Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

It should’ve been in there. In the movie, “North by Northwest.” David Trotter writes about it in the June 4, 2015, edition of the London Review of Books, entitled “Hiatus at 4 a.m.”

Alfred Hitchcock was being interviewed around this time of year in 1962 (yeah, 53 years ago!). He was 62. (I like to think part of his reason for giving so much in these talks with Francois Truffault was the irony: 62 in ’62 – he wouldn’t be 63 until later that summer.)

Imagine this scene: Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. He stops in Detroit in its Motor City heyday … Here’s what Hitchcock tells Truffault:

“I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foreman. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece.  Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut  and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, “Isn’t it wonderful!” Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!”

Hitchcock, he never stopped … What a man! An inspiration to us all.

This too, is a great takeaway from the Trotter essay of four books, including one by our friend Michael Wood: “Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much”:

“The transitions between films became almost as swift and as seamless as the transitions within them.”

Words to live by. If only this great were still with us!

Next: Running for Your Life: Are You STILL Running?