Hitchcock thrills with North by Northwest
By Rolf Dumke
Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful film North by Northwest (1959) is my top American thriller. It mixes up the life of Roger Thornhill – a smug advertising executive and self-contained ladies’ man, only hounded by his overly protective mother – with the violent world of cold-war espionage and counter espionage. In the bar of the Plaza Hotel, Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) – decked out, as usual, in a well-fitting suit – is called to the telephone by a bellboy and becomes entangled by mistake in a net of spies and counterspies.
Prolog
By Rolf Dumke
Movies in the 1950s were an intoxicating and disturbing experience for an immigrant boy. They exposed the psychic underbelly of an America disturbed by Freud, sex, women, and crime; troubled by the Cold War struggle between patriotic Americans and communist traitors; haunted by Ray Bradbury’s and Orson Welles’s impending attacks by aliens from outer space; and unbalanced by the drama in American high schools that created or cemented social barriers, allocating dramatically different life chances among its students.
Will the real Alfred Hitchcock please step forward
By Morris Dean
The title of Julian Jarrold's 2012 HBO film about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of his two films The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) refers to the 33-year-old actress Tippi Hedron. According to the movie and presumably to the book on which the film is based—Donald Spoto's 2009 Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies—Hitchcock had seen a television advertisement featuring Ms. Hedron and told an assistant, "I want that girl."
Psycho revisited,
or adultery v. art
By Jonathan Price
If you’re a film buff or if you have nothing to do this weekend, or if you’re a fan of Alfred Hitchcock, or if you wanted to know how Psycho was made, but were too afraid to ask, you might want to spend a few hours watching the 2012 film, Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi.
