Classic Film Series: Hitchcock

Both the "Athens Banner-Herald" and the "Red and Black" (the UGA student newspaper) recently ran articles about GMOA's Classic Film Series, which consists of four films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Dr. Janice Simon, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Art History in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, will introduce all of the films but the final one, providing artistic and historical context. The films will be shown in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium at the museum at 7 p.m. on select Wednesday nights, and are free and open to the public (plus, they serve as blue card events for UGA students).

"The 39 Steps," one of Hitchcock's earlier films, made before he moved from England to Hollywood in 1940, has already shown, but there are still three left, and while it is difficult to select only four from among the dozens of films he directed, each of them brings something unique to the table.

"Saboteur" will be shown on Wednesday, January 28. It stars Robert Cummings as Barry Kane, a man accused of sabotage to an aircraft plant who escapes in order to find the real saboteur. Released in 1942, it contains what would come to be one of the director's trademarks: a scene set at or on a national landmark. Hitchcock set scenes in "North by Northwest" (1959) and "Vertigo" (1958) at Mount Rushmore and the Golden Gate Bridge, respectively, but even in 1929, with "Blackmail," which contains a climactic scene set in the British Museum, he was already using this trope. "Saboteur" comes to a head with a fight scene on the Statue of Liberty and is the director's first use of the device in his American films.

It also makes up a nice trilogy with the films he directed immediately before and after it. "Suspicion" (1941), which precedes it, stars Joan Fontaine as a naive woman married to Cary Grant, a con man. Fontaine's character slowly begins to suspect her husband is out to murder her for her money, and the film's suspense largely consists of wondering what steps she will take in response to this knowledge. "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943) is a similar story of family suspicion, this time focusing on a young girl who finds out her favorite uncle is a murderer. While "Saboteur" fits neatly into the classic model of Hitchcock as a director obsessed with the wrongfully accused, it also relates to "Suspicion" and "Shadow of a Doubt" as films that can be seen as influenced by the ongoing world war. "Saboteur" addresses wartime paranoia more explicitly, while the other two films focus on intrafamilial suspicions as a metaphor for the tensions always present inside a country during and in the run-up to war.

Join us for "Saboteur" and mark your calendar for the other two remaining films in the series, "Marnie" (Wed., Feb. 11) and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (Wed. Feb. 25).