Mark Padilla's classical reception readings of Alfred Hitchcock
features some of the director's most loved and important films, and
demonstrates how they are informed by the educational and cultural
classicism of the director's formative years. The six close
readings begin with discussions of the production histories, so as
to theorize and clarify how classicism could and did enter the
projects. Exploration of the films through a classical lens creates
the opportunity to explore new themes and ideological investments.
The result is a further appreciation of both the engine of the
director's storytelling creativity and the expressionism of
classicism, especially Greek myth and art, in British and American
modernism. The analysis organizes the material into two triptychs,
one focused on the three films sharing a wrong man pattern (wrongly
accused man goes on the run to clear himself), the other treating
the films starring the actress Grace Kelly. Chapter One, on The 39
Steps (1935), finds the origins of the wrong man plot in early
20th-century British classicism, and demonstrates that the movie
utilizes motifs of Homer's Odyssey. Chapter Two, on Saboteur
(1942), theorizes the impact of the director's memories of the
formalism and myths associated with the Parthenon sculptures housed
in the British Museum. Chapter Three, on North by Northwest,
participates in the myths of the hero Oedipus, as associated with
early Greek epic, Freud, Nietzsche, and Sophocles. Chapter Four, on
Dial M for Murder (1954), returns to Homer's Odyssey in the
interpretive use of "the lay of Demodocus," a story about the
sexual triangle of Hephaestus, Aphrodite, and Ares. Chapter Five,
on Rear Window (1954), finds its narrative archetype in The Homeric
Hymn to Aphrodite; the erotic theme of Sirius, the Dog Star, also
marks the film. Chapter Six, on To Catch a Thief (1955), offers the
opportunity to break from mythic analogues, and to consider the
film's philosophical resonances (Plato and Epicurus) in the context
of motifs coalesced around the god Dionysus/Bacchus.
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