Mark Evanier isn’t a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. But, then, he doesn’t like cole slaw either. Hitchcock is my favorite director, at least up to Psycho, but Evanier considers even that movie a disappointment.
Hitchcock can, I suppose, be categorized as a genre director of thrillers; but that would be the same as saying John Ford was a genre director of westerns, or Frank Capra specialized in screwball comedies.
NPR has a feature on a new book about the music in Hitchcock’s movies. Click here to hear. The audio player below has Bernard Herrmann conducting a brilliant arrangement of his music for Psycho, 14 minutes long, that I transferred from an old LP.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/Psycho.mp3]
Hi! I read Mark’s blog for his gentle sense of humor and some of his post topics are of things I used to own or knew about years ago. Recently he wrote about Polaroid land cameras and when I was 7 and went to Florida that’s what I used there. He’s a tomato soup fan as I am and if I go to CA during the select time I’ll have to try it where he goes. In the meantime, I like to read his and your blogs before I go to bed and sometimes after when I can’t sleep. I just recently found a woman’s blog by watching the freezing Bears/Packers game Monday and hearing a weather report there from a meteorologist Amy Freeze who used to be in Philly. That led to me looking her up on Yahoo!, reading where she went on Wikipedia and linking to this blog from a wikipedia link. Her name is Corrin and she blogs out of suburban Chicago.
I’m certainly a big booster of Mark Evanier, but I actually disagree with him on a number of subjective fronts — none of them political — from candy corn to “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which I consider to be a superb study of the human condition as represented in small town America. In contrast, “Mad, Mad World” doesn’t do a lot for me. I’ve never been able to sit through more than about fifteen minutes of it before giving up in exasperation. My father, however, loves IAMMMMW, and he sent me the DVD for my birthday. I’ve sent Evanier money in the past to support his blog, but not this year, because I wanted to help comic book artist Gene Colan.
Hi! Doug, I llke Alfred Hitchcock too but I know Mark Evanier likes the movie from 1963 “It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World”. That film was just on the Retroplex channel and I can’t believe it’s almost as old as me! A few members of the main cast are living: Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caeser, but many have passed on. I consider it a fine showcase for the talents of the times I like the scene at the end where they’re hanging off the fire escape