Showing posts with label Alfred Hitchcock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alfred Hitchcock. Show all posts

Friday, April 4, 2014

Making the Right Choices for "Wrong Number": An Interview with Director Patrick Rea

In October, BMFI launched its inaugural Silver Screen Inspiration Short Film Contest to encourage emerging filmmakers and celebrate cinema’s rich history. From over 280 entries, four finalist short films have been chosen: "Miss Todd," "Wrong Number," "Redemption," and "Sonus." In April, see these remarkable short films on the big screen before the features that inspired them, and learn more about the finalist filmmakers on BMFInsights.


Making the Right Choices for "Wrong Number"

By Kerri Grogan, Staff Assistant

Filmmaker Patrick Rea delivers suspenseful, twisting drama in "Wrong Number," one of Bryn Mawr Film Institute's four Silver Screen Inspiration Short Film Contest finalists. Written by Amber Rapp and inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Dial M for Murder (1954), "Wrong Number" connects two strangers by way of a misdialed phone number.

Patrick's production company, SenoReality Pictures, won Heartland Emmy awards for their short films, "Get Off My Porch" and "Woman's Intuition."

I interviewed Patrick via e-mail about his film. Keep reading to find out how Dial M for Murder inspired him, how he worked with his actors, and his favorite parts of the filmmaking process.

What aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder helped inspire this film?

In the Hitchcock film, the plot deals with infidelity and a murder plot that goes awry. Without giving too much away, I often thought that in "Wrong Number", there is a hint that Maggie may have caught her husband in an affair which led her down the road she has taken. I also wanted to use the phone in our film as a device to create tension and suspense, like Hitchcock did in Dial M for Murder.

“Wrong Number” centers on a telephone conversation between two disparate strangers, and the way that it unfurls is very important for building character and creating drama. How did screenwriter Amber Rapp approach creating the dialogue for the film?

Amber approached the dialogue to make it seem as innocent as possible as a way of misdirecting the audience, much like Hitchcock. Amber wanted to lull the audience into a false sense of comfort. Most people watching "Wrong Number" for the first time think it's just a conventional conversation between two souls in a chance encounter. Amber did a good job of revealing a lot about the characters in a very short period of time, thus making the ending all the more of a surprise.

You elicit wonderful performances from your actors. Would you talk about your process working with them on set?

We spent a great deal of time rehearsing the conversation. I had worked with Joicie Appell on a previous film, Nailbiter, and had developed a great working relationship with her. This was the first time I had worked with Cinnamon Shultz. I had seen her do great work in Winter's Bone (2010). I thought she carried the right amount of gritty strength and innocence to make the Maggie character likeable, yet mysterious. I rehearsed both of them for several days before shooting the film. Once we got all the kinks out with the dialogue we were ready for filming. They had rehearsed the film together, but when filming, neither were on set at the same time. Because we had done so much prep, the two still knew how to maintain the right rhythm.

In "Wrong Number," a woman takes comfort in dialing a familiar phone number, but she's taken by surprise when a stranger answers instead.

In addition to several award-winning shorts, you have also directed a feature, Nailbiter (2013), and the comedy special Jake Johannsen, I Love You, which aired on Showtime. What are some of the unique challenges and benefits of short filmmaking, feature filmmaking, and filming live events?

I really believe that short films are a great way to learn new techniques and really build your skills as a filmmaker. A feature film takes so very long to raise money for, and I feel that short form storytelling can be an excellent way to keep yourself from feeling creatively stagnant. One particular challenge to short filmmaking is being able to tell a three act story in a short period of time. You have to really develop the characters and make the audience relate to them in a truncated duration, and that can be difficult to pull off.

As for feature filmmaking, an obvious challenge is raising the necessary capital to make it a reality. It's also a marathon making a feature. With a short, you can usually have it completed in six months, while a feature can go on for years, and you have to keep your love of the project alive as well as keeping others excited about it as well. Nailbiter started principal photography in 2009 and wasn't released till 2013. That required a lot of energy to keep the momentum going.

Filming live events are always fun and scary. You never know what might happen on the day of filming. While filming Jake Johannsen, I Love You, we had to explain the audience that this was a live event and if something went wrong, we would need to pause and fix things to start again. We were fortunate that nothing went wrong.

What do you enjoy most about filmmaking?

I really love the collaborative atmosphere on set! I love the shooting process the most and if I do my homework ahead of time, it's usually a party! I also love seeing it with the sound and music for the first time. That's when it finally comes alive!

Thanks, Patrick!

See "Wrong Number" and the classic feature that inspired it, Dial M for Murder, on Tuesday, April 8, at 7:00 pm. The film will be shown in conjunction with a Cinema Classics Seminar. Join us on April 27 for our ACTION! Dedication Celebration, where we will announce the Silver Screen Inspiration Short Film Contest winners.


Kerri Grogan is BMFI’s Staff Assistant. She studied animation at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and moonlights as a dice-rolling, video gaming geek, blogger, and comic artist.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Terror by the Sea: THE BIRDS

Our "Hitchcock at the Height" series comes to a close this Wednesday, July 31, with the avian thriller The Birds, which will be introduced by Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D.

Terror by the Sea: The Birds
By Kerri Grogan, BMFI Staff Assistant

Spoiler warning!

This year marks the 50th anniversary for Hitchcock's harrowing film, The Birds (1963), but the novelette it was based on was already a decade old by then. Also titled The Birds, it was written by Daphne du Maurier and originally published in 1952. Both feature deadly attacks by birds in a seaside town, but there are some big differences from text to film. One of the main changes was Tippi Hedren's character, Melanie Daniels, who was originally war veteran and family man Nat Hockens.

The other distinctive change is setting. While the original story is set in du Maurier's native Cornwall, Hitchcock moved the story to Bodega Bay, a remote coastal town in California. Eerily enough, two years before the film's release, there was a real avian invasion in the seaside city of Santa Cruz, California. Hitchcock reportedly asked for a copy of the news article covering the event (which you can read here) to use as research material. Obviously the real event had no widespread aftermath, but the novelette does: by the end, all of Britain is suffering from deadly attacks. Hitchcock's film doesn't explicitly have the same apocalyptic results, but it does hint at it.

Hitchcock leaves a very open ending in the film by intentionally omitting a "the end" title card. He wanted audiences to have the impression that the terror faced in the film was ongoing.

Did you know? The attic attack scene took a full week to film, and used only live birds–no puppets. Hedren was injured during filming, and afterwards, she was so exhausted that she had to spend a week in the hospital! Hitchcock leading man Cary Grant happened to be visiting the set that week, and after watching the filming, he called Hedren "one brave lady" for her work on it. [Source]


Kerri Grogan is BMFI’s Staff Assistant. She studied animation at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and moonlights as a dice-rolling, video gaming geek, blogger, and comic artist.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Gus Cileone: Voyeurism, Fantasy, and VERTIGO

BMFI film fan and author Gus Cileone interprets Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Vertigo. Do you agree? See the film for yourself on the big screen at Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Wednesday, July 17. Vertigo is showing as part of our Hitchcock at the Height film series, which is presented in conjunction with a four-week film course about the filmmaker's best-known works.



Voyeurism, Fantasy, and Vertigo
By Gus Cileone, BMFI Film Fan
*Spoiler Alert*


Alfred Hitchcock addresses voyeurism often, which is fitting, since his audience lives vicariously through the characters he presents on the screen. But, he goes further, making the audience, from the perspective of the camera lens, an unseen presence stepping into the stories themselves. We become a Peeping Tom, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window; we observe Janet Leigh through the hole in the wall, in Psycho; we are accused directly of causing the coming apocalypse in the diner scene in The Birds.

In Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart’s weird obsession with Kim Novak’s Madeleine takes this voyeurism to the point of obsession. The voyeur has no respect for the individual, who is only a means to satisfy the voyeur's fantasy. In the opening credits we see a woman's face and then her eye. We then look into that eye, and there is a spinning pinwheel. Right from the beginning, Hitchcock is saying that a man can lose his balance with obsession over a woman.

After Stewart's detective, Scottie, discovers that he has acrophobia, hanging from a gutter after chasing a criminal, he is traumatized by witnessing a fellow policeman fall off the roof trying to save him. Falling becomes a motif in the film. The story takes place in hilly San Francisco, which symbolizes the precariousness of Scottie's predicament. (Scottie lives right near Coit Tower.) Probably because he feels guilty about the dead police officer, he dives into the bay to save Novak's character. But the jump also shows how dangerous his obsession can become. Of course, there are the falling deaths from the tower, and Scottie has dreams of falling off the tower. After the death of his fantasy woman, he drops into a state of catatonia, unable to be in the real world. The falling theme also refers to the danger of falling in love with the wrong person, for both Scottie and Novak's Judy. One could push it and say, for Scottie, the towers are phallic symbols, and the fear of falling could symbolize the fear of impotence in real life, thus encouraging the escape into fantasy.

Jimmy Stewart stars as a traumatized detective caught in a deadly scheme.
The acrophobia is not only a plot device so that Scottie can't witness it when Gavin (Thomas Helmore) throws his wife off the tower. It also symbolizes Stewart's character's inability to see the big picture from a height. He can only see as far as his version of a dream woman. The first scene deals with beauty and sex, as we watch his ex-fiancée, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), draw fashion pictures and discuss a newly designed bra. She is not the Hitchcock ice goddess, since she just draws beauty and clinically describes the bra's engineering. When she draws a picture of Novak as Gavin's wife Madeleine and substitutes her own face, Scottie quickly departs the room, showing how she does not fit his sexual requirements. She is real and can't compete with a dream girl. Gavin is an old friend, who knows of Scottie's disability, and wants Scottie to find out where his wife is going on her mysterious trips. At first Scottie is the voyeur spying on her beauty at the restaurant. Hitchcock places the audience in the car seat, following Novak, joining the detective in his fantasy. When he follows her through a dark walkway and opens the door, the scene lights up with the beautiful colors of flowers that the equally beautiful Novak is buying. It reminds one of Dorothy opening the door of her drab house to witness the awe of Oz, which is both a fantasy land and can be dangerous, just like Scottie's obsession.


Madeleine (Kim Novak), when Scottie follows her to the flower market.
The husband says a dead woman is possessing his wife. She goes into spells, visits her grave, and looks at the dead woman's painting on the wall of the gallery. Scottie observes that the curl in Novak's hair mirrors the curl of the dead woman in the painting. We realize that the circular curls also echo the theme of spinning wheels, leading to actual and symbolic vertigo. The story of the ghost plays into the whole unreal, fantasy theme of the film. Scottie sees Madeleine check into a hotel, but the concierge says she was not there that day, and there is no evidence of her in the hotel room. After Scottie rescues Madeleine from the bay, the camera shows her clothes hung up and drying in his home, and Novak naked under the covers in his bed. This is kind of creepy, knowing that she has been undressed by a stranger. It is as if Stewart's character presumptuously has actually taken possession of her (in contrast to her pretending to have become possessed) as an object in his fantasy world.


After rescuing Madeleine, Scottie takes her to his apartment.
When they are in the sequoia forest, Madeleine seems to disappear for a while, like an unearthly spirit. After his release from the mental institution, Scottie looks for Madeleine wherever he goes, like a morbid ghost hunter. It is ironic that he becomes haunted by the ghost of a woman who pretended to be haunted by another dead woman. Of course, when Scottie accidently sees Judy, thinking she is only a Madeleine look-alike and not part of the murder conspiracy, he wants to resurrect the dead Madeleine, forcing the now-in-love Judy to again play the same part. After Scottie finally recreates Madeleine by changing Judy’s make-up, hair color and style, and clothes, Novak materializes out of the hotel room's wall in a neon-sign-illuminated mist, like a ghost.

Scottie's obsession is a kind of madness. Gavin says there is madness in Madeleine's family, which sets the stage for the belief that she would commit suicide (her name even has the word "mad" in it). And, Scottie's madness leads to a sort of personality suicide as he realizes at the end, as Roger Ebert says in his book The Great Movies, that another man (Gavin) created the woman he wanted to forge, and thus Scottie's dream was not even his own. First he lost the person he wrongly thought was his ideal woman incarnate, and then he loses the woman he thought he created to be his perfect reproduction of his ideal. For Hitchcock, the desire to possess one's dream person is an impossible act and can only turn life into a nightmare.



Gus Cileone is a retired government employee who worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has received several writing awards and has published two novels, A Lesson in Murder and Feast or Famine. You can visit his website at www.augustuscileone.com.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Andrew J. Douglas: Seven Reasons to See SPELLBOUND

Bryn Mawr Film Institute concludes its "Hitchcock: The Early Years" film series with a screening of Spellbound on Tuesday, July 31 at 7:00 pm. The film will be introduced by our Director of Education, Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D. Check out the seven reasons why he thinks you should see this Hitchcock masterpiece.



Andrew J. Douglas: Seven Reasons to See Spellbound
By Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D., Director of Education, BMFI

You’re not likely to find Spellbound on anyone’s list of the best Hitchcock films, though it was very popular and lauded by critics and the Academy upon its release. You can decide for yourself, of course, but here are seven reasons I think it’s most definitely worth seeing:

1. Spellbound IS an Alfred Hitchcock film. Like pizza (and one or two other things), even Hitchcock movies that aren’t the best are still pretty darn good.

2. Spellbound stars Ingrid Bergman. Even though she spends much of the film looking like a cross between a Victorian schoolmarm and a researcher at Heidelberg University—with the rigid personality to match—her natural radiance still manages to shine through. This is the first of three films she made with Hitchcock (Notorious, the following year, and Under Capricorn, 1949, being the others), and across them she demonstrates her range and talent as an actress.

Ingrid Bergman plays a psychiatrist who falls in love with her amnesiac patient (Gregory Peck).

3. Spellbound stars Gregory Peck. This doesn’t do anything for me, personally, but I understand there are those out there for whom this would be a particular selling point. Enjoy.

4. Salvador Dalí designed the dream sequence. It was originally longer and more elaborate than what is in the finished film, and Hitchcock had also hoped the surrealist painter would be able to create more than one segment for the film. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see this combination of mainstream Hollywood entertainment and European fine art.


5. Spellbound was an early and influential example of Hollywood delving into the world of psychoanalysis. Folks in Hollywood, such as the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, had been “on the couch” for years, but the field itself was just beginning to make its way into mainstream culture. It obviously influenced future Hitchcock films, such as Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964), but some credit Spellbound with giving rise to a series of psychological films in the late 1940s: Shock (1946), with Vincent Price; Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949), featuring Gene Tierney as a kleptomaniac (and also co-written by Spellbound co-screenwriter Ben Hecht); and Max Ophüls’s Caught (1949), starring James Mason.

6. Spellbound marks the first use of the theremin in a Hollywood film. Miklós Rózsa, who had received an Academy Award nomination for scoring Double Indemnity (1944), incorporated the unconventional instrument into his only collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock. Though he earned three Oscar nominations for his work in 1945—for this film, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, and Charles Vidor’s A Song to Remember—it was Spellbound that got him the statue.

After an incident in an operating room, Gregory Peck admits to Dr. Peterson (Bergman) that he doesn't think he really is the Dr. Edwardes that he claims to be.
7. Liverwurst. I’ve never eaten it, and I’m not even sure what it looks like, but the way it figures into the flirtation between Bergman’s character and Peck’s, it must make for one heck of a sandwich.



Dr. Douglas received his Ph.D. from the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He will introduce BMFI's 35 mm screening of Spellbound on Tuesday, July 31 at 7:00 pm and is also teaching the four-week class Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Anmiryam Budner: Why I Love REBECCA (and My Daughter Didn't)

BMFI Board Member Anmiryam Budner shares why Hitchcock's Rebecca has been a favorite since she first saw it in the 1970s, and how her own interpretation of it changed when she discovered that her teenage daughter's reaction to the film was very different. See Rebecca on the big screen on Tuesday, July 24 at 7:00 pm at Bryn Mawr Film Institute, introduced by Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D.



Why I Love Rebecca (and My Daughter Didn't)
By Anmiryam Budner, BMFI Board Member

[Please note that this contains spoilers.]

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

I first heard that oh-so-famous line in 1977 sitting in the Regency Theater on Broadway between 67th and 68th streets in NYC. I was fifteen years old and had already sat through Gaslight, the first film on the double feature bill. I have never been sorry that I took those four hours to sit in the dark and watch these classics about young women facing danger, physical and psychological. And, while I still love Gaslight, it is Rebecca that enveloped me then and continues to fascinate me to this day.

My boss, who had alerted me to the program, later admitted that she sent me off to the theater knowing that I would completely and utterly identify with the second Mrs. de Winter as played by Joan Fontaine. Despite a courageous start, shouting to prevent Maxim de Winter’s presumed suicide on cliffs in the south of France, she is almost immediately revealed to be young, gauche, poor, utterly insecure, and nameless. She bites her lips, bites her fingernails—rather, Joan Fontaine gamely pretends to bite them since it’s clear that her manicured movie star fingernails had not been subject to nervous gnawing until the moment called for in the script—knocks vases over and gratefully obeys when Maxim tells her to eat up her lunch. At fifteen I yearned for romantic attachment, while also craved relief from the demands of encroaching adult responsibilities. That a handsome, brooding, rich, and English older man would notice me, like me, and, in an impulsive moment, whisk me away from the cares of a subservient existence—in my case the mundane woes of making it through high school as an unattractive bookish teenager—this was a mythic tale near and dear to my heart.

The unnamed second Mrs. de Winter looks around the deceased Rebecca's bedroom, preserved intact. 


Of course, unlike so many classic romances, marriage is not the end of Rebecca, but only the first act. The real heart of the movie only begins to unfold when the newlywed odd couple arrives back at Manderley. No mere house, but a menacing castle with a large staff, unused wings, and a routine established by the first Mrs. de Winter, the dead—but ever present—Rebecca. And, let’s not forget Mrs. Danvers, perhaps one of the most frightening figures ever seen on a movie screen. Judith Anderson’s strong, plain face with its beaky, jutting nose, framed by a wreath of black braids so tightly wound they must have hurt, and those hands, always folded, clutching each other, lest she explode… I still shudder every time she appears on screen.




I rooted for Joan Fontaine as she adapted to this overwhelming environment and winced at each of her missteps. I tensed when it appeared that Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers would destroy Maxim and his young bride. I sighed in relief when, despite the loss of Manderley, the movie ended with a promise of happiness with the unnamed second Mrs. de Winter’s emergence from the cocoon of adolescence into adult partnership and the elimination of Maxim’s guilty secret. Though, like Maxim, I mourned the loss of innocence that was necessary to their building a more adult relationship. I wasn’t ready to grow up and so I wasn’t ready for the character to do so either.

Over the decades I approached repeat viewings of Rebecca without questioning my easy adoration. In fact it held a place in my pantheon as a piece of art that allowed me to recapture the glorious loss of self that is so difficult to find in anything—books, movies, music—after childhood. I moved on through college, graduate school, career building, and parenting. Through it all, Rebecca remained visual comfort food. VHS and DVDs made it easy for me to return to Manderley again and again; to relive the sensation of being rescued, threatened, and then finding true safety. It wasn’t until I attempted to watch the film with my then-eleven-year-old daughter that I began to peel back the layers of complicated pastry that supported the strudel I was downing with relish.

I approached the moment with high expectations. We had watched a number of classic films by this point and she had also evinced a taste for romantic comedy that led me to think Rebecca would be a hit with her. Therefore, I was shocked when, fairly early in the movie, soon after the action shifted to Manderley, my daughter paused the disc and announced, “I don’t like it. She’s such a wimp. Why doesn’t she stand up for herself?”

She liked her heroines to be heroic, or at least not scared of their own shadows. The girl on the screen was lacking in everything to which she aspired: she wasn’t confident, she didn’t speak her mind. In short, she was contemptible. “Just wait,” I said. “She gets better by the end. Really, you’ll love it,” I promised. Then I begged, but she was stubborn.

I think it we ended up re-watching one of the Harry Potters. Sigh.

I was crushed that my child, my wonderful, glorious child, didn’t immediately fall under the spell of this great movie I loved so much. What had I done wrong?

Eventually I pulled back from my bitter disappointment and understood that I had done nothing wrong. In fact, her reaction was a good thing. Really, did I want my child to suffer from the same insecurities that had plagued me? Of course not. On the contrary, I was relieved to discover that she was stronger and less afraid of the world than I had been at the same age.

The second Mrs. de Winter can only be a true partner to Maxim (Laurence Olivier) after she learns the truth about Rebecca. 


Okay, that’s good. I even admitted to myself that she had a point. You pity the second Mrs. de Winter, but you also want to smack her. Why doesn’t she insist that Maxim offer a tour of his castle or confront him about his feelings for his first wife? Wouldn’t any sane person insist on firing Mrs. Danvers after taking one look at her? Did this different way of interpreting the main character mean I couldn’t love this movie anymore?

No, I still loved it, and I was surprised to discover that in looking at it without resorting to the primal response pathways I had laid down in my youth, that other meanings coexisted with my original interpretation without negating it. For one thing, it’s a morally unsettling story. Rebecca’s death is ruled a suicide, but we know Maxim is in fact guilty of killing her and hiding her body. True, she probably intended him to kill her, but does that excuse him?

Claustrophobic close ups intensify our discomfort at Mrs. Danver's attempts to intimidate and destroy the second Mrs. de Winter.

Above all, I started to develop an inkling of the true genius of Hitchcock’s direction. He used all of the tools he had—editing, mise-en-scène, lighting, and music—to produce an atmosphere of menace that permeates the entire film. He heightens psychological tension through the use of close ups, nestling actors so tightly together that it makes me as a viewer feel that the vast spaces of Manderley are overwhelmed by the claustrophobia of sexual tension and jealousy that are poisoning the household. He even manages to hint that Mrs. Danver’s obsession is fueled by repressed lesbianism without, needless to say, ever stepping past the allowable conventions of the time.

Even if you’ve seen it before, go again on Tuesday, July 24. Andrew Douglas, who knows way more about this film than I do, will help you to discover something new.


Anmiryam Budner, a life-long film addict, is a BMFI Board member and Bryn Mawr resident. In addition to sitting in the dark watching movies she is also an avid reader, knitter, and aspiring writer.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D.: Why I Love NOTORIOUS

BMFI's Director of Education, Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D., contributes this second entry in a series of blog posts about how the movies showing at BMFI have inspired our staff and volunteers. We hope you love them as much as we do.


Why I Love Notorious
By Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D., BMFI Director of Education

Notorious (1946) isn’t one of Alfred Hitchcock’s flashiest films, even though it has two of the most glamorous stars he ever worked with—Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Notorious doesn’t have nearly the most memorable narrative or surprising plot twist of any Hitchcock film, though its story provides such a potent conflict, it’s been lifted for a number of novels, television episodes, and films—perhaps most famously by screenwriter Robert Towne for Mission: Impossible 2. Neither does Notorious have one of the director’s most visually arresting scenes—think of Psycho or North by Northwest—but it does have the single most clever and meaningful use of a coffee cup in the history of cinema.

But don’t lament Notorious for what it doesn’t have; love it for what it does. Beyond the great elements mentioned above, the movie also contains perhaps the single most romantic and suggestive on-screen kiss ever to come out of the studio system, one of Hitchcock’s most thoroughly malevolent “mothers”, and one of the best uses of the MacGuffin ever. 



The coffee cup in question. Ingrid Bergman shines as a spy who infiltrates a ring of Nazis in Rio de Janeiro in Hitchcock's Notorious, showing Tuesday, August 2 at BMFI.

I love it for that coffee cup I first noticed when I saw the film as a college student. That petite mug put me on the path to learning and caring about mise-en-scene. It is true that sometimes a coffee cup is just a coffee cup... but Notorious taught me to never take it for granted.

Dr. Douglas will introduce BMFI's 35mm screening of Notorious on Tuesday, August 2. The film is being shown in conjunction with his four-week film class, Alfred Hitchcock: The Best of the Rest.

Dr. Douglas received his Ph.D. from the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. His next class at BMFI is a one-night Summer Classics Seminar focusing on Steven Spielberg's classic thriller, Jaws, on August 16.