensate by drawing conclusions about Hitchcock based on his films. Kind of silly, really. Spotos analysis of the films could be interesting, but it's very uneven...he'll spend 10 pages on one film, and barely mention the existence of another. And the only revealing passage on anything regarding Hitchcock's life itself is on his Tippi Hedren years. However, my chief problem with The Dark Side of Genius is Spoto's tendency to excuse Hitchcock when convenient. It's ridiculously facile. EVERY time Spoto reached an unsuccessful Hitchcock film, he explains how Hitchcock was preoccupied, depressed, or altogether uninterested in the that film. Can't we allow that a genius is fallible? His classics were the product of passion; his failures were due do lack of interest. That's way too black and white a stance for any serious biographer or film scholar to promote. He never allows that Hitchcock tried and failed at times. To Spoto, when he failed, it's because he didn't care.
Rating:
Summary: The Man Who Knew Too Little
Review: Spoto has done an admirable job at putting together 500 compelling pages of reading. Unfortunately, he mentions the fundamental problem with this book in the very preface...that Hitchcock left few records and let his guard down for few individuals. The Hitchcock most knew was no more personal than what we know from his television persona. So right away, we have a biography that doesn't have much basis. So Spoto tries to compensate by drawing conclusions about Hitchcock based on his films. Kind of silly, really. Spotos analysis of the films could be interesting, but it's very uneven...he'll spend 10 pages on one film, and barely mention the existence of another. And the only revealing passage on anything regarding Hitchcock's life itself is on his Tippi Hedren years. However, my chief problem with The Dark Side of Genius is Spoto's tendency to excuse Hitchcock when convenient. It's ridiculously facile. EVERY time Spoto reached an unsuccessful Hitchcock film, he explains how Hitchcock was preoccupied, depressed, or altogether uninterested in the that film. Can't we allow that a genius is fallible? His classics were the product of passion; his failures were due do lack of interest. That's way too black and white a stance for any serious biographer or film scholar to promote. He never allows that Hitchcock tried and failed at times. To Spoto, when he failed, it's because he didn't care.
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of the Artist as a Dog
Review: Spoto's life of Hitchcock, originally published in 1983, is one of the best biographies of a film director we have in English. It's a warts and all portrait, but instead of pitying or disliking Hitchcock for his idiosyncrasies and meannesses, we come to admire him even more for his singular dedication to the art of movies (and he was an artist, not merely "the master of suspense", to use an essentially narrow and insulting characterization). And as far as sheer technique goes, sheer mastery of the medium, Hitchcock probably was/is unsurpassed among modern day filmmakers. Spoto gives us detailed accounts of the making of each of Hitchcock's major films. He really did dislike actors, calling them cattle, but he of course had a fascination with blonde actresses. The book's most poignant segment is the episode invovling Hitchcock's infatuation with Tippi Hedren (a mediocre performer at best who should have been grateful for a great man's attention and adoration), which ultimately ended in humiliation and unhappiness for both of them. Spoto is wrong, however, about MARNIE. It is one of the director's greatest movies, as moving and sad a depiction of desperation as has been committed to celluoid. It fully deserves its late revival in critical favor. This is a clearly written, highly entertaining biography, and one of the closest glimpses we are liking to get straight from the director's chair.
Rating:
Summary: Spoto's solid but flawed biography
Review: This is a far better book than Spoto's Art of Alfred Hitchcock, where he makes terrible mistakes. Spoto is an ambitious writer who obviously enjoys his subject's films. His vision of Alfred Hitchcock as a tormented and sexually frustrated artist is not entirely convincing. Spoto piles on the anecdotes but cannot create a staisfactory synthesis of tormented genius. Hitchcock eludes him as he has eluded most biographers. The central problem of Hitchcock was that he was an entertainer and no amount of intellectual analysis can deny this fact. His films were to be commercial successes and he aimed steadily at his market. Spoto focuses far too much on the sexual underpinnings of Hitchock's work and ignores the enormous fun of the films. This book is a fair introduction to Hitchcock. Writers like Robin Wood,have gone further and better. Yet in the end, the sheer volume of his research will make this obligatory reading on Hitchcock. It will never be defintive.
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