In his illuminating study of Psycho, Raymond Durgnat provided a minute analysis of its unfolding narrative, enabling us to consider what happens to the viewer as he or she watches the film, and to think afresh about questions of spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psycho-analysis, editing and shot composition. In his introduction to this edition, Henry K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' as the culmination of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film studies 'Grand Error'.

Raymond Durgnat s classic study of British films from the 1940s to the 1960s, first published in 1970, remains one of the most important books ever written on British cinema. In his introduction, Kevin Gough-Yates writes: Even now, it astounds by its courage and its audacity; if you think you have an original approach to a filmor a director s work and check it against A Mirror for England, you generally discover that Raymond Durgnat had said it already. Durgnat himself said about the book that the main point was arranging a kind of rendezvous between thinking about movies and thinking,...