Found this in a charity shop today: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, part of The Film Classics Library’s “most accurate and complete reconstruction of a film in book form”. It’s a comic book-like presentation of the whole of the movie and an absorbing read. I often find that stills from movies (especially old black and white ones) often make shots and scenes seem more weighty, more impressive than they seem when you actually watch the movies themselves. I’m not entirely sure why this is – or whether this is something that’s just me. When I was in my early teens I found a copy of the Hitchcock/Truffaut conversations which were accompanied by – what I thought at the time were – amazing sequences of shots. When I saw the films themselves, the Hitchcock ones, they never lived up to how I’d constructed them in my imagination. It’s a little the same here. I do think Psycho is an excellent film – but reading through this book much of it seems far better than I remember Psycho actually being. Look at the final scene with Anthony Perkins sitting on the chair after being arrested (below). That’s absolutely stunning.  It looks like there are other books in this series covering The Maltese Falcon (oh!) and Frankenstein.