Hitchcock and The Cold War: New Essays on the Espionage Films, 1956-1969

The eight essays collected in this volume make the case that Hitchcock’s spy films of the 1950s and 1960s are among his most important achievements because they contain his most salient political views as well as revealing fully the complexity of his moral compass. The Cold War as the historical setting for the second The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), North by Northwest (1959), Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz (1969) inspired Hitchcock and his screenwriters to create narratives marked by distinct moral ambiguity that, while present as a subtext in the spy films of the 1930s and 1940s, now became the thematic core of the later works.