Ed Driscoll

The Audacity Of Hitchcock

Reading about Obama’s North By Northwest gaffe, I’m afraid to ask what he thinks Roger O. Thornhill’s middle initial stood for. And Roger L. Simon notes:

Anyone who doesn’t know that was shot on a set is a relative cinematic idiot. In fact, Hitchcock practically always used sets quite deliberately and famously. No kudos to Obama on that one.

Exactly. If only because it’s the one invariable contemporary knock against Hitch, which usually goes something like, “Awesome director, but geez, all those sets and rear projection sure looked phony.”

The nadir of Hitchcock’s studio-bound obsession with rear projection had to have been Marnie. It’s an otherwise interesting late-period Hitchcock film, but the audience’s suspension of disbelief had to have gone out the window during the scene that cuts from a location shot of a stunt woman on a horse in field, to a close-up of Tippi Hedren on the set, astride a horse so phony looking, it looks like something stuffed by Build-A-Bear.

Finally, moving beyond Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Kathy Shaidle ponders “Obama’s other questions about the movies“.

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