Good Evening,

Today I have a story about a curious ol fellow. No, I can't introduce you to him. You see. He's dead.

He may have introduced you to Mt Rushmore or the Statue Of Liberty. From his mouth you might have first heard and understood the word, "Murrrrder."

Some said this strange fellow had his belly button removed so he would no longer think of his mother.

Oh yes. Mother. He changed the way that word affected us as well.

Can you walk by a gathered flock of Birds and not think of screaming children?

When you are sick, and a loved one brings you a glass of warm tea or coffee. Do you wonder why you are sick?

When you haven't seen that old lady next door for a couple of days, do you think she is dead? I do.

Alfred Hitchcock. A strange man. Strange because he liked to hear his audience shriek. He loved to quicken somebody's pulse. He adored phobias and the macabre... And now.. so do I.

Is there a director I love more? No. Hitchcock knew what made me tick. Not just me, but just about every soul on this planet. He knew how to fool us. How to scare us. And he knew how to get us to watch.

He wasn't a mere director, he was a presence. By that I mean this...

You were constantly aware that Hitchcock not only made the movie, but was standing... just out of sight behind you with a cattleprod hidden in the shadows of the auditorium waiting to.... GET YOU.

There are few immortals on this planet. People that simply will continue to exist after their bodies are degraded into dust. I believe of all directors... Alfred will always stand the test of time. His films are not stale in the least. Take THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS for example.

Sixty-Four years ago THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS was released. Earlier this year I introduced the film to quite a few people in my backyard on 16 mm under the night sky. The film began at 1:30am. Many people had to go to work that following morning, but none left their seat.

Well before we audience members were asked to ponder “What is the Matrix” we were pondering, “What are the Thirty-Nine Steps?” 64 years from now will we care about What the Matrix is? I don’t know, but I do believe ears will be attuned to the last reel of Hitch’s classic. The verbal dueling between Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll is tremendous. I really care for these characters.

To this day I’m freaked out by people with part of that one finger missing. And thankfully I don’t run into them everyday... But when I do, I knock em over the head and run for the Train.

Oh yeah... Trains. Alfred gave us a wonderful sense of dread about striking up a conversation with a stranger on public transportation. Everytime a reader of the site that I’ve never met before comes up to punch me in the face for something I have written, I bow my head and say a brief prayer that they not be a Bruno Antony. A My Murder for Your Murder stranger. Criss cross you see.

He’s a filmmaker so insidious that it is nearly impossible to make a thriller and not have someone somewhere tell you that Hitchcock did it better.

Why is that?

Well, because Hitchcock focused himself as a filmmaker. He was constantly honing his skills to a razor’s edge. He found the type of film he loved and he made them. And he didn’t feel repetitive. He didn’t feel like he was recycling ideas constantly. Far from it. The world of suspense was so rich to him that he scarcely felt the need to mine outside of it.

Whereas today’s filmmakers are scatterminded. When they become a director they never really want to declare a major. Instead they wander about trying survey coarse and survey coarse. Never truly settling down with an actor. Never really finding a genre niche.

Nowadays, we’ll find exploitation directors at work on serious historical dramas, comedic directors working on Horror films, Horror film directors working on Violin movies, action directors working on sweeping melodramatic romances, fantasists working abandonment films. Romance directors working on children’s films... and so on.

But Hitch, with a few exceptions, stayed on track. He invented rules of visual story-telling that every filmmaker working today uses.

He didn’t learn storytelling from film, but rather from books, magazines and newspapers. Alfred worked with writers like Raymond Chandler, Ernest Lehman, Angus MacPhail, Ben Hecht, Hume Cronyn (yeah him), Charles Bennett and many others.

I was once lucky enough to meet one of these men, and had the pleasure of speaking briefly with him about Hitchcock. It was Ernest Lehman. When he spoke of Hitch, his eyes lit up. Their work together on NORTH BY NORTHWEST was astonishing to me. It is one of my favorite of his films, but according to Ernest on that day in Hogg Auditorium here in Austin, the film started off on shaky ground. There was some sort of pressure to begin shooting before the regular Hitchcock preparations were done. He was writing the script as Hitch was shooting. One day... Ernest related that he had managed to get Roger Thornhill to the tourist center at the base of Mount Rushmore, but he didn’t have a clue why the film wasn’t ending there. Why did he have to be on Mt Rushmore at the end and how was he supposed to get him up there.

Apparently, he was hit with the most viscous case of writer’s block he’d ever been faced with. He was beside himself, he stared at the blank page for days and days. And finally Hitch came to him wondering where his script pages were. What the hold up was. And Ernest swallowed his pride and told Alfred.

Alfred sat there. Stared at him for a few seconds and allegedly said, “Just shoot him.” And then... Right then. That wall crashed down around Lehman as the simple brilliance of it allowed him to rush through the rest of the script. Get Roger up on them faces and the rest is history.

I remember when Hitchcock died. My parents and all their friends came up into the upstairs of my house on Red River here in Austin. A sheet dropped from the ceiling and we watched Hitchcock on 16mm till dawn. I laid with my feet at the base of the screen and staring up at a quite ridiculous angle... And I was afraid with a smile on my face.

That’s what Hitchcock did for me. Fear with a smile. He made you feel delighted that you were afraid. You could hear him laughing at you with every start and twitch he gave you. And thank goodness he did. I’ve spent countless hours before his work.

My favorites? SHADOW OF A DOUBT, ROPE, REAR WINDOW, NOTORIOUS, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE WRONG MAN, SUSPICION, SPELLBOUND, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, THE THIRTY NINE STEPS, THE LADY VANISHES and THE TROUBLE WITH (me).

Strangely, I’ve never been particularly fond of either PSYCHO or VERTIGO. I believe this to be a psychological rebellion against the establishment for naming those his best, but... While I feel they are brilliant, they don’t leave me with a smile. At the end of both of them I am very much disturbed. They worked their spell upon me... But the others I mentioned... Well, I just enjoy them more.

Go out and watch a Hitchcock film tonight. Go to your local video store and rent the ones you haven’t seen. Let him surprise you today. Don’t you need a surprise?