Hitchcock's Suspense Stories: The Thirty-Nine Steps (Collector's Hardcover Edition)

The stories collected in this set are all adaptations of Alfred Hitchcock's films and television shows. [1]

Hitchcock was recognized during his lifetime as the greatest film director of all time, yet he never won an Academy Award for Best Director, despite receiving six nominations. In 1968, he received a special Academy Award and, that same year, the Directors Guild of America's D. W. Griffith Award. In 1979, he received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award.

What Hitchcock contributed to the art of cinema was certainly much more than purely cinematic technique. Just as the characters in his films often have multiple personalities, Hitchcock himself had many facets as a filmmaker. He was a master of suspense, a master of psychology, and, above all, a master philosopher of cinema. Few people have perceived the absurdity of life and the fragility of human nature as profoundly as he did. Beneath his carefully crafted techniques, we see a soul repressed under a strict Catholic upbringing. Hitchcock's films are contradictory unities of life and death, sin and punishment, reason and madness, innocence and temptation, oppression and resistance. They are poems that speak directly to the darkness in the human heart. He was called "the Freud of cinema."