Author: DOuG pRATt

Getting Hitched

I continued my Alfred Hitchcock viewing on TCM. Saboteur — not to be confused with Hitchcock’s earlier Sabotage — has a brief scene that’s straight out of a Western. Then there’s an encounter with a blind man, just like in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. And how about a nod to Tod Browning’s Freaks for good measure?

Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings’ co-star in Saboteur, passed away in 1995. When she died I learned that whenever I visited my younger sister’s family I was driving past the retirement home where Lane lived out her final years.

Hitchin’ Post

This is Turner Classic Movies’ Alfred Hitchcock binge weekend. I’m a Hitch guy, and I never tire of watching many of his films.

Foreign Correspondent is a favorite that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Watching Shadow of a Doubt, an otherwise much greater film, I was reminded how much the ending just doesn’t work for me.

I was in high school when Hitchcock appeared on The Dick Cavett Show.

P.S. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Psycho, but my favorite was at a sold-out TCM Event showing in Phoenix, where the movie is ostensibly set. It’s playing on TCM right now, and until this moment I’d never before noticed the shower behind Janet Leigh in her apartment, before she runs away with the money.

Chameleon Actor

Stephen Colbert chatted with Robert Duvall recently. Colbert asked Duvall about working with Brando, which is where this clip comes in.

A very different interview with Duvall would focus on his Science Fiction work, including THX-1138.

Years before THX-1138, Duvall appeared in The Twilight Zone. A while ago I watched as many episodes of the original The Outer Limits as I could before it was yanked from Amazon Prime. The series was good at stretching what could have been half-hour episodes into full hours. Duvall worked well with the deliberately slow pacing, as seen in “The Chameleon.”