Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho reputation, including "Rope", "Rear Window", "To Catch a Thief", "The Man Who Knew Too Much", and "North by Northwest". The project, which Hitchcock tackled in part to compete with financially successful, low-budget, youth-oriented horror movies, went on to astound many by becoming a cultural watershed, an international box-office success, a film classic, and a forerunner of the violent, disorienting films and real-events of the turbulent 1960s and '70s. "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" was initially distributed in hardcover print by W.W. Norton for Dembner Books on April 15, 1990 in the United States. A trade paperback edition was
Alfred Hitchcock (May Whitty), a British spy posing as a governess, disappears on a train journey through the fictional European country of Bandrika. The film saw Hitchcock receive the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, the only time he won an award for his direction. Benjamin Crisler, the "New York Times" film critic, wrote in June 1938: "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world." David O. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning