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Hitchcock Lecture 5
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1934)
Lecture 5
Lecture: One can never know too much (about Hitchcock)
Screening: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 or version 2 (1955)
Reading: Cohen Vol 1 Part 2 Continued
Recommended Readings: Sloan, J. Hitchcock: The Definitive Bibliography (pp. 120-123);pp28-65)
Zizek, S "One can never know too much about Hitchcock" (Reader)
Stam, Burgoyne, Flitterman Part II "Cine-Semiology"
The 39 Steps (1935)
Novel by John Buchan
Sabotage (1936)
Based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
The Secret Agent (1936)
Novel by W. Somerset Maughm
Hitchcock and women
“Throughout his work Hitchcock reveals a fascinated and fascinating tension, an oscillation, between attraction to the feminine… and a corresponding need to erect, sometimes brutally, a barrier to the femininity which is perceived as all-absorbing.”
– Tania Modleski The women who knew too much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Methuen, New York, 1988 p 42
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Production • Produced by Michael Balcon• Written by Charles Bennett and D. B. Wyndham-
Lewis• Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson (scenario) • Starring: Leslie Banks• Edna Best• Peter Lorre• Nova Pilbeam• Frank Vosper
Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre (June 26, 1904 – March 23, 1964), born László Loewenstein, was an Austro-Hungarian actor frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner. He made an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in Fritz Lang’s film M. Lorre also appears in Casablanca (1943)
Charles Bennett b. 2/Aug/1899 d: 15/Jun/1995
Author of the stage play Blackmail with whom Hitchcock had a fruitful working relationship. His association with Hitchcock continued into the 1930s, with Bennett writing some of the latter's most famous British films - "The Man Who Knew Too Much", "The 39 Steps", "Secret Agent", "Sabotage" and "Young and Innocent". Bennett left England to work with Hitchcock on his first American film, "Foreign Correspondent" in 1940.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955)James Stewart ... Dr. Benjamin McKenna
Doris Day ... Josephine Conway McKenna
Brenda De Banzie ... Lucy Drayton (as Brenda de Banzie)
Bernard Miles ... Edward Drayton
Ralph Truman ... Inspector Buchanan
Daniel Gélin ... Louis Bernard (as Daniel Gelin)
Mogens Wieth ... Ambassador
Alan Mowbray ... Val Parnell
Hillary Brooke ... Jan Peterson
Christopher Olsen ... Hank McKenna
Reggie Nalder ... Rien
Richard Wattis ... Assistant Manager
Noel Willman ... Woburn
Alix Talton ... Helen Parnell
Yves Brainville ... Police Inspector
Plotline
Dr. Ben McKenna, his wife Jo and their son Hank are on a touring holiday of Africa when they meet the mysterious Louis Bernard on a bus. The next day Bernard is murdered in the local marketplace, but before he dies he manages to reveal details of an assassination about to take place in London. Fearing that their plot will be revealed, the assassins kidnap Hank in order to keep the McKenna's silent. Ben and Jo go to London and take matters into their own hands.
Documentary edge
The shootout at the end of the film was based on the Sidney Street Siege, a real-life incident which took place in London on 3 January 1911 when a group of anarchists conducted a long gun battle with the Police after barricading themselves into an East end house. The Siege of Sidney Street, popularly known as the "Battle of Stepney” ended with the deaths of two members of a politically-motivated gang of burglars supposedly led by Peter Piaktow, a.k.a. "Peter the Painter", and sparked a major political row over the involvement of the home secretary, Winston Churchill.
The ‘MacGuffin’ or ‘McGuffin’
The McGuffin’ which is, in effect, nothing!Hitchcock explained the term in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: "[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin.' It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is most always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.“http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/
Truffaut Interview (1966)
"It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highland.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all."
McGuffin examples
• The eponymous statuette in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941).
• “The man who knew Too Much” Message in the shaving brush “Wapping G. Barbor make contact A. Hall, March 21st”
• The uranium bottles in Notorious (1946)
Week 6
The 39 Steps (1935)
Lecture 6: Doubling in Hitchcock’s Film
Screening: The 39 Steps (1935)Reading: Cohen Vol. 1 The Slave revolt of memory” R to the power of gamma pp 110-126Recommended Readings:
Sloan, J. Hitchcock: The Definitive Bibliography (pp. 124-127)Hitchcock "Core of the Movie - The Chase" (Reader)
Hitchcock's preferred method of dispatch
Strangling!
Scissors
“The best way to do it is with scissors” but the quintessential aesthetically pleasing murder endorsed by Hitchcock seems to be the strangle which provides an opportunity for viewing a protracted struggle - a life and death spectacle - between two or more protagonists.
Paraphilia
Paraphilia a term used in psycho-pathology to categorize a clinically defined deviancy that causes those afflicted to seek sexual gratification by raping, stabbing and throttling women and children.
The strangle
Instances of murder by strangling appear in fifteen of his films: The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Stage Fright, the late version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and North by North West.
Strangling is graphically detailed in The Lady Vanishes, Jamaica Inn, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Torn Curtain and Frenzy– Spoto, 1983:353
“It’s all in the details” Hitch
Zizek Discusses these details somewhat differently as sinthoms -- “characteristic details which persist without implying common meaning”
“Hitchcockian Sinthoms” in Zizek, Slavoj Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (But were frightened to ask Hitchcock )London, Verso 1992)
According to author Ken Mogg, the screenwriter Angus MacPhail, a friend of Hitchcock, may have originally coined the term.
demarks
And Deleuze terms the symbolic details in Hitchcock’s works “demarks”that areoriginal signs that stand apart from a series of signs. He cites the sails of the windmill in ForeignCorrespondent that turn in the opposite direction to the wind, the glass of milk in Suspicion, the key that doesnot open the door in Suspicion and the airplane crop sprayer where there are no crops in North by Northwest. 1
1.Deleuze, G. Cinema 1: The Movement Image trans Tomlinson, H., and Habberjam Minneapolis,University of Minnesota Press 1986 p 203
fetish items and narrative drivers
The glove (Blackmail), a ring (Shadow of a Doubt), keys and purses (Notorious, Under Capricorn, Dial M for Murder, Marnie) or tiepin (Frenzy), and bars about which much has been written by Hitchcock scholars: Robin Wood, Sydney Gottlieb, Tania Modleski, Raymond Bellour, Slavoj Zizek, Tom Cohen, Mladen Dolar among others.
See Demonsablon, P., “Lexique mythologique pour l’oeuvre de Hitchcock Cahiers du Cinéma 11 :no 62 18-29, 54-55 1956 An alphabetical listing of recurring objects and motifs in Hitchcock’s films, rings, keys, cats etc. also in Manz, H P Alfred Hitchcock: Eine Bildchronik Zurich, Sancoussi 1962
Hitchcock's views on art
“Let's say I'm a painter who paints flowers. What interests me is the way in which things are treated. But on the other hand, if I were a painter, I would say: ‘I can only paint something that contains a message.’”(Alfred Hitchcock) Chabrol, C. & Rohmer, Eric. Hitchcock: the First
Forty-Four Films, Translated by Stanley Hochman, New York, Frederick Ungar, 1957/1979: xi
I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned. I’m only self- indulgent about treatment. I’d compare myself to an abstract painter. My favourite painter is Klee (Alfred Hitchcock)– McGilligan, P. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in
Darkness and Light. New York, Regan Books Harper Collins 2003:476
John Buchan
The 39 Steps 1935
How Important?
In 1999 it was named 4th in a British Film Institute of British films, while in 2004 Total Film named it the 21st greatest British movie of all time. Recognized by Hitch as his first major production.
Robert Donat (Friedriche Robert Donath)
(1905-1958)
Robert Donat
R D made fewer than twenty films in contracts with MGM, Warners and RKO
The Private Life of Henry VIII(1933)
Goodbye Mr Chips (1939)
The Winslow Boy (1948)
Madeleine Carroll (1906- 1987)
Madeleine Carroll
One of Hitchcock’s earliest prototypical ice cool, glib, intelligent blondes
