Thomas Leitch

Hitchcock the Entertainer

One of the most delicious ironies of Alfred Hitchcock’s career is years after he achieved success in England and America as a popular entertainer, his defenders in France and those other two countries sought to claim greater artistic value for his work precisely by rescuing him from his status as an entertainer. This presentation seeks to explore Hitchcock’s changing status as an entertainer by focusing on four touchpoints: the different meanings of “entertain,” “entertainer,” and “entertainment”; the different ways Hitchcock sought to make thrillers from The Lodger to Family Plot entertaining; the shifting valences contemporaneous reviewers attached to the idea of Hitchcock as an entertainer; and the evolving relations in the eyes of cinephiles and critics in more established fields between entertainment and art. The presentation, which aims to distil the evolution of Hitchcock the entertainer over the past century, will be illustrated by PowerPoint slides.

About
Thomas Leitch recently retired from the University of Delaware, whose Film Studies program he had directed for thirty years. His extensive writings on Alfred Hitchcock include Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (1991), The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock (2002), A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock (2011), and many essays for The Hitchcock Annual. His most recent books are The Scandal of Adaptation (2023) and Engagements with Adaptation (2025).