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World Literature Today (2013) - Alfred Hitchcock, creator and creation: fictionalizing the "master of suspense"

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Abstract

  [...]ongoing are the more than one hundred anthologies of mystery and suspense stories by various publishers that began when Simon & Schuster approached Hitchcock to put his name on a book soon after the show began. George Baxt (who had worked in Hollywood) did a baker's dozen of movie star mysteries (1984- 97) with The Alfred Hitchcock Murder Case as his second. I made no attempt to reproduce the "real" Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, or Kim Novak, but followed Kaminsky's lead with movie stars and stuck to their public images. A recent novel by Nicola Ipson, Fear in the Sun, attempts a more accurate portrayal, mixing a murder mystery with a meeting between writer Josephine Tey, Hitch, and his wife, Alma, as they adapted a Tey novel into the film Young and Innocent (1937).

Article

When I first heard that actor Toby Jones was to play the role of Alfred Hitchcock in The Girl, an HBO movie, I wondered what curse had been placed on him. In 2006 he had appeared brilliantly in Infamous as Truman Capote. However, in fall 2005, Capote was released starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role, and whether Jones was, as some critics asserted, better at the impersonation became irrelevant. Now Toby Jones was playing Hitchcock in the same year that Anthony Hopkins plays him in Hitchcock. The Girl, however, was aired before Hitchcock, so perhaps there is truth in the general rule that whoever gets there first wins, as when Hollywood inexplicably released two versions of Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Dangerous Liaisons with Glenn Close and John Malkovich (1988) cost $14 million and grossed almost $35 million, while Valmont with Annette Bening and Colin Firth (1989) cost $33 million and grossed just over $1.1 million.[1] We can assume, however, that one version of the two is likely to be better than the other, and The Girl is so appalling, it is hard to imagine Hitchcock is worse.

Experiencing two portrayals of the same character in a short period of time almost always means that the viewer or reader will be comparing them as the drama develops and, because of this, will have difficulty suspending disbelief on the second occasion. The emotional reaction to the second portrayal will be muted, and therefore it won't seem as convincing. T...

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Notes & References

  1. Internet Movie Database Pro, pro.imdb.com.
  2. Several copies are available on YouTube.
  3. Andrew Goldman interview of Tippi Hedren, "The Revenge of Alfred Hitchcock's Muse," New York Times, 5 October 2012.
  4. The Times (London), 19 May 1983, www. hitchcockwiki.com

About the Author

J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including The Murder of Frau Schütz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead Line, which was an e-book best-seller. He has also published seven nonfiction books and dozens of short stories and articles, including his column on international crime writing in WLT since 2004. In 2008 he was elected president of the International Association of Crime Writers.