Film Friday: Hitchcock, anyone?

I'm a bit annoyed that I was in two hotels over the course of four nights, had HBO, and didn't get to see their film about Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, The Girl.   I arrived at one hotel on Halloween, and it happened not to be on by the time I'd checked in late that night.   Then, the hotel I stayed in the following few nights didn't give me the new November HBO schedule so I'd no idea when it'd be on.   I was curious, knowing what I did about the troubled relationship between Hedren and Hitchcock.    Perhaps I'll make it a screening for my course next term on Hitchcock.

My class is under the umbrella title "Film/Media Authorship," which is broad enough to cover theoretical issues surrounding the idea of authorship in a collaborative medium like film but also to allow a focus on one or two directors over the course of a term.   Obviously, Hitchcock makes an ideal subject for both topics:  more has been written about Hitchcock than any other English-language film-maker.  

I was very pleased that my oldest daughter has taken such a liking to Hitchcock, though she's seen very few of the films so far.  Even so, she wanted to have an Alfred-Hitchcock-themed birthday party: her friends  came over and played my Hitchcock edition of Clue and later we watched Rear Window, which I thought a relatively safe choice since you don't see the murder take place, and it's probably a lot easier for 12 yr olds to follow than Vertigo.

But of course, now comes the making of the syllabus.

Recently when I taught a course in film adaptation, I used survey monkey to ask registered students what they might like to see in the class.  I'm not going to do that this time, since I suspect most of the students will only have heard of the films, and probably only seen one or two.   What this does mean is that I'm making a list, right here.

I don't want to make lists on my blog.  I just think it screams "GEEK!"  But  I'll try rationalizing it by saying it's not really a list as much as it is a bullet-item list of possible films to screen.  I get I think thirteen weeks to show stuff, which somehow, seems apropos for Hitchcock.   Here are my thoughts:

• The Lodger (everyone begins with this one important silent film that he made)
• Blackmail (again, crucial in UK film history as first sound film) 
• Murder! (important themes)
• Sabotage (defining suspense -- Sylvia Sidney's kid brother carrying the bomb...) 
• Rebecca ("If you covered him with garbage/George Sanders would still have style.." -- Ray Davies, "Celluloid Heroes," truer words never did he write; a brilliant cast top to bottom)
• Suspicion (maybe this is why I'm lactose-intolerant: Cary Grant bringing up the scariest class of milk in movie history)
• Shadow of a Doubt (incredibly important Freudian stuff)
• Notorious (dangerous, sexy, and Claude Rains, too)
• Rope (important if failed experiment)
• Strangers on a Train (Robert Walker's greatest role, CRISS-CROSS!) 
• Rear Window
• Vertigo
• Psycho  

The last three are obvious, but  there are so many others I want to get to: Marnie is a favorite of mine, and though I don't remember Frenzy  well, I know enough writers have championed it that it's probably worth looking at, too.  The Wrong Man also seems like a great case study in the politics of race and representation, and how does one not show The Birds?   A student can do a research paper comparing the two versions of Man Who Knew Too Much, so I feel fine leaving both out.   I love Lifeboat, wishing I could get to that.  North by Northwest is so much fun, and on the other end, I Confess is quite serious.   

If I recall my own undergrad Hitchcock course correctly, we only covered I think three British films, the rest being Hollywood.  It was there that I first saw Marnie, and because the class was taught by Dana Polan, we watched his only comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.  (You can see Polan's essay on the film in a number of anthologies.)    It's always difficult to narrow down.  Even going with what I like -- usually the best pedagogy anyway -- is hard to do.   At least with Orson Welles, you're dealing with a relatively smaller body of work.   And in the age of home video, pretty much the entire corpus of Hitchcock's work is out there for the students to screen privately.  

The "easiest" organization is chronological; it allows one to examine the context of film history at the time of the given film. Because the course also concerns authorship, it might make sense to address the matters thematically: representation of police, blondes, voyeurism, transference of guilt, etc.  Or, given the question of authorship, consider the collaborators, too: there are books associated with the various script-writers out there now; many essays address the roles of his various cameramen and editors; some concern the influence of his wife Alma; and most famously, the role of composer Bernard Herrmann has been very thoroughly considered.  

So many possibilities.   I suppose there are worse problems to have: though I live in the Sandy-zone, I never lost power, and I have enough gas in my car for now to get to work one more day.  If anyone wishes to suggest a film or two, feel free, but I hope you explain why, even if it's something that's so obvious (like, for example, The Birds really is).