Barry Forshaw: For admirers of one of this country’s greatest film directors – and I include myself among those admirers – there is a problem: our shelves are groaning under the weight of books on the man. But it is now necessary to clear space for another arm-straining volume which at a stroke becomes one of the most essential contributions to the Hitchcock library: Alfred Hitchcock: All the Films.

Bernard Benoliel and his colleagues have produced a volume that combines a striking visual design with penetrating analysis of every single film and TV show directed by Hitchcock, written in what might be described as ‘academic-lite’ – accessible text that frequently includes insights not to be found in other books on the director.

Alfred Hitchcock opted to utilise the crime form for some of the most personal and fully achieved works in the field. And regarding the Master of Suspense, it is worth noting that, although worldwide film criticism caught up with his achievement initially through the insights of French writers such as Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol (who championed him as something more than just a talented entertainer), opinionated English critics (such as the team who put together the highly influential – if sporadically published – journal Movie, essentially an English Cahiers du Cinéma) took a stand against the lazy view of the day (most notably espoused in the establishment magazine Sight and Sound) that the crime film – and Hitchcock –was not worthy of serious consideration.

The inclusion of the Leytonstone-born director in any study of the history of film is sui generis, so towering is his achievement in both his British and American films; while there are those who have made a case for more mainstream directors who tackle more respectable genres (such as David Lean), many would argue that Hitchcock is the most influential creator the British cinema ever produced, in any genre. And looking at his British films (before his move to America and creation of such complex masterpieces as Vertigo and Psycho) remains a salutary experience. Early admirers (who were not prepared to accept the director’s own slightly disingenuous assessment of his talents (as simply the ‘Master of Suspense’) – notably French critics writing for Cahiers du Cinéma) prioritised the director’s exuberant British films over his later American work, but that assessment has now been radically re-evaluated. Nevertheless, the British films remain an astonishing body of work, brimming with a young man’s fizzing intoxication with both his own talent and the medium he loved, from the early silent classics such as The Lodger in 1926 (with its precocious visual flourishes) through the first British sound film, the innovative Blackmail, three years later and up to the sublimely eccentric British version of The Man who Knew Too Much (in 1934). Hitchcock’s willingness to combine a playful attitude to the crime/thriller genre with a commitment to colourfully-dawn character and setting (freighting in a richness not hitherto to be found in the field) remain as winning today as when they were first made. Of course, these films (and such vintage crowd-pleasers as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938)) also began to explore the more complex and intriguing themes first identified by his more informed followers, notably the famous ‘transference of guilt’ theme and an examination of the limits of heroism as adumbrated in his studies of ordinary men caught up in dangerous circumstances beyond their control. But even had Hitchcock not been tempted overseas – and had never made his remarkable American films – his legacy of work in Britain would be considerable – not least for its influence, which continues to this day, both in United Kingdom and throughout the world.

So — whatever books on Hitchcock you may possess, I’m afraid this doorstop-sized volume is simply unmissable.

Alfred Hitchcock: All the Films by Bernard Benoliel et al is published by Black Dog and Leventhal