38 Facts About Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ That You Probably Didn’t Know "According to male lead actor Rod Taylor, the seagulls were fed wheat mixed with whiskey to keep them on the set and prevent them from randomly flying away."
I noticed that. Still have some Old Crow. I could pickle the mealworms in it, and not have to keep them in the refrigerator.
Alfred Hitchcock’s America "In the mythic landscape that is Hitchcock’s America the murderous or perilous coexists with the homely and domestic. People aren’t who they claim to be. A son can impersonate his dead mother (Psycho). A salesgirl in a San Francisco department store can impersonate an industrialist’s wife (Vertigo). Murder is the result, premeditated in one case, spontaneous and unplanned in the other. But if murderers and their accomplices reinvent themselves, the hero, too, must be nimble enough to employ a fictive identity. In Saboteur Barry Kane’s very name suggests that he starts with a strike against him. When his friend Ken Mason perishes in the fire at the airplane factory where they work, and the fire is determined to be the result of industrial sabotage, Kane is the chief suspect because he was seen handing Mason a fire extinguisher that the saboteur had filled with gasoline. (Unfortunately, no one saw the villain, Frank Fry, hand the extinguisher to Kane.) Though he is innocent, goodhearted, and good-natured, there is a sense in which Kane has repeated Cain’s crime in Genesis: He has not been his brother’s keeper. And he must suffer the fate of Cain, who was sentenced to wander the earth. Barry Kane must cross America in his quest to absolve himself by fingering the real saboteur. The episodic film begins in Los Angeles and ends in New York Harbor. When on the run Barry claims that his name is Barry Mason, conflating his own first name with the last name of his slain buddy, we know he’s on the right path, for the progress of a Hitchcock hero is often a parable of identity, and names are sometimes changed along the way." Read entire article
"sometimes I wonder if I'm doing a jimmy stewart imitation myself."... "I am james stewart playing james stewart. I couldn't mess around with the characterizations. I play variations on myself." -James Stewart Read More
Alfred Hitchcock makes many cameos in his films. Here he is in Psycho, wearing a cowboy hat, outside Marion Crane's (Janet Leigh) office, about 6 minutes into the film.
Gulliver Hitchcock Tie-Down "When a bunch of tiny people need to restrain a (to them) giant one, a classic method is to bind the bigger creature to the ground while asleep. Waking up, the large person finds they've been tied down by string — lots of it — stretched over their body between stakes, allowing one of the mini-people to perform a Colossus Climb onto their chest and make demands."
Why We Are Still Talking About Alfred Hitchcock’s fearless film-making Known both for his fearless filmmaking and ground-breaking methods, here we explore just how vast his legacy is. The Renegade "Anyone who has seen North by Northwest will remember the climactic scene in which our hero is pursued across presidential faces on Mount Rushmore – or, as we should point out, a very realistic recreation of Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock was originally given permission to film there, on the condition that there would be no violence depicted on the presidents’ heads. He revealed in a newspaper interview that he intended to film actors running and shooting each other directly across their faces, and had his permit immediately rescinded by the US Department of the Interior. He filmed the scene in a studio, but cheekily thanked Mount Rushmore and the department in the credits, which tricked many viewers into thinking he filmed it at the real location. According to legend, he originally wanted Cary Grant to have a sneezing fit inside the giant nostril of a president, but ultimately settled for a raucous chase instead." (Read More)
Theme from Spellbound (Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, 1945) Played on the theremin by Grégoire Blanc