The Hitchcock Murders
Peter Conrad
362pp, Faber
£16.99

There is now a Hitchcock industry in a way that there isn't a Buñuel industry or a Fritz Lang one, or even a John Ford or an Ozu one. For the moment the two great survivors of the first century of cinema are those outsized talents and self-promoters, Hitchcock and Welles. (Message to posterity: direct fat.) Welles was a born show-off and risky business, though vindicated by Citizen Kane drearily topping every critics' poll going; Hitchcock, the more calculating, made himself into a public figure to sell his films, and his besuited act of portly Englishman in Hollywood was perfomance art years ahead of Gilbert and George. Hitchcock also understood and worked the Hollywood system in a way that Welles never managed.

Both men retained a childish awe for the power of cinema - echoed in Welles's remark about film-making being the best train set a boy could have - which still holds sway through the influence of directors like Spielberg, as opposed to the notion of film being, say, an instrument for political change. Yet, for all its intricacy and power, there often remains something arrested about much of Hitchcock's work, and it's worth pointing out that he was over 60 when he made what was essentially a youth movie, Psycho.

Hitchcock's present reputation is partly attributable to the current super-domination of American mainstream cinema, which still feeds off the type of film he pioneered, and, particularly, to Psycho, which laid down the template for the modern horror film. He was also a critic's dream in terms of personal content in a commercial context, subtext, and longevity. The career stretched back to early cinema ("Silents are a dead duck, Mickey," to Michael Powell), and later involved his successful export from England to Hollywood. A Catholic background - always a useful critical feed - allowed the films, like Greene's novels, to be read as essays in transgression and guilt.

Hitchcock provided a signature to his films (with his famous cameos) long before critics began cataloguing cinema by director; at the same time he was canny enough not to make intellectual claims for his work, preferring to see it as practical. His preoccupations - the business of suspense and the art of murder - remained constant, allowing for easy critical cross-referencing. The requirements of suspense meant that he was more concerned with the manipulation of assembly and structure than other directors. The films were famous for being premeditated down to the final angle, making the routine of shooting a chore and, just as famously, turning actors into cattle. Any modern screenwriting manual or class is a neurotic extension of Hitchcock's method, endlessly fussing over structural formulae.

As a promoter, Hitchcock was a consummate marketer, and his career can be offered as a model for contemporary analysis in terms of product and brand-identity. He also conforms to today's ideal of the artist: private vision harnessed to and rewarded by commercial success. The final cherry for the critic is, as David Thomson has noted, that Hitchcock's films "are deeply expressive of the way we watch and respond to stories. Their greatness is often employed to explain the nature and workings of cinema. Thus Hitchcock became a way of defining film, a man exclusively intent on the moving image and the compulsive emotions of the spectator."

The battle for Hitchcock's reputation was won long ago. The French New Wave, particularly Truffaut, who published a long interview in book form, and English Leavisites rallied to the cause in the 1960s, and film writers like Raymond Durgnat and Charles Barr, as well as Thomson, have written authoritatively and well on Hitchcock. Studio paraphernalia, scripts, memos, letters, tabloid-style exposés of Hitchcock's sadism towards actresses and decline in old age have all contributed to what has become an oversubscribed area.

Now we have the Faberisation of Hitchcock, and it's difficult to know what to make of it. A respected critic is asked to be both fan - a Hitchcock obsessive even, who confesses "a covert intimacy" - and respectable academic who can work his way round the subject without confining himself to the ghetto of film studies. Little reference is made to other film writing, with the exception of Truffaut, which is quoting Hitchcock anyway. Conrad also sideswipes modern film theory, which is understandable as his initial connection to Hitchcock was subjective and entirely to do with the forbidden impulse.

Conrad's obsession began at 13 in Tasmania, when he cut school and illegally sneaked in to watch an afternoon screening of Psycho; there "he lost his virginity". He also became infected. Much of his argument is to do with the notion of cinema as a coded form of sexual repository. Hitchcock, a repressed man, was more than aware of this. His films are littered with double entendres and visual sexual puns; in private he was given to smut, and sent tapes to Prince Rainier, for his eyes only. The body of work can be seen as the apotheosis of a censored cinema - being about what can't be shown (and what you can get away with) - and part of the young Conrad's bewilderment on seeing Psycho was that he was allowed to see as much as he did. The cleverness of the film, he knows now, is that it is the eye of the beholder that makes what is seen explicit.

Nevertheless, his account of his initiation is not particularly compelling, with a fudged Oedipal gag for its punchline (Conrad surprised in the shower by father brandishing carrots). From the academic angle, he is keen to enlist Hitchcock into the ranks of the Surrealists because of Hitchcock's understanding of film as an anxious form of dream state, but this argument could be extended to many other film-makers. Cinema has always been a form of reproduction (projection) and dissection (cutting) and Hitchcock's cinema reflected that more than most, peopled as it was with fretful ghosts (actors forbidden to improvise) inhabiting a landscape of sexual ambiguity and innuendo. Given this, it is not hard to find material to support a theory of cinema as 1) wet dream, 2) a form of death, and 3) both, with murder as its extension.

The Hitchcock Murders amounts to assiduous use of the VCR and impressive thematic cross-cutting between films, and occasionally the work of directors like Fritz Lang whose career ran parallel to Hitchcock's, and who was in many ways the more interesting film-maker. Curiously, for all its intellectual weight (Conrad is an Oxford professor of English), what the book doesn't do is encourage a re-viewing of the films, remaining firmly grounded and text-bound, at its best when dealing with text, particularly literary sources. Hitchcock had an eye for writers who adapted well to the screen - many now nearly forgotten, including Patrick Hamilton, Thomas Boileau and Pierre Narcejac, and Jack Trevor Story, as well as some whose reputations have held, like Daphne Du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith. Comparisons between film and source make for interesting reading, mainly for what Hitchcock left out. Many of the works drawn from included expressions of wartime or post-nuclear anxieties (even The Birds), which he was careful to cut. The overt message, it seemed, got buried with the body.