Steve Pratt enjoys a book about the twists and turns of a great film director's life.

THE body of a rotund man floating along the Thames looked familiar, the face and the portly figure recognisable from the movies.

But nothing nasty had happened to Alfred Hitchcock. The East End-born son of a London greengrocer was merely exercising his macabre sense of humour and marketing skills.

The director was announcing his return home to make Frenzy, a typically gruesome thriller and the first film he'd made entirely in his home country for more than 20 years.

Floating a lifelike dummy of himself on the river was the type of gimmick, mischievous and macabre, that he loved. In a business where those in front of the cameras expect to be the stars, Hitchcock proved bigger than his movies.

Few directors have achieved the personal fame that Hitchcock did, thanks partly to his insistence on always making a cameo appearance in his own films.

In Mr Hitchcock, Quentin Falk - editor of Bafta magazine Academy and author of books on Anthony Hopkins, Albert Finney and Graham Greene - gathers together the various strands of the director's life and career in one compact volume.

There have been books about him before but this one neatly packages all the information in one informative and entertaining volume. The added bonus comes in fresh accounts from those who worked with him on Frenzy, his penultimate film in a career that stretched from the days of British silent movies to the mid-1970s.

And he was one of the first directors to embrace the small screen and realise its potential through his ground-breaking TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The title left you in no doubt who was responsible for this series of quirky thrillers heralded each week by a suitably sinister introduction from the Master of Suspense himself.

Falk reminds us that while such classics as Psycho, The Birds and North By Northwest are fondly remembered by critics and audiences alike, his career wasn't an undiluted success. There were downs as well as ups. By the time he made Frenzy, his career was at its lowest ebb.

His previous 51st film Topaz had flopped at the box-office. Hitchcock hoped that Frenzy, scripted by Sleuth's Anthony Shaffer about a necktie murderer and filmed in his home city of London, was just the thing to put him back on the movie map.

At a cost of 2m dollars, it was made for half the cost of Topaz. In that respect it resembled Psycho, made fast and with no frills for less than a million dollars on a 30-day shooting schedule.

The success of that shower shocker had more than a little to do with his promotion of the film. There was the trailer in which Hitchcock himself, as lugubrious as ever, took cinema audiences a guided tour of the Bates Motel. Then came his insistence that no-one would be admitted after the start of the film.

The book reminds us of Hitchcock's obsession with food, murder and blondes (including Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren), all of which were reflected in his movies.

Off-camera, he was married to same woman for 54 years. But some accused him of deserting his country in its time of need when he moved to California in 1939 and stayed there during the Second World War and beyond.

What can be forgotten is just how good and innovative a director he was and the technological challenges he undertook.

Falk quotes a recent assessment that Hitchcock is "easily the most modern of directors from Hollywood's mature Golden Age".

There's even a word, Hitchcockian, coined to describe the work of those who've tried, with varying success, to emulate his style.

The public are just as likely to remember him for his comments about actors, although he denied he ever said they should be treated like cattle.

But at times he seemed more interested in directing his trademark scenes of suspense than in helping an actor find the key to their performance. As he told Paul Newman, whom he directed opposite Julie Andrews in the Cold War thriller Torn Curtain: "Your motivation, Mr Newman, is your salary".