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A Memoir by His Last Collaborator and the Final Unproduced Screenplay, The Short Night' A penetrating account of the author's experience working with the famous director on 'The Short Night,' Hitchcock's final film project, which remains unproduced. Takes the reader behind the scenes,into Hitchcock's home and into the Universal Studios bungalow where the director planned his movies, giving an insider's look at the way Hitch worked and illuminating a very private side of the man. Illustrated with 29 B & W photos.'

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About a year before Hitchcock's death in April 1980, screenwriter Freeman spent six months working on a script with the great director - in frequent sessions at Hitchcock's Universal Studios bungalow. Here, then, he offers a brief memoir of the aged Hitch, along with the complete - and annotated - screenplay. The memoir, though less than 70 pages long, includes several chunks of padding: Freeman's humdrum thoughts on some major Hitchcock films, a summary of Hitch's famous cameo appearances, etc. - all of it material that will be over-familiar to a Hitchcock-minded readership. Still, there are more than a few compelling bits of observation and conversation in this reminiscence: the sympathetic portrait of ill, half-senile, depressed Hitchcock - drinking heavily to dull severe arthritic pain; an inkling, in a visit to the Hitchcock home, of Hitch's approval-seeking relationship with invalid-wife Alma ( I felt as if I were intruding on someone's first date ); Hitchcock's creepy crushes on comely receptionists, his fantasies about Ingrid Bergman ( Mad for me all her life ), his free-associative, sometimes kinky monologues. And, in both the memoir and the scene-by-scene script annotation, Freeman provides strong examples of Hitchcock's still-emphatic talent and technique: the constant movement from the general to the particular, the density of felt detail, the thoroughness and penetration with which he attacked characterization. (The screenplay itself, The Short Night, is a sturdy revenge/love story, set mostly in Finland, full of potential for memorable Hitchcock-style sequences.) In sum: amusing, sad glimpses of a giant in decline, yet very much himself - stretched out to book-length with marginal matter. (Kirkus Reviews)

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