Hitchcock Truffaut

Film historian Kent Jones tries to cover too much ground in this frustratingly brief documentary that falls short of the standards he set with Val Lewton: the Man in the Shadows (2007) and A Letter to Elia (2010). Having traced the prison experiences and career arcs of Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, Jones explains how they came to spend eight days chatting in a small room at Universal Studios in 1962 and how the resulting book demonstrated what Cahiers du Cinéma had long declared: the Master of Suspense was a bona fide auteur. Jones invites film-makers like Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Richard Linklater to enthuse about the tome and reveal their debt to these two giants of cinema. But he then drifts into prolonged analyses of Vertigo and Psycho, wasting time that could have been spent assessing Hitchcock's technique and psychology or the dynamic between the 63-year-old Englishman and his 30-year-old acolyte. The plentiful clips from across the Hitchcock canon are slickly assembled, but there's too much awed blather and too few fresh insights.