About
Sonbert was also a noted film critic and his writings about feature films are among his more extraordinarily profound and insightful creations In them he expressed admiration for a pantheon of American directors working within the studio system including Alfred Hitchcock Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk An indication of his enthusiasm for Hitchcock was his reputation for conducting tours for visiting friends associates and filmmakers of the locations around San Francisco used by Hitchcock while filming Vertigo 1958 and for signing his reviews under the penname Scotty Ferguson the sonamed protagonist of this renowned film In 1986 Sonbert gave a lecture at the Pacific Film Archive in which he spoke of the schizophrenic split in Marnie between images of enclosure and escape representing the interplay between male domination and female independence Sonbert paralleled these conceits in his own film A Womans Touch Jon Gartenberg