A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender – Books
A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender
by Stephen Rebello
FFC rating: 7/10
by Walter Chaw I’m not alone in quoting passages from Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho in lectures and conversation over the years. Written in a user-friendly, almost conspiratorial style, it has a breathlessness that makes old history and twice-told tales alive and urgent again. Would Hitch burn all the capital he’d earned from the success of North by Northwest on a grimy little project about a serial killer and something-something a decapitation in the shower by the same? The book’s final moments, with Hitchcock conducting the audience like a symphony from the projection booth, deliver a payload of dopamine like the clash of cymbals at the end of a particularly stirring concerto. Rebello’s latest, A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender, is more of the same: a deeply researched yet slender volume that recounts well-known (and more obscure) stories from the making of another masterpiece–in this case, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.
