Time to #ShareCPLove for today!<\/p>\n
I have a distinct memory from when I was a kid. It was 1980 and we\u00a0had recently moved from Southern California to Tucson, Arizona (site of one of those Twilight Zones<\/em><\/a> that just stuck creepily with me for years, making me Very Nervous in Tucson when I started driving by myself at night\u2014<\/a>which\u00a0makes it all the odder that I do narrations for Chilling Tales for Dark Nights.<\/a>..<\/em>\u00a0but that’s a different story).<\/p>\n April 29th Alfred Hitchcock died.<\/p>\n “Ummmm… so?”<\/em><\/p>\n So it’s one of those parent-related moments that lodged itself into my memory for no very good reason. I remember watching the local news with Dad and that night they announced Hitchcock’s death. There was a (very) brief moment of silence followed by one of the news guys\u00a0(could have been an anchor, could have been the weatherman, no idea) piping up and saying something to the effect of, “Well good riddance. We don’t need any more blood-and-gore movies like his!”<\/p>\n At which point my dad snorted and said, “What an idiot!” at just about the same moment that the anchor (or at least the news guy with some authority and a brain) said something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong. Hitchcock was a master of suspense, not gore\u2014and if all you know of him is one black-and-white scene from Psycho<\/em> upon which you’re basing your assessment than you’re a bigger idiot than I thought.”<\/p>\n Okay, my dad (who is normally very calm and even)\u00a0snorting at the doof was a quality-parent-moment all by itself, but the fact that the news anchor was effectively backing him up (long distance and by psychic means, I guess) was really cool (I was 13. So sue me).<\/p>\n Now curious, I asked: what’s <\/em>Psycho and why did the idiot guy say that?<\/em><\/p>\n I received an inspired-yet-brief introduction to Hitchcock films (titles, basic plots) and a description of how tame “the shower scene” from Psycho actually was, compared to, say, Friday the 13th<\/em><\/a> (which was released in 1980) or Halloween<\/em><\/a> (1978). Later, at College, I made a point of seeing any Hitchcock films that were shown on or around campus (big screen! Score!<\/em>) and also pulled some from our local video (ahem, yes, I know<\/em>) store from time to time. Sophomore year, I grabbed a VHS of Rope<\/em> after hearing a professor in the film department make some offhand comment to a student like, “don’t try to re-do Rope<\/em>. You’re not Hitchcock yet.”<\/p>\n You probably never heard of Rope<\/em>\u00a0and for good reason. It’s not Hitchcock’s best film, but for\u00a0a Theater and Film student it is certainly one of his most interesting. The only other time I heard anything about what Hitchcock pulled off was when a professor, teaching about the infamous\u00a0Hays Code<\/a>\u00a0(e.g.,\u00a0one foot on floor when on a bed, no kiss longer than 3 seconds, etc.<\/em>), told us that Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman managed to break the code<\/a>\u00a0rawther notoriously in Notorious<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here – it’s a three minute<\/em> kiss scene where each kiss only lasts the maximum three seconds<\/em>(!):
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