{"id":15568,"date":"2017-07-28T09:49:37","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T13:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2017\/07\/28\/15568.html"},"modified":"2018-03-09T15:46:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-09T20:46:04","slug":"hitchcock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2017\/07\/28\/hitchcock\/","title":{"rendered":"Hitchcock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So, there is a running joke in The Thirty-Nine Steps<\/cite> of references to Alfred Hitchcock films. Well, I call it a running joke, but that may be a misnomer—at any rate, there are a handful of verbal and visual references to Alfred Hitchcock and his films. And I briefly discussed Hitchcock films with one of my castmates, and it occurred to me that he and I have very different ideas of what constitutes a “Hitchcock film”. And I think he’s right, and I’m wrong, despite my being right.\n

Let me explain: if a random person were to say “Hitchcock film”, that person would be talking about Psycho<\/cite>, The Birds<\/cite>, Rear Window<\/cite> and maybe Vertigo<\/cite>. Possibly North by Northwest<\/cite>, maybe Notorious<\/cite>, conceivably Rope<\/cite>. That’s it, right? That’s what we are talking about when we are talking about a “Hitchcock film”.\n

And, well, that’s not actually what I’m talking about when I talk about a Hitchcock film. I’ve never actually seen The Birds<\/cite>, and I haven’t seen Psycho<\/I> all the way through from beginning to the end, either. My favorite Hitchcock film is probably Jamaica Inn<\/cite>, and that isn’t a “Hitchcock film” at all. Rebecca<\/cite> might be a “Hitchcock film” or might not be, but it’s a terrific movie. I like The Lady Vanishes<\/cite> a lot, although it’s not really as good as The 39 Steps<\/cite>. It’s not just that I prefer his earlier, funnier work (which I do), as I like both North by Northwest<\/cite> and Dial M for Murder<\/cite> quite a bit. But then, I like Blackmail<\/cite> and The Lodger<\/cite>, and I prefer the original Man Who Knew Too Much<\/cite> to the remake, which I didn’t actually finish watching. So, yeah, probably the earlier, funnier work. Or at least the funnier—I don’t actually like horror movies, as a genre, but do really enjoy the comic caper-thriller. Alfred Hitchcock is talked about as a master of suspense, as of course he is, and that’s what makes a Hitchcock film a “Hitchcock film”, but he was also<\/i> a master of the comic caper-thriller.\n

Anyway, I suppose it’s not a surprise that when a fellow directs half-a-hundred movies, they will differ somewhat, one to another. And if a person becomes an adjective, as you might say, it will describe only a small portion of what that person actually is. I think of Alfred Hitchcock as making movies about spies, wrongly accused men on the run from police, and meet-cute flirtations where the couple have secrets from each other. That’s not what people mean by “Hitchcock film”, though, and I should keep that in mind.\n

That was the last time I spoke with President Trump,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is once again culturally illiterate in a peculiarly information-rich way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flim"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16279,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15568\/revisions\/16279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}