Eva of Coffee, Classics, & Craziness is hosting the Alfred Hitchcock Blogathon this weekend in honor of the director’s birthday on August 13th. Along with a number of posts covering films from the Master of Suspense, she’s put together a fun questionnaire for bloggers to answer concerning their thoughts on his films! Here are my answers…
- What was the first Hitchcock film you ever watched?
Dial M for Murder, which I watched as part of an assignment for a film history class. We had to pick from a list of directors and write about three films assigned to him, and that was one of them (the other two were Vertigo and Psycho). I swiftly followed my first Hitchcock viewing with Rear Window despite it not being part of the assignment.
- What’s your favorite Hitchcock film?
It’s a three-way tie between his most well-regarded: Psycho, North by Northwest, and Rear Window. Rebecca is a hair behind them, only because it’s not a true Hitchcock movie to me (despite many of his trademark elements being present, it also had a lot of involvement from producer David O. Selznick), but it’s an AMAZING movie nonetheless. - What’s your least favorite Hitchcock film?
I’ll admit I wasn’t fully paying attention to it when I first watched it, but Under Capricorn was a little tedious for me. I’d like to try watching it again at some point though… - What’s your favorite Hitchcock cameo?
Hard to choose, but the one in To Catch a Thief is probably my favorite.
- Who’s your favorite Hitchcock villain?
For the next three questions, I’m going to name three characters because it’s a nice number and sometimes I just hate choosing one: Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in Shadow of a Doubt, and Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train.
- Hero?
Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) in North by Northwest, L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) in Rear Window, and Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) in Foreign Correspondent.
- Heroine?
I love practically all of them, but I’ll narrow it down to three as I did with the previous two questions: the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) in Rebecca, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) in Notorious, and Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) in Shadow of a Doubt.
- What’s your favorite Hitchcock quote?
So I have a bunch of movie quotes (privately) saved on my Facebook profile, and three of them are from Hitchcock movies:
– “That cat knows something.” – Mr. & Mrs. Smith
– “What’s the use of looking backward? What’s the use of looking ahead? Today’s the thing – that’s my philosophy. Today.” – Shadow of a Doubt
– “I wish there could be an invention that bottled up the memory like perfume and it never faded never got stale. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and, and live the memory all over again.” – Rebecca
The last one is taken straight out of the book (the movie is very faithful to its source material), so I don’t know if you’d count it as a Hitchcock quote per se. - And, finally, how many Hitchcock films have you watched?
36 and counting! You can check out my ranked list of his films on Letterboxd here.
I love/agree with all your answers. 🙂 And I’m almost positive I’d love/feel sorry for Norman Bates if I ever watched Psycho.
For all the bad things he does, he’s quite a sympathetic character. Anthony Perkins does an amazing job of instilling some humanity in Norman Bates. 🙂
Interesting thought on Rebecca not being a true Hitchcock film. I think I know what you mean.
That reminds me, I have to watch it again.
Yeah I think because it’s such a well-done adaptation, it doesn’t quite have Hitchcock’s imprints on it. But as I said, I still rate it very highly in his filmography! 🙂